An hour later I was standing. That was my big accomplishment so far that day. It felt like somebody had put needles all over the floor, but I was on my feet and that meant I could move around and maybe even get out of there. I was slowly walking around the bed when Guy and Maskwa appeared in the doorway. Maskwa came right up to me and grabbed both of my arms.
“Alex,” he said. “How are you feeling?”
“I’m standing,” I said. “That’s enough for right now.”
He kept studying me. “You look terrible.”
“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “Have you seen Vinnie?”
“Yes. His face-”
“He was actually very lucky. Although I’m sure he doesn’t feel that way.”
Maskwa looked at his grandson, then back at me, shaking his head slowly. “We are so sorry,” he said. “We were trying to do the right thing.”
“I know, Maskwa. Nobody could have imagined this.”
“The constable wouldn’t let us fly back to get you. He told us he was going to go get you himself.”
“He may have saved your lives.”
He looked at me close. “DeMers. That was his name, right?”
“Yes.”
“I still can’t believe it.”
“At least we found Tom,” I said. “At least we did that much.”
“You are a good friend, Alex. And now Vinnie needs you more than ever. Time will heal his body, but his spirit… It is very sick. You must know that.” “We’ll take care of him,” I said. “I will, and his family.”
“Good, good. And if you ever need anything from us. Anything. You call us.”
“There is one thing.” I said.
“Anything.”
I gave him my keys. “I left my truck at your house.”
He laughed. “Of course. We’ll bring it over.”
While I was waiting for them, I asked the nurse for something to put on my feet. She brought me some slippers that looked like folded-up old newspapers, maybe size 15 or so. They barely fit on my swollen feet. After a couple more minutes of practice, I went padding down the hall at one mile per hour until I found Vinnie’s room. Fortunately, it wasn’t hard. The entire Hearst Medical Center might have had ten rooms total, and Vinnie’s was two doors down from mine.
He was lying on the bed when I came in. The whole right side of his face was bandaged, and his feet were propped up in the air, just like mine had been. He was staring at the ceiling.
“Vinnie,” I said.
He looked over at me, then down at my feet. “Nice slippers.”
“Are you all right?”
“Never better.”
“Vinnie, I’m serious. Are you okay?” If his spirit was sick, like Maskwa had said, I couldn’t see it.
He sat up in the bed. “They told me your feet were twice as bad as mine. We’re gonna have to get you some better boots next time.”
“Next time, eh?”
“I promised to buy you a beer,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”
We found our clothes, signed some papers, and then waited for a prescription for Vinnie. An hour later, the staff sergeant came to see us one more time. He asked us a couple more questions, nothing he hadn’t asked before. He seemed reluctant to let us go, but finally he did. We stood by the front door, waiting for Guy and Maskwa to bring the truck around. It was a decent day for October in Ontario-no snow, no rain. The temperature was even above freezing. It made it a little easier to walk outside in our cheap slippers when the truck showed up. We said goodbye to Guy and Maskwa again, and then we were finally on our way home. It was hard to feel the pedals under my feet, but I made do. As we left the medical center, I couldn’t help noticing that the flag was flying at half-mast.
“Do you think you should call home?” I said.
“The constable told me she already called them yesterday.”
“She called your mother?”
“Yes, she did. She told her I’d be home soon.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “How come they’re not here?”
“What do you mean?”
“Your whole family. I’m surprised they weren’t camped out in the parking lot.”
“I didn’t want them to come up here,” he said. “I’m not ready to see them yet.”
“Well, it was good of her to call your family. Especially after what she went through herself yesterday.”
He looked at me. “Are you surprised?”
“No. She just didn’t seem very happy with us today.”
He looked back out the window. “Can you blame her?”
“That reminds me,” I said, picking up the phone. “Remember we had all those messages? As long as we’re still in town, with the cell tower…” I turned on the phone and checked the missed calls.
“Twenty-seven calls in all,” I said. “They just kept calling me.”
“When was the last call?”
“Let’s see. Yesterday. Around two o’clock.”
“None since then? They just stopped?”
“Yes.”
“They must have found out,” he said. “That guy who called you, didn’t he say he was Red’s brother?”
“Yeah, he did.”
“So I guess I know how he feels.” He kept looking out the window.
“Yes,” I said. “I suppose so.”
He didn’t say anything. I kept driving. I couldn’t help thinking about the man’s voice, the faraway voice of Red Albright’s brother-he had come all the way up here himself, just as we had done. He just wanted to know what the hell was going on. I couldn’t blame him for that, despite his lack of manners. He just wanted to know.
And now he did.
Home was eight hours away, down the same roads we had already driven on, through the same trees. It was only a few days before, but now it all felt different. The whole world had changed.
Vinnie slept for a while. He almost looked peaceful, until I’d hit a bump or until his mind would cycle through all the things he’d seen and he’d wake up with a start.
“Alex,” he said, more than once, with a sudden panic in his voice.
“It’s okay, Vinnie. We’re almost home. Go back to sleep.”
I stopped at a gas station in Wawa. I got out and pumped the gas, standing there in my cheap slippers and my coat covered with dried mud. I shifted my weight back and forth from one burning foot to the other. When I paid the man, he looked at me like I was a mental patient.
The day dragged on. I kept driving. I was tired, but I’d be damned if I was going to stop anywhere short of home. From Wawa we drove south along the shores of Lake Superior, around Batchawana Bay, into Soo Canada. We were so close to home now. All we had to do was get over the bridge.
“Oh, horseshit,” I said. “They’re gonna take one look at us and… God damn it.”
I picked up the cell phone and called information, got through to the OPP station in Hearst, and asked if Constable Reynaud was still around. A minute later, I heard her voice.
“Constable,” I said. “You’re still there. This is Alex.”
“What is it, McKnight?”
“We’re coming up to the bridge. Any chance you could call ahead and clear the way for us?”
“You’re all the way down there already? You shouldn’t have driven so far in your condition. It’s not safe.”
“I would have thought you’d be happy to get us out of the country.”
“Don’t get cute with me, McKnight. All right? It’s bad enough.”
“I’m sorry. We just want to get home.”
“I’ll call right now,” she said. “I’ll tell them to expect two men who look like shit.”
“That sounds about right,” I said. “Vinnie tells me you called his mother personally. I’m glad I got the chance to thank you for that.”
There was a silence on the line. “Mrs. LeBlanc sounded like a good woman,” she said. “Now if you’ll excuse me.”
“Good night,” I said. “I’m sorry about your partner.”
She hung up.
I rolled through town and onto the International Bridge. Vinnie woke up and looked out at the water. “The bridge,” he said.
“Don’t worry, they know we’re coming.”
When we pulled into the American customs booth, the man had obviously gotten the message. He looked us both over and whistled. “They said you’d look bad, but good Lord.”
The sun was going down when we hit Michigan soil. We had forty-five minutes to go. Forty-five minutes to my own bed.
I drove the roads I knew so well, from Soo Michigan to Paradise, through the Hiawatha National Forest, along the southern rim of Whitefish Bay. It was too dark to see the water now. The sign on the edge of town said WELCOME TO PARADISE! WE’RE GLAD YOU MADE IT! I drove by the sign, stopped at the blinking red light, went past Jackie’s place to our access road.
Drop Vinnie off at his house, I thought. Get him inside, make sure he’s comfortable. Then go home and go to bed. And sleep for at least three days.
As I pulled onto my road, I was blinded by a pair of headlights.
“Who the hell?” I couldn’t imagine who was on their way out. Then I remembered all the hunters who were due to check out of my cabins. I would have been back in plenty of time to see them off, if everything hadn’t gone to hell.
I stopped the truck and opened my door. It was a long, black sedan. I didn’t recognize it. Two men got out.
They weren’t hunters. That was obvious. Then it came to me. The two FBI guys said they’d be in touch. They didn’t waste any time.
But I was wrong again. It wasn’t the FBI. I realized that as soon as I saw their faces, and the guns in their hands.
They had my cell phone number. With a little work, you could find out my address. And here they were.
They were on top of us before I could do a thing. No time to back up, no time to get out and run-not that we would have been able to run, anyway.
“Out of the truck,” the one man said. He said it in a matter-of-fact way, the way you’d tell a mover where to put the furniture. The guy on Vinnie’s side, he looked a little more serious about it. He had a big nose, but with all the advance publicity, I was expecting something even bigger.
I looked at my man closely as I got out. He was thick in the neck and shoulders, the way an old football player would look, years after he’s stopped playing. My guess was linebacker turned nightclub bouncer. He had a nice leather jacket on, a high forehead with thinning hair on top. I understand steroids are murder on the hair. There was a diamond earring in his right ear.
“Nice and easy,” he said. He gave me a quick pat-down and turned me around to face the other man across the bed of my truck. The whole scene was side-lit by the glare of the headlights.
“Which one of you is McKnight?” the man with the nose said. Red’s brother. He was smaller, built more like a baseball player. He had a leather jacket on, too-probably a size L to my man’s XXL. He was using a gun a lot more, holding it right to Vinnie’s temple, just above the tape.
“I am,” I said. I looked at Vinnie. He was doing just fine, all things considered.
“And you’re the Indian?” He pulled his head back by the hair.
Vinnie didn’t flinch. “Yes.”
“Start talking.”
“About?”
“Why did you call Red?”
“We were looking for my brother,” Vinnie said. “Red hired him as a guide.”
“Yeah, I know that.”
“Then what do you want from us?”
Easy, Vinnie. I tried to catch his eye.
“What I want from you, you stupid fucking Indian, is the whole story.” He got a tighter hold on Vinnie’s hair, came closer to him, put his face right next to Vinnie’s. “What the fuck happened up there?”
“Did the police call you?”
“They called his wife. They said he was buried in the ground up there.”
“They all were. My brother, your brother. All of them.”
The man shook his head. “Who did this?”
“We don’t know,” Vinnie said. “We know a man named Gannon was involved. That’s all.”
“No. No, that’s not good enough. You hear me? That’s not fucking good enough. My brother is dead. And I want to know why.”
“So do I,” Vinnie said. His voice was even, his eyes clear. There was a supernatural calm all over him, and it was scaring the hell out of me.
“So talk,” the man said. “Tell me what you know about this. You gotta know something. You were up there, weren’t you? Were you involved in this? Was this something you and your Indian brother did?”
“No,” Vinnie said. “We didn’t. And you can stop talking like that. If you want to kill us, go ahead. After what we’ve been through, I don’t even care anymore. Go ahead and put a bullet in my head if you want, but stop talking about my brother that way.”
That threw him a little bit. His eyes got wider, and I was sure he was about to do something stupid. It was a good time to speak up.
“We found him,” I said. “We found your brother.”
He looked over the truck bed at me. “Where?”
“Out in the woods. Where Gannon had buried him, along with the others.”
He took a few hard breaths. Everything else was still, all around us. “You found Red?”
“That man you’re holding on to, you see the bandages on his face?”
“Yeah?”
“Gannon shot him. He blew part of his ear right off.”
He looked closer. “Okay. Then what?”
If I was gonna do this, I had to sell it all the way. It seemed like our only way out. “You wanna know what this man did to Gannon? You wanna hear what this man did to the man who killed your brother?”
“Yes, I wanna hear it.”
“He took a long, heavy stick,” I said, “and he sharpened it. I distracted Gannon, so Vinnie could sneak up behind him. We didn’t have any other weapons. You understand what I’m saying? All we had were sticks.”
“Go on.”
“While Gannon was shooting at me, Vinnie came up behind him and ran that stick right through his back. If he had gotten him in the heart, he would have died almost immediately, but that’s not the way it happened.”
“How did it go?” he said. “Tell me.”
“The stick must have gone through his lung. The blood was such a bright color. He was pumping that blood right out of his lungs, all over the ground.”
“How long did it take him to die?”
“A long time,” I said. “He was bleeding on that ground for a long, long time.”
“Were his eyes open? Did he say anything to you?”
“His eyes were open. He tried to say something, but he couldn’t. He was drowning in his own blood. He was choking on it.”
There were tears in the man’s eyes. “You’re telling me this man killed the man who killed my brother.”
“Yes,” I said. “He ran a stick through his chest and he died a horrible, painful death. That’s what this man did.”
“This man right here.” He pulled the gun away from his head.
“He did it for his brother,” I said. “And for your brother. And the other men. And me. He saved my life.”
The man let go of Vinnie. He bent over and put his hands on his knees, the gun pointing at the ground. He took a few wet breaths through his nose and shook his head. “Is that it?” he said. “Is that all there is? What was this guy’s name again?”
“Gannon. Hank Gannon.”
“He did all this by himself?”
“We don’t know that,” I said. I figured, what the hell, go ahead and push your luck. “Maybe you can help us figure it out.”
The man stood up straight and looked me in the eye. “What do you mean?”
“We’re just wondering. If somebody else was involved, maybe it was one of the other men in the hunting party. Or at least somebody else that you’d know about.”
He thought hard. He looked past me, at the big man standing behind me. “What do you think, Jay? Who could it be?”
I sneaked a look at him. He was standing there with both hands on his gun. He was looking at the ground. “I’m just thinking,” he said.
“What?”
“You know.”
“No, man. Are you serious?”
“What are we talking about?” I said.
The sudden look on his face told me I was pushing it a little too far.
“Never mind,” I said. “We just want some answers. As much as you do.”
“Well, don’t you worry about it,” he said. “If we find out there’s somebody else still walking around, we’ll make that person pay. Believe me, we’ll turn them fucking inside out.”
He stood there for a long time, breathing hard and shaking his head. The big guy crossed his arms and looked around at the trees. I wasn’t sure what to do. Ask them if we could go? Invite them down to the Glasgow for a drink?
“I was supposed to be up there,” he finally said. “Those guys never go hunting without me. Until this time.”
It made sense. That’s why there were five men instead of six.
“I should have been there,” he said. “I should be in the ground with Red.”
The big man looked at the sky and shook his head.
“I hope you guys understand why we’re here,” he said. He put the gun back in his coat. “I’ve been going a little crazy ever since I found out. I just have to do something about it, you know what I mean?”
“Yes,” I said. “I understand.”
“We drove all the way up there,” he said. “And then all the way home. And then when we heard… Fuck, we drove all the way here. We waited around for you. This is some kind of little shit town you got here.”
He looked down at Vinnie’s feet. “What’s with the slippers?”
“It’s a long story,” I said.
“Yeah, well, we got some things to do now. We gotta go talk to some people. Let’s get out of here, Jay…”
They went back to their car.
“Hey,” he said, standing in the glare of the headlights. His voice caught as he asked us his final questions. “Is it true what they said? Did my brother really get set on fire up there?”
“Yes,” I said. “They were burned.”
He stood there for a long moment, looking up at the sky.
The big guy spoke up again. “They were burned, Dal.”
“Yeah, I heard the man.”
“I’m just saying-”
“That’s enough. Let’s go.”
They got in the car and drove it around the truck. Their wheels spun as they edged off the road into the heavy grass. For a moment I thought we’d end up standing in the mud in our hospital slippers, trying to push them out. That would clinch the evening, right there. But then the wheels found purchase and they were free. I watched the glowing taillights as they turned right onto the main road and were gone.
“Are you all right?” I said.
Vinnie stood there holding on to the side of the truck. “Yeah, I’m just fine,” he said. “That was actually a good warm-up.”
“How’s that?”
“Tomorrow will be worse,” he said. “That’s when I’ve got to face my family.”