William Krueger - Thunder Bay

Rupert swung his eyes slyly across Schanno and me. “It’s my firm belief, gentlemen, that everyone has a price. Am I correct?”

It was Schanno who broke the embarrassed silence that followed. “You may know business, Mr. Wellington, but you’re no judge of men.”

Rupert settled his gaze on me. “He speaks for you?”

“He took the words right out of my mouth,” I said.

“Very well.” He offered that unpleasant smile again. “I think you’re about to find I’m not such a terrible judge of men after all, Mr. Schanno.” He lifted his hand and gave a little wave toward the house.

Benning stepped out, and he wasn’t alone. Dougherty was with him. They didn’t bring us breakfast. They carried a couple of high-caliber automatics.

“Dougherty?” Wellington said.

“He flew up with me,” Rupert said. “I dropped him off on the other side of the point before I taxied here. He hiked in.”

Wellington addressed Benning and Dougherty. “What’s the idea with the weapons?”

“You’ll have to ask the other Mr. Wellington,” Benning replied.

“I’m asking you.”

“As their employer?” Rupert laughed. “I told you everyone has a price, Hank. I bought these men from you a long time ago. Morrissey, too. In fact, they haven’t really worked for you since almost the beginning.”

Wellington again addressed the two men from Manitou Island. “Is that true?”

Benning shrugged. “He says shoot, we shoot. Nothing personal.”

Wellington faced his brother. “And are you going to say ‘Shoot’?”

Rupert drummed his fingers on the table, as if considering. “Maybe not. We’ll see.”

I was trying to figure out a move, some way of distracting Benning and Dougherty. Without obviously turning my head, I checked the field of fire from the deck. If one of us was able to make it to the ground and run for cover, could he reach the woods without being cut down by the automatics?

Rupert laughed.

“What’s so funny?” Wellington asked.

“You thought all those years that you were protecting me from the truth. Hell, Hank, I learned the same time you did that we had different fathers. You told me you didn’t read your mother’s journals until after my father died. Well, your mother wasn’t the only one who kept a journal. My father started his as a way of recording his prospecting expeditions, but he ended up including just about everything in his life. After he died, I found them in his personal safe. All these years, I’ve actually known more than you because not only did I know he wasn’t your father, I also knew about what happened at that cabin in the hills. Those journals your mother wrote? My father read them, or at least one of them. When Carlos Lima was in the hospital dying, Maria left the journal out and open. Leonard took a look, read about the Negro, and went back north where he did what he had to do to get what he wanted.”

I saw a look of relief cross Meloux’s face. An important question had finally been answered. From his hospital bed, he’d told me Maria’s beauty was a knife. Now he knew the truth.

“And so you sent Morrissey to take care of Meloux,” I said to Rupert Wellington.

“You can understand it’s not a story I’d like people to know. It’s not just that there are legal ramifications that could shake Northern Mining, but the entire legacy of my father would be rather horribly sullied.” He drilled his brother with a sudden, angry look. “You never cared for him, Hank. You made that clear. Me, I loved my old man.”

Henry Wellington shook his head sadly. “Enough to kill for him?”

“Love and money, Hank. What else is there of importance?”

I thought it was time for a desperation punch here. “Other people know Meloux’s story,” I said.

He dismissed it with a quick wave. “The ramblings of an old man who had no proof. And who, by the way, won’t be around to defend his claims.”

“How do you intend to work that?” Schanno asked in a rather disinterested tone.

“You, O’Connor, and the Indian will just disappear. There are so many lakes up here, nobody’ll find your vehicle or your bodies. As for Hank, well, everyone knows how bizarre his behavior has become. His suicide, when it’s discovered, won’t be a great surprise.”

“My children know the truth about me, Rupert.”

The younger Wellington grinned coyly. “The perception of family is unreliably altered by love.”

“The police will look at you very hard,” I pointed out.

“At this very moment,” Rupert replied, “I’m being seen at the wheel of my sailboat as I glide out of the marina in Thunder Bay for a day on the lake. I took a lesson from you, Hank, and found myself a man who impersonates me quite well. I’ve used him successfully on several occasions.”

“A lot of risk,” I said.

He gave a philosophical shrug. “‘A man’s reach should exceed his grasp; else what’s a heaven for,’ right?”

“I thought I knew you, Rupert,” Wellington said.

“You’ve always been too wrapped up in yourself to see anyone else clearly, Hank. All the headlines, all that glory. When I was a kid and you came home from Korea, I wished some MiG had shot you down in flames.”

His older brother looked amazed and disturbed. “I didn’t realize.”

“And then you handed the business over to me. Do you have any idea how often I’ve heard ‘Henry didn’t do it that way’? I could live in your shadow, Hank. I’ve done it all my life. But I won’t let you destroy my father.”

I’d calculated that I might be able to jump the deck rail and zigzag my way to the trees. If Benning and Dougherty were good with their weapons, they’d nail me before I was halfway there, but I figured if I didn’t try something, we were all dead anyway.

Schanno beat me to it. He wrapped his enormous hands around the table and heaved it in the direction of Benning and Dougherty so that the big umbrella blocked their view for an instant. He vaulted the rail and hit the ground running. He cut one way, then another, and the automatics opened up, sewing a jagged stitch across the yard. I saw Schanno falter, and I knew he’d been hit.

Just as I tensed to launch myself at the two men, the pop of a rifle came from the woods beyond Schanno. The glass of the sliding deck door exploded. Benning and Dougherty dove through the empty door frame toward safety, inside the house. Rupert Wellington was right behind them.

The shots kept coming, chunking into the logs, shattering glass inside the house. For a man of ninety-plus years, Henry Meloux moved remarkably fast. He was down the steps and hightailing it for the woods in the opposite direction Schanno had gone. It was a good move because it would divide the attention and the fire of the men with the automatics. Henry Wellington was at his heels. Me, I went after Schanno, who was crawling toward the cover of the pines.

Benning and Dougherty returned fire into the woods. Their bullets clipped branches and sent splintery sprays of bark flying as they raked the area where the shots seemed to have originated. That gave me the chance to grab Schanno, help him to his feet, and both of us reached the cover of the woods, where we flattened ourselves in the underbrush.

“Keep moving, Wally,” I said.

He tried but couldn’t go far.

“Where are you hit?”

“Leg,” he said, clutching his right thigh.

Blood wormed between his fingers, and I took a look. The bullet had gone cleanly through his leg, leaving two holes, entrance and exit. He was bleeding badly, but it wasn’t pulsing, so I didn’t think an artery had been clipped. I took my shirt off, tore it in half, and made two compresses, one for each hole. I still had on the drab green T-shirt I’d put on underneath that morning.