Boundary Waters

  “It doesn’t fucking matter who I am. And as for what I want, well, I’ve got that.”

  The woman, Cork thought. Shit. His .38 was in his pack, on top, just under the flap. He’d put it there—a mistake, he now knew—because he hadn’t brought his holster and had no easy way to carry it and had convinced himself that this kind of ambush wouldn’t happen until they’d located Shiloh. Now there was no way he could get to it before Mr. Clean put a bullet through Louis, and probably the rest of them as well.

  “Louis?” Sloane asked, confused.

  Mr. Clean rolled his eyes. “Shiloh, you dumb fuck.”

  “Who sent you?”

  “Jesus. You guys. I swear, after I kill you, you’ll be grilling Satan about whether he’s got a license for his fucking pitchfork.”

  “You hurt my son, I’ll rip you apart,” Stormy said.

  “You make a move in this direction, Chief, and I’ll blow his head off. Then yours.”

  Between Cork and Mr. Clean stood Stormy, Raye, Sloane, and Louis. Cork thought desperately that if he could get behind them for just a moment, out of sight, he might be able to reach into his pack for the .38. He began to ease himself behind Stormy.

  “Hey, burger man. Where the fuck do you think you’re going?”

  “Just going to drop my pack, that’s all. Getting heavy.”

  “Won’t be heavy much longer.” Mr. Clean grinned.

  “What do you want with the woman?” Sloane asked.

  “Business. This is all just business.” Mr. Clean shrugged off a rifle that had been slung over his shoulder and set it against a stump at the edge of the trail.

  “That rifle,” Sloane said. “You got that rifle from Grimes. It was you.”

  “No shit, Sherlock. First time I ever killed a man with an ax. I kind of liked it.”

  “How’d you track us?” Cork asked. He was interested, but mostly he wanted to keep the man talking while he tried to figure something that might stop what he knew was about to happen.

  “Training, burger man. It’s all in what you learn.”

  “Where’s Shiloh?” Raye asked.

  “Right where we want her.” Mr. Clean grew suddenly sober. “I think we’ve talked enough.”

  Cork knew that was it. No matter what they did, they couldn’t sidestep it. He felt responsible. He felt sorry for young Louis.

  Then the boy’s eyes shifted toward the woods. At the edge of his own vision, Cork saw what had drawn Louis’s attention. A blur of gray.

  Mr. Clean saw it, too. Startled, he swung his weapon in that direction for an instant. Sloane leaped on the opportunity, grabbed the boy, and shoved him back into the arms of Willie Raye. He put himself squarely between Mr. Clean and the others. The barrel leveled on him; the next shot sent him staggering back. He fell in a heap, rolled over, and lay still, wedged between the big packs strapped front and back on him. Sloane’s sacrifice gave Stormy just enough time to catapult himself at the giant in camouflage fatigues. Stormy wrapped his powerful lumberjack’s hands around the wrist of the huge arm that held the gun and forced it skyward. Another round exploded from the Colt and tunneled into the low clouds above them. Stormy was more than a head shorter and a good seventy pounds lighter than the other man, but the force of his body and the added weight of the pack propelled them both backward. For a moment, it looked as if Stormy had him. Then Mr. Clean delivered a deft knife-hand strike to Stormy’s neck, a powerfully calculated blow that buckled Two Knives.

  Cork was there to take his place. A running head butt threw the big man back a couple of steps so that he stumbled over the top of a big gray rock slab jutting from the ground. Cork leaped on him. He drew back for a right cross to the big man’s jaw, but the pack on his back slowed him. Mr. Clean hit first. The blow caught Cork just behind the ear, boomed into him hard as a cannonball. Cork tumbled off. He tried to stand, but the toe of a boot caught him brutally in the diaphragm and knocked the breath right out of him.

  Gasping for air, he saw Stormy fly at Mr. Clean again. Stormy grasped the big man from behind in a powerful bear hug and lifted him off the ground. He was about to do a body slam when Mr. Clean’s arm shot back, hard as the piston on a steam engine, and his elbow rammed Stormy’s nose. Stunned and bleeding, Stormy struggled to hold on, but Mr. Clean broke loose. He delivered a kick to Stormy’s solar plexus that lifted Stormy off his feet.

  Cork staggered up, too slowly. Mr. Clean had Stormy’s head pulled back, throat exposed. In his right hand he brandished a large hunting knife.

  “Time to fucking end this,” he growled. His hand flicked toward Stormy’s throat.

  The blade never touched Stormy. Three shots popped in quick succession. The camouflage jacket Mr. Clean wore exploded in a spray of fabric and blood. The man folded like an empty flour sack.

  In the profound quiet of the moment after, in the moment when there was nothing he could do but catch his breath, Cork heard the splash and tumble of the Little Moose just out of sight, the small whimper of Louis still caught up in Willie Raye’s arms, the gasp of the man on the ground as he curled around his pain, and the disbelieving whisper of Sloane, who’d managed to shuck his packs and stood frozen with the gun in his hand. “Jesus. Sweet Jesus.”

  Stormy drew himself up. Louis ran to him and threw his arms around his father. Stormy wrapped his boy in a hug. Blood ran in a thick stream from his nose and reddened his upper teeth. He looked at Sloane, and said, “Thanks.”

  Sloane wobbled, then sat down hard and sudden.

  Cork moved to him as quickly as his own hurting body would let him. “Are you hit?”

  “I don’t know.” Sloane stared down at his chest, then put a hand under his coat and felt around. “No blood.” He looked at Cork, his face an ashen color. “How could that be?”

  Arkansas Willie Raye knelt at the packs Sloane had carried. “Are you a religious man?”

  “Why?”

  “Cuz lookee here.” Raye reached into a pack that had a bullet hole through it dead center. He hauled out the shattered pieces of a heavy cast-iron skillet and a sack that leaked flour from what looked like a big worm hole bored in one side. Raye stuck a couple of fingers into the hole, fished around, and brought out a flattened slug.

  “Something—” Sloane looked toward the woods. “Something drew his fire.”

  Louis turned in his father’s arms. “Ma’iingan.”

  “Wolf?” Sloane asked.

  “I saw it, too,” Cork said.

  A sound leaked from the man on the ground. Not words, but an attempt maybe. He rolled to his back and held his side. His hands were bloody as butchered meat.

  “Stormy, take Louis down the trail,” Cork said. “Why don’t you clean up your face and see what’s broken and wait for us there.”

  The father and the boy picked up their gear. Stormy shouldered a canoe, and they moved on.

  Sloane knelt next to the man on the ground. He examined the wounds, then shook his head at Cork. “From the way he’s bleeding, I’d guess I hit an artery.”

  “There’s nothing we can do.” Cork glanced at Willie Raye, who stood nearby, staring down at the dying man. “Why don’t you head along with Stormy and Louis.”

  “No. If he knows something about Shiloh, I want to know what it is.”

  “I don’t think he’ll be saying much.” Sloane sat down on the wet ground. The man beside him stared up at the sky.

  “Can he hear us?” Raye asked.

  “I don’t know what he can hear.”

  “Ask him about Shiloh.”

  Sloane leaned to the man and said, “Do you know where Shiloh is?”

  The eyes—blue-white, like snow at first light, Cork thought—rolled slowly in Sloane’s direction. Sloane bent very near and listened.

  “What did he say?” Raye asked.

  “He told you to fuck yourself.”

  The dying man’s face contorted and his body tensed, then relaxed.

  “Is he dead?” Raye asked.

 
Sloane felt the carotid artery. “Not yet.”

  Cork knelt beside the man and checked his pockets. “No identification. Nothing.” He sat down heavily and tenderly felt himself where he’d been kicked. Nothing seemed broken. “This could take a while,” he said to Sloane.

  In his hand, Sloane still held the gun. He looked at it, appraising it from several angles as if it were an instrument he didn’t understand at all. “A cop for thirty years and I never shot anyone till now.”

  “He was going to kill us,” Cork said.

  Sloane put down the gun. “Christ, I could use a cigarette.”

  “Me, too,” Cork said.

  Sloane grew quiet, studied the close, gray clouds. Cork looked down the trail in the direction from which they’d just come. He thought about the ambush.

  “Why didn’t he just shoot us?” he asked.

  “What?” Sloane seemed pulled back from a far place.

  “He was going to kill us, that was obvious. Why didn’t he just shoot us while we had our hands full of the canoes? He could have done it in a few seconds.”

  Sloane thought about it. “Maybe he likes people to be afraid before they die. I’ve profiled killers like that.”

  “They’ve got Shiloh,” Willie Raye broke in, pleading. “This man’s gonna die anyway. You said there ain’t a thing we can do ’bout that. We should move on. We should move on now.”

  “He’s right,” Cork said.

  “I don’t feel right about it,” Sloane said. “I wouldn’t leave a wounded animal to die like this.”

  “You could shoot him again,” Arkansas Willie suggested.

  Cork and Sloane both looked at him.

  “It’s what you do with a wounded animal,” Raye said. “It’s that or leave him. Hell, my girl’s still out there. And if what he said is true, if they got her, then we need to find her fast. We can’t wait around for this man to take his time in dying.”

  Cork said quietly to Sloane, “We’ve got a chance of saving Shiloh. We should do everything we can for the living.”

  “I’m not going to shoot him again.” Sloane took a sweater from his pack, rolled it, and put it under the dying man’s head as a pillow. “I don’t suppose it’ll make much difference.” He put his gun away and lifted the scoped rifle that had been taken from Grimes.

  Shouldering their loads, they burdened themselves again and moved out along the portage, leaving one more man to mark with death their passage through that wilderness.

  30

  THE TAMARACK COUNTY COURTHOUSE was built in 1896 with timber money. Constructed of honey-colored blocks quarried in the Minnesota town of Sandstone a hundred miles south, the courthouse stood three stories high and was crowned by a beautiful clock tower. If the passage of time were truly marked by the tower clock, the town of Aurora would have been standing still for thirty years. For three decades, time had been frozen at twelve twenty-seven. The story was that the hands had stopped at the exact moment Corcoran O’Connor’s father died. It might have been true. Both the clock and William O’Connor were hit during a wild exchange of gunfire between officers of the sheriff’s department and two escapees from the state prison in St. Cloud. The men had paused in Aurora on their flight to the Canadian border in order to rob the Citizen’s National Bank. Sheriff William O’Connor and two deputies responded to the silent alarm. Cork’s father put himself between a round from a stolen deer rifle and Louise Gregory, a short-tempered old woman deaf as a brick, who’d walked unknowingly into the melee. Every few years, the town council debated fixing the clock—debated renovating a lot of the old courthouse—but they always balked. Partly this was because the clock was seen as a kind of monument to something noble and heroic, and partly it was due to the fact that the repair would have cost a small fortune. So, like much in Aurora, things stayed pretty much the way they were. However, there were new names on the roster of the town council and new revenues coming in from business generated by the casino, and people seemed more willing—eager, even—to put a new face on the town. There was talk of a whole new county court complex that would house the sheriff’s department and county jail as well.

  All this was possible, Jo O’Connor granted, but as she sat in court that gray October morning listening to the ancient heating pipes cough and grumble, passing gas and water like old men, she knew nothing changed very quickly in Aurora. And, she was surprised to realize, she liked it that way.

  The pipes, Judge Frank Dziedzic had warned after he convened the proceedings, were going to be distracting. He apologized and promised that the heating system was being worked on and urged all parties to be patient and make the best of it. By the time Wally Schanno appeared in the back of the courtroom shortly before noon and signaled to her, Jo was more than ready to request a recess. She didn’t have to. Opposing counsel Earl Nordstrom, while attempting to introduce into evidence a waiver of easement rights signed by the Iron Lake Reservation tribal council, was finally drowned out in a clatter of rattling metal that made him crush the document in his hands. Judge Dziedzic was favorably disposed to granting his request for a continuance until the heating was fixed.

  Jo gathered her papers and turned as Schanno approached the plaintiff’s table.

  “Got some interesting news,” he told her. “The Bureau people I know did some checking for me. At least some of what you were told is true. Special Agent in Charge Booker T. Harris of the Los Angeles field office is officially on personal leave. There’s not, at this time, any official Bureau involvement in the investigation of the deaths of Elizabeth Dobson or Dr. Patricia Sutpen. And there are currently no Bureau personnel with the names of Virgil Grimes or Dwight Sloane.”

  Jo snapped her briefcase shut. “Special Agent in Charge Harris didn’t go into the Boundary Waters, did he?”

  “No, he’s out at the Quetico.”

  “I think we should pay him a visit, don’t you, Wally?”

  Schanno drove them out in a sheriff’s department cruiser. The wind that had come the night before, bringing the clouds and the cold, had stripped the color from the trees. Wet leaves plastered the roadways. The limbs of the birch and aspen that lined the shore of Iron Lake were absolutely bare. Jo stared at the trees as they passed, and the bared branches made the world look fractured.

  Like all the cabins at the big new resort called the Quetico, Harris’s cabin stood on the very shore of Iron Lake, surrounded by hardwoods and evergreen in a way that made it feel completely isolated. It was a beautiful pine log structure, two stories, with a screened porch in front and wide glass windows all around. Smoke poured from the stone chimney. All the curtains were drawn.

  Jo opened the porch door and stepped in. Schanno followed. The porch was furnished with cane chairs and table, a bentwood rocker, and a standing brass lamp. The wood burning in the fireplace inside the cabin scented the air. Jo knocked on the door, waited a five count, then knocked again. As she raised her fist a third time, the door opened. Booker T. Harris filled the doorway.

  “Agent Harris,” Schanno said. “We need to talk.”

  Harris didn’t reply. His eyes shifted toward Jo.

  “This is Jo O’Connor. Corcoran O’Connor is her husband,” Schanno told him.

  “Ms. O’Connor.” He nodded politely, but his courtesy had a grim edge.

  “We’d like to ask you a few questions,” Jo said.

  “I’m afraid that will have to wait. I’m busy at the moment.” His gaze shifted again to Schanno. “Couldn’t we arrange to speak in your office later, Sheriff? Say in an hour?”

  “The answers we need can’t wait,” Schanno replied.

  “It’s impossible for me to talk to you now.”

  “Impossible?” Jo said. “I’ll tell you what’s impossible. To believe anything that you tell us is the truth, that’s what’s impossible. So far, you’ve misrepresented facts, framed an innocent man, and may very well have put in jeopardy the lives of several people, including a child.”

  Schanno said, “We talk now,
here, or I’ll place you under arrest and we’ll all go down to my office and talk there.”

  “Arrest me for what?” Harris asked.

  “Something along the lines of criminal misconduct, pending an investigation by the Bureau’s OPR. I called the resident agents in Duluth. They contacted the L.A. field office. There is no official investigation here.”

  “Ah.” Harris looked behind him and to his left. “Just a moment.” He waited, his eyes tracking something neither Jo nor Schanno could see. “Maybe you’d better come in,” he finally said.

  Harris pushed the door open wide and moved away. Inside, the cabin was plush. Wormwood paneling on the walls, thick beige carpeting, brown leather sofa and love seat facing a big fireplace made of brown stone. The far wall was mostly glass looking onto a scene in which the gray water of Iron Lake and the gray drip of the sky merged in a dismal, seamless curtain. The room was lit with lamplight and the flicker from logs burning in the fireplace.

  Harris wasn’t alone in the cabin. The other man was slender, early fifties, his hair long and silver and pulled back in a ponytail. He wore a hooded gray sweatshirt, the hood thrown back, with STANFORD printed in red across the chest. His jeans were neatly creased and he wore expensive Reeboks. He stood near the fireplace, beside a map—a topographical map of a section of the Boundary Waters—taped to the wormwood paneling. On a table near the long glass windows sat a large radio transmitter, a laptop computer, and several other pieces of electronic equipment.

  Although the room was full of the smell of the burning pine logs, there was another odor in the room, less appealing to Jo. Cigar smoke.

  “Jerome Metcalf,” Harris said, introducing the man with the silver hair.

  “Another agent?” Schanno said skeptically.

  “A consultant,” Harris clarified. “Communications, electronics, that kind of thing. Jerry, this is Sheriff Wally Schanno and Jo O’Connor. Corcoran O’Connor’s wife.”

  “How do you do?” Metcalf made a slight, gracious bow with his head.

  “Not too well, thanks,” Schanno said. “I feel like a trout being jerked around on a line. I need some straight answers.”