That’s when I noticed Reynaud getting out of the plane. “McKnight, what did you just say?”
It all went to hell in the next few minutes. It didn’t matter whether we were in America or Canada-cops are cops, and they’re supposed to stay in control of everything around them, but this was something they’d never had to deal with before. I kept my mouth shut while they piled out of their plane and climbed aboard Gannon’s. The other constable we had met, the one with the suntan, was the pilot. Reynaud jumped out first, landing light on her feet. She climbed up the ladder and down the other side, making her way out on the far float to her partner’s body. I didn’t see her reaction. I was too busy cooperating with the other constables, putting my hands behind my back so they could cuff me.
Of course, once they cuffed me, they couldn’t get me into their plane. On another day it would have been funny.
“This other man in the passenger’s seat,” Boxer Face said to me, “is he dead, too?”
“That’s Vinnie LeBlanc. You met him before. We need to get him to a hospital right away.”
She came back through the plane, looked at Vinnie, put her hand on his neck, and then came down to me. She looked at me for exactly one second and then backhanded me right across the face.
“I’m sorry about DeMers,” I said. “But I didn’t do it. He was dead when we got here.”
“Who killed him?” Her face was red, and she was rubbing her hand.
“As far as I can tell, Hank Gannon. He’s over there on the shoreline.” I nodded my head in the general direction.
“Where?”
“Up in the trees. He’s dead, too.”
I felt one of the other constables squeezing my shoulder.
“We did kill Gannon. He was trying to shoot us.”
“We saw you with the rifle, McKnight. You threw it back in the plane when we landed.”
I took a deep breath. It was probably a good time to stop talking. That would have been the smart thing. But nobody’s ever accused me of being smart. “Look,” I said, “we’ve been up here for two days. Guy Berard and his grandfather flew us up here.”
“I know,” she said.
That stopped me. “Where are they now?” I said. “Are they-”
“They’re at home,” she said. “Why did they fly you out here?”
“It’s a long story, okay? We need to get Vinnie back to a doctor. I’ll tell you the rest on the way.”
She looked at the two men, then at me. “My partner is dead, McKnight. The best cop I’ve ever known. The best… human being. He’s dead.”
“So are the other men,” I said. “Okay? I should tell you that much right now. We found them.”
“What men?”
“Vinnie’s brother, Tom. And Albright, and the rest of the men who were missing.”
“What are you talking about? They flew back out on Saturday.” “No,” I said. “We found them. A couple of miles north of the cabin.”
She didn’t know what to say to that. Not that I blamed her. A dead partner, that was more than enough. That’s one thing I knew all too well.
“I’ll tell you everything I know,” I said. “Please, we’ve got to get Vinnie out of here. He’s been shot in the face, for God’s sake.”
That woke her up a little bit. “Jim, you better get on the radio.”
“I don’t think we’ll get through,” he said. “Not sitting down here on this lake. We need to get up in the air.”
“All right, you better take these men back, then. I’ll stay here.”
“Natty, you can’t do that,” he said.
“I’m not leaving my partner,” she said. Her face was like stone now. “Get in the air and call for backup.”
They had to drag Vinnie out of his seat and carry him to the other plane. After all we had been through, he just about drowned right there. They took my handcuffs off, let me jump across, then put the handcuffs back on when I was in my seat. The pilot spun the plane around and gave it the gas.
“Smallest damned lake I’ve ever taken off from,” he said. He pulled back on the yoke and the plane fought its way up into the air.
As we climbed over the trees, I looked down at Gannon’s plane. Reynaud stood there on the float, holding on to the ladder, watching us fly away.
Chapter Nineteen
When we were in the air, the pilot called in the basics. A constable dead on the scene, another man, the owner of the plane, dead on the shore. Five men in a shallow grave north of the cabin site. At least according to me. Boxer Face sat in the passenger’s seat, looking back at me every few minutes. It was hard to read his expression. He was probably thinking twenty different things at once. I was sure one of those things was just how good it would feel to open the door and toss us right out of the plane.
They didn’t ask me to tell the rest of my story, as I had promised. They were saving that for the ground.
We flew for an hour and a half. The drone of the engines eventually got to me, and I drifted in and out of a trance as we bounced and buzzed our way all the way to a small airport. It was a true amphibian plane, one that could land on pavement as well as water. When we got out, three OPP cars and an ambulance were waiting for us.
They put Vinnie in the back of the ambulance and me in the back of one of the cars. About a half hour later, I was sitting in a bed in the clinic with an IV in one arm and the other arm handcuffed to the bed rail. A doctor was cutting the laces off my boots with scissors while the two constables stood by watching.
“How long were you out there?” he asked.
“Most of two days.”
“Immersion foot,” he said. “Let’s see how bad.”
“What about Vinnie? How’s he doing?”
The doctor looked up at the officers. “I don’t know,” he said. “Someone else is working on him.”
When he finally slipped the boot and sock off, the foot was purple. It looked and felt like some alien thing. “Not good,” he said.
“What do you have to do now?”
“We have to let them warm up slowly,” he said. “And then it’s just a matter of keeping them dry and elevated.” He went to work on the other boot.
“Can one of you guys go see how Vinnie is doing?” I said.
Neither of them moved. They both stood there and looked at me with their hands folded across their chests.
“Thanks a lot,” I said.
Another man, vaguely familiar to me, came in while the doctor was getting my other boot off. That foot looked just as bad. “Nice case of trench foot,” he said. “You’re gonna be hurting for a long time.”
“Can you tell me about my friend?” I said.
“They’re cleaning out his wound right now. That duct tape probably saved his life. Was that your idea?”
“It’s all we had to work with.”
“That spear that killed Mr. Gannon, was that yours, too?”
“Yes.”
“Who actually killed him?”
“We both did. We had to.”
“Mr. McKnight, who physically ran the spear through Mr. Gannon’s body?”
“Vinnie did.”
He let out a long breath, closed his eyes, and pinched the bridge of his nose. I realized where I had seen him before. He was the staff sergeant we had seen at the station. This was obviously supposed to be his day off, because he wasn’t wearing his uniform.
“Your name is Moreland,” I said. “You’re the detachment commander.”
“Yes.”
“You’ve got to understand something. We didn’t kill Constable DeMers.”
“He was three months away from retirement. Did you know that?”
“He mentioned it, yes.”
He opened his case and took out a tape recorder. “So start at the beginning.”
That’s what I did. I told him everything, from the first time we came up to the lodge, to meeting Guy and his grandfather, flying up to the lake, finding the dead bodies, and then the other plane landing. I told him the whole thing from start to finish, and then I told it to him again, this time with some other men standing around listening to me. The doctor took out the IV and gave me some water. He asked me what I thought I could eat. I said anything they had. While I was waiting for the food, some men from the Royal Mounted Canadian Police came in and I had to tell the whole story one more time.