Blood Is the Sky: An Alex McKnight Mystery (Alex McKnight Mysteries)

by Steve Hamilton

  I took a deep breath and let it out. “Okay,” I said. “Here goes nothing.”

  “Wait,” he said, looking up into the sky. “Another cloud’s gonna pass over the moon.”

  We waited another few minutes. The cloud came in front of the moon and cast a shadow over the whole scene. We picked our way through the brush and into the clearing. I expected the gunshots at any second. The only question was which one of us would be hit first.

  We crept closer to the cabin. A slight wind picked up. It carried the trace of a noise from far away. The bears again. I swallowed hard and kept moving.

  Then another sound. A sudden rush of air. I grabbed on to the club, got ready to swing.

  Bats. The goddamned bats woken-up from the back wall of the cabin. A couple dozen of them flew out from the bottom of the wall and into the night. I took a breath and kept going.

  When we got to the cabin, I went around the right side. It was unnerving, not being able to see what Vinnie was doing. I found the plastic lid from a garbage can. That would be my decoy. When I got to the front of the cabin, I peeked around the corner and caught Vinnie’s eye.

  He gave me a little nod of the head.

  I threw the lid at the front door. It hit the frame and then the ground. Clunk, clunk.

  Nothing happened.

  I waited another minute. Then I turned the corner and made my way to the door, keeping low to the ground. I looked in through the screen window, couldn’t see a damned thing. The door creaked when I eased it open. Fucking door, I thought. Fucking son of a whore door.

  When the door was open just enough, I slipped inside. After all the moonlight outside, in here I was totally blind.

  I sat there for a while, giving my eyes a chance to adjust. Outside, the cloud moved past the moon. A thin stream of light came in through the front window, and shapes started to appear in the room. I saw the table, the stove, the refrigerator. The door to the back room.

  They had trashed the place. It was already a mess before—now it was completely destroyed. There were pieces of Styrofoam all over the floor, and what looked like the stuffing from our sleeping bags. When I moved back and took a look in the back room, I saw the wood stove pushed completely over, the exhaust pipe pulled right out of the ceiling. I came back out into the kitchen, checked the refrigerator and the cupboards. Every bit of food was gone. The pots and pans were gone, even the utensils. Old Mother Hubbard, I thought, and what a fucking strange thing to think of at a time like this. They had probably taken everything that could have been of any use to us and thrown it right in the lake. For the hell of it, I tried turning on the stove. There was no propane.

  I got down on my hands and knees and checked the floor. Maybe they had missed something. There was an empty plastic bottle under the table. Good for holding water. I put that in my coat. And what was this? It was something silver. I reached under the table and grabbed it. A half roll of duct tape. I put that in my coat, too. You never know.

  A sound. Outside. Something close.

  Where’s that club? Where did I put that fucking club?

  Over there by the door. I grabbed it and crouched down next to the door, waiting for it to open. The sounds got closer. My heart was pounding in my chest. This is it. This is the showdown.

  It was joined by another sound. Some kind of hissing. It sounded like—

  Fuck, it was Vinnie. What was he doing?

  I looked out the window. A big black bear was coming toward the cabin. His fur glistened in the moonlight. Vinnie was hissing at him, trying to keep him away.

  I slipped out the door and waved at him. We met up on the back side of the cabin, moving quickly, back into the cover of the trees. “I didn’t know what to do,” he said. “I didn’t want that bear to come right through that window again.”

  “He can have the place now,” I said. “They totally destroyed everything inside.”

  “That figures. If they’re not gonna be there themselves tonight—”

  “Maybe they’ll come back here. Should we stick around?”

  He leaned over with his hands on his knees. “I don’t know, Alex. I don’t know what the fuck to do now.”

  “Let’s move back in the woods,” I said. “If they come back, we should be able to hear them.”

  We made our way through the trees until we were about a hundred yards from the cabin. We found a thick mass of hemlock, perfect for hiding behind. If they came this way tonight, we’d hear them long before they got to us.

  I took the roll of duct tape out of my coat pocket, made Vinnie roll his sleeve up, and taped up his arm. “It ain’t perfect,” I said. “But it’ll do for now.”

  His face was a different story. I knew I had to do something with it, but the slightest touch made him flinch. “Here,” I said, grabbing a stick. “Bite this. And hold your hair up.”

  He did as he was told. I stretched a piece of tape from his jaw, down his cheek, over his ruined ear, and around to the other side of his face. He closed his eyes and bit right through the stick. I put another piece of tape over the first, and then another. It looked like hell, but it seemed to stop the bleeding.

  He sat down in the dirt and leaned back against a tree trunk. I sat down next to him. I listened closely to the night, but didn’t hear a thing. The crickets were all asleep, buried under the ground. The birds had all flown south. The bears were out there somewhere, but at that moment I couldn’t hear them.

  “We need another plan,” I said.

  Vinnie didn’t answer me. His head bobbed down, snapped back up, then bobbed down again.

  “You should rest awhile,” I said. I pulled him closer, so he could lean his head against my shoulder, with the bad side of his face in the air.

  “No,” he said. But he put his head on my shoulder and kept it there.

  I spent the next couple of hours just sitting there, careful not to move. No matter how much I thought about it, I couldn’t make things look any better. We were lost.

  As I drifted off, I wondered if the next time I closed my eyes would be my last.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I opened my eyes. There was a dim light, and a wet fog hung heavy in the air. I could feel the cold dew on my face. When I tried to straighten out my neck, the pain ran right down my back. Holy God, I thought. This cannot be happening.

  My heart stopped when I realized Vinnie wasn’t sitting next to me anymore. For one horrible moment, I wondered if they had gotten to him somehow. They had killed him like the others and now they were on their way back for me. Then I heard him behind me.

  “Good morning,” he said. He was working on a long stick, carving the end into a sharp point. The duct tape was still wrapped all around his head. The black and red stripes had run into two great smudges on his face.

  “Is that a knife?”

  “Just a little jackknife. Too small to hurt anybody.” He put the stick down and started on another. “Now if you had brought your gun—”

  I thought about it. “My gun’s on the bottom of Lake Superior right now.”

  “Too bad,” he said. “Want some breakfast?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Here,” he said. He threw me the plastic bottle I had taken from the cabin. He must have gone to the stream to fill it with water. “I found some dandelions. It’s just something to put in your stomach, if you want.” He dropped a couple of plants in my lap.

  I took a long drink of water and tried taking a bite of one of the leaves. It tasted like bitter lettuce.

  “I can’t find any insects,” he said. “It’s too late in the year.”

  Insects, I thought. If he had found any, I’d be eating them. The way my stomach is feeling right now, I’d do it.

  “Today’s the day, Alex. Are you ready?”

  I looked at him. I couldn’t understand why he suddenly had so much more energy than I did. “Vinnie, are you all right?”

  “For now, I am. Tonight will be a different story.”

  “Wh
at are you talking about?”

  “By the end of the day we’ll be really hurting. There’s hardly anything edible up here. We can’t signal for help, not that anybody else is even gonna fly over here. We can’t build a fire. They’d find us in a minute. We can’t get back on our own. It’s too far. We’ve only got one hope.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Their plane.”

  “What are we gonna do? Steal their plane and fly it?”

  “Not unless you know how. I was thinking about their radio.”

  “How do we get to it?”

  “Think about it, Alex. We know the plane’s still here, right? We would have heard them if they had left. We know they’re somewhere south of here. We have to find the plane.”

  “Okay, that makes sense.”

  “You know what else? If we find their plane, we’ll find them. Or at least one of them. That plane is their only way out, too.”

  “The plane is their only vulnerable spot,” I said. “They have to protect it.”

  “Exactly. We have to hit them there. We don’t have any other choice.”

  “Except sitting around and waiting for them to make a mistake.”

  “Which we can’t do,” he said. “Not for much longer.”

  I grabbed the tree and pulled myself up. I had never felt more drained in my entire life. Vinnie handed me one of his sharpened spears. “One way or another,” he said. “We have to end this today.”

  We went back through the trees, toward the cabin. When we got to the edge, we both stopped in our tracks.

  “If there’s more than one of them,” I said, “there might be somebody watching the cabin now.”

  “Could be. In the daylight, we’d be easy targets.”

  So we made our way around the lake to the western trail, keeping ourselves hidden in the woods. When we got to the trail, Vinnie checked the ground. “Somebody came this way,” he said. “Heading away from the cabin.”

  “We’ve got to be careful. They could be anywhere right now.”

  He nodded as he looked all around us. “They know we’re coming.”

  “What, to their plane?”

  “Yeah, think about it. They know the same thing we know. Getting to that plane is our only hope.”

  “They’ll ambush us on this trail,” I said.

  “We’ve got to go around the trail, get to the plane some other way.”

  It’s not what I wanted to hear, but I knew he was right. We left the trail, climbing rocks to the higher ground that seemed to run parallel, using our spears for leverage. The loose pine needles on the rocks made the going tough. More than once we both slipped and just about killed ourselves.

  When we got to the top, we saw that what we thought was higher ground was just an illusion. The land gave way again and then rose to yet another hill, and then probably another. We had to climb back down and then fight our way through thick brush, and then climb again. The sun came up, but it wasn’t enough to burn off the morning fog. After an hour of picking our way over the rocks and through the brush, we were both soaking wet. It might as well have been raining.

  We stopped to rest. We emptied the bottle of water. “We should come to another stream,” he said. He was breathing hard, and his breath made little clouds in the cold morning air. “All these lakes are connected.”

  “Are your feet killing you, too?” Beyond the cold and the wet, I could feel the blisters growing with each step.

  “I’m trying not to think about it,” he said. He rubbed at the duct tape on his face.

  We kept going. As long as the rising sun stayed on our left, we knew we were moving in the right direction. But God damn it all, it was too slow. We went for another hour. Then another. The sun rose higher in the sky.

  Strange thoughts came to me—memories of things that had happened years ago. Things I had forgotten. A day walking in the woods when I was a kid. The sudden fear that I was lost.

  Vinnie tried to step over a great fallen tree. He misjudged the height and ended up tumbling right over it. He lay on the ground with his head on the rotting wood, his eyes closed. His spear lay across his chest.

  “Vinnie, are you all right?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Come on, get up.” I grabbed his hand.

  “I’m sorry, Alex. I’m sorry. It’s all my fault.”

  I sat down on the log. “Just rest a minute,” I said.

  “I’m trying to get us out of here.”

  I looked down at him. All that energy he seemed to have when he woke up, that was all just a show. It was for me. Now he was paying for it.

  “The lake’s gotta be close now,” I said. “We’re almost there.”

  He didn’t move. “Guy and Maskwa,” he said. “A kid and his grandfather. They’re dead, Alex. And we’re next.”

  “Get up, Vinnie.” I reached down and hooked my hands under his arms. When I pulled him up, everything went black for a moment. I fought off the dizziness and pushed him forward.

  We walked for another hour. There were no words spoken between us. We just kept moving. We met up with the trail again, and saw a perfectly preserved bootprint right in the middle of it. When we crossed over to the other side of the trail, we heard a stream. When we got to it, we both dropped our spears, fell down on the ground, and drank the cold water. If someone had seen us at that moment, he could have walked right up and shot us in the head.

  I sat up and splashed the water on my face. It was so cold it hurt. The sun was above us, shining down on us with no warmth at all. It felt like even the sun had abandoned us, another strange thought. I shivered.

  “This stream must lead to the lake,” I said.

  Vinnie didn’t answer me. He was on his hands and knees, the water dripping from his face.

  “Vinnie.”

  “Do you hear it?” he said.

  “Hear what?”

  “The music.”

  “Vinnie, there’s no music.”

  “The water,” he said. “It’s making music.”

  “Don’t leave me, Vinnie. Don’t give up.”

  “The water flows from the four hills to the Path of Souls.”

  I crawled over to him, grabbed his collar and pulled his shoulders up so he was facing me. The tape was coming off his face. New blood ran down his neck.

  “Vinnie, I’m gonna tape you up again. And then we’re gonna go get the guys who killed your brother. Okay? We’re gonna go fuck them up right now.”

  His eyes came into focus. “The Path of Souls, Alex. Tom’s already there.”

  “Yes,” I said. “He’s there. But it’s not your time yet. Or mine.”

  He looked into my eyes for a long time. Then he nodded. He pulled the bloody tape off his face without flinching. I dried everything off as well as I could with my shirttail, and then I put new tape on his face while he held his hair back. When I was done, he stood up and gave me his hand to help me up.

  Vinnie reached into his pocket and pulled out Tom’s wristwatch. I had forgotten all about it. He wiped some of the mud off the band, touched the hands through the broken crystal. “Let’s go find them,” he said.

  I picked up my spear. It was a good heavy stick, with a sharp point on one end. This is what we had. This and the element of surprise.

  We followed the stream for the next half hour. The sound of the water running over the rocks was hypnotic. It made me drift off into more memories. The flashing lights on a patrol car, the patterns the lights would make on a wall. Riding on a bus, working a baseball in my hands.

  Then, a sudden noise. We both froze. It sounded like something moving in water. A boat, maybe?

  We walked slowly, careful not to make any noise, holding our spears with both hands like a pair of primitive hunters. I could see the water now through the trees. The stream ran down a little wash and into the lake, maybe fifty yards away.

  We made our way down to the shoreline, hiding behind the thick wall of trees. Finally, we saw what was making the
noise.

  It was a moose, calmly chewing on a great green mass of water plants. On another day it would have been funny, finally seeing a moose up here.

  I let my breath out.

  And then I saw the plane in the distance.

  “That plane—” Vinnie said. He stood behind the tree next to mine, looking out at the water.

  “It’s Gannon’s.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  It was a small lake, maybe a quarter mile across. The plane was right in the middle, spinning slowly in the wind. It had to be anchored there. The nose of the plane drifted around toward us.

  Somebody was sitting on one of the floats.

  “Alex, who is that?”

  The bottoms of his boots were just skimming the water. He was wearing a green poncho.

  And that hat. I recognized it.

  Gannon was right there in front of us, sitting outside his plane. The way his hat was tipped forward, it looked like he was asleep.

  “Am I seeing things?” Vinnie said.

  “If you are, then I am, too.”

  “Is he really just sitting out there taking a nap?”

  “If he is, we’ve got to get to him before he wakes up. Think we can swim out there without making too much noise?”

  “We don’t have to,” Vinnie said. “Look.”

  He pointed to a spot along the shoreline, maybe a third of the way around from where we were standing. A yellow rubber raft was drifting lazily, just a few feet from shore.

  “You figure that boat was tied up to the plane?” I said. “And somehow got loose?”

  “It looks that way.”

  “I don’t like this, Vinnie. It’s too easy.”

  “How many men flew in, do you think?”

  “Well, if Gannon is involved in all this, then everyone else at the lodge has to be, too, right?”

  “You would think,” he said. “Unless—”

  “Unless he did this all on his own,” I said. “Or with somebody else we don’t even know.”

  “Didn’t Helen say she wasn’t even there at the lodge when they came back?”