“Why don’t you clean up your face and see what’s broken and wait for us there.”
The father and the boy picked up their gear. Stormy shouldered a canoe, and they moved on.
Sloane knelt next to the man on the ground. He examined the wounds, then shook his head at Cork.
“From the way he’s bleeding, I’d guess I hit an artery.”
“There’s nothing we can do.” Cork glanced at Willie Raye, who stood nearby, staring down at the dying man. “Why don’t you head along with Stormy and Louis.”
“No. If he knows something about Shiloh, I want to know what it is.”
“I don’t think he’ll be saying much.” Sloane sat down on the wet ground. The man beside him stared up at the sky.
“Can he hear us?” Raye asked.
“I don’t know what he can hear.”
“Ask him about Shiloh.”
Sloane leaned to the man and said, “Do you know where Shiloh is?”
The eyes-blue-white, like snow at first light, Cork thought-rolled slowly in Sloane’s direction. Sloane bent very near and listened.
“What did he say?” Raye asked.
“He told you to fuck yourself.”
The dying man’s face contorted and his body tensed, then relaxed.
“Is he dead?” Raye asked.
Sloane felt the carotid artery. “Not yet.”
Cork knelt beside the man and checked his pockets.
“No identification. Nothing.” He sat down heavily and tenderly felt himself where he’d been kicked. Nothing seemed broken. “This could take a while,” he said to Sloane.
In his hand, Sloane still held the gun. He looked at it, appraising it from several angles as if it were an instrument he didn’t understand at all. “A cop for thirty years and I never shot anyone till now.”
“He was going to kill us,” Cork said.
Sloane put down the gun. “Christ, I could use a cigarette.”
“Me, too,” Cork said.
Sloane grew quiet, studied the close, gray clouds.
Cork looked down the trail in the direction from which they’d just come. He thought about the ambush.
“Why didn’t he just shoot us?” he asked.
“What?” Sloane seemed pulled back from a far place.
“He was going to kill us, that was obvious. Why didn’t he just shoot us while we had our hands full of the canoes? He could have done it in a few seconds.”
Sloane thought about it. “Maybe he likes people to be afraid before they die. I’ve profiled killers like that.”
“They’ve got Shiloh,” Willie Raye broke in, pleading. “This man’s gonna die anyway. You said there ain’t a thing we can do ’bout that. We should move on. We should move on now.”
“He’s right,” Cork said.
“I don’t feel right about it,” Sloane said. “I wouldn’t leave a wounded animal to die like this.”
“You could shoot him again,” Arkansas Willie suggested.
Cork and Sloane both looked at him.
“It’s what you do with a wounded animal,” Raye said. “It’s that or leave him. Hell, my girl’s still out there. And if what he said is true, if they got her, then we need to find her fast. We can’t wait around for this man to take his time in dying.”
Cork said quietly to Sloane, “We’ve got a chance of saving Shiloh. We should do everything we can for the living.”
“I’m not going to shoot him again.” Sloane took a sweater from his pack, rolled it, and put it under the dying man’s head as a pillow. “I don’t suppose it’ll make much difference.” He put his gun away and lifted the scoped rifle that had been taken from Grimes.
Shouldering their loads, they burdened themselves again and moved out along the portage, leaving one more man to mark with death their passage through that wilderness.
30
The Tamarack County Courthouse was built in 1896 with timber money. Constructed of honey-colored blocks quarried in the Minnesota town of Sandstone a hundred miles south, the courthouse stood three stories high and was crowned by a beautiful clock tower. If the passage of time were truly marked by the tower clock, the town of Aurora would have been standing still for thirty years. For three decades, time had been frozen at twelve twenty- seven. The story was that the hands had stopped at the exact moment Corcoran O’Connor’s father died. It might have been true. Both the clock and William O’Connor were hit during a wild exchange of gunfire between officers of the sheriff’s department and two escapees from the state prison in St. Cloud. The men had paused in Aurora on their flight to the Canadian border in order to rob the Citizen’s National Bank. Sheriff William O’Connor and two deputies responded to the silent alarm. Cork’s father put himself between a round from a stolen deer rifle and Louise Gregory, a short-tempered old woman deaf as a brick, who’d walked unknowingly into the melee. Every few years, the town council debated fixing the clock-debated renovating a lot of the old courthouse-but they always balked. Partly this was because the clock was seen as a kind of monument to something noble and heroic, and partly it was due to the fact that the repair would have cost a small fortune. So, like much in Aurora, things stayed pretty much the way they were. However, there were new names on the roster of the town council and new revenues coming in from business generated by the casino, and people seemed more willing-eager, even-to put a new face on the town. There was talk of a whole new county court complex that would house the sheriff’s department and county jail as well.
All this was possible, Jo O’Connor granted, but as she sat in court that gray October morning listening to the ancient heating pipes cough and grumble, passing gas and water like old men, she knew nothing changed very quickly in Aurora. And, she was surprised to realize, she liked it that way.
The pipes, Judge Frank Dziedzic had warned after he convened the proceedings, were going to be distracting. He apologized and promised that the heating system was being worked on and urged all parties to be patient and make the best of it. By the time Wally Schanno appeared in the back of the courtroom shortly before noon and signaled to her, Jo was more than ready to request a recess. She didn’t have to. Opposing counsel Earl Nordstrom, while attempting to introduce into evidence a waiver of easement rights signed by the Iron Lake Reservation tribal council, was finally drowned out in a clatter of rattling metal that made him crush the document in his hands. Judge Dziedzic was favorably disposed to granting his request for a continuance until the heating was fixed.
Jo gathered her papers and turned as Schanno approached the plaintiff’s table.
“Got some interesting news,” he told her. “The Bureau people I know did some checking for me. At least some of what you were told is true. Special Agent in Charge Booker T. Harris of the Los Angeles field office is officially on personal leave. There’s not, at this time, any official Bureau involvement in the investigation of the deaths of Elizabeth Dobson or Dr. Patricia Sutpen. And there are currently no Bureau personnel with the names of Virgil Grimes or Dwight Sloane.”
Jo snapped her briefcase shut. “Special Agent in Charge Harris didn’t go into the Boundary Waters, did he?”
“No, he’s out at the Quetico.”
“I think we should pay him a visit, don’t you, Wally?”
Schanno drove them out in a sheriff’s department cruiser. The wind that had come the night before, bringing the clouds and the cold, had stripped the color from the trees. Wet leaves plastered the roadways. The limbs of the birch and aspen that lined the shore of Iron Lake were absolutely bare. Jo stared at the trees as they passed, and the bared branches made the world look fractured.
Like all the cabins at the big new resort called the Quetico, Harris’s cabin stood on the very shore of Iron
