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out, he took Slone’s rifle and slapped the spittle from the boy’s mouth. He could recall the old man’s sandpapered palm on the skin of his cheek.
    Then his father gave him a just-born husky to care for, “to fix that hardness in you,” he said. And Slone cared for the animal for a decade until it lost vigor and grew lumps. At his father’s demand Slone put it down himself with the .22 rifle, then buried it in the hills of Keelut beside the ravine. He felt certain—he was twenty—that he’d not again in this life undergo such gutting grief. He saw the dog everywhere, smelled it on clothing, heard it in the cabin, dreamed of it. Haunted and bereft, he learned then, were an unforgiving pair.
    The mustached one said, “We thought you’d have some questions for Mr. Core, Vern, since he was there, since he saw that woman last. He’s been a help to us so far.”
    Slone turned again to Core in the armchair, sipped from his own coffee. He examined his knuckles, his wedding band, and under a thumbnail a blood blister that puzzled him. Each finger seemed a marvel of movement.
    “Can you raise the dead?” he asked finally.
    “No, sir, I cannot,” Core said.
    “Then I’ve got no questions for you.”
    “I’d like a cigarette, please,” Core said.
    Slone looked. He did not understand.
    “Can I get a cigarette from you?” Core asked again.
    Slone passed the pack to him then, and Core, nodding thanks, fingered one free from the box—the same unknown brand Medora had shared with him when he first arrived in Keelut, a black dagger for a logo. He reclined again and lit it from Slone’s lighter and sat staring at its glow.
    “You can’t think of where the wife’s gone to, Vernon? Anywhere at all?” the fat one asked. “A relative or friend, maybe? That woman have friends, any friends at all?”
    Slone rose from the table then, bored by this, and Cheeon followed. Core stayed seated with the cigarette, his body still aching and warm from a flu that would not leave. The fizzing medicine he’d drunk an hour earlier had done nothing to quell the fever.
    The detectives stood. The fat one said, “We need a statement when you could, Vernon, and a bunch of damn papers that need signing. At the station would be best, if you’re all set to go. Don Marium is there, you know Don? He asked us to meet you here and then bring you over to the station, if you wouldn’t mind it. Sooner would be better than later, most likely.”
    Slone stared at the cop and said nothing.
    “Shit, we know you just got back, Vern. We’re sorry as shit about all this. The more time we wait, the farther that woman gets, is what I’d say. We got them leads, a few we wanna go over with you, if you don’t mind coming on back now. I know it’s late. We got a map set up on the board there.”
    Cheeon stood before the painting, once again inspecting the moose in wig and lipstick, somebody’s idea of a gag in a morgue, this abomination he could not comprehend. When Russell Core began snoring in the armchair all four men turned to look at him.
    * * *
    In the lampless parking lot behind the morgue, Slone and Cheeon stood at the detectives’ truck and watched the wolf man drive off into whatever night awaited him, whatever fate was ready to claim him. His headlights showed sideswept flurries that by first light would thicken into a scrim of snow.
    They turned to piss shoulder to shoulder in the plowed berms at the edge of the dark lot, streams of yellow slapping into hardened snow. Slone could see the white and orange lights of town, the blinking red eye of the radio tower beyond the rails.
    The fat one spoke behind them. “You boys wanna follow us on over? We have coffee waiting there, good coffee, warm you right up. Put a splash of bourbon in there and you’re all set.”
    Slone zipped his fly and took the .45 from Cheeon in the dark. He turned and shot the fat one through the face from a yard away.
    He shot the other through his forehead.
    They