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

guy. Harry breathed through his nose, deep diaphragmatic breathing to slow his racing heartbeat.

The men formed a respectful circle around her. Then she walked toward Bud’s curtained bed. Emery moved to stop her. The big guy physically yanked Emery back.

Now it was Emery’s turn to get mad. “Am I running a criminal investigation or what!”

“You ain’t running shit. We better start thinking about damage control,” said the big guy. Harry noticed that everyone in hearing distance of this shouting—the nurses, the doctor—ducked their heads down into their shoulders.

“Who’s the big one?” Harry asked the minister.

“Mike Hakala, county prosecutor.”

“And the others?”

“The county board,” Karson said. “Terry Hakala, owns the lumber yard. Used to be mayor till we cut the position. And there’s Greg Hakala, the banker, and the little one is Morris Hakala, he used to run public works, now he operates the garbage business. Couple of cousins. They used to manage the paper mill cooperative. When it went under, they scrambled onto the only thing left afloat, the local government.”

Harry appraised the Hakalas, who tended toward piratical 92 / CHUCK LOGAN

mustaches and longish hair. All they needed was horned helmets to be a gathering of Minnesota Vikings logos.

Jesse’s voice rose in argument behind the curtain. Harry was up.

Everybody raced to Bud’s bed. Jesse was crying again and pointed her finger at Bud whose dilated eyes yawned in alarm. Physically, he cringed from her.

“I told you to listen to Mike, goddamn you. This wouldn’t have happened if you had the guts to stand up to Larry. But you had to try to be one of the boys!…” She saw Harry and drew herself up.

“Instead you had to bring him…”

Harry braced himself for her accusations.

She yanked the ring from her finger and threw it at Harry. The diamond bounced off his chest and rolled under the bed. Then she slapped Harry in the face. Right in the stitches. He didn’t even feel it. He was completely absorbed in the deft intelligence working behind the grief in her eyes.

Emery grabbed her. Bud tried to sit up and tipped over the IV

stand. It clattered on the tile, a sound as stark and hollow as Jesse’s voice. “How much is Chris’s life worth, Bud? That’s how much your fucking divorce is going to cost!”

Movement suspended. Everyone pretended to be invisible and Harry and Jesse stared at each other across a roomful of statues. A nurse swooped down and pulled the curtains tight around the bed.

“He killed my son. Isn’t anybody going to do anything?” Jesse sobbed. Numb stares. Karson moved to intercede. Emery seized the smaller man by the arm and pushed him away. “You stay away from her,” he hissed. No one looked at Harry except Karson and Harry sensed that the minister was another outsider here.

Jesse the magician, who was going to turn her son’s corpse into gold, bowed her head and walked from the silent room. When she was gone, Harry asked an orderly where the bathroom was.

On unsteady feet he walked to the bathroom that was at the opposite end of the hall from where Emery and Hakala were trying to calm Jesse. He washed the blood off his hands, HUNTER’S MOON / 93

stared into the mirror over the sink, and tried to get used to the four claw marks that crossed his face.

The blood was persistent, etched into the creases of his hands.

He wanted to feel sorrow, but all that came was a flush of the tri-umphant adrenal fury he had felt on the ridge.

The rust-tinged water swirled down the drain and took with it the last ten years of his life. He’d paid all his bills on time and drove the speed limit and went soberly to the nice little office everyday where the people said “excuse me” instead of “outta the way, motherfucker” and he was a kind of artist like his mother had wanted and he went to groups to learn how to control his anger because it was the anger that had always got him in trouble. And the anger was worst when somebody tried to use him. And damn if Jesse hadn’t used him in the baddest way because he was willing to break all the rules for her.

Harry stared at the bloody drain and finally the revulsion came.

A sixteen-year-old kid lay dead by his hand and not twenty minutes before he’d pulled the trigger he’d been knocking around right next to the womb that bore him. And the locals were playing blindman’s buff.

The vertigo and nausea wobbled up his throat and he barely made it to a stall to vomit. That’s how Jerry found him, hugging the toilet bowl, coming down from the dry heaves, still gagging, with hot salty tears streaking his torn cheeks.

15

Maston County was governed from a one-story building of yellow masonry with a flat asphalt roof and opaque glass brick plugs for windows. The structure took up one of the four city blocks that was downtown Stanley. The county occupied the half of the building that faced the waterfront. The other half was the municipal liquor store.

Emery went into the building. Jerry waited as Harry took a look around. Older people mainly, carefully walking through 94 / CHUCK LOGAN

heaps of snow the plows had thrown up on the sidewalks. Several groups of orange-clad hunters hurried by. He did not see a single mother with a child.

A seagull stood sentinel on a lamppost overlooking a breakwater made of granite boulders. At the south end of town, the silent smokestacks of the paper mill were stapled against the sky, as incon-gruous among the granite, waves, and pine as a cement space platform that had toppled out of orbit. The gull cried. The gray, unhurried white-capped rollers of Superior sloshed ice cubes against the boulders. It could have been a dying town on the coast of Maine.

Across the street from the county offices, dusty windows in four brick storefronts caught the morning light. Military recruiters had set up in one