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

by Steve Hamilton

  “I don’t know, Alex.”

  “Someone has to know this plane is here,” I said. I tried hard to keep the desperation out of my voice. “You can’t just fly a plane into the woods and not have someone notice it’s gone.”

  “They were all packing up,” Vinnie said. He kept looking out the window, his whole body slumped in the seat like somebody had pulled his plug. “The lodge could have been empty.”

  “What about DeMers? Somebody will be looking for him.”

  “Yeah. Eventually.”

  “Are there any more of those energy bars down there? You should eat something.”

  “I didn’t see any.”

  I leaned my head back against the seat. As soon as I closed my eyes, I felt dizzy. Bad idea. When I opened them again, the plane had spun around so that we were facing the spot on the shore where we had left Gannon. I could just barely make out his body, lying in the dirt. The plane kept turning slowly, Gannon’s body and all the trees moving across our line of sight, the whole world spinning around us.

  I picked up the headset again, yelled into the transmitter a few more times, then threw it back down.

  “At least I got him,” Vinnie said. “At least he’ll go down with us.”

  “Stop it, Vinnie. Stop talking like that.”

  “I killed him, Alex. At least I did that.”

  “We’ve got a rifle now. Hell, we can go shoot that moose.”

  “You go ahead,” he said. “I don’t think I can move anymore.”

  “You rest a while,” I said. “I’ll take care of it. Don’t worry.”

  Vinnie closed his eyes. I tried to fight it, but my eyelids dropped. I felt dizzy again but then it passed and I was almost comfortable, except for the pain in my gut and the way my feet felt, like they weren’t even part of my body. My clothes were still dripping wet, but they didn’t feel cold anymore. In fact, I was starting to feel warm. Just a few minutes with my eyes closed, in this warm, comfortable seat—

  I stood up and hit my head on the plane’s low ceiling. “Vinnie,” I said. I touched his face, the red and black stripes on his cheeks, now smeared by the water. “Vinnie, you gotta hang in there.”

  He didn’t move.

  I pulled his coat tighter around his neck. I climbed back over the rear seats, looking for something else to keep him warm. There was a metal box in the very back of the plane. Inside it were a polar fleece blanket and a first aid kit.

  “This is great,” I said. “We could have used these two days ago.”

  I took the blanket back up to Vinnie and wrapped it around him. I was about to break out some bandages, then thought better of it. Let him sleep for a little while. In the meantime, I’m gonna go get us some food.

  I picked up Gannon’s rifle, opened the door, and climbed down the ladder to the float. I looked under the belly of the plane, across to the other float. DeMers’s body was still lying there. One boot was in the water, and the stain was rising up his pant leg.

  “What the hell happened, DeMers? How did you get mixed up in this?”

  I looked down at the cold water. Just the thought of jumping back in made me start shivering again.

  “You’re not talking, eh? I don’t blame you.”

  The shadow of a cloud passed over us.

  “God damn it, DeMers. I think I know what happened. You got yourself killed trying to get us out of here.”

  A wind picked up in the trees. I could hear it rattling the branches.

  “Am I right?”

  The wind moved out and rippled the water.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t even think about that right now,” I said, “I’ve got a moose to kill.”

  I wasn’t looking forward to that, either. All we had was Vinnie’s little pocket knife. We’d have to make a fire somewhere, and cook the meat. None of which would happen if I kept standing there talking to a dead man.

  I was just about ready to jump in when I heard the noise. In the distance, it sounded like—

  A plane.

  The buzzing grew louder and louder. My first thought was, here’s more horror coming from the skies, another planeload of killers. My second thought was thank God, it’s Guy and Maskwa, coming to get us out of here at last.

  It was neither.

  A blue Cessna finally appeared over the tree line, heading north. I stood there on the float, watching it. I didn’t hide. I didn’t wave at it. I just stood there with Gannon’s rifle in my hand, watching it bank and circle around and begin its descent onto our lake. The pilot had spotted us. There was no way he could have missed us. When the plane was low enough, I saw the official markings and emblem of the Ontario Provincial Police. That’s when it occurred to me.

  Constable DeMers was dead. His body is hanging off the other side of this plane.

  And I’m holding the rifle that probably killed him.

  By the time they hit the water, I had thrown the rifle back into the plane. Vinnie was still out cold. As the plane got closer, I saw somebody leaning out the window with a megaphone. I couldn’t hear a word over the engine noise.

  Finally, when the plane was thirty yards away, I could make out what he was saying. “Did you hear me? I said, put your hands in the air! Right now!”

  I put my hands up. As the plane drew close, it kicked up enough turbulence in the water to make me lose my balance. I grabbed on to the ladder, and spent the next minute or two listening to the man yell at me while he climbed out of his own plane and tried to jump onto ours. It’s a tough maneuver, and this man obviously didn’t have the knack for it. He ended up with one leg on the float and one leg in the water, all the way up to his crotch. It was the constable with the boxer face, one of the men who had shown up when we had found the Suburban in the woods.

  “Son of a bitch, that’s cold,” he said. I was about to tell him he didn’t know anything about how cold the water was, but I held my tongue. I knew the scene was about to go from bad to worse.

  “That man on the other float,” I said. “That’s DeMers. He’s dead.”

  That’s when I noticed Reynaud getting out of the plane. “McKnight, what did you just say?”

  It all went to hell in the next few minutes. It didn’t matter whether we were in America or Canada—cops are cops, and they’re supposed to stay in control of everything around them, but this was something they’d never had to deal with before. I kept my mouth shut while they piled out of their plane and climbed aboard Gannon’s. The other constable we had met, the one with the suntan, was the pilot. Reynaud jumped out first, landing light on her feet. She climbed up the ladder and down the other side, making her way out on the far float to her partner’s body. I didn’t see her reaction. I was too busy cooperating with the other constables, putting my hands behind my back so they could cuff me.

  Of course, once they cuffed me, they couldn’t get me into their plane. On another day it would have been funny.

  “This other man in the passenger’s seat,” Boxer Face said to me, “is he dead, too?”

  “That’s Vinnie LeBlanc. You met him before. We need to get him to a hospital right away.”

  She came back through the plane, looked at Vinnie, put her hand on his neck, and then came down to me. She looked at me for exactly one second and then backhanded me right across the face.

  “I’m sorry about DeMers,” I said. “But I didn’t do it. He was dead when we got here.”

  “Who killed him?” Her face was red, and she was rubbing her hand.

  “As far as I can tell, Hank Gannon. He’s over there on the shoreline.” I nodded my head in the general direction.

  “Where?”

  “Up in the trees. He’s dead, too.”

  I felt one of the other constables squeezing my shoulder.

  “We did kill Gannon. He was trying to shoot us.”

  “We saw you with the rifle, McKnight. You threw it back in the plane when we landed.”

  I took a deep breath. It was probably a good time to stop talking. That would
have been the smart thing. But nobody’s ever accused me of being smart. “Look,” I said, “we’ve been up here for two days. Guy Berard and his grandfather flew us up here.”

  “I know,” she said.

  That stopped me. “Where are they now?” I said. “Are they—”

  “They’re at home,” she said. “Why did they fly you out here?”

  “It’s a long story, okay? We need to get Vinnie back to a doctor. I’ll tell you the rest on the way.”

  She looked at the two men, then at me. “My partner is dead, McKnight. The best cop I’ve ever known. The best … human being. He’s dead.”

  “So are the other men,” I said. “Okay? I should tell you that much right now. We found them.”

  “What men?”

  “Vinnie’s brother, Tom. And Albright, and the rest of the men who were missing.”

  “What are you talking about? They flew back out on Saturday.” “No,” I said. “We found them. A couple of miles north of the cabin.”

  She didn’t know what to say to that. Not that I blamed her. A dead partner, that was more than enough. That’s one thing I knew all too well.

  “I’ll tell you everything I know,” I said. “Please, we’ve got to get Vinnie out of here. He’s been shot in the face, for God’s sake.”

  That woke her up a little bit. “Jim, you better get on the radio.”

  “I don’t think we’ll get through,” he said. “Not sitting down here on this lake. We need to get up in the air.”

  “All right, you better take these men back, then. I’ll stay here.”

  “Natty, you can’t do that,” he said.

  “I’m not leaving my partner,” she said. Her face was like stone now. “Get in the air and call for backup.”

  They had to drag Vinnie out of his seat and carry him to the other plane. After all we had been through, he just about drowned right there. They took my handcuffs off, let me jump across, then put the handcuffs back on when I was in my seat. The pilot spun the plane around and gave it the gas.

  “Smallest damned lake I’ve ever taken off from,” he said. He pulled back on the yoke and the plane fought its way up into the air.

  As we climbed over the trees, I looked down at Gannon’s plane. Reynaud stood there on the float, holding on to the ladder, watching us fly away.

  Chapter Nineteen

  When we were in the air, the pilot called in the basics. A constable dead on the scene, another man, the owner of the plane, dead on the shore. Five men in a shallow grave north of the cabin site. At least according to me. Boxer Face sat in the passenger’s seat, looking back at me every few minutes. It was hard to read his expression. He was probably thinking twenty different things at once. I was sure one of those things was just how good it would feel to open the door and toss us right out of the plane.

  They didn’t ask me to tell the rest of my story, as I had promised. They were saving that for the ground.

  We flew for an hour and a half. The drone of the engines eventually got to me, and I drifted in and out of a trance as we bounced and buzzed our way all the way to a small airport. It was a true amphibian plane, one that could land on pavement as well as water. When we got out, three OPP cars and an ambulance were waiting for us.

  They put Vinnie in the back of the ambulance and me in the back of one of the cars. About a half hour later, I was sitting in a bed in the clinic with an IV in one arm and the other arm handcuffed to the bed rail. A doctor was cutting the laces off my boots with scissors while the two constables stood by watching.

  “How long were you out there?” he asked.

  “Most of two days.”

  “Immersion foot,” he said. “Let’s see how bad.”

  “What about Vinnie? How’s he doing?”

  The doctor looked up at the officers. “I don’t know,” he said. “Someone else is working on him.”

  When he finally slipped the boot and sock off, the foot was purple. It looked and felt like some alien thing. “Not good,” he said.

  “What do you have to do now?”

  “We have to let them warm up slowly,” he said. “And then it’s just a matter of keeping them dry and elevated.” He went to work on the other boot.

  “Can one of you guys go see how Vinnie is doing?” I said.

  Neither of them moved. They both stood there and looked at me with their hands folded across their chests.

  “Thanks a lot,” I said.

  Another man, vaguely familiar to me, came in while the doctor was getting my other boot off. That foot looked just as bad. “Nice case of trench foot,” he said. “You’re gonna be hurting for a long time.”

  “Can you tell me about my friend?” I said.

  “They’re cleaning out his wound right now. That duct tape probably saved his life. Was that your idea?”

  “It’s all we had to work with.”

  “That spear that killed Mr. Gannon, was that yours, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who actually killed him?”

  “We both did. We had to.”

  “Mr. McKnight, who physically ran the spear through Mr. Gannon’s body?”

  “Vinnie did.”

  He let out a long breath, closed his eyes, and pinched the bridge of his nose. I realized where I had seen him before. He was the staff sergeant we had seen at the station. This was obviously supposed to be his day off, because he wasn’t wearing his uniform.

  “Your name is Moreland,” I said. “You’re the detachment commander.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve got to understand something. We didn’t kill Constable DeMers.”

  “He was three months away from retirement. Did you know that?”

  “He mentioned it, yes.”

  He opened his case and took out a tape recorder. “So start at the beginning.”

  That’s what I did. I told him everything, from the first time we came up to the lodge, to meeting Guy and his grandfather, flying up to the lake, finding the dead bodies, and then the other plane landing. I told him the whole thing from start to finish, and then I told it to him again, this time with some other men standing around listening to me. The doctor took out the IV and gave me some water. He asked me what I thought I could eat. I said anything they had. While I was waiting for the food, some men from the Royal Mounted Canadian Police came in and I had to tell the whole story one more time.

  The food came right in the middle of my story. It was turkey and mashed potatoes with gravy. I asked the men to forgive my bad manners as I dug into my own little early Thanksgiving.

  When they were all gone, a new constable I’d never seen before stayed to watch me. He looked like he had just started shaving, and he sat in a chair and never took his eyes off me once, like he was expecting me to hop up at any second and try to escape. I lay there, still cuffed to the bed, with my legs propped up with pillows, my feet in the air.

  I must have passed out for a while. When I woke up, the constable had been replaced by Boxer Face. The room was in shadows. I asked the man about Vinnie, but he had nothing to say to me.

  “You’ve got to uncuff me,” I said. “I need to use the bathroom.”

  Nothing. He didn’t even blink.

  “Look, if I was told to sit in a chair and watch somebody who I thought might have killed one of my fellow officers, I’d be acting the same way. Hell, I’d be tempted to do a lot more than just give him the silent treatment.”

  He stared at me.

  “But you need to know something,” I said. “I didn’t kill him. Okay?”

  “If you need to take a piss,” he finally said, “then use the bottle.”

  “You’re a real pal,” I said. Then I proceeded to attempt the impossible—urinating into a urinal bottle with one hand cuffed to the rail.

  “I don’t suppose you’d feel like taking this away,” I said.

  “What do you think?”

  I rang the nurse for some help, then I settled back and tried to sleep a little
bit. It didn’t work. I couldn’t stop thinking about Vinnie, wondering where the hell he was and how he was doing.

  And more than anything, I couldn’t stop wondering what had really happened up there. And why. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  Hours later, when it was dark in the room and the constable had been replaced by yet another, I finally drifted off into a hazy half sleep. In my head I saw pine trees, and a plane turning slowly in the middle of a lake, and the wide-open eyes of a dead man.

  And bears.

  The doctor looked at my feet again in the morning. He told me the color was a lot better, and asked me how they felt.

  “Like hell,” I said. “They itch like crazy.”

  “That’s to be expected,” he said.

  “Any chance I could get some socks? I feel like Frankenstein’s monster lying here.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “I hope you like white cotton socks, because that’s all you’ll be wearing for the next few weeks.”

  “Fine, whatever. Now can you tell me how my friend is doing?”

  “Not too bad, considering. He did lose part of his right ear.”

  “I figured that. Can I see him?”

  The doctor looked at the constable who was lucky enough to draw chair duty that morning. “That’s not up to me,” the doctor said. “There are a couple of men in with him right now, asking more questions.”

  “I’m sure I’m next,” I said.

  I was right. About an hour later, two men came in the room. They were wearing dark gray suits and expensive hair, and I wasn’t surprised when they told me they were from the FBI. It made sense they were there, with five dead men out of seven being Americans. They asked me all the same questions. I gave them the same story. They promised me they’d be speaking to me again if and when I got back to America. If and when, they said.

  I ate some more. I lay there in the bed, quietly going insane.

  Then Constable Reynaud walked in the room. She looked like hell. She looked like she was having almost as bad a week as I was. She told the constable on duty that he could leave, and then she unlocked my handcuffs.

  “We found the bodies,” she said. “Right where you said they’d be.”