The shot had missed its mark, but was the shooter still there?
Cork had long ago given up carrying a firearm, but that didn’t mean he didn’t miss the comfort it might have offered in just this kind of situation. He tried to come up with a plan for what he would do if the shooter came off the ridge to hunt him in the open. He couldn’t run. A good hunter with a decent scope would bring him down easily. Maybe he could make it to the gorge, climb down, and hide among the rocks. The shooter would have to come down to him, and that proximity might even the odds a little.
Cork didn’t like having to expose himself to keep an eye on the ridge, and he went flat on his belly and slithered under the Land Rover. In the shadow there, with the left front wheel masking him, he kept a sharp eye to the far side of the bridge.
He lay that way for a good ten minutes and saw no movement on the ridge. He’d just about decided that the shooter had fled when he heard a vehicle approaching on the road. A few moments later, a dusty white pickup swung into view, coming from the south. It crossed the bridge, slowed, pulled onto the shoulder, and stopped. A Shinnob, Hooty Nelson, got out and walked toward where Cork lay. He looked startled when Cork slithered from beneath the Land Rover.
“Car trouble?” Hooty asked.
He was tall and lean and wore his hair in a crew cut. There were deep creases at the corners of his mouth, because he smiled a lot. But the thing that anyone who dealt with Hooty noticed most was his left eye, which was lazy. Sometimes, because of that wandering eye, it seemed as if Hooty was talking to someone over your right shoulder. He was a mechanic at the Tomahawk Truckstop on Highway 1 and must have been heading home from work. He wore oil-spotted Carhartt coveralls, and although his hands were clean, under every fingernail lay a crescent of black engine grease.
“Not exactly. Take a look at that windshield,” Cork said.
Hooty eyed the bullet hole and whistled. “You okay?”
“Yeah.”
Hooty looked at the place under the Land Rover where Cork had lain for protection, and he said, “Checking the oil pan to see if it got hit, too?” He grinned, an expression that came and went quickly, and he ended with a philosophic shake of his head. “Hunting season. Them damn hunters from the Cities, they’ll shoot anything that moves. Last year, my cousin Glory, she was just sittin’ in her trailer watchin’ TV. Damn bullet comes through the wall, whizzes right past her, not a foot from her nose, goes out the other side of the trailer. She’s more mad than scared, and she goes outside and spots three white guys in brand-new blaze orange outfits runnin’ off into the trees like kids scared cuz they broke a window or something. Come huntin’ season, I don’t let my kids outta my sight.”3
Cork chose not to disabuse Hooty of the notion that it was an accident. He thanked the man for stopping, and both went their separate ways.
* * *
Sheriff Marsha Dross looked at the slug Cork had put in the palm of her hand.
“I dug that out of my backseat,” he told her.
“You think somebody was actually shooting at you?” she asked.
He sat in her office at the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department. Agent Phil Holter was there, too, and Ed Larson. Dross and the BCA agent had given a press conference shortly after noon. To avoid any lingering reporters, Cork had parked a block from the building and had managed to slip inside unseen.
“Or was it just a stray hunter’s round, as your friend on the rez suggested?” Holter said.
“A huge coincidence that somebody would be shooting at a buck and almost hit me instead, don’t you think?”
Holter took off his rimless glasses, pulled a clean handkerchief from his back pocket, huffed a breath onto each lens, and began to wipe. “Why would somebody be shooting at you, O’Connor?”
Rhiannon was what he thought, but what he said was “Maybe because I’m asking questions.”
“Questions we should be asking?”
“Not necessarily.”
“But important enough, apparently, that somebody wants you to stop asking them.”
Dross entered the questioning. “What were you doing on the reservation, Cork?”
“I wanted to talk to Isaiah Broom.”
“About what?”
“Bow hunting.”
“Is he a bow hunter?”
Cork nodded. “He hunts like Jubal and I did, still-stalking.”
“You think he had something to do with Jubal Little’s death?” Dross continued.
“It was a possibility I wanted to check out.”
“What did you find?”
“In his hunting, he uses arrows identical to mine.”
“Meaning the arrow that killed Jubal Little might have come from him? Why would Isaiah Broom want Jubal Little dead?”
“Casinos.” It was Ed Larson who answered. He was wearing one of his tweed sport coats with suede elbow patches, and he’d been sitting quietly in a corner, tugging on a loose thread hanging from the sleeve. He’d seemed to be paying very little attention, but Cork knew that brain of his was working at light speed. “Jubal Little’s proposal for six state-run casinos. That’s a political hot potato none of the other candidates would touch. Little could because he was Indian. Take him out of the election and the problem goes away.”
“Thin,” Holter said.
“But worth checking,” Larson insisted.
“There’s another possibility you might want to look into,” Cork said. “Talk to Lester Bigby.”
“Bigby?” Dross looked bewildered. “What’s the connection?”
“Lester bow-hunts, too, and he has a long-standing personal grudge against Jubal. Tie that to the fact that Bigby’s heavily invested in preserving the environmental status quo of our area, while Jubal Little’s on the bandwagon for new mining operations, and I think you’ve got a couple of good reasons for him to want Jubal dead. If you talk to him, ask him where he was on the day Jubal was killed.”
“Why?”
“Because when I talked to him, he danced all around that question.”
“You’ve talked to him already?” Holter had put his glasses back on, and from behind those clear lenses his eyes shot fire at Cork. “Jesus, this is our investigation, O’Connor, and I don’t appreciate you mucking around in it.”
“Last time I looked, Agent Holter, it was a free country. A man can still ask questions.”
The office was filled with afternoon sunlight that came through the window facing west. Where the direct rays hit the floor, the old oak boards looked as if they were made of crystallized honey. That same window overlooked the department’s parking lot. In the stillness that followed Cork’s retort, he could hear the grumble of an engine from one of the media trucks leaving. He heard a reporter shout an unintelligible question, to whom, he couldn’t say.
“Okay,” Holter said, shifting his body as if squaring off against Cork. “Let me tell you what I think about this slug of yours. Seems to me there are three possibilities.”
“Love to hear them,” Cork said.
“One: Someone did try to shoot you and missed. Two: The slug was a stray from a hunter, as your Ojibwe friend suggested. And three: The slug was fired to make it look as if someone was trying to shoot you.”
“A phony attempt on my life, is that what you’re saying?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“Why would someone do that?” Dross asked the agent.
“To make O’Connor here look less guilty,” Holter replied.
“Someone risked blowing my head off just to make me look innocent?” Cork actually laughed.
“Not someone,” Holter said and pointedly eyed Cork.
“Me? You think I shot that slug through my window?” Cork glanced at Dross and Larson to see if they were reacting with the same disbelief, but their faces gave away nothing of what they were thinking. “That’s just ridiculous.”
“We’ll follow up on the leads you’ve given us, Cork,” Larson promised. “In the meant
ime, it would be best if you stepped back and let us handle the investigation. For your own sake.”
Anger made everything inside him burn. Cork wanted to hit someone, Holter especially. But he held himself in check. “One question before I leave. Have you got anything more on the dead man on the ridge?”
Larson replied, “We’re still looking into it. Let me walk you to your car, Cork.”
They went out a side door and made their way unnoticed to Cork’s Land Rover, parked a block away. Neither man had spoken, but at the vehicle Larson said, “In an hour, can you be at the spot where you say the shot was fired?”
“Why? You want to take a shot at me, too?”
Larson smiled. “Not easy being on your side of all this, I’m sure. But it’s not easy on our side either, Cork. We’re trying to be thorough and impartial. It’s best if you can refrain from taking this investigation personally.”
“You realize how moronic that sounds, Ed?”
“Yeah.” Larson gave a boyish kind of shrug. “But keep it in mind. So, an hour?”
“I’ll be there,” Cork said.
CHAPTER 28
He drove through Aurora, a town he knew so well he could have walked it blind and not been lost for a moment, a town he loved as much as he loved anything outside his family. But he drove angry. He was pissed at Jubal Little. Pissed at Jubal for dying, pissed at Jubal for the way he’d died, and pissed at what, with his final breaths, Jubal had left behind, a mystery that threatened Cork and his family: Rhiannon.
“Who are you? What am I supposed to know?” he shouted at the hole in his windshield. He slammed the palm of his hand against the steering wheel. “Goddamn you, Jubal. Why couldn’t you keep your goddamn trap shut, just this once.”
He headed to Sam’s Place and was relieved to see the parking lot empty but for Jenny’s Subaru. He was just about to go inside when his daughter came out with Waaboo toddling beside her. His grandson smiled, and Cork’s mood changed instantly. Anger drained away; love flooded in; but with it came rushing back his fear for the safety of his family.
Jenny let Waaboo run, if you could call it that, to Cork, who swept him up. The little boy’s black hair smelled of French fries.
“You timed it well,” Jenny said to him. “The last reporter got discouraged an hour ago and left. Ever since word got out about the search of our house this morning, we’ve been fighting them off like mosquitoes.”
“Sorry,” Cork said. “Did you call Leon Papakee?”
“Yes. He said he’d see what he could do.”
“Good.” That, at least, was a little relief. “Is Stephen inside?”
“Yeah. He and Judy are holding down the fort, such as it is.” She swept her hand across the empty lot. “The good thing about all the reporters, we sold a lot of burgers this afternoon.”
Waaboo squirmed in his arms, wanting to get down, and Cork released him. Waaboo toddled toward the lakeshore, but Jenny caught him before he’d gone far and picked him up. “Are you sticking around?”
“No. I’m meeting Ed Larson out on County Sixteen.”
“Anything in particular?”
“Yeah, take a look at this.” He walked her to the front of the Land Rover.
“Is that a bullet hole?” she asked, horrified.
“From a deer slug.”
“Somebody tried to shoot you?”
“Not necessarily, according to Agent Phil Holter. I may have shot my own windshield.”
“Why would he think that?”
“Because he’s covering all the possibilities, which include me being responsible for Jubal Little’s death and trying to make it look like I’m not.”
“He can’t believe that.”
Waaboo was straining to get free and making unhappy noises.
“I honestly don’t know what he believes. Look, Jenny, I want you to close up Sam’s Place. Close it up now, and go home. Shut the curtains and don’t open the door for anyone.”
She looked at the windshield. “Because one of those may come our way?”
“I don’t think so, but I’m not taking any chances. And I’m going to give Cy Borkman a call, have him come over and hang out with you guys.”
Borkman had retired from the sheriff’s department a couple of years earlier, but he still moonlighted in private security. Cork was pretty sure that, when Cy knew the gravity of the situation, he’d give a hand in a heartbeat.
“Do you really think we’re in danger?”
Cork nodded toward Waaboo. “Do you want to take a chance?”
Jenny had been in that kind of danger before. Only a year earlier, she’d risked her life, faced down a cadre of crazy religious zealots armed to the teeth, in order to save the life of the child in her arms. In a sad way, it had armored her against just the sort of brutal potential that Cork was afraid she might be facing again. Her look went hard, and she put her cheek against her son’s head. “I understand.”
“I may be home late tonight, so don’t worry about me.”
Again, she eyed the hole left by the slug. “That’s probably not possible.”
* * *
Larson was at the bridge ahead of him, and he wasn’t alone. John Berglund, from the Border Patrol, was there, too. Both men stood at the base of the ridge from which Cork believed the shot through his windshield had been fired.
Cork shook Berglund’s hand and said, “Seeing a lot of you these days.”
“Back at you.”
“Is this what you do on your time off?”
Berglund smiled. “Been doing this pretty much since I was a Boy Scout. Lot of years now. Not much I like better than reading trail.”
“You guys ready?” Larson said.
“For what?” Cork asked.
Larson lifted a hand toward the top of the ridge. “Let’s see about that shooter.”
It was late afternoon. The sun was an emptying orange balloon caught in the branches of the trees. The temperature was dropping noticeably.
Berglund hesitated, eyeing the ridge, the sun, and finally the far side of the bridge Cork had been approaching when the shot was fired.
“How long ago did it happen?” he asked.
“A little over two hours,” Cork said.
“The sun would have been about there in the sky?” Berglund pointed to a spot about sixty degrees west of zenith.
“About,” Cork agreed.
“Glare on your windshield?”
“Yeah. Tough to see clearly.”
Berglund considered the ridge again. “Probably a blessing. You couldn’t see the shooter because of it, but the reflection off the windshield probably also made it tough for the shooter to see you clearly. Missed by a hair, Ed told me.”
“A little more than that, but close enough it scared the hell out of me.”
Berglund seemed satisfied. “All right, let’s go.”
They climbed the ridge, which was bare rock until very near the top, where scrub undergrowth had taken root among the crags. Above that, a stand of tenacious poplar saplings capped the rock outcrop. The men separated by a dozen feet and began to go over the ground carefully. The light was fading quickly, and Cork wasn’t sure they’d be able to see anything.
It was Berglund who said, “Over here.”
Cork and Larson joined him, and he pointed to a spot behind one of the larger saplings where there was an indentation in the thin topsoil.
“From a knee,” he said. “Somebody knelt here, probably in a firing position.” He walked away, toward the back of the ridge, his eyes reading the ground. “He left this way.”
Cork had always considered himself to be a pretty good tracker, but whatever the signs Berglund saw Cork was blind to.
He and Larson followed the Border Patrol agent down the backside of the ridge, where Ahsayma Creek ran. In the language of the Anishinaabeg, ahsayma meant “tobacco.” The creek was named for the color of the water, a tobacco-spit brown, the result of bog seepage, from which much of the flow had come. They tr
ekked through a gully heavily lined with popple, and Cork finally saw tracks pressed into the leaves underfoot. The trail led back to the road, to a pull-off a quarter mile south of the bridge. In the soft earth there, they found tire indentations.
“You might want to get people out here to get impressions, Ed. You got good tire tracks, and look here.” Berglund crouched and put his finger to the ground where the perfect imprint of a boot sole had been left. “Not a common-looking pattern,” he noted. “Might not be too hard to identify the brand.” He gazed back in the direction of the bridge. “This guy picked a pretty good spot to take a shot at you, and it was probably only the angle of the sun and the reflection off your windshield that saved you. If, in fact, he was trying to take you out. So he’s somebody who has a sense of what it takes to hunt. What do you think, Ed?”
“I think that’s a lot of conjecture, John, but I’ve got nothing better to offer. When we get these tire impressions evaluated and that boot imprint, we’ll know a hell of a lot more. And, Cork? I’ll tell Phil Holter he can let go of thinking you might have done this yourself. I’m looking forward to seeing the disappointed expression on his face.”
* * *
Cork filled his tank at the Food ’N Fuel in Allouette. It was getting late and he was hungry, so he grabbed a bowl of chicken wild rice soup and a cup of coffee at the Mocha Moose. He glanced at the headline on that day’s copy of the Duluth News Tribune, which had been left on one of the tables. The dam collapse was the lead. The death toll in Colorado was rising dramatically. The pictures of the towns in the canyon below the dam were devastating, all rubble and mud. Jubal Little was still front-page news, but his death, which was still officially being called a hunting accident, had taken a backseat to the greater loss. Cork wondered how Jubal would have felt about that.