The Twilight of Lake Woebegotten Read Free Page B

misfortune that stupid and drunk were often indistinguishable even from a very slight distance. “Yesterday, ’round about twilight, out near my place. Don’t know who. Some fella, maybe seventeen, eighteen. He didn’t look like anything special, but he moved fast as a greased pig with a lightning bolt up his ass.”
    “That’s pretty fast,” Harry allowed.
    “He jumped on the deer, and it was like a bird of prey falling out of the sky and landing on a little bunny rabbit or something. Just bite, tear, rip. When the fella saw me looking, he ran away.”
    “Hmm,” Harry said. “I reckon you ate the deer? Turned my evidence into steaks and jerky?”
    “Uh,” Gunther said, and Harry sighed.
    “That’s all right. Keep your eyes open, though, and if you see that fella around, let me know? Somebody who’d run down and kill a deer bare-handed… I’d say that at least warrants a friendly conversation.”
    “You missed the part where he said the guy was some kind of supernatural wolfman dracula monster,” Ace said. “With red eyes and big teeth and who knows whatall else.”
    “Hmm,” Harry said, and drummed his fingers on the bar. “Well, that’s all right. What good’s a story if you don’t gussy it up a little to make it even better?” Harry laid his money on the bar, and Ace pushed it back to him, a little ritual Gunther had witnessed with jealousy a million times—he damn sure paid for his drinks, and sometimes Ace got a wild hair and wouldn’t even sell him any booze, let alone go giving it away—and told Gunther to stay out of trouble.
    “Another whiskey,” Gunther said, after ascertaining that enough of his Army pension money remained in his wallet to justify the extravagance of whiskey you drank inside a warm bar instead of a cold fishing shack.
    “Only if you promise not to tell any more stories about pudding,” Ace said. “You’re making me hungry.”

    “You really want me to go tromping around the woods, what, looking for tracks or something?” Stevie Ray said. He was Harry’s assistant and the only other employee of the Lake Woebegotten Police Department, though he was only a part-timer, and in his other job as back-up bartender and sometime bouncer at the Backtrack Bar, he’d become very well acquainted with Gunther Montcrief. “On the say-so of the most notorious drunk in town?”
    “I take your point, but Gunther doesn’t usually tell wild stories.” Harry propped his feet up on the big desk. “He usually tells old stories about the combat he’s seen and the women of negotiable virtue he met during his years stationed in the Pacific, but this? This is new. If there’s a feral fella running around the woods eating deer, don’t you think we should know about it?”
    Stevie Ray sighed and pulled on his earflap hat. He went outside and walked around the back of the police station—which was more a general-purpose civic building that happened to have a jail cell in it—and took a moment to breathe the autumn air. Tomorrow was the first day of September, and winter would be along a month or so after that. Stevie Ray tried to live in the moment, but it was hard not to think about what the future might bring.
    After making sure he was alone, which wasn’t too difficult in a town as small as Lake Woebegotten, he took out his cell phone and scrolled through the contacts to a name that just read “Dr. S.” He waited a moment, then said, “Hey, doc, Stevie Ray here. I just thought you should know, somebody saw one of your boys running down a deer out by the lake.”
    He listened a moment, then sighed. “It matters because it was the part of the lake by the Ojibwe reservation. You don’t want to upset the Woebegotten Band—” Another pause to listen. “Well our witness didn’t say anything about the hunter being hairy , and was pretty specific about it just looking like a normal fella apart from the super-speed and whatnot, so no, I don’t think it was one of the boys