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

of them. The Minnesota Department of Human Services had a sign in another. The third had been the County Gazette and was now a food shelf. The faded sign on the fourth advertised the Maston County Economic Development Coop and was empty.

The next block was doing a little better. It had the bank, the hardware store, the drugstore, a diner, and some antique stores.

Newer stuff, a tourist restaurant, the IGA grocery, a motel, and the Holiday station were up on the main highway.

Jerry nodded across the street. “Military’s the only ones doing any hiring these days.” His pale blue eyes traveled up the mass of Nanabozho Ridge. “Wolves are coming back though.”

Three Indian winos hobbled around the corner from the liquor store and engaged Harry with bleary curiosity. Must be the big event in town. Watching the cops take a man with a busted-up face and blood on his clothes from a police car to the station.

Jerry ushered him through a door with peeling stenciled letters: COUNTY SHERIFF. They crossed a lobby with a radio dispatch desk and went down a dim corridor of buckled green linoleum and walls of cheap imitation paneling. Mike Hakala popped out of an office and motioned them down the hall.

They took Harry into the lunchroom and sat on folding HUNTER’S MOON / 95

metal chairs at a Formica cafeteria table. There were crumbs on the table and a half-eaten ham sandwich curled on a crumpled paper bag next to a pint of milk and the last house fly in Minnesota buzzed in a drunken circle above their heads.

Harry declined to make a statement until his lawyer called. Hakala temporized, told him that no criminal charges would be filed. That it looked like self-defense under very tragic circumstances. A domestic, he called it. There might be a grand jury to review the incident and Harry could be called to testify.

Hakala asked him if he was considering charging Becky for clawing his face. Harry shook his head. He cruised right through. No hint that Jesse had said anything to complicate his story.

Hakala told him to sit out by the desk and wait for his call.

Harry waited on a cheap couch and stared at the frayed copy of Guns & Ammo that lay on the chipped plastic coffee table. A deputy brought him a cup of coffee as a succession of serious-looking people trooped in, tracking snow. He assumed they were the forensic techies from the crime lab. They conferred with Hakala and Emery in an office behind a glass partition that faced the radio dispatch desk.

Harry kept feeling his pockets. He must have lost his cigarettes at the hospital, probably in the bathroom. He looked up. The minister, Karson, stood in the doorway, watching him pat his pockets. Karson tossed him a pack of cigarettes.

“I just talked to Bud and decided I should look in on you,” said Karson.

“They let you talk to him?”

“What I do,” said Karson, sitting down on the couch. “I marry them and bury them. The rest of the time I talk to them. Mostly I listen.”

“You marry Bud and Jesse?”

Karson sighed. “No. The Honorable Judge Toyvo Hakala did that in his offices three weeks ago.”

“You going to bury Chris Deucette?”

“Yes, I suspect I will do that.”

96 / CHUCK LOGAN

Jerry walked past them and nodded to Karson with a civil smile.

His body language was dismissive: Tits on a boar. Karson nodded back with the superior, inhibited air of a vegetarian at a buffalo roast.

Harry and Karson smoked together for a few awkward minutes.

Then Harry motioned toward the office where Emery and Hakala were hunched over a desk. “What do you think they’re talking about?”

“Politics.”

“Why politics?”

“It’s called cover your ass and protect your political supply lines,”

said Karson.

“Explain,” said Harry.

Karson cleared his throat. “Well, Bud Maston was going to be the golden goose for this town and now he’s up the hill with a gunshot wound. Maston bankrolled Larry Emery’s run for office.

That makes Larry Maston’s man on the Hakala pirate ship. It would behoove Larry to look after Maston’s general well-being to ensure his own.”

The fine web of wrinkles tightened around Karson’s blue eyes.

“Except Larry has been falling down on the job. Last month, Chris Deucette, whose body is now in a little room in the hospital being dissected like a laboratory frog, walked into high school, late for class, and outrageously stoned. When his homeroom teacher took him aside, Chris pulled out a very large handgun and threatened the teacher’s life.”

Harry sat up and narrowed his eyes. “Where’d he get the gun?”

“Broke into Emery’s house, where he used to live, and stole it.”

Karson puffed on his cigarette and continued. “Well, everybody got called in, me included. We’ve never had a gun incident in our school. Mike hit the roof. He wanted Chris to do some kind of time for it. At least a stint in a drug-dependency program, with family counseling tacked on. Larry got Bud to convince Mike to let Chris off, put him

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in their joint parental custody. So now Mike’s nervous that that decision might come back on him.”

Karson flicked the ash from his cigarette. His voice flicked too.

“Larry Emery is a very advanced thinker. A troubled kid pulls a gun, so you take him out and teach him how to shoot a bigger, more powerful gun so he can go slaughter deer…” Karson shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe that spirit won the West, but it sure fucked up in this case.”

“You and Sheriff Emery aren’t real close, huh?”

“He hates my guts.”

“Guy looks pretty spaced out for a lawman from what I’ve seen today.”

Karson chuckled ironically and his forehead furrowed with wrinkles. “Now we come to the interesting part that everyone, including Bud, seems to have neglected to tell you in all the confusion.”

“What?”

Karson’s lips jerked in a faint smile. “You killed Larry Emery’s bastard this morning. That’s why Hakala has him on such a tight leash.”

The walls of the police station started marching in and