She cocked her head and the movement rippled her straight hair.
“He took you off the street, fixed your teeth, got you your job. You’re his hard guy Frankenstein. Wasn’t for him, you’d be exercising those fifty-caliber shoulders on a loading dock somewhere, going to seedy AA meetings every night, and having tense dreams about glasses of draft beer.”
Harry gave her a tight smile and sorrow bunched the corners of her lips. He couldn’t decipher what impulse sucked the tears back from her eyes. One second it was vulnerable, the next it shriveled into the bitterest of smiles.
“You can fuck me, but you can’t see me, and I’m sitting right here in front of you,” she said.
“Jesse…we have to talk about Chris.”
Her eyes slapped him. “Nobody’s innocent. All clear?”
Maybe all they had were random moments. This one was gone.
Her words came in tight wire bundles. “Listen carefully, wise ass.
Tell your master I want the lodge, the lake, the land…and a million dollars.”
“That’s pretty steep blood money for a murdering kid.”
A spark of hellfire flew in her eyes. “Combined business and divorce settlement. He can cash out. Simple round figures.”
HUNTER’S MOON / 225
“Why don’t you tell him?” he asked.
“He slapped an injunction on me. We’re not supposed to talk.”
“So get a lawyer.”
“Why? When you’re here. The invaluable friend.” She laughed bitterly. “The best man, the best shot…the best fuck.”
They became aware of the waiter poised nervously to take their order.
“I lost my appetite. How about you?” she said briskly. The waiter retreated.
She pulled some bills from the pocket of her purse and dropped them on the table, getting ready to leave.
“You don’t have much of a life, do you?” she asked as she stood up. “You’re not interested in money, or power. Just some myths about who you are and a few moments when they seem to come true. Chris was one of those moments, wasn’t he?”
“Why’s Becky hiding?” he countered as they walked toward the coat rack.
“Keep it simple, stupid. The lake, the lodge, the land, and the money.”
He took her arm and pulled her around to face him. “You don’t fit up here, with Emery and Cox.”
Her face flashed. “We don’t all get to wind up where we fit.
Sometimes we wind up where we get stuck.” She pried off his hand and put on her coat.
In the parking lot they hunched in their coats, leaving, but not finished. Harry dropped all pretense of control. “Why’s Cox look at me that way?” he demanded.
“You mean like he’s seen a ghost?” Abruptly she turned and walked down the path among the boulders to the shore. Harry followed her. She turned up her collar and huddled close to him.
“Why are we here?” he asked.
“Open your eyes.”
He peered into her face. She took his chin in her hand and pointed it out over the lake. The horizon flamed pale green 226 / CHUCK LOGAN
and vermilion where the Aurora Borealis made a million-car pileup at the edge of the world.
“Pretty,” he said, looking into her face.
“It’s fucking beautiful, Harry. The most beautiful thing you’ll ever see.”
Another situation, another woman; it would be the time for a kiss and the kiss was spectral between them in the warm, white vapor of their breath mingling and gone in the night.
He opened his mouth to speak. Her finger pressed her lips and gently moved to his, sealing them. She was so good it looked like a real tear bent in the corner of her eye when she said, “The worst part of all this is it had to be you.”
She turned and walked up the path. Halfway up, she spun and made an electric figure against the flickering sky.
“What the hell do you want?” he yelled at her.
“I want you to take a chance on me.”
Then she disappeared into the darkness. He caught up to her in the parking lot.
“Anything else you want to tell Bud?” he asked in a hoarse voice.
“Sure, tell him life is unfair.” Composed now, she got into her car and rolled down the window. “I’m a damsel in distress. Since you served those papers at the funeral, the local cavemen think I’m up for grabs. Larry has it in his mind that the guy who gets the biggest deer gets me. Men, huh?” she said as she drove away.
Her presence lingered and the caress of evil came as softly and innocently as a breeze stirs a flag. Shoot a deer. Fuck a dragon. Betray Bud. Out on the black arena of Superior, ice cracked like a starter pistol.
38
Take a chance.
The old infantry gamble. Stay low in the weeds with nineteen. Or stand up and walk toward it and tempt the bitch.
HUNTER’S MOON / 227
Hit me.
It wasn’t her sensuality that stayed with him. It was the credible way she plunked down her demands.
She meant a million bucks. Harry thought about it. A dollar sign, a one, and six zeros. And Bud, pickled in guilt about Chris, would probably roll over for it. So what kind of a risk did she have in mind?
Bud’s Jeep found its way to the front door of the Stanley Municipal Liquor Store and Harry was going two out of three falls with a powerful urge when the counterman flipped the closed sign on the door. He took the hint. Tie match for tonight. He drove up Highway 7.
The large manila envelope was tacked to the lodge door with a push pin. No writing on it, brand new, unsealed.
Harry placed it on the dining room table, went back out on the porch, and listened. Only the cold biting down and the cooling tick of the Jeep engine.
The envelope contained a yellowing page from the Duluth Times.
He glanced at the date on the folio as he smoothed out the folds in the faded newsprint. Six years old.
Damn.
A circle of red Magic Marker swirled around a photograph on the page. Jesse’s hair was shorter and she was more
