Benning and Dougherty returned fire into the woods. Their bullets clipped branches and sent splintery sprays of bark flying as they raked the area where the shots seemed to have originated. That gave me the chance to grab Schanno, help him to his feet, and both of us reached the cover of the woods, where we flattened ourselves in the underbrush.
“Keep moving, Wally,” I said.
He tried but couldn’t go far.
“Where are you hit?”
“Leg,” he said, clutching his right thigh.
Blood wormed between his fingers, and I took a look. The bullet had gone cleanly through his leg, leaving two holes, entrance and exit. He was bleeding badly, but it wasn’t pulsing, so I didn’t think an artery had been clipped. I took my shirt off, tore it in half, and made two compresses, one for each hole. I still had on the drab green T-shirt I’d put on underneath that morning.
“Hold those in place,” I told him.
I slipped my belt off and wrapped it around his leg so that it covered the compresses. I pulled the belt as tight as I could and looped it in a knot to hold it.
“Don’t move,” I said.
“Where are you going?”
“To find out who saved our asses.”
“We’re saved?” Somehow, Schanno managed a smile.
I kept close to the ground and worked my way north, away from the lake. The shots from Benning and Dougherty had become intermittent. The shots from the woods had ceased altogether. I wondered about that. I also wondered about Meloux and Henry Wellington.
In the undergrowth, thirty yards from where Schanno and I had taken cover, I spotted a booted foot sticking out from behind a fallen log. I approached carefully. What I found nearly broke my heart.
Trinky Pollard lay on a bed of brown pine needles, staring up at the canopy of branches high above us. Next to her was a carbine. The rifle butt was splashed with blood. The blood had come from a bullet hole torn through Trinky’s fine, slender throat. I knelt and felt for a pulse, but I knew in my heart it was hopeless. A round from the house chunked into the trunk of the nearest pine and I flinched in reflex.
How she had managed to get there, I couldn’t begin to guess. Somehow, she’d found a way to cover our backs and had paid an awful price for saving our lives.
Two more rounds popped from the house and snipped off branches far to my right. They were firing wildly. That one of their rounds had found Trinky Pollard was pure blind luck on their part.
I grabbed Trinky’s carbine and dug in her pockets, where I found two extra clips. I aimed at the doorway of the deck and pulled off three rounds in rapid succession. I loped to Schanno and handed him the weapon and the clips. He frowned at the blood, still wet on the stock.
“Where’d you get this?” he asked.
“I’ll tell you later. I want you to use it to keep them occupied.”
“What about you?”
“I’m going to get my rifle from the Bronco. If these guys are bright, they’re going to divide up and go hunting pretty soon. We need to even the odds.”
“Whatever you say.” Schanno propped himself against the trunk of a pine, laid his cheek against the carbine stock, aimed through the underbrush, and fired.
I took off and circled toward the front of the big house. At the edge of the yard, I paused, eyeing the couple hundred feet of open ground that lay between me and my old Bronco. I didn’t want to get caught out there, but I didn’t have a lot of choices. I finally committed to a mad dash, keeping the Bronco between me and the front porch. I pressed myself against the passenger side. The metal was heating up in the morning sun, and I felt it, warm, through the back of my T-shirt. I reached around to grasp the handle of the rear door.
That’s when I heard the front door of the house open. I ducked, but not before I saw Benning and Rupert Wellington step onto the porch. Wellington held a weapon, a scoped rifle. I dropped to the ground and flattened myself on the gravel of the drive. I could see the bottom of the porch steps. I watched the feet of the two men descend and saw them separate. Benning dashed for the woods that hid Schanno. Wellington headed in the direction his brother and Meloux had gone.
After they left, I slipped into my Bronco and pulled my Winchester from its zippered bag. I grabbed a box of cartridges from the toolbox where I’d stored them. Quickly, I fed several rounds into the rifle and put a handful in my pocket. I started for the woods, after Benning. At the back of the house, Dougherty and Schanno were still exchanging fire. Schanno thought he was keeping them busy. Dougherty knew the score better, knew that Schanno was about to be hit from the flank. I had to get to Benning fast.
I caught a glimpse of him creeping his way toward the lake. The deep layer of pine needles under our feet deadened the sound of our movement. I saw Benning pause and study the ground. I realized he’d found Trinky’s body. It confused him, delayed him in his mission, and gave me an opportunity to get myself set. It wasn’t a difficult shot, and I didn’t hesitate to take it. My rifle cracked; the recoil kicked my shoulder; Benning dropped like a boneless man. I ran to the spot. He’d fallen a few feet from Trinky, where he lay facedown while tendrils of bright red blood crawled into the brown needles. I took his automatic, which turned out to be a 9 millimeter SIG-Sauer with a full clip. I returned to the front of the house. Leaving my rifle at the door, I slipped inside with the SIG. From the back came the pop of Dougherty’s automatic. I worked my way through the rooms and peered around a corner at the sliding deck door. Dougherty stood with his back to the wall. A couple of seconds later, he swung through the glassless opening and pulled off a round in Schanno’s direction. Before he could turn back, I put myself in a firing stance with the SIG and aimed at his torso.
“Drop your weapon, Dougherty!” I shouted.
His head swiveled. He stood frozen, caught in a moment of indecision. Then he spun, bringing his own weapon around to fire.
He bucked forward before either of us got off a shot and he fell to the floor. A dark red stain bloomed low on the back of his shirt. Schanno, I thought. Dougherty, in the moment he stood wavering, had presented a fine target for the carbine, and Schanno hadn’t wasted the opportunity.
Dougherty groaned. I crossed the room and took his weapon. If I’d had time, I would have tried to do something for him, but Rupert Wellington was outside, bent on killing his brother and Meloux.
I stuffed the SIG into my belt and retrieved my rifle from the front porch.
Then I went hunting.
FORTY-NINE
I entered the woods where I’d seen Meloux and Henry Wellington disappear. Their trail was easy to follow, unsettlingly easy. Obviously, they’d been more intent on speed than secrecy. They’d headed west and very quickly joined the trail that led to the ruins of the cabin in the hills. There was a lot of evidence of their recent passage: footprints where the soil was soft, trampled weeds, brush along the edges of the trail with visible broken branches. Meloux and his son were blundering along like elephants.
I found the place where Rupert Wellington had picked up their tracks. His own were just as easy to follow.
They were many minutes ahead of me. Meloux, spry as he was, was still quite old, and I didn’t believe he could hold very long to the kind of pace that would be necessary to keep them ahead of Rupert. I wondered why he hadn’t just taken to the woods and used all he knew, his vast knowledge of hunting and tracking, to hide himself. Probably it was because he had his son with him and that made a difference in his thinking.
I padded along as quickly and quietly as I could, knowing it would do no good to give myself away and get shot in the bargain.
I’d gone a quarter of a mile when I came to a little creek I remembered from the day before. Beyond it was the meadow where Meloux had paused to take in the mint scent of the wild bergamot. On the far side of the clearing, just slipping into the trees, was a flash of light blue. Rupert Wellington’s polo shirt. He wasn’t far ahead.
I leaped the creek but waited before entering the m
eadow. I didn’t want to risk becoming a clear target for Wellington, should he look back. From my right came a low, birdlike whistle. There was Meloux, twenty yards away, with his son beside him, both of them eyeing me over a fallen, rotting log. I wove toward them through the underbrush at the edge of the clearing.
“Henry, you were too easy to follow,” I whispered. “Rupert knows you came this way.”
The old man actually gave me a sly wink. “A trick the Ojibwe learned from the bear. Give the hunter an easy trail, then circle behind.” He stood up. “We can go back now. Or”—he looked to his son for the decision—“we can become the hunters.”
Wellington turned to me. “What’s the situation back at the house?”
“Benning and Dougherty have been taken care of. Wally’s hit. He needs medical attention. And, Henry,” I said to Meloux, “Trinky Pollard’s dead. They killed her.”
Meloux’s face was stone. His eyes were dark ice. In the quiet at the edge of the clearing, his breath became fast and angry. I couldn’t ever remember seeing him upset, but I could see it now.
“If we go after Rupert,” Wellington said, “we risk ourselves and your friend Schanno. What’s the point? We should go back.”
I thought Meloux probably felt differently. Hunting Rupert Wellington, the black heart behind so much recent misery and the son of a heart even blacker, would have been his choice. Meloux was Mide, concerned with the wholeness and balance of being. Hunting an enemy was not alien to his understanding of the forces that kept that balance. But he’d given the decision to his son, and the decision had been made.
He nodded and we all turned back together.
From his house, Wellington called the provincial police station in the town of Flame Lake. Then he turned his attention to Dougherty, who’d lost a lot of blood but was still conscious.
Henry and I went to see about Schanno. He wasn’t where I’d left him. We found him sitting propped against a pine tree next to the body of Trinky Pollard. He looked empty, his face pale, his eyes blank.
“You need to lie down, Wally,” I told him gently. “You’re going into shock. The wound,” I said, though I suspected it was more than that.
“I don’t get it, Cork.” He stared, uncomprehending, at Trinky’s body.
“She must have followed us, been watching our backs, Wally.”
Later, the police found her green SUV, the one that had tailed us from Thunder Bay, parked in the woods, not far away.
He shook his head slowly. “I was the one who was supposed to watch our backs.”
Meloux had seated himself between Trinky Pollard and Benning. He began to sing softly. Singing, I knew, to help guide them onto the Path of Souls.
“Lie down, Wally.” I took his shoulders and urged him into a prone position. I lifted his feet and propped them on Benning’s body to keep them elevated and keep blood flowing to his brain. I didn’t think about the irony of that situation. I did it because it made sense.
Schanno stared up at the sky, which was broken into blue fragments by the green weave of pine boughs above us. “I’m too old for this,” he said.
I put a hand on his shoulder. “Is anybody ever young enough?”
From far away came the cry of a siren, a sound as out of place in that quiet morning as all the death that had come before it.
Schanno and Dougherty were airlifted by helicopter to the community medical center in Ignace. Dougherty, devastated by Benning’s death, talked to investigators and told them what he knew, plenty to corroborate the story the rest of us had given.
Trinky Pollard’s body was taken to Thunder Bay. A stepbrother arranged for her memorial service, which was held a week later. Schanno and I drove up from Minnesota for it. Most of the people at the service were former RCMP colleagues. She didn’t have much family. The memorial was brief, and afterward her stepbrother, in accordance with her wishes, went out on a boat he’d chartered and spread her ashes across the water of Lake Superior.
A couple of days after the shootings, Rupert Wellington walked into the police station in Flame Lake and turned himself in. The press had arrived by then, and the papers and television news were full of images of him, dirty and tired and hungry, trying to use his handcuffed hands to block his face from the cameras. Later, we would all learn that the sounds of the sirens had alerted him to the danger of returning to his brother’s place, and he’d kept to the woods, hoping to figure a way out of the mess he’d gotten himself into. There wasn’t any.
Meloux stayed in Canada. He spent ten days with his son and his grandchildren, who came from British Columbia and Toronto to be with him and their father. I had no doubt Meloux’s heart was as light and healthy as it had ever been.
Immediately after the shootings, I spent a night in Ignace making sure Schanno was okay in the hospital there. The doctors wanted to keep him a couple of days for observation. The provincial police had given me permission to return to Minnesota, with the understanding that they could call me back if I was needed. The next morning, I took off for home.
At a gas station in Grand Portage, just south of the border, I called Jo. I tried her office first, but Fran, her secretary, told me she wasn’t going to be in all day. She wouldn’t tell me why, and I didn’t like the reservation in her voice. I called home. Jo picked up. I could tell something was wrong.
“It can wait until you get home. You’ve been through enough the last couple of days,” she said.
“Jo, what is it?”
She was quiet, considering whether to put me off or let me in.
“It’s Jenny, Cork. She started bleeding last night. I took her to the hospital. She lost the baby.”
“Ah, Jesus.” I leaned my forehead against the wall above the pay phone. “How is she?”
“A mess.”
“I’ll be home as soon as I can. No more than three hours.”
“Don’t push it, Cork. It’s over. Just get home safely.”
I spent the rest of the drive feeling shitty, railing at God, beating myself for not being there for my daughter when she needed me.
I pulled into the drive in the late afternoon and parked in the shade of our elm. Stevie came running from the backyard with Walleye not far behind. My son was all bounce. Walleye ambled along with a kind of patient obedience. His tongue was hanging out, and I felt sorry for the old boy. Stevie had clearly worn him out. Walleye was probably hoping Meloux was with me, a sign that they could both return to their quiet lives as over-the-hill bachelors.
“Dad!” Stevie cried. “Watch this!” He turned to the dog. “Come on, Walleye. Come on, boy.”
Walleye took his time but eventually joined us under the canopy of the elm.
“Okay, boy, sit.”
Walleye sat, blinking tolerantly.
“Now roll over, boy.”
Stevie used his arms in an exaggerated rollover gesture, but Walleye didn’t get off his butt.
“Here, like this.”
Stevie eased the dog’s front legs forward so that Walleye’s whole body settled on the ground. With his small, eager hands, my son urged the dog onto his side, then his back, and finally onto his belly once again.
“We’re still practicing that one,” Stevie explained.
“Good work,” I said. “Your mom inside?”
“Yeah.” Stevie’s face clouded and his dark young eyes got painfully serious. “She’s with Jenny.”
“Don’t work him too hard.” I nodded toward Walleye, who’d lowered his head onto his paws and was relaxing in the grass. “There’s a saying about old dogs and new tricks.”
“I know that one,” Stevie said. “But Walleye is extra smart. Come on, boy. I’ll show you how to catch a Frisbee.”
Walleye’s placid brown eyes gave me a brief, pleading look.
“Come on,” Stevie said. He nuzzled the dog’s nose against his own.
What could Walleye do? What could any good heart do in the face of such uncompromising affection? The old dog staggered to his fee
t and lumbered after Stevie.
Jo met me at the door. She kissed me warmly and gave me a long, heartfelt hug. She whispered against my neck, “I’m glad you’re back. I’ve been watching the news reports of what happened up there. It sounds awful.”
“I imagine what’s happened here hasn’t been easy either. Jenny upstairs?”
Jo nodded. “She hasn’t been out of her room since we came back from the hospital.”
Thunder Bay (Cork O'Connor Mysteries) Page 30