Blood Is the Sky: An Alex McKnight Mystery (12 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
11.66Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
“We’ll find them, Vinnie.”
“Do you think they’re alive?”
I didn’t have an answer for that one. I didn’t even try.
Maskwa woke us up with the sun. Guy was already in the kitchen, filling up a big Styrofoam cooler with ice.
“If we’re gonna fly all the way out there,” Maskwa said, “we’ll need some food. Do you want me to throw some beer in there, too?”
“I won’t stop you,” I said. “As long as you’re not drinking it while you fly.”
He laughed. Then he slung a big bag over his shoulder and told us to follow him. “It’s time to show you my plane,” he said.
He led us out the back door and down the path to the lake, the same path I had noticed the day before, leading past Guy’s house into a rough field of rocks and weeds. “I do hunts myself,” he said as we picked our way down the trail. “I take them even farther north.”
“Do you have much business?” Vinnie said.
“Less and less. I used to do them with my son, Guy’s father. We were a good team.”
“Your son’s not around anymore? I’m sorry, is he—”
Maskwa waved his hand at that. “I did a couple with Guy, but he can make a lot more money over at the lodge. I don’t blame him.” He sneaked a look back at his grandson, who was bringing up the rear. I tried to take the
heavy cooler from him, but he shook me off.
“I do some guide work myself,” Vinnie said. “When I’m not working at the casino.”
“What’s your job there?”
“I deal blackjack.”
Maskwa laughed. “Blackjack,” he said. “All day long, right? Taking the white people’s money?”
“Something like that.”
“And then you take them into the woods so they can feel connected to nature.”
“Just like you,” Vinnie said.
Maskwa laughed again. “Yes! Of course I do. Why shouldn’t I?”
The weeds got taller as we got to the lake. We finally came to an old building that looked like a boathouse. It might have been a boathouse at one time, but when Maskwa opened the door we saw an airplane inside. He told us it was a DHC-2 Beaver, not quite as big as Gannon’s Otter, but more than enough plane to get the job done. “Her name’s Mikiskon,” he said. “That was my wife’s name.”
He started pulling on a chain to raise the big lakeside door. When it was open he hopped up on one of the floats and climbed the ladder into the cockpit. He gave the engine a few cranks until it finally caught. The noise was downright painful. He came to the door and took the cooler from Guy, and then waved Vinnie and me up the ladder. As soon as we were on board, sitting on seat cushions that looked like something out of an old boat, Guy pushed the plane out onto the lake, jumped onto the float, and climbed the ladder to join us. He closed the door and sat down beside his grandfather.
“Everybody ready?” he said.
I wasn’t sure, but I wasn’t going to say anything. We had come this far.
Maskwa grabbed a handle mounted on the floor and pumped it up and down a few times. Then he let the throttle out and pointed the plane toward the far end of the lake. The plane gained speed, the floats riding rough over the waves.
“Next stop, Lake Agawaatese!” Maskwa said. He had to yell over the din of the motor. “Vinnie, did you tell Alex what the name means?”
“It’s kind of a complex word,” Vinnie said. “It literally means ‘He casts a shadow while flying.’”
“You mean like a bird?” I said.
“Bird, cloud, whatever.”
“How about an airplane?” I said. But I don’t think anyone heard me. We were getting closer and closer to the far shoreline. Maskwa pulled the yoke back, and the plane fought its way off the water and into the air. It didn’t look like we’d have enough room to clear the trees, but I figured the man knew what he was doing. I sat back in my seat and tried to relax. It almost worked.
We cleared the trees with three inches to spare. Hell, maybe it was four inches. The plane kept climbing into the sky, higher and higher, until the whole forest was laid out below us from one horizon to the other. Many miles to the north, Lake Agawaatese, with its flying shadows, was waiting for us.
We flew for the better part of an hour, passing over a thick pine forest broken only by lakes and streams and wet marshlands. I looked down and saw a moose cow standing up to her knees in water. She didn’t seem to notice us.
The morning clouds had moved off to the east, but the wind was still blowing. A gust would catch the plane now and then, dropping the bottom out of my stomach. At one point, the plane took a sudden dip and half the dashboard
came loose and landed in Maskwa’s lap. Guy reached over and calmly pushed it back in place.
I felt Vinnie tapping me on the shoulder. I looked over and saw an eagle soaring in the sky. “Migizi,” he said. “Maybe that’s good luck.”
Maskwa banked the plane and started his descent. Through the windshield I could see the lake coming up fast. He brought the plane in just over the trees, with what looked to be about three inches to spare again, and then touched down. We skipped a couple of times until the water finally grabbed us for good.
“A little rough, Grandpère,” Guy said.
“Let’s see you do it,” Maskwa said.
“I’ve watched you enough times, I bet I could.”
Maskwa cut the throttle back and drove the plane through the water. There was a light chop, just enough to make the plane rattle like it would fall apart any second. I didn’t see the cabin at first, but then we rounded a slight bend and there it was on the far shore, a small white building with an L-shaped dock, an aluminum motorboat tied up to it. As we got closer, I saw another smaller building by the water, and a third back in the woods.
“There’s a boat here,” Vinnie said.
“Yeah, we keep the motor in the shed,” Guy said. “Along with the gasoline. I helped Mr. Gannon bring that boat out in his plane last year. There’s no way he’ll ever bring it back.”
Maskwa cut the motor just before we got to the dock. We drifted the rest of the way. Guy climbed out his door and jumped onto the dock. When the plane was tied down, we followed him. I could still feel the vibration of the plane’s engine in my legs as I walked up the dock. The buzzing still rang in my ears.
“All right, let’s take a look around,” Guy said. He led us into the cabin. There was a small wooden porch and a
screen door in front, with two screened windows. One of them was pushed in. “Goddamned bears,” he said. “If they smell garbage—”
When I stepped into the cabin myself, garbage was exactly what I saw. There was one picnic table in the center of the room, with enough spilled breakfast cereal and ketchup and fish batter and God knows what else to draw a dozen bears. The stale smell of beer hung in the air, and the wooden floor was sticky to walk on. There were unwashed plates stacked up on the counter, and three pots on the propane stove. When Guy opened the propane refrigerator, there was a carton of eggs on the bottom shelf and nothing else.
While the other men stood there looking at the mess, I went into the other room. There were three separate bunks—just bare wood to put your sleeping bags on—and a wood stove. I opened the little door and looked inside. I couldn’t tell how old the ashes were.
“My God, what an unholy pigsty,” Maskwa said. He picked a skin magazine off the floor and threw it in the empty trash can.
“It obviously wasn’t like this the last time I saw it,” Guy said. “But you could fake this, you know what I mean? If you wanted to make it look like somebody was here, you just come in and trash the place.”
“They could fool the police that way,” Maskwa said. “But not you.”
Guy nodded his head. “First, the propane,” he said. He went outside to the big tank on the side of the cabin. “When I left here last time, it was three-quarters full. Now it’s … Let’s see …” He checked the gauge. “About one quarter.”
“Is that how much gas you’d use if you were here a week?” I said.
“Yeah, pretty much. You got the oven and the refrigerator, plus the two overhead lights.”
“So maybe they were here,” Maskwa said.
“Unless somebody switched the tanks. Hold on.” He went down to the little shed by the dock and looked inside. He took out two red gasoline cans and shook them one by one. “Damn, these are empty,” he said. “How much could they use?”
“They must have gone out in the boat a lot,” Maskwa said.
“Two cans worth?”
“You think they switched the cans, too?”
Guy shook his head and looked around the place. “I don’t know.”
“If there’s no way to know for sure—”
“Hold on,” Guy said. “The outhouse. When I left here, I made sure there was toilet paper in there. I know for a fact that there were exactly four rolls in there, with half a roll on the wall. I’m positive.”
I stayed on the dock while they went to check. This was one mission I didn’t need to be a part of. I stood there watching the lake, as the colors changed with each passing cloud. We were so far away from anywhere else right now. We had taken the last road, and now an hour’s worth of flying had put us here on the shores of this lake. I zipped up my coat.
“Okay,” Guy said as he joined me on the dock. “They were here.”
“You have to admit,” I said, “it was pretty unlikely from the beginning. I mean, I suppose it was good to come out here in any case. This is the last place they spent any time. But right now I don’t see how it can help us.”
“Something’s still wrong,” Vinnie said. He had been quiet since we had landed here. “Something is very wrong.”
“How do you mean?”
“Let me ask you something,” he said to Guy. “If you were leading a hunt here, would you leave this place looking like this?”
“No, of course not.”
“Even if you couldn’t stand the men you were with. And it was them that made the mess?”
“I’d still clean up before we left,” Guy said. “And they’d hear about it, believe me.”
“Exactly. That’s the same thing Tom would have done.”
“So what are you saying?” I said.
“They didn’t leave here under normal circumstances,” Vinnie said. “Something happened. Maybe they had to leave in a hurry.”
“Or maybe,” Maskwa spoke up behind us, “they never left at all.”
Vinnie turned around and looked at him.
“Maybe they got lost hunting,” Maskwa said. “The people at the lodge, they didn’t want to deal with it. So they lied.”
“Tom wouldn’t get lost,” Vinnie said.
“Your brother is a long way from home. These are not his woods.”
“If that’s what happened,” Vinnie said, looking beyond the cabin at the thick wall of trees, “then he’s still out there. Tom knows how to survive. He knows how to find plants he can eat, how to make shelter, how to make a fire.”
“But what about their wallets?” I said. “Why would they be in the Suburban?”
“They may have left them here at the cabin,” Vinnie said. “When Gannon came out here, he found them. Maybe Maskwa is right, Alex. Something may have happened. The people at the lodge are just covering it up.”
Maskwa stepped up to Vinnie and grabbed him by the shoulders. “We will look,” he said. “I promise you. We can’t panic, Vinnie. We can’t run around here like chickens.”
“I know.”
“Let’s eat first, okay? Then we’ll look.”
Maskwa sent Guy back to the plane for the big bag and the cooler. Then he sat down on the dock and took out two long salamis and a loaf of bread.
“Grandpère,” Guy said. “How much food did you bring?”
“I had an intuition,” he said. “Something told me we’d be here all day.”
We all sat down on the dock with him and ate. Maskwa passed me one of the cold Molsons from the cooler. The sun came out and shone on the surface of the lake, making it feel a lot warmer than it really was. Under different circumstances, it would have been a hell of a nice day.
I couldn’t stop thinking about that Suburban ditched in the woods. It seemed too far-fetched, that they’d dump it there just to cover themselves. The whole thing was starting to feel wrong, from top to bottom. The real answer was probably something simple. It almost always is.
“You and Vinnie can go out together,” Maskwa said as we finished up. “Alex will come with me.” He looked at his watch. “We should meet back here at 3:00. The days are getting shorter—any later and we won’t have enough daylight to fly back.”
Vinnie and Guy picked the trail that went north from the cabin site. The other trail curled around the rim of the lake before heading west. The pine trees were thick enough to obliterate the sunlight. Maskwa led the way.
“If they’re lost,” I said, “then they could be miles away from here. How are we gonna find them?”
“We won’t,” he said. “But we may find which way they
went. A man can’t walk in the woods without leaving some trace behind.”
I followed him deeper and deeper into the woods. The trail seemed to disappear every now and then, but Maskwa didn’t hesitate. He kept moving forward, and inevitably the trail would appear again. “You see all these tracks,” he said.

Other books

Count This Cowboy In by Malone, Misty
Sorrow’s Knot by Erin Bow
Joy and Tiers by Mary Crawford
The Call of Distant Shores by Wilson, David Niall, Eggleton, Bob
The Wild Girl by Kate Forsyth
Waking Kate by Sarah Addison Allen