William Krueger: Red knife

“Put the gun down,” LeDuc said in the stillness that had returned.

Ortega set the Glock in the dirt at his feet.

“Arthur,” LeDuc called. “You get that?”

Arthur Villebrun raised a cell phone that he held in his right hand. “I got it.”

LeDuc walked to Ortega. “What we have is video of you shooting this man, this Latin Lord, who you called hermano. We don’t care what you tell your other brothers, but whatever it is you better make damn sure it keeps them from ever coming back to the Iron Lake Reservation. We don’t want you and we don’t want your drugs. And I can’t imagine you want this video getting into the hands of the other Latin Lords. Who knows what they might think?”

“I can go?” Ortega asked, clearly skeptical.

“That was our bargain.”

He eyed the warehouse. “You’re really going to burn all that merchandise? It’s worth a couple million dollars.”

“We measure its worth differently.”

Ortega let his gaze march across the faces of all the men still standing that morning, then he considered those dead. He turned and walked slowly back to his plane. He released the line tied to the sapling and shoved the plane away from shore. He hopped onto the float and climbed into the cockpit. The engine coughed, caught, and the props began to spin. He turned the floatplane toward the exit of the cove and guided it onto the body of the lake. In a couple of minutes, the plane lifted off, took a long curl toward the south, and vanished beyond the hills.

LeDuc turned to Will Kingbird. “The man who killed your son and your daughter-in-law is dead. Are you satisfied?”

“I would rather have killed him myself,” Kingbird replied.

“This way is better for everyone.” LeDuc spoke to all the men gathered there. “The dead and the drugs we’ll burn. The Tahoe will disappear in the bogs. In the old days, there would be songs and stories about what happened here this morning. This is a different time. What we’ve done can never be spoken about. Never. We’re all in this together and our safety depends on our silence. But in our hearts, we will always know what we did for The People today. Build a fire now. A big fire. And let’s burn what doesn’t belong here.”

Will came home smelling of fire but Lucinda didn’t ask where he’d been. She said, “Are you hungry?” and she fixed him huevos rancheros, one of his favorites, and gave him coffee and sat with him while he ate.

“Where’s our son?” he asked.

“He went to early Mass,” she said. “We can still make the late service at church, if you’d like.”

“I’d rather just stay here with you,” he said.

When he was finished eating, she washed the dishes while he showered and shaved. He called her to the bedroom where she found him naked, and for the first time in forever they made love. Afterward she lay against him, and although she wondered where he’d been and what he’d done, she didn’t ask. After a while, he spoke to her quietly. “There’s still Uly,” he said.

Cork and his family made the late service. As he went through the Sacrament of Reconciliation, he considered deeply what had occurred that morning, the carnage of which he’d been a part. When he looked into the cup of red wine at the rail, he thought about the blood of the five men slaughtered at dawn. Returning to the pew, he knelt and prayed, explaining that the dark and hungry thing Meloux had seen in his vision had to be the Latin Lords. He told himself and God that although killing was never good, it was sometimes necessary, and that it had been essential that the Ojibwe deal with the Latin Lords before the youth of the reservation were swallowed by that darkness. In the end he accepted that he didn’t know if those five men had died for anything but he was certain they’d been killed for something, and in the balance between the elements that made the world better and those that made it worse, what had happened that morning at Black Duck Lake was for the best. He could live with it. He would have to.

In the parking lot, a sheriff’s cruiser was parked next to Jo’s Toyota. When the O’Connor family left the church, Deputy Cy Borkman got out.

“Morning, everybody,” he said. Borkman was a heavy man and as he smiled in the sunlight, the loose flesh of his face folded into deep, easy creases. “Cork, the sheriff would like to see you.”

“What about, Cy?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“All right. Let me take my family home and I’ll be there directly.”

“I think you’d better come now. You can ride with me.”

“Sounds serious.”

Borkman didn’t reply, just stood squinting against the glare of the sun, waiting.

Cork kissed Jo. “If this is going to take long, I’ll call.”

“I’ll save you some lunch,” she promised.

Cy Borkman had begun his law enforcement career when Cork’s father was sheriff of Tamarack County. Cork had known him all his life and considered him a good friend. “Come on, Cy,” he said as they pulled out of the parking lot. “What’s up?”

Borkman shook his head. “Can’t say.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“You’ll know soon enough.”

“Is it bad?”

Borkman turned onto Oak Street and headed south, toward the sheriff’s department. “Sure going to be bad for someone,” he said.

Cork smiled, trying to make it as affable an expression as he could muster. “Bad for me?”

Borkman drilled him with a frank look. “What’s the matter? Got a guilty conscience?”

Cork let it go and for the rest of the ride listened to the squawk of the cruiser’s radio and to Borkman, who jawed enviously about all the reports of big fish caught the day before. Borkman ushered him through the security door and escorted him to the sheriff’s office, where Marsha Dross and Simon Rutledge were waiting.

“Thanks, Cy. We’ll take it from here.” When the deputy was gone, the sheriff said, “Have a seat, Cork. Would you like some coffee?”

“No, thanks.” Cork took the empty chair. “What’s this about, Marsha?”

“We know who killed Buck Reinhardt.”

Cork was truly surprised. “That’s great. Are you going to tell me?”

“Actually, I’ll leave that to Simon, since he’s the one responsible.”

Rutledge sat on the sill of an open window, relaxed, with his legs crossed. He wore faded jeans, a white shirt under a navy cardigan, and New Balance walking shoes. He looked like a college professor about to address his class, pleased with what he was going to present.

“You remember the night Reinhardt was killed, after we finished at the Buzz Saw, I made a rather late visit to his wife, Elise.”

“I remember,” Cork said. He recalled the joking speculation that Rutledge had more than business on his mind.

“I figured she was bitter already and dealing with a good deal of grief over the death of her daughter, and once she learned about her husband’s faithless behavior she’d probably added anger to the mix. It seemed to me a volatile combination, one that might drive a person to do something as extreme as murder. Call it a hunch.”

“A hunch?” Dross laughed. “Come on, Simon, you put it together like a chemical formula.”

Rutledge smiled and went on. “When we interviewed her earlier, she told us she usually didn’t go to bed until well after midnight, when the booze finally put her under. She was up when I got there, and as a matter of fact, had a drink in her hand.”

“A little surprised to see you, I imagine,” Cork said.

“Absolutely. But you know me, Cork. Utterly charming. She invited me in, offered me a drink, which I accepted, and we had a little chitchat about this and that, during which I mostly sympathized with her situation. She was pretty well lubricated and I steered the conversation toward the killing. I assured her we’d get the shooter. All we had to do was locate the rifle that had been used, and I was sure that wouldn’t be too difficult since we had an expended cartridge, which would give us plenty to go on. Unless-I added this as a dramatic afterthought-the shooter had the presence of mind to get rid of the weapon. Right away, I could see a kind of desperate realization in her eyes, which she tried to cover by undoing the top button of her blouse.”