The Wind Knot

by John Galligan

  The sheriff looked at Fritz Shunk. Shunk was looking at his shoes, his pant cuffs, like he would be able to see poison ivy on them.

  “He’s a trout bum. Nothing but fishing for five years. Driving that thing around. Montana. Colorado. Wisconsin. Pennsylvania. Nothing but fly fishing. You know what fly fishing is? Fly fishing is what You-Know-Who does. Can you believe it?”

  “Sheriff,” Shunk said, “if You-Know-Who made whoopee with left-handed donkeys, she’d still have a name. Give it a break.”

  One of the evidence techs had emerged from the RV: a black woman, short and plump and scowling, her clothing way too tight. She stretched, raising blue latex hands into the foggy morning air. Lodge tipped his head her way.

  “So is that gal one? I can’t tell.”

  “You gotta stop this, Bruce. Seriously. I don’t want to be defending the county against a lawsuit. We hardly have the money to plow snow.”

  “Did you know Julia Inkster was one?”

  “Julia Inkster is something different. It’s called bi.”

  Lodge shook his head. Old guy, sue him for being confused. That’s what they’d do. Teriyaki up a lawsuit. Make him the one with the problem.

  Shunk changed the subject. “Oglivie’s ex-wife tell you anything else?”

  “She had a message for him.”

  “Yeah? What?”

  Lodge tried to remember exactly how the woman said it. But his mind took the long way, a frequent pattern of late. He had gone through Oglivie’s vehicle last evening. He had found just under a thousand dollars cash. He had found vodka, Tang, instant coffee, bread, and peanut butter. He had smelled mud and sweat and tobacco. The vehicle had nearly three hundred thousand miles on it. Lodge had sat down in the driver’s seat for a few moments, a little dazed, wondering what such a life was about. Now he had it: the exact opposite of his stay-put bridge fishing.

  “She said, ‘Tell him to go to hell.’ I told her, ‘Actually he’s in custody at the moment for suspicion of murder.’ She said, ‘Then I guess he already made it there.’”

  Shunk said, “Whoa. Was she high?”

  “She said, ‘So I’ll see him soon.’”

  “Seriously, was she effed up?”

  Lodge looked at his county attorney. Here was a gray-haired man, semi-retired, who was still twenty years younger than the sheriff. Young enough to be a boy of his, living in another world. “Now, I wouldn’t really know a thing like that, Fritz, would I?”

  Shunk put a hand on his shoulder. “Let’s go down to the river.”

  “Gotta call a wrecker for the bookmobile,” Lodge said. “Then I think I’ll rig up. Tell You-Know-Who I’ll be there in a minute.”

  Deputy Margarite DuCharme had been inside the bookmobile most of the night, bundled in her duty jacket and her emergency blanket, reading. That was lucky, having something to do. She wasn’t much of a reader, but hey. When the Marquette County evidence techs showed up around eight, she had put a paperback in her pocket and walked on numb feet down to the river, swinging her arms and clapping her hands.

  She went along the high bank to a spot in the sun and positioned her back against the warming sand. Her chordite bulletproof vest worked perfectly for this. In the back it hunched up and supported her neck. In front, squared up to the sun, it acted as a heat sink. Plus, always thinking safety, if some Milwaukee gang banger erupted from the thick brush across the river and shot her in the chest …

  Deputy DuCharme laughed at herself. She was out of Milwaukee now. Way out of Milwaukee. Still, she would never go on duty without the vest—never, ever, anywhere, any time, not even before breakfast in the middle of nowhere.

  After about fifteen minutes in the sun, she was decently comfortable, except for her toes. She was yawning, finishing Pippi in the South Seas—finally getting her chance to follow up on one of Esofea’s many recommendations. It was exhausting, making friends with a librarian.

  “Hey, young lady.”

  It was Fritz Shunk on the bank above, a Pickleman’s sack in his hand.

  “You look comfortable.”

  “I’m getting there.”

  “Divers not here yet, eh?”

  Margarite stood up and brushed herself off. “Nope.” She squinted at the river. “There’s a deep hole around that corner there. I’m thinking he went at least that far.”

  “Current really took him for a ride.”

  “I guess so.”

  “So full of hot air he must have floated like a cork.”

  Margarite climbed up the bank. From some long-ago injury, the county attorney moved like he was two different people, one trying to run and the other trying to sit down. He was hard to keep up with anyway. Margarite trailed him downstream to the wide patch of scorched earth that framed a partially burned blue tarp.

  “What’s with the fire?”

  “I think he moved the body with this tarp. He tried to burn it.”

  Shunk hitched over to the spot where the high bank slumped into itself and formed almost a funnel. “I get it. He rolled the body down right here. Pretty slick. And what’s all that?”

  Margarite told him her theory. The splintered wood was pieces from inside the RV. He put it under his tires so he could turn that thing around. He was coming back out when Esofea blocked him.

  “Anyway, here,” Shunk said. He handed her the sack. Inside was an egg sandwich and a Coke from Shunk’s tavern in Newberry, The Log Jam, plus a bottle of Smart Water, some gum, and a Pickleman’s chocolate doughnut with multi-colored sprinkles.

  “Thanks.”

  “Oh, you betcha.”

  “Perfect,” Margarite said. “You’re way ahead of me. I’ll never get the lingo.”

  “I’ve been in that tavern almost three years, eh?”

  Margarite snapped the Coke. It didn’t feel right on her stomach, but it was something. It opened her eyes. Started a new view of things. The Two Hearted River, infused with sunshine, flowed blissfully inside its corridor of trees and brush in fall color, wet with melting frost. Pretty and sedate, like nothing ever happened.

  “So where’s the big guy?”

  “He’s coming. You freeze your ass off last night?”

  “I was about ready to burn some books.”

  “The old boy’s having trouble with the new status of things.”

  “I gathered that.”

  “He’s calling you You-Know-Who.”

  “Great.”

  “He thinks you should have told him.”

  “I was taking it slow.”

  “He thought you and he were friends.”

  “Me too.”

  “Here he comes,” Shunk said.

  Bruce the Moose crested a bump in the sand road and eased down the near side with a spinning rod bouncing in his hand. He was a sweet old bear of a man who before last week tended to come at Margarite like she had jam on her face. She loved it. It broke her heart, what was happening. Made her furious, too.

  “Morning, Sheriff.”

  Lodge squinted into the sun toward the Two Hearted. “Morning.”

  “No news on my end,” Margarite offered. “Quiet night.”

  His eyes on the river, Lodge said, “Good deal. Figured while I wait for the divers to get here, I’m going to toss a few.”

  “There’s a nice fish feeding out there,” Margarite said.

  “Where at?”

  “It’s feeding on insects though,” she said. “Not on soup spoons painted red-and-white.”

  “We’ll see about that.” The sheriff shaded his eyes. “Where’s it at?”

  Margarite had seen the trout earlier, looking up from Pippi in the South Seas at a spot where a riffle piled up against the far bank. From there an eddy nosed its way counter-current until it rejoined the sand shoal that formed the riffle. She pointed toward that topmost pocket of sheltered water, where a good-sized brown fed on emerging insects, bulging the surface with its kiped snout.

  “Uh-huh. That’s a nice one. You see that, Fritz?”
>
  Shunk sniffed and peered myopically at the river. The county attorney was a short and stocky man, bristly gray all over, making Margarite think of a badger. “Only fish I ever caught was in a fry basket,” he said.

  Margarite set her Coke down in the sand. She took a bite of cold egg sandwich. It stung her esophagus all the way down. Not fault of the sandwich, though. These last few days, acid roared on and off like a gas burner in her chest. She was livid with Julia. She was baffled with herself. And Sheriff Lodge hadn’t looked her in the eye or said her name in the ten days since the Newberry Labor Day Brat Fest.

  “Have her teach you that fancy fly fishing,” Lodge told Shunk.

  There it was. Her. Shit. When she was standing right here. When she had stayed here all night, doing her job above-and-beyond so the old man could go home, feed his kitty, have a beer, talk out loud to his dead wife and go to sleep.

  “Her is too busy,” she said. “Her is too busy sinning. It’s all her does.”

  Lodge grunted. He had that big red-and-white Daredevil spoon speared into the cork of his rod. His massive pink hand went to it. Unsteadily, he freed the treble hook. He began to say something about a little brook trout but stopped. Everything had changed in the moment at the picnic when Julia, ripped on keg beer, had crawled onto Margarite’s lap, straddled her tightly, leg-locked their groins together, and started eating off the opposite side of her sweet corn.

  Margarite had spent the next few days in shock. After six months of trust-building, she had gone in six seconds from Deputy DuCharme to Deputy Dyke, doing it with a local chick who, as it turned out, nobody knew was gay—and who commenced to defending herself in bars afterward, telling people that Margarite had approached her, that Margarite was four-and-a-half years older than she was, that Margarite had taken this job to be with her, and that she was Margarite’s third live-in girlfriend in the last five years, all of which was true. Coincidentally—sure—Lodge had swapped Deputy DuCharme off to Schoolcraft County for five straight shifts of highway duty on the Seney stretch.

  Margarite dropped the egg sandwich back in the bag. Screw it. Get to work. He kept it up, she would sue him. Period. “Let’s go ahead and have a meeting since we’re all here,” she said. “The question is do we charge Oglivie.”

  “No.” Shunk jumped at the point. “We don’t even have a body yet,” he said. “And Esofea could be wrong. Our ‘victim’ could be shacked up with a nineteen-year-old in L’Anse for all we know. Though from what I hear, nineteen is a little over-the-hill for Heimo Kock.”

  Margarite glanced at Lodge. He had been looking at her. Now he unhooked the Daredevil and it swung out, his big paw chasing. “I agree with wait,” she said. “We have twenty-four hours to charge him and we’ve got a lot of questions. I think the cash in his glove box makes it possible he did this for someone. Every third car down the highway carries an enemy of Heimo Kock. Could be a lot going on here.”

  They both watched Lodge chase the swinging Daredevil with his hand. Margarite glanced at the river. The trout still fed, unaware of the impending air raid.

  “Shit,” Shunk said finally. “My dream case? That cretin Donuts Rudvig did this so Kock wouldn’t sacrifice him for setting the Pine Stump fire. Rudvig killed his boss, paid a drifter to dump the body … No, wait. I have a better idea. How about this?”

  Shunk adjusted his body angle and lowered his voice, cropping Lodge out of the discussion. Margarite felt the usual bolt of guilt, but the sheriff didn’t seem to notice. Or maybe Bruce the Moose had just accepted the way things had become.

  “We’re dealing with a coup,” Shunk hypothesized quietly, next to her ear. “Rudvig and the rest of Kock’s swamp rats teamed up to kill the asshole and take over his business. Rudvig gets murder one. We nail the rest of the pack on conspiracy and it’s game over, the end of an era. Then I re-retire.”

  Margarite couldn’t flow with the fantasy, but she gave Shunk a stiff smile for trying. “That might be what happened. But the simplest answer is highway robbery.”

  Margarite remembered the Coke she had set down in the sand. She tried it again. Like pouring gas on a fire.

  She raised her voice to bring the sheriff back in, if he cared to be. “I’ve got an interview with Esofea in an hour. She calms down, she’ll start to make more sense. When I talked to her last evening she couldn’t seem to make up her mind about what she saw, or why she shot the suspect.”

  Margarite paused. One hot summer night she had tasered a burglary suspect in Milwaukee. The guy fell, hit his head on the pavement, went into a grand mal seizure. He did live, sure. But the deputy easily recalled how when you hurt another person you were plunged into an altered state for a while, your head full of replays and what-ifs, logic clashing with remorse wrestling with denial angling for forgiveness. Esofea’s mental state had to be a mess.

  “Dolf Cook needs a visit too,” she continued. “He may have seen his brother recently, or seen Oglivie in the campground, or both. Kock’s wife will have some answers about what he’s been up to, with whom, where he’s supposed to be. I’m sure like everyone else she’s been hearing all kinds of rumors since last night. Then I’ll have to speak with whoever’s in charge at the outfitter. That’s Donuts Rudvig probably, so I’ll go have a shit sandwich with him. Meantime, we need a vehicle. We need basic crime scene results. But most of all we need a body …”

  Suddenly Margarite felt she might throw up. She closed her eyes and swallowed, feeling a chill on the back of her neck. First she didn’t eat, then she couldn’t eat. Since Labor Day, this is how it was.

  She heard Shunk’s voice. “What do you think, Sheriff? Wait until tonight to talk about charges?”

  “Sounds like you two got it all figured out.”

  “You ok with that, then?”

  “As to what I’m ok with,” Lodge said, “that would be another conversation.”

  Zinnng! went the sheriff’s spinning reel, and Margarite opened her eyes.

  That fat red-and-white spoon soared over the Two Hearted on a shining filament of line. For an instant it was a graceful thing to see. For an instant, as the reel buzzed and the cast peaked, the Daredevil paused like a hummingbird, exactly over the trout.

  Then it crashed down in a belly flop, tore the water and left it swirling. The trout was long gone before the sheriff said, “Ok, Fritz. Watch this.”

  Back in Newberry, Margarite parked at the north end of Main Street by Shunk’s Log Jam tavern. She walked for the exercise under a huge pale sky to the Holiday station, where she bought a nine-ounce bottle of Pepto-Bismol.

  That same number, nine voice mails, all from Julia, uploaded onto her cell when she turned it on. But Margarite put the phone back in her pocket. She was too tired to wrangle with Julia.

  She peeled the plastic safety wrapper off the Pepto bottle. She threw that and the little plastic measuring cup into the public trash can outside the high school. She measured her pink stuff in glugs. One glug. Two glugs.

  Maybe she could stop at two glugs, she thought, now that Heimo Kock was dead. Presumed dead. Maybe she should try.

  She reached her cruiser. The day was warming up. She took her jacket off and put it in the trunk. She waved at Shunk’s wife, Louise, who was back from a supply run to Manistique, lugging groceries through the back door of The Log Jam. Louise Shunk balanced a sack on her knee, freeing a hand for a thumb’s up. This is a good day, she was saying. No more Heimo Kock. No more threats. No more fires in the Log Jam’s pamphlet rack, where they displayed brochures for alternative U.P outfitters.

  Margarite knew Louise Shunk was anticipating the best for her husband, for herself, for the restaurant, for Luce County. And maybe Louise was right. But the brilliant blue sky made Margarite’s head hurt. Now, assuming Heimo Kock was dead, should she and Shunk pull out the stops, involve the sheriff, go after Kock’s lieutenants and cronies and flunkies—mainly Rudvig—through a Pine Stump arson and homicide charge? If it went well, they could pull up Superior Outfitters b
y the root. Or should they drop Pine Stump, return the case to Lodge’s conclusion of “accidental death,” and hope that trouble in Luce County died with Heimo Kock?

  If he was dead.

  He was dead.

  She hoped he was dead, Margarite confessed to herself. She had never before wished for a thing like that.

  The next steps would depend on Shunk, whether the county attorney’s approach to justice would turn out to be absolute or concessionary. The latter would make peace with the sheriff’s style, for sure. Margarite had thought a lot about that style, trying to find words for it. From the start she had felt wrong about working with Shunk behind the sheriff’s back, on an investigation the sheriff had closed. Then she learned about his fishing. Bruce the Moose fished trout from bridges, with spinners. He took a three-cast howdy-do and moved on, never caring if he caught a fish or not. To Margarite’s mind, that said everything you needed to know about how Lodge had run the Luce County Sheriff’s Department for the last thirty-some years. Get along, move along, and arrive home by supper.

  Not a system equipped to deal with the fatal fire at Pine Stump junction. Lodge’s conclusion of “accidental,” supported by longtime county attorney Lars Peterson, Lodge’s old friend, had ignored serious questions about Heimo Kock’s involvement. Downstater Fritz Shunk, a retired civil rights attorney, having purchased the Log Jam for something to do, spent the better part of a year listening to nasty rumors from behind his new bar, and when Lars Peterson lost his faculties to a stroke, Shunk had decided to un-retire and run for the vacant county attorney seat on a “Clean U.P.” slogan.

  Shunk had received no help from Sheriff Lodge, and Paul “Donuts” Rudvig had quickly assembled the signatures and filed an affidavit of candidacy to run against him. This was a fact that Margarite was still trying to wrap her head around. To run for Luce County Attorney you had to be eighteen and a resident. That was it. Felonies—Rudvig had two: one drugs, one firearms—were not a problem. Body odor, bad habits, and general hatefulness were fine too, apparently. Legal experience not required. No doubt Luce County voters, knowing the great and mighty Heimo Kock was behind Rudvig, had found themselves in a fear-hope conflict. But in the privacy of the voting booth, exactly fifty-one percent had gambled that Fritz Shunk could take out “the Governor of the U.P.”