Hunter's Moon by Chuck Logan (english novels to read .TXT) 📕

over your head. That should have hit you. I taught that boy to shoot. He was a natural. You had the scope all out of square. That gun shot a foot off at twenty feet. And another thing. You gave Chris steel jackets, not soft-nosed hunting loads. So it’d make a neat, clean hole.”

“Okay, Larry, that’s the way you want it. Give me my rights.”

“That picture board Cox had in his workshop threw me, so I brought it home to study it,” said Emery.

“I want to talk to my lawyer,” Bud demanded in a strangled voice.

He hugged the pistol with both hands against his chest.

Harry noticed that Emery had his hair pulled back in a braid.

Little blue ribbon tied to a dream catcher back there.

“Couldn’t just shoot Jessica, could you?…had to…” Emery faltered, regained his voice. “She wouldn’t marry me when I come back,” he said in his mournful voice. “I didn’t believe her when she said she was pregnant. I was on my way overseas. She never forgave me for that. Leaving her alone. Spent my whole life making up for that.”

“Harry did it. Harry did it,” Bud pleaded.

Larry Emery, the father of Jessica Deucette’s children and the legal executioner of her husbands, continued to speak. “At first, when I came back, she wouldn’t even let me see Chris and Becky.

Years and years I took care of her, got her out of jams, but I was never good enough. Wouldn’t let me tell them the truth. And finally when they knew, she wouldn’t let them have my name.” Emery’s voice banged the granite walls. “Tell me again how you got my baby high on drugs and played games with him, Maston.”

“You gotta help me here, Harry. Look at him, he’s—”

“So long hero,” said Harry.

396 / CHUCK LOGAN

“You can’t do this to me!” Bud raised the Colt and fired. Rock chips drew blood from Harry’s cheek and neck and the noise was a white-hot wire in his ears.

“Never hit anything shaking like that.” The last thing Harry saw in Bud Maston’s eyes was disbelief.

He turned his back and started through the narrow passage. It was personal what was going on back there. It required privacy. He never looked back, not even when the shots reverberated through the tight space almost rupturing his eardrums.

He walked into the cold night air toward the flashlights and the balloons of chilly breath. Randall. Ginny Hakala was there, crying softly. Becky, shivering in a blanket, leaned against Mitch. Miss Loretta held her chin high, as befits the Ojibway version of a Spartan mother. Mike Hakala and several deputies stepped forward. Jerry Hakala handed Harry a cup of coffee. Morris pressed a wad of gauze to his bleeding arm.

Far below, he could see the flicker of a fire on the lake and hear the happy drum.

Emery came out. Jerry held up the medical bag and raised his eyebrows and nodded toward the cave. “We need this?”

“Not fucking likely,” mused Morris.

Emery shook his head and Becky sobbed and Emery put his arm around her and held her for a second. Don Karson stepped from the darkness. Emery reached out and squeezed the minister’s elbow.

“Stay with her. She might need to talk,” he said. Karson nodded to Mitch and Miss Loretta and they walked Becky back down the trail.

Emery held out his hand. The big .44 magnum lay in his palm with tiny wisps of steam or smoke still leaking from the barrel and the chamber. Mike Hakala put his hand on the pistol, then Jerry.

Harry covered the other men’s hands with his own.

Emery holstered the pistol, unbuckled his gunbelt, fingered his badge off his chest, and handed it all over to Mike Hakala. Mike declined and handed them back. “There’ll be a board.

HUNTER’S MOON / 397

Turn it in when we get back to town. He resisted arrest, Larry. You were just doing your job.”

Larry Emery nodded and cinched the gunbelt around his waist.

His voice rang in the darkness. “Awright, people. Do it right. Process it. Don’t touch nothing, take pictures. Get the medical examiner up here. And when it’s all done, make sure you get all the pieces of him outta there. Be another four hundred years of bad luck if the spiders eat his fat ass.”

62

Harry made the drive in Linda’s car but was unable to bring himself to set foot back in that graveyard, so he watched the ceremony from a distance as they buried Jesse next to Chris in the cemetery beyond the old company housing on a quiet, chilly November day.

And the wind whispered down through the pines and scattered a lacy veil of snowflakes across the brooding ridge and the name we hear whispered at a graveside is always our own.

After the service, he drove directly back to St. Paul and attended his first AA meeting in years. Later he learned that, when no one claimed Cox’s body, Sheriff Emery purchased a plot for him, next to the ring of granite stones.

It was too early to tell whether he would carry permanent nerve damage in his left hand from Bud’s knife thrust. The lasting wound was more subtle and had to do with who he was now. Increasingly he caught himself facing north with the intuition that the healing was to be found in conversation with Miss Loretta’s voices in the deep woods up on Nanabozho Ridge.

The casket containing Bud Maston’s remains made the trip from the county morgue in Stanley, Minnesota, to the Fort Snelling Veterans’ Cemetery in the open bed of Jay Cox’s truck. Mitch Hakala received $200 for making the drive from

398 / CHUCK LOGAN

the prestigious St. Paul law firm of Noble and Deal, which was none too happy about disposing of the Maston estate. Their client had been page-one news for two weeks, ever since he’d died resisting arrest for two counts of premeditated murder.

And ever since the detailed diary of Jason Cox—a document that read like the obsessed odyssey of a modern Ahab—had mysteriously