Blood Is the Sky: An Alex McKnight Mystery by Steve Hamilton

Reynaud took him by the arm. They had their little conference while Vinnie and I went down the steps. Hank Gannon was waiting for us, his arms folded across his chest. When we were two steps from the bottom, he still hadn’t moved.
    “I’m surprised you’re not wearing handcuffs,” he said.
    “Gannon, we’ve already had enough for one day,” I said. “Step aside.”
    “Did you explain to the constables why you lied to us?”
    “Yeah, we explained it. Now get out of the way.”
    “You feel like explaining it to me?”
    “No,” I said. “I don’t.”
    He shifted his eyes to Vinnie. “How about you?”
    “Where’s Helen?” Vinnie said.
    “She went for a walk. She couldn’t stand to be around here anymore.”
    “I owe her an apology,” Vinnie said. “I hope you’ll give it to her for me.”
    He shook his head. “You just don’t get it. She’s been working so hard to keep this place going.”
    “That’s got nothing to do with us,” I said. I stepped down to put myself between them. “This place was in trouble long before those men went missing. You said so yourself.”
    “Yeah, no kidding,” he said. “And this was just what we needed for a send-off—a bunch of drunken assholes from Detroit and a drunken Indian who didn’t even know his own name.”
    The constables came out the door. A few seconds later and Vinnie might have found the end of his fuse again.
    “Let them go, Hank,” DeMers said. “They’ve got to get back home.”
    Gannon looked up at them, then at Vinnie, and then at me. After a long moment he stepped back. We walked up to the truck. Ron came out of his butcher’s shed and stopped dead in his tracks. He watched us walk by. He didn’t have to say anything to us. The look on his face was enough.
    We got in the truck and I fired it up. Only then did Millie come out of the shed. She walked up toward us,
moving quickly, like she wanted very much to tell us something. Ron caught her from behind and led her away, casting one last look over his shoulder at us, like even this sudden impulse on his wife’s part was somehow our fault.
    “Let’s get away from this freak show,” I said. “I hope I never see it again.”
    “They’re packing up,” he said. “Nobody will see it again.”
    I pointed the truck down the service road and punched it. “We’ll go home,” I said. “We’ll get a good lawyer for your brother. Sooner or later, they’re gonna turn up, and Tom’s gonna be in big trouble.”
    Vinnie shook his head.
    “As soon as he gets home and you know he’s okay and you’ve got him hooked up with the lawyer, that’s when you can kick his ass.”
    I got us down the twisty damned service road without incident. No moose, no running into the mud. When I hit the highway I took the left and headed back to 631. It appeared a few minutes later. I put on my right-turn signal.
    I turned. Then I stopped.
    “What’s wrong?” Vinnie said.
    “Is there a reservation around here?”
    “I think so,” he said. “They call them reserves up here.”
    “Okay, reserve. Where is it?”
    “Let me think … There’s one on Constance Lake. That’s probably the closest.”
    “How far away?”
    “Maybe twenty, thirty miles.”
    “Which direction?”
    “East. It’s just north of a little town called Calstock.”
    I swung the truck into a U-turn and went back to the highway.
    “I take it we’re going there?”
    “You got it,” I said.
    “Aren’t we supposed to be going straight home?”
    “We’re supposed to be, yes.”
    “So why are we going to the reserve instead?”
    “There was a young Indian at the lodge,” I said. “Yesterday. I saw him on the dock, just as we were leaving.”
    “You think he might know something?”
    “Maybe he does. Maybe he knows something the other folks couldn’t tell us.”
    “Couldn’t or wouldn’t?”
    “Take your pick.”
    “I suppose we could try,” he said. “We could ask around for the man who works at the