Blood Is the Sky: An Alex McKnight Mystery (29 page)

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Authors: Steve Hamilton

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BOOK: Blood Is the Sky: An Alex McKnight Mystery
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Ice Run
Blood Is the Sky
North of Nowhere
The Hunting Wind
Winter of the Wolf Moon
A Cold Day in Paradise
CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR
EDGAR AWARD–WINNING AUTHOR
STEVE HAMILTON
 
 
BLOOD IS THE SKY
 
“Heartily delivers on suspense, atmosphere, and riveting action.”
—
Denver Post
 
“Hamilton never misses a beat.”
—
Rocky Mountain News
 
“Hamilton won an Edgar and an Anthony in 1998 for
A Cold Day in Paradise.
This smart, brisk, twisty tale is even better.”
—
Kirkus Reviews
(starred)
 
“A reader’s delight: a fast-paced, breathtaking adventure for which a night’s sleep gladly will be sacrificed.
Blood Is the Sky
is a stunner.”
—
Romantic Times
 
“A grand-slam tale.”
—
Midwest Book Review
 
“A fine writer, [Hamilton] excels at describing the lonely locale as well as depicting such memorable characters.”
—
Publishers Weekly
 
“Blood Is the Sky
is brilliant. Some books you can’t put down because the story is so compelling. Some books you can’t put down because the prose is so spellbinding. And then, every once in a while, you read a book that combines both. Steve Hamilton has written the best private eye novel—heck, maybe the best novel—I’ve read this year.”
—Harlan Coben, author of
Left for Dead
 
“Steve Hamilton writes tough, passionate novels with a strong emphasis on heart and humanity. His latest flat-out smokes. This is crime writing at its very best.”
—George Pelecanos, author of
Hell to Pay
and
Soul Circus
 
“Easily Steve Hamilton’s best novel so far—therefore an automatic book of the year. Everything is here—his trademark sense of place, vivid, resonant characters, and a plot that will break your heart.”
—Lee Child, author of
Persuader
 
“Blood Is the Sky
takes us into the dark and brooding heart of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It’s got everything—tension, action, surprises. Alex McKnight is a believable hero who can also tell a good story.”
—T. Jefferson Parker, author of
Silent Joe
and
Black Water
 
“This book is relentless. I had to read it straight through. The best mysteries are about the past coming up out of the ground and grabbing the present by the throat. Steve Hamilton knows this.
Blood Is the Sky
fills that bill and then some. This is his best yet.”
—Michael Connelly, author of
Chasing the Dime
 
NORTH OF NOWHERE
 
“Hamilton[’s] … tensile prose … reflects the dramatic, often violent contradictions of people who live on the edge of the world.”
—
The New York Times Book Review
 
“Superb! Hamilton keeps the action fast and furious and manages to keep the reader off balance.”
—
Publishers Weekly
 
“A brisk, well-plotted tale.”
—Kirkus Reviews
 
“A bracing, sometimes sidesplitting … novel.”
—
Booklist
 
“Agreeable plot twists (the revelation of whodunit really is a surprise) and thoughtfully engages some larger questions about wilderness real estate developments and the limits of friendship.”
—
Washington
Post
 
“A complex, solid story enhanced by unpredictable twists and turns. Psychological suspense and an excellent chase scene propel
North of Nowhere
to its most rewarding conclusion.”
—
Florida
Sun-Sentinel
 
“Hamilton packs plenty of hardscrabble characters and pithy dialogue into a nifty mystery … there’s nothing like a bit of Paradise—Michigan, that is.”
—
Columbia State
 
“North of Nowhere
has a twisty plot with genuine surprises, but it’s the understanding of the people who live in the Upper Peninsula and the love for both the harshness and beauty of the Lake Superior shoreline that make this another good entry in a terrific series.”
—
Flint Journal
 
“A fast-paced book with wonderful characters … Hamilton writes great prose.”
 
“A robust entry … Alex is at his best and the support cast augments the isolated feeling of going north of nowhere that shows why Steve Hamilton is an award-winning author.”
—
Internet Bookwatch
 
THE HUNTING WIND
 
“Un-put-downable … exceptionally entertaining.”
—
Publishers Weekly
 
“Hamilton spins a smooth yarn.”
—
The New York Times Book Review
 
“The surprise ending delivers a satisfying jolt.”
—
Booklist
“Compelling.”
—
Los Angeles Times
 
“Easy-going, smoothly written tale.”
—
Seattle Times/Post
-
Intelligencer
 
“[
The Hunting Wind
] is to the same standard … [as] Hamilton’s Edgar-winning
A Cold Day in Paradise.”
—
Boston Globe
 
WINTER OF THE WOLF MOON
 
“The isolated, wintry location jives well with Hamilton’s pristine prose, independent protagonist, and ingenious plot. An inviting sequel to his Edgar Award-winning first novel,
A Cold Day in Paradise.”
—Library Journal
 
“[Hamilton’s] protagonist is likable as well as durable, his raffish cast is sharply observed and entertaining. Moreover, he knows how to pace a story, something of a lost art in recent crime fiction.”
—
Kirkus Reviews
 
“There’s almost as much action in the book as there is snow—and there’s heaps of white flakes. But Hamilton’s first-person narrative has a lyric cadence and thoughtful tone that nicely counterpoints all the rough-and-tumble stuff.”
—
Orlando Sentinel
 
“In his second novel, Steve Hamilton continues the high standards he set in his Edgar-winning debut,
A Cold Day in Paradise. Winter of the Wolf Moon
is an entertaining tale buoyed by solid plotting, wry humor and brisk pacing … characters are so well shaped they hit the scene breathing. Alex embodies the traits of a good private eye—a loner, stubborn and haunted by his past … no matter what the season outside,
Winter of the Wolf Moon
has the depth of winter between its pages, and its exciting story will keep you warm.”
—
Ft
.
Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel
 
A COLD DAY IN PARADISE
 
“Ingenious … Hamilton unreels the mystery with a mounting tension many an old pro might envy.”
—
Kirkus Reviews
 
“Hamilton combines crisp, clear writing, wily, colorful characters and an offbeat locale in an impressive debut.”
—
Publishers Weekly
 
“[A] well-plotted and tightly written thriller.”
—
Detroit Free Press
 
“A good combination of crafty and colorful characters, an offbeat locale in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and really crisp, clear writing … there are several plots, all woven together very well. Alex is a very likable character, as are other townspeople, and the writing moves very swiftly, making this an easy and enjoyable book to read.”
—
Sullivan County Democrat
 
“PI Alex McKnight’s ‘mean streets’ are the deep pine woods and the small lakeside towns of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and here the past comes to find him, chilling as the November wind. A must for PI and suspense fans.”
—Charles Todd, author of
Wings of Fire
 
“His story is so fundamentally sound and stylistically rounded that Hamilton ought to be teaching whatever writing course he may have taken toward producing this novel.”
—Jeremiah Healy, author of
The Stalking of
Sheilah Quinn
and
The Only Good Lawyer
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In a land of hard winters, the hardest of all is the winter that fills you with false hope. It’s the kind of winter that starts out easy. You get the white Christmas, but it’s a light snow, six inches tops, the stuff that makes everything look like a postcard. The sun comes out during the day. You can take your coat off if you’re working hard enough. The nights are quiet. The stars shine between the silver clouds. You celebrate New Year’s. You make resolutions. It snows again and you run the plow. You shovel. You chop wood. You sit inside at night by the fire. You say to yourself, this ain’t so bad. A little cold weather is good for a man. It makes you feel alive.
That’s what I was thinking. I admit it. Although maybe I had other reasons to believe this winter would be easy. Maybe this winter I could be forgiven for letting my guard down. One good look at the calendar would have put my head back on straight. Spring doesn’t come until May, Alex. Which meant—what, winter had ten rounds left in a fifteen-round fight? That was plenty of time. That was all the time in the world.
When the storm finally hit, I was down the road at the Glasgow Inn. Jackie had the fire going and had just made a big pot of his famous beef stew. He had the cold Molsons,
bought at the Beer Store across the bridge and stored just for me in his cooler, for the simple reason that American beer cannot compare to beer bottled and sold in Canada. That and a Red Wings game on the television over the bar were all I needed. On that night, anyway. I had plans for the next day. I had big plans. But for now I was happy just to be with Jackie, and to do everything I could to slowly drive him insane.
“Alex, you’re gonna tell me what’s going on,” he said for the third time. He was an old Scot, God love him, with the slightest hint of a burr in his speech. Born in Glasgow sixty-odd years ago, the son of a tugboat captain, he came to Michigan when he was a teenager. He had been here ever since, eventually opening up the Glasgow Inn. It looked a lot more like a Scottish pub than an American bar, which meant you could spend the whole evening there without getting depressed or drunk or both.
“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
“Like hell you don’t. You’ve been bouncing in here, saying hello and how are you. Smiling and laughing.”
“I’m happy to see you,” I said. “Is that so bad?”
“Since when are you happy about anything?” He gave me that Popeye squint of his. “It’s January, for God’s sake.”
“Almost February,” I said. “How many inches have we had?”
“Don’t even say that, Alex. You’ll jinx it. You know a storm’s coming.”
“I had another cancellation today. There’s not enough snow to ride on.” This time of year, snowmobiling was the biggest business inParadise, Michigan. Hell, it was the
only
business. Every rental cabin in town, and every motel room, was booked months in advance. On most January nights, Jackie’s place would be crawling with men from
downstate, most of them with their big puffy snowsuits zipped down to the waist.
And that sound. The whine of the engines, coming from every direction. It always drove me crazy. But this night was silent.
“Tonight,” he said. “We’ll get buried. You watch.”
I shrugged and looked up at the hockey game. “Bring it on.”
“And what’s with the salad, anyway?”
“What salad?”
“Lettuce and vegetables, Alex. That salad.”
“What are you talking about?”
“For dinner. You had a salad.”
“I had the stew, Jackie. Since when can I pass that cup?”
“You had a little bowl of stew and a big salad.”
“Okay, so?”
“You don’t eat salads for dinner. I’ve never seen you eat a salad in fifteen years.”
“So I felt like a salad, Jackie. What are you getting at?”
“You’re not drinking as much beer, either. Try to deny it.”
I held up my hands. “Guilty. You busted me.”
“You’re working out, too. I can tell.”
“You’ve been bugging me for years to take better care of myself,” I said. “So now maybe I am. Is there something wrong with that?”
“You finally decided to listen to me? That’s what you’re telling me?”
“Is that so hard to believe?”
“Yes, Alex. It is. You’ve
never
listened to me. Not once.”
The door opened at that moment, saving me from Jackie’s third degree. It was my friend and neighbor, Vinnie
LeBlanc, bringing in a blast of cold wet air.
“Holy Christ,” Jackie said. “You can smell the snow coming. It makes my bones hurt.”
“Who’s winning?” Vinnie said as he took off his coat. It was a denim coat with a fur collar, the only coat I’d ever seen him wear, no matter how cold it got. He was an Ojibwa Indian, a member of the Bay Mills community. He had moved off the reservation a few years ago, and had bought the land down the road from mine and had built his own cabin. We were friends for a while, and then we weren’t. Then I helped him look for his brother. What we found was a hell of a lot of trouble, but somehow we also found our friendship again. Just like that, without a word.
“Wings,” I said. “Two to one. They just waved one off for Colorado.”
He sat down next to me and asked Jackie for a 7Up. The man never touched alcohol, going on nine years straight.
“Jackie’s right,” Vinnie said. “It’s gonna snow. You better not be too far away from home when it does.”
“That’s a good one,” Jackie said. “Since when does Alex go anywhere?”
Vinnie looked down at his glass. He rattled the ice. He had a smile on his face, a smile so subtle you wouldn’t even see it if you didn’t know the man as well as I did.
He knew. He was the only one who knew my secret.
I just couldn’t tell Jackie about it. Not yet. I knew he had strong opinions about some things in life, and this was one thing he’d have a lot to say about. Maybe I wasn’t ready to hear it yet. Or maybe I didn’t want to ruin it. Maybe talking about it in the light of day would make it all vanish like a fever dream.
For whatever reason, I kept my mouth shut that night. I was happy to sit by the fire and watch the rest of the
hockey game. The Wings gave up a late goal and after the five-minute overtime had to settle for a tie. Vinnie put his feet up and closed his eyes. There was still white tape on the side of his face, where the bullet had taken off part of his ear. I knew he was spending a lot more time over at the reservation now, looking after his mother. I didn’t see him nearly as much.
We heard the wind picking up. There was a soft ticking at the windows. The snow had started. Outside this building, not a hundred yards away, lay the shoreline of Lake Superior. The ice stretched out a quarter mile, into the darkness of Whitefish Bay. Beyond that there was nothing but open water—water so cold and deep it was like a cruel joke to call it a lake at all. It was a sea, the Sea of Superior, and tonight it would feed the snow gods.
“You’re gonna be plowing,” Vinnie said. He kept his eyes closed.
“I’m ready.”
He opened one eye. He started to say something and stopped.
“What is it?” I said.
He smiled again. Two smiles in one night.
“You’re not going anywhere tomorrow,” he said. “You’re gonna be stuck here.”
“We’ll see about that,” I said. But I knew he was probably right. God damn it.
We finally left around midnight. I said goodbye to Jackie and he dismissed me with a wave of his hand.
“You got him a little worked up,” Vinnie said as we stepped out into the night. There were already three inches of new snow covering the parking lot. “He doesn’t like not knowing what’s going on.”
“A little suspense is good for him,” I said. “It keeps him young.”
“I’m going to my mother’s house,” Vinnie said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“I’ll plow your driveway. Drive carefully.”
We brushed our windshields off and then we were on our way, Vinnie to the reservation in Brimley, and me back up to the cabins. If you ever come to Paradise, Michigan, you just go through the one blinking red light in the middle of town, then north along the shore about a mile until you get to an old logging road. Hang that left and you’ll pass Vinnie’s place first, and then you’ll find my place. My father bought the land back in the 1960s, and built six cabins. I live in the first cabin, the one I helped him build myself, back when I was an eighteen-year-old hotshot on my way to single-A ball in Sarasota. At the time, I never thought I’d be back up here for more than a visit. I certainly wouldn’t have imagined living up here. Not this place, the loneliest place I’d ever seen. But all these years later, after all that had happened, here I was.
I put the plow down and pushed the new snow off as I went. It felt as light as talcum powder. I drove by Vinnie’s place and then mine, and kept going. The second cabin was a quarter mile down the road. There was a minivan parked in front, with a trailer carrying two snowmobiles hitched behind it. A family, a man and his wife and two sons. I’d given them the chance to cancel, but they’d said they’d come up no matter what. Even with no snow, they looked forward to thetrip every year. Now it looked like they might get some riding in after all.
Another quarter mile and I got to the third cabin. It was dark. Another quarter mile and then the fourth and fifth cabins together. They were dark, too.
One more quarter mile. The last cabin my father had built. His masterpiece. Until somebody burned it down. The walls were about half rebuilt now, a great blue tarp covering the whole thing, propped up in the middle to
keep the snow off. Rising above it all was the chimney my father had built stone by stone.
I stopped and got out of the truck, made sure that the tarp was sealed tight. The wind died down and the pine trees stopped swaying. I took a long breath of the cold air and then got back in the truck. I plowed my way back to my cabin.
I went in and listened to the weather report on the radio. More snow was coming. A lot more. They didn’t even try to guess the number of inches. That’s always a bad sign.
God damn it all, I thought. I’m going to Canada tomorrow. I don’t care if we get three feet. I’ll plow again in the morning, and then I’m going.
I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. I ran a hand through my hair, then picked up the package and read the directions one more time.
“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” I said out loud.
I looked in the mirror again. Then I put on the plastic gloves and went to work.
The phone rang. I took the gloves off and wiped my hands on the towel. I picked it up on the third ring, looking at the clock. It was almost one o’clock in the morning.
“Alex,” she said. With that voice. It still hit me in the gut, every time. She was Canadian, so she had that little rise at the end of each sentence. That singsong quality, almost melodic, but at the same time it was a voice that meant business. It had some darkness in it, a smoker’s voice without the smoke.
“Hey, it’s late,” I said. “Are you all right?”
“Yes, but I was just listening to the weather.”
“A little snow. No problem.”
“A little snow, eh? They’re talking like twenty-four inches. What are they saying down there?”
“They’re not saying. You never know with the lake. It could be less than that. Or more.”
“I don’t think you’re coming out here tomorrow.”
I thought about what to say. There was a distant humming on the line. “I think I can still make it.”
“Don’t be a dope,” she said. “You’ll kill yourself.”
Out of a hundred different feelings I can have in one minute when I’m talking to her, one feeling in particular came into focus now. It was not the first time I’d felt it, this little nagging doubt, that maybe I wanted something out of all of this. Something real. And that maybe she had woken up that morning not wanting anything at all.
And then the thing that always came right after that. The certain realization that I was being a complete ass.
“Besides,” she said. “Don’t you have people staying in your cabins? If it’s snowing all day, don’t you have to stick around to plow them out?”
“I’ve got one family,” I said. “The rest of the cabins are empty.”
“Okay, but even so. That one family will need you around, won’t they?”
I closed my eyes and rubbed the bridge of my nose. “If there’s a lot of snow falling, yeah. I can’t be away for too long.”
“So maybe it’s time to try out your idea.”
I opened my eyes. “What’s that?”
“You know, about me coming to your place.”

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