Read Online Hold the Dark: A Novel by William Giraldi - Free Book Online

Cheeon raised a finger to his lips, shook his head for them to remain quiet, to keep back, and he unlatched the steel door to the coldroom for Slone to enter.
    He entered alone. He saw his son in an extended corpse drawer, the sheet folded to his waist, toe tag nearly the size of the boy’s whole foot and attached like a price. His cobalt boy had grown in the year he was gone, the boy’s face bones altered from either time or death. Hair longer than he’d ever seen it. Burgundy stain beneath the paper skin of his throat. Dark bulbs beneath slitted lids. He looked unfed and Slone wondered if this was a trick of death.
    He breathed through sobs as a woman breathes through birth—solar plexus sobs, and he gave in to them, knowing this was his only time, his only chance for tears. He let them come and pass. For long minutes they rippled over him. Then he placed his palm on the boy’s pale chest, his birdlike ribs. He bent—his skull tight from weeping, a pressure through his neck and face. He touched his lips to the boy’s and whispered, “Remember me.”
    * * *
    In the break room at the morgue, dense with the scent of coffee, the detectives sat in craters on the sofa. Across from them Slone and Cheeon smoked at a table. Russell Core sat in an armchair to their left, staring into his cup. Donald Marium had asked him here; he said Core was the only link to what had happened in the village. On the wall in this room a painting of a moose in scarlet wig and lipstick. When they’d first entered, Cheeon considered this picture closely, as if it were a calculus equation.
    The cop with the mustache said, “Do you have any idea where on earth that wife might’ve fled to, Vern? Any idea at all where she went to?”
    “We’ll get her,” the fat one said. “She’ll pay for it, Vernon. We’ve got leads, a few of them.” He held a file folder, a sheaf of documents on Medora Slone: photos and maps and Slone could not guess what else.
    The other with the mustache said, “We got her picture out all over the state. All over, Vern. Troopers looking high and low for the wife’s truck. But it’d be real good if you could give us some idea of where that woman might’ve fled to. Into Canada, maybe? We been in touch with the Mounties there. Dumb asses, all of ’em, but we been in touch.”
    This cop drank from a miniature Styrofoam cup and seemed irked by the morgue’s coffee. “I know it’s a damn hard time for you, Vern, what that woman did.”
    Most of the people in this town weren’t from here—they were willful refugees from the lower forty-eight. Slone and Cheeon both could instantly spot a forty-eighter. The fat one, Slone guessed, was northern California, maybe Oregon. The mustached one was most likely from Texas. Migrated here to dabble in policelike work when not cutting down moose out of season. This wolf man was a midwesterner. They felt needed now, Slone guessed. Important. Useful in this dark.
    Slone’s left eyelid twitched as it often did when he went without sleep. He’d tried to nap on the plane but could not. He smashed out his cigarette and turned to see Core, his white wolf face and regal beard. He was sitting oppressed and silent in the armchair.
    “You found my boy?” Slone said.
    Core met his eyes, nodded yes, and glanced away. Slone half nodded in return, in his gratitude, his version of thanks said with the face. Core looked down at his feet, at the salt-stained boots that belonged to Vernon Slone, the boots Medora had let him borrow two weeks ago when he arrived. When Core realized he was wearing them his head lightened with embarrassment and he tried to cover one boot with the other but knew it was useless.
    “Mr. Core was called here by your wife,” the fat cop said. “Damn woman told him a wolf took your boy. Can you imagine that, such a thing?”
    At twelve Slone had shot dead a wolf in the hills above Keelut. For a live target to practice on, for fear and for fun. When his father found