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

“I’ll get something,” said Jesse, but she couldn’t move.

“No. No. Wait for the ambulance,” said Harry. “We need some cops.”

“Cops,” said Jesse, paralyzed.

“Mom, we gotta get out of here,” wailed Becky as she paced in a caged circle and opened and closed her fingers and plucked at the air.

“Where’s Chris?” asked Jesse starkly.

He pushed her away. “He tried to kill Bud. I had to stop him.

There wasn’t any time…”

“Where’s Chris,” she whispered fiercely. “Where’s my boy?”

Harry looked straight into Jesse’s clouding eyes. “He’s dead, Jesse.

Chris shot Bud and I shot Chris and he’s dead.”

Then it was faces by Diane Arbus in a wraparound funhouse mirror. Becky’s features elongated into horse eyes swollen in fury and terror and Jesse’s teeth and gums enlarged as her lips contracted and pores cratered her skin.

Becky came off the porch and grabbed at Jesse and yanked her away from Harry, “Mom, don’t you see? He’s going to kill us all!”

and her hysteria erupted from inside her but the shock was hitting Jesse from the outside in waves that glittered like rain on a marble statue and it was as bad a moment as he had ever known.

But he got on them and shook them by the arms: “Calm down.

We need a medic.”

“Don’t you touch her,” Becky screamed and jumped in HUNTER’S MOON / 73

front of her mother and she charged in a blur of gray and they went down in the snow and her fingers raked his face, tearing the skin, barely missing his eyes. “Killer,” she screamed over and over. “Killer!

Killer! Killer!”

“Stop this,” Jesse ordered, trying to get her arms around Becky.

Harry had blood in his eyes as Becky squirmed beneath him in a manic flurry of fists, elbows, and knees. Finally he pinned her arms and Jesse started to bolt toward the woods. “I’ve got to go out there,”

she panted.

“No, not till the cops get here.” And he tackled her, and Becky came at him again. The siren was faint, between the shouts and grunts of struggle. Then louder.

Jesse’s hair was still down, with a wild shine from their lovemaking and warm in his hands when he yanked her head back. “You bitch, you tried to kill Bud,” he whispered fiercely.

Terror softened her lips and swelled them and tears brimmed in her eyes. But she met his glare straight on. “And any doctor who examined me right now would diagnose rape the way I’m wracked up,” she whispered right back. Their lips were an inch apart and they breathed the supercharged air from each other’s lungs. Becky lunged away from them and rolled over and came to her knees and pressed both hands to her ears and screamed: “Why are you whispering?”

A whirling blue strobe from a police flasher slapped Jesse’s face and the Maston County deputy’s Chevy Blazer practically ran the three of them down as it slid to a sideways stop in the drive. The first thing the deputy saw when he bolted from the car was the blood all over Harry’s face. The first thing he heard was Becky’s high quavering scream:

“Killlerrr!”

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Eight A.M. in Maston County. The low clouds sagged with arsenic amber, black, and gray and Harry 74 / CHUCK LOGAN

hugged himself and shivered at the top of the ridge. Nauseous, he wanted to brush his teeth real bad.

The deputies strung piss-yellow tape through the trees to cordon off Chris’s body, the spot where Bud had fallen, and the slope leading up to Harry’s deer stand in the down pine. The tape billowed slack, then reared and snapped in a gust of wind. Shots popped several ridges away where someone was shooting at deer, not people.

Harry started at the reports and the Maston County Sheriff’s deputy who was the first to answer the call placed a steady hand on his arm. In his Prussian blue winter uniform, the cop made a trim cutout against the poison sky.

Four Highway Patrol deputies, another local deputy, the sheriff, and the medics from the ambulance were down below with Bud.

More cops were back at the lodge seeing to Jesse and Becky.

The sheriff, a tall man in a red Hudson’s Bay mackinaw, stood near the orange blob of Chris’s body, keeping everyone away from the tracks in the snow that choreographed the fatal seconds in the ravine.

And Harry could see Bud’s face—Brillo beard stuck in dirty Ivory soap—between the backs and shoulders of the medics.

His deputy escort was young and competent, very correct in his bearing with tragic excitement animating his athletic Scandinavian face. Maybe they didn’t get this kind of call much up here. He had asked questions and methodically taken notes in his spiral notepad and had photographed the scene with a Polaroid as the medics went in to get to Bud. He had directed their initial approach with care so as not to disturb evidence. Procedure had set in, setting boundaries for shock.

Harry gagged and tried to spit the taste from his mouth.

“How you doing?” asked the deputy.

“I’m good,” said Harry, wiping spittle from his lips. Probably the wrong thing to say. He gingerly dabbed his face with a bloody wad of gauze and loose meat wobbled like thawing steak. Four deep lacerations started on his left cheek

HUNTER’S MOON / 75

under the eye, raked across the bridge of his nose, and clawed down his right cheek.

“Where’s your coat?” asked the deputy.

Harry nodded down the slope. “Used it to cover him.”

The deputy yelled down the incline. “Somebody bring Mr. Griffin his coat.”

Harry grimaced. The hemorrhaging adrenaline that had carried him this far had flamed out and now his guts were charred hollow and dirty as a chimney fire. The deputy watched him closely for signs of shock.

“We got this under control here, Mr. Griffin. We can get you back to town. Get you somebody to talk to.”

“Talk to?” Harry shook his head. “A lawyer?”

“No, uh, they got people trained in crisis counseling—”

“Christ,” muttered Harry. Minnesota cops. They probably all had counseling degrees. “You got a cigarette?” he asked