“I have a motel,” Core said.
“Stay with us, I insist,” he said, smiling. “We have a spare room. And you’ll like my wife. We’ll have a home-cooked meal.”
“Because you’d rather keep an eye on me, you mean.”
“You’re free to leave, Mr. Core, you probably know that. But you haven’t left yet, you’re still right here talking to me. You can be a witness, whatever you want to call it, but you’re gonna show me this spring.”
Through the windshield, through blurs of blown snow, they watched the young girl and husky get swallowed by hulking cones of covered spruce. Marium swigged from whiskey again and passed the bottle to Core.
In his double-bay garage, at six a.m., the sun still loath to bring its light, Shan Martin dialed Marium’s office—he had the number memorized—and tried to get him on the phone. “You tell Marium to call me, tell him I have information about Vernon Slone. I saw which way he’s going and I believe that reward money is mine. You tell Marium to call me.”
He returned the phone above the workbench to a cradle blackened by years of oil and grease. On the radio a weather report complaining of more storms, snow from the north. He flattened a cigarette filter into a can and moved a truck’s carburetor aside. On a square of aluminum he crushed a pain pill with a hammer, then with a putty knife scraped the residue from the head and chopped, plowed the powder into a line. With a rolled one-dollar bill he snorted half into one nostril and half into the other.
When Shan turned, he saw him there by the door in a wolf mask, the pistol-grip shotgun at his side like a cane. The sight of Slone in his garage made it suddenly hard to breathe.
“Jesus, Vernon? What are you doing? The hell you wearing, man? I thought you left.” His peculiar new voice was a choked wobble.
Slone stepped toward him slowly. Shan inched back against the workbench.
“Is this Halloween, man? The fuck you wearing?”
Slone’s boots made not a sound on the concrete floor.
“I thought you left. You come back for some pills? That wound must be killing you. I can get you more.”
Just the breathing inside the mask.
“You all right, man? I was just talking to Darcy on the phone, she wants more money from me, you know women, it’s always that way with them.”
Slone stepped nearer still and Shan looked to the gun. “The hell you doing, Vernon?” Slone raised it to pump the first slug into the chamber—a sound metallic and final in the cuboid cold of the garage.
Cornered where the workbench met the cinder-block wall, his face a welter of anguish, Shan pitched wrenches and screwdrivers that bounced from the padding of Slone’s coat and clanged to the floor. He shrank more into the corner, his face now coiled in a noiseless sob. When Slone reached him, he pressed the barrel up hard beneath Shan’s sternum. In the muzzle of the mask a hollow wet breathing, those familiar eyes embedded above a lupine snarl.
Sniveled pleas, an appeal to their past. Excuses—what the divorce had done to him, his abysmal debt. An apology for this betrayal, a prayer with tears. The radio sound behind them, the weather report foretelling of this winter’s reign.
The blast ripped up through Shan Martin’s chest and out his throat and face in a vermillion flare, thrust him back into the cinder block before he slumped dead to Slone’s feet, his face leaking teeth and pieces from where his mouth had been. Slone lifted a garage door, backed up his truck to the new snow machine strapped to a trailer, then attached the trailer to the truck’s hitch… on the radio behind him the weatherman trying to explain arctic air, still in calm drone about what was coming.
XI
A snowplow scraped against asphalt at eight in the morning, shook the house when it hit the curb. Core woke to its headlamps and racket—woke in the spare bedroom in Marium’s home, the room that in eight months would belong to Marium’s child. Nothing in this room now but a single bed and an ironing board, the iron unplugged on a green carpet. No dresser, not a chair. Walls bare, a washed-out cream. Before sleep he’d felt that familiar sense of being afield in an unfamiliar bed, a welcome trespass among the scent of strange laundry soap. Lying wrapped in the dark and straining to hear the sounds of the house and not to make a sound himself.
The night before, Marium’s wife, Susan, had cooked a meal of burbot and rice in a kitchen with appliances much older than her. All evening at the table she observed Core with barely veiled suspicion. He tried to diffuse such discomfort with talk of children.
“What’s it like to have a daughter?” Susan said.
“It’s good, though I’m not the best man to ask about kids. I haven’t been the father I planned on being.”
“I hear no one is,” she said.
“I was away a lot, more than I wanted to be.” And I’m still away now, he thought.
“You were away to work, I’m guessing,” Marium said. “To make money. That was for her.”
“There are ways to make money that don’t involve being apart from your family. I was younger than you by a bit. What are you, forty-three? You’re wanting a boy, I’d bet.”
“Sure I do.” He looked to Susan. “But a girl is good too. And I’m forty-eight. A fogey like me having my first kid.”
“Fogey?” Core said. “I’ll trade with you.”
Now in the dark of the morning Marium knocked twice on the door to the spare bedroom. Core was already dressed, trying to unearth his toothbrush from the bottom of a duffel bag.
“Sunup is ten-fourteen,” Marium said. “We gotta get to the plane. You’re right that Slone is still here. We got a call in last night from a mining camp north of here. Slone was there yesterday and there’s a dead man to prove it. Plus a call in early this morning from one of Slone’s old buddies. We gotta get to the plane.”
“Shouldn’t you go talk to those people? I can wait here.”
“There aren’t any clear roads to that mining camp now, but I got a guy going to interview Slone’s buddy. We’re going to find that hot spring behind Keelut, Mr. Core.”
As they drove through town, Core saw shops alight in dull fluorescence, their storefront windows thick with frost, slow shapes inside like fishes beneath lake ice. Bags of sand and salt stacked on a pallet in front of the hardware store. Someone had long forgotten to take down a wind chime and it hung now before the grocer’s like a birdcage of ice. Stray citizens passed on a sanded sidewalk, sacks of larder slung across their shoulders. The hands of the clock tower frozen to the wrong time. The temperature was twenty below. Marium rushed into a diner and returned with egg sandwiches and coffee.
“We won’t have more than two hours’ air time after sunup,” he said. “You get caught in a blizzard this time of year and you lose the horizon. Then you hit a mountain or the ground and never even know it. You know what day it is?”
“Friday,” Core told him.
“It’s the winter solstice. Longest night of the year.”
“All the nights here feel pretty long to me,” Core said.
“Tonight is eighteen hours and thirty-three minutes of darkness.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means we have to get back before that dark begins to fall. Slone’s buddy left a message at the station at six this morning, and if he’s right that he just saw Slone heading somewhere, that means Slone’s got a four-hour lead time on us.”
“Do you think this friend is right about seeing Slone? I doubt the man would let himself be seen.”
“Shan Martin is a thief and I never met a thief that wasn’t a liar too, so I don’t know. But if Slone came out of the bush then he must have needed something. Food or ammo, or maybe he’s hurt. The woman at the mining camp told us she shot the shit out of his truck.”