“Oh God, oh God, please,” yelled the guy.
Harry pushed him face first into the snow. “Fuck the ground, asshole,” snarled Harry.
“What?” came the bewildered response.
Harry knelt and frisked him. He’d dropped his rifle. Wasn’t carrying another weapon. “Stand up,” he ordered. “Who the hell are you?”
“Na-Na-Norm Patton. I wa-wa-work in the Ba-ba-bank.”
“What are you doing out here?”
“Sa-sa-searching.”
Harry seized him by the collar and pulled him to his feet. “Down the hill. I’m right behind you.”
Pushing Norm Patton ahead, he retraced their footprints, retrieved Patton’s deer rifle, then his shotgun. Snowmobiles scurried loudly up the trail next to the lake. Other lights, headlights, it looked like, flashed between the cabins by the lodge. A crumpled cellophane squawk, police radio.
Backlit by the headlights, two figures jogged toward him and his hyperventilating prisoner. Harry slid the .45 back into his belt, out of sight.
“Griffin!” shouted Larry Emery. “Now what, you sono-fabitch!”
Jerry Hakala’s only slightly less furious face bobbed next to the sheriff’s.
274 / CHUCK LOGAN
“Calm down, Larry,” yelled an indignant voice from the snowmobiles convened on the trail. Don Karson.
“I seen her, Sheriff,” said Norm Patton. “Sh-sh-she was right down here on the trail with him.”
“This asshole shot at me,” yelled Harry, throwing Patton’s rifle into the snow.
“Did not,” stuttered Patton. “I tried to blow my whistle like you said, but it had slobber in it and was froze. So I fired three times in the air—”
“Air my ass, shot right over my head!” Harry shouted.
“Did not! Then this nut started shooting the woods apart.”
“Norm,” growled Emery, struggling to keep his voice under control,
“How come you had you a rifle up there? I said no guns. No guns!
We’re looking for a screwed-up teenage girl. All she needs is to think people are shooting at her!”
“Hell, Sheriff, was still light when I got into position, thought I might see that big bastard deer’s ’posed to be in Maston’s swamp.”
Emery snarled deep in his throat. “Griffin! What the hell were you doing out here with a shotgun?”
“He’s got a pistol, too, pulled it on me up there.”
“Shut the fuck up, Norm.”
“Sheriff Emery, sir,” Harry said with excessive respect. “I heard somebody moving round back of the cabins, went to take a look.
Last time somebody came through there they set me on fire.”
Don Karson stepped up. “Still solving problems with guns, Harry?” he asked. Then he turned to Patton. “Norm, you all right?
You’re not injured—shot or anything?”
Norm laughed nervously. “I crapped my pants.”
A ripple of laughter chorused through the crowd of deputies and citizens.
“This isn’t funny,” Karson was indignant. “Not one damn bit funny. This isn’t a search. It’s a damned circus. What’s needed here is some adult leadership.”
Emery’s derisive chuckle turned murderous. “Too bad the paper went out of business. You could write a letter to the editor.”
HUNTER’S MOON / 275
Karson drew himself up and faced Emery. “People are getting real tired of smelling your whiskey breath.”
“Get your big mouth out from behind the hem of Jesus’ garment and say that, Don,” Emery said between clenched teeth.
“All right, you guys…” Jerry Hakala stepped between them. “It’s been a long day.”
Emery turned toward the Blazer. His shoulder sideswiped Harry, pushing him off balance.
“Stand by, fucker!” Harry warned.
Emery spun, his face hideous in the headlights. Jerry shepherded him with a broad shoulder. “Larry…”
“Just what we all need. A little more violence,” Karson said in a jerky voice.
Harry watched the blaze-orange posse troop down Bud’s driveway.
In the lodge, frustrated, he threw the shotgun on the dining room table. He was inside something where you don’t get to think anymore. Like everybody, he was reacting.
Tell Mom to stop the divorce?
Numb, with circles of pain ringing in his ears from the gunfire, he looked up Cox’s number and dialed it.
She answered on the second ring. “Hello?” The first hello was bright and husky. Hope.
“Hello? Becky? Is that you? Honey?” Desperate hope, then cancel the hope.
“Who is this?” A tin quiver of fear.
Harry couldn’t do it. He hung up. It was torture, just like she said.
Two butterflies stuck on a length of pain. Unable to move toward each other.
Do the responsible thing. Call Bud. No idea where he was. Harry called Linda’s office. Closed down, the machine on. He tried her home. Another machine.
“This is Harry. Find Bud and tell him I talked to Becky. She saw the whole thing that morning Chris tried to shoot him. We have a witness. Emery is mounting a search for her. I’m worried she might meet with an accident. Call me ASAP.”
276 / CHUCK LOGAN
45
Harry cleaned the shotgun in front of the fireplace.
There was no convenient ramrod to swab the folly of shooting up the hill at Norm Patton. Dumb.
Then shivers. That was killing hate he’d seen in Emery’s face. The bottle of J.D. flickered in the firelight. Just a reach away.
Pictures, Becky said.
Okay. His eyes roved the lodge. What happened here in October?
Abruptly he got up, picked up a flashlight on his way through the kitchen, and pushed through the plastic sheeting that walled off the new construction and entered the addition.
The light meandered over a carpenter’s belt discarded on the deck, bulging with tools, and shined on Cox’s rusted Skilsaw, abandoned on the sawhorses. If they were cleaning out the place, why would Cox leave his tools behind? He thumbed the rime of rust on the saw blade and evaluated the dust on the blueprints spread on the sawhorses.
Whatever was going on here stopped a month ago. When Chris made his threats, when Bud and Jesse decided to marry. Harry squatted on the plywood decking and played the light across the Sheetrock. The light stopped on the diagonal shadow of a ladder behind another sheet of plastic.
The ladder was placed into a stairwell and led to the second floor.
Harry swung the light ahead as he climbed the ladder. Cages of naked two-by-fours defined the rooms. Nothing but scraps of lumber.
Nails and dust.
A bit of color snagged the light, out on the balcony. Harry stooped to a
