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

attend. His flair for giving spirited banquet speeches did not go unnoticed.

Bud Maston sobered up into the most socially adept person Harry had ever known. He knew innately where everybody was and what they needed and had an uncanny knack for graciously positioning himself with perfect timing to provide it. This personal quality proved to have a downside called politics.

Bill Tully, the Godfather of the Minnesota Democrats, had 16 / CHUCK LOGAN

sized him up. He has looks, he can talk, he’s a war hero. He has the bread. And the guy really fuckin’ cares. He could stand for national office.

Harry had watched the shadow of power come to a point in Bud as an army of freebooting hacks eyed his fortune and told him it could be done; Congress two terms, then a shot at the Senate.

Asked his opinion, Harry flat out told him it was a mistake. Bud had looked right through him the way the first Mastons must have gazed at the virgin North Woods—with a lust that was as scary to the touch as their ax blades. Bud began putting Harry on hold.

A year ago, Bud flashed ahead in the polls going into the Democratic primary for the U.S. Congress seat in St. Paul. He had social magic and polish and that gregarious sweat people love to breathe.

And a bottomless campaign chest. The mob picked up the blood scent of doomed charisma and chanted: “Bud, Bud.” To Harry it sounded like: “Jump, jump.”

His face appeared in Time and Newsweek, a new Democrat who was compared to Governor Kerry of Nebraska. Accused of being another bleeding-heart liberal, he began to wear his miniature Purple Heart pin in his lapel.

The Congressional Medal of Honor he’d won as a marine lieutenant in Vietnam hovered over the campaign like a halo of stars on a field of blue. Bud never discussed it.

But Harry knew a few things about his old roommate. He knew that behind the elegant public persona, Bud camped precariously at the edge of a black pit inside himself. In most people, the cynical enzyme that filters out human suffering accumulates with age. In Bud, the process was reversed. It was only a matter of time before the political carnival snapped him. He had the best pollsters and consultants that money could buy.

What he needed was a friend.

The insiders whispered and the media hinted at clinical depression when Bud suddenly went into a social coma and quit the race.

HUNTER’S MOON / 17

He didn’t even make a public statement. The campaign sent out a terse news release that he had reconsidered for personal reasons.

When the hoopla died down, Harry found him, haunted and disheveled, in his apartment on the top floor of the old Rivers Hotel overlooking the St. Paul riverfront.

Bud just raised his hands, lowered his eyes, and never said a word.

Harry had not consciously tried to convey it, but, thinking back, the last expression Bud Maston had seen on his face was “I told you so.”

That’s where they’d left it, a year ago, when Bud drifted into exile up here.

Harry didn’t understand depression. Not really. It was a condition he linked with drinking, with hangovers. With setting yourself up to lose.

“Turn’s coming up. Highway 7,” said Bud.

Signs winked in a fit of snow—ACE HARDWARE, BEST WESTERN, some churches. To the right, Harry glimpsed shadows of red brick and bare windows. There was supposed to be a big paper mill somewhere. A Holiday gas station levitated in a furor of candle-power, flickered, and then disappeared into the agitated blankness on the edge of Lake Superior.

“Stanley,” said Harry.

“Yeah,” said Bud. “Tobacco Road North since they closed the mill.”

“You had something to do with that, didn’t you?”

A little testy, Bud said, “Hell, they were polluting the lake…”

The only thing moving, Harry turned left on Highway 7.

“Hope the plows have been out,” said Bud.

They climbed slowly up the south slope of Nanabozho Ridge and passed meager tiers of houses with windows illuminated by the soulless waver of TV screens and entered a gauntlet of giant, wind-staggered pines.

The Jeep churned through a foot of snow, deeper drifts. Visibility cut down to five yards. Then three. Harry couldn’t 18 / CHUCK LOGAN

see the side of the road. He shifted into low gear and steered inside a set of fading tire tracks. They passed the blur of a general store with a solitary gas pump. “Where’s the turnoff?” Harry asked.

“Half a mile. There’s a big sign on the right side of the road.”

“Where the fuck is the side of the road?”

“Maybe we should put on the tire chains.”

“We got wheels. We need eyes.”

“According to the speedometer we still have four-tenths of a mile.

I clocked it from when we turned off the main highway,” said Bud.

“If we get stuck, no heroics, we stay with the car,” said Harry, mindful that it had been a long time since he’d been out in this kind of weather. The last ten years he’d mostly watched it gnash its fangs against city windows.

The Jeep labored at the tight end of a funnel and the tires started to wallow and sideslip. The tracks in the road were blotting out.

“Shit.” The right wheels churned sideways and they were off the road; the shoulder was snow pudding. The wheels spun, dug a trench, forward motion ceased, and the Jeep stalled.

Bud pursed his lips. “It’s only a tenth of a mile. We could try to walk in.”

“No way. We dig it out.”

Outside took on a whole new meaning: instant disorientation.

Harry’s breath went small in his chest as the wind wrapped his fancy mountain parka around his spine. They were buried in a snow bank almost up to the passenger door window. Harry dug furiously with his hands to free the exhaust pipe. The cold put needle teeth in the snow. Chastised, he yanked on his gloves. The red flash of the hazard lights revealed how swiftly the snow was filling in their tracks. Take ten steps in any direction and you’d