Wild Thing: A Novel (33 page)

“This
morning?
” Out the window, the sun’s just going down.

“Late morning. Pre-lunch. Still, someone’s got a pretty good booking agent.”

“No shit.” I’m almost as impressed by Palin’s turnaround as I am by the fact that Rec Bill managed to get Professor Marmoset on the phone.

As if he can read my mind, Professor Marmoset looks at his watch.

“How long are you here for?” I say.

“Not long. I’m on my way to the Mayo. I’ve got one of Rec Bill’s planes at Ely Municipal. I can give you guys a ride to Minneapolis if you want.”

“Violet can go. I need to return the car.”

He gestures to the armchair. “Then sit. I at least need to hear
your
version of this business.”

I tell him. He doesn’t interrupt much. At the end he says “You know, you can make a
passive
nightscope out of a digital camera.”

I just stare at him.

“In case you ever need to.”

I say “You can make a passive nightscope out of an active nightscope and a piece of tape.”

“For three times the price.”

“I’m on an expense account. Any thoughts on the
lake monster?
”

Marmoset yawns. “What’s
your
take on it?”

“That there’s something fucking down there.”

“Okay.”

“And if it’s mechanical, it’s the best piece of engineering I’ve ever heard of.”

“Agreed.”

“Which means it’s probably not mechanical. Which means it’s probably some kind of actual fucking creature.”

He frowns. “By ‘actual fucking creature,’ you mean an animal not generally understood to exist?”

“Yes.”

“That seems implausible.”

“Of course it seems implausible. It seems fucking insane. But I saw it.”

“You saw it?”

“Felt it. Well enough to be able to tell it wasn’t anything else.”

“So…”

“So I think it’s like that thing Sherlock Holmes says. Where anything’s possible if there’s no other explanation.”

Violet looks at me in surprise.

Marmoset says “That’s actually the one stupid thing Holmes says. You and I discussed it once on the shuttle to Mercy Hospital. That and how Houdini did the removable-thumb trick for Arthur Conan Doyle and Doyle thought it was actual magic. Anyway, it’s wrong: there’s always another explanation.”

Violet doesn’t smile, just keeps looking at me. It’s worse.

“And there will be an explanation for this,” Marmoset says. “In fact, we even know how we’ll get it.”

I turn back to him. “We do?”

“Of course. Why was someone so convinced the monster was real that they felt compelled to chase it down in an amphibious boat? At night, in secret?
Reggie
doesn’t seem to have
believed in the monster. Debbie told you
she
didn’t. Dr. Hurst’s friends in the bar said they did, but neither of them seems to have enough at stake to feel strongly one way or the other. So what makes the person in the boat so certain? What do they know that we don’t?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “What?”

He raises his palms. “No idea. We don’t even have enough information to say for sure whether the person on the boat shot Chris Jr. and Father Podominick. But I think finding that person, or even identifying him, will get us the answers to every question we have.”

“You’re right,” I say. “I’ll do it.”

Marmoset looks at me sharply. “I didn’t mean you literally, Ishmael. I meant the police.”

“The police have had two years to deal with this.”

“Yes, and I imagine they’ll consider it a higher priority now.”

“Right. Unless Teng’s death gets covered up.”

Marmoset looks skeptical. “To protect Palin?”

“Or Tyson Grody,” I say. “Or the Ficks, whoever they are—or even Teng, or Teng’s company, or his reputation or whatever. Or all of them.”

Marmoset wrinkles his nose. “I think that’s unlikely. And even if someone
does
manage to keep it quiet, this situation is no longer our responsibility. I wouldn’t have gotten you involved in the first place if I’d known there had been actual deaths at White Lake.”

“And you’re not worried there’ll be more?”

“I think we can rely on Parks and Recreation to put up a ‘No Swimming’ sign.”

“What about a ‘No Getting Shot with a Hunting Rifle’ sign?”

“Ishmael,” Marmoset says quietly. “Do you really think your staying here is going to make people
less
likely to get killed?”

Oh,
snappity
.

“The police will find the person with the boat,” he says. “There can’t be that many companies that
make
amphibious boats, and those companies can’t sell that many of them.”

I’m not about to let it go, though. “What do you want to bet the boat turns out to have been charged to Chris Jr.? Like the nets and harpoons no one seems to have wanted?”

Marmoset nods. “It’s a possibility I’ve considered.”

“I’m going back to White Lake. I’m going to find the guy with the boat and make him tell me what’s going on.
Now
is when he’ll be there.”

“As will the police.”

“There may be some cops, but not like there will be once they start dragging the lake. Not to mention what will happen when word
does
get out that Palin was here. The journalists alone will rent every canoe Reggie owns. We know that, and the guy in the boat knows that, so now is when he’ll try again. He couldn’t even stay away when Reggie’s tour was nearby.”

“Assuming he or she was aware of that.”

“Why wouldn’t he have been?” I say. “Everybody else was. You know what I’m saying is right.”

“In some respects, but—”

“I’ll go alone. There won’t be anyone to get hurt.”

“Except you, Ishmael. You do count for something, you know. There are other, more important things you’re capable of.”

“No,” Violet says.

We both look at her.

“Not alone. I’m going with you. Whatever the fuck your name is.”

I stare back at her. “Forget it. No way.”

“You owe me. We started this together and we’ll finish it
together. And you’re going to answer some fucking questions on the way.”

“It’s too dangerous.”

“Both of us or neither of us.”

“You can’t stop me.”

“And you can’t stop
me
,” she says. “And I’m a lot better at canoeing than you are.”

“But—”

Why would she even
want
to?

I turn from her to Marmoset. “What have you been telling this woman?”

Marmoset shakes his head with an expression I’ve seen on him a million times before. Dismay without surprise.

“Nothing I don’t now regret,” he says.

Lake Garner / White Lake

Boundary Waters Canoe Area, Minnesota

Saturday, 22 September–Sunday, 23 September

There are a couple of cops—a woman and a man—on chaise lounges on the beach of Lake Garner, both stripped down to their undershirts. At one point she blows him against a tree. Which doesn’t make it at all uncomfortable to be waiting with Violet at the other end of the lake.

With the help of maps drawn up by Henry, the trip back has taken less than two days. Our instructions to him: give us the direct route, fuck how hard the portages are. We’ll use GPS and a twenty-nine-pound canoe.

And thank the Christ for that. I’ve just spent two days having a series of exchanges I’ve spent my entire adult life trying to avoid.

Like:

“Have you ever killed someone just to intimidate someone else?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Anyone by accident?”

“No. Well—once someone I took with me on a job killed someone I didn’t mean to kill.”

“Someone innocent?”

“Underage.”

“A kid?”

“Around the same age as Dylan Arntz.”

“But not innocent?”

“Like I say: underage.”

“What did you do to the guy who killed him?”

“Eventually? Killed
him
.”

“Because of that?”

“It didn’t help.”

“Are there people you’re glad you’ve killed?”

“Glad I killed personally? No. I wish I’d never killed anybody.”

“But there are people you killed who you’re glad are dead.”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever kill anyone you didn’t know anything about?”

“Yes. I tried not to, but yes. Some people I killed just because David Locano asked me to.”

“How many?”

“Give me a minute.”

“Would you kill David Locano if you could?”

“That’s giving me a minute? Yes.”

“Because of Magdalena? And because of your grandparents?”

“Yes.”

“Both?”

“Yes.”

“Equally?”

“Fuck!”
^*

Except for the tent Palin was using, which her bodyguards took with them, Reggie’s campsite is still mostly intact, only now with fluttering crime scene tape around it. When the cops go back to sunbathing, Violet and I discuss the possibility that they’re sleeping here, and that we’ll have to row past them in the dark and go over the spit at its far end. But exactly at five p.m. the Parks and Rec floatplane glides in to pick them up, using the ramp Palin’s bodyguards left in place on the beach.

Violet and I paddle the length of Lake Garner, skirt the tape, and cross the spit. Take the beach as far along White Lake as it goes, then get back on the water.

We try not to talk as we paddle. It’s bad enough that the sound of every stroke I screw up comes back at us off the walls of the canyon. And that I’ll probably flip out the way I did when we went to Omen Lake to look at the rock paintings. I’m not sure why I haven’t flipped out already.

Maybe it’s the need to focus. After the second zigzag, we’re in geography we haven’t seen before, and the cliffs are full of indentations conceivably large enough to hide a boat. Why that should successfully distract me from the idea of an animal conceivably large enough to
eat
a boat, I don’t know. But being back on White Lake in clear daylight is somehow easier than it was to have to think about it in advance.

Which is not to say that when we reach the last, and widest, segment of White Lake, where the cliffs are gone and there’s forest on three sides, I’m not covered in sweat that has nothing to do with exertion.

Or that when we spot a gap in the shoreline undergrowth that looks large enough to stash our canoe, we don’t get ourselves and our boat off the water and into the brush as quickly as fucking possible.

The sun goes down as fast as it did three days ago.

The moon’s bigger, though, and for a couple of hours it’s brighter. Then the clouds slide over it, and things turn suddenly
dark
. So dark the branches in front of your face are only slightly purer black than the space around them, and you can hear the lake right in front of you but not see it.