No badge. No gun. His person was his authority. He moved with shambling grace; a powerful man with a deceptive softness to his loosely chiseled features; hatless, his long dark hair ruffled almost to his shoulders, softly curly, in the breeze.
Emery drew close and his watchful tobacco eyes were mournful and bloodshot and teared with the cold. He stopped a few feet away and seemed to loose his balance.
Deputy Jerry immediately went to him. Profound sympathy softened the vigorous lines of the young cop’s face as he took the sheriff by the arm and steadied him. “How you doing with this, Larry?” he asked.
The sheriff took a deep, shuddering breath and released it.
HUNTER’S MOON / 79
“I’m okay,” he said but the scary way his eyes flashed told Harry to get ready to meet the most pissed-off and most dangerous man in Maston County.
Emery let Harry have another second of the glare, then he folded it back into his eyes like a jackknife blade and said, “Jerry, you go down an’ help Morris with the video camera so’s we got more than just treetops on that tape. And don’t have him spitting tobacco juice on any evidence. Do it right. And don’t piss off the God almighty State fucking Patrol.”
“Morris knows what to do,” said Jerry and didn’t move. They had a quick conference, heads close. Emery perused Jerry’s notebook, then returned to Harry. Jerry hovered a few feet away.
“I’m Larry Emery. Sheriff here.” He said, icy with control.
“How is he?” Harry asked.
Emery squinted at him. “You want a lawyer? Go back into town, get a lawyer. Or talk to somebody ’bout being upset? We got this preacher works for us you can talk to now when your heart starts going pitter-pat.”
“Is he all right?” Harry repeated.
“Seems to be. Looks like you’ve bandaged a gunshot wound before.”
“Nothing went into his guts or anything?”
“Flesh wound. Through and though.” Emery slowly scanned Harry’s face. “He’s more worried about you.”
Harry nodded and winced as the ooze from the claw marks cracked in the cold.
“Girl really did a job on you,” said Emery. “Need that looked at.”
“Your deputy said you had some questions?”
“Bud says you saved his life. What d’you say?” Emery asked. He took a small wooden cylinder from his pocket, twisted off the top, and withdrew a toothpick that he held between his fingers and put it to his lips like a smoker. His fingers shook.
“It was real fast,” said Harry.
“Um-hum,” nodded Emery. He was looking down the slope.
80 / CHUCK LOGAN
At the kid’s body, hugging the bush. “So you was up here, in this dead pine,” he walked the yellow tape to the platform 20 feet away.
The angle of the land and the brush below just blocked the line-of-sight view from the stand to where Chris had stood. Emery’s eyes took this in. “And you hear this shot—”
“Yelling. They were yelling at each other.”
“What’d they say?”
“An argument. Bud called Chris an ‘ungrateful little shit,’ I heard that.”
“Then what?”
“Two shots and Bud screamed. I jumped out of the tree and ran to the edge of the ridge where I could see. Bud was down, the kid—”
“Name was Chris,” said Emery. “Christopher Warren Deucette.”
“Chris was reloading, tearing at the bolt like it was jammed, then he aimed it at Bud—”
“How long you know him—Chris, I mean?”
“Met him last night. We just drove up from the Cities. Bud married his mother…
“Lives with her. Keeps her.” said Emery with distaste. He threw the toothpick away. “You got another cigarette?”
Harry handed him his pack. Emery tore off the filter and took a light from Harry’s Zippo. He dragged for a moment and exhaled.
“You talk much to Chris?”
“A little, about hunting—”
“Anything between Chris and Maston come up? Anything explain why he’d put a deer gun on Maston?”
“Right after it happened Bud said something about stolen goods.
Not real clear on that part.”
“You get that in your notes?” Emery queried Jerry, who nodded.
Then Emery studied Harry carefully. After an interval, he went on.
“An’ you see Chris shoot at Bud. Was they standing close?”
Harry shook his head. “Bud was down, crawling away, bleeding.
The ki…Chris, he was working the bolt—”
“So you didn’t see him shoot?”
HUNTER’S MOON / 81
“Not the first two. Third one hit a tree next to Bud’s head. Same time I fired.”
Emery peered down the slope, at angles and distances. “So his shot went wild when he was hit? Or he missed?”
“Too close to tell.” Harry remembered Bud’s agonized statement—that he was trying to talk to Chris. Did he react too fast? His memory was starting to function again and it served up the image of the gray movement he’d seen in the trees right after the shooting and matched it with the image of Becky in her ski suit racing down the trail, coming off the porch at him. “Maybe I should talk to a lawyer,” he said.
“I don’t think we’re to that yet, Mr. Griffin. Don’t think this is headed that way. But that’s your right. Take you back and you make your phone call. You get your legal advice, then we’ll get your statement. Like the law says.”
There was something heavy and remorseful in Sheriff Emery’s manner when he pronounced the phrase, “the law.”
Harry and Emery walked in silence back along the ridge and down to the trail with Deputy Jerry just behind them. The herd of cops and medics had made a wallow of the snow, obliterating any snowshoe tracks. As they approached the grove of pines, Harry stiffened as he watched Emery’s alert tracker’s eyes inspect the two sets of footprints that left the trail and went into the trees.
Harry stopped flat-footed. The tracks ended abruptly in recently feathered snow. Sprinkled pine needles and curls of rusty bark traced the path of someone who had swept the entire area with a pine-bough broom.
Harry held his breath and heard the leather creak on Jerry’s gunbelt as the deputy shifted his weight. Trying
