Copper River (5 page)

When he handed Cork the cell phone, the man seemed disappointed. “Looks like it got hit by a bullet,” Ren told him. “But here, you can use ours.” He handed Cork the phone he’d taken from Thor’s Lodge on his way back and also a walkie-talkie.

“What’s with this?” Cork asked, looking at the little Motorola unit.

“Mom wanted you to have one of the walkie-talkies. None of the guest cabins have phones, so if you need us in the night or something, just use that.” Ren started to turn away but held up a moment. “The people who shot at you, did you shoot back at them?”

“No.” Cork studied the pad on the cell phone, his finger poised to dial.

“Why not?”

“I’d have been firing on the fly. My shots might have gone wild. Somebody innocent could have been hurt. It was a better idea just to get the hell out of there.”

“Have you ever shot anybody?”

Cork hesitated before answering. “Yes.”

“Did you kill them?”

He hesitated even longer. “Yes.”

Cork didn’t look like a man who killed people. He wasn’t tall or menacing or grim. He didn’t even look like a cop, really. Maybe it was his eyes. There was something kind in them.

Ren took a chance. “Did it hurt when they shot you?”

Cork closed the phone and put it in his lap. “Not at first. At first, I was too scared.”

“Scared?”

“Somebody shoots at you, Ren, believe me, you’re scared. You know about adrenaline, right?”

“Sure.”

“One of the effects of adrenaline is to mask pain.”

“So, did it hurt later?”

“A lot. What scared me most was losing blood and the chance of going into shock.” He waited, but at the moment Ren didn’t have anything more to ask. “Mind if I make my call?”

“Oh, sure. Go ahead.”

Ren went back to his sketch pad on the table and pretended to be drawing while Cork talked.

“Dina? It’s Cork.” He closed his eyes. “Safe at the moment. I screwed up, though. Somebody almost collected on that bounty. They put a bullet in my leg before I got away.” He shook his head. “No, no hospital. I don’t want to be a sitting duck. Look, is there any chance your phone’s been tapped? You’re absolutely certain? Okay, I’m in Bodine, Michigan, forty miles northwest of Marquette. I’m staying with my cousin and her son. A resort called Copper Country Cabins, about a mile west of town on County Road Eighteen.” He laughed quietly. “God was smiling on me. Jewell’s a veterinarian. Patched me up, gave me some painkillers, and put her son, Ren, to work as my personal assistant and bodyguard.” He winked at Ren, who’d looked up at the mention of his name, then turned serious again. “No, don’t call Jo. I’m sure her line’s been tapped. They may even have bugged the duplex. I don’t want her or the kids or anyone else down there jeopardized.” He gave a final nod. “Fine. I’ll see you in the morning. And, Dina? Thanks.”

He broke the connection and laid his head back against his pillow in a tired way.

“Dina?” Ren asked.

“A friend. She’s saved my life on a couple of occasions.”

“You could have used her yesterday.”

Cork grinned. “I’m all right, Ren. You don’t have to stay. I have my bedpan. And the walkie-talkie if I need you.”

“Mom asked me to stay. I don’t mind.”

“Suit yourself.”

Ren went back to his sketching. He was working on White Eagle, but he hadn’t been able to get the features to his liking. The guy was supposed to be Indian, yet every time Ren tried for that look, he failed. White Eagle had all the muscle you’d expect on a superhero, but his face looked too, well, white. When he forced himself consciously to draw Indian, it felt exaggerated and artificial.

His father had taught him to draw from life. Looking around him, Ren saw no model. As far as Indians went, in Bodine he and his mother were it. And his mother had never been big on being Indian.

He heard Cork snoring softly and he considered him. There didn’t seem anything imposing about the guy, especially laid out on the bunk with a bedpan in easy reach.

A cop in the family.

Who would have thought?

H
e wasn’t given to nightmares, but this night he dreamed a doozy.

His father with his head split open, scratching at the window.

Ren jerked awake. Although sleep still dragged at his senses, he was certain something had been there. He sat upright and glanced toward the window glass that glowed with moonlight. An eerie evanescence invaded his room. It gave the familiar contours—his desk, chair and computer, his shelves of books, his plaster castings and plastic models and wall poster of Spider-Man—an unfamiliar sense of menace. He listened, heard nothing for a full minute. Thought
wind.
Thought
branches.
Thought
nightmare
. Still, there was a nudging certainty behind his thinking that told him
something
.

He didn’t think of himself as brave. His fifth-grade teacher had once told him that he was bright and reasonable, and that had sounded fine to Ren, though he hoped
brave
might be added someday. He was curious, however, and finally his curiosity overwhelmed his fear. He inched the covers back and slid his bare feet onto the cool floorboards. He crept to the window, stepped into the spill of moonlight, and peered out.

His room was at the back of Thor’s Lodge and the windows opened toward the forest that ran almost unbroken from the old resort all the way to the Huron Mountains in the west. Tall hemlocks shattered the fall of moonlight, and a quilt of silver splashes spread over the deep bed of evergreen needles that covered the ground. On that soft bed, anything could approach without a sound.

He pressed his nose to the cold glass. His eyes shifted left, right, trying to pierce the night and the shadows. The fog of his breath obscured the windowpane for a moment. He drew back, wiped the glass with the arm of his pajama top.

In that instant, he caught a glimpse of motion, a blur among the trees. He leaned forward so quickly his nose bumped the glass and his eyes blinked shut. When he opened them, the blur was gone.

It was an animal, he was sure. A coyote, maybe even a wolf. Yet, there was something about it that was not like any coyote or wolf he’d ever seen. The swiftness. There, gone. And a sense—okay, maybe he was imagining this, he admitted—of power barely contained.

The cougar?

He stood at the window for a few minutes more, but nothing moved.

Ren knew he should go back to bed, and he knew he would not. The thrill of the possibility of what was out there was far too attractive. He felt afraid and excited at the same time. He pulled on his pants and a hooded sweatshirt, slipped into socks and his sneakers. As a last thought, he grabbed the baseball bat from his closet.

In the kitchen, he took the Coleman flashlight from its charging cradle, then he stepped outside.

A clear fall night. Breathing the air was like sucking frost. The careless hand of the wind off Lake Superior brushed the tops of the pines, which rocked back and forth easily. Ren held the flashlight in his left hand, the beam turned off. In his right, he gripped the bat. He crept to the side of the cabin, pressed against the sturdy logs, and peered around the corner. He scanned the clear area with the chopping block in the center where his father used to split wood for the cabins’ stoves.

Quiet as a spider, he stole along the wall to the back. He poked his head around that corner, too, and saw no more than he’d seen from his window: the woods empty except for all that silver light and shadow. He held his breath and listened. He thought of turning on the flashlight, but if there was something there, something magnificent and cautious, he didn’t want to scare it away.

A thump on the ground behind him made him spin. In the dark, his eyes darted around desperately. He edged backward, finally hit the switch on the flashlight, illuminating a big pinecone the wind had nudged loose from a branch.

He padded to his bedroom window and ran the beam of the flashlight along the wall. Beneath his window frame, long scratches cut parallel lines down the logs. Ren had never seen those marks before. He knelt and brushed his hand over one of the gouges. From the exposed bone-white wood at the heart and from the curl of the shavings along the edges, he knew they were new. Very new.

A low growl preceded the impact. Ren was slammed against the cabin wall. He didn’t even have time to scream before he hit the ground with the animal on top of him.

Then the animal laughed and said, “You’re dead meat, dude.”

“Get the hell off me, Charlie. Goddamn it, get off.”

He struggled, awash in adrenaline and a killing rage. Charlie, usually about as sensitive as a brick, seemed to realize the depth of his anger. She jumped off him and stepped back.

“Dude, I’m sorry. I was just joking with you.”

Ren bounded to his feet, his hands fisted. He was on the verge of laying into her, held back from throwing blows by the thinnest of threads.

Charlie had been in more fights than she could probably remember, but she didn’t lift a finger to defend herself. “Ren, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

In the moonlight, her face became a silver mask of pain and Ren was caught by surprise, as startling in its way as Charlie’s ambush had been. She was the most fearless, pigheaded person he knew, and she never apologized.

“Come on, Ren. Please don’t be mad at me.”

He understood that it wasn’t just an apology. It was a plea. Charlie needed him. His anger vanished and he lowered his hands.

“Your old man on a bender?” he asked.

“No worse than usual. He’ll drink himself to sleep in a while.”

“Want to sleep here?”

“Naw. I’m going to look for Stash’s dead body.”

“The one he saw in the river?”

“You catch on quick, Einstein.”

“You told him you didn’t think there even was a body.”

“You coming or not?”

He was so wide awake now, it would take him forever to get back to sleep. Besides, the truth was that the idea of looking for a dead body in the middle of the night appealed to him.

“All right, sure.” He bent and picked up the flashlight and the baseball bat. When he straightened up, Charlie was grinning at him.

“What?” he asked.

“You were going to try to kill me with that bat? Dude, I’ve played baseball with you. You’ve got the lamest swing in the whole world.”

She turned from him, laughing, and led the way through the dark.

From the shed where the now unused resort equipment was stored, they took two mountain bikes. They followed the lane to the county road, navigating by moonlight. It was almost a mile to the picnic shelter overlooking the Copper River. Because the cold had already driven away the crickets and the tree frogs, they biked in a silence broken only by their heavy breathing and the rattle of the bike chains.

They left the bikes at the shelter and walked a hundred yards down a tree-lined path that led to the mouth of the river, where the fast water seemed to have no impact at all on the vast, deep stillness of the lake. On either side of the river mouth lay small beaches of smooth, rounded stones. After big storms, Ren loved to walk the shoreline searching for agates washed up by the waves. There were also large boulders that had tumbled down the river over aeons and come to rest on Superior’s shore. That night the lake was peaceful. The sky was a sweep of stars melting into the glow of a gibbous moon. There was plenty of light for Ren and Charlie to see their way without a flashlight. Ren preferred it that way. He liked the eerie feel of the moonlit scene. Although he didn’t believe they’d find a body, he’d let himself open up to the thrill of an expedition with such a dark purpose, and he was glad Charlie wanted him along. In a way, it was like telling a ghost story. He didn’t believe it, but he loved the creepy feel and the grim distant voice in his head that said
Maybe
…

The water lapped at their feet. After a while, they sat on two boulders that gave a view of the river mouth and the scattering of lights to the east that was Bodine.

Charlie had been unusually quiet. Ren wondered if she was still upset because he’d been mad at her. For as long as he could remember, they’d been best friends. There’d been times when they’d been royally pissed at each other, but it had never been a big deal. Lately, however, Charlie was different. Things seemed to bother her more. Moods held her a long time in their grip. Sometimes she was distant, and Ren wondered where she’d gone.

Charlie had never had an easy life. Everyone in Bodine knew it. Just about the time she was learning to walk, her mother had run off with a logger named Vernon Atwater, and nobody’d ever heard from either of them again. Charlie’s father raised her alone. He was moody and had a lazy eye that never quite looked at you straight on. Summers he worked for a nursery this side of Marquette. Winters he bolted a plow onto the front of his pickup and cleared snow. He wasn’t a mean man, exactly, but neither was he affectionate. Saturday nights he drank too much, and then he got loud and angry. He’d rant about how he ended up consigned to life’s craphouse, and he’d blame everybody from his bastard old man to the lying sons of bitches in Washington for his misery. Somewhere along the way, he’d usually include Charlie. Which might have been somewhat tolerable if he’d only taken out his disappointment verbally.

When she was eleven, Charlie was sent to live with a foster family in Marquette while her father, under court order, got himself on more stable footing. When she finally returned to Bodine, she wouldn’t talk about her experience. The one thing she would say, and said adamantly, was that she’d never go to a foster home again. Even drunk, her old man was better.

Now when things got too bad, she’d run off for a while. Sometimes she showed up on Ren’s doorstep and his mother let her stay in the guest room. Sometimes she needed to get away completely and she hitched to a safe house for homeless teens in Marquette. Eventually she’d return to Bodine. She told Ren that whenever she was gone she could always tell that her father was happy to see her again. Even his lazy eye, for a short while, would focus entirely on her.

“Maybe it’s on the other side.” Ren pointed toward the rock beach on the far side of the river mouth.

“What?” Charlie asked.

“The body.”

“Oh,” Charlie said. “Yeah, maybe.”

Ren realized she wasn’t even thinking about the body now. Probably she’d never even believed in it, but looking was better than being home.

“You want to go back?” he asked.

“Not yet.”

She reached down, picked up a rock, threw it far out into the lake. Ren saw a burst of silver.

“Careful,” he said. “You’ll wake up Pressie.”

“Who?”

“Not who. What. The Presque Isle Monster. The monster of the lake.”

“Bullshit.”

“No, really. I can’t believe you’ve lived here your whole life and never heard of it. You know, like Nessie, the Loch Ness monster. It’s that kind of thing. The big ore boats have seen it for years. Every once in a while a boat disappears out there without a trace. Nobody knows why or where. I heard that one time the Coast Guard got a radio transmission from a fishing boat a few miles off Marquette saying their nets were caught on something that was pulling them under. That was it. The boat was never heard from again. If the lake weren’t so cold and people actually swam in it, I bet there’d be lots of folks who ended up dinner for Pressie and everybody would know about it.”

She was stone silent and her face turned from Ren toward the lake that was a great, flat plate of pale reflected moonlight.

“You’re so full of shit,” she said, although she didn’t sound convinced.

He could see that Charlie was intrigued, which was good. He wanted to coax her out of the quiet dark into which she’d slipped.

“Think so? Look, here it comes.”

His finger directed her attention to a long black shape sliding along the surface of the lake, following the shoreline on the far side of the river mouth. It moved slowly, silently rippling the moonlit water.

“What is it?” Charlie whispered.

“I told you. Pressie.”

Charlie watched a while longer. “It’s just a boat,” she said hopefully.