Force of Blood Read online

  She sighed dramatically. “There’re a lot of young officers who could use your guidance in teaching them to do things your way … the old way … the right way.”

  He immediately changed the subject. “Where’s Sedge live?”

  “Right on M-123, about four miles west of Tahq State Park, just east of CR 500. The place is an old service station, a cinder-block hovel with a Mobil Oil sign. The other officers call it the Bomb Shelter. Nobody can believe the Department of Environmental Quality or the EPA haven’t condemned it. Sedge likes to run solo. None of us has ever been inside.”

  “What’s Sedge’s call?”

  “Two One Thirty.”

  “What’s Sedge like?”

  “Same as you when you began—storm trooper, takes no prisoners.”

  I was like that? Always hard to tell if McKower is jabbing for fun or for real. “You in the Newberry office today?”

  “I promised Sergeant Bryan I’d work with him and one of his new officers between Trout Lake and Fibre.”

  Six-foot-six Sergeant Jeffey Bryan, Service recalled, had been a cub CO when the two of them had gotten into the middle of a strange shooting incident between Amish and Mennonite hunting parties some years back.

  “Later.”

  “Bear in mind that what you say to young officers gets passed around like gospel.”

  “Just fucking great,” he said, and hung up. Would Eddie Waco promote her to Lansing? He was an idiot if he didn’t. As for him and Lis, she’d find ways to keep track of him. She always had.

  4

  Halfway House, Chippewa County

  THURSDAY, MAY 3, 2007

  Grady Service spent the night in the Newberry office, studying the area topographical maps he’d spread all around the conference room.

  He had been to Vermilion Point where the feds once had a top-secret wolf-training operation, but never anywhere near Crisp Point or between the two sites. He considered giving Jingo Sedge a bump, but ruled it out. Santinaw had come to him for a reason. Until he had a better feel for what he was going into, if anything, it would be better to not complicate matters.

  He tried to find a plat book for Chippewa County, but the back of his truck was trashed beyond description. Probably left the damn thing at home. You’ve got to clean out your truck, he lectured himself. He looked at a topo instead. Five-Pack Creek seemed to parallel Lake Superior, north of what was listed on one of his maps as the Vermilion Rod and Gun Club property. It had been there when he worked in the district, but he had no idea if the club was still in operation.

  Halfway House—he learned from a clerk who worked at Pickelman’s General Store south of Newberry on M-28—was the site of a shack, of which there might or might not be anything left. There was no way to know because the place was rarely visited by anyone the man knew of, and every winter seemed to eat more of the shore and embankments out that way.

  Service made his way north on Old Maple Block Trail, where it angled north off the East Town Truck Trail. It was just after 4 p.m. when he stashed his truck a mile or so south of the old Rod and Gun Club property, hoisted his ruck, secured the truck, and headed north on foot through the sandy soil, jack pines, and scrub oaks. He figured the hike to be about three miles, maybe a smidge more. No way to tell where Duncan Katsu’s camp was, but there couldn’t be many places up this way, and somewhere ahead he expected there would be a county fire number or a camp sign.

  Within an estimated quarter-mile of Lake Superior, and easing through a heavily wooded area of scrub oak on a steep barrier dune, he caught the faint sound of voices and stopped to try and pinpoint the source. Damn sinus condition made hearing unreliable. Gotta go see Vince, get this ear shit taken care of.

  Voices ahead, somewhere to the left, not close. Wind’s out of the north. Hearing was a key sense in the woods, and a lot more difficult to use accurately than your eyes, but often more reliable. Move cautiously, he reminded himself.

  His Automatic Vehicle Locator rolling map and his topo charts had shown Five-Pack Creek flowing out of Brown’s Lake to the west and meandering eastward and north, sort of roughly paralleling the coast. He’d never seen Five-Pack Creek, but guessed it would be cold and narrow with a steady current and a mostly loon-shit bottom, tag alder banks, and probably a lot of woody debris. Probably will have some native brook trout in it, but too far off the beaten path for most anglers to bother with. Can feed me if I’m hungry enough.

  He had a hand line stowed in his ruck, and if he got the opportunity and was in the mood, he told himself, he might get up a brook trout meal tonight. After hiking, he was feeling slightly winded again, and already hungry. The last real meal he’d had was yesterday’s breakfast, when he’d made one of his giant shroomelets. He patted his stomach. You can afford to miss some meals, pal.

  This morning he’d telephoned his granddaughter in Houghton and had enjoyed a nonsensical conversation with the two-and-a-half-year-old, which left him feeling kingly: Little Maridly. Just the thought of her made him smile and feel warm all over. She talked nonstop and smiled at him nonstop and would stand beside him and pat his back like he was an old dog. Which you are, he reminded himself.

  More voices, this time further right. Could be wind, he reminded himself. Wind tended to whip off the lake into the barrier dunes and send fractured sound scrambling.

  Five-Pack Creek turned out to be exactly what he’d expected, and as he walked westward he found a shallow place with hard-packed gravel. There was an orange plastic cap stuck in the grass. Assholes who litter! He picked it up, stuffed it in his pocket, waded across, and made his way northeast through an immense expanse of chest-high horsetail ferns. His mind was on fish. The gravel area suggested fall salmon and spring steelhead runs. Law-abiding anglers might not make the effort to get out this far, but violators surely would.

  Halfway through the ferns, the plants suddenly erupted into life and his heart began pounding as something began running tight, fast circles around him. Instinctively he pulled out his .40 cal and held his breath as a gangly, long-legged young wolf popped onto a grassy hummock ten yards away and stared at him before loping away.

  Calm down, he told himself. Then, What the hell is a single wolf doing here? This time of year the packs are usually in their rendezvous areas, teaching their pups how to hunt and kill beaver.

  The terrain rose steadily as he moved north until he crested a ridge and could see a dense marsh below and the big lake beyond that, its swells slopping lazily against the beaches. He couldn’t actually see the beaches or shore, but he could hear Lake Superior.

  What made the most sense was to get down to the beach, look around, backtrack into the cover of the tree line, and make temporary camp. If he decided to go for brook trout, he could hike back to the creek. There should be natural bait in abundance along the stream’s edge.

  From the trees, Service looked eastward and saw smoke wafting from below—from where he guesstimated the beach to be. Actually, he thought he’d caught a faint smell of smoke before, but the wind was shifting to the northwest now and curling the smoke away from him. No law against fires out here, but it seemed uncomfortably close to the water’s edge, and if the wind came up or a tanker passed, even a half-mile offshore, whoever was tending the fire would get swamped by incoming waves, or worse. Unless his mental picture of the beach was different than reality. At least the fire seemed close to the water, which meant not much fuel for it to get into.

  Preferring not to show himself, he walked eastward and moved downhill through the trees. A couple of hundred yards east, he froze when he saw two apparently naked men jog quickly through the trees, headed south. Both were shirtless and had feathers in their hair. They wore ankle-high moccasins, he thought, but he wasn’t sure. It was pushing twilight now. Something weird for sure. But it is the U.P., he reminded himself, shaking his head, as if this explained all aberrations.

  Allowing the pair to move on, he saw what appeared to be a clearing on the edge of the tree line where a s
mall fire was flickering. One man was sitting alone on a log, smoking a cigar, his face painted red and black. Jesus, what the hell is this?

  Service watched from concealment as three more men came up from the woods to the north, mumbled a few words to the man by the campfire, and continued southward, same as the first two men. These three wore loincloths and just looked naked. Probably the other two had been the same. Still, it was peculiar.

  A tiny fire was an Indian’s fire, not a white man’s. Service found himself nodding off. Sign of age; unable to maintain focus like when you were young.

  He fell asleep and kept nodding awake and checking on the man. He finally woke with a start not to sound exactly, but to motion, moving air or something, someone or something cutting through dune grasses, something afoot, vibration. Not that damn wolf again. Blurry-eyed, he saw the fire still flickering on low, but its tender nowhere in sight. Damn. Jesus, did I sleep all night? Doofus!

  Looking around frantically and trying to shake off sleep, he saw stooped black forms moving through the eelgrass around him, not running, but not walking either. Lots of them, spread pretty well, good discipline. Nobody could get a whole bunch of them with one shot. Why such discipline? Asshole militia types? The U.P. had plenty of them. I hate gun-nut militias, he thought.

  A light touch on his shoulder startled him so badly he nearly yelled, but he managed to contain himself. A voice said, “You gonna sit there in the sand, old man, or deal yourself in?”

  Female voice, confident, in charge. Before he could ask, the voice added, “Jingo Sedge. And you’d be Service, the legend himself.”

  Before he could answer, she had moved on. He struggled to his knees and got up, semi-stumbling through the loose sand until he got his bearings and began to get his mind focused. By then, Sedge was moving like a greyhound and he had to hump to keep up. He only reached her as all hell broke loose in the form of a collective human scream that was more penetrating than any lynx he’d ever heard—and one lynx was way more than enough to stop the unsuspecting heart momentarily. This was like that, only a lot louder and more penetrating. Somehow, over the top of the crescendo, he could hear a female stentorian voice commanding, “Touch this man and you are going to fucking jail!”

  Service caught up to the crowd and pushed his way between the painted men without shirts to find Sedge holding the arm of a small man and glaring at the rest of the group.

  A tall man with wild hair was in front of her. Service tapped his arm and said, “DNR,” and eased over to Sedge’s side. Why the hell didn’t Lis tell me Sedge is female?

  Light was beginning to draw pink in the eastern sky, most of the landscape blackening like buried coal. Morning on the way. How much did I miss last night?

  The man had long black hair tied back in a long braid, and the bright red print of a human hand across the bottom half of his face.

  “Bojo. This like some sort of Shinob Halloween?” Service asked. “Seems a little early for costumes.” Shinob was an obscure slang word for the Anishinaabeg, the tribe white men called Ojibwa or Chippewa.

  The man grunted. “Just like em-shii-goo-shee to have the cultural sensitivities of a reptile.” The man looked up at Service and held out a cigar. “Wa-bish-kis mis-sabe.”

  “My Shinob’s a hair rusty,” Service said, ignoring the cigar and sitting down cross-legged on a hummock of grass. “Talk fucking English.”

  Sedge said, “White Giant, the White Shadow Wolf.”

  Service ignored her, said to the pony-tailed man, “You Katsu?”

  The man nodded. “One seed of many planted by Huronicus St. Andrew, master manipulator.”

  “Santinaw told me the sand is bleeding.”

  “Obviously not for him, or he’d be here as a matter of honor.”

  Service held up his hands. “Listen, I haven’t got a clue what any of this is about, or even what the hell ‘bleeding sand’ is. Your old man asked me to come see you, and here I am.”

  Sedge said, “White Giant super dick rides in to rescue incompetent rookie CO and savage Shinobs.”

  The chip on her shoulder wouldn’t fit into the bed of an oversized pickup truck. Service added, “Santinaw doesn’t send anyone without a good reason. ’Course, sometimes he’s not too damn good about saying what those reasons are.”

  Katsu chuckled and once again held out the cigar. “That’s Santinaw, the backwoods puppetmaster—certain he’s pulling all the strings, even when they don’t exist.”

  Service accepted the cigar and lit it. “Megwetch,” he said with a head nod. “Thanks.”

  Katsu offered nothing to Sedge, who harrumphed indignance.

  As it grew lighter, Service saw that all the men with Katsu were painted, some of them frighteningly so.

  “This public land?” Service asked after a while.

  “Define ‘public,’ ” Duncan Katsu said. “There’s been Anishinaabeg here since time began.”

  “Bullshit,” Sedge interjected. “If you’re referring to your people, they have not been in this area since time began. They migrated from northeast Canada around 1500 and pushed the Sioux westward over a hundred years or so. Your ancestors were interlopers, same as the Europeans. You, me, us—same-same, dude; run people off, take over their property.”

  “You gonna bust us for trespass?” Katsu asked in a challenging voice.

  Service said, “Hell, I don’t know exactly where I am, which means if you’re trespassing, I guess I am too.” He added, “You want to ask your people to all step up where I can see them? I don’t much like people hanging back in the dark when I’m in the light. Nothing personal. Think of it as an occupational courtesy.”

  Katsu’s people spread out until Service counted twenty-four of them, all decked out in breechcloths or deerskin leggings, their loosened hair long, with lots of feathers, and more than a few traditional weapons, the curved clubs called “breakheads” looking especially lethal. All of the people wore paint in a wide variety of designs, but the colors tended mostly to be black and red, like Katsu’s, and Service wondered if this was meant to signify something.

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d say this looks like a war party,” Service said.

  “Could come to that,” Katsu said. “If the others choose, we’ll happily oblige.”

  Katsu glared at Sedge.

  What others? “As in your others, or other others?” Service asked.

  Katsu said, “You wear a badge. It should be obvious.”

  Little about tribals was ever obvious, and about the time you thought it was, they knocked you off balance with subtleties so deep they were often inexplicable, and certainly unfathomable to one not raised in Native traditions. “I can’t even solve my granddaughter’s jigsaw puzzles,” Service said. “And she’s just going on three.”

  “A white member of the Shadow Wolves can’t figure things out?” Katsu said, leering at him. “That’s bullshit, wabish.”

  “Yeah, total bullshit,” Jingo Sedge added.

  “No, it’s apples and oranges,” Service countered. God, Sedge is a total pain in the ass. Like a damn Jack Russell always on the attack.

  At that moment Service heard a poorly muffled ATV coming down the beach toward them. Katsu’s painted and feathered people immediately charged eastward, screaming.

  Sedge surged after the group and Service followed. She somehow got past the lead Ojibwa and charged into a man who was getting off the four-wheeler, hitting him with a violent head-on tackle that put him on his back on the ground with a loud thump.

  She grabbed the individual’s arms, twisted them behind him, cuffed him, and yelled at Service, “Secure the driver!”

  Service grabbed the driver as he tried to restart the machine and knocked him off the seat, jerked him to his feet, and only then discovered he had just rough-dusted a woman, skinny as a rail, loose hair, wild eyes, shaking like a leaf.

  That’s when the infernal shrieking began anew, screams so penetrating they shot a chill down Service’s spine, the
sort of screams he had once heard from fanatical North Vietnamese troops charging to their deaths through the jungle at night.

  But this morning there was no crackle of gunfire or grenades popping, and all he could hear was a voice shouting angrily. Soon Sedge appeared, escorting a small red-haired man with a goatee and long hair. The man was struggling vigorously and hopelessly against Sedge until he saw Service.

  The woman Service held was about the man’s age, skinny and mean-eyed.

  “You white?” the cuffed man asked. “Or one of them? So damn much mixed blood in the tribes nowadays, can’t hardly tell who’s real anymore.”

  “I’m Detective Service, Department of Natural Resources, and I’m real.”

  “Sedge, conservation officer,” his partner of the moment announced.

  “Detective? Game wardens? Where the hell are the real cops? Listen, tell these bloody Shinob cretins to leave us alone.”

  “Who are you?” Service asked.

  “We call him Cool Ghoul,” one of Katsu’s people called out.

  “Professor Delmure Arcton Toliver,” the man said. “Dr. Toliver to these troublemakers.”

  “You a doctor who treats patients, Del?” Service asked.

  “My doctorate is in history, my thesis on the Anishinaabeg migration.”

  “Up here you’ve gotta treat patients to be called ‘Doctor.’ ”

  “You don’t mean up here … you mean out here. This place is on the edge of the Earth.”

  “He’s desecrating our ancestors,” Katsu said with a hiss.

  Toliver took a deep breath and said measuredly, “We’ve been through this before, Katsu. This land is not a burial ground. There are no bodies here. This was a fishing village and a safety refuge from bad weather. There were never more than twenty or thirty people living here at any given moment, and there were no burials.”

  “There are hundreds of remains here,” Katsu replied. “Na-do-we-se bodies.”

  Toliver snorted. “Jesus, man. The oral traditions of your own people say the battles between Ojibwa and Na-do-we-se took place at least forty miles southeast of here. Remember—Iroquois Point?”