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Ecw Press - Ron Corbett

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175 pages

English

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'Gruesome murders, a northern secret, and a buried past While working one afternoon on the Northern Divide, a young tree-marker makes a grisly discovery: in a squatter s cabin near an old mill town, a family has been murdered. An army vet coming off a successful turn leading a task force that took down infamous biker criminals, Detective Frank Yakabuski arrives in Ragged Lake, a nearly abandoned village, to solve the family s murder. But no one is willing to talk. With a winter storm coming, Yakabuski sequesters the locals in a fishing lodge as he investigates the area with his two junior officers. Before long, he is fighting not only to solve the crime but also to stay alive and protect the few innocents left living in the desolate woods. A richly atmospheric mystery with sweeping backdrops, explosive action, and memorable villains, Ragged Lake will keep you guessing about the violent crime, the nature of family, and secret deeds done long ago

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Publié par	Ecw Press
Date de parution	16 novembre 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781773050959
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0450€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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RAGGED LAKE
RON CORBETT
A FRANK YAKABUSKI MYSTERY

CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Fireflies in the Snow I
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Fireflies in the Snow II
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Fireflies in the Snow III
Chapter 36
Epilogue
About the Author
Copyright

A. A violent order is a disorder; and
B. great disorder is an order. These
two things are one. (Pages of illustrations.)
“Connoisseur of Chaos ,”
Wallace Stevens

AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. All places and characters are imagined. While the story takes place somewhere on the Northern Divide, there are no literal depictions of any city or town on the Divide.

CHAPTER ONE
The cabin had been built by the headwaters of the Springfield River, not far from Five Mile Camp where the Cree who worked for O’Hearn Forest Products once lived. This was on the Northern Divide, where rivers ran north and south and all the trees were coniferous, a land of lush, green forests and running water — so much running water there was a low hum in the air for much of the year.
The cabin was built by a family: a man, woman, and young girl who arrived at the headwaters one spring and started hauling lumber from the abandoned work camp. When O’Hearn learned of the theft, it sent a bull rigger to investigate; but when the man came back to Springfield, he told the company to forget about it. The family was coco. The trusses and frames had been put together without the aid of a mitre, he explained, so there was a demented-playhouse slant to the roofline. The door was rough-hewn planks. The windows were mismatched sizes. The strangest part of all was perhaps the roof, which was made of beer and pop cans flattened to resemble tin shingles. From a distance, the rigger said, laughing at the memory, the cabin looked like a Christmas tree about to keel over.
“They will be gone in a year,” he promised. “Don’t waste your time and money on lawyers. Forget about them.”
The family rarely left the cabin, or the land near the cabin, going only occasionally to the nearby village of Ragged Lake to cash a cheque the man had mailed to him care of the Mattamy Fishing Lodge. There, they would buy provisions from the kitchen. Except for these two interactions — cashing a cheque with a bartender, buying food from a cook — the family seemed to have no other dealings with people.
“Want anything else this month?” the cook would sometimes ask the man. “I can give you a deal on some eggs. Or whisky. Would you like whisky? I can talk to the bartender about getting you some.”
“The eggs won’t make it,” the man would answer, “and I don’t need whisky.”
“What man up here doesn’t need whisky?”
“Bad for you —” and here the squatter would point to his head and make a sound like a gun going off “— blows off your head.”
“But you put it back on with more whisky,” the cook would answer. “That’s how whisky works.”
But the squatter never bought whisky. Just dried milk, Red River cereal, coffee, sugar, flour, and other non-perishables that he packaged carefully into a Woods rucksack. He’d lift it onto his back and walk five miles back to his cabin. He was a middle-aged man with long, blond hair matted and unwashed — black flies and sumac buds mashed into the strands of his hair in summer, ice and snow in winter. Tall and thin, he usually wore mechanic bibs and flannel shirts, and his skin was that of an old man, weather-scarred and burnished. The woman was tall and beautiful. The young girl looked like her mother.
No one in Ragged Lake ever visited the family, and, with Five Mile Camp long abandoned, people rarely even came close. The cabin was not on a snowmobile trail. The fishing on the Springfield was generally considered poor until the river widened five miles to the south. The cabin was as cut off from people and the daily activities of people as an archaeological ruin waiting to be discovered.
It was for this reason no one in Ragged Lake could say with certainty when the family was murdered.
It was a tree-marker working for O’Hearn near the headwaters, marking pine to be cut, who found them, surprised when he saw the cabin, because it was on none of his maps. When the boy approached, he caught the scent of something warm and tart, a broad, sweet scent on a day that had until then carried only the sharp, thin smells of winter. Pine gum and frozen water. Spruce and falling snow.
The boy never went inside the cabin. Peered through a window and then took off for Ragged Lake, making good time on his snowshoes, then telling the bartender at the Mattamy something bad had happened by the headwaters of the Springfield. Something that shouldn’t have happened, because no cabin should have been out there on O’Hearn timber rights, on O’Hearn land. Something evil-bad had happened.
They needed to phone someone.

CHAPTER TWO
The call was logged in at the Cork’s Town detachment of the Springfield Regional Police at 6:17 p.m. on a Tuesday evening, the first week of February. An elderly dispatcher took the call, asked a few questions, then reached for an incident-report form and repeated most of his questions. The call was logged out at 6:29. After that, the dispatcher hit a key on his computer and a list of names and phone numbers appeared on his screen. He dialed the third on the list.
When the phone was answered, the dispatcher said, “Yak, I know you’re gone for the day, but I just took a call from some bartender at a fishing lodge up in Ragged Lake. Guy says there’s been some people killed up there.”
Frank Yakabuski rubbed his eyes and looked around the small apartment where he was sitting. His father had gone to the kitchen when his cellphone rang and was now running water for a kettle. Yakabuski held up one finger and his father nodded.
“People killed? What are you talking about, Donnie?”
“It was all a jumble, Yak. You need to talk to the guy. The Mattamy Fishing Lodge. That’s where he said he was phoning from. I’ve got the number.”
“The Mattamy? Up in Ragged Lake? Since when do we take calls for Ragged Lake?”
“The past four years, Yak. You didn’t get the memo? Oh, right, major crimes. Excuse me, Senior Detective Frank Yaka-freakin’-buski.”
“Just asking, Donnie. Is that because of the detachment closing in High River?”
“You got it. You must be one hell of a detective.”
“All right, all right. Give me the number.”
“Got it right here. How’s Billy, by the way?”
Yakabuski stared at his father. His dad was looking out his kitchen window, waiting for the kettle to boil, a Hudson’s Bay blanket on his knees and an open paperback on his lap. Three years ago, his father had walked into the Stedman’s department store in High River looking for mosquito netting for his hunt cabin only to be followed a minute later by a stickup crew from Springfield. Yakabuski’s father saw them come in. One man stationing himself by the front door. The other two heading toward a back office. His father followed the two heading toward the office before shouting: “Cops! Put your hands where I can see ’em!”
He was old-school. From a generation that thought if a cop told you to put your hands where he could see them, that’s what you did. Instead, the two men turned, craned their necks to see if they were missing something, then raised the sawed-off shotguns they had hidden beneath their coats and fired. It was only the tremendous bulk of Yakabuski’s dad that saved him. He took the blast in his hips and stomach instead of his chest. He still ended up face down in the toy aisle of the Stedman’s with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle figurines raining down on him. But he didn’t die.
“He’s good. Thanks for asking.”
“Never gets any easier, does it? If there’s anything Linda or I can do, all you have to do is ask, Yak. You know that, right?”
“I know that, Donnie. Thanks.”
“You can’t do it all yourself. There are plenty of people down here who think the world of your dad. You could get all the help you needed if you just—”
“Still got that number, Donnie?”
“Right. Here it is.”
. . .
Yakabuski walked into the kitchen to find his dad still staring out the window. The kettle had boiled and then clicked off.
“You have to make a call?”
“I do.”
“You can make it here if you want.”
“I can make it in the car, too.”
“It won’t matter?”
“I don’t see how.”
His dad nodded and the trace of a smile slipped across his face. He turned his wheelchair to look at his son.
“When did you start taking calls for Ragged Lake?”
“Four years ago, Donnie says. After the feds closed down their detachment in High River. Any major crime comes to us, apparently. There’s a bartender at the Mattamy says some people have been killed up there.”
Ragged Lake was high in the North Country, right on the Northern Divide, about four hundred miles from Springfield.
“Killed how?”
“Donnie didn’t know.”
“How many?”
“He didn’t know.”
“Fuckin’ Donnie. How would you even get to Ragged Lake this time of year? You can’t drive any of the logging roads.”
“If the lodge is open, maybe there’s a plane.”
“Maybe.”
The sun was about to sink below a line of low-rise apartments on a bluff the other side of the river. For the past thirty minutes its trajectory had cast an oblong shadow across the city, moving over the highways and subdivisions, the rail line and glass