Hunter's Moon Chuck Logan (novels to read TXT) 📖

trim and tanned-looking and she wore a white party dress and held a bouquet of flowers. A tall rugged man in a tux stood next to her and their hands were joined around a champagne glass. They stood in the cockpit of a sailboat and the boat’s name danced in stylized white script across the transom.

Tyche.

Harry blinked and read the headline over the picture: KIDWELL

TIES THE KNOT BEFORE HE SAILS.

Tip Kidwell. He read the cutline: “Tip Kidwell toasts his solo round-the-world voyage with his new bride, the former Marie Bursac.

The couple were married on Kidwell’s 36-foot-sloop just before he sailed.”

Bursac? Her maiden name?

Kidwell had been a story. Harry’d made a map of the voyage 228 / CHUCK LOGAN

for the paper and updated it as Kidwell navigated the globe. He’d sailed back into the Duluth harbor a hometown hero. The big news twist came the next day. Kidwell had been killed in a confused shootout with Duluth police who had a warrant to search his boat for a load of cocaine. Their timing had been bad. A shipment of drugs was found in Duluth, but not on Kidwell’s boat, and a huge legal stink resulted in a lawsuit against the police department. Harry couldn’t remember.

Suddenly very sober in his thinking, he grabbed the phone and called Randall’s number in St. Paul.

“I wake you up?” Harry asked when Dorothy answered.

“No, I was reading. What’s happening?”

“Randall there?”

“Put him on a plane this morning. He’s gone to a conference in D.C. Harry? He’s been scratchy on the subject of you. Did you guys have words?”

“Ah, he was riding my ass about coming up here, I barked at him.

Forget that, listen. Remember Tip Kidwell?”

“Sure, I interviewed the pompous bastard.”

“You remember anything about his wife?”

“No. I didn’t work that end of the story.”

“I just came home here and there’s this envelope with a page from the Duluth paper six years old tacked to the door. Picture of Kidwell just before he sailed. Staged a wedding on the boat. Dorothy, he married the same lady Bud did. I’m sure of it. Name’s different, face is the same.”

Dorothy’s voice sat up, alert. “Really.”

“Whoever left it for me circled her face in red.”

Her voice perked up. “This is creepy, in an interesting way.”

“Somebody up here wants to tell me something.”

“You talk to Bud about it?”

“Not yet. Dorothy, are you still on speaking terms with that Minneapolis homicide cop with the blow-dry hair and the black Porsche?”

Aghast, Dorothy protested. “Harry, that was years ago.”

“But he’d trip all over his big gun to do you a favor, wouldn’t he?”

HUNTER’S MOON / 229

Her voice squirmed. “I don’t know. Randall did sort of scare him half to death.”

“Get something to write with.” Harry scrambled through the sheets of paper on the table, found Ginny’s note with Cox’s birth date.

“Do I have to?” Dorothy asked reluctantly.

“You have to. Pulling in my chits.”

“Okay. Ready,” said Dorothy.

“Have your cop run Jason Emmet Cox, born January twenty-first, nineteen forty-one, through the computer. But mainly see if he can find somebody in the Duluth coppers who’ll give him the dirt on Kidwell, the bust, the shooting, all the stuff that didn’t get in the press.”

“What are you looking for?”

“Maybe the reason they didn’t have a grand jury…Dorothy, find the name of the cop who shot Kidwell. And what the widow wound up with.”

“Now there’s an ugly thought. I’ll get back to you.” Lowkey news-hound excitement made a tin rattle in her voice. She hung up.

“Tyche,” Harry said aloud. Tyche Fortuna—the bitch goddess of gamblers and mercenaries-was a realpolitik deity the ancient Greeks turned to after they lost their civilization. That dumb country-club prick Kidwell had the wit to name his sloop after Jesse.

Bud said what? She married a guy in Duluth and he died. Right, in a hail of police bullets.

Okay, so who left the clipping?

Karson. Had to be. Doing his backwoods Deep Throat routine.

A car horn blared in the drive. Harry jumped up and ran out the door and saw the now-familiar shadow dart past the pole barn.

He hadn’t locked the Jeep. Becky had turned on the lights. When he went to turn them off he saw the note pinned under the windshield wiper.

“Meet me up on Nanabozho Point in the morning. Early.”

230 / CHUCK LOGAN

39

Harry dressed in the predawn dark, made coffee, filled a Thermos, and packed it, along with two sandwiches, in his knapsack. He tossed in Bud’s fancy Zeiss binoculars, loaded the rifle, and tested the bindings on a pair of Bearpaw snowshoes.

Then he studied a Superior Hiking Trail map on the back of a Snowshoe Lodge brochure. Trails trickled through a long rectangle marked “privately owned” that started at the highway and stretched back over the top of the ridge. Bud’s property.

He wanted the dotted line that branched off from the lakeshore and meandered up the ridge to the overlook at the peak: Nanabozho Point.

Quiet as a shadow, Harry slipped into the greater shadow of the forest.

The muscle below his left shoulder blade twinged hot—the vulnerable place on his body he couldn’t touch. For years he’d superstitiously believed that a bullet orbited Detroit, waiting to land on that spot, and he could feel them out there, sniper eyes plucking at his clothing.

He followed the snowmobile trail and it was smooth going on the snow cushion over the hard pack the sleds had left. No need for the Bearpaws slung over his shoulder.

The moon sailed in Persian lamb clouds and spun spidery shadows. The shadows reminded him of Jesse.

Keep it simple. Stay alert.

He followed the snowmobile trail to the cross trail and squinted to make out the sign. An arrow pointed up to the point. Junction.

Always an apt place for an ambush. He slipped off the trail and found a spot in the pines. He cut a pile of boughs to make a nest 20 yards down a long moraine from the crossing.

He sat motionless and his hearing unplugged by stages until it seemed that he could hear the sun