Authors: William Kent Krueger
“Nothing will happen.”
“You have a crystal ball? You know everything that’s out there? Then who’s been following us?”
“For my money, nobody.”
“Here. Use this peg to secure that loop to the ground.”
Sloane did as he was instructed.
“Why would the boy lie?” Cork asked.
“His father told him to.”
“Why on earth would Stormy do that?”
“Ex-cons don’t need a reason to lie. It’s as natural to them as pissing.” Sloane pushed another peg into the soft earth. “Besides, if I’m looking behind me to see who’s there, I’m not looking at Two Knives.”
Cork said, “I know the gun you claimed to have found in his truck was a frame.”
“The fifteen grand wasn’t. You explain that one to me.”
“Somebody set Wendell up. And Stormy along with him. I’m not sure why. But I can tell you this, I’d trust Stormy and Wendell with my life.”
Sloane sat back on his haunches. “Now I’ll tell you something, O’Connor, something I’m surprised you never learned as a cop. Never turn your back on an ex-con. Let me remind you that only this morning that man threatened to cut Harris in half with a chainsaw.”
Cork shook his head. “I wonder about you, Sloane. I find it interesting that you took the time to learn the meaning of the word
ma’iingan.”
“A few hours of research in a library doesn’t make me a bleeding heart when it comes to Indians, O’Connor. Especially one who’s done time for manslaughter.”
“Now the tent frame.” Cork reached for the flexible rods. “Hold that flashlight steady and let me tell you about Stormy Two Knives. I’ve known him all my life. He used to run his own logging operation. Had a dozen men working for him, white and Shinnob. Didn’t matter to him what a man’s heritage was so long as he was a hard worker. Stormy wasn’t rich, but he paid his men and his bills on time.”
Cork lifted the tent and began to secure it to the frame.
“A few years back, the forest service opened a tract of national forest land for logging. It was a bid system. Highest bidder cut the timber. The reservation council members approached Stormy and asked him to bid. He told them he wasn’t interested in logging the area. Turned out they weren’t interested in having it logged either. In fact, they wanted the land protected from logging because there’s a stand of virgin white pine there hundreds of years old. They’re called Nimishoomisag, Our Grandfathers. It’s an area important to the Anishinaabe because it was a traditional site for
giigwishimowin.”
“What’s that?”
“In the old days, when an Ojibwe boy was ready for manhood, he left his village and entered the woods for a period of fasting. During that time, he dreamed the visions that would guide him through his life.”
“Sort of a rite of passage,” Sloane said.
“
Exactly. Stormy agreed to help the council and placed a successful bid. The man in charge of the bidding for the forest service was a guy named Douglas Greene. A lot of folks considered Greene more a logging-company man than a forest service agent. Anyway, when he learned that Stormy didn’t intend to log but to leave the area untouched, he nullified Stormy’s bid and gave the contract to the next highest bidder, a big logging firm out of Bemidji. They were going to cut every one of those fine old pines for a hundred dollars apiece.
“Now Stormy’s never been real big on his Ojibwe heritage, but he’s always had a strong sense of what’s right and wrong, and a temper that suits his name. He was fit to be tied. There’d been bad blood between him and Greene before because of Greene’s chummy association with big lumber. Stormy hightailed it down to Duluth to confront Greene, but Greene refused to see him. Didn’t matter. Stormy waited for him in the parking lot all day. When Greene finally came out, they had words. Stormy testified that Greene began the scuffle, swung at him with a lug wrench. The lot security guard testified that it was Stormy who started things. Anyway, Greene fell and hit his head against the cement base of a lamppost. According to the medical examiner’s report, he died almost instantly. In the end, the question came down to who the jury believed—a white security guard who’d seen things from a distance of forty or fifty yards over a bunch of parked cars or an Indian.”
“A jury of his peers,” Sloane pointed out.
“Hardly,” Cork said. “There were no Native Americans on the jury. In fact, there wasn’t a single person of color.”
“What do you expect me to do?” Sloane asked. “Cry for the man?”
“Just quit riding him.”
Cork finished erecting Sloane’s tent and stood back.
“Speaking of Two Knives,” Sloane said, swinging the beam away and into the woods, “where is he? I haven’t heard that ax for a while.”
The crack of a firearm came from the direction of the landing. Cork and the others stopped what they were doing and stared into the darkness down the trail. A moment later, the sound came again.
Arkansas Willie stepped back into the campsite. “What’s that all about?”
Sloane grabbed the walkie-talkie. “Grimes, do you read me? What’s going on? Grimes?”
“
W
HERE’S
T
WO
K
NIVES
?” Sloane shouted.
“Stormy!” Cork called toward the woods.
Sloane dug in his pack and brought out an ammo clip and a handgun. “O’Connor, watch the boy. He goes nowhere, understand?” He grabbed a flashlight and headed up the trail toward the landing.
Arkansas Willie Raye stood motionless beside his half-erected tent and whispered, “Jesus.”
From his own pack, Cork pulled out his Smith & Wesson .38 police special and a box of cartridges. He filled the cylinder and was very glad he’d cleaned and oiled the weapon the night before.
“Turn out your flashlights,” he instructed the others. He put his arm around Louis and said calmly and quietly, “Why don’t we all move back of the canoes.”
They crouched together behind the overturned Prospector that Cork and Raye had paddled all that long afternoon. Although the canoe was made of Kevlar, the same material used in bulletproof vests, Cork knew the hull was too thin to stop a bullet. It might, however, keep them all from being easy targets, if it came to that.
“My dad,” Louis whispered.
“He’ll be fine,” Cork told him. “He can take care of himself.”
Raye leaned very close to Cork. “What do you think’s going on out there?”
“Those were rifle shots,” Cork said. “Probably Grimes.”
“Why didn’t he answer on the walkie-talkie?”
“I don’t know.”
They hunkered down in silence. Cork strained to see into the dark where the trail opened toward them. He struggled to catch every sound. Although there was little wind on the ground, high in the trees above them the branches swayed and groaned and bullied out most other noises.
He felt a sudden stir of the air at his back and he whirled. Stormy Two Knives knelt beside his son.
“You okay, Louis?” Stormy asked.
Louis nodded.
“Heard the shots,” Stormy told Cork. “What’s happening?”
“We don’t know. Why didn’t you answer when I called?”
“If somebody was taking a notion to shoot at us, I wasn’t eager for them to know where I was.” He gripped the ax in his hand and held it ready.
They heard the snap of twigs breaking underfoot, someone approaching rapidly from the landing. A shape, blacker than the dark of the night, moved out from the corridor between the birch trees and immediately dropped to the ground. Cork sighted his .38 on the spot where the figure went down.
“O’Connor?”
Sloane’s voice came from that spot.
“Over here,” Cork called back, low.
Sloane stood up and his flashlight blazed full on them, blinding Cork.
“Two Knives!” Sloane cried. “Drop that ax, you son of a bitch!”
Stormy set the ax on the hull of the overturned canoe. The weight of the ax head carried it down until it hit the keel.
Cork put up his hand, attempting to block the light. “What’s going on, Sloane?”
“Turn around, Two Knives,” Sloane ordered from behind the glare. “Hands behind your back. Do it now or I’ll drop you where you stand.” He shoved his gun into the light.
Stormy did as he was told.
“Cuff him, O’Connor.” A pair of handcuffs landed on the hull beside the ax. “Cuff him, or by God I’ll shoot you both.”
“Go on, Cork,” Stormy said. “He means it.”
Cork snapped on the handcuffs, then turned angrily toward Sloane. “What the hell’s going on? Where’s Grimes?”
“You want to see Grimes?” Sloane’s voice had climbed to a tremulous pitch. “I’ll show you Grimes. I’ll show you all Grimes. Up the trail.” He shoved his light toward the landing, ushering them that way.
Louis followed the beam, falling in step next to his father. Cork put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “It’s a mistake. We’ll get it straightened out.”
Without the load they’d carried in, they went much faster. In a few minutes, they reached the lake. To their right lay the fallen birch covered with raspberry vines where Grimes had hidden. Sloane illuminated the thicket. The vines at first glance looked ready for harvest. Among the leaves, glimpses of wet red flashed, like dewy berries in the light. But harvest was long past and whatever berries had filled those vines had weeks before been the feast of birds and bear.
“Let’s take a look at your handiwork, Two Knives,” Sloane said, and shoved Stormy ahead of him.
“Louis, you stay here with Willie,” Cork said. He followed Sloane and Stormy to the other side of the thicket.
Grimes lay fallen forward into the thorny raspberry vines.
“Look here,” Sloane said hoarsely. He brought the flashlight close to Grimes’s neck.
The wound was deep, nearly severing the head from the body. It looked as if it had been cleanly done with a single blow, one powerful bite of an ax swung by an expert hand. The spray of arterial blood still dripped from the raspberry vines.
“Stormy didn’t do this,” Cork said.
“The hell he didn’t,” Sloane shot back. “Whoever did it knew Grimes was waiting, and knew exactly where. And look here.” He moved the light so that the smashed radio lay in the middle of the circle the beam made on the ground at Grimes’s feet. “Rifle’s gone, too. Probably hidden somewhere he can get at it when he decides to do the rest of us. I’d bet he fired those shots himself to distract us, give him time to hide it.”
“There was somebody behind us on the lake,” Cork said. “Grimes had an infrared scope. Maybe they had infrared, too, and spotted him first.”
“There was nobody back there, O’Connor.”
“Look, Sloane,” Cork argued. “If Stormy killed the man, why doesn’t he have any blood on him? A wound like that would have sprayed blood on the killer.”
Sloane looked at Stormy a moment, pondering viciously. Then a cold light came back into his eyes. “Where’s your jacket, Two Knives?”
“Jacket? I guess I left it where I was cutting wood.”
“Right,” Sloane said, disbelieving.
“Why would I want him dead?” Stormy asked.
“You had fifteen thousand reasons, remember?” He towered over Stormy Two Knives and looked himself ready to murder. “Raye!” he shouted. “Get the spade from my gear at the campsite. Bring it back here.”
“What’re you going to do?” Cork asked.
“We can’t take the body with us and we’re not turning back,” Sloane said. “So we’re going to do the only thing we can. Bury him here.”
“Don’t go, Willie.” Cork kept his voice calm, although he wanted to grab Sloane and shake sense into him. “Listen to me, Sloane, it’s crazy to separate us. There’s somebody out there with a rifle and a nightscope.”
“There’s nobody out there, O’Connor. It’s Two Knives and you know it. You’re protecting him.” Sloane looked at Cork, his brown eyes wild with accusation. “I told you, never trust an ex-con. Maybe I should’ve made that never trust an Indian.” He swung his gun menacingly toward Raye. “Now go get that fucking shovel.”
“I’ll go for the shovel,” Cork said.
“No, that’s okay.” Arkansas Willie stepped away from Louis. “I’ll go, Cork. I think you need to stay here.” He nodded toward the boy, who looked scared.
“Take this, then.” Cork handed him his .38. “Know how to use it?”
“Point and pull the trigger, right? I think I can just about handle that.” He gave Cork a grin, saluted him with the barrel of the gun, then turned his flashlight down the path and headed back toward camp.
“Sloane,” Cork tried again, “you’re making a big mistake.”
The agent was staring at the dead man whose raspberry blood colored the vines. “My only mistake,” he replied, “was letting Two Knives out of my sight.”
They buried Grimes near the landing. Stormy Two Knives dug the grave, all of it, with Sloane standing over him. It was shallow. Two feet below the surface, the spade began to spark against gray gneiss, ubiquitous fragments of the great Canadian Shield that underlay all the living things of the Boundary Waters. They covered the body with dirt and stacked a foot of stones over that to keep the animals from digging.
“Was he a religious man?” Arkansas Willie asked when they’d finished.
“I don’t know,” Sloane said.
“I thought maybe we should say something. A prayer or something.”
“Prayers are to comfort the living.” Sloane shined the flashlight down on the mound of stones and the light reflected back, giving his skin an ash gray pallor that made him appear as grim and unrelenting as a visitation of Death. “When this is over, we’ll give him a decent burial among his own people. They can pray all they want then. Right now, we’re going back to camp and get some sleep. We’ve still got a long way to go.”
Raye, Louis, and Stormy moved ahead down the trail. Cork hung back and spoke quietly to Sloane. “You’re wrong about Two Knives. And that means there’s someone out there who knows how to kill.”
“I’m not wrong,” Sloane said.
“You’re sure of that? One hundred percent?”
“One hundred percent.” Sloane walked away.
“I’ve got two suggestions,” Cork said.
Sloane stopped.
“I still say no fire. And I think you and I ought to take turns on watch through the night.”