Winter of the Wolf Moon: A Mystery Read online

  ENORMOUS CRITICAL ACCLAIM

  FOR AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR

  STEVE HAMILTON

  WINTER OF THE WOLF MOON

  “The isolated, wintry location jives well with Hamilton’s pristine prose, independent protagonist, and ingenious plot. An inviting sequel to his Edgar Award-winning first novel, A Cold Day in Paradise.”

  —Library Journal

  “[Hamilton’s] protagonist is likable as well as durable, his raffish cast sharply observed and entertaining. Moreover, he knows how to pace a story, something of a lost art in recent crime fiction.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “There’s almost as much action in the book as there is snow—and there’s heaps of white flakes. But Hamilton’s first-person narrative has a lyric cadence and thoughtful tone that nicely counterpoints all the rough-and-tumble stuff.”

  —Orlando Sentinel

  “In his second novel, Steve Hamilton continues the high standards he set in his Edgar-winning debut, A Cold Day in Paradise. WINTER OF THE WOLF MOON is an entertaining tale buoyed by solid plotting, wry humor and brisk pacing … Characters are so well shaped they hit the scene breathing. Alex embodies the traits of a good private eye—a loner, stubborn and haunted by his past … No matter what the season outside, WINTER OF THE WOLF MOON has the depth of winter between its pages, and its exciting story will keep you warm.”

  —Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

  A COLD DAY IN PARADISE

  “Ingenious … Hamilton unreels the mystery with a mounting tension many an old pro might envy.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Hamilton combines crisp, clear writing, wily, colorful characters and an offbeat locale in an impressive debut.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “[A] well-plotted and tightly written thriller.”

  —Detroit Free Press

  “A good combination of crafty and colorful characters, an offbeat locale in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and really crisp, clear writing … There are several plots, all woven together very well. Alex is a very likable character, as are other townspeople, and the writing moves very swiftly, making this an easy and enjoyable book to read.”

  —Sullivan County Democrat

  “P.I. Alex McKnight’s ‘mean streets’ are the deep pine woods and the small lakeside towns of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and here the past comes to find him, chilling as the November wind. A must for PI and suspense fans.”

  —Charles Todd, author of Wings of Fire

  “His story is so fundamentally sound and stylistically rounded that Hamilton ought to be teaching whatever writing course he may have taken toward producing this novel.”

  —Jeremiah Healy, author of

  The Stalking of Sheilah Quinn

  and The Only Good Lawyer

  ST. MARTIN’S/MINOTAUR PAPERBACKS TITLES

  by STEVE HAMILTON

  A Cold Day in Paradise

  Winter of the Wolf Moon

  The Hunting Wind

  North of Nowhere

  Blood is the Sky

  WINTER OF THE WOLF MOON

  STEVE HAMILTON

  NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  WINTER OF THE WOLF MOON

  Copyright © 2000 by Steve Hamilton.

  Excerpt from The Hunting Wind copyright © 2001 by Steve Hamilton.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 98-056343

  ISBN: 0-312-97475-2

  EAN: 80312-97475-6

  Printed in the United States of America

  St Martin’s Press hardcover edition / February 2000

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition / February 2001

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4

  TO NENA

  Acknowledgments

  For so graciously sharing her time and her knowledge of the Ojibwa life, I owe a great debt of gratitude to Donna Pine from the Garden River First Nation.

  Thanks also to Frank Hayes and Bill Keller, Liz Staples and Taylor Brugman, the real-life agents “Champagne” and “Urbanic,” Bob Kozak and everyone at IBM, Bob Randisi and the Private Eye Writers of America, Ruth Cavin, Marika Rohn and everyone at St. Martin’s Press, Jane Chelius, Larry Queipo, former chief of police, town of Kingston, New York, and Dr. Glenn Hamilton from the department of emergency medicine, Wright State University.

  And finally, to my wife Julia, who makes everything possible, and to Nickie, who gets to be a big brother soon….

  CHAPTER ONE

  Two minutes. That’s how long it took me to realize I had made a big mistake.

  The blue team was good. They were big. They were fast. They knew how to play hockey. From the moment the puck was dropped to the ice, they controlled the game. They moved the puck back and forth between them like a pinball, across the blue line, into the corner, back to the point. Once they were in the zone they settled down, took their time with it, waited for the best opportunity. They were like five wolves circling their prey. When the shot came it was nothing more than a dark blur. The center slid across the front of the goal mouth, untouched, taking the puck and with one smooth motion turning it home with a sudden flick of the wrist. It hit the back of the net before the goalie even knew it was coming. Right between his legs. Or as they say on television, right through the five hole.

  It was going to be a long night for the goalie on the red team. Which I wouldn’t have minded so much if that goalie hadn’t been a certain forty-eight-year-old idiot who let himself get talked into it.

  “It’s a thirty-and-over league,” Vinnie had said. “Every Thursday night. No checking, no slapshots. They call it ‘slow puck.’ You know, like ‘slow pitch’ softball? ‘Slow puck’ hockey, you get it?”

  “I get it,” I said.

  “It’s a lot of fun, Alex. You’ll love it.” Vinnie was my Indian friend. Vinnie LeBlanc, an Ojibwa, a member of the Bay Mills tribe, with a little bit of French Canadian in him, a little bit of Italian, and a little bit of God knows what else, like most of the Indians around here. You couldn’t see much Indian blood in him, just a hint of it in the face, around the eyes and cheekbones. He didn’t have that Indian air about him, that slow and careful way of speaking. And unlike some of the Indians I’ve met, especially the tribes in Canada, he looked you right in the eye when he spoke to you.

  Vinnie was an Ojibwa and proud of it. But he didn’t live on the reservation anymore. He never drank. Not one drop, ever. He could put on a suit and pass for a downstate businessman. Or he could track a deer through the woods like he knew the inside of that animal’s mind.

  He had found me at the Glasgow Inn, sitting by the fireplace. I should have known something was up when he bought me a beer.

  “I don’t think so, Vinnie. I haven’t been on skates in thirty years.”

  “How much you gotta skate?” he said. “You’ll be in goal. C’mon, Alex, we really need ya.”

  “What happened to your regular goalie?”

  “Ah, he has to give it a rest for a couple weeks,” Vinnie said. “He sort of took one in the neck.”

  “I thought you said it was slow puck!”

  “It was a fluke thin
g, Alex. It caught him right under the mask.”

  “Forget it, Vinnie. I’m not playing goalie.”

  “You were a catcher, right?” he said. “In double-A?”

  “I played two years in triple-A,” I said. “But so what?”

  “It’s the same thing. You wear pads. You wear a mask. You just catch a puck instead of a baseball.”

  “It’s not the same thing.”

  “Alex, the Red Sky Raiders need you. You can’t let us down.”

  I almost spit out my beer. “Red Sky Raiders? Are you kidding me?”

  “It’s a great name,” he said.

  “Sounds like a kamikaze squadron.”

  Red Sky was Vinnie’s Ojibwa name. During hunting season, he did a lot of guide work, taking down-staters into the woods. He liked to use his nickname then, playing up the. Indian thing. After all, he once told me, who are you going to hire to be your guide, a guy named Red Sky or a guy named Vinnie?

  “Alex, Alex.” He shook his head and looked into the fire.

  Here it comes, I thought.

  “It’s just a fun little hockey league. Something to look forward to on a Thursday night. You know, instead of sitting around looking at the snow and going fucking insane.”

  “I thought you Indians were at peace with the seasons.”

  He gave me a look. “I got eight guys on my team. They’re going to be very disappointed. We’ll have to forfeit the game. All because a former professional athlete is afraid to put on some pads and play goal for us. You gonna just sit here on your butt all winter? Don’t you ever get the urge to do anything, Alex? To actually use your body again?”

  “You’re breaking my heart, Vinnie. You really are.”

  “You can use Bradley’s stuff. It’s all new. Mask, blocker, glove, skates. What size do you wear?”

  “Eleven,” I said.

  “Perfect.”

  I didn’t have much chance after that. Vinnie had been there when I needed him, taking care of the cabins while I was out making a fool of myself pretending to be a private investigator. So I certainly owed him one. And he was right, I was tired of sitting around all winter. How bad could it be, right? Put on the pads and the mask, play some goal. It might even be fun.

  It was fun all right. I flicked the puck out of the goal to the referee and he skated it back to center ice for another face-off. I barely had time to take a drink of water from my bottle when they were back in my zone again, moving the puck back and forth, looking for another shot. The blue center was skating around in front of my goal like he owned it. I had to keep peeking around him to follow the puck.

  “Get this guy out of here,” I said to anyone who could hear me. “Don’t let him just stand here.”

  A long shot came from the blue line. I knocked the puck down, but before I could dive on it, the blue center knocked it into the net. Three minutes into the game, and I had given up two goals. The center did a little dance, waved his stick in the air, his teammates jumping all over him like they just won the Stanley Cup.

  Vinnie skated by. “Hang in there, Alex,” he said. “We’ll try to give you a little more help.”

  I grabbed the front of his red jersey. “Vinnie, for God’s sake, will you hit that guy or something? He’s camped out right in front of me.”

  “There’s no checking, remember? Alex, we’re just playing for fun here.”

  “I’m not having any fun,” I said. “You don’t have to take his head off, just … give him a little bump.”

  The blue center was skating around in wide circles now, bobbing his head. He was chanting to himself, something like, “Oh yeah, baby, oh yeah, oh yeah, oh baby, oh yeah.”

  I knew the type. It doesn’t matter what sport you play, you always run into guys like this. In baseball, it was usually a first baseman or an outfielder. They came up to the plate with that swagger in their step. I’d ask them how they’re doing as they’re digging in, just because that’s what you do in baseball, but they’d ignore me. First pitch is a strike, they look back at the umpire with that look. How dare you call a strike on me? I’d throw the ball back to the pitcher and then give him the sign for a high hard one. Guys like that need the fear of God put in them every once in a while, something to remind them that they’re human just like the rest of us. If not a bolt of lightning then at least a good ninety-mile-per-hour fastball under their chin.

  It was reassuring to see that hockey players had to deal with these guys, too. Vinnie smiled at me, took off a glove and adjusted his helmet strap. “Maybe just one little bump,” he said.

  I knew they played three ten-minute periods in this league, a concession to age and to the fact that most teams only had nine or ten players. So I only had twenty-seven more minutes to go. I slapped my stick on the ice. Go Red Sky Raiders.

  Vinnie’s men finally woke up and started playing some hockey. While the puck was in the opposite zone, I stood all alone in front of my goal, looking around at the Big Bear Arena. It was brand-new, built by the Sault tribe with money from the casino. There was a second rink on the other side, locker rooms in the middle, and a restaurant on the upper deck. The stands were mostly empty, just some women watching us. None of them looked like they were on our side. I pulled the mask away from my face, wiped away the sweat. The catcher’s gear I wore a million years ago—the chest protector and the shin pads—was nothing compared to these goalie pads. It felt like I had a mattress tied to each leg.

  The game started to get a little “chippy,” as the hockey announcers like to say. The elbows were coming up in the corners, the sticks were hitting other sticks, maybe even a leg or two. There was only one referee, a little old guy skating around with a whistle in his hand, never daring to blow it. He was probably retired from a civil service job, never got in anybody’s way his whole life and wasn’t going to start now.

  I finally stopped a couple shots. It wasn’t like catching a baseball at all, I realized. A pitch in the dirt, you become a human wall. The glove goes down between your legs. You don’t even try to catch it. You let it bounce off you, you throw the mask off, and then you pick it up. A hockey goalie can be more aggressive, move out of the net, cut off the angle.

  “Att’sa way, Alex,” Vinnie said. He was breathing hard. He bounced his stick off my pads. “Now you’re getting it.”

  Toward the end of the first period, there was a loose puck in front of the net. I dove on it. The blue center came at me hard, stopping right in front of me. He cut his skates into the ice, sending a full spray right into my face. The old shower trick. I had seen it on television a thousand times, now I got to experience it in person.

  As I got up I stuck my stick into the hollow behind his knee. He turned around and cross-checked me. Two hands on his stick and wham, right across my shoulders.

  I looked into his eyes. A cold blue. Pupils dilated, as wide as pennies. My God, I thought, this guy is either stone crazy or high. Or both.

  The referee skated between us. “Easy does it, boys,” he said. “None of that.”

  “Hey, ref,” I said. “That metal thing in your hand, when you blow in it, it makes the little pea vibrate and a loud sound comes out. You should try it. And then you can send this clown to the penalty box for two minutes.”

  “Let’s just play some hockey, boys,” he said, skating off with the puck.

  The center kept looking at me. Those crazy eyes. I took my mask off. “You got a problem?”

  He smiled when he saw my face. “Sorry, didn’t realize you were an old man. I’ll try to take it easy on you.”

  When the first period was over, we all got to sit on the bench and wipe our faces off for a few minutes. Nobody said anything. We could hear the other team on their bench, laughing, yelling at each other. Just a little too loud, I thought. A little too happy. Then they started making these noises. It sounded like that stupid chant you hear them do down in Atlanta at the Braves games. The Indian war chant.

  Vinnie stood up and looked at them over the partitio
n. Then he looked at us. Eight faces, all Bay Mills Ojibwa. And one old white man. Nobody said a word. They didn’t have to.

  Here it comes, I thought. I’ve seen this look before. I’ve never met an Ojibwa who wasn’t a gentle person at heart, who didn’t have a fuse about three miles long. But when you finally gave that fuse enough time to burn, watch out. You see it in the casinos every couple months. Some drunken white man makes a scene, starts yelling at the pit boss about how the no-good Indian dealer is cheating him. Doesn’t even realize that the pit boss himself is a member of the tribe. If he pushes it far enough he goes right through a window.

  I felt a little looser in the second period, watching my Red Sky Raiders take it to the blue team. Vinnie was right about one thing—it felt good to use my body again. For something other than cutting wood or shoveling snow, anyway. If this was a mistake, it certainly wasn’t a big one. It wouldn’t rank up there with the other major mistakes of my life. Like getting married when I was twenty-three years old, just out of baseball, not sure what I was going to do with my life. Not a good reason to get married.

  Or letting myself get talked into becoming a private eye. And everything that happened after that.

  Or Sylvia. Letting myself fall in love with her. Yes, I’ll say it. The puck is in the other end. I’m skating back and forth in front of my net, wondering why I’m thinking of these things. But yes, I’ll say it. I loved her. “I’ve been hiding up here,” she told me. “I’ve been hiding from the world. I think you are, too, whether you admit it or not.” And then she left. Just like that. “I hope I’ve touched your life.” The last thing she said to me. What a melodramatic college-girl thing to say. I hope I’ve touched your life.