William Krueger - Thunder Bay

“I have instructions to take you to Mr. Wellington.” He kept his shades on when he spoke to me.

“Lead the way.”

“How’s your gas?” he asked.

“I filled up on the way here.”

He nodded and turned back to the Explorer.

“What if we get separated?” I said.

“We won’t.”

We followed him northwest out of Thunder Bay, keeping to Highway 17, part of the Trans-Canada Highway system. The sun had just passed its zenith when we finally put civilization behind us. For a long time after that, the highway cut through flat country with a lot of timber and not many towns.

A little over two hours later, we came to Ignace and turned north. We stopped at a gas station with a small restaurant. Benning pulled up to a pump and signaled us to do the same.

“Last chance for gas for quite a while,” he said.

Meloux used the men’s room while I filled the tank. Schanno went inside to get us some bottled water. He came back with three microwaved burritos as well. Within ten minutes, we were off again, following a hundred yards behind the Explorer. The burritos were hard beans and tasteless sauce wrapped in tortillas the texture of white leather, but we were all hungry and gobbled them down.

In a while, Meloux was napping in the backseat. Schanno and I talked.

“You and Trinky seemed to hit it off,” I said.

Schanno thought about that and then nodded. “She’s a good, sensible woman. Easy to talk to.” He studied the pine trees that walled the highway. “It’s been lonely.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Know what I miss most, Cork? Arietta used to sing around the house. It didn’t matter what she was doing, she was always singing. I could tell from the nature of the tune just how she was feeling. A snappy song and she was happy. Something blue and she was down. But always her voice there, filling the house. Place seems so damned empty now, I almost hate being there.”

“I can imagine,” I said.

“It’s been hard saying good-bye.”

I didn’t think that needed a response, so I studied my side-view mirror.

“Trinky’s thinking of sailing up the Saint Lawrence to the Atlantic in a few weeks, then heading south along the East Coast to the Caribbean. Needs a good deckhand, she says.”

“You told me. You interested in the job?”

“It’d be something to do.”

“And you like the company.”

He swung his gaze my way. “Is it too soon, you think?”

“Wally, I don’t know that there’s any blueprint for the affairs of the human heart. You try to do your best to listen to what it tells you, and do your best, when possible, to follow. That’s how it seems to me.”

He nodded. “Funny, you know, that I’ve got a dog named Trixie. Almost like Trinky. I called her Trixie last night.”

“She hit you?”

“When I explained, she thought it was cute. Say, what’s so interesting in that mirror of yours?”

“We’re being followed.”

He craned his neck to look back. It took a minute before the vehicle behind us came into view as it rounded a curve.

“How do you know it’s following us? This is probably the only good road in a hundred miles.”

“In the absence of evidence to the contrary, it’s safest to assume the worst.”

“The worst being?”

“Benning’s ahead of us. If Wellington wanted to put us in a pinch, he’d have someone behind us as well.”

Schanno unbuckled his seat belt and crawled into the back. Meloux was so deeply asleep he didn’t notice the jostling. Schanno dug in his bag, then came back up front. He was holding a handgun and a box of cartridges.

“What the hell is that?” I said.

“A Colt Python.”

“Jesus, you brought that over the border? We could have been arrested.”

“You’re forgetting Henry’s luck.”

“If you think he’s so lucky, what do you need that for?”

“My dad always told me to hedge my bets.” He began feeding cartridges into the Colt. “You think Rupert Wellington is involved in any of this?”

“I don’t think a man in charge of a corporation like Northern Mining is as ignorant of what’s going on as he’d like us to believe. What exactly his part is, I can’t say.”

The vehicle trailing us-a dark green SUV-kept its distance.

“If Benning slows down and that SUV behind us speeds up, I’ll probably be glad you have that Colt,” I said.

In the back, Meloux snorted in his deep slumber.

“I don’t understand Henry,” Schanno said. He snapped the cylinder closed. “Why worry about his son after seventy years? What good could it do him?”

“This isn’t about his own good. Henry’s worried about his son.”

“He oughta be. We all know Morrissey wasn’t after any pocket watch. Just between you and me, I think Henry’s setting himself up for a big fall. What kind of son would behave like this Wellington?”

“A sick one. That’s what Henry believes anyway. He also believes he can help.”

“There are some people-and you understand I’m not one of them-who are going to say Henry’s just out to get something, maybe a piece of Wellington’s fortune.”

“Anybody says that, they don’t know Henry. Hell, he’s never taken a cent of the distribution he’s due from the rez’s casino profits. He had Jo set up a fund. The money goes directly into it. After he’s gone, it’ll be used for college scholarships for Shinnobs.”

“A guy like Henry, you’ve got to admit, Cork, seems too good to be true.”

A horrible smell invaded the Bronco. I looked at Schanno and he looked at me. We both looked back at Meloux, who smiled in his sleep.

“I should have warned you about Henry and beans,” I said. “Jesus, roll your window down.”

Schanno took a deep breath of the fresh air that rushed in. “What I just said about Henry? You can forget it.”

After five hours on the road and nearly three hundred additional miles on my old Bronco’s odometer, we came to the outskirts of a small town called Flame Lake. It was the first sign of civilization we’d seen in a long time. Mostly, there’d been the gray pavement down the middle of an endless green corridor, with the occasional blue relief of a lake to break the monotony. Benning pulled off into a roadside park along a little river, and we followed him. He stopped, got out, and came to my side of the Bronco.

I was watching for the SUV in the mirror. So was Schanno. He had his loaded Colt in the glove box.

“Wait here,” Benning said.

“What for?”

“I have to make a call. I’ve got to use a phone in town. Cells don’t work up here. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

“No choice, I guess.”

“That’s right.”

Benning headed off in his Explorer. I got out, walked to the road, and looked back the way we’d come. I hadn’t seen the SUV pass by us, and I wondered where it was. I had to look hard, but I could see it, pulled way off to the side. If we tried to head back to Thunder Bay at this point, it could easily cut us off. I thought about swinging the Bronco around and going back, just to see who it was. My guess was Dougherty. But Wellington was a man with unlimited resources, so, hell, it could have been anybody or, more likely, a platoon of anybodies.

Schanno came up beside me. “What do you think?”

“If they’ve got something up their sleeves, I doubt it’ll happen here. We’ll just have to be careful.”

Schanno grunted, and I took that for agreement.

Meloux had climbed out, too. We were in an area of rugged hills covered with boreal growth, mostly jack pine and black spruce. Meloux stood near a picnic table and studied the hills. There was a little map posted near the parking area. It showed a lake-Flame Lake- curling in a long, lazy, ten-mile arc to the west of the town. It also showed the Flame Lake Mine, a few miles west of where we stood.