Last Night In Twisted River

“Well, don’t get your balls crossed about it,” Ketchum said.

“Apparently, it doesn’t exist-at least not yet,” Danny told his dad. “You know that Pedro is nuts, Pop-you know that, don’t you?”

“Of course I know he’s nuts, Daniel!” the cook cried. “Poor Pedro was just so convinced-he made it sound plausible.”

That Saturday night before the Christmas break-the last night that Patrice would be Patrice-Danny and Ketchum had ordered three bottles of the Barolo Massolino. As the cook had told Arnaud, Ketchum drank most of the wine, but Ketchum had also been counting.

“You may say you have a couple of beers, and one or two glasses of red wine with your dinner, Danny, but you’ve had four glasses of wine tonight. Even three glasses of wine, on top of two beers, is kind of a lot for a little fella.” There was nothing accusatory in Ketchum’s tone-he was simply setting the record straight-but Danny was defensive about it.

“I didn’t know you were counting for me, Ketchum.”

“Don’t be like that, Danny,” the logger said. “It’s just my job to look after you fellas.”

Ketchum had complained about Danny’s tendency not to lock the house on Cluny Drive after he came home from dinner. But most nights the cook came home later than his son, and Dominic didn’t like fumbling around with the door key. The cook preferred to lock the front door after he’d come home, and before he went to bed.

“But wine makes you sleepy, doesn’t it, Danny?” the woodsman had asked. “Most nights, I expect, you fall sound asleep in an unlocked house-before your dad is back home.”

“Mountains of moose shit-as you would say, Ketchum,” Danny had replied.

That was just the way they did things in Toronto, the cook and his son explained to the veteran river driver. Danny and his dad had locked each other out of the house before; it was a nuisance. Now, when they went out, they left the house on Cluny Drive unlocked; when they were both back in the house for the night, the last one to go to bed locked the damn door.

“It’s the red wine that troubles me a bit, Danny,” Ketchum had told the writer. “With red wine, you fall asleep like a rock-you don’t hear anything.”

“If I drink only beer, I’m awake all night,” Danny told the logger.

“I like the sound of that a little better,” was all the woodsman had said.

But the red wine wasn’t really the problem. Yes, Danny would occasionally drink more than a glass or two-and it did make him sleepy. Still, the wine was no more than a contributing factor, and the restaurant’s new name wasn’t part of what went wrong at all. The problem was that after all their efforts to elude the cowboy-and the dubious name changes, which would prove to be pointless-Ketchum had simply been followed.

THE COWBOY HAD FOLLOWED Ketchum before, but Carl was none the wiser for it. The retired deputy had twice trailed the logger on his hunting trips to Quebec; Carl had even tracked Ketchum all the way to Pointe au Baril Station one winter, only to assume that the younger man the old woodsman was camping with was just some Ontario hick. The cowboy had no idea who Danny was, or what Danny did; Carl had wildly concluded that possibly Ketchum was “queer,” and that the younger man was the old logger’s lover! No little fella with a limp had materialized on these adventures, and Carl had essentially given up on following Ketchum.

One word would change everything-the word and the fact that both Ketchum and the cowboy did their tire business at the same establishment in Milan. Tires, especially winter tires, were important in northern New Hampshire. Twitchell’s was the name of the tire place that Ketchum and the cowboy frequented, though the grease monkey who did the important talking was a young Canuck named Croteau.

“That looks like Ketchum’s rig,” Carl had said to the French Canadian-this was a week or more before Christmas, and the cowboy had noticed Ketchum’s truck on the hoist in the garage at Twitchell’s. Croteau was changing all four tires.

“Yup,” Croteau said. The retired deputy observed that the Canuck was removing Ketchum’s studded tires and replacing them with un-studded snow tires.

“Does Ketchum have an inside tip that it’s gonna be a mild winter?” Carl asked Croteau.

“Nope,” Croteau said. “He just don’t like the sound of the studs on the interstate, and it’s mostly interstates between here and Toronto.”

“ Toronto,” the cowboy repeated, but that wasn’t the word that would change everything.

“Ketchum puts the studded tires back on when he comes home after Christmas,” Croteau explained to the deputy, “but you don’t need studs for highway drivin’-out on the interstates, regular snow tires will do.”

“Ketchum goes to Toronto for Christmas?” Carl asked the Canuck.

“For as long as I can remember,” Croteau said, which wasn’t very long-not in the cowboy’s estimation. Croteau was in his early twenties; he’d been changing tires only since he got out of high school.

“Does Ketchum have some lady friend in Toronto?” Carl asked. “Or a boyfriend, maybe?”

“Nope,” Croteau replied. “Ketchum said he’s got family there.”

It was the family word that would change everything. The deputy sheriff knew that Ketchum didn’t have a family-not in Canada, anyway. And what family he’d had, the old logger had lost; everyone knew that Ketchum was estranged from his children. Ketchum’s kids were still living in New Hampshire, Carl knew. Ketchum’s children were grown up now, with kids of their own, but they had never moved away from Coos County; they’d just cut their ties to Ketchum.

“Ketchum can’t have any family in Toronto,” the cowboy told the dumb Canuck.

“Well, that’s what Ketchum said-he’s got family there, in Toronto,” Croteau insisted stubbornly.

Later, Danny would be touched that the old logger thought of him and his dad as family; yet that was what gave them away to Carl. The cowboy couldn’t think of anyone whom Ketchum had absolutely taken to-or had seemed at all close to, in the manner of family-except the cook. Nor had it been hard for the ex-cop to follow Ketchum’s truck, unnoticed. That truck burned a lot of oil; a black cloud of exhaust enveloped following vehicles, and Carl had wisely rented an anonymous-looking SUV with snow tires. That December, on the interstate highways of the northeastern United States -they would cross into Canada from Buffalo, over the Peace Bridge -the cowboy’s car was as nondescript as they come. After all, Carl had been a cop; he knew how to tail people.

The cowboy knew how to stake out the house on Cluny Drive, too. It wasn’t long before he was familiar with all of their comings and goings, including Ketchum’s. Of course the cowboy was aware that Ketchum was just visiting. While Carl must have been tempted to kill all three of them, the deputy probably didn’t want to risk going up against the old logger; Carl knew that Ketchum was armed. The house on Cluny Drive was never locked during the day, or at night, either-not until after the last of them, usually the cook, had limped home to go to bed.

It had been easy for the cowboy to get inside and have a good look at the house; that way, Carl knew who was sleeping in each room. But there was more that he didn’t know.

The only gun in the house was the one in the guest bedroom, where it was clear to Carl that Ketchum was staying. The cowboy thought it was an odd gun, or at least an unsophisticated weapon, for Ketchum to be carrying-a youth-model Winchester 20-gauge. (A friggin’ kid’s shotgun, Carl was thinking.)

How could the deputy have known that the Winchester Ranger was Ketchum’s Christmas present for Danny? The old logger didn’t believe in wrapping paper, and the 20-gauge, pump-action shotgun was loaded and stashed under Ketchum’s bed-exactly where the cowboy would have hidden a weapon. It never occurred to Carl that the 20 -gauge wouldn’t be going back to New Hampshire with the veteran river driver, whenever it was that Ketchum eventually returned to Coos County. The cowboy would just wait and see when that would be-then make his move.

Carl thought he had several options. He’d unlocked the door to the fire escape in Danny’s third-floor writing room; if the writer didn’t notice that the door was unlocked, the cowboy could enter the house that way. But if Danny saw that the door was unlocked, and re-locked it, Carl could come into the house through the unlocked front door-at any time of the evening, when the cook and his son were out. The cowboy had observed that Danny didn’t go back to his third-floor writing room after he’d had dinner. (This was because of the beer and the red wine; when the writer had been drinking, he didn’t even want to be in the same room with his writing.)

Whether Carl entered the property via the third-floor fire escape or walked in the front door, he would be safe hiding out in that third-floor room; the cowboy only had to be careful not to move around too much, not until the