He came awake. The silver IV pole lay on the tiles beneath the bed, aligned with a trickle of clear fluid. Dog’s back formed a sheet of dawning pain. The catheter squirted, bent double in his fist. For a moment he observed his thought-stream: cloudy but fishable, like a river after a rainstorm. The room contained a phone.
“This is me again. Put on M.J.”
Dog recalled his name was Ray. Ray laughed. “She ain’t feeling too good right now.”
“If she can talk, put her on.”
A door closed, cutting unclear sounds in half. Ray was chewing something. “She can’t talk.”
“Why is that?”
“Because I said so.”
Standing, Dog felt hung from the skin of his back, like a Sioux brave in the Sun Dance, his feet not quite touching the floor.
“Look,” he said. “I’m going to be late. But I’m coming. You can count on that. You tell M.J.—” Dog went into a woozy spin, staggered into a cabinet full of swabs and needles and latex gloves “—and then you pack your shit up and get out of my house.”
“I ain’t going nowhere, ya focking needlenose.” The guy spoke pure Boston twelve-pack. Dog saw Narragansett in cans, gold chain, and diamond ear stud, Bruins Starter jacket with a.45 in the pocket. Good chance M.J. had rediscovered cocaine.
Dog heard her voice: “I want to talk to him. Give me the phone.”
“You don’t need this jerkoff. Get over it.”
“Give me the phone, Ray. Please?”
“He said to tell you he ain’t coming.”
“He can tell me himself.”
He heard a smack. A cry. Another smack and a silence. Dog hung onto the counter, his forehead braced against the cartridge of hand sanitizer. He felt far away, but not in any normal sense. He felt like he could fly there. Like if he could leave this room it right now would happen.
“Don’t call again,” Ray threatened.
“Oh, I won’t,” Dog promised.
He hung up the phone. For a moment his certainty dissolved and reformed as the mental image of Curious George in a palm tree. Then he was speaking with his tax guy, Harvey Digman.
“Harvey, I think I’m going to need bail money.”
The old man sighed. Dog heard rattling, then aerosol. Then more rattling.
“I got shot.”
“Jennifer,” said Harvey away from the phone, “regretfully, love, we’ll have to finish this later.” The rattling stopped. He was back. “This lovely young woman has agreed to spray her erotic graffiti art on my wall.” He coughed. “Shot by whom?”
It came to Dog: “Pippi Longstocking.”
“That’s quite an accomplishment, my friend. Even for you.”
“And I think I’m a murder suspect. I’m going to need a hundred grand or so.”
Another sigh. “Where are you? What’s going on?”
Dog paused to answer this question as precisely as possible. This was a simple hospital room on the ground floor. He was in an open-ass gown and white socks. An IV needle was taped to his left forearm. The link lay leaking on the floor in a curl of Velcro straps. He was rigid with stinging pain across the back. The pain grew stronger every moment.
Dog let go of the phone and tried the windows. His back split open as he reached. His organs hung out in the air. No. That didn’t happen. He was ok.
The windows were pin-locked. Dog backed up with eyes watering. Shit. He looked at the IV link, dribbling onto the floor. It was so far down. He did not believe he could bend over.
He found a blood pressure cuff. He dangled it. He got Velcro to touch Velcro. He raised the IV link, dropped it, raised it again. He got the drug back in him. He felt the surge. Ok. Go, Dog, go.
The whole IV stand had to come with Dog as he hobbled to the door and opened it. A sheriff’s deputy looked up from his magazine and reached for something on his belt.
Dog closed the door. He soared above the room. Through blurry vision he looked for something he could swing and hit the deputy with. He settled on a bed rail. But the rail would not detach. Not for Dog, who suddenly had no strength, no logic. Not even memory.
He only had desire. And wings. He flew at the deputy head first, missed, and was put back to bed.
“Harvey?” he said.
8
All of these being actions that pointed a large flashing arrow at guilty, reflected Deputy Margarite DuCharme after Tim Shrigley, the part-timer, reported Oglivie’s feeble attempt at escape.
When, with nothing more potent than your ass hanging out of a hospital gown, you attack an armed man as big and ugly as Tim Shrigley, you have obviously done something you can’t afford to pay for. Most likely that something was exactly what it appeared to be, except a little worse. At least this was true about ninety-eight percent of the time, in Margarite’s experience.
CrimeNet had come up with a little more on Theodore “Dog” Oglivie. Brushes with the law in Wisconsin, Montana, New Mexico, Washington, and Colorado. The kind of minor stuff that drunks and drifters got into—vagrancy, disorderly, driving without a license, fishing without a license, urinating in a public place, a gas station drive-off—but none in the last year, as if he had cleaned up his act—plus an ancient, unviolated restraining order filed with police in West Newton, Massachusetts. He had behaved himself on that one.
So feel good about it, Margarite told herself. She had in custody some kind of transient fishing hobo nicknamed Dog who had twice already attempted escape. She had a librarian for a star witness, and in Danny Tervo she had an up-and-coming career criminal as a conspirator and/or accomplice. Plus the crown jewel: Heimo Kock was dead. She really didn’t doubt it. He would have turned up by now if he weren’t. How much better could it get?
Which meant she could just relax, put the kiddie puzzle together for Fritz Shunk, close out the arson case, get it all wrapped up in time for an October yacht cruise with Julia over to Duluth, where they would go to the casino, check out the Tweed Museum of Art, do burgers and microbrews at Sir Benedicts overlooking that awesome harbor and then make love in a hotel room, somehow Margarite’s favorite place of all. That would get things going back in the direction they were headed during the dating phase, before Margarite landed the Luce County job and moved north so they could be together.
With these thoughts, driving north past Oswald’s Bear Ranch under one of those late summer Superior skies, Margarite took a big gulp of Pepto. Then another.
She met Greg Bright from the Michigan DNR at the entrance to the Reed and Green Campground on the main stem of the Two Hearted River. The ranger led her in about a quarter mile along a soft sand road. On the river side, illegal campsites had been carved out of the brush and pines above the river. Each site was posted with a statement of the DNR rule prohibiting exactly such activity. Graffiti scrawled in charcoal over the postings screamed out die, government trolls! and u.p. secede! The resistance was alive and well, obviously.
Reed and Green was tiny, six or eight campsites on a tight loop around pit toilets, a trash depot, and the iron ranger—hollow, lidded, and locked—inside which campers dropped their registrations and payments. Margarite parked behind the DNR pickup. She suspected what was coming. Greg Bright didn’t know her yet, didn’t live in the county, wasn’t in on the scandal. So, predictably, he would work from the rubric of an obviously well-formed female sheriff’s deputy, pretty in the face, friendly to him, and not wearing a wedding ring.
Sure enough, the ranger became a stammerer in the face of this impossible planetary alignment. Margarite was going to have to finish his sentences.
“When was the last time you opened this thing?”
“Every two weeks on, let’s see, uh, Fu-fu- …”
“On Friday.”
“And Saturday. It … it takes two days. This one I get Fu-fu- …”
“Friday. Got it. Ok. Do you keep records?”
“N-name, address, license plate. Phone and email if they … they … if they, uh …”
“If they provi
de it. Good. And those are kept where?”
He was sorting through his keys like he had never seen them before. “Uh,” he said. He gave the iron ranger’s cap a hopeful tug, though anybody could see the whole cast-iron setup would still be there, lock and all, after the apocalypse.
“Marquette? Or the regional down in Newberry?”
He got out “Newberry” and wiped his palms on his jeans. “Ok,” he said.
“People always pay?”
“You gotta be kidding,” Bright said, getting his breath back finally. Then with a big, wild smile, he held up the proper key for her to see.
He reached down the iron tube. He brought up a small handful of tiny manila envelopes with carbons affixed. He sorted them and showed her six with Ned Oglivie written in, the expired Massachusetts plate number, no address, phone, or email.
He stuck the others, the non-Oglivies, in his shirt pocket. “Something funny here,” he said, and Margarite could see what he meant. Oglivie’s envelopes were slightly puffy, as if he had paid his twelve dollars in ones every time. Greg Bright tore one open and said, “Oh, Christ. Now I’ve seen it all.”
“What?”
“P-p-put your …”
Margarite put her hand out. He upended the envelope, shook it, and out fell six dry flies. All six were big and bushy, with red in the body, brown and white in the wings.
Margarite laughed. “Royal Coachmen. So, two bucks apiece? Are they worth it?”
Greg Bright picked a bushy fly from her palm. He inspected it. “Heck if I know. I use worms.”
Margarite looked at the dates on the envelopes. Oglivie’s unorthodox payments began the previous Wednesday and went in perfect sequence right up to the day before Esofea had caught him dumping Heimo Kock in the Two Hearted River. So where was Oglivie the final night? Margarite was betting on Tervo’s place, in Deer Park. She opened the trunk of her cruiser and brought back an evidence bag. She felt jittery, her legs weak. Not much get-up-and-go in Pepto-Bismol.
“Those are classic, old-school flies,” she said. “They’re attractors. Brook trout love them. But I’m going to need all the envelopes. Everybody. Thanks.”
Greg Bright stared, his lips parted, his face flushed. Nice guy, she was thinking. So learn from the Lodge mistake. Folks up here just didn’t see it coming. Clue him in as soon as possible.
“S-s-so,” he said, “you like to go fishing?”
“I do.”
“You got someone to go with?”
“I’m teaching my sweetheart.”
“Lucky guy.”
“Gal.”
“Oh.”
See? It came out of nowhere.
“Her name is Julia.”
Margarite was almost too exhausted, but she made herself smile at Greg Bright, show empathy for his distress. She was getting better at this. She gave him a little chuck on the arm. “But thanks.”
Dolf Cook’s summer place was close by. Greg Bright retreated and Margarite walked over there.
The gay mosquitoes found her. This was a joke she and Julia had developed during steadier times. In a little-known footnote to the Book of Genesis, God had made it ten percent across the board, right down to tomboy porcupines and butch-dyke butterflies. This was the moment when God’s work went from “very good” to “excellent.”
Everything’s fun when you’re in love, Margarite mused. When she was coming up from Milwaukee once a month, their dates were wonderful. Julia was often a little sick, but they did fun things together. They tried out different bed-and-breakfast places. They played snowmobile poker. They went moose watching in the Seney Swamp. They kayaked at Pictured Rocks. They snuggled, made love, laughed together, looked at real estate, and dreamed about the future. And God had stricken neither of them dead, obviously—though, speaking of the Royal Coachman, one of those dates had involved a thrilling close shave as they were fly fishing on the catch-and-release water on the lower Escanaba River.
Margarite thought of the incident now, one of those near-death experiences that that gave you the priceless gift of awareness. She had been using the Royal Coachman because it was big and bright, and she was hopeful that Julia, who was learning, could follow the fly on the water.
To her surprise, Margarite had raised a good-sized brown from one of the cracks in the river’s limestone bottom. Julia was wading over to take the rod and fight the trout, for the experience.
They were catching a trout together. Nothing more, nothing less—but a thrill for Margarite. The sky had not been particularly threatening. Or maybe Margarite hadn’t noticed the storm building over the western tree line. In any case, as Julia fought the trout, a lighting bolt had snapped above them like the business end of a hundred-mile whip. Crack! Boom! Technicolor! Ozone! For an instant their surroundings were luridly colorful, like a retouched photograph.
Then they were holding each other against a sheet of hot rain. They staggered, deaf and shaking in the current, feeling each other for a pulse. Somehow Julia still held the rod, but that big trout was struck dead at the end of the leader—and here is where the event became a story they could cherish.
“Ma’am,” Deputy Margarite DuCharme had drawled eventually, “this section of the river is a no-kill zone. I’m going to have to take you into custody.”
“Oh, no,” swooned Julia. “Not again …”
Heimo Kock’s older sibling, his only sibling, was a mess—though Margarite could see that Dolf Cook hadn’t exactly been a Swiss-watch kind of guy beforehand. He answered his summer cottage door in mis-buttoned satin pajamas with a burn hole in the shirt tail, plus a sizable damp spot around the fly and down one leg. Kock’s brother had located only one slipper in which to present himself, and his first words from behind the door—“who the hell’s it?”—sounded chunky and wet in his mouth.
“Mr. Cook, I’m Deputy Margarite DuCharme from the Luce County—”
Jowly and red-eyed, Cook garbled right over her: “Ah, Christ, you’re a woman. The hell they send a woman for, so I can embarrass myself?”
Of all the potential corrections to be made by a self-conscious gentleman, Cook threw off his solo slipper with a furtive little kick. It landed somewhere near a kindling box in the foyer.
“Forgive my language and come in please, young lady.”
Cook turned and slung an arm with a highball glass at the end of it. The gesture upset his balance and launched a gout of liquid toward a cluttered table. Margarite smelled scotch. She checked her wristwatch: a little after one PM.
“Thank you. As you know, we have a report that your brother’s body was seen in the river. I’m so sorry—”
“Bit of a hash,” he interrupted. “At Yale they called me Pig Pen.”
“I’m not so neat myself,” Margarite admitted.
She smiled. He glinted back and struck: “But you didn’t go to Yale, though, did you, missy. Probably University of Western Southern North Dakota, or like that. Huh?”
He was shambling away from her with a limp. Near the crown of his head, a freshly broken scab stained a spot of oily dull gray hair. Margarite found it grimly interesting that this was kin of Heimo Kock. The man presumed dead had been stylish and hearty. Kock always looked like a NASCAR driver, except with fishing logos. And, in Margarite’s limited experience, Heimo Kock, unlike his brother, would gladly insult a person directly to her face.
“No, sir. I went to the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point.”
“So sad for you,” he said. He made it to his bar area and did a Y-turn. “But here you are. You married?”
Margarite retried the smile. “Who’s asking?”
“I had four wives,” Dolf Cook answered, pointing a belligerent finger at her. “None of them regrets a goddamn moment.”
“I’m sure.”
“I got a little chickie, plays with me every summer while I’m up here.” He was drifting on his feet, tracking Margarite with the finger. “I don’t pay her.” This was a denial, indignant. “I give her gifts. Bec
ause I love her. Whaddya think of that?”
“I think that’s great.”
“I own restaurants in fifteen states. You don’t believe me, do you?”
“Of course I believe you.”
“You married?”
“Nope.”
“Bring it on, chickie-babe,” Cook said, and then he turned, finding himself misaligned with the bar, reaching his glass toward the dusty snout of a musk ox.
Good god. Margarite had had an inkling of this. She knew Bruce the Moose had handled a call or two regarding Dolf Cook from the tavern at the White Pines Hotel in Newberry. And a few weeks back, the sheriff had driven up to deal with complaints about an old man harassing campers at the Reed and Green. But relax, Margarite told herself, observe. On this bright day the man’s living room was dark with game trophies and weapons, a shrine to the male à la Teddy Roosevelt—or no, up here it was Hemingway who set the standard. Margarite meant to check out a book or two, try to understand the whole Hemingway thing.
“I’ll have straight tonic water, if you’re pouring that for me.”
She watched Cook turn his back ineffectively and splash scotch into the glass, as though he could slip her alcohol without her noticing. She wondered: what kind of woman goes for that? He handed her the drink.
“Shall we sit down?” she suggested, already taking a seat at Cook’s cluttered dining table. A half dozen dry flies in a saucer caught her eye. Here again were Royal Coachmen, tied in the same way as the flies in Oglivie’s payment envelopes.
Cook began pawing documents into a heap. Innocently, Magarite caught the corner of a glossy photo and drew it toward her, just beyond his reach. The photo showed Cook anxiously gripping a large brook trout, his rod across his chest, the trout extended toward the camera to make it look bigger.
“Wow. Nice fish.”
His hand said gimme-gimme. “Goddamn right it’s a nice fish.”
“That’s a big brookie.”
“It’s a coaster.”
The Wind Knot Page 9