Blood Is the Sky: An Alex McKnight Mystery (15 page)

Read Blood Is the Sky: An Alex McKnight Mystery Online

Authors: Steve Hamilton

Tags: #Mystery, #Thriller, #Suspense, #Adult

BOOK: Blood Is the Sky: An Alex McKnight Mystery
10.37Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
“This is gonna hurt,” I said as I put his left arm on the table, pushing the sleeve of his coat up. As soon as I touched his arm with the hot towel, he stood up and pushed me away.
“Tom,” he said. “I’ve got to help Tom.”
“Vinnie, get back here.”
He went out the door and jumped down off the front porch. “I’ve got to help him,” he said. “The bears.”
I chased him down, grabbed him around the waist.
“The bears,” he said. “The bears.”
“They’re gone,” I said. “Come on, Vinnie. Sit down. The bears are gone.”
I pulled him back to the porch and sat him down on it. We were back outside in the cold air now. I took a deep breath and tried to clear my head. Then I squeezed out the soap onto the hot towel and pressed it onto his arm. He closed his eyes.
I washed him off as well as I could, starting with the cuts in his arm, then his face. The blood turned the towel pink. “Stay here,” I said. I went into the cabin and took the pot off the stove, brought it outside and put it down next to him. I took out a strip of fabric and pressed it against his arm.
“These cuts aren’t as bad as I thought,” I said to him. “It’s a good thing you had this coat on.”
He looked at me. For the first time since I found him up there, he looked right at me. His eyes were red.
“We’ve got another problem,” I said. I took another
strip out of the pot and wrapped it around his arm. “The plane came back a while ago. It circled around a couple of times and then it landed. Or at least I thought it did. But when I got back, the plane wasn’t here.”
With the fabric wrapped around his arm, I took two more thin strips out of the pot and tied them around the edges, tight enough to keep the bandage in place.
“The plane didn’t land on the lake, Vinnie. It must have gone down in the woods.”
Vinnie kept looking at me, until it finally sank in. He turned his head and looked out at the lake.
“You can’t land anywhere else,” I said.
As soon as I said it, I knew it wasn’t true. You can land somewhere else. There were other lakes. If you flew over this lake and kept going north, and you saw that the bears were uncovering your secret, the secret you had buried in the loose ground on the side of the stream, you would know that Vinnie and Alex were about to become your biggest problem. And so you would circle back and land your plane, but not on this lake. You would land on a different lake.
I thought back to our trip up here, flying over the trees. The other lakes, all strung out like pearls on the ground, connected by the thin streams. There was one lake, to the south of this one. I tried to remember how far away it was.
You land on the nearest lake. You get out of your plane. You know these woods. You know there’s a trail to Lake Agawaatese.
You come quietly.
“Vinnie,” I said. “We’ve got to get out of here.” I stood up and looked around, leaving Vinnie on the porch. I followed the line of trees with my eyes, all the way around the lake.
That’s when I heard the first gunshot.
Vinnie was down. That was the first thing that came to me. I ran over to the front porch and said his name, saw blood on the side of his face. I heard another shot. Wood chips flew from the side of the cabin.
I grabbed him by the coat and pulled him to his feet. There was another gunshot, and then another. Everything after that was a mad rush of fear and adrenaline. We ran like animals, tripping over rocks and roots, pine boughs lashing our faces. There was nothing left but running. No thought. No sanity. No reason. Just running through the trees with our hearts pumping in our throats.
Vinnie tripped and went down hard. I picked him up, just as we heard a branch snapping somewhere behind us. We kept running. He went one way around a great rock, I went another. I thought I’d pick him up on the other side, but he wasn’t there.
There was a stream here, maybe the same stream we had seen before, maybe not. I had no idea where the hell I was. I almost called his name out loud, then realized how suicidal that would be. I stopped and listened. I could hear nothing but my own breathing and the soft sound of the water on the rocks.
Something moved in my peripheral vision. I ducked
instinctively, waiting for the rifle blast. Vinnie’s face appeared around the trunk of a tree. He was holding his right ear, the whole side of his face painted in blood. He was leaning against the tree like it was the only thing holding him upright.
I went to him, pushed his hand away, and looked at his face. He brushed me away and pointed at the ground. I looked down and saw my own footprints. We were making it pretty damn easy for them to find us.
“Come on, this way,” I said. I was about to take him up the stream but thought better of it. That’s exactly where they’d expect us to go. Instead, I led Vinnie downstream for a good hundred yards, cutting back against our original direction. The water was cold and it soaked my boots again, but what the hell.
We jumped out of the stream and hit the woods again. We couldn’t run anymore. But we kept moving. There was no trail here. We didn’t want a trail. We squeezed our way between trees and climbed over rocks. I don’t know how long we kept going. I don’t know how far away we got from them, or how hard we made it for them to find us. When Vinnie started to slow down and stumble, I figured we had gone about as far away as we were going to get.
We came to a large ridge of exposed rock. I peered down over it and saw that there was an overhang. “Vinnie, down here,” I said.
I helped him crawl down over the ledge. He collapsed right there, his back against the wall of rock. I grabbed the trunk of a big pine tree that had fallen down and muscled it over, leaning it against the overhang. When I ducked inside, I saw that I had showered Vinnie with brown pine needles.
I brushed him off and finally got a good look at his face. There was a long furrow in his cheek, where the
bullet had grazed him. His right earlobe was gone.
“Ah, fuck, Vinnie,” I said. “God damn it all.”
He was breathing hard, a long line of mucus hanging from his nose.
“Give me your arm,” I said. He was losing blood a hell of a lot faster from his face, so I rolled up his sleeve and untied his bandage. I took it off and pressed it against his cheek and his ear. He struggled, but I held on tight. Finally, he gave up and went limp against me. I leaned back against the rock. He slid down with his head in my lap. I kept the cloth pressed against his face, closed my eyes, and listened.
Every sound in the forest, every mouse running over a leaf, every breath of the wind—it all made me wonder if they had found us yet. They could be standing on top of the ridge right now, looking down at us, waiting for us to move so they could shoot us.
It’s just a matter of time, I thought. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, just how fucking hopeless it was. You’ve got no food, no water, no weapons, no way out. You’re gonna die here, just like Tom and those other men.
Those other men. They have to be the reason for all this. Somehow, they got hooked up with something bad, and Tom went down with them. And now us.
Fuck that, I thought. We’re not dead yet.
We are not dead yet. Five words. Keep saying them to yourself, over and over.
We are not dead yet.
Vinnie shivered. He tried to say something, but I couldn’t make any sense of it.
“You’ve got to hang on,” I said. “For God’s sake, just hang on, okay?” I tried to huddle up closer to him, to keep him warm.
“Don’t give up,” I said. “Please, Vinnie. We’ll get through this.”
I hung my head down. I was so exhausted, I felt myself sliding into a half-awake dream. I felt pine branches hitting me in the face, felt my legs running, my lungs aching for air.
I saw dead bodies in the ground. I smelled the burned flesh.
Minutes passed.
Hours.
The shadows grew longer all around us. I kept slipping in and out of the dream.
Running. Running away from the men in the ground.
The hand reaching out like a claw.
The smell. God save me, the smell.
Something woke me up with a start. A sudden noise above us. I held my breath and listened.
Nothing.
I looked down at Vinnie. His eyes were open. “Alex,” he said.
“What is it?”
“Is this really happening?”
“Yes,” I said. I was still holding the cloth against the side of his head. The whole thing was stained red. “We’ve got to figure out what to do.”
He took the cloth from me and pushed himself up. Blood dripped down his neck.
“Keep holding that,” I said. “You’ve got to keep the pressure on.”
He winced as he put the cloth back to his face. “I think we’re having ourselves a bad day,” he said.
How he could make a joke like that, I couldn’t even imagine. But it made me feel better. Somehow, the Vinnie I knew was back. It made me feel like we still had a fighting chance.
“This might be a dumb question,” I said, “but why would they leave us out here overnight and then come
back the next day? Why didn’t they just kill us yesterday?”
“Alex, that wasn’t Guy and Maskwa shooting at us.”
“They’re the only people who knew we were up here.”
“It couldn’t have been them.”
“Why not?”
“They would have found us by now, for one thing. And they wouldn’t have shot at us from so far away.”
“Why is that?”
“Guy and Maskwa knew we weren’t armed.”
“They knew we’d run away as soon as we saw them.”
“They could have still gotten a lot closer. Anybody else would have had to be a lot more careful.”
I thought about it. “Okay, so who is it?”
He took the cloth off his face, turned it over, then put it back. “God only knows, Alex. Whoever did that …” He pointed in the general direction behind us. I didn’t have to wonder what he was talking about. “Whoever that was, I think that’s who we’re talking about here.”
“If it’s not Guy and Maskwa,” I said, “then where are they? They were supposed to be here today.”
“Maybe they already got to them,” he said. His voice was drained of all emotion. “First them and now us.”
“If that happened, then there’s nothing we can do about it. We’ve got to think about getting ourselves out of this.”
“Time’s not on our side,” he said. “I’ll probably stop bleeding, but we’ve got to find some food. I saw juniper by the stream. And some dandelions, but that’s not gonna do much for us. We’ve got to get to them soon, while we still have some strength left.”
“Do you think they’re at the cabin?”
“Probably. Our only chance is to try to sneak up on them. We should wait until nightfall.”
“What, try to go back there in the dark? They’ll have lights.”
“Exactly,” he said. “That’ll be our only advantage. If it’s like last night, there’ll be enough moonlight for us to see everything we need to. If they have flashlights, their eyes will never get adjusted to the dark.”
“Okay,” I said. “We take our shot at ’em. We do it tonight.”
“Look at that sky,” he said. Through the branches we could see another blazing sunset. It looked just like the sky from the night before, but of course everything was different now. The whole world had tipped upside down.
“Last night,” he said, “I was thinking to myself, that’s Tom’s sky, the ‘Pleasing Sky,’ the sun going down in the west. I thought it was a good omen.”
He closed his eyes and kept them closed for a long time. His breathing grew ragged.
“Vinnie, are you all right?”
“Our grandmother used to tell us these stories,” he said. “These stories about our ancestors, all the things they did, the ceremonies, the medicines. Here’s Tom and me, growing up in this house on the reservation, going to the public school. We didn’t know anything about this stuff. But our grandmother, she made sure we learned our real history. She made us promise we’d remember it and tell it to our own children.”
He stopped for a moment to wipe his eyes with one hand. He kept the other hand held tight against his face. The blood was drying on his fingers.
“You don’t go to war for land, or for power. You go to war to avenge your brother’s death. You gather your warriors, you gather your medicines. You make a war pole, you do your war dance. You sing the war song. I don’t remember how the song goes, but there’s one part that always stuck with me. Something about looking up at the sky and seeing the red, and knowing that someone
would die. ‘Blood is the sky.’ That’s the line I remember ‘Blood is the sky.’”
He dipped one finger into the dirt and rubbed a streak across each cheek. “You paint your face with black,” he said. He dipped his finger in the dirt again, leaned over close and put a streak on each of my cheeks, as well.
He took some of his own blood and rubbed another streak on each cheek, above the black. “And red,” he said. He took more blood and rubbed it on my face.
“Then you’re ready,” he said. “You’re ready to go to war.”

Other books

See You on the Backlot by Thomas Nealeigh
Island by Peter Lerangis
At Blade's Edge by Lauren Dane
Worth Everything by Karen Erickson
WakingMaggie by Cindy Jacks