Page 75 of God’s Country

“I was sheriff of Tamarack County for a lot of years. I own Sam’s Place in Aurora. I live on Gooseberry Lane. I came into the Boundary Waters with several members of my family a few days ago. I was kidnapped, more or less.”

There was quiet on the far side of the flashlight.

“We saw men at the campsite across the channel. Were you with them?”

“I was, but I escaped.”

“Cork O’Connor, you say?” This was the first voice again. “What’s a Waaboo burger?”

A test question from someone who must have ordered food from Sam’s Place at one time or another.

“It’s a bison patty with or without cheese. I named it after my grandson, whose nickname is Waaboo, which means little rabbit. The men who kidnapped me, here’s what they’ve done.” I lifted my shirt and showed them the bruising from the kicks Ollie had delivered.

“Oh, my,” the second woman said.

“Would you mind directing that light somewhere else?” I asked. “It’s kind of blinding.”

I heard them speaking in low voices, then the beam of light shifted to my feet.

“Come ahead but slowly. There’s a log by the fire pit. Sit down facing the fire.”

I did as I was instructed. When I was seated, the two women stepped into the small circle of light still cast by the last flames of their fire.

One was tall, angular, with a strong, determined jaw and a ramrod straight back. Her hair was a little grayish and cut very short. I placed her somewhere in her late thirties. The other woman was more diminutive, but she wore a sleeveless T-shirt and I could see that there was a lot of muscle to her biceps. She was blond, with hair that brushed the tops of her shoulders, and her face was softer than that of her companion, who was probably a few years her senior.

“Just keep sitting,” the tall woman said. I could tell she was the one who’d claimed to have a gun. She did hold a weapon in her hand, but it was a hatchet, not a firearm. She lifted it for me to see. “If you make any kind of threatening move, I’ll split your head wide open.”

I liked this woman, her grit. She moved around behind me, so that I couldn’t see her. Her companion remained in front of me, on the far side of the fire pit. She held a paddle, gripped to be swung if necessary.

“You must have seen me coming,” I said.

“We were watching the northern lights,” the woman with the paddle replied.

The display was growing dimmer now, fading naturally but also being washed out more and more by the brilliance of the rising moon.

“We saw you crossing the aqualoon.” She used her paddle to point toward the lake.

“Aqualoon?”

“That’s my invention,” she said with obvious delight. “It’s the swath of moonlight reflected on the surface of a lake.”

“Aqualoon,” I said. “I like it.”

“Explain how you got kidnapped and how you escaped,” the woman at my back said, her tone much more stern than her companion’s. She was still suspicious.

So I did. I told them the whole story, start to finish—tracking the Kennedy brothers, finding Cordell, watching him limp away, Tucker Jackson and Leticia and the devil’s asshole. When I got to the dead man we left on Big Woman Lake, the woman with the paddle, who was clearly affected by that tragic news, said, “Do you know who it was?”

“No idea. We left his body there.”

“My god, these men are monsters.”

“Exactly,” I agreed. Then I finished my story with how I escaped that night.

The woman behind me slowly came around and stood with her companion. “Those two men you left back there, you took their only canoe?”

“That’s right.”

“Then they have no way of getting out of the Boundary Waters. With everyone looking for them, it’s only a matter of time now until they’re caught.”