Winter of the Wolf Moon: A Mystery Read online

  When I got to the sixth and last cabin, I saw the same kind of mess, and the same kind of emptiness. Every single renter had left. I didn’t imagine any of them would be sending me money, either. Not that I blamed them. If federal agents woke me up to search the place I was renting, I’d stiff the landlord, too.

  The only consolation, I thought, was that I wouldn’t have to hear as many snowmobiles for a while.

  But wait. There was an envelope on the table. I opened it up and found three hundred-dollar bills. Benjamin Franklin, Leon’s best friend. I couldn’t help smiling.

  When I had cleaned up the place, I stood in the center of the room and looked at it. It was the last cabin he had built. The biggest and the best. There was a real kitchen, separated from the rest of the cabin, with its own woodstove. There was even a second floor in this cabin, with a balcony overlooking the living room. My father had built the fireplace with all the stones he had moved or dug up while making the other cabins. Standing there in that cabin, I actually started to feel human again, so I figured I’d stay a while. I brought some wood in and made a fire. I even found a can of good coffee in the kitchen. After I had made a cup and sat there looking out at the snow, I couldn’t stop myself from leaning back on the couch. The warmth from the fire felt too good. In less than a minute, I started to fall asleep. In a half-dream, I was behind Bruckman’s snowmobile again, sliding over the snow.

  The tree coming up fast. I can’t avoid it. I’m going to slam into it.

  Impact. A loud bang like a gunshot.

  I sat up straight, instantly awake. The front door opened and Vinnie walked into the cabin.

  “Oh, it’s you,” I said. “You woke me up.”

  “Who was laying on the horn in my driveway a couple hours ago?” he said.

  “I thought you said Indians only need three hours of sleep every night”

  “I never said that,” he said.

  “Must have been somebody else.”

  “You been cleaning up after the deputies?” he said. He looked around the room.

  “Yeah, did you see them this morning?”

  “They were just finishing up when I got home,” he said. “They stopped at my place and asked me some questions.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I told them you had a major drug ring going for years. About time they busted you.”

  “That’s it,” I said. “No more freebies for you.”

  “I brought you some beer,” he said. The bottles clanked in his hands. “Sorry, they’re American.” He gave me a bottle, opened one up for himself and pulled a chair over from the kitchen table.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “I figured you’d be having a tough day,” he said. “God, you look terrible.”

  “Thanks again. Wait a minute, are you drinking beer?”

  “It’s non-alcoholic,” he said, holding up the bottle. “I tried one a couple years ago, figured it was time to try again. See if they got any better at making it.”

  “So how is it?”

  “I think they need a couple more years.” He tried to screw the cap back on the bottle but couldn’t quite get it to work. “So, now what?” he said. “You’re not still looking for her, are you?”

  “Not really,” I said. “There’s no place to look anymore. Why do you ask?”

  “I’m just wondering why you’ve gone to this much trouble. You only just met her that one night.”

  “Vinnie, she got kidnapped and it was my fault” My head started hurting again, just having to say the words. “She came to me for help and I fucked up. What do you want me to do, just forget it?”

  “She was in trouble long before she got to you.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. “She chose her own path. Step by step. All that shit again.”

  “All right,” he said. “All right. Let’s not go through this again.”

  “You brought it up,” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just …”

  “What?”

  “You’re killing yourself over this. And it’s not your fault. No matter what you think. That’s all.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said.

  A long silence reigned. We watched the last of the fire go out in the fireplace.

  “Alex, this has got to be the best fucking cabin I have ever seen in my life,” he said. “Your father was a genius.”

  “He got pretty good at it,” I said.

  “You’ll sell it to me one day, won’t you?”

  “When you’ve got a million dollars, come talk to me.”

  “After all I’ve done for you,” he said.

  “Make it two million.”

  I finished my beer and then he helped me clean up the place a little more. I could never leave that cabin without making it look perfect. One more reason to never live there myself. When we went back outside, the sun was making another rally, fighting its way through the snowclouds. A single brilliant beam swept slowly over the snow-covered trees like a searchlight.

  “What are you gonna do now?” he said.

  I thought about it. There weren’t many options. “See what Jackie made for dinner,” I said. “Read the paper.”

  “Don’t you get sick of that place? I’m starting to hate going there.”

  “It’s either that or sit in my cabin,” I said. “At least this way I have somebody to annoy.”

  “Save me a seat by the fire,” he said. “I’ll be in later.”

  I drove down to the Glasgow. You’ve got some life, I said to myself. A cabin and a bar and snow up to your ass. When I walked into the place, Jackie took one look at me and winced. “You look terrible,” he said.

  “That seems to be the consensus,” I said.

  I sat in that bar for the rest of the day. There was nothing more I could do about Dorothy. I didn’t even have any renters to take care of anymore, thanks to the agents. I just sat there by the fire, feeling almost normal again, except for the fact that everything hurt and it took me five minutes to get up to go to the bathroom.

  When the sun had gone down, the place started to fill up. Snowmobilers came in fresh from the trail, their faces red from the cold.

  The men were all talking about their snowmobiles and where they would ride the next day. There was laughter. Somebody lit a cigarette next to me.

  The smell of it. The smoke.

  Dark outside. The sound of the men in the room.

  It all came back to me. The night she was here in this room. Sitting right here talking to her. The way she looked into the fire when she was talking.

  She was so afraid.

  I know this. It is not a new thing to me. But now it hits me in the stomach. Now I feel it myself.

  She was so afraid.

  I thought it was Bruckman she was afraid of. The boyfriend she ran out on. The usual story.

  But no.

  It was something bigger. Bruckman was nothing.

  It was Molinov. I didn’t even know his name that night, didn’t know that he existed. But now I see it. It all comes to me at once. It runs down my spine and into my gut.

  What did she say about the wolves? You shoot the wolf closest to your door. But there are other wolves behind him. Bigger wolves. With bigger teeth.

  Molinov was the bigger wolf. That’s who she was afraid of all along, from the very beginning.

  And now he has her.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  A voice, from far away: “Alex.”

  I came back. I was in the Glasgow Inn again, sitting in front of the fire.

  “Welcome back to planet Earth,” Jackie said. “Do you want dinner or not?”

  “I need the phone,” I said. “Can you bring it over here?”

  “That’s why I have a cordless phone,” I heard him say as he left me. “So you don’t have to get out of your chair.”

  When he brought the phone back to me, he set it down on the little table next to my chair and bowed. “Your hi
ghness,” he said.

  “Thank you. Now go away.”

  He shook his head and went back to the bar. “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” I said aloud as I punched in the numbers. An officer answered.

  “Is Chief Maven still there?” I said.

  “He’s just about to leave,” the man said. “May I tell him who’s calling?”

  “This is Alex McKnight,” I said.

  I heard some muffled voices on the other end and then Maven’s said, “McKnight, what do you want?” he said.

  “Chief Maven,” I said. “I just called to thank you again.”

  “The hell you did,” he said. “State your business. I’m on my way home to dinner.”

  “I want to talk to Agent Urbanic,” I said. “Can you have him call me?”

  “What am I, your secretary now?”

  “I figured you’d know how to reach him,” I said. “They don’t seem to be staying here in town anymore.”

  “All right, all right,” he said. “I’ll have them call you. Let me guess, you’re at the Glasgow Inn.”

  “Not Champagne,” I said. “I want to talk to Urbanic.”

  I heard him muttering something to himself. “Is there anything else you want me to do, McKnight? Come out and shovel your driveway for you?”

  “No, thanks,” I said. “I have a plow. Oh, but while you’re having the DA drop charges, how about throwing out Vinnie’s assault charge?”

  “That officer came back to work today,” he said. “He looks almost as bad as you do. Good night.”

  “Good night, Chief,” I said, but he had already hung up.

  The phone wasn’t lying on the table more than two minutes before it rang. “McKnight,” I said.

  “This is Champagne.”

  “I wanted to talk to your partner,” I said.

  “You’ll talk to me.”

  “That’s what you think,” I said, and hung up.

  The phone rang again a minute later.

  “This is Urbanic. What the hell’s going on?”

  “I wanted to talk to you,” I said. “You seem like you might be half human.”

  “So talk.”

  “Tell me about Molinov.”

  “Why do you want to know about Molinov?” he said.

  “Because he took her. We have to find him.”

  “Who’s ‘we,’ Mr. McKnight?”

  “You, me. I don’t care. Damn it, Urbanic. If you could have seen how scared she was that night …”

  “We’re working on it,” he said.

  “No, you’re not,” I said. “You’re looking for that stupid bag. I know how you guys operate.”

  “The bag came from Molinov,” he said. “Find the bag and you find the man. Find the man and you find Dorothy. At least according to you. Am I right?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Just.” I hesitated. “What’s your first name? I don’t want to keep calling you Agent Urbanic.”

  “My name is John.”

  “Okay, John. John Urbanic. Is that German?”

  “Polish,” he said.

  “John, you gotta tell me what’s going on. Who is this Molinov guy?”

  There was a long pause on the other end of the line. I sat there listening to the silence, watching the fire. “We don’t know that much about him,” he finally said. “The name is Russian, that much is obvious. Whether it’s his real name or not, we don’t know. Nobody has ever seen him, not in America anyway.”

  “Bruckman said he saw him,” I said. “He said he stole the bag from him in New Jersey.”

  “We heard that much,” he said. “We’ve been trying to catch up with Bruckman for about two months. We were about to put a move on him last week, but we weren’t sure where the bag was.”

  “The football,” I said.

  “That’s my partner talking,” he said. “He likes code words.”

  “What’s in the bag?”

  “It’s methcathinone,” he said. “It’s a synthetic stimulant, similar to methamphetamine.”

  “Speed,” I said.

  “It’s like speed,” he said. “Maybe a little worse. They call it ‘cat,’ or ‘wild cat’ if it’s got a little crack mixed in. It’s got the same energy boost on the way up, but sometimes it’s a hard ride down. Paranoia, hallucinations. Seizures, even.”

  “So that powder they put in my truck,” I said. “That wasn’t from the bag?”

  “No,” he said. “That was good old-fashioned cocaine. Not even good cocaine. I guess they didn’t want to waste any of the good stuff just to set you up.”

  “If she took the bag, they must be running pretty low on this, wait a minute, did you say they call this stuff ‘wild cat’? Like the cat’s in the bag?”

  “It sounds cute, I know, but believe me, this stuff is a killer. It’s been tearing up Russia for years.”

  “It comes from Russia,” I said. “So Molinov …”

  “Yes,” he said. “Whoever he is, it looks like he’s testing out the market, see if he can start a little import business.”

  “And these two guys who work for him,” I said. “Pearl and Roman? What kind of names are those?”

  “You got me,” he said. “They don’t sound like nice guys.”

  “What was she doing?” I said. “Why did she take the bag? She should have just run away.”

  “We’d like to talk to her about that,” he said. “We know she came to you on Friday night. On Saturday, we had no Bruckman, no Dorothy. Only Alex McKnight. You can see why we were interested in you.”

  “I suppose so,” I said. “I was your only lead.”

  “I’m sorry it … well, it didn’t turn out to be a very pleasant experience for you.”

  “John, you’re moving up from half human to almost human here. Why are you telling me all this?”

  “Because you had nothing to do with it,” he said. “I could see that as soon as we questioned you.”

  “You should do something about your partner,” I said. “Make him shut up while you do all the talking.”

  “He’s better with the guilty ones,” he said. “And believe me, they’re almost always guilty.”

  “John, you’ve got no idea where this Molinov guy is now? Or these guys who work for him?”

  “No idea,” he said. “But if they got the bag back, you gotta figure they’re not sticking around.”

  “And if he has Dorothy?”

  Another pause. An awful silence before he said what I already knew. “If they got to her, then I don’t like her chances.”

  I squeezed the phone. There was not a word I could think of saying.

  “Alex, are you there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “We’ve got the Mounties looking for Bruckman. If we find him, we’ll try to trace Molinov back to New Jersey or wherever the hell he is right now. You’ve had no involvement in this from the beginning, right?”

  I said nothing.

  “Alex?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Okay, so now it’s time to let us do whatever we can do. Just let it go, Alex.”

  “Let it go,” I said.

  “Stay home and stay warm,” he said. “If we find out anything, I’ll let you know. In the meantime, if my partner sees you again, I think he’s going to kill us both. I can’t imagine what he’s going to say when he finds out I told you all this.”

  “You mean he’s not right there, listening in?”

  “No, I made him wait in the next room. I think I hear him tearing the drapes down.”

  “Send me the bill,” I said.

  “Take care of yourself, Alex.”

  I thanked him and hung up.

  Let it go, he said.

  I picked the phone back up and dialed Leon’s number.

  “He’s Russian,” I said.

  “We figured that,” he said. “From the name.”

  “Now we know for sure. He’s from Russia.” I told him everything Urbanic had told me, and then I gave him
the punch line. “Any ideas on how we can find him?”

  “Not that I know of, Alex. Not any way that the DEA couldn’t do a hundred times better.”

  “No, I didn’t think so,” I said. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have bothered you. You’ve got me thinking you can do miracles now. The way you found Bruckman’s place, and then the way you found Bruckman himself.”

  “That was just common sense and hard work,” he said. “With Molinov we don’t even know where to begin. I thought you said this was over, anyway?”

  “It is,” I said. “I shouldn’t have called. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “If I think of something, I’ll call you.”

  “Thanks, Leon.”

  “Good night, partner.”

  “Good night, Leon.”

  I hung up the phone, put it back down again. Now there was nobody else to call, nothing else to do.

  I stood up. From across the room Jackie expressed his amazement at the feat. Then he asked if he could have his phone back sometime that evening.

  When I stepped outside, I regretted it instantly. I pulled my coat tighter around my body and went to my truck. I just couldn’t stand the idea of sitting in that place all night again. I didn’t feel like going back to the cabin. The renters were all gone, anyway. I didn’t know what to do with myself.

  You’re going to drive yourself crazy, I thought. You’re going to keep thinking about this until you’re ready to kill yourself.

  I got in the truck and drove. I didn’t even know where I was going. I just wanted to keep moving.

  Let it go, he said. He actually said that.

  Out of sheer habit, I drove east toward the Soo. Maybe I’ll go to the casino, I thought. See how much money I can lose playing blackjack. I’m already sitting on five empty rentals at the height of the season. Let’s see just how low I can go.

  “There’s nothing you can do,” I said out loud. My voice sounded thin against the roar of the heater and the cold air whipping against the plastic window. “They’re gone. You can’t find them.”