Hunter's Moon by Chuck Logan (the false prince series txt) 📗

phone and thought, Just as well: drunks were like terrorists. You didn’t negotiate with them when they were using.

You were supposed to let it go…

He reached for the pack of cigarettes next to the lamp, debated, put them down, killed the light, and climbed back in bed. But he was pissed now and he tossed in the covers until he curled up on a shallow ledge of sleep.

When the phone rang the next time, he had to pick it up because that was what happened in the dream.

“Harry, buy a suit,” said his mother. He couldn’t see her in the dream but he could feel her all around him and she sent mixed messages; she’d wanted him to be an artist but she’d sent him to military school and she’d even read The Iliad to him while he paddled in her warm amniotic sea. Now, as then, her voice arched with nervous hope, softly protective and fragile as a wishbone.

“Try on this jacket,” she said. The jacket was black, double-breasted, and when he slipped it on, it fit him perfectly. A carnation was curled in the lapel, suggesting a wedding or a funeral.

Damn it.

Heart thumping, he swam from the tangle of sweaty sheets and his hand jerked automatically for the cigarettes. He lit an HUNTER’S MOON / 3

American Spirit and the smoke came at his eyes. Mom had been dead for more than thirty years, so why in the hell did he have to buy a suit?

Gradually, the familiar bite of tobacco laced up his discipline.

With a grim smile, he shooed the nightcrawlers from his bed and stubbed out the cigarette and wiped the sweat off his face. Nights like this were the reason he lived alone.

He had stolen an undisturbed hour of sleep when the phone rang again, for real. He reached for it, resigned: shit comes in threes.

“I got married three weeks ago,” said Bud in a glum voice.

“Say again?” Harry sat up.

“I need something from you,” said Bud.

“What the fuck?”

“I’m having a stand-up ceremony in town next month. The works.”

His voice was exhausted but steadier now. “I need you to hold the ring. You know, best man—”

“Jesus, Bud…”

“The present I want from you is…you gotta go hunting with me and my wife’s kid this weekend.”

“You don’t talk to me for a year and you call shitfaced in the middle of the night—”

“You gotta,” Bud insisted.

“Bullshit, I don’t gotta do anything.”

Bud mumbled, “Look, I shouldn’t have to beg…”

So the big debt was being called in. So it was duty. “Christ, I haven’t been hunting in—”

“Since before the army, I know,” said Bud.

“I have to work. I don’t have a rifle,” said Harry.

“It’s all taken care of. All you need is a deer license for zone one.

I already called Randall. He’s getting a rifle ready for you…”

“You didn’t bug Randall at three in the morning?” Randall was as close as Harry came to having a family.

“Look, I called Randall, okay? I already bought you stuff to wear.

And I called Tommy over at the paper. You have the time off—”

4 / CHUCK LOGAN

“Don’t go pulling strings, goddammit,” Harry muttered. Tommy was Thomas Riker, a distant presence seen on elevators who was the publisher of the paper where Harry worked as an artist. Bud rubbed elbows with Riker at the Athletic Club before he took his belly flop off the top of the social ladder.

“Let’s just do it. I’m driving down tonight. I’ll pick you up, ten o’clock, Friday morning,” said Bud. The phone clicked—and that was that.

Harry lit another cigarette and watched flurries dot an ice-water dawn.

Presumably, Bud’s “Detroit Harry” crack was supposed to evoke Harry’s gloriously stupid youth in less tranquil places than St. Paul and provide a dash of northwoods brio to prod him for the hunt.

But that wasn’t it. Bud had coined the Detroit Harry line originally to convey a certain audacious style of stepping in.

Harry spread his fingers and drew them in a gentle snare around the moment and weighed it in his palm. The subtle gesture disappeared in lines of force as he made a fist.

He knew a lot of people and as they grew older and paired off and had kids and hunkered deeper into their lives, they didn’t invite him to dinner or to their parties.

They only called him when they were in trouble.

2

Harry allowed himself a quiet hour to make coffee and shower before he called Tim Randall. “So Bud Maston’s back,”

Randall observed in a bemused voice.

“He said he called you,” said Harry.

“Last night. He’s in a manic phase. Married. Full of plans. Plans to open a fishing lodge in the spring. Said he was curious about the current state of your gun phobia. Whether you could handle knocking down a big deer.”

“He sounded to me like an experiment where all the mice got out,”

said Harry.

HUNTER’S MOON / 5

“You guys,” said Dorothy Houston, coming on an extension.

“Maybe he fell in love. There’s this thing called romance.”

“Check it out,” said Harry dubiously. “Right in Webster’s. One definition of romance is ‘doomed to failure.’”

“We all feel bad about what happened last year, Harry. Maybe he’s trying to turn that around,” said Dorothy.

Harry pictured them, two lean redheads, sitting in the kitchen of the big house on River Road that overlooked the Mississippi. “We’ll see,” he said.

“So you’re going?” asked Randall.

“Have to. He’s calling in his chits,” said Harry.

“I have some errands and Tim’s got a big old rifle ready for you.

We’ll drop by,” said Dorothy.

Dorothy smiled when Harry opened the door. Randall stood behind her with a cased rifle under his arm.

She was four years older than Harry, which put her closer to fifty than to forty. Her prettiness had faded, but not her alert green eyes, or her slender, upright figure, or her long, fiery hair. A wrenching scar ripped the left corner of her smile and puckered up her cheek to her eye.

Colonel Randall remained gaunt and powerful at sixty-three and the spooky shadow of