Dark Tiger Page 8

  “They got a Russian couple staying there now. Rumor has it he used to torture political prisoners for the KGB. She’s about forty years younger than him. There’s a country singer and her boyfriend. She’s a big star, they say, and he’s a heroin addict. Some actor’s there with his two teenage boys. An outdoor writer and his wife, some rich couple from Texas, pair of CEOs from Chicago. That’s how it is. A lot of big shots. You or I, we couldn’t afford the place.”

  “They’re having good fishing?” said Calhoun.

  “The salmon are bitin’ like snakes, they say. I couldn’t tell you from personal experience.”

  “You don’t fish?”

  Swenson turned and looked at Calhoun. “I’m an employee. I’m not invited to fish.”

  “You like to fish, though, huh?”

  “Sure. Who doesn’t?”

  “You can come out with me sometime,” said Calhoun.

  “Get yourself in trouble with management,” said Swenson, “hobnobbing with the help.”

  Calhoun smiled. “I can live with that. Hell, I’m the help, too.”

  They fell silent for a few minutes. Below them it appeared to be all pine woods, with the occasional stream or pond. Now and then Calhoun glimpsed one of the sandy roads that had been cut out of the woods by the lumber companies for their big trucks to haul the logs. The roads looked like pale scars on the green landscape.

  “How long’ve you been flying?” said Calhoun, mostly by way of making conversation.

  “Choppers in Vietnam got me started,” said Swenson. “When I got out, I flew the bush in Alaska for twenty-five years, and I’m not prepared to say which was more dangerous. Crashed and burned in both places. This here is sort of my retirement. Compared to Alaska, Maine’s easy.”

  “The weather?”

  “Exactly,” said Swenson. “Well, in Nam, of course, we had people shooting rockets at us. In Alaska you have a different weather system in every river valley. You never know which one’s going to show up where you’re flying. Nobody can predict them. The pilots understand the weather better than anybody, because their lives depend on it, but nobody’s perfect. Sooner or later, everybody goes down. Then it’s a matter of if you survive it.”

  “You went down?”

  “More than once,” said Swenson.

  “Ever go down up here?”

  “In Maine?” Swenson shook his head. “Nope. Not yet.”

  “That’s comforting,” said Calhoun.

  “In Maine the weather’s more predictable. You can understand it if you pay attention. Like today. I’m pretty sure we got a good hour before these clouds drop down too low for safe flying.”

  “Pretty sure?”

  “Sure enough to be flying,” said Swenson.

  “My life is in your hands,” said Calhoun.

  “You watch what I do,” said Swenson. “If I have a stroke or a heart attack or something, it’ll be up to you to bring us down.”

  “I’m watching,” said Calhoun. “I’d just as soon you stayed healthy, though.”

  Calhoun understood that he didn’t need to watch. He’d flown planes before, and if he had to, he knew, the muscle memory of it would click in and he could do it again.

  They were quiet for a little while as the wooded landscape passed under them. Then Calhoun said, “Did you know McNulty?”

  “McNulty,” said Swenson.

  “He was a guest at the lodge.”

  “I know who he was,” said Swenson. “What’s your interest in McNulty?”

  “Nothing, really. I just heard about him is all.”

  “What’d you hear?”

  “That he got killed.”

  “You want some advice,” said Swenson, “my advice is, don’t say anything about McNulty and that girl getting shot.”

  “When I’m at the lodge, you mean.”

  “Yes, sir. That’s what I mean.”

  “They’re sensitive about it, are they?”

  “Management is,” said Swenson.

  “Meaning Marty Dunlap.”

  “And his wife. And his son.”

  “Tell me about them.”

  Swenson gave his head a little shake. “Not much to tell. The wife’s in charge of the kitchen help and the chambermaids. June’s her name. She’s pretty interested in religion. The son—Robert—he does the booking and tends to the guests. You don’t want to cross Robert. Marty oversees everything and deals with the guides and the other help. He’s a pretty straight shooter.”

  “Robert’s not a straight shooter?”

  “Robert’s ambitious. He’ll run you over if he has to.”

  “So what’s their problem with McNulty?”

  “Obvious,” said Swenson. “McNulty was a guest at the lodge, and he got killed. Embarrassing. The guests aren’t supposed to die at Loon Lake. We had the sheriff up there interrogating everybody, including the guests. Not exactly the image they’re looking for. So now it’s over and done with and hopefully forgotten, and I’m giving you good advice when I tell you not to bring up the subject of Mr. McNulty.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind,” said Calhoun.

  CHAPTER TEN

  From the air, Loon Lake reminded Calhoun of a lumpy half-deflated football. It was the biggest of seven lakes, which were all connected by thin silvery ribbons of water like a string of odd-sized, misshapen pearls. Some of the streams that ran between the lakes appeared to be several hundred yards or more of boulder-strewn whitewater. Others were just the narrows linking the foot of one lake with the head of the next. This system of interconnected streams and lakes was, Calhoun understood, one long riverway meandering its way to the Atlantic Ocean.

  Curtis Swenson dropped the plane so that they were flying just a few hundred feet above the treetops. “Big Hairy,” he said as they swooped over one of the lakes. Then, pointing to another, smaller lake, “Little Hairy. Don’t ask me who named them. They all have old Indian names, too, but at the lodge, they use these American names. This one here is Drake Pond. Loon’s the biggest, almost three miles long. Down there you can see Muddy Pond and Crescent Lake and June’s Pond. Marty named that one after his wife, I know that. Fishing’s good in all of them. The rivers, too. And don’t overlook the currents in the narrows at the head and foot of every lake.” A minute later, he said, “There’s the lodge.”

  Swenson made a turn over the lodge. It was perched on a knoll overlooking a cove on Loon Lake where an E-shaped dock stretched into the water next to a big boathouse. Another float plane, this one smaller than the Twin Otter, was tied up at the dock.

  The lodge was sided with raw cedar. It featured a lot of glass. It was a big rambling many-angled structure with ells on both sides. It seemed to crouch on the knoll like a native animal. There were a couple of other smaller buildings, and snuggled into a grove of pine trees on the lakeshore was a cluster of cabins.

  Swenson flew to the south end of Loon Lake and turned the plane so that it was heading north into the wind. “Here comes the tricky part,” he said. “Landing and taking off. You’ve got to watch out for logs and boulders just under the surface. A chop like we’ve got here, they’re hard to see.”

  “Where do the logs come from?”

  “They still cut a lot of lumber around here,” Swenson said. “They load the logs in trucks to take ’em to the mills. They used to run logs down the lakes, but that’s illegal now. Still, sometimes a big rogue log finds its way into a river or lake, and it gets semiwaterlogged and drifts along just under the surface, and if you hit it with your pontoon, it will blow up your airplane. Boom. Quick as that.”

  Comforting, Calhoun thought.

  Swenson brought the plane down. Calhoun held his breath. The water seemed to zoom up to meet the pontoons, but it landed so lightly on the corrugated surface of the lake that Calhoun couldn’t tell exactly when the pontoons touched the water.

  They taxied up to the dock. Two men were there to help bring the plane alongside and tie it off. One of the men was Marty Dunlap.
The other was younger, somewhere in his late twenties, Calhoun guessed. Both were wearing khaki pants and green flannel shirts. The younger man had his face jutted forward at Marty, and his hand gripped Marty’s shoulder. Calhoun read anger on the man’s face and in the tension in his neck and shoulders.

  Marty shrugged the younger guy’s hand away and turned to help ease the plane alongside the dock. The other guy stood there for a moment glaring at Marty’s back before helping with the plane.

  Calhoun stepped onto the dock, turned, and gave a whistle, and Ralph came bounding out of the plane. The dog headed for dry land. Calhoun knew what he had in mind.

  Marty Dunlap came up to him, clapped him on the shoulder, and gave his hand a shake. “Stoney,” he said. “Great to see you. Glad you could make it.” Calhoun saw that his green shirt had the triple-L logo, the same one that was on the fuselage of the float plane, stitched onto the left breast pocket.

  “I had a good pilot,” he said.

  “That must be your dog,” said Dunlap, jerking his head in Ralph’s direction.

  “His name’s Ralph,” said Calhoun.

  “This is my son, Robert,” said Dunlap. “Robert, come here and meet Mr. Calhoun.”

  Robert Dunlap had black hair and pale blue eyes and neatly trimmed black stubble on his cheeks and chin. He was a few inches shorter than Calhoun but stocky and strong looking. His green shirt was identical to Marty’s.

  Robert held out his hand. The anger and tension Calhoun had seen in him a few minutes earlier was gone. Now he was smiling. “Welcome to Loon Lake, Mr. Calhoun,” he said.

  Calhoun nodded. “You can call me Stoney.”

  Robert nodded. “Sure.”

  There was a golf cart parked on the dock. Marty Dunlap went over and spoke to the young man who was sitting behind the wheel, a lanky redheaded guy who looked like a college kid, also wearing a dark green shirt with the triple-L logo over the pocket. The young guy nodded and steered the cart over to where the Twin Otter was parked, and he and Curtis Swenson began unloading supplies from the plane and piling them into the little wagon that the golf cart was towing.

  Marty Dunlap came back to Calhoun and said, “Let’s show you your cabin. You can settle in, get your gear stowed away. Dinner’s not for a couple hours. Robert, let’s help Stoney with his stuff.”

  Robert gave a little shrug, then hefted Calhoun’s duffel onto his shoulder. Marty took a couple of gear bags. Calhoun carried the bundle of fly rods and the last gear bag, and they all trooped off the dock and along a path that followed the rocky lakeshore past a big boathouse to the cluster of cabins.

  All of the cabins had screened porches across the front. Marty pushed open the screened porch door of one of the cabins. The porch was furnished with a small square table and chairs plus two comfortable-looking rocking chairs, and there was a wood box full of cut and split firewood.

  Robert opened the cabin door and they went inside. It was a single big room with a kitchen area at one end and a bed at the other end and plenty of windows. On the back wall was a woodstove with a sofa and some chairs clustered around it. Under a double window on the front wall was an eating table with four wooden chairs. There was a big closet in the back corner by the head of the bed, and a chest of drawers sat at the foot. A bookcase in the corner was packed with paperback books.

  Marty opened a door on the back wall. “Bathroom,” he said. “You got a toilet and a shower and plenty of hot water.”

  “All the comforts of home,” said Calhoun.

  “No TV,” said Robert.

  “I don’t have a TV at home, either.”

  “No telephone,” said Marty, “and no cell phone reception, I’m afraid. We’ve got a satellite phone at the lodge that our guests can use for emergencies.”

  “That’s the way it should be,” said Calhoun. “Place like this, up here in the howling wilderness.”

  “Wilderness, all right,” Robert said. “Though it doesn’t exactly howl. Electricity from our generators and hot running water and flush toilets. Not to mention gourmet food.”

  “It’s wilderness enough,” said Marty.

  “Sure,” said Robert. “Luxury wilderness for the rich dudes.” He jerked his head at the door. “Come on. Let’s let Stoney get himself settled in.”

  “Right.” Marty nodded. “Dinner’s at six in the main lodge. Use the back door. Guides’ dining room’ll be right there on your left.”

  After the Dunlap men left in their matching khaki pants and green shirts and their quiet father-son tension, Calhoun found a bowl, filled it with water, and put it on the floor next to the sink. Ralph drank half of it, then lay down on the braided rug in front of the woodstove and went to sleep. Calhoun opened his duffel on the bed, hung his shirts and pants in the closet, and dumped his socks and underwear in the chest of drawers. Then he took his fly boxes and reels and other fishing stuff out of the gear bags and laid it all out on the table. He stuck his Colt Woodsman .22 in the drawer of the table beside his bed, and he propped up the aluminum tubes holding his fly rods in the corner.

  He turned on his cell phone, saw that there was no service, turned it off, and stuck it in the bureau drawer where he’d dumped his socks. He put his deputy’s badge in that drawer, too.

  After he finished unpacking, he lay down on the bed, laced his hands behind his neck, and closed his eyes. He thought about Kate. No phone service meant he wouldn’t be able to talk to her while he was up here. Marty Dunlap had been pretty clear that his satellite phone was for guests with emergencies, by which he meant that it was not for guides, whether or not they had emergencies. Not that most people would think talking to Kate would constitute an emergency, but it felt fairly urgent to Calhoun.

  It had been sweet of her to come to his house last night to try to patch things up between them, even if it didn’t work out. She’d wanted something from him that he couldn’t give her, which was nothing new. So she went home madder than when she’d arrived, and now he faced a month without any chance to patch things up with her.

  If he’d played it differently, if he’d defied Mr. Brescia and made Kate promise not to say anything to anybody and then hinted to her, at least, about why he had to come to Loon Lake, she might’ve kissed him before she left, might’ve even stayed for a sleepover . . .

  He drifted off, thinking about Kate, the smell of her hair in his face, the feel of her skin against his, and then he was easing along a jungle path holding a machete in both hands. There were shouts coming from behind him, and he tried to run, but the path was muddy, and his bare feet kept getting sucked down. When he came to a bend in the path, he saw a woman’s face peering out from a box with bars made from thick twisted vines. She was naked, and through the leafy vines Calhoun caught a glimpse of a breast and a bare leg. He stood there ankle deep in the muddy pathway holding his machete like a baseball bat. The woman was whispering to him in some foreign language he didn’t understand. She seemed to be laughing and crying at the same time. He tried to move closer to her, but his feet were stuck in the mud, and then she began shouting at him, and he tried to tell her that he was going to save her, but the words stuck in his throat. He swung his machete at the bars that imprisoned her, but he couldn’t reach them, and the shouting from behind him became louder. They were shooting at him, and cannons were going boom, boom, and then the woman’s face disappeared . . .

  Even as he dreamed it, he knew this was one of his old nightmares. As he forced himself to wake up, the cannons shooting in the dream became a fist pounding on his cabin door.

  He sat up, rubbed his face, and tried to shake away the disorienting remnants of his dream.

  There were several variants to this dream, but they always featured the same woman, and she always needed to be rescued, and Calhoun always failed. He wondered who she was. Somebody from his unremembered life, he was sure of that. Someone he’d once loved. He knew that from how he felt about her in his dreams.

  He blew out a breath and called, “Come on in. I
t ain’t locked.”

  The door opened and a tall, lanky man stepped into the cabin. He had a long, deeply tanned, creased face, dark eyes, and black hair pulled straight back into a ponytail. It was hard to guess his age. He could’ve been forty or sixty.

  Ralph uncoiled himself from the braided rug and went over to sniff the man’s cuffs.

  “That’s Ralph,” said Calhoun. “I’m Stoney. Stoney Calhoun.”

  “I’m Franklin,” said the man. He reached down and scratched the back of Ralph’s neck. “Franklin Delano Redbird. Your fellow guide. Sorry if I woke you up.”

  Calhoun shrugged. “That’s okay.”

  “I came to take you to dinner,” said Franklin Delano Redbird. “Your dog, too. He’s welcome in the guides’ dining room. I can show you how things work around here, if you want.”

  Calhoun went over to where Franklin Redbird was standing inside the door and held out his hand. “That’s very generous of you,” he said. “I accept. I appreciate it.”

  “I got the day off tomorrow,” said Franklin Redbird. “We can take out a canoe, do some fishing, give you a feel for the lakes, if you’d like.”

  “You must have something better to do on your day off,” said Calhoun.

  Franklin shrugged. “I got no interest in driving down to St. Cecelia, picking up a woman, getting drunk, gambling away my paycheck. That’s the other option. I’d rather go fishing.”

  “Well,” Calhoun said, “thank you. I’d love to go fishing with you.”

  “It’s a date, then.”

  “Excuse my manners,” said Calhoun. “Come on in. Have a seat.” He gestured at the chairs by the woodstove. “I don’t know what I’ve got here to offer you.”

  Franklin went over and sat down. “There should be a six-pack of beer and some Cokes stocked in your refrigerator,” he said. “I’ll have a Coke.”

  Calhoun went to the refrigerator and took out two Cokes. He went over, handed one of them to Franklin Redbird, then sat beside him.

  Franklin talked about the fishing, which had been good, and the food, which was always excellent, and the sports, who were mostly rich and powerful and demanding. Once in a while you’d get a client who really loved fishing, but most of them already had so much excitement in their important lives that catching a few fish, even wild native brook trout and landlocked salmon, didn’t seem to matter very much, although if you couldn’t put them on some fish, they wouldn’t hesitate to let you know that they didn’t like it. “Well,” he said, narrowing his dark eyes at Calhoun, “you’re a guide. You know how it is.”