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

HUNTER’S MOON / 293

“Hush,” she ordered, “just hush.”

Deftly, with a metal hiss, she drew down his zipper, and freed him from the tangle of his underwear. Her fingernails teased.

Harry slapped her face. She slapped him back. A carnal greeting.

“We know each other, you and I,” she said gaily. “I’m your missing rib.”

She twirled the bottom of her lipstick tube and daubed it on the glans of his penis. Her dark head tipped forward, took him in her mouth, and rolled in a figure eight.

Just a quick visit that inflamed him. When she looked up, she was smiling, and she had her lipstick on. She stood up briskly, shouldered her purse, and walked from the room. “I’ll come see you tonight and we’ll work on the rest. Turn out the lights when you leave,” she said.

He walked toward the wooded hills in back of the trailer and put one foot in front of the other, aimlessly, in the blowing snow. Where he’d sought enemies, he’d found afflicted people. This whole week, not even people. Dogs running loose, a foam of pain dripping from their jaws.

All he had to show for the day was lipstick on his dick.

The weird orange light of the north stirred embers of storm-charge in the snow and he kept walking, deep into the woods.

Not sure anymore. Were they going to kill Bud? Arrange another accident? This time, coincidence would have a better aim. Jesse would walk away and lay on a beach and sip snappy rum drinks.

Harry tried to imagine Jay Cox in a Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses.

Cha cha cha. Becky the witness would disappear, be found in the spring when it thawed. Patient Larry Emery would do the paperwork and wait for Jesse to return to him. Then they’d all sharpen their knives and go after the will…

Ice cracked and his feet went out from under him. Yikes!

294 / CHUCK LOGAN

Waist-deep in frigid black water. He scrambled for solid ground.

Soaker. Great. He’d blundered into a fucking tamarack swamp.

Walk around, dummy. In minutes, his leg muscles were cramped from jumping from one clump of roots to another. His gloves were drenched and his hands cut raw from grabbing at saplings. Solid sheets of ice clung to his jeans. Boots cased in it.

The wind burned the sweat running in his eyes and sleety snow slashed his face and dreadlocks of frozen sweat clicked in his hair.

Forget Jesse and Emery. You’re lost, man.

Harry began to shiver in a cloud of steam and he wished it was from fear. His body was losing heat faster than it could replace it.

Okay. You’re wet, wind’s rising, the temperature’s plunging. You have daylight. But how much?

Calmly, he smoked a cigarette and stared into the bleak maze of trees and marsh. You have a lighter. No matches. He smiled at the irony. Raised in the woodland shadows of the Great Lakes, he’d made all the obvious mistakes. Not just being disoriented without a map or compass. Soaked to the bone. Been up all night, hadn’t eaten. Plus all that coffee. Dehydrated for sure.

Build a fire and dry out? Or walk out while he had light. Walk out. He’d have to backtrack. No calm way to get out of the swamp.

He lurched on stiffening feet. Patient black water pooled under patches of thin ice. Trick was not to…Don’t think the word. He’d already thought lost.

He broke the ice off his pants and began the long march back.

Hadda be that goddamn fat sticky snow that fluffed up. Mistake to be going this fast, but he had to go on tracks while he still had them.

He fell into a jerky trot doubling back on the boot prints that swelled with new snow. The ground was pulling zippers shut. Fainter, fainter. Gone.

No more walking tracks, just his fresh lost tracks.

He stood perfectly still and strained his ears. Hoped to hear a truck, a chainsaw, some reference.

Mistake. The wind spooked him with a low groaning HUNTER’S MOON / 295

among the trees and panic creaked ajar in the switchback moraines and the jack pine wagged their skinny boughs. Thumbs down. The snow blew almost horizontal in the limbo light.

Shaking uncontrollably now, an ominous solidity bonded his feet and boots together and a painful sting tightened in his fingers. Harry began to jog to get his circulation going. Blindly, just to move. The synergy of wind and snow torqued him and loosed a trampling surge in his chest.

He’d held on to the rifle. Useless damn thing, fringed with ice.

He pressed it to his chest to rein in his runaway heartbeat. The wind scythed him and hacked off a corner of the light. And he came down with bone-deep shivers and it was hostile everywhere he looked and the idea of night entered his mind.

Nanabozho time.

A carnival of jack-in-the-boxes went booga booga in the wind.

Control slipped a notch and Harry had a peek at full-blown panic.

It occurred to him that Tad Clark should have his group out here on the bone lip of hypothermia. Talk about the Shadow. The primitive power of wilderness.

The only heat came from the pulsing tick under his left shoulder blade. Not alone out here. Harry tried to wrack the lever on his rifle.

Frozen solid. He yanked his knife from its scabbard. It fell from his numb fingers. He lurched after it, digging frantically in the snow.

Couldn’t find it. Lost.

The wind soared, the branches rattled like a gallows tattoo, and the cold sliced right through him. He felt the blood turning gray in his veins and the whiteout was erasing him like a small mistake and when it passed, the forest reached for him.

Join us, beckoned the line-dancing trees and the wind chanted, midwife to the Windigo. You winter soul of men. You spirit of starvation, of cannibals, of incest, of murder…

He took a deep breath and stared it in the face. Don’t fight it, you’ll just mess it up. Be calm.