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

from his numb hand. He followed it, dropping comically on his rump.

He had a good smell of himself.

Retrieving the Colt with cardboard fingers…it felt like he was wearing gloves. Brushed away the snow. No gloves. Just more blood stiffening in the cold. He stared at the swinging trailer door. Thought Hakala had cops guarding her.

It was going to be real bad.

Go see. Unsteadily, he approached the trailer. In the door, swung the pistol in a clumsy uncoordinated arc. Radio on. Polka music.

Idiot sing-song accordion.

She had fought hard. The living room was in shambles. Table overturned. Cox’s pills were strewn on the carpet. On the hallway wall, leading to the bedroom, the stigmata of her bloody handprint.

The light was on.

His curse had always been to be at his best in the presence of horror. A battlefield stench scattered his drugged fog.

He bolted from the room and smashed the gun’s butt into 352 / CHUCK LOGAN

the radio. Then he closed the door on its creaking hinges. Silence.

Slowly, solemnly, he went back. SEE MEXICO. A gaudy confetti of travel brochures was glued wetly over the posed naked bodies.

Harry did not decipher rage on the smeared walls. Not even sickness. Something evil had played here and dumped her forward from the headboard in a final contraction over her own evisceration; legs spraddled, knees bent, her heels had been tucked into the stirrups of Cox’s collarbone.

Harry took a deep clarifying breath and saw the shovel on the floor. Bastard had used the entrenching tool on her. But the bloody fingerprints on the handle would belong to Detroit Harry. Don’t think about the handle.

Cox had been killed with two shots to the back of the head. Jesse…

The splintered shaft protruded between her legs. In his frenzy, the fucker’d snapped it off after he had hacked…

Harry touched the graying clay of Cox’s bicep, moved a strand of Jesse’s matted hair from the tattoo there. Bayonet piercing a heart: Death Before Dishonor.

He drew a sheet over their obscene posture and covered the hairy tongue of severed testicles that spilled from between Cox’s teeth.

North Vietnamese trick. Seen that one before.

Harry withdrew carefully, closed and latched the door. As he went out, the survival armor girdled him. Can’t feel it now, worry about the living. Becky.

Snowflakes pelted through the Jeep’s headlights. He stooped and picked up Cox’s hat with the Snoopy emblem as the cold pure air hit him like a whack of Zen.

Blind spots, Randall had cautioned.

Remember patterns.

He adapts, Jesse’d said. One seamless puppet show from the minute his phone rang early that morning. Bud propositioning Murphy for the story. You’re so predictable. Knew I’d shoot. Bringing in Linda, getting her up here so she could see him strung out. With this damn gun. And Karson at the lodge.

HUNTER’S MOON / 353

And he’d had plenty of time to drop in at his home, no problem with cops, and lift the computer disk and pictures.

Harry swung the .45 in a two-handed grip, scanning the snow-spangled trees. Not Emery. Wrong about Jesse too. Pushed her out the door straight into…

Raining shit and blood in a blacked-out Hell. They’d say he was drunk again and this time they’d say he murdered two people. He’d been here before to this terribly lonely place. But Randall had been there that time. Need Randall.

“Becky?” Damnit. Where was she? The Jeep beckoned, lights on, running in neutral. This was no place to be. He was a survivor. Time to boogie.

Not this time.

Couldn’t survive leaving her in there like that. More than dead.

Negated. Harry didn’t consider himself a Christian. But maybe she was. Sung in the choir…

First he washed his hands and took off his spattered shirt. Then he found a bucket under the sink and filled it with hot water. From the bathroom, he took clean towels, a washcloth, and a bar of her scented soap. He reentered the ghoulish room and threw back the sheet. Eased Cox from the bed and gently laid him on the floor. Put a blanket over him.

She’d always said he didn’t see her. He saw her now as he plucked scarabs of filth from her face and dealt with the shovel handle. He straightened her legs and did his best to tidy the wreckage of her stomach. Working with the patience that tenderness required, he washed her limbs, taking care to get between her fingers and her toes. When he was finished, he tucked a sheet to cover the worst and went back for a fresh cloth to cleanse her throat and face. Then he unknotted the ugliness from her hair and drew a brush through it. When it was done, he bent to close her eyes and some trapped water spilled from the open clouded iris and trickled down the stiffening cheek.

Harry turned out the light.

Too late, he realized there was another vehicle in the drive. A blue-and-white sheriff’s Blazer.

354 / CHUCK LOGAN

“Drop it! Don’t move! Swear to God I’ll blow your fuckin’ head off!” Jerry Hakala’s voice shook, about a foot behind Harry’s back.

Thing about snow. Made it easy for people to sneak up on you. Was like friendship…

Harry pulled the pistol from his belt. He didn’t drop it. “I saw through the window, you creepy fuck!” Jerry yelled. “Looks like a kill floor in there.”

“Where’s Emery, Jerry?”

“Spit my name out of your mouth, you fuck.”

“I mean you pulled the cops outta here when you spotted Emery,”

Harry said.

“Blood here’s not even cold. He didn’t do this, asshole. You did.”

“Jerry. I don’t want you to get any more excited. I’m not moving too good right now.”

“Drop the damn piece!”

Harry didn’t move. “Becky’s here somewhere,” he said.

“You sonofabitch,” Hakala hissed. Lynch law was in that voice.

Harry was betting Jerry wouldn’t shoot him in the back.

“I mean…alive. She was right out front here—”

“Put it down. I mean it.” Jerry’s voice wrapped tighter.

“Who tipped you, Jerry?”

“Maston came downtown looking for you. Said you were drinking, on the prod. Last chance, fucker.”

Jerry’s finger was probably down to