Hunter's Moon, Chuck Logan [i am reading a book TXT] 📗

“You just going to roll over for those fuckers? Try and buy your way out? You don’t owe them shit. They set you up, man. Jesse unzipped my fly to keep me from going into the woods that morning!”

Bud recoiled and sparks ignited in his eyes.

“Yeah, you married the town pump, buddy. Wake up.”

Bud’s eyes crackled and his voice shook. “I always tried to help you…and this is how—”

“I saved your ass,” retorted Harry. “I blew that kid all over the fucking county.”

“And you enjoyed it. You should have seen your face.”

“Guys,” said Linda in a tense voice, aware of all the forks suspended in midair around them.

“No,” snarled Bud. “I have to tell him this. I been there, too. I went over there and it was twisted, but it was service. You, you sonofabitch, you went back, to Laos, and you went back as 332 / CHUCK LOGAN

a mercenary. You did it for money and for kicks. Christ, those CIA creeps even sprung you out of jail in Detroit—”

“Jail?” said Linda.

Harry shook his head. “Not jail. The workhouse.”

“Because he beat up his wife.”

“You’re outta line, Bud. You can’t handle this stuff anymore,” said Harry.

“I can,” said Bud. “I’ll show you, you big-dick sono-fabitch!” Bud lurched across the table and tried to grab the gun in Harry’s belt.

Harry blocked him, shoved Bud back. Breakfast stopped. A fork clattered to a plate.

A Maston County deputy came over. “Is everything all right, Mr.

Maston?” he asked.

“Fine. It’s a personal matter that we should not have aired in public,” said Bud, busying his hands with his lapels. The deputy moved away. Bud stood up, folded the Duluth paper, and put it in his suit pocket, then he picked up Chris’s story and mashed it into a ball in his fist. Before Harry could stop him, he went to the Fisher stove, opened the door, and chucked the ball of paper into the fire.

Harry started out of his chair to follow. Linda held him back with a cautioning hand. “Let him be alone for a while.”

Harry shook his head. “He’s going to fuck up.”

“You really cut him,” said Linda.

“Aw, shit,” Harry stood up. He caught a flash of Bud’s determined eyeballs through the windshield of the Trooper as he pulled away from the diner with two police cars in tow.

Linda plucked his sleeve. “Did you really beat up your wife?” she asked in a serious voice.

“Huh?” Harry put his hand in front of his eyes. Where was she from? Venus? Didn’t she know what was going on?

“Well, did you?”

“Christ no, Linda…it was…” He reached for a handle in the thin air to steady himself. Nothing. Bud hadn’t left any ground under him. And the look on Linda’s face. “You wouldn’t understand…Why the hell did you have to come?” he asked.

HUNTER’S MOON / 333

“We thought we could talk to you…”

He stared at her hard.

She drew herself up. “Because I love you, you dumb sono-fabitch.

So does he. He’s reaching out to you and you slapped him down.

He’s not well, he’s depressed…that was crude, what you said about that grasping bitch he married. You screwed her, didn’t you?”

“I don’t know what I did.”

Linda tucked her briefcase under her arm. “Well I have to get a new court date so I can smile at her and arrange to hand over a check like I get paid for. Then I’m outta here. Last chance for a ride home.”

“Linda, you don’t get it. See all these cops? There’s a guy out there who’s this one-man army and all he wants to do is kill your client. There’s a manhunt.”

She looked at him, perplexed.

“I mean a person hunt. Fuck it.”

She gave him a frosty look and gripped her briefcase. “Where’s the court house?”

“One block down across the street, in the back room of the liquor store,” said Harry. “Jesus, wait. I’ll walk you.”

54

Harry watched Linda drive out of town and the dreary damn overcast promised more snow and hung thistles of fatigue in the iron light and Nanabozho Point brooded down from the top of the ridge and he shouldn’t have said that to Bud about Jesse. That hurt him.

Cops came and went down Main Street. Harry sat in the Jeep and smoked a cigarette. Morris came over and knocked on the window.

The deputy grinned. “All the people with college educations are to meet at the lodge. You, Maston, and Karson. Just got a call from Maston’s escort. Follow me up.”

Halfway up Highway 7 Morris’s flasher erupted into a blue 334 / CHUCK LOGAN

meteor and two cop cars topped the rise ahead of them. Hogging both lanes, the cops bore down and forced them off the road. Morris’s tires showered Harry with snow and gravel as he whipped a 180 and joined the pack.

Great. There went his guards.

He found the front door of the lodge wide open. Okay. Light-headed and fatalistic with exhaustion, he swung the Colt and step-by-step cautiously checked out the rooms, then the basement. He entered the addition, climbed the ladder, and searched the unfinished rooms and the balcony. Back in the den, he saw that the computer port was open and the disk was gone.

So was the picture of Chris and the Italian postcard.

The visitor had left an unsubtle calling card. A fifth of Jack Daniel’s sat amid the clutter on the dining room table.

My brand. Nice touch. Emery’s idea of a joke? He hurled the bottle across the main room into the fireplace. Another shattered whiskey flower bloomed from the soot and creosote and smelled like Larry Emery’s breath.

Emery could be here. Right outside. No, the cops were piling on to something. They must have spotted him. Not thinking too clearly right now.

The phone rang and he grabbed it.

“Now what?”

“Najoong, motherfucker,” said an energetic voice from the crypt.

Harry sagged to a chair. Hallucination wasn’t out of the question.

“Hollywood?” Harry’s lips slowly formed the question.

“Long time, buddy.”

Harry visualized a mountain airstrip in the Laotian highlands, gray helicopters in the creeping mist, and the