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

Kellogg Boulevard. Louise cleared her throat. “He called Steve Cotter and asked to borrow money.”

Shit. Cotter was the manager of the Rivers Hotel. He’d give Bud the shirt off his back.

“Tell him to wear a hat,” Louise sang out after Harry. “There’s a storm…”

The Rivers. Shoulda figured. Bud still kept a suite of rooms. The wounded animal always returns to its den.

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Bud had lived there for years. The Rivers was a crumbling brick relic that had been slated for demolition for three decades. George Armstrong Custer had reputedly received his last haircut in the hotel barber shop. Bud had a soft spot for the old wreck and had managed to get it on the Historical Register. The hotel bar had been their old drinking haunt.

He ran six blocks and a red light in fourth gear and left the Honda idling, flashers on, in front of the hotel, and went into the lobby.

Bennett, the reception clerk, had a startled twitch to his handlebar mustache as if he just seen an elephant graze through the ferns in the lobby.

“Where is he?” Harry demanded.

Bennett rolled his eyes toward the bar, which had swinging doors that Harry knocked wide apart going in. A small early luncheon crowd looked up from their small sandwiches and large tumblers.

An aroma of sawdust, whiskey, and tobacco smoke cured the air.

The long horseshoe bar had a rail. Tall stools. Circa 1860 spittoons.

No Bud. He walked to his old stool and drummed his fingers over the scarred teak bar. He kept his left hand out of sight.

Snowflakes as big as half dollars cartwheeled against the windows.

Tony, the bartender, wore a vest and a look of discreet curiosity held close to it. As he wiped the bar and put down a fresh ashtray, he purred, “Harry, haven’t seen you in a while. Read about you though. What’s up?”

“You seen Bud?”

“He’s in the back with Steve.” Tony glanced at the windows and made bluff conversation. “This one’s coming from the West. Lifted the roof off the Rockies and is going to drop it smack on us. You want some coffee?”

Steve kept a safe in the back. Harry stared at the office door at the rear of the room. So play it safe with nineteen showing or push it a little. “Hit me,” said Harry.

“Come again?”

“Jack Daniel’s. Double. Straight up,” said Harry, putting a five down on the bar. Felt right. No. Necessary. No way he HUNTER’S MOON / 151

could pull off tomorrow morning straight. Damn. He needed those divorce papers.

The drink arrived. He raised it and peered through the distorted prism of the thick tumbler at the mural of Custer’s Last Stand that stretched across the back wall next to the office door.

Custer stood in the center of the painting, his sword raised as the redskins closed in. At first Harry didn’t recognize Bud when he came out of the office with a wad of folding cash clutched in one hand and a drink in the other. No beard. He’d cut his hair, shorn it, penitent-fashion, down to the scalp. A baggy maroon U of M

sweatshirt hung from his shoulders.

Bud stared at him and the stalk of celery protruding from the sturdy Bloody Mary in his hand began to shake. Bud gulped the drink, dropped the glass, scuttled around the bar, went between a screen of tall potted palms, and out the side door.

Harry gave chase down the hotel corridor. “Hold it right there,”

he yelled.

“You’re drinking. All bets are off,” Bud yelled back as he hobbled, favoring his left side. He turned a corner and went down a corridor of banquet rooms. The hall stopped in a dead end. Bud looked left and right and choose the door to the left, the one with a drum poster stuck to it.

An Assembly of Men.

Christ. Harry paused at the door and took a deep breath. Like two more symptoms of desperation, the men’s movement and the state lottery had surfaced at about the same time in Minnesota. Same bunch that staged the production for public TV up at Bud’s lodge.

He opened the door and entered the large hotel suite.

The furniture was shoved in a big circle and an elusive Plains Indian flute played low on a stereo. Stuff on the walls. Masks. Spears.

Pine scent trickled from sticks of burning incense.

Thirty guys who didn’t need to be at work on Monday morning stood around. They tended toward carefully

152 / CHUCK LOGAN

groomed beards, sensitive eyes, and affluent bodies starved from exercise.

Bud’s disheveled entrance and now Harry’s bloody left hand created a nervous murmur. Bud talked urgently to a portly dude in a fringed buckskin shirt with a leonine mane of black Grecian Formula hair crawling down his neck.

Bud’s electric blue eyes danced around the room. Gregarious Bud, trying to work the crowd, groping for his social magic.

But this gang had read the papers. They regarded him as if he’d staggered down off a sand dune on Mars; sloppy, wild-eyed, badly dressed, stitches in his lower lip, and a round, messy stain leaking from his bandaged left side, soaking through his sweatshirt.

Bud stepped behind the endomorph in buckskin. “Leave me alone, I mean it,” he challenged as Harry went straight for him.

“Hold on, there,” rumbled the big man. Tad Clark had had a reputation in the Cities as a “cause person,” now he’d trimmed his political sails. Now everybody was his own cause. Harry moved Clark aside and seized Bud’s wrist. The Assembly of Men began to assemble.

“Look out, he’s been drinking,” Bud warned in a loud voice.

Coldly, Harry said, “Make a hole. I’m taking Mr. Maston back to the hospital where he belongs.”

Bud tried to pull free. Harry snapped his wrist into a gooseneck come-along. Bud resisted and Harry discovered there was still con-siderable physical strength in his large body. Harry wrenched the arm violently, locking the elbow and wrist, stiffening it into a fulcrum. “Ow!” Bud cried out in pain.

Clark stepped forward and put a loose hand on Harry’s shoulder.

“No