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

Harry lit a cigarette. Emery took out one of his toothpicks.

“Yeah, so?” asked Harry.

“So…” Emery twirled his toothpick in his blunt fingers. “I think you’re one of them interesting guys that things happen to. Fact is, if I was on vacation and met you in a bar somewheres, I suspect we could trade a few stories. But you ain’t the kind of person I appreciate setting up housekeeping in my county. So when your business here is done, I want you gone.”

Harry offered him a cigarette. Emery shook his head. “Gave it up.”

“Like Jesse gave you up for Bud Maston?”

Intimidating pathology toyed in Emery’s smile and a mean street-wise sneer replaced molasses and cornbread in his voice. “How’s a fuckup like you and a rich fatboy like Maston get to be friends anyway?”

HUNTER’S MOON / 195

“Met in Vietnam Veterans Against the War.”

Emery snorted with contempt. “You serve together over there?”

“Nope. First time I saw Bud was in 1969. Protest rally at the U

in Minneapolis. Then it was AA. You heard of Alcoholics Anonym-ous? For people with drinking problems?”

“You’re the one needs crutches, man, not me,” said Emery. He sipped his coffee and spread the printouts on the table like a poker hand.

“Dee-troit City. You got this habit of assaulting people. Six months in the House of Correction. What happened there, Griffin?”

“I used to smell like you in the morning. It got me in trouble.”

“Uh-huh. Was you drinking when your wife filed this assault charge for hitting her?” Harry didn’t respond. “How you go from wife beater to working for a newspaper?”

“Grew up.”

“July sixty-seven. Conviction for aggravated armed assault during the Detroit riot. You got a suspended sentence. One of the parties involved in the incident was a black guy, lawyer, now a judge in Detroit. He bargained the suspension.” Emery showed Harry a fax of a military DD214 discharge and grinned. “Got you a bunch of medals. Uncle Sam appreciated your knack for armed assault.” Emery tapped the discharge. “Says here you were assigned to Advisers.

Story in the newspaper said you were in Special Ops. You get off on that kind of stuff?”

“You’ve been busy,” said Harry.

“Computers is wonderful things. Assaulting a National Guardsman with a knife during a riot and insurrection, it says here.”

“It was a bayonet and it was two Guardsmen.”

“Tell me about it.”

“You wouldn’t get it. You hadda be there.” Harry came forward in his chair. “So you know where I’ve been. I’m curious where you were the morning your kid took a shot at Bud Maston.”

196 / CHUCK LOGAN

“Scoff-law attitude, Griffin. I’d watch that. Don’t tempt me to kick your ass and dump you over the county line. Fact is, I got ample cause not to like you much.”

“It’s mutual. I think you’re a poor excuse for a sheriff.”

Jerry moved a little closer and Emery grinned and ruffled the printouts. “You only served six months of a twelve-month sentence in the House of Correction. Somebody sprung you. Copper I talked to in Detroit said it was a government deal. Took me a while to figure it out.” Emery’s lip curled. “Got into your military records.

You was discharged from the army in May sixty-eight. You was wounded in Vietnam. You collected some disability for a couple of years. Seventy to seventy-two. Thing is, on the VA paperwork, there’s a record of you being treated for gunshot wounds in an Air Force hospital in Udorn, Thailand, in January, sixty-nine. What happened?

You get shit-faced in Dee-troit, take the wrong bus, and wake up in Thailand?”

“This is all crap…” said Harry. But he was impressed with Emery’s persistence as a hunter. In the woods, in computer banks. Shit.

“That buddy of yours down in the Cities, Randall the hot-shit writer. He was regular army, then he got mixed up with the CIA. I think you went back over there as a fucking mercenary. You’re Maston’s trained dog, ain’tcha? Kind of scumbag who does it for money.”

“And what do you do it for, Emery? Love?”

Jerry stood at the table. “Okay, guys, take it easy.”

Emery projected menace softly. “Lemme explain how it works, newspaper artist. Maston has projects. Some are good for the town.

The hospital, the school, the Christmas tree farm. He wants to come off as a guilty fatboy making amends for when his family raped this whole end of the state.”

Emery took a sip of coffee. “’Course it ain’t gonna do any good.

In ten years they’ll be no town left, and birds will be building nests in the new hospital. Jobs ain’t there. Last year we voted the town mayor’s office out of existence. Closed the library. Half the stores and half the classrooms in the high

HUNTER’S MOON / 197

school are empty. All ’cause do-good Bud Maston used his clout to get the mill closed so the fishies wouldn’t die. Fish are fine. Town’s dying. He’s still a Maston, and he’s still fucking people.”

Emery scratched his ear lobe. “Now here’s the problem. You’re one of Maston’s projects that has went and got itself lost.”

“Nice how all you people are so worried about me. Karson and now you.”

“Fuck Karson.”

“He on your shit list, too?”

“Let’s just say he ain’t the kind of guy I like to see teaching kids in Sunday school.”

“Seems like a pretty intelligent guy.”

“Yeah, right. Been to college and everything.” Emery grinned.

“Fact is, you and him got a lot in common. Reason he’s up here in the bumfuck outback is he had some emotional problems down in Minneapolis when he was pastor at a big parish. Nervous breakdown and getting high with the kids in his church is what I heard. I can guess at the rest.”

Emery stood up. Anger came silently in him, like his tread. He threw the police and medical records and Jerry moved between them.

“They paste you back together in the VA?” Emery snarled as Jerry covered him. “Drug dependency. Stress groups. Did ya tell ’em where it hurts? They ask you why you couldn’t handle it on your own? Fuck!” Emery turned away.

Then