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

bracket over the cash register. On the cable hookup to the weather channel, a loop of sawtooth isobars like the bite radius of a shark slung a cold front down a map of Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Bud went out to the pumps and checked the tires. Harry remembered that he’d forgotten to pack toothpaste and went back in.

“Stanley, huh?” the guy behind the register mused as he rang up the order. “You from there?”

Harry shook his head as the guy handed him his change.

HUNTER’S MOON / 13

“I went once,” said the guy. “Dry socket. Nothing there.”

Harry shrugged and opened the door. The guy came around the counter. His chapped face was bitter; his body was caved in by hard labor and a ripple of washboard chest muscle showed beneath layers of quilted underwear at the collar of his grease-stained overalls.

Harry knew the breed from his own cousins and uncles back in Michigan.

“That’s him, ain’t it? Do-good Bud Maston,” he said with a razor-thin smile. He pushed past Harry and hawked up a gob of spit and gave it to the wind in Bud’s direction. Harry watched the gobber freeze and roll as it hit the snow. Walking away, he heard the muttered: “Fat rich fuck couldn’t buy his way into Congress, huh.”

The money. Bud had spent his life trying to lose his rich-boy shadow and when the test came, it had eaten him whole. He didn’t have the million-dollar harelip when Harry met him. Then, he was just another guy back from the war. But the money was waiting.

Old Minnesota money plundered from the Iron Range starting back in the fur trade, then timber and mining. The Mastons had exhausted the iron in the Nanabozho Ridge, cursed the wrecked strip of land between Lake and Cook counties with their name, and sought to wash the sweat and blood from their loot through philanthropy.

Bud was the last Maston and he had so much money that he gave it away for a living, as director of the Maston Foundation in St. Paul.

Bud might have overheard the station attendant, the way he winced into the churning twilight. Spray some freckles on young Orson Welles playing Citizen Kane, that was Bud a year ago. Now his patrician face had swollen with an alcohol bloat and all that drive had turned to lard.

He wore a blaze-orange vest over an olive-drab commando sweater that bulged tight, like a green innertube around his waist.

He’d gained fifty pounds and grown his copper-colored hair shaggy, down to his slab shoulders. A scraggy beard hid his strong chin, his long fingernails were cracked and rimmed with grime, and a button on the fly of his jeans was undone. He was not wearing a wedding ring.

14 / CHUCK LOGAN

He swung his face toward Harry and his blue eyes could have been painted by van Gogh—contrived to be more brilliant than real life—the way they throbbed, bloodshot with pain. But he didn’t say a word.

They got back in the Jeep and drove north and left human scale behind with the lights of Duluth and fell under the power of Lake Superior. Highway 61 squeezed to two lanes and swerved through cuts in the Precambrian hills and pine thrust up and disappeared as the snow came faster, hypnotizing them, and they lost the light and pushed on, all alone, into howling, tunneled darkness.

A slow hour out of Duluth, Bud pulled onto the shoulder and put the Jeep in neutral. Twenty feet ahead in the high-beams, barely legible in the flying snow, a highway sign shuddered in the wind: Entering Maston County.

“You drive,” Bud said.

They changed seats. Harry put the Jeep in gear and felt his way in four-wheel drive along the slippery highway that had narrowed to a dogsled trail, winding through the pines. Drifts snaked across the road and Harry accelerated to crash through one that almost breasted the grill.

They careened out of the drift into an open area and the crosswind wrapped them. “Whiteout,” Harry muttered and fought the wheel.

“This is the last open spot; we’re good,” said Bud.

The Jeep lurched and the shoulders of the storm crowded in, predatory, waiting for them to make a fatal mistake. They crossed the open ground into the cover of the trees where granite hills blocked the wind and Harry could see again.

A yellow sign flashed at the side of the road: MOOSE AREA. DRIVE

CAREFULLY.

Bud sighed, draped one hand on his belly, munched on a Snickers bar, and finally broke the trance of the storm. “I really appreciate this,” he said.

“Does she have a name?” asked Harry.

“Huh?”

“Your wife?”

HUNTER’S MOON / 15

“Of course. Jesse.”

“Where’d you meet her?”

“Local VFW. She was tending bar and—”

“A bartender? You married a bartender?”

“What’s wrong with that?” Bud countered defensively. “She’s not one of those Type-A bitches with an MBA. She’s a…real woman.”

“You going to tell me about it?” asked Harry.

Bud sighed again, fumbled in his pocket, put a filtered cigarette between his lips and forgot to light it. “She’s got two kids. Twins.

Sixteen years old. Boy and a girl. The girl’s all right. The boy, Chris, I’m having trouble with.”

Harry reached over, popped his Zippo lighter, and lit Bud’s cigarette. Bud took one drag, made a face, rolled down the window, and threw it out. Harry frowned, waiting for more. Bud looked away. He opened his hand and a glob of the Snickers melted across his palm.

Bud went to Harvard and his family had a county named after it.

Harry graduated from the auto factories of Detroit and the U.S. infantry and didn’t know his father’s real name.

They’d both lost parents when they were young and they’d both been busted up in the Big Hit-and-Run-Accident over in the rice paddies. Linda Margoles made a witch’s ride across Harry’s memory.

They both had bad luck with women.

Before Bud got the money, they had been roommates and best friends. Then Bud came into his inheritance and took over the foundation and began to change. The phone was always ringing.

He had all these events to