William Krueger - Trickster's Point

“Car trouble?” Hooty asked.

He was tall and lean and wore his hair in a crew cut. There were deep creases at the corners of his mouth, because he smiled a lot. But the thing that anyone who dealt with Hooty noticed most was his left eye, which was lazy. Sometimes, because of that wandering eye, it seemed as if Hooty was talking to someone over your right shoulder. He was a mechanic at the Tomahawk Truckstop on Highway 1 and must have been heading home from work. He wore oil-spotted Carhartt coveralls, and although his hands were clean, under every fingernail lay a crescent of black engine grease.

“Not exactly. Take a look at that windshield,” Cork said.

Hooty eyed the bullet hole and whistled. “You okay?”

“Yeah.”

Hooty looked at the place under the Land Rover where Cork had lain for protection, and he said, “Checking the oil pan to see if it got hit, too?” He grinned, an expression that came and went quickly, and he ended with a philosophic shake of his head. “Hunting season. Them damn hunters from the Cities, they’ll shoot anything that moves. Last year, my cousin Glory, she was just sittin’ in her trailer watchin’ TV. Damn bullet comes through the wall, whizzes right past her, not a foot from her nose, goes out the other side of the trailer. She’s more mad than scared, and she goes outside and spots three white guys in brand-new blaze orange outfits runnin’ off into the trees like kids scared cuz they broke a window or something. Come huntin’ season, I don’t let my kids outta my sight.”3

Cork chose not to disabuse Hooty of the notion that it was an accident. He thanked the man for stopping, and both went their separate ways.

Sheriff Marsha Dross looked at the slug Cork had put in the palm of her hand.

“I dug that out of my backseat,” he told her.

“You think somebody was actually shooting at you?” she asked.

He sat in her office at the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department. Agent Phil Holter was there, too, and Ed Larson. Dross and the BCA agent had given a press conference shortly after noon. To avoid any lingering reporters, Cork had parked a block from the building and had managed to slip inside unseen.

“Or was it just a stray hunter’s round, as your friend on the rez suggested?” Holter said.

“A huge coincidence that somebody would be shooting at a buck and almost hit me instead, don’t you think?”

Holter took off his rimless glasses, pulled a clean handkerchief from his back pocket, huffed a breath onto each lens, and began to wipe. “Why would somebody be shooting at you, O’Connor?”

Rhiannon was what he thought, but what he said was “Maybe because I’m asking questions.”

“Questions we should be asking?”

“Not necessarily.”

“But important enough, apparently, that somebody wants you to stop asking them.”

Dross entered the questioning. “What were you doing on the reservation, Cork?”

“I wanted to talk to Isaiah Broom.”

“About what?”

“Bow hunting.”

“Is he a bow hunter?”

Cork nodded. “He hunts like Jubal and I did, still-stalking.”

“You think he had something to do with Jubal Little’s death?” Dross continued.

“It was a possibility I wanted to check out.”

“What did you find?”

“In his hunting, he uses arrows identical to mine.”

“Meaning the arrow that killed Jubal Little might have come from him? Why would Isaiah Broom want Jubal Little dead?”

“Casinos.” It was Ed Larson who answered. He was wearing one of his tweed sport coats with suede elbow patches, and he’d been sitting quietly in a corner, tugging on a loose thread hanging from the sleeve. He’d seemed to be paying very little attention, but Cork knew that brain of his was working at light speed. “Jubal Little’s proposal for six state-run casinos. That’s a political hot potato none of the other candidates would touch. Little could because he was Indian. Take him out of the election and the problem goes away.”

“Thin,” Holter said.

“But worth checking,” Larson insisted.

“There’s another possibility you might want to look into,” Cork said. “Talk to Lester Bigby.”

“Bigby?” Dross looked bewildered. “What’s the connection?”

“Lester bow-hunts, too, and he has a long-standing personal grudge against Jubal. Tie that to the fact that Bigby’s heavily invested in preserving the environmental status quo of our area, while Jubal Little’s on the bandwagon for new mining operations, and I think you’ve got a couple of good reasons for him to want Jubal dead. If you talk to him, ask him where he was on the day Jubal was killed.”

“Why?”

“Because when I talked to him, he danced all around that question.”

“You’ve talked to him already?” Holter had put his glasses back on, and from behind those clear lenses his eyes shot fire at Cork. “Jesus, this is our investigation, O’Connor, and I don’t appreciate you mucking around in it.”

“Last time I looked, Agent Holter, it was a free country. A man can still ask questions.”

The office was filled with afternoon sunlight that came through the window facing west. Where the direct rays hit the floor, the old oak boards looked as if they were made of crystallized honey. That same window overlooked the department’s parking lot. In the stillness that followed Cork’s retort, he could hear the grumble of an engine from one of the media trucks leaving. He heard a reporter shout an unintelligible question, to whom, he couldn’t say.

“Okay,” Holter said, shifting his body as if squaring off against Cork. “Let me tell you what I think about this slug of yours. Seems to me there are three possibilities.”

“Love to hear them,” Cork said.

“One: Someone did try to shoot you and missed. Two: The slug was a stray from a hunter, as your Ojibwe friend suggested. And three: The slug was fired to make it look as if someone was trying to shoot you.”

“A phony attempt on my life, is that what you’re saying?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

“Why would someone do that?” Dross asked the agent.

“To make O’Connor here look less guilty,” Holter replied.

“Someone risked blowing my head off just to make me look innocent?” Cork actually laughed.

“Not someone,” Holter said and pointedly eyed Cork.

“Me? You think I shot that slug through my window?” Cork glanced at Dross and Larson to see if they were reacting with the same disbelief, but their faces gave away nothing of what they were thinking. “That’s just ridiculous.”

“We’ll follow up on the leads you’ve given us, Cork,” Larson promised. “In the meantime, it would be best if you stepped back and let us handle the investigation. For your own sake.”

Anger made everything inside him burn. Cork wanted to hit someone, Holter especially. But he held himself in check. “One question before I leave. Have you got anything more on the dead man on the ridge?”

Larson replied, “We’re still looking into it. Let me walk you to your car, Cork.”

They went out a side door and made their way unnoticed to Cork’s Land Rover, parked a block away. Neither man had spoken, but at the vehicle Larson said, “In an hour, can you be at the spot where you say the shot was fired?”

“Why? You want to take a shot at me, too?”

Larson smiled. “Not easy being on your side of all this, I’m sure. But it’s not easy on our side either, Cork. We’re trying to be thorough and impartial. It’s best if you can refrain from taking this investigation personally.”

“You realize how moronic that sounds, Ed?”

“Yeah.” Larson gave a boyish kind of shrug. “But keep it in mind. So, an hour?”