William Krueger - Trickster's Point

He leaned close, and his shadow fell over the kid’s face. “Donner? Can you hear me?” He gingerly touched Bigby’s neck with his fingertips, feeling for even a ghost of a pulse. He laid his ear against Bigby’s chest. Nothing came to him, except the smell of Bigby’s emptied bowels. Cork stood and moved far enough away that he couldn’t smell the stench of death.

The full weight of the situation fell on him, and his legs would no longer hold him up. He dropped into a sitting position on the wet ground and went, for a little while, into a kind of daze.

“Cork?” It was Jubal’s voice cutting through the haze.

Cork snapped back to the terrible reality of the moment.

“You okay?” Jubal asked.

“He’s dead.”

Jubal’s face was ghost white, and he sat down heavily beside Cork. “I know.”

“What happened?”

Jubal was quiet a long time, and the voice that finally spoke was smaller than Cork had ever heard from his friend. “He stumbled. He just stumbled and fell.”

Cork tried to look into Jubal’s eyes, to find some clue there about the truth of that explanation, but Jubal averted his face.

“I want to know everything,” Cork said.

“There’s nothing to know,” Jubal insisted, almost desperately. “I accused him of what happened to Winona. He didn’t deny it, just told me to go fuck myself.”

“And then he… just fell?”

“He swung at me. He started it. So I swung at him. Next thing I know, he’s stumbling back and falling. It was an accident, I swear. Cork, we’ve got to figure out what we’re going to say about this.”

“What do you mean?”

“We both have to tell the same story.”

“It was an accident. We just tell them that.”

Jubal shook his head furiously. “We can’t tell anyone I went up there with him. Who’s going to believe that I didn’t intentionally push him?”

“You didn’t, did you?”

“Of course not. But nobody’s going to believe me. I’m an Indian. That’ll come out now. Think white people are going to take an Indian’s side in something like this?”

“You’re Jubal Little,” Cork said, amazed that his friend had no idea how much weight that carried.

“Jubal Littlewolf. With a father in prison for manslaughter. Like father, like son. That’s how they’ll play it.” He took Cork by the shoulders and leaned toward him until their faces were only inches apart. “You’re my brother. I’m counting on you.”

A breeze had finally come up, cooling against his face. Cork was suddenly deeply aware of how much he loved his friend. He had a choice. He could believe Jubal or not. If he believed him, there was only one thing he could do.

“What do we tell them?” he said.

P hillip Holter, the agent in charge of the BCA team that had been sent to help with the investigation of Jubal Little’s death, was a tall, good-looking guy somewhere in his forties. He had a build that made it clear he and a barbell were intimate friends. His hair was black and thick and held in place with a shellacking of mousse. He wore stylish glasses that had no framing around the lenses, so there was nothing to detract from one’s view and appreciation of his deep baby blues. His gaze was studied; he seemed never to blink. There was a crispness in his actions and in the way he spoke that suggested he was a man who knew his abilities and was pretty sure others appreciated them as much as he did. Cork took an immediate dislike to him, a rare experience in all his own years as a cop, but he figured he’d take a dislike to anyone who eyed him as if he were the Son of Sam.

They interviewed Cork and Stephen separately. Holter took the father, and Ed Larson questioned the son. Under the circumstances, Cork couldn’t very well insist that he be with Stephen while Larson conducted that interview, but he wasn’t greatly concerned. The truth that Stephen would tell-and that Cork told as well-didn’t incriminate either of them. This most recent body, they’d simply stumbled upon. When Holter pointed out that the arrow was identical to the one that had killed Jubal Little and also to the arrows Cork had carried in his own quiver, Cork simply replied, “If they are my arrows, then it would be just as easy to steal two as one. Same thing would be true if someone decided to manufacture an arrow identical to mine.”

Cork and Stephen stood well out of the way while the crime scene techs-deputies whom Larson had sent to the BCA for special training-did their jobs. The dead man’s wallet had yielded a driver’s license bearing the name William Graham Chester, a resident of Red Wing, Minnesota. When he was asked, Cork replied that the name meant nothing to him and reiterated that he’d never seen the man before. A search of the area offered no other immediate evidence, except for the tracks that the officer from the Border Patrol had been following when he left.

After a while, among the bare aspen trees, Holter convened a conference with Sheriff Dross and Captain Ed Larson. In the time since her discussion with Cork that morning, Dross had changed into her uniform, over which she wore a yellow down vest. Though the day continued to threaten precipitation, she sported no hat on her short hair, which was the brown of otter fur.

“What do you think they’re talking about?” Stephen asked.

“They’re probably trying to figure what all this has to do with Jubal Little’s killing.”

“Are the two definitely related?”

“What do you think?” Cork asked. It wasn’t rhetorical.

Stephen said, “That’s what I was thinking about all the way to Allouette. It could have been that, whoever he was, he was just at the wrong place at the wrong time. But the more I thought about that, it just seemed too big a coincidence.”

“I think you’re right.”

“So if they’re related, how?”

Cork had been watching the three cops in discussion. Holter had said something that caused Larson to look in Cork’s direction and furiously shake his head.

“Any speculation?” Cork asked his son.

Stephen seemed surprised to be asked, and he furrowed his brow for a while before he answered.

“It might make sense that they were in on it together and something went bad between them up here.”

“In on it together?”

“Like, well, they wanted to be sure that Mr. Little was dead, and they meant to do it in a way that would throw the blame on you. So the arrow. But you’ve always talked about how hard it is to hit a moving target, especially from a distance, so they brought the rifle along, too, as sort of backup. If the arrow missed, they were going to shoot Mr. Little with the rifle.”

Cork smiled at the beauty of the logic, which was different from his own, and better. He’d been thinking that it was two separate men with two separate agendas, but he couldn’t quite put it together in an understandable way. Stephen’s scenario, on the other hand, made good sense.

Stephen was almost as tall as his father, and he looked almost directly into his father’s eyes as he went on. “But if the first plan didn’t work, and they couldn’t pin the murder on you, then…” He faltered. Traditionally, the Ojibwe were a people who ably hid their emotions behind a stolid mask, and Stephen was the O’Connor in whom the Ojibwe blood was most apparent. But he didn’t bother to try to hide his horror. “If they hadn’t killed Mr. Little with the arrow and had to shoot him, they’d probably have to get rid of the only witness. So you’d be dead, too.”

Cork put a reassuring hand on his son’s shoulder. “But I’m not dead.” He nodded toward the great stone monolith that stood dark against the gray sky. “Nanaboozhoo, that old trickster, must have something else in mind for me.”