16

CFS Lodge, Ford Lake, Minnesota

Still Saturday, 15 September

There’s no explosion, though, or bursting glass. Just a run of light-flashes. I push off the floor and get through the door just as it goes off again.

I get around the cabin in time to see someone disappear into the woods that lead up to the outfitters. In a cabin somewhere to my left, Bark the Dog starts barking. I try to run and sniff my fingers at the same time. Violet’s smell gets the hairs on the back of my neck up.

As a flashlight switches on ahead of me and I enter the woods, I suddenly understand why Sheriff Albin is so obsessed with cleared paths. Even though the trees have skinny trunks, like the whole area’s been logged, their branches form an airborne web.^[44] Ducking the small, stabby, eye-level branches just makes you more likely to get clotheslined by the chest-high thick ones. It’s like oozing at high speed through a filter made of wood. And unlike the lawn, which was as moist and springy as a cake, the ground here feels like rocks and thumbtacks.

It’s a bad place to be in your boxer briefs, but it’s not doing any favors for the guy I’m chasing either. Even with my thumbs up at my temples so my forearms will protect my face, and never putting all of my weight on one foot, I’m gaining on his flashlight beam.

As soon as I can see his collar, I dive for it. Yank it backward and down, landing him hard on his back.

I shine his flashlight on him.

Overweight guy around forty in an anorak. Winded and squirming from the light. He’s got a camera with a gigantic white telescopic lens held tightly to his chest.

“Who are you?” I say.

He breathes in and out a couple of times. “Nobody.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I was lost. Get off of me.”

Bark comes tearing out of the woods like a disembodied set of eyes and fangs, dark on dark. Hops on the guy’s groin with all four feet and joyfully bounces off.

“Who are you?” I say when he recovers slightly. “Don’t make me ask you again.”

“What’s the situation?” Miguel says, coming up behind me. He’s in a robe and slippers, holding a 9mm in a two-handed military stance. Through the trees, I can see lights turning on in the cabins.

“Put that away,” I say. “This guy was taking pictures through the window.”

“Were you yelling before?” Miguel says to me.

“Yeah.” Bark starts licking the side of my head.

“Why?”

“Nightmare.”

“About what?”

“Don’t remember.”

Del arrives, in his own robe-and-handgun ensemble. “Who’s he?”

“He hasn’t said yet,” I say.

“He’s about to,” Miguel says. He jams the 9mm into the guy’s temple. “Who are you, motherfucker?”

“Ow, fuck!” the guy says.

I say “I said, put it away.”

“Soon as he tells us who he is.”

I take Miguel’s gun, eject the magazine, rack the chambered bullet out, and toss it into the woods.

“Fuck!” he says, going after it.

“You’re both fucking crazy,” the guy on the ground says.

“What’s going on?” Violet says, reaching us. She’s dressed, which makes me realize how sweaty I am, and how cold out it is. Reggie’s right behind her in a fleece shirt and his microshorts. There’s a lot of shining flashlights in each other’s eyes while Bark jumps around deliriously.

“Yo!” one of Tyson Grody’s guys yells from down by the lawn. “What’s going on up there?”

“It’s under control! No guns!” I shout. To Reggie and Violet, I say “This guy was snooping. Taking pictures.”

“Of what?” Violet says.

“I don’t know.”

“Who is he?”

Reggie says “Was there someone screaming?”

Miguel, searching through the brush, says bitterly “It was Dr. Azimuth. He was having a nightmare. Then he threw my gun over here.”

One of Wayne Teng’s bodyguards is next to Violet, though I don’t recall seeing him arrive. No gun, at least.

“All right. Out with it,” I say to the guy on the ground.

“Fuck you. Call the police if you want. I wasn’t doing anything illegal.”

“I’m pretty sure trespassing’s illegal,” Reggie says.

“This is private property?” the man says. “I need to get a better map of the easements around here. And if anyone touches me again I will sue the shit out of all of you.”

“No, you won’t,” I say, patting down his coat pockets. I fake a punch to his gut to make him flinch to one side, then pull the wallet from his back pocket.

“You’re mugging me!”

“You’ll know when I’m mugging you.”

In among the crap in the wallet there’s a driver’s license and a bunch of different business cards, all with the same name, “Michael Bennett.” One says “Michael Bennett, Desert Eagle Investigations, Phoenix, Arizona.”

“Who are you working for?” I say.

“Bite me. I wouldn’t tell you if I knew.”

I notice Jane, wife of Davey, coming up through the woods with some of the other lodge staff.

“You don’t know who hired you?”

“They used a middleman. It’s standard practice.”

Del leans down with what is, I realize too late, a drawn combat knife. For a second I think he’s going to stab the man, but he just cuts through the strap of his camera. Says “Mind if I take a look at this?”

“Yes—I do. Don’t touch that,” the man says.

“Is this thing self-stabilized?”

“God damn it, give it back!” He tries to sit up. My hand is still on his collar.

“What’s the assignment?” I ask him.

“I’m looking for wildlife—”

“Are these the pictures?” Del says, prying the memory card out. “Watch this.”

Pretty much everyone yells “Don’t!” as Del pinches the memory card in half and lets it drop.

“Oops,” he says.

Then he realizes he’s just ruined our chance to find out what the guy was here to photograph.

The guy realizes it too. Stands up, brushes himself off, and takes the camera from Del’s hands. Looks at me and says “Wallet.”

I give him his wallet. Del looks mortified.

“Gentlemen, ladies,” the photographer says as he turns to go uphill.

“Son, you come back here, your easement’s going to be my foot up your ass,” Reggie says.

“That’s right, motherfucker,” Miguel says from over in the brush.

★★★

“Probably wanted pictures of the ref,” Reggie says, lighting a joint. He and I are on the porch of his cabin. After the departure of Michael Bennett of the Desert Eagle Agency or whoever he was, and my following him up the hill to get his license plate number, I stopped by Reggie’s cabin and asked him if he had a minute.

“Who is the ref?” I say.

“In good time.” He offers me the joint.

I rarely do drugs anymore, because as I’ve grown older I’ve become able to achieve the same states of emotional instability and poor decision-making skills without them, but neither have I quite gotten into the habit of turning them down. I drag deeply, and an artificially cheery assessment of my character and actions sets in almost immediately.

Why don’t I do drugs anymore?

“I’ve got alpha-blockers, too, if you want some,” Reggie says. “For the other thing.”

“What other thing?” I say on the let-out.

“You know—the nightmares.”

I let that lie.

“Were you in the service?” Reggie says.

“No.”

“Too bad. They’ve got some cool things going on with PTSD now at the VA. You know, I could get my doc to talk to you on the phone.”

“Reggie,” I say to him. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“With what?”

“With any of this. The tour.”

He laughs. “Do I look like someone who knows what he’s doing?”

“Yeah,” I say. “You do. You’ve got the only viable business in an economic wasteland. You’ve got friends. You’ve got enough juice to get someone like Tyson Grody to show up for your crazy-assed monster plan. So why do you have a crazy-assed monster plan?”

Reggie tucks the joint into the good side of his mouth to relight it. “I’m not gonna tell you the money doesn’t have anything to do with it. I wouldn’t mind getting out of here. Move to Cambodia, live on the beach. I’ve got some personal reasons, too, though.”

“Like what?”

“It’s something a friend of mine wanted to do.”

“You mean Chris Jr.?”

“You’ve heard of him.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I heard the monster hoax was his idea. I also heard you killed him.”

If it shakes Reggie up, he doesn’t show it. “Yeah, well,” he says, exhaling. “That’s what everybody thinks.”

“Did you?”

“No. I loved Chris Jr. He was like a little brother to me—if I could have had a little brother who was that much less fucked up than I was.”

“So why do people think you did?”

“It’s how I got this place.” He gestures out across the water. With the glass lake reflecting a cutting-needle moon, it’s spectacular. The air is damp and thick with the sounds of a living environment: frogs or cicadas or something. Pikes fighting loons, for all I know.

“What happened to him?”

“No fucking idea,” Reggie says, handing off to me. “I was right here—inside—playing poker with Del and Miguel and another guy, who doesn’t work here anymore, and we heard the shots.”

“Chris Jr. was shot here?”

Reggie points. “Down there. On the pier. Chris Jr. and this other guy, a priest. We didn’t find them till the next day, though. We went outside when we heard the shots, but we couldn’t see anything, so we figured it was just some jackass shooting off drunk, or night hunting.”

So Chris Jr. was shot on the same pier the picture was taken on. With Reggie nearby.

Which means what? I can’t really see Del and Miguel risking felony homicide charges to help Reggie fake an alibi. It’s possible, but they’d need to really love whatever it is they do for him, or with him, or whatever—or else really love him. Most people will think twice about buying into a murder rap, particularly when it’s going to give someone they already know is capable of murder a reason to want them dead too.

But maybe they didn’t know they were doing it. With a decent scope, Reggie could have shot Chris Jr. and Father Podominick from right here at his cabin. Out the bathroom window or something, then hidden the rifle and come back to the game asking what that noise was.

“You have to understand,” Reggie says. “Chris Jr. didn’t live here. Christine didn’t want to, because of school for Autumn and all that, so the whole family lived in Ely. Chris didn’t even tell her he was coming out here that night. Said he was going to Sears. He didn’t tell us either. Christine called here an hour or so after he was shot and asked if Chris had stopped by, but we didn’t think he had, so we said no. We still have no idea what he was doing out here. Father Podominick neither.”

“Did you notice anything that night?”

“Nope. Just the two shots. Police thought they came from out on the lake, or around the shore.”

“Did you hear a boat?”

“No, but that doesn’t mean anything. Lot of people around here use electric motors, so they can sneak up on the fish. And everybody’s got a canoe.”

“Could someone have shot him from as far away as Ford?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t have.”

Odd thing to say. “Is it possible one of Debbie Schneke’s Boys killed Chris Jr.?”

“No. She didn’t have those at the time.”

“Could she have done it herself?”

“Nah. Not Debbie. She wasn’t as bad back then as she is now.”

“Not even right after Benjy died?”

Reggie salutes me with the joint as he relights it. “You have done your homework, son. But no, I don’t think so. Obviously you can’t go killing a woman’s kid and expect her to be the same afterward. Benjy was a cool kid, too—I knew him because he was dating Autumn. He put up with all kinds of shit from us. But Debbie didn’t fully lose it till later on, and I think there were other factors involved when she did. I don’t really know, though. Her and me’d stopped dating by the time the kids died.”

I suddenly feel stoned. “You and Debbie Schneke were dating?”

“Oh, yeah. On and off for about six years. Way off, sometimes, but still. She really was a different person back then.”

As with every other part of this weirdness, I have no idea what to make of that. “Why didn’t you tell the people you wanted to come out here about Benjy and Autumn?” I say. “As a selling point, I mean. Why wasn’t it mentioned in the documentary?”

“Fuck, I would never exploit Autumn’s death for bullshit like that. I was crazy about that girl. I would have taken a bullet for her. Anyway, the documentary I didn’t really have anything to do with.”

“Except for sending it out.”

“Sure, there’s that. But making it was all Chris Jr.’s thing.”

“You weren’t part of the original hoax?”

“No. I knew about it, I guess, but I got the idea Chris Jr. wanted to do it on his own. Or maybe he just didn’t want me to be involved. He was thirty-seven or whatever. I’m sixty-two. I’d known his dad since before he was born—I’d been living here since Chris Jr. was around fifteen. I figured maybe he wanted a chance to try something all on his own for once.”

“And it worked out so well that now you’re trying it.”

Reggie shakes his head. “Part of why I’m trying it is because the whole thing went to hell. Like I say: most of it’s about the money. But not all of it. Something or somebody killed Autumn, then somebody shot Chris Jr. If doing this trip brings me face-to-face with whatever or whoever that was, it’ll be worth it, money or no money.” His eyes are wet. Both of them. “Hey, you want a Dr Pepper?”

“No, thanks.”

“I’m gonna have one.”

“Go ahead.”

When he comes back, I say “Reggie, is there any reason at all to think there’s actually a monster in White Lake?”

He looks surprised. “Sure there is. I wouldn’t be doing this otherwise.”

“Like what?”

“Well. For one thing, Chris Jr. thought there was. I know he did, because right before he died, he bought all this equipment to catch it—giant nets and hooks and stuff. Most of it showed up after he was gone, but it was serious stuff. He was loading up for something.”

“Okay. Any other reason?”

“Yeah,” Reggie says. “I’m not saying there necessarily is one in White Lake. But I have run into one of these fuckers before.”