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

take a leave of absence. Bug out for a while.”

“I’ll deal with it. I’ll get ’em to kill the story, the part about you.”

“Don’t kid yourself. You don’t deal with something like this. You just turned into a story.”

HUNTER’S MOON / 121

“Fucking Bud. He musta said something to Murphy. Put the blood in the water.”

“It doesn’t make any difference where it started. Technically, it’s all accurate information. The clever juxtaposition gives it lurid texture. It’s what you get for living an interesting life in a world of newspaper subscribers and voyeur reporters who grub along in quiet desperation.”

“You’re a lot of help.”

“Screw ’em,” Randall chuckled. “What are they going to do? Send us to Vietnam? Let’s invite Murphy over. I’ll get out the twenty-two and we’ll sit around and shoot squirrels in the backyard while he interviews us about back when we were ‘assassins’ together.”

“They’ve no right, man,” said Harry.

“Hunker down. Let it blow over,” said Randall. “Why don’t you come back here tonight?”

Randall’s concern was practical, not emotional like Linda’s.

Randall knew he could sweat some sheets.

“I’ll think about it.”

The minute he put the phone down, it rang. A reporter from Channel 7. Harry pulled the phone connection out of the wall.

His heart started to race. Steady down. Do the tricks.

In sobriety he had evolved disciplined routines; first he put the water on for coffee, then twenty minutes of meditation till the water boiled.

He sat on the carpet, folded his legs into a half lotus, shut his eyes, and let his thoughts scatter into the darkness behind his eyelids.

He imagined them swirling in a slow-motion, underwater storm.

The heavy ones sank. The lighter ones trickled up like ribbons of bubbles.

The tension was supposed to start seeping through a pressure ridge along his brow and slowly bleed away.

Jesse’s face didn’t sink, it didn’t ascend. It said, “People 122 / CHUCK LOGAN

can’t help when they meet.” Over and over, until the kettle whistled.

She was still whispering through the caffeine star clusters as he groomed the strong Colombian with boiling water.

Christ. He scrubbed his knuckles in his sweaty hair and broke into absurd laughter. This was the year he was going to quit smoking.

Loosen up. Trade in the boxing gym for cross-country skis. He had even looked in a pet shop. Birds and cats. Linda Margoles had suggested one or the other. Chided that both were not a real good idea.

He’d even considered getting some new furniture to splash a little color around.

The studio was a woodcut of where a man should live, dreamed up by a boy raised in pretelevision America that Harry kept quiet with antiques, bookshelves, old nautical maps on the wall, a globe, and the smell of tobacco.

A ship captain’s room, Linda Margoles had remarked on making her final exit. The narrow single bed was a bunk that could accom-modate sex by the night.

Not wide enough for love.

Harry paced and touched his belongings. A gritty blowup from Bill Mauldin’s World War II classic Up Front hung near the drawing table. Joe and Willie. Two cartoon uncles who had taught him to draw as he copied them on the long nights of his youth as a military cadet in Georgia. He’d ridden the holiday trains between Georgia and Michigan and his cartoon characters had come to life for him in the faces of GIs in transit to and from Korea.

He smiled ironically at his reflection in a black window. “I got my teeth fixed, Ma.” He laughed, adding, “I got a good job. I’m not punching a clock at Chrysler anymore…”

Almost pulled it off. For a few years he’d drawn dark laughter for the editorial page. But times changed. He changed. He’d found himself getting comfortable. He detoured around the mean streets that he’d once walked. The computers came. He traded in his steel pen for a plastic Macintosh mouse.

A safe life. Too safe. Like the artwork he created that was HUNTER’S MOON / 123

two steps removed from his fingertips behind a wafer of plastic and a video monitor.

A stamped, addressed envelope lay on the drawing table. His child support payment to the Wayne County Friend of the Court in Detroit. Forgot to mail it in his haste after Bud called.

The kid was in high school now. Harry hadn’t seen him since he was in diapers. But this year, with ten years sober in the bank, he thought maybe…

Touching all the bases didn’t help. Minnesota Harry’s comfy life was trickling away. The sharp edges that he had learned to fold discreetly inside had flashed out. In the grove, on the ridge—that was him. Not this. Not books and pieces of paper. Not predictable habits.

Detroit Harry grinned at him from the picture hanging over the drawing table and he saw how he would sandbag Murphy and kill the story.

He had his pride and a certain reputation and Murphy could dig up pieces of his past that didn’t square with his image. It was fine to be a reformed drunk in Minnesota. But not some other things.

He called the newsroom and asked for Murphy.

“Frank Murphy.” The voice was tense, self-absorbed.

“Murphy, you sonofabitch—”

“Griffin! Where are you?”

“What the hell’re you doing with this story?”

“My job. We have to be thorough on this one, Harry. You work here. We have to bend over backward to dot all the i’s; we could be accused of favoritism. Besides, it’s a hell of a story.”

“Your ass. Look, I’ll talk to you, off the record, but I want you to leave Randall and his wife out of it.”

“His wife? Dorothy Houston. She teaches journalism at the U.

She used to work here—”

“She was there that day, they were together. That scar on her face—”

124 / CHUCK LOGAN

“No shit, this is great stuff.”

“I’ll talk about what happened this morning. But not the rest. You know where I live?”

“I’ll get it from the city desk. We’d like to bring a photographer.”

“You bring nothing.”

“Be right there,” said Murphy.

Tactical on Murphy. Scrappy competitive guy. Short. Napoleon complex. Hungry for front-page ink. He