you’re a cop here.”
“My father’s family are all from Chicago, Willie, and a lot of them are cops. It’s not Aurora, but it feels comfortable to me.”
“I hear you’ve met someone.”
Willie was talking about Jo McKenzie, a law student at the University of Chicago, whom Cork had met on a routine burglary call and had fallen for. It was serious, although they weren’t talking marriage yet. He was amazed that Willie knew.
Willie apparently saw his surprise and grinned. “The rez telegraph.”
“What about Winona?” Cork finally said.
Willie’s aspect turned grave. “She’s in trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“Serious. She’s in Oregon, hooked up with some people who aren’t good people, and I need to get her away from them.”
“What do you mean ‘not good people’?”
“For one thing, the man she’s with abuses her.”
“Beats her?”
“That. And other things, I’m sure.”
“Why doesn’t she leave him?” Which was a natural question, although Cork had been on plenty of domestic disturbance calls in which the woman, clearly abused, refused to leave her abuser.
“At this point, I believe that, even if she wanted to, she couldn’t. He won’t let her.”
“She’s being held against her will? That’s kidnapping. The Oregon authorities should be involved, Willie.”
“It would be hard to prove, and there’s another reason the authorities shouldn’t be involved. These people she’s with, they grow marijuana for a living. It’s a pretty big operation.”
“And you’re afraid of what might happen to her because of her part in that?”
“It would just be better if we could get her away on our own.”
“Ah,” Cork said, suddenly getting it. “You want me to help you rescue Winona.”
“I can’t do it alone,” Willie said.
“Just you and me? My guess is that, if those people are involved in drug trafficking, they’re armed. And even if we got to her, there’s no guarantee she’d leave with us.”
“Jubal Little,” Willie replied.
“What?”
“She would leave if Jubal asked her to.”
“Jubal and her, that was a long time ago, Willie.”
“Henry Meloux told me once that they’re like two halves of a broken stone,” Willie said. “The last time I saw her, all she talked about was Jubal. To her, it’s like yesterday.”
“I don’t know.”
“Please.”
“I haven’t spoken to him in years.”
Out of college, Jubal Little had been drafted by the Los Angeles Rams. He was on their roster for two seasons, but his style, which network commentators tended to characterize as “undisciplined,” relied enormously on his ability to scramble and make something out of a broken play. He had trouble working within the rigid professional system, and he’d been cut. He was picked up by the Denver Broncos but lasted only a season. The Kansas City Chiefs gave him a shot, but there, too, he’d proved a disappointment, and after two years of mostly sitting on the bench, he’d been let go. No one had shown any interest in him since. Cork wasn’t even certain where Jubal was living at the moment.
“I don’t know what else to do, who else to ask,” Willie said.
Cork looked at his watch. “Tell you what. Hang tight in your hotel room today. I’ll see if I can track down a telephone number for Jubal, and if I’m lucky, we’ll give him a call.”
Willie looked relieved and grateful. He reached out and took Cork’s hand. “Henry Meloux asked me to tell you something. He said, ‘Remind Corcoran O’Connor that I named him well.’ I don’t know what that means.”
“Henry gave me my Ojibwe name,” Cork said. “Mikiinak.”
“Snapping turtle?”
Cork shrugged. “Tenacious, I think, is his point.”
Willie thought about it. “And dangerous. A big snapper can take your finger right off. Thank you, Cork.”
He didn’t exactly go by the book, but Cork got the private telephone number for Jubal Little, who was living in Durango, Colorado. The La Plata County deputy Cork connected with told him Jubal worked for a company that custom-built expensive log homes.
“Yeah, this is Jube.”
Jube? Cork wondered. When did that happen?
“Jubal, this is Cork O’Connor.”
There was a long pause, then, “You’ve got to be shitting me.”
“God’s truth. It’s Cork.”
“Well, son of a gun. Where are you? Chicago still? Last we talked, you were going to try to get yourself into a cop’s uniform.”
“Yeah, still in Chicago. And, yeah, I got the uniform.”
“No kidding. I could’ve told you fifteen years ago that’s exactly what you’d end up doing. You always were the poster child for truth, justice, and the American way.” Jubal laughed and asked, “What’s this about?”
Cork explained the situation, and Jubal said nothing the whole time. For a while after he’d finished, Cork heard only the hiss of the static across the long distance.
Then Jubal said, “When do we leave?”
CHAPTER 21
A lthough Cork had often watched Jubal Little play football on the television screen, in the flesh, his old friend was startling to behold. Jubal had grown. Not just in height but also in mass. His football career had dictated that he create a body that could take brutal beatings week after week, pounding from men as big as rodeo bulls. And a magnificent body it was, broad and towering. But there was something that diminished his presence, an air of uncertainty, of defeat that Cork had never seen in him when they were kids. In high school in Aurora, when Jubal walked the halls between classes, the sea of bodies would part for him. It was subtle, but now Cork thought he saw in Jubal’s eyes a look of desperation, the look of the lost.
They used Willie’s American Express Gold Card and rented a Jeep at the Portland airport, then drove east down the Columbia River Gorge. It was early April, and Cork had never seen air so gray or mist so viscous. He had a sense of mountains rising up almost from the roadside, but a hundred yards above him, everything was swallowed by cloud and drizzle. The great river on their left looked as cold as water could get without becoming ice. On their right, waterfall after waterfall unspooled long, loose threads of liquid that hung down the face of wet black rock. It seemed like a world in which moss and rot reigned.
They passed through Hood River, a dismal-looking little town squatting among the hills. They had breakfast, and Jubal flirted with the waitress, a pleasant woman who easily told him her name was Johanna Sisu. He asked, “So, Johanna, when will we see the sun?”
She laughed, didn’t bother to look at her watch, but simply nodded instead toward the calendar on the wall. “ ’Nother month, give or take a week.”
Cork and Willie tipped her well. Jubal left her with only the golden memory of his smile.
Twenty miles later, they hit The Dalles and turned south into great hills that were soft and green with winter wheat. At Madras, they veered east again and eventually entered a desolate area of plateaus and canyons carved out of thick layers of old lava flow.
“The Great Oregon Desert,” Willie said. ThGreOrgnDeser.
“You came out here alone?” Jubal asked, clearly astonished.
