over everything reflected the sky, and the whole land appeared to bleed. Warm weather returned in the first week of October, and for the past few days it had felt almost like June again.
“I love Indian summer.” Marsha Dross smiled, as if hoping for a pleasant change of subject.
She was a tall woman, nearly six feet, and slender. Her hair was coarse and brown and she kept it short. She had a broad face, large nose. In her uniform and without makeup-something she never wore on the job-she was sometimes mistaken for a man. Off duty, she knew what to do with mascara and eyeliner and lip gloss. She preferred tight dresses with high hemlines, gold jewelry, and line dancing.
“Don’t you love Indian summer, Cork?”
“Know where the term Indian summer comes from?” he asked.
“No.”
“A white man’s phrase. They didn’t trust Indians, so when the warm days returned in late fall and it felt like summer but everyone knew it was a lie, they gave it a name they deemed appropriate.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Yes.”
“Yes, what?”
“I do love Indian summer.” He pointed to the right. “Turn here.”
“I know.”
Dross pulled onto a side road even smaller and rougher than the one they’d just followed, and they slipped into the blue shadow of a high ridge where a cool darkness had settled among the pine trees. The red-orange rays of the setting sun fell across the birches that crowned the hilltops, and the white trunks seemed consumed by a raging fire.
“I wish you had let me take the call alone,” Dross said.
“As soon as you hit that skunk, so did I.” He smiled briefly. “You know my policy.”
“I responded to a lot of calls on the rez when Wally was sheriff, and Soderberg.”
“I’m sheriff now. Domestic disturbances can turn ugly, even between people as harmless as Eli and Lucy.”
“Then send another deputy with me. You don’t always have to go on the rez calls.”
“When you’re sheriff, you can do things your way.”
Life, Cork knew, was odder than a paisley duck. Three months before he’d been a private citizen, proud proprietor of Sam’s Place, a small burger joint on a lovely spot along the shore of Iron Lake. Flipping burgers was a vocation many people probably considered only slightly less humble than, say, rounding up shopping carts in a Wal-Mart parking lot, but Cork had grown fond of his independence. When a scandal forced the duly elected sheriff, a man named Arne Soderberg, from office, the Board of County Commissioners had offered Cork the job. He had the experience; he had the trust of the people of Tamarack County; and the commissioners happened to catch him in a weak moment.
Dross slowed the Land Cruiser. “The truth is, you love going out like this.”
The truth was, he did.
“There,” Cork said.
It was a small, shabby cabin set against the base of the ridge, with a horseshoe of poplar trees around the back and sides. There was an old shed to the right, just large enough for a pickup truck, but Cork knew it was so full of junk there was no way a pickup could fit. A metal washtub sat in the yard, full of potting soil and the browning stalks of mums that had frozen days before. A big propane tank lay like a fat, white hyphen between the cabin and the shed. Behind the shed stood an old outhouse.
Dross parked off the road in the dirt of what passed for a drive. “Looks deserted,” she said.
The curtains were open and behind each window was deep black.
“Eli’s pickup’s gone,” she noted. “Maybe they patched things up and went off to celebrate.”
The call had come from Lucy Tibodeau who lived with her husband Eli in the little cabin. These two had a long history of domestic disputes that, more often than not, arose from the fact that Eli liked to drink and Lucy liked to bully. When Eli drank, he tended to forget that he weighed 140 pounds compared to Lucy’s 200-plus. In their altercations, it was generally Eli who took it on the chin. They always made up and never actually brought a formal complaint against one another. Patsy, the dispatcher, had taken the call and reported that Lucy was threatening to beat the crap out of Eli if someone didn’t get out there to stop her. Which was a little odd. Generally, it was Eli who called asking for protection.
Cork looked at the cabin a moment, and listened to the stillness in the hollow.
“Where are the dogs?” he said.
“Dogs?” Dross replied. Then she understood. “Yeah.”
Everybody on the rez had dogs. Eli and Lucy had two. They were an early-warning system of sorts, barking up a storm when visitors came. At the moment, however, everything around the Tibodeau cabin was deathly still.
“Maybe they took the dogs with them.”
“Maybe,” Cork said. “I’m going to see if Patsy’s heard anything more.”
Dross put on her cap and opened her door. She stepped out, slid her baton into her belt.
Cork reached for the radio mike. “Unit Three to Dispatch. Over.”
“This is Dispatch. Go ahead, Cork.”
“Patsy, we’re at the Tibodeau place. Looks like nobody’s home. Have you had any additional word from Lucy?”
“That’s a negative, Cork. Nothing since her initial call.”
“And you’re sure it came from her?”
“She ID’d herself as Lucy Tibodeau. Things have been quiet out there lately, so I figured we were due for a call.”
Marsha Dross circled around the front of the vehicle and took a few steps toward the cabin. In the shadow cast by the ridge, everything had taken on a somber look. She stopped, glanced at the ground near her feet, bent down, and put a finger in the dirt.
“There’s blood here,” she called out to Cork. “A lot of it.”
She stood up, turned to the cabin again, her hand moving toward her holster. Then she stumbled, as if she’d been shoved from behind, and collapsed facedown. In the same instant, Cork heard the report from a rifle.
“Shots fired!” he screamed into the microphone. “Officer down!”
The windshield popped and a small hole surrounded by a spiderweb of cracks appeared like magic in front of Cork. The bullet chunked into the padding on the door an inch from his arm. Cork scrambled from the Land Cruiser and crouched low against the vehicle.
Dross wasn’t moving. He could see a dark red patch that looked like a maple leaf spread over the khaki blouse of her uniform.
The reports had come from the other side of the road, from the hill to the east. Where Cork hunkered, the Land Cruiser acted as a shield and protected him, but Dross was still vulnerable. He sprinted to her, hooked his hands under her arms, and dug his heels into the dirt, preparing to drag her to safety. As he rocked his weight back, something stung his left ear. A fraction of a second later another report came from the hill. Cork kept moving, his hands never losing their grip as he hauled his fallen deputy to the cover of the Land Cruiser.
A shot slammed through the hood, clanged off the engine block, and thudded into the dirt next to the left front tire.
Cork drew his revolver and tried to think. The shots had hit an instant before he’d heard the sound of them being fired, so the shooter was at some distance. But was there only one? Or were others moving in, positioning themselves for the kill?
He could hear the traffic on the radio, Patsy communicating with the other units, the units responding. He tried to remember how many cruisers were out, where they were patrolling, and how long it would take them to reach that cabin in the middle of nowhere, but he couldn’t quite put it all together.
Dross lay on her back staring up with dazed eyes. The front of her blouse was soaked nearly black. Cork undid the buttons and looked at the exit wound in her abdomen. A lot of blood had leaked out, but the wound wasn’t as large as he’d feared. It was a single neat hole, which probably meant that the bullet had maintained its
