just this once.”
He headed to Sam’s Place and was relieved to see the parking lot empty but for Jenny’s Subaru. He was just about to go inside when his daughter came out with Waaboo toddling beside her. His grandson smiled, and Cork’s mood changed instantly. Anger drained away; love flooded in; but with it came rushing back his fear for the safety of his family.
Jenny let Waaboo run, if you could call it that, to Cork, who swept him up. The little boy’s black hair smelled of French fries.
“You timed it well,” Jenny said to him. “The last reporter got discouraged an hour ago and left. Ever since word got out about the search of our house this morning, we’ve been fighting them off like mosquitoes.”
“Sorry,” Cork said. “Did you call Leon Papakee?”
“Yes. He said he’d see what he could do.”
“Good.” That, at least, was a little relief. “Is Stephen inside?”
“Yeah. He and Judy are holding down the fort, such as it is.” She swept her hand across the empty lot. “The good thing about all the reporters, we sold a lot of burgers this afternoon.”
Waaboo squirmed in his arms, wanting to get down, and Cork released him. Waaboo toddled toward the lakeshore, but Jenny caught him before he’d gone far and picked him up. “Are you sticking around?”
“No. I’m meeting Ed Larson out on County Sixteen.”
“Anything in particular?”
“Yeah, take a look at this.” He walked her to the front of the Land Rover.
“Is that a bullet hole?” she asked, horrified.
“From a deer slug.”
“Somebody tried to shoot you?”
“Not necessarily, according to Agent Phil Holter. I may have shot my own windshield.”
“Why would he think that?”
“Because he’s covering all the possibilities, which include me being responsible for Jubal Little’s death and trying to make it look like I’m not.”
“He can’t believe that.”
Waaboo was straining to get free and making unhappy noises.
“I honestly don’t know what he believes. Look, Jenny, I want you to close up Sam’s Place. Close it up now, and go home. Shut the curtains and don’t open the door for anyone.”
She looked at the windshield. “Because one of those may come our way?”
“I don’t think so, but I’m not taking any chances. And I’m going to give Cy Borkman a call, have him come over and hang out with you guys.”
Borkman had retired from the sheriff’s department a couple of years earlier, but he still moonlighted in private security. Cork was pretty sure that, when Cy knew the gravity of the situation, he’d give a hand in a heartbeat.
“Do you really think we’re in danger?”
Cork nodded toward Waaboo. “Do you want to take a chance?”
Jenny had been in that kind of danger before. Only a year earlier, she’d risked her life, faced down a cadre of crazy religious zealots armed to the teeth, in order to save the life of the child in her arms. In a sad way, it had armored her against just the sort of brutal potential that Cork was afraid she might be facing again. Her look went hard, and she put her cheek against her son’s head. “I understand.”
“I may be home late tonight, so don’t worry about me.”
Again, she eyed the hole left by the slug. “That’s probably not possible.”
Larson was at the bridge ahead of him, and he wasn’t alone. John Berglund, from the Border Patrol, was there, too. Both men stood at the base of the ridge from which Cork believed the shot through his windshield had been fired.
Cork shook Berglund’s hand and said, “Seeing a lot of you these days.”
“Back at you.”
“Is this what you do on your time off?”
Berglund smiled. “Been doing this pretty much since I was a Boy Scout. Lot of years now. Not much I like better than reading trail.”
“You guys ready?” Larson said.
“For what?” Cork asked.
Larson lifted a hand toward the top of the ridge. “Let’s see about that shooter.”
It was late afternoon. The sun was an emptying orange balloon caught in the branches of the trees. The temperature was dropping noticeably.
Berglund hesitated, eyeing the ridge, the sun, and finally the far side of the bridge Cork had been approaching when the shot was fired.
“How long ago did it happen?” he asked.
“A little over two hours,” Cork said.
“The sun would have been about there in the sky?” Berglund pointed to a spot about sixty degrees west of zenith.
“About,” Cork agreed.
“Glare on your windshield?”
“Yeah. Tough to see clearly.”
Berglund considered the ridge again. “Probably a blessing. You couldn’t see the shooter because of it, but the reflection off the windshield probably also made it tough for the shooter to see you clearly. Missed by a hair, Ed told me.”
“A little more than that, but close enough it scared the hell out of me.”
Berglund seemed satisfied. “All right, let’s go.”
They climbed the ridge, which was bare rock until very near the top, where scrub undergrowth had taken root among the crags. Above that, a stand of tenacious poplar saplings capped the rock outcrop. The men separated by a dozen feet and began to go over the ground carefully. The light was fading quickly, and Cork wasn’t sure they’d be able to see anything.
It was Berglund who said, “Over here.”
Cork and Larson joined him, and he pointed to a spot behind one of the larger saplings where there was an indentation in the thin topsoil.
“From a knee,” he said. “Somebody knelt here, probably in a firing position.” He walked away, toward the back of the ridge, his eyes reading the ground. “He left this way.”
Cork had always considered himself to be a pretty good tracker, but whatever the signs Berglund saw Cork was blind to.
He and Larson followed the Border Patrol agent down the backside of the ridge, where Ahsayma Creek ran. In the language of the Anishinaabeg, ahsayma meant “tobacco.” The creek was named for the color of the water, a tobacco-spit brown, the result of bog seepage, from which much of the flow had come. They trekked through a gully heavily lined with popple, and Cork finally saw tracks pressed into the leaves underfoot. The trail led back to the road, to a pull-off a quarter mile south of the bridge. In the soft earth there, they found tire indentations.
“You might want to get people out here to get impressions, Ed. You got good tire tracks, and look here.” Berglund crouched and put his finger to the ground where the perfect imprint of a boot sole had been left. “Not a common-looking pattern,” he noted. “Might not be too hard to identify the brand.” He gazed back in the direction of the bridge. “This guy picked a pretty good spot to take a shot at you, and it was probably only the angle of the sun and the reflection off your windshield that saved you. If, in fact, he was trying to take you out. So he’s somebody who has a sense of what it takes to hunt. What do you think, Ed?”
“I think that’s a lot of conjecture, John, but I’ve got nothing better to offer. When we get these tire impressions evaluated and that boot imprint, we’ll know a hell of a lot more. And, Cork? I’ll tell Phil Holter he can let go of thinking you might have done this yourself. I’m looking forward to seeing the disappointed expression on his face.”
Cork filled his tank at the Food ’N Fuel in Allouette. It was getting late and he was hungry, so he grabbed a
