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

a light heavyweight prominent Minnesotan. That’s a big story on a slow news day.”

“Christ, I never thought of that,” said Harry.

“Button up, Harry, till we get there.”

“Will do,” said Harry.

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Randall came back on the line. “Hang tough,” he said. “Don’t let it fuck with your head. Help’s on the way.”

“Thanks,” said Harry.

Emery drove. Harry sat in the passenger seat of the sheriff’s Blazer with his duffel between his knees. Jerry took up his silent post in the back.

They turned onto the highway, went around a curve, and the land fell away. Superior stretched flat and endless looking like God’s level beneath brooding clouds. Way too much sky for Harry to handle right now. He lowered his eyes. The town of Stanley hid below them in the trees.

He ran his toothbrush over his teeth. Emery glanced at him. Harry slipped the toothbrush into the chest pocket of his shirt.

Emery sipped from his Thermos cup and slouched behind the wheel. Sorrow stacked up ledge on ledge in the sheriff’s face and his somber eyes mirrored the distant thunderheads.

They slowed down. Decaying white clapboard houses lurked in the undergrowth and straddled the road on the heights above Stanley. The old mining ghost town was just two rings of company housing surrounding the skeleton of a company store. A sturdy WPA brick schoolhouse had its windows boarded up and scrabbly jackpine grew to the second story. Harry recalled there’d been a bloody labor dispute here back in the ’30s.

People still lived among the ruins in swayback houses bailed together in Jackpine Savage squalor, in yards fenced with barbed wire and landscaped with rusting cars. A solitary Holstein cow walked a muddy path along a fence line. A new snowplow idled in a cloud of exhaust in front of a large pole barn.

Emery turned off at a crossroads. Several pickups were parked in front of the general store. Hunters in orange pulled a deer carcass from one of the trucks. A single eight-point buck dangled from the birch tree. Emery stopped, got out, and

86 / CHUCK LOGAN

inspected the deer. The hunters did not greet him. They stepped back solemnly, giving him a wide deferential berth. Emery got back in the Blazer.

Across from the store, a cinder-block building was painted bulk-head gray-green. A cold neon sign over the door announced: VFW.

The marquee sign in the parking lot had remnants of a bingo announcement that had been cannibalized to spell out DEER HUNTERS

WELCOME.

The hospital was right off Highway 7, set into the hillside among the houses sprinkled above Minnesota 61. The new brick-and-glass facade was gracefully landscaped with pines and junipers. In back, 55-gallon drums stuffed with hunks of drywall and electrical conduit littered the raw slope. A granite slab near the entrance bore the chiseled dedication: Stanley Maston Memorial Medical Center.

A dozen pickups were parked in front of the emergency room door. Two had stiffening deer carcasses protruding from their beds.

Orange men milled around.

Emery grumbled. “Everybody’s come to see the show. Shit…”

The snow made a loud Styrofoam squeak under Harry’s boots and captions of freezing breath hung over the crowd of hunters.

A haggard-faced Jay Cox exploded from the crowd and came straight at Harry and pushed him.

“Why isn’t he under arrest?” Cox growled at Emery. His eyes sparked as if powerful machines were stripping their gears in there.

“You’re outta line, Jay,” Emery said softly, easing between them.

Then, out of nowhere, Emery had springs in his feet. Graceful as a puma he moved on Cox and acquired Cox’s face in his hand, fingers spread, like he was palming a basketball. He heaved him off balance and sent him sprawling into the snow. Jerry interposed his body, watching Emery, not the furious Cox.

“Get him outta here before…” said Emery in a calm voice, leaving the threat hanging in the air. Some of the men HUNTER’S MOON / 87

surrounded Cox, took him aside to walk it off. Harry took a mental note. Sheriff Emery: question mark. Second line: doesn’t like Cox.

Emery guided Harry, in front of him, through the hospital door.

“Need you to look at his face,” Emery said to a nurse at the desk, walking into the emergency room.

“How are you, Larry,” asked the nurse. “You need anything?”

“Where you got Jessica and Becky?” asked Emery.

“In the lobby. They’re calmed down. You got any more shot-up city people out there, or is this it?” asked the nurse, turning Harry’s face in her cool fingers as if she were inspecting a hat she might buy.

The interior of the ER revolved in a clean spin of antiseptic tile, bright lights, and gleaming stainless steel. Harry yielded to trembling fatigue and his knees collapsed. Emery caught him.

“Delayed shock,” Emery said to the nurse.

The nurse led Harry to a chair, popped a thermometer into his mouth, told him to strip off his coat and roll up his sleeve so she could strap a blood pressure cuff on his arm. A young doctor, his green surgical suit spotted with blood, walked over, drying his hands on a towel. “Larry, I think you should sit down,” he said.

Emery shook him off. “Can Maston talk?”

“The man’s been shot,” protested the doctor.

“Ain’t shot that bad. Wait’ll you see the boy.”

“Two minutes,” said the doctor.

“Normal,” said the nurse, raising an eyebrow, taking out the thermometer and unstrapping the cuff.

They had Bud across the ER, screened off. Emery went behind the curtains. Harry walked over and heard Bud’s voice, foggy with pain.

“Oh God, Larry, I’m sorry…”

Harry stepped in. Bud was pale and naked except for a blue hospital sheet thrown across his gut. He was hooked up 88 / CHUCK LOGAN

to some machine by electrodes taped to his chest. The wound in his side was painted mercurochrome orange; the actual holes were a ragged black.

Bud muttered weakly, his face ash-white. “Forgot how much it hurts to get shot.”

Emery escorted Harry back outside the curtain. “Just as soon you two didn’t talk till we get us a preliminary report from the forensic bunch outta Duluth. He can’t