and saw George LeDuc’s truck at the curb. LeDuc got out and Henry Meloux with him. Cork pulled his boots on and headed downstairs. He reached the door just as the bell rang.
“ Anin, Henry. Anin, George,” he said, using the more formal Ojibwe greeting. “Come on in.” He moved aside to let the men enter. He couldn’t read their faces. “Coffee?” he offered.
“No,” Meloux replied. LeDuc shook his head.
“What’s up?” Cork asked.
LeDuc said, “Henry showed up on my doorstep this morning. He told me he had to see you.”
“Well, here I am.”
The old Mide spoke: “I told you, Corcoran O’Connor, that I had a vision of a dark, hungry thing.”
“I remember, Henry.”
“I have finally seen this thing clearly. It came to me before sunrise. It has the face of a youth. And I saw it standing in a meadow, surrounded by many bodies, also young. This dark thing was drinking their blood.”
“Do you know what it means, Henry?”
“I am not sure. But the meadow is a place I know from the stories I heard when I was a boy. It is called Miskwaa-mookomaan.”
“Red Knife,” Cork said. He knew the name, too. It had come up a few years earlier when the school district was debating the site for the new high school. They’d elected finally to build it on the place where, long before, the Ojibwe had slaughtered a hunting party of Sioux.
“One more thing, Corcoran O’Connor. I saw your daughter, Anne, among the bodies covered with blood.”
“Where is Annie?” George LeDuc asked.
“She left for school. She’s probably there by now.”
Then Cork thought about what Will Kingbird had told him, about Ulysses taking the rifle from the gun shop. Will had been afraid his son had taken it to kill Buck Reinhardt, but maybe Uly, a boy misunderstood and much picked on, had a different purpose in mind all along.
Cork grabbed the telephone in the hall and dialed Annie’s cell phone. The phone rang and rang and finally went to voice mail. He tried not to panic. Annie always turned her phone off before she went into school. It was a rule.
He hurried to the kitchen and grabbed the keys to his Bronco. He shouted to LeDuc and Meloux as he headed out the side door, “I’m going to the high school.” He didn’t wait for an answer.
He backed out of the drive in his Bronco and shot down Gooseberry Lane. He thought briefly of calling the sheriff’s office, but he had no proof that anything was going to happen, today or any other, just the vision of an old man. Besides, it would take him only five minutes to get to the high school. And what could possibly happen in five minutes?
FORTY-SIX
Annie had just turned off her cell phone and was coming into the school parking lot with Cara when Uly Kingbird called to her. He was standing beside the red Saturn his mother usually drove.
“Annie, can I talk to you?”
“Go on,” Cara said. “I’ll see you inside.” She headed toward the school entrance where a late-arriving bus had parked and its student riders were spilling from the door.
Annie put her cell phone in her purse and crossed the parking lot to Uly. He looked terrible, disheveled, red eyed, as if he hadn’t slept at all. “Uly, what’s wrong?” she asked.
“Could we talk? Please? In private, in the car?”
“Sure. We need to make it fast, though. We don’t want to be late our first day back after suspension.”
Uly got in the driver’s side. Annie went around to the passenger door and slid in. Uly grabbed the steering wheel and squeezed, as if he were choking a snake. The tension in his body and the pain that twisted his face frightened Annie.
“What is it, Uly?”
“I don’t know what to do, Annie.”
“About what?”
“Last night I went over to Darrell’s house. I had to get one of my dad’s rifles.”
“What was it doing over there?”
“Long story. I’ve got it in the trunk. I’m taking it back to the shop after school.”
“Sorry. Go ahead.”
“Darrell was all pissed off when I got there. His granddad and him had been fighting, I don’t know what about. Darrell said he was going to add him to the target list.”
“Target list?”
“It’s this list we keep. Whenever somebody’s really been an asshole, we put him on the list. Then we shoot him.”
“What?”
“Darrell’s granddad keeps a lot of firearms around: pistols, rifles. We go out and set up bottles somewhere and shoot the hell out of them. Each bottle is somebody on the list. It’s just a way to, you know, deal with stuff. It’s not serious. At least I never thought it was. Last night, Darrell starts saying things that scared me. He said it was time to take care of the target list. He said he had a plan all worked out. He wanted us to do it together.”
From the school came the ring of the final bell, calling students to homeroom.
“He said what we’d do is lock the doors, chain them from the inside so nobody could get out. He has them, the chains. He showed them to me. And the locks. Then we’d sweep through, taking down anybody we wanted to.”
“What doors, Uly?”
He stared at the school and nodded in its direction.
“Oh my God.”
“I told him it was crazy, Annie. He’s like, ‘Dude, the whole fucking world is crazy. In the end, you’ve got only one choice. Do you go out with a bang or a whimper?’ It’s something he got off the Internet. He says it all the time.”
“We’ve got to tell somebody.”
“Who?”
Annie thought a moment. “Let’s start with Ms. Sherburne.” The school psychologist, who was also Annie’s softball coach.
Uly’s face went sour. “I don’t know. I’ve talked to her about stuff before. We don’t, you know, connect. And what if I’m wrong? Darrell already takes a lot of crap. If this got out, Jesus, he’d like have to move or something.”
“What if you’re not wrong?”
“I don’t know, Annie. I thought about it all night long and I just don’t know.”
“Look, if he’s talking this way, he needs help even if he’s not really thinking of doing anything.”
“Why? I mean sometimes I’ve thought how great it would be just to shoot all the assholes. That’s why we had the target list.”
“But would you, Uly? Would you really shoot them?”
He stared at the school building and finally shook his head. “No.”
“Would Darrell?”
Uly thought it over. “All right,” he said at last, though he didn’t sound totally convinced.
They got out of the car. The parking lot was empty and quiet. Annie knew they were already late for class, but they needed to talk to Ms. Sherburne and would be even later. They walked silently to the front entrance. Annie reached out and pulled the door handle. The door opened just a little then stopped. Annie yanked and heard the metallic rattle of a chain on the other side and in the last moment of her mind working clearly, she thought, Oh God. Darrell Gallagher.
