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

driver. In a snarl of motors, the pack lunged back into the woods.

Jerry was out of his truck, yelling on his radio handset. Harry dived for a big coal-scoop snow shovel that leaned against the doorway and hurled shovelfuls of snow at the burning porch. No way. The roof was already kindling.

Jerry screamed. “Axes! Fire extinguisher!”

Harry came from the kitchen with an extinguisher and emptied it into the flames. Jerry found a chopping maul and an ax. His boot on Harry’s shoulder, he scrambled up to the porch roof, reached down, and pulled Harry up with him. Back to back, they danced in the flames, swinging at the cedar shakes. Wood chips flew as they hacked the joists that held the porch to the lodge. Somewhere in the frenzy, two firetrucks manned by stout Viking types arrived. They attacked the porch with crowbars, axes, and bigger fire extinguishers.

Tore the sucker free, nails shrieking in the cold, threw a chain around the whole shebang, hooked it to the back of an engine, and dragged it clear of the main building. The porch joined the bonfire that consumed the Honda and the

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snowmobile. A circle of firefighters doused the pyre in a chemical cloud.

Deputy Jerry, black-faced with smoke, probed among the smolder-ing wreckage. “What happened?” he demanded.

“Assholes came through and tried to burn it down.”

“You ID anybody?”

“You kidding?”

The alert young cop kicked at a spent shotgun shell. He evaluated the buckshot stipple in the smoking black hull of the dead Arctic Cat. Bent down, gingerly rubbed away soot, shined his flashlight, and wrote in his spiral notebook.

“You, ah, shoot anybody else tonight, Mr. Griffin?”

“Gave them a couple barrels of number eight birdshot. Doubt it even went through their snowmobile suits.”

Jerry scribbled more notes in his notepad. “We’ll check the hospital emergency room. And I got the serial numbers off this sled.”

One of the firemen muttered loud enough for Harry to hear.

“Lucky they didn’t stuff a walleye up his ass and set him on fire after this morning!”

Jerry grimaced and pushed his Russian-style fur cap back on his sooty head. “Hope you and Maston got your insurance paid up. You ain’t gonna get a lot of sympathy around here today.” Then he waved his pen and notebook at the stuttering embers. “But this is arson.

That’s serious.”

“What’s your last name, Jerry?” asked Harry.

Jerry explored the inside of his cheek with his tongue. “Hakala.”

“Which part of the tribe you from?”

“My dad owns the bank.” He coughed and tried to look official.

“So you gonna come in, press charges?”

Harry laughed. “What good would it do in this county?”

“We’ll investigate.”

Harry turned on his heel, clambered up to the mud porch, and went inside. He sat down at the dining room table and methodically cleaned the shotguns while firefighters sprayed the porch one last time. Then they climbed back on their rigs.

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On the way out, one of the trucks demolished the landscaping in the middle of the horseshoe drive, grinding a five-foot Japanese yew into powder.

Fucking hayseeds.

Not Deputy Jerry. He was no country joke. He stood awhile, warming his hands over the collapsed embers. When Harry looked out the window again, he was still there. A few minutes later, calmed down enough to recognize that Jerry’s timely entrance saved his ass, he realized that the young cop was doing his job, guarding him against further harm.

Harry took him a cup of coffee.

Jerry sipped, toed a smoking hunk of porch, cast his blue eyes around at the tires still fitfully burning on the greasy chassis of Harry’s car, and said, with deep sincerity, “Mr. Griffin, why don’t you go home?”

Harry grinned and went back inside. Jerry left the cup on the mud porch and repositioned his Blazer across the entrance to the driveway.

The chemical tang of fire retardant leaked into the lodge’s main room through the shattered windows. In the garage, next to Bud’s Jeep, Harry found packing boxes from the new stereo. As he tore the corners out of the cardboard, flattening it, a sheet of stiff paper fell out. A photograph, blurred emulsion, enlarged, printed on 8

1/2 by 11. Someone had cut the face out of it. Neck and naked shoulders remained.

Weird? He shrugged and went after the broken windows, piecing cardboard plugs and securing them with duct tape. Then he swept up the glass and aired the place out.

With a flashlight and the 12-gauge, Harry went back outside.

Coals hissed in the quiet. Jerry kept watch down the driveway.

Harry stalked up the trail in the direction the retreating snowmobiles had taken and found fresh tracks that led all the way up the ridge. He followed them to the fallen pine and put the light on the bare wood of the tree stand. The tracks went down the slope into the dark near the swamp.

Harry stopped ten yards from the gooseberry bramble bush 184 / CHUCK LOGAN

where Chris had died. The night visitor had collected the yellow police tape, tied it into a large, many-ribboned bow, and fixed it to the bush. Walking closer, he saw a dozen white roses beneath the bow, stiff with freezer burn. Becky. Hadda be. Messing with his mind. First claws his face. Then the strange routine at the funeral.

Harry played the flashlight beam over the snow beneath the flowers and saw deep slashes in the frozen pink rime. Blotches of coffee-colored urine. An enormous deer track was setting up in the red slush.

He turned off the light and squatted when something moved in the brush. Pincushion alert, Harry peered into the dark. Really big.

Thrashing. It stamped and made a blowing noise, like a kid blowing into the neck of a Coke bottle.

Deer. Maybe Chris’s deer.

He waited for the sounds to come closer. Finally, unable to be still, he switched on the light. Just a wall of brush, tamarack, and brambles. The sounds moved off, deeper into the darkness.

He walked back up the ridge, stopping every few feet to listen to the silent tickle of the mist. He