Date: Sun, 30 Mar 2014 15:01:46 -0400
From: Jake Preston <jemtling@gmail.com>
Subject: Psychic Detective 27

Psychic Detective 27
By: Jake Preston

This is a work of erotic gay fiction, intended for readers who enjoy a
murder mystery in which fully developed characters interact sexually and in
other ways. Their sexual encounters are sometimes romantic, sometimes
recreational, sometimes spiritual, and almost always described
explicitly. My attention is equally divided between narrative, character
development, and sex scenes. If you don't care for this combination, there
are many other excellent "nifty" stories to choose from. And remember that
while nifty stories are free, maintaining a website is not. Please think
about donating at http://donate.nifty.org/donate.html

Writing is usually a solitary avocation, but not necessarily so on
nifty.org, where a longer story appears in installments. If my characters
and my story grab your attention, you can always intervene with suggestions
for improvements. All sincere comments will get a response!

Jake, at jemtling@gmail.com


       *  *  *  *  *  *


Chapter 27
Death March


	In this year's Timberdays parade, the 'Ojibwe Monument' float used
birch-bark scrolls as its theme, to get out the message that the Ojibwe
people had hieroglyphic writing long before the advent of Europeans. Just
behind this one, the 'Ojibwe Craft' float featured a wigwam, and artisans
demonstrating the crafts used to decorate it.

      To these, the Ojibwe delegation added a third float, designed to
celebrate the second anniversary of marriage equality in Minnesota. Its
theme was the marriage of Sam Black Bear and Ben Hasek, the Ojibwe
lumberjack and the Slovak iron-miner. They were married under Ojibwe law,
two years prior to marriage equality in Minnesota. Sam and Ben rode on the
float, along with symbols of lumberjacking and mining. There was no sexual
innuendo. It could have passed as a Chamber of Commerce float. Some viewers
thought that's what it was.

      Four local churches- Baptist, Lutheran, Congregational, and Catholic-
organized a 'family values' booing section that taunted the Ojibwe floats
when they passed down Main Street. It was the first ecumenical event in
Ashawa's history, an act of trickle-down homophobia.  Children threw rocks
at the Marriage Equality float, and at other floats, until a patrolman told
them to knock it off, and threatened to charge three pastors and a priest
with inciting violence if it happened again. Ben Hasek took pictures of the
four clerics and the stoning, which appeared in the following week's issue
of North Country Advocate. The Advocate editor, in an editorial about the
incident, noted that Ashawa's Main Street is kept fairly clean, and
wondered where the children got the rocks.

	For most of the parade, Red Hawk rode on the 'Ojibwe Monument'
float, which he had designed, but when the rock-throwing started on Main
Street, he moved two floats back to be with Sam and Ben.

      After the parade, Red Hawk was 'off duty' and spent the afternoon in
the playing-field.  Friday was given to throwing-events- the axe, the
sledge-hammer, the caber- and a new contest: cutting thick Norway trunks
with a two-man saw. Red Hawk cruised lumberjacks, but didn't score. Not
that it broke his heart. Sometimes he cruised out of habit. It was just a
way of expressing his gayness. He didn't seem to notice three guys
following him on the way back to his car. "Atta girl!" one of them shouted
when he leaped across the railroad tracks. They had noticed him on the
'Marriage Equality' float in the parade, and objected to Ojibwe costume
and, most of all, to his long hair. "He can't look like that," one of them
said. "That's wrong. Just look at him!"  They jumped him by the tracks. Two
of them held him down, while the third shortened his hair with a
hunting-knife.

      Göran Svenson- the new sheriff in town- sped to the track and
stopped the three men who had assaulted Red Hawk. He was preparing to
arrest them. Suddenly he had a change of heart. "Get in the cruiser," he
said to Red Hawk. "We've got to get to the lake right away!" Red Hawk
obeyed without question. He could see the signs when Göran experienced a
sudden insight. Harv Winik would have called it one of his 'psychic
moments'.

	"Maybe you should let me drive," Red Hawk said when Svenson
spiraled unsteadily along the road parallel to the railroad- one of those
roads that no one remembers by name, but if you say 'the one that ends at
the hockey-rink', everyone knows where you mean. They exchanged seats.

      "Where's your archery equipment?" Svenson asked.

	"At the cabin," Red Hawk said.

	"We'll go there first. You're gonna need it," Svenson
said. Seemingly in a trance, he whispered Dmitri's name, almost inaudibly,
but his body-language looked like he wanted to scream it. When he settled
down, he confided to Red Hawk: "All week I've been getting odd
sensations. Now they're coming at me like a taser. They're from Dmitri. I
can sense what he's feeling. I can visualize what he's seeing. He's in
danger, which means that David must be, too."

	"Should I call someone?" Red Hawk asked, speeding down the road to
the lake.

	"Call Tom," Svenson said. "Tell him to have the Kris Kraft ready to
take us to Eight Eagles."

      An hour later, Tom let them off at Eight Eagles, Svenson with a rifle
and service revolver and Red Hawk with bow and arrows. The inspected the
twenty-foot length of buck-fence in the clearing. "We're waiting for
something to happen here," Svenson said. Red Hawk shimmied up a Norway pine
to a perch that gave him a view of the clearing. Svenson settled in at a
spot behind a lichen-bound boulder. "When the time comes, shoot to kill. Do
you understand?" Svenson said to Red Hawk.



 	* * * * * *



	Notwithstanding the libelous nickname given to the 'Red Star
State', Minnesota calls itself 'Land of 10,000 Lakes' on its license
plates. Actually there are closer to 11,000, many unnamed and some
undiscovered, or unknown to cartographers. One of them lies ten miles north
of Lake Ashawa, in a wilderness unvisited even by hunters, hidden behind
marshes and bogs and guarded by horse-flies and deer-flies by day, bats and
no-see-ums by night, and a Genghis-Khan army of mosquitos at all
hours. That's where Ashawa's wretched Deputy Sheriff, Dudley Nelson,
together with his Sergeant, lay bound in captivity for days in a
dilapidated cabin that once belonged to a trapper of beavers. They were
confined in a windowless storeroom with a third man who was almost skeletal
after months of captivity. He spoke only when spoken to, in an almost
inaudible voice, and said his name was Baily and he worked at a coffee
shop. He was too disoriented to recall his last name, but said he was
'taken' at Apollo's. "What's Apollo's?"  Nelson asked him. "It's a bar by
the harbor."

	For a few days, when the search for the Deputy and the Sergeant was
active, the sound of an airplane overhead gave them hope, but moss growing
on the roof made the hovel-like cabin invisible. Three prisoners subsisted
in an unhanseled forest, shadowed by Norway and white pine. Their only
source of light was a crack between two logs, which also admitted an
occasional mosquito, their only nocturnal visitor, whose siren-buzz was
prelude to a landing and a drawing of blood. Their captors were a tall,
pale, white-haired man and a shorter, thin, dark one. He was loquacious, a
smooth talker, the opposite of Albino Guy (that's what they called him),
who never spoke except to bark orders-"Stand
up!"-"Sit!"-"Eat!"-"Shit!"-when they were released from their handcuffs and
ankle-cuffs, one at a time, to be watered and fed like beasts in a barn.
Not every day though-only when Albino Guy and 'Brad Nails' were
together. When there was just one of them, they were given water in the
storeroom but went hungry. Sometimes they were left alone for days at a
time. "If they leave us here in winter, we'll freeze to death," Nelson
said.

	That wasn't about to happen. On Friday morning, Albino Guy
harnessed the prisoners together in chains and started a southern trek on a
trail of tears. As assurance against escape, they were compelled to walk
barefoot and naked from the waist down. "We're moving you to a new
location," Albino Guy told them. The Sergeant was hopeful, but Nelson and
Baily Arlenas knew they were on a death march. They wondered why Brad Nails
wasn't with them. The walk under Norways and white pines was easy, but when
they passed through tamarack swamps the ground was muddy and
treacherous. Patches of bramble lacerated their feet. They waded an eerie
marsh where a thousand and one barren tree-trunks stood in fetid water,
denuded of bark and overgrown gray with lichen and powdered with the
skeletal remains of dragon-flies. Undead in the Kingdom of Plants- roots
clutching some invisible stone in their watery grave- bare branches beat
the air, unable to grasp the souls of birch, beach, poplar, white pine and
jackpine, elusive spirits of former species, floating in a summer
breeze. Each gust of wind brought a plop in the swamp where another branch
fell in the water, causing a disturbance among hovering dragon-flies and
water-beetles. At the ragged boundary between water and turf, where the
muck was deepest, a chorus of green-backed, gold-bellied frogs croaked in
protest at human intruders in a bed of yellow and white
water-lilies. Spider-webs swayed between branches and glinted in sunlight,
spotted with corpses of flies and mosquitos. Baily Arenas had lost his will
to live, and tried to bash his head against a lichen-and-moss-covered
boulder, but Albino caught him and forced him back into the line-up.

	They came to an inlet on the north shore of Lake Ashawa. It looked
out at an open bay but was hidden from view of the channel that led to
Eight Eagles. Albino positioned Nelson, the Sergeant, and Bradley in the
back of a rowboat, huddled and bound. Albino took the seat at the
oarlocks. "You ask who I am. I'm Old Man Geryon, your guide across the
Styx," he said woodenly, as if he were putting two sentences together for
the first time.



      * * * * * *



	Another group of three, Dmitri, David, and Sheila, anchored their
boat at the landing- rock on Eight Eagle Island's north side. Sheila took
pix of Dmitri in his sunga and David in his speedo. Dmitri and David
checked out the twenty-foot-long buck-fence in the clearing. "I wonder who
put this here, and when," David said.

	"It feels strong enough to support our weight," Dmitri said while
he tested the top rail.

	"I like it," Sheila said. "It'll give my pictures a country-western
flavor." She asked the boys to pose nude, leaning against the top two
rails.

	"If we can pose like this for Mrs. Ravitch, I guess we can do it
for Sheila, assuming she doesn't flatter herself into thinking that one of
us is interested in her," Dmitri said to David.

	"Move closer in, boys, so I can get a sharper contrast of cut and
uncut cock," Sheila said.  She persuaded them to fondle each other to
hardness while leaning against the fence.

	"Let's dress up the scene with a hint of bondage," Sheila said. She
pulled a length of rope from her purse and tossed it to David. He used it
to tie Dmitri's hands to the top rail. David stood facing Dmitri, who
hoisted himself with his ankles resting on David's shoulders. "Don't stop
now," Sheila said. David penetrated Dmitri, his discretion overcome by
desire. Sheila interrupted. She took David's place and pulled up her slinky
black dress, revealing that 'she' was a 'he'-and penetrated Dmitri.

      Sheila wanted a new pose, with David face-down on the fence, his
wrists tied to the top rail. Dmitri said no. He sensed the danger, if both
of them were bound to the fence. When David resisted, Sheila pulled a
revolver from her purse and pointed. Dmitri kicked it out of her hand and
shouted at David to run. David ran to the shore, dove into the lake, and
kept under the water.  Sheila waited with the revolver. She was prepared to
shoot when he surfaced for air. She aimed at a disturbance in the
water. Just then she collapsed-struck down by an arrow that entered her
neck at the nape and exited where his Adam's apple had been. By the time
Göran Svenson caught up with David and helped him out of the lake, Red
Hawk was busy cutting the cords that bound Dmitri's wrists to the
buck-fence. The four men stood around Sheila's corpse. Svenson wiped her
face with his tee-shirt. Behind a mask of mascara appeared the face of
Albino's mysterious companion. Dmitri shuddered at the revolting thought
that this creature had invaded his anatomy. David pulled him away from the
scene. "How could I have been so stupid?" He asked. "Stupido!" He wanted to
beat his head against a tree.

      Red Hawk intervened: "From what I saw, perched in that Norway, you
boys did the right thing," he said. "The disordered display of sex created
the distraction I needed. If 'Sheila' hadn't have got caught up in it, I
wouldn't have had a clear shot."

       Albino heard the commotion on the island and made his escape north
on the trail, leaving Nelson, the Sergeant, and Baily alive in the
rowboat. "This is the second time we've closed in on Coleman and he got
away," Svenson said. "He's like a ghost or an apparition. What kind of
divine intervention will it take to catch him, I wonder?"

	"Intervention of the shamanist kind," Red Hawk replied.