Blood Is the Sky: An Alex McKnight Mystery (2 page)

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Authors: Steve Hamilton

Tags: #Mystery, #Thriller, #Suspense, #Adult

BOOK: Blood Is the Sky: An Alex McKnight Mystery
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I shut the chain saw down and wiped my forehead with my sleeve.
“You’re gonna go deaf,” he said. “Where’s your ear protection?”
“I left them around here someplace. Just can’t find them.”
He shook his head at that, then walked right past me to the stacks of logs. Like many Bay Mills Ojibwa, you had to look twice to see the Indian in him. There was a little extra width to his high cheekbones, and a certain calmness in his eyes when he looked at you. You always got the feeling he was thinking carefully about what to say before he said it.
“White pine,” he said.
“Of course.”
“Where’d it come from?”
“Place down near Traverse City.”
“I thought I saw a truck going by,” he said. “That was what, Wednesday?”
“He was supposed to be here Monday.”
“Couple of these logs I wouldn’t use on a doghouse,” he said. “Like this one right here.”
“I know. I was gonna put that one aside.”
He slipped his hands under the log and lifted it. He was maybe three inches shorter than me, and thirty pounds lighter, but I wouldn’t have wanted to fight the man, on the ice or off. He carried the log a few steps and tossed it in the brush.
“That’ll be your waste pile,” he said. “I see another one right down here.”
“You don’t have to do that, Vinnie. I know which ones are bad.”
He went over to the cabin, knelt down, and ran his hand along one of the logs. “You know which ones are bad,” he said, “and yet this one right here seems to be part of your wall already.”
“When did you become the county inspector?” I said. “I didn’t see it in the newspaper.”
He let that one go. “Can I ask why you’re doing this by yourself?”
“My father did it by himself.”
“Did he start building in October?”
“I know I’m not going to finish it,” I said. “I just had to start. I couldn’t wait until spring.”
He smiled at me as he stood up. “Patience was never your strong suit.”
“Vinnie, you always loved this cabin. You told me once you’d buy it off me for a million dollars. You remember?”
“I do,” he said. “This was the best cabin I’ve ever seen.”
“Put yourself in my place,” I said. “If somebody burned this down, what would you do?”
“First of all, I’d kill whoever did it.” He thought about it for a moment. “Did you kill him?”
“No,” I said.
“But he’s dead.”
“Yes.”
“Okay, then. The next thing I’d do is rebuild the thing, as close as I could to the original.”
“Exactly.”
“But I wouldn’t do it alone,” he said. “Not with a friend
down the road who knows twice as much about building cabins as I do.”
“Excuse me, twice as much? Since when?”
“Make that three times as much. I was trying to be kind.”
“Yeah, well, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got work to do.”
“You’ll never even get to the roof,” he said. “You want the snow to pile up in here all winter?”
“What are you saying? You really want to help me?”
“Your father’s spirit sent me,” he said. “He knows what this thing would look like if you did it yourself.”
“Ah, Indian humor,” I said. “I’ve really been missing that.”
“Let me go get my stuff,” he said. “I’ll see if I have an extra pair of earmuffs, too.”
“Yeah, get me those earmuffs,” I said. “I have a feeling I’ll be needing them now.”
That’s how I got my help. That’s how we started being friends again.
We worked until the sun went down. I offered to buy him dinner at the Glasgow, but he took a pass. He said he was going over to the reservation to see his mother. The next morning, he was on the site before I was. He was spot-peeling logs with his drawknife.
“Let me ask you something,” I said when I pulled up. “Aren’t you supposed to be out in the woods this month?” Vinnie’s regular job was dealing blackjack over at the Bay Mills Casino, but every fall he’d make extra money working as a guide for hunters.
“I’d rather be doing this,” he said.
“And your day job?” I said. “You’re still dealing, right?”
“I asked for some time off.”
“Vinnie, you don’t have to do this.”
“I needed a break anyway, Alex. Okay? Don’t worry about it. Just help me peel these things.”
“Those are already peeled, Vinnie.”
“By what, a machine? Here, let me show you the right way to do it.”
Somehow, I managed not to kill him that day. When we got to work, we found a good rhythm and added three more rows to the walls. We didn’t talk much about anything except what log came next, and where it should go. There was not a word said about what had happened between us.
When we had run out of daylight, I invited him to have dinner at the Glasgow again. He seemed to hesitate for a second before saying yes. “If you’ve got a hot date or something, just tell me,” I said. “I won’t be offended.”
“I’ve been over on the rez a lot lately,” he said. “They can do without me for one night.”
There was a whole story behind that one—Vinnie moving off the Bay Mills Reservation and buying his own land. I knew it didn’t sit well with the rest of his family, even though he made a point of spending most of his free time there.
“Come on,” I said, “I’ll buy you a steak.”
Jackie did a double take when we walked into the Glasgow together. “Well, look at this,” he said.
“Two steaks,” I said. “Medium rare. You know the rest.”
“Good evening to you, too,” he said. “I’m just fine, thanks for asking.” If he was genuinely mad at me, it didn’t stop him from opening a cold Canadian and sliding it my way.
“It’s good to see you,” Vinnie said. “It’s been a while.”
“Don’t tell me,” Jackie said. “You’re showing Alex how to build his cabin. Am I right?”
“It was too painful to watch,” Vinnie said. “I had to step in.”
“You guys are hilarious,” I said. “Just keep it up.”
That’s the way it went, on a cold October night. It had been another cold night, not that long ago, when the woman had come to me. She was an Ojibwa, someone Vinnie knew, someone he had grown up with on the reservation. She was in trouble and I did what I could to help her. In the end, Vinnie was involved, and that’s when he had to make his choice—whether to trust me or his own people. I had no good reason to blame him, but the choice hurt me just the same. And it had stayed there between us ever since.
Until this night. We sat by the fire and talked about the cabin and what we would work on the next day. We pretended that nothing had ever changed. Maybe that’s how you get past it. You pretend until it’s real.
He was there to help me the next day, the day after that, and then the next. I bought him dinner every night. Hell, it was the least I could do. We were putting those walls up so fast, we actually had a shot at getting the roof on before it snowed. That’s what I thought, anyway. And then, of course, it did snow. It wasn’t much, just a few flurries overnight that turned to rain in the morning, but it was enough to knock us out of the game for the rest of the day. Vinnie ran off to do something on the rez, and I checked on the renters in the other cabins. It was bow season in Michigan, so I had all the usual men from downstate, the men who appreciated the fact that my land was right next to the state land, and that I’d leave them a cord of firewood outside their door and otherwise leave them alone. Bow season was easy, because bow hunters are the true gentlemen of the sport. They don’t make a racket, and they keep the cabins clean. Firearm hunters were usually okay, although I’d still get my share of drunken clowns.
Snowmobilers, of course, were the worst of all. Just one more reason to dread the winter, and to hope like hell that the snow wasn’t coming for good.
It wasn’t. Not yet, anyway. The next morning the sun came out and melted away the thin traces of snow on the ground. When I got to the cabin site, I was surprised to see he wasn’t there yet. An hour later, I started wondering. I was doing as much of the work as I could on my own, but it was getting harder and harder to set the logs. Without Vinnie to help me, I’d have to set up the skyline. Of course I wasn’t even paying him, so what right did I have to complain?
By lunchtime I thought I’d head down the road and check on him. His truck was gone. I couldn’t help but think of another day, when I had sat in this exact same spot, looking at his empty driveway, wondering where he was. It turned out he had spent the night in jail, having taken a hockey stick to the face of a Sault Ste. Marie police officer. That was the beginning of a very bad week.
Good God, Vinnie, I said to myself. I hope to hell you weren’t out finding trouble last night.
I went down to the Glasgow for some of Jackie’s beef stew and a Canadian. “Where’s your man?” Jackie said as he served me.
“You got me. He didn’t show up today.”
He gave me a look. “Whattsa matter, trouble in Paradise?”
“No trouble. I just don’t know where he is.”
“Last time, you ended up in the hospital.”
“Jackie, he’s been helping me all week, okay? Don’t you think he deserves a day off?”
“If that’s all it is, fine,” he said. “I’m just saying, the last time Vinnie got in trouble, you’re the one who ended up almost getting killed.”
“Okay, I hear you.”
“Okay, then.”
“Okay.”
Vinnie walked in just then and saved us. He came to the bar and sat down next to me.
“Give the man some beef stew,” I said.
“No thanks,” he said. That’s when I knew something was wrong. If you have any appetite at all, you don’t turn down Jackie’s beef stew.
“What’s going on?” I said.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t around today. Something sort of came up.”
“You don’t have to apologize,” I said. “Hell, it’s not like I’m paying you anything.”
Vinnie thought about it. “You realize,” he said, “that I’m the one paying you. For what happened. This is how I’m settling my debt to you.”
“You don’t owe me anything,” I said. “We’ve been through this, remember?”
I sure as hell didn’t want to go through it again. Not when we both seemed to be finally getting over it.
“I remember,” he said. “But still—”
“For God’s sake,” I said, “are you gonna tell me what’s wrong?”
He sat there for a long moment, while Jackie looked back and forth between us, clearly expecting the worst.
“It’s Tom,” he finally said.
“Your brother.”
“Yeah.”
I didn’t know a hell of a lot about Tom LeBlanc. I knew he was a few years younger than Vinnie, and that he had caused his family enough trouble to make Vinnie look like the golden boy. There was one incident at the Canadian border that Vinnie never wanted to talk about. I had to read about it in the Soo
Evening News
. That was the last time I had seen Tom, in fact, right before he had
gone off to serve his two years at Kincheloe.
“What’s the problem?” I said. I knew he was out on parole now, and saying all the right things about staying straight. But hell, if he was in trouble again, it wouldn’t exactly shock me.
“He was on a hunting trip in Ontario. He was supposed to be back a couple of days ago.”
“And he didn’t make it back?”
“No.”
“You don’t think—”
“What, that he’s passed out in some bar in Canada? Is that what you mean?”
“Vinnie, come on.”
“It’s different this time, Alex.”
Here it comes, I thought. He’s been going to the meetings; he’s a changed man. The whole speech. That’s what I expected.
That’s not what I got.
“This time,” Vinnie said, “he’s me.”
“He took my place,” Vinnie said. “Don’t you see what I’m saying? Tommy was up there pretending to be me.”
I didn’t get it at first. Then it hit me.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Are you telling me he was up there on a hunt?”
“Yes.”
“And he was pretending to be you.”
Vinnie looked down at his hands. “Yes.”
“Because you couldn’t go. On account of you helping me with the cabin.”
“No, that’s not it, Alex.”
“Vinnie—”
“It was his job, not mine. They called him.”
“So why did he have to pretend to be you?”
“It’s kind of a long story,” Vinnie said. “Bottom line, I’m the one who let him do this. It’s all on me.”
“When was he due back?”
“Couple of days ago.”
“Who else went?” I said. “Did anyone else get back yet?”
“No, not yet.”
“Who was it, Vinnie? Who did he go with?”
“Look, can we talk about this on the way? I’ve got to get over to the rez.”
“We’re both going?”
“Yeah, I need you to go with me,” he said. “If you don’t mind.”
“You gonna tell me why?”
“I need you for protection.”
“Protection?” Jackie looked at me and then threw his towel in the sink.
“It’s my mother,” Vinnie said. “I figure if you’re there, she’ll be less likely to kill me.”
I knew that was just a line, but I went with him anyway. I figured I owed him that much. We took my truck, and he sat there on the passenger’s side, looking out at the trees. After a few minutes of silence, he gave me the rest of the story.
“This man called him,” he said. “From Detroit. He said he had heard he was a good guide, that he knew how to turn a hunt into a real party. You know, not just the usual slog through the woods. Tom told him that he wasn’t really doing too many hunts anymore. He recommended me, instead. He told them I was the real deal.”
I knew that was Vinnie’s first love. There were other hunting guides who could track animals for you, and then field-dress and tag them if you were lucky enough to bag one. Vinnie would do all that and then tell you the stories his grandmother had told him, about the land and the sky, the animals and the seasons. The four points on the compass and how they got their names. The
manitous,
which were the great mysteries, the spirits of Ojibwa mythology. If it was a dark, windy night, he’d tell you about the
windingo
, which was an evil, flesh-eating monster. Vinnie could take an ordinary hunting trip and turn it into summer camp for grown-ups.
Of course, he used his Ojibwa name on these hunts—Misquogeezhig, which in English is “Red Sky.” It just doesn’t work when your Indian guide is named Vinnie.
“So why didn’t they take you?” I said. We were going along Lakeshore Road, curling around the southern shore of Whitefish Bay to the reservation in Brimley. It was my favorite road in the world, and I figured I’d take it while I still could. In a couple of months, it would be obliterated by ice and snow.
“They told him he was the guy they wanted, and then they said something about him and peace pipes.”
“Peace pipes? Oh no, wait a minute—”
“Yeah. He got the idea. He told them he didn’t do that kind of thing anymore. This is what got him into so much trouble in the first place.”
“Did he tell them he just got out of prison?”
“No, I don’t think so. He just told them he was out of that business.”
“Okay, so then what?”
“They say they really want him and they’ll pay him a thousand dollars.”
“A thousand dollars for a week in the woods?”
“And Tom says no. He really can’t do it. So they say okay, we’ll pay you two thousand dollars.”
“Two thousand?”
“So Tom says no, and why are they even asking him to do a hunt in Canada, anyway? He’s never led a hunt up there. They have their own guides. In fact, the Canucks would have a cow if they found out these guys from America were bringing their own guide with them. They probably wouldn’t even let them go out.”
“What did this guy say about that?”
“He said, don’t worry, we’ll take care of it. And then he offered him three thousand dollars.”
“Good God.”
“And Tom said, where do you want to pick me up?”
“Vinnie, who is this guy?”
He shook his head. “Tom said his name was Albright.
He didn’t say what he did for a living, but it sounded like he was some kind of heavy hitter in Detroit. The kind of guy who usually gets what he wants. He said he had four other guys who wanted to get away for a few days. You know, just cut loose in the woods.”
“I know that one,” I said. “I get the ‘cut-loose’ type staying in the cabins during firearm season. They stay up all night drinking and then they go out the next morning and shoot anything that moves. They all want that big buck so they can mount his head on the wall.”
“Actually, this was a moose hunt. That’s why they were going to Canada. They said they’d already done the deer thing. They wanted the big game.”
“Moose. Even better. What do those things weigh, like eight hundred pounds?”
“A bull can weigh over twelve hundred.”
“Is it firearm season up there already?”
“Yeah, it’s a lot earlier in Canada.”
“Okay, so for three thousand dollars he said yes. When did they pick him up?”
“Saturday before last.”
I did the math in my head. “That was before I even started working on the cabin.”
“Yeah, it was.”
I looked over at him. “So it really wasn’t about you sticking around to help me.”
“No,” he said. “I told you that.”
“Okay, okay. So you let Tom go. Why did he have to pretend to be you?”
Vinnie didn’t say anything. He watched the trees go by.
“Oh, wait a minute,” I said. “Don’t tell me.”
“It would have violated his parole.”
I just about drove into the lake right there. “Oh, that’s beautiful,” I said. “This is getting better by the minute.”
“He’s not supposed to leave the country.”
“Yeah, no kidding. When they’ve already caught you bringing a twenty-pound bag over the bridge, they kinda like you to stay off it for a while.”
He looked at me, and then back out the window. “I know it doesn’t look like such a good idea right now,” he said. “The rest of my family sure doesn’t think so.”
Lakeshore Road took us away from the bay, onto the Bay Mills Reservation. If there wasn’t a sign there to tell you, you wouldn’t even know you were on Indian land. It looked just like any other middle-class housing development. There were raised ranches on either side of the road, with well-kept lawns dying off in the cold weather. The road to Mission Hill, with the old burial ground at the top, would have been the first clue that you were in a different kind of place. Then, of course, there were the two casinos—the little King’s Club, the first Indian casino in the state, and then the bigger Bay Mills Casino, with its great cedar walls rising against the backdrop of Waishkey Bay.
“So he was due back when?” I said as I turned off the main road. “A couple of days ago?”
“Yeah, they should have dropped him off on their way back.”
“Do you have this guy’s phone number?”
“Tom left me Albright’s cell phone number. I’ve left a couple of messages, but haven’t heard back yet.”
“So maybe he hasn’t gotten them yet,” I said. “Maybe they’re just still up there.”
“It’s a fly-in hunt, Alex. They take you to the cabin, then come back for you a week later. By then you’re ready to come home, believe me.”
“You’re up there all by yourselves for a week?”
“They usually come back once during the week to check on you, fly out any animals you’ve taken. But aside
from that, yeah, you’re up there all alone. Depending on where you go, it’s usually a long way from anywhere.”
“So where did they go? Isn’t there a lodge there or somewhere they take off from?”
“I’ve been trying,” he said. “Nobody’s answering. I know the phone service is kind of unpredictable up there, but damn, it just gives me a bad feeling.”
“But not bad enough to call the police?”
He thought about it for a moment. “You know what’ll happen if I do that. If they find out he’s up there, he’ll go back to prison.”
The driveway had four cars in it already, so I pulled off onto the edge of the road.
“More cousins,” he said as he got out. “This will be fun.”
I followed him around to the back door. There were toys everywhere—a red car, a big plastic yellow house with green shutters, even a wooden fort like something out of the Old West. “What do they do in this fort?” I said. “Play cowboys and Indians?”
“You’re funny,” he said. “Are you ready?”
“With all your family in there, we’re gonna play that game right now. I’ll be General Custer.”
He shot me a look. “Don’t bring any of those jokes inside,” he said. “Okay?”
“Lead the way.”
As he opened the door, the heat and noise hit us. There were at least twenty people in the kitchen, some men sitting at the table, some women holding young children. Two other children raced into the room, stopped to stare at us for a split second, and then raced out even faster.
One of the men stood up and put his hand on Vinnie’s shoulder.
“You’ve met my cousin Buck,” he said to me.
The man shook my hand. As he looked at me, his face told me absolutely nothing.
“I seem to remember,” I said.
Vinnie introduced me around to the rest of the room. It was all a blur after the first three or four names. There was a pot of coffee brewing in one of those big machines you see in restaurants. Another half-empty pot was keeping warm on the top burner. Without saying a word, one of Vinnie’s uncles poured me a cup.
“Your mother is in the bedroom,” Buck said to Vinnie. “She wants to see you.”
Vinnie asked me to wait out here in the kitchen. He went down the hallway like a man walking his last mile.
A couple more kids ran into the room and around the table. A woman yelled at them, while another woman right next to her gently rocked a baby in her arms. That baby could obviously sleep through anything.
One man broke open a pack of cigarettes and passed them around. Soon the air was filling up with smoke. Nobody looked at me. Not once.
I shifted back and forth on my feet, looked out the window at the cold, hard ground in the backyard. The telephone rang. A man picked it up. One of Vinnie’s cousins—not Buck, but some other cousin whose name I wouldn’t have remembered for a million dollars. He turned his back to me and talked in a low voice.
This is what Vinnie left, I thought. A house like this, on land owned by the tribe. All this family around him. Even if he lived in another house on the reservation, the family would be there. Maybe not all at once like this, but they’d come, one by one, every single day. That’s the way it works here. Your door is always open. Some days, I thought it was a great thing. It was something I envied. Today it was making me dizzy.
Vinnie moved off the rez, and his family still hadn’t
accepted it. Hell, maybe they blamed me for it, like I was the one who kept him there. Move up to Paradise, Vinnie, away from your family. Buy your own land, build your own cabin. Live there all by yourself like a lonely white man.
I stood there for another few uncomfortable minutes, until Vinnie finally poked his head back in the room and beckoned me down the hallway. I sidestepped a couple of the kids to get to him. “What’s going on?” I said.
“She wants to talk to you.”
“Why does it feel like I’m going to see the principal?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. She just wants to ask you a couple of questions.” He led me down to the master bedroom and opened the door. The room was empty.
“Where is she?”
“She’s in the bathroom,” he said. “You’re company, so she had to get fixed up.”
“Yeah, well, thanks for leaving me out there with the rest of your family. We had a great time together.”
“They don’t dislike you, Alex. They just don’t understand you. In fact, they worry about you.”
“They worry about me?”
“Sure, you should hear them talk about you. My mother especially. She thinks you walk around carrying too much pain.”
“If your cousins ever get me alone in a dark alley, then I’ll be carrying some pain.”
He shook his head. “Alex, Alex …”

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