Trickster's Point

by William Kent Krueger

  “Go with me,” Winona said.

  “She’s not going nowhere,” Beckett said. His voice broke as he stammered. “And neither is Nona. You all just get out of here. Just go.” He waved the barrel toward the door.

  “We’re not leaving without Winona,” Jubal said. He spoke with a firmness, a certainty Cork hadn’t heard since they’d reconnected. It was the voice of the old Jubal.

  “Me and this rifle say different.”

  Cork’s eyes shifted between Jubal’s face and the face of the kid. He saw fearlessness in one and nothing but fear in the other, and between them nothing but disaster. “Corcoran O’Connor,” he said stepping forward. “Chicago Police Department. Son, I want you to put that rifle down. Put it down now.”

  “Chicago? What are you doing here?” Beckett asked.

  “We came to bring our friend home, that’s all. If you try to stop us, it will be kidnapping. There’ll be cops all over this place. Is that what you want?”

  Beckett looked at Winona, looked at her like a kid with no clue. “Do you want to go?”

  Winona thought for a moment, then nodded. “Yes, Beckett. Yes, I do.”

  His eyes jumped from Cork to Jubal and back. “I think we need to talk to Uncle Cole about this.”

  Jubal said, “I’m going out through that door right now, and I’m taking my friend. You can shoot me, or you can move aside and let me pass.”

  Jubal stepped in front of Winona and Cork and began to walk forward. The kid’s eyes grew wide, owl-like, and he leveled the barrel at Jubal’s chest. Cork knew this was not the way to play it, but Jubal had made his move, and anything Cork did would only confuse the kid more and maybe push him over the line.

  Beckett retreated a step, then another. And then, more by accident than by design, stood with his back against the frame of the barn door, his body blocking their way. He could no longer simply step aside and let them pass. Unless he folded completely now, they would have to go through him. Blood pounded in Cork’s temples, and his gut seemed to empty and then draw taut as he readied for the chaos of what he was afraid was about to come.

  Suddenly Winona stepped from behind the shield of Jubal’s body and put a hand on his arm to hold him back.

  “Beck,” she said gently. “These are my friends, and all they want is to take me home. That’s all I want, too. Just to go home. Please.”

  She walked ahead, slowly, and to Cork she became a being of enigmatic contradiction. Her body seemed such a frail thing, slender and delicate, yet there was an unquestionable power in her spirit, in her measured step, even in the very gentleness of her voice. She closed the gap between herself and the end of the rifle, and her eyes never left the face of the boy in the doorway.

  “Please, Beck,” she said, reaching out as she neared him. “Let me go home.” She put her fingers against the rifle barrel and eased it aside.

  The moment the rifle was no longer pointed at them, Jubal sprang. In three long strides, done in the blink of an eye, he was on the kid, yanking the firearm from his hands and shoving him roughly out the door. Petra screamed, and Winona said, “Oh, Jubal, you didn’t have to do that.”

  Through the open door, Cork saw the kid scramble to his feet and take off at a run. A moment later, he heard the sound of a small engine kick over and come to life. The ATV, he figured. And he knew the kid was going for his father and his uncles.

  Jubal lifted the rifle to his shoulder.

  Cork raced forward and tried to yank the firearm from Jubal’s grip. “Let him go, Jubal,” he barked.

  Jubal shoved him away as the ATV shot down the lane between the trees and was gone. He turned on Cork, his face gone red with rage, and there was murder in his eyes. When they were kids, such a look would have shriveled Cork’s heart. But he’d patrolled the streets of South Side Chicago long enough to have been glared at by men bigger and meaner and more heartless than Jubal Little could ever be. Still, Jubal was the one with the rifle, and Cork took a step back.

  Winona came between them. “We need to go,” she said. “Now.” She turned to the other woman. “Oh, Petra, come with us.”

  “I can’t,” Petra said, her abject misery obvious. “Go. Go before they come back.”

  Winona hugged her briefly, kissed her cheek, and turned to Jubal. “Let’s go.”

  They ran, following the lane between the trees where the ATV had gone. They neared the edge of the orchard with its broken-down white fence, and Cork saw the dust raised by the Jeep as Willie drove it out of the hills.

  They kept running, and the Jeep hit the flat of the valley floor and bore down on them. As Willie pulled up to them and stopped, Cork cried out, “Let me drive.”

  Willie slid from his seat. While he shuffled around to the passenger side, Jubal and Winona piled in back. Cork turned the Jeep in a tight arc, and they shot toward the safety of the hills. In the rearview mirror, through the cloud kicked up behind them, he caught sight of another storm of dust rising far down the valley. The approaching McMurphys. He leaned more heavily on the accelerator.

  They hit the switchbacks and began to climb. Cork took the turns hard and fast, and the tires slid precariously across the dirt roadbed. Below them, the brown pickup swung into the lane that led between the trees to the ranch house.

  They hit the crest of the hill and, on the other side, followed the creek with its cottonwoods as it wound its way toward the main road into Furlough. Cork’s eyes swung between the empty road ahead and the veil of dust behind him that was all he could see in the mirror now. After several miles, it became clear that the McMurphys had opted not to follow, and Cork slowed to a more reasonable speed.

  “Could you stop?” Winona asked.

  “I’d prefer to keep going,” Cork said. “At least until I can see civilization.”

  “She asked you to stop,” Jubal said.

  Cork had heard watch commanders deliver orders in that same voice, and it rankled him. But he pulled to the side of the road and killed the engine.

  Winona spoke again. “Could I get out, just for a minute?”

  They all left the Jeep and gathered at the side of the road. Winona held herself as if she was cold.

  “Are you all right?” Willie asked. Arouaureye?

  “Everything’s happened so fast, I just need to center a little.” She looked at her brother and seemed for the first time to notice him. “Oh, Willie, this was your doing, wasn’t it?” She threw her arms around him and held him for a long time, and her shoulders shook as she wept.

  “It’s okay, Nona.” Willie spoke softly, with his cheek against her boyish hair.

  She let go of her brother and turned to Cork.

  “Is it really you?”

  “Yeah,” Cork said.

  She wiped tears from her cheeks. “You look so . . . manly.”

  “I shave and everything,” Cork said.

  She smiled, and her eyes went to Jubal, and what was in them was the same look that had been there the first time she’d seen him in Grant Park, when they were all hardly more than children. “It’s been a long time.”

  She might as well have been a magnet, and his eyes two steel balls, because he couldn’t look away from her face. When he finally spoke, he sounded like a man in a trance. “It’s been forever.”

  In the next instant she was in his arms, with her face against his massive chest. She wept and murmured, “I don’t deserve this.”

  He stroked her hair and said, “No, no. It was all those years of crap you didn’t deserve. And that was my fault. All my fault. But I’m here now, and I’m taking you back where you belong.”

  “Home,” she said and put her hand to her mouth as if in utter amazement.

  “We should be going,” Cork said. “Just in case they change their minds about following. There’ll be time for reunions later.”

  “Yes,” Winona said and stepped away from Jubal, and looked shyly down.

  Willie helped her into the Jeep. Jubal held back and leaned to Cork and said
in a low voice, “About that rifle.”

  “What about it?”

  Jubal gave him another withering look and said, “Don’t ever try to take anything from me again.” He quit Cork and joined Winona in the backseat of the Jeep.

  In the months that followed, the lives of Jubal and Winona shifted dramatically. Winona returned to the rez, where she became a kind of recluse. Jubal spent that spring and summer in Aurora, mostly in the company of Winona. He changed or, more accurately, changed back. It was as if he found something in his own being that had been lost, and he became whole again. He negotiated a tryout with the Minnesota Vikings and secured a spot on their roster that fall. By midseason, he’d become their starting quarterback, a position he would hold for the next ten years. In that time, he would create for himself a lasting place in the hearts of most Minnesotans.

  Cork returned to Chicago, married Nancy Jo McKenzie, and a few years later, brought his family home to Aurora.

  * * *

  When Cork finished his story, Rainy laid her head on his bare chest. Her breath ghosted over his skin, warm and familiar. “So the old Jubal came back,” she said.

  “Not the old Jubal, although some of him was still there. He grew into someone else, the man he always believed he was meant to be, a guy destined for something great. And greatness takes up a lot of space. There wasn’t room for anyone near him who might challenge him.”

  “That would be you?”

  “Turned out that way. Jubal and I still had some good years ahead of us, good moments that felt like the old days. When Winona came back, he had reason to come back to Aurora, too. He spent winters here, used it as his official place of residence. Once in a great while, the old Jubal would slip out, and it would feel like it did in the old days.”

  Cork stroked Rainy’s hair and finally asked the question that had been, in large part, the reason he’d come.

  “Rainy, the day Jubal was killed, when I came here to talk to you and Henry, I asked if the name Rhiannon meant anything to you. Do you remember?”

  “Sure. It was Jubal’s Rosebud. The name on his lips as he died. Hard to forget.”

  “Did you talk to anyone about Rhiannon?”

  “I asked Uncle Henry. The name meant nothing to him.”

  “You spoke to no one else?”

  “I’m pretty sure not. Why?”

  “Do me a favor,” Cork said. “Promise me you won’t mention the name to anyone.”

  Rainy eyed him with a mix of suspicion and concern. “What’s going on, Cork?”

  He thought of just trying to elicit a promise without an explanation, but he knew Rainy wouldn’t let it go at that. So he told her about the threatening phone call he’d received the night before.

  “No idea who it was?”

  “Male, that’s all I can say.”

  “Maybe the same person who set you up in Jubal’s murder?”

  “Maybe. But I don’t see the connection yet. Could be it’s the other shoe I’ve been expecting to fall any minute. I just don’t know. At the moment, nothing makes much sense to me. Until it does, promise me that Rhiannon goes no farther than us.”

  “It will give you peace of mind?”

  “It will.”

  “Consider it done,” she said and kissed him.

  His cell phone beckoned from the pocket of his jacket, which hung on the back of one of Rainy’s chairs. He said, “I’d better take that.” He left the bed and, naked, danced across the cold cabin floor. He checked caller ID. The call was coming from his house on Gooseberry Lane. It turned out to be Jenny.

  “You better come home, Dad.”

  “What’s up?”

  “The sheriff’s people are here. They have a warrant to search our house.”

  CHAPTER 23

  It was early enough that the media hadn’t yet roused themselves for the day, and when Cork turned onto Gooseberry Lane, he saw no television vans or reporters. A few of his neighbors were out, standing on their lawns, watching the sheriff’s people and agents of the BCA moving in and out of his house. The driveway was blocked by a Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department cruiser and a dark blue sedan with state plates, and the garage door had been raised. Jenny’s Subaru, which normally would have been in the garage, was parked on the street. Cork pulled up behind it and got out. Agent Phillip Holter and Captain Ed Larson came from the house and met him on the porch steps.

  “What’s going on?” Cork asked, keeping his voice low, though he wanted to scream the question. The sun was up, the sky clear and bright, but the morning was still cold enough that his breath huffed out visibly, like blasts of steam.

  “The arrow that killed Jubal Little,” Holter replied. “Your prints are all over it. And only your prints.”

  “I put my hand around that arrow, Agent Holter. Jubal insisted that I see if it might easily be pushed through or pulled out.”

  “When the sheriff’s people got there, the arrow was still in him,” Holter said.

  “Of course it was. I had no intention of actually moving it. It was a hunting arrow, for Christ’s sake. You have any idea how badly I would have torn him up if I’d tried? And what’s with the search warrant? If you wanted to go looking through my house, I’d have been happy to let you in.”

  Larson said quietly, reasonably, “We need to go by the book, Cork. For your sake as well as ours.”

  Holter said, “Mind coming with me to the garage?”

  Cork followed him through the wide opening where the garage door had been lifted. It was a two-car structure, which Cork kept clean and well organized. On the north wall hung all his lawn and gardening tools. On the south, he’d mounted large hooks where the O’Connors hung their bicycles when not in use. Along the east wall, he’d created a work area, with a bench and long table and good, bright shop light. Hand tools hung from Peg-Board above the table, and to the right stood a shelving unit where he kept his power tools and supplies.

  At the moment, one of the agent’s team was boxing some materials from the shelves, but he paused when Cork and the others entered.

  Holter said, “Take a break, Greg,” and nodded for him to leave.

  Holter walked to the worktable and picked up a section of what looked to be a long, slender dowel. He rolled it between his fingers, then held it up for Cork to look at.

  “The beginning of an arrow?” he said.

  “I make my own. But you already know that.”

  “Do you make them all the same? With the same pattern of fletching?”

  “Yes. It’s a way to identify my arrow from others that might be shot during a hunt.”

  “The arrow that killed Jubal Little was exactly like all the arrows in the hip quiver you wore that day. The same fletching.”

  “What of it?”

  “One of yours?”

  “Like one of mine,” Cork said.

  “Exactly like one of yours,” Holter said. “Yet when Captain Larson here talked with you at the department immediately following Jubal Little’s death, you never mentioned that fact.”

  “I knew Ed was smart enough to figure it out eventually.”

  “The arrow that killed the man identified as William Graham Chester, that was exactly like one of your arrows, too. Tell me, O’Connor, how is it that someone else could have shot an arrow you made? Or one exactly like it.”

  “My guess is that someone stole it. Or they made it in exactly the way I make mine.”

  “Stole it? Just came in and took it? You don’t lock your doors?”

  “Agent Holter, I don’t know anyone in Aurora who locks their doors. Could I see that warrant? What exactly is it that you’re looking for?”

  “I’d like to see that warrant, too.” A tall man with a long ponytail and dressed in a jean jacket and white shirt and blue jeans walked into the garage. He had eyes the color of chocolate brownies and a voice that spoke its words as slow and rich as maple syrup. This was Leon Papakee, Cork’s attorney. Like Cork, he was what Indians sometimes called a “bl
ood,” a man of mixed heritage. Leon’s Indian heritage was Meskwaki, out of Iowa.

  “Thanks for coming, Leon,” Cork said.

  “Captain Larson, Agent Holter,” Papakee greeted the officers. “Could I see the warrant, please? And where’s Sheriff Dross?”

  “Inside,” Larson replied, nodding toward the house. “I’ll get the warrant.” He left the garage through the side door and headed to the house.

  “I haven’t seen you in a while, Phil,” Papakee said casually. “How have you been?”

  “Busy, Leon,” Holter replied, just as easily.

  “You two know each other?” Cork asked.

  “We crossed swords once before,” Papakee said. “The Louis Santee case, down in Granite Falls, couple of years ago. So, is the miscreant business booming, Phil?”

  “Economy’s down, Leon. Always drives the crime rate up.”

  “Think Jubal Little was killed because of the poor economy?”

  “At this point, Leon, your speculation is as good as mine.”

  “My speculation is that my client had nothing to do with the recent deaths at Trickster’s Point, and that your presence here is entirely unnecessary.”

  Before Holter could reply, Larson returned with the warrant and handed it to Papakee, who read it carefully.

  “I’d like to talk with my client in private. All right?”

  “Sure,” Holter said with a magnanimous air.

  They walked out of the garage and into the backyard. Trixie, the O’Connors’ mutt, was lying in the sun near her doghouse. She roused herself when she saw the two men and trotted toward Cork, her tail wagging like a crazy metronome. She came between the men, and both Cork and Papakee leaned down to pet her.

  “What do you know about Holter?” Cork asked.

  “Ambitious as they come. By the book, but if he’s got it in for you, he’s like a bronc rider, and he’ll stay on you till you break. The warrant’s pretty specific,” Papakee said. “They’re taking any tools and materials that might relate to the making of arrows. That’s understandable. But they’re also taking your computers and printers. And they’re looking for some flyers advertising your P.I. business. Any idea why?”