Dead by Dawn

by Paul Doiron

  I stagger around one of the steel posts to which the limp chain is hooked, looking for Tiff.

  I don’t want to shoot her, but I am prepared to do so.

  The breeze has swirled the exhaust from her idling snowmobile into its headlights. The effect is eerie: a glowing blue vapor of snow and smoke. The air tastes of spilled gasoline.

  I see Tiff Dillon siting on her ass in the road, fiddling with her gun.

  She’s thrown off her helmet to deal with her malfunctioning rifle. She aims it at me, pulls the trigger, and nothing happens.

  She keeps trying the trigger. Even the best guns are subject to misuse and misfires.

  Has she bent the barrel?

  Has she mistakenly engaged the safety?

  Somehow ejected the magazine?

  I don’t have time to wait for her to figure out the problem. She is desperate, terrified, and under the mistaken belief that I am going to gun her down.

  It must blow her mind when, instead, I steal her ride.

  30

  Outside Grambo’s trailer, the dog with the curled tail was barking at my Jeep. He must have scented the wolf. I was half-tempted to open the kennel to see what would happen. Shadow was overdue for lunch.

  “Hey!”

  The yapper laid his ears flat against his skull and snarled at me. Then he recommenced his leaping attacks on my rear bumper.

  The sun had become a pale yellow spot fading into clouds that weren’t there when I entered Grambo’s trailer. The wind had turned and was coming from the northwest, not steadily but in half-hearted gusts. For the first time all day, I tasted snow on the air. Emma Cronk’s spell seemed to be working.

  The little cur slunk off a few paces as I approached the Jeep, then rushed to the bumper after I’d climbed inside.

  Shadow let out a yawn that ended in a growl.

  I couldn’t see the wolf inside the crate, but the Jeep smelled of his urine-soaked blanket.

  “Did the barking wake you?”

  He jabbed the cage door with his nose, then proceeded to gnaw at the metal. If he kept it up, he might break one of his shiny clean teeth.

  “I know you’ve had a shitty day, brother. But we’re finally going home. I just have to make one last stop.”

  He huffed.

  “Yeah, I know I said that before.”

  I was so intent on the wolf that I was startled upright by a rapping at my window.

  Tina Dillon—I assumed that was her surname since she wore no wedding ring—had come out of her grandmother’s trailer and was looming beside the door in a black parka. I couldn’t see her hands.

  When I was a new graduate of the criminal justice academy, and for some years afterward, I had been prone to paranoia in these situations. Someone would approach my window, and I was positive they were going to shoot me through the glass. Our instructors had shown us dash-cam videos of law enforcement officers being ambushed, overpowered, and assassinated during “routine” traffic stops. Out of a well-placed concern for our safety, they had cultivated a fear in us of the very people we would be policing.

  Like everyone in the years since, I had seen the news stories of the cops who leapt out of cruisers with guns drawn: the stupid, life-ending mistakes. And I had endeavored to change my mind-set, to cultivate the bravery inside myself instead of the fear. Most people are good, after all.

  Even so, I kept my hand on my sidearm as I powered down the window.

  She had the parka hood up over her russet hair. The sunlight was dimming but still brighter than it had been inside the trailer, and I noticed she had a yellow half-moon beneath her left eye. Someone had punched her, some time ago. At six feet tall and two hundred pounds, she was a physically imposing person. Whoever had attacked her hadn’t been afraid of being beaten to a pulp.

  “Would you mind calling off your attack dog?” I said.

  “He ain’t mine,” she said in that same smoke-strained voice.

  “Whose is he?”

  “Someone who died last year.” She stepped clear of the Jeep and shouted at the dog. “Shut it, Waffles!”

  The cur fell silent.

  “What can I do for you, Tina?”

  She coughed into her fist. “If I give you a name, you’ve got to promise you didn’t hear it from me.”

  I hadn’t taken Tina Dillon for a potential ally, the way she’d sneered at me inside Grambo’s living room.

  “Do you mean the man who found the life vest?”

  “You’re not going to find the guy from his fucking aura.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Promise first.”

  “All right.”

  “His name is Vic Bazinet. He lives down at number two. He drives one of those septic trucks. If he’s home, you can’t miss it. Otherwise look for a blue Corolla. It belongs to his cunt daughter, Felice.”

  I had never appreciated that word used for a woman but wasn’t about to lecture her on profanity.

  “Bibi told me she had a friend named Felice,” I said.

  “A friend! That’s one way to put it.” She scissored the fingers of both her hands together. “You understand what I’m saying? Felice lives with her dad and her two brats, Levi and Noah.”

  I recognized the name of Levi. He had been the rude boy playing with Tina’s daughter, Treasure.

  “No offense, Tina, but you don’t strike me as the neighborhood watch type. Why are you telling me this?”

  Laughter brought on another coughing fit. “Felice took my man,” she said, hoarsely. “It sounds like a cheesy country song, don’t it? Anyway, he’s not in the picture anymore.”

  “I thought you said—”

  “That girl swings every which way. Jamal turned her lez again, is my guess.”

  “You’re referring to the man Felice ‘stole’ from you?”

  “Jamal Marquess.”

  “He’s dead?”

  She widened her tired eyes. “How the hell did you guess that?”

  “You said this Jamal was out of the picture. You said that dog, Waffles, used to belong to someone who died. What happened to Mr. Marquess?”

  She shook a Kool out of the pack. She brought up a lighter, sparked a flame, and took a long drag on the cigarette so that the end sizzled. Her gaze remained focused on mine the entire time. The calculation was plain for me to see.

  “Jamal fell asleep with a bottle of Bombay gin and a blunt,” she said, exhaling smoke. “He managed to light his carpet on fire, but he was too drunk to wake up. Waffles got out somehow. Now that dog sort of belongs to everyone—we feed him scraps. But sooner or later, someone’s going to run over the little shit, probably on purpose. It might even be me.”

  The pitiless way she told the story made me question the accidental nature of Jamal’s tragic end. I was under the impression that Tina Dillon had no problem with me jumping to a more nefarious conclusion. She enjoyed arousing my suspicions, in fact.

  “The funny thing is, I didn’t even like the asshole,” she said, aware of my turn of mind. “I knew Jamal was using me. I knew he was a player. Would’ve been fine if he hadn’t knocked me up same time he was fucking Felice. The day I let a man disrespect me—I don’t care how big his dick is. He got what he deserved.”

  “Is that a confession?”

  For the first time, she showed me her tobacco-stained smile. “I have no idea what you mean.”

  I started to roll up the window, then stopped.

  “The baby you had with Jamal—was it a boy or a girl?”

  The smile vanished. “There was no baby.”

  * * *

  The residents of Pill Hill were toying with me. I had zero doubts that Lynda Lynch had ordered her “granddaughter” to come after me. They were incriminating this Vic Bazinet for reasons I didn’t yet understand.

  Was it because they hated cops in general and game wardens in particular? And punking me was a low-cost way of getting kicks on a drab December afternoon? Or were their motives more sinister?

  O
ne thing I knew for certain was that Tina hated Felice. You don’t fake that kind of contempt.

  She hadn’t radiated personal warmth toward me either. None of the Dillons had. Of all of them, Tori had been the most vicious. Her story about having an embittered friend on Maquoit Island might or might not be true. But there was no question that her animus toward me felt intensely personal.

  “Don’t get caught up there alone after dark.”

  A vision flashed through my memory of a septic truck passing me on the hill. I doubted I would find Bazinet at his trailer. Maybe that was why Tina had chased me down. They were worried about me leaving if my interviewee wasn’t home from work.

  I drove around the loop, looking for the green pumper. People who have trouble with the law tend not to use house numbers or put their names on their mailboxes. They don’t want to make it easy for the police to find them.

  The Bazinets’ house was clearly numbered. And, as Tina had said, there was a Corolla parked out front.

  I stopped a hundred feet up the street and took its measure through my binoculars.

  In the minds of most middle- and upper-class people, trailer parks are places of generalized squalor. The prefab buildings are indistinguishable. The yards are littered with junked appliances and derelict autos.

  Sometimes the stereotype holds true. I have driven through redneck slums, loud with barking dogs and crying babies.

  But I have also visited mobile home developments that are as wholesome as an English country village.

  Pill Hill seemed to run to both extremes.

  Burch’s double-wide had been over-the-top in its architectural invention. Its yard was an outdoor showroom for every motorized toy a man-child could want. Everything about it was extravagant.

  Lynda Lynch’s home, by contrast, had been frumpy outside and folksy inside. But not dirty in any sense. The word that came to mind was “grandmotherly.”

  Vic Bazinet’s trailer was something altogether different. To use a four-letter word, the place was a dump.

  Out front: a cigarette-burned armchair with a FREE sign on it, a smashed air conditioner on a wood pallet, a telephone-cable spool repurposed as a picnic table, a cord of firewood waiting to be stacked.

  Nor could I overlook the vacant lot across the road. A burnt trailer had been torn down and trucked away for scrap metal. But the scorched foundation remained. Jamal Marquess, RIP.

  It must’ve made for a hell of a view for Felice Bazinet: looking out your window at the place where your ex-lover burned to death.

  While I was surveying the scene through my binos, the Bazinets’ Christmas lights came on. Strings of green and red bulbs were nailed up and down the corners and along a roofline jagged with lengthening icicles. As holiday displays went, it was simultaneously tacky and heartbreaking.

  The sight made me think of my own Christmas predicament. Where would I go? And more importantly, with whom? I had successfully dodged making a decision, but my time was up.

  Aimee Cronk had once teased me, “It must be torture being loved by two women.”

  In fact it was. All the more so because I had always felt undeserving of love.

  Without pausing to indulge in a bout of self-pity, I picked up my phone from the console and called Dani. I was legitimately curious about how her interview had gone. And sooner or later, we needed to discuss the rumor her mother was spreading around Pennacook.

  To my surprise Dani picked up immediately.

  “I was about to call you!” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ve got awesome news.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “Jemison wants me to come in for a sit-down. He said he’d been talking to people around the state, asking who he should recruit, and my name kept coming up. We really hit it off on the phone, too. I’m going in for an interview tomorrow. He didn’t say it, Mike, but I think I’m going to get the job.”

  The feeling in me was of a bomb having dropped and yet failed to explode. The news was a dud. I registered the impact but nothing else. But at least the uncertainty was over.

  “Congratulations.”

  “Aren’t you happy for me?”

  “I’m very happy for you.” She worked so hard, and I was one of those old-fashioned people who liked to see virtue rewarded. “I guess the new job will mean you’ll move to Greater Portland. You won’t want to commute in from the boondocks.”

  Greater Portland was even farther from Ducktrap than her current rental.

  “I haven’t thought that far ahead. I mean, I don’t even have an offer yet. I’m so excited, though. I’ve had trouble focusing all afternoon. This could be my best Christmas present ever, Mike.”

  “It puts the Nintendo I bought you to shame.”

  “You’re upset.”

  “I was trying to make a joke. I’m thrilled for you, Dani. Really. I know how hard you’ve worked for this opportunity. You deserve it.”

  “You’re upset,” she said again.

  “It’s been a long day.”

  “Is Shadow all right?”

  “He’s healthier than me. But we’re still not home yet.”

  “Where are you?”

  “You ever hear of a charming place called Pill Hill in Stratford?”

  “Vaguely,” she said. “I’m guessing a few dealers might live there. What have you been doing?”

  “Wasting my time, mostly.”

  When I’d called, I’d thought of talking her through the events of my day, telling her about the crazy characters I had met. I’d had an idea of engaging her in the puzzle. But I found now that I didn’t have the desire.

  “Have you had Shadow with you this whole time?”

  “He’s been sedated until a little while ago.”

  “You shouldn’t keep him cooped up like that.”

  “So he’s been telling me.”

  “Jesus, Mike.”

  Any thought I’d had of confronting her with the rumor her mom was spreading around Pennacook was gone. We were past that now.

  “I’ll give you a call when I get home.” I sounded tired in my own ears. “I want to hear more about what Jemison said.”

  “Maybe it would be better if we talked tomorrow, after the interview,” she said. “I’ve got to study tonight, learn more about him and what he did in Indiana. I want to be the best-prepared job applicant he’s ever met.”

  “Just be Dani Tate,” I said. “If he doesn’t recognize how great you are, then you don’t want the job anyway.”

  “You’ve always been in my corner, Mike. You’ve been such a steppingstone in my life.”

  A steppingstone?

  “You should head home soon, too,” she said. “There’s supposed to be snow tonight. The roads will be slick, and we’re putting out extra troopers. I’m so glad I don’t work the night shift anymore.”

  We said our goodbyes. Only later did I realize she never asked what had brought me to Pill Hill.

  31

  The new sled I have stolen lacks the raw power of Tori’s. It is an older Yamaha, one of the base trail models, fireplug red, with a lower windshield than I am used to. It’s a practical all-purpose snowmobile, not a flat-out suicide machine. I won’t be outracing anyone on this nag.

  Driving a sled at night in the snow is always a challenge. Without the benefit of a helmet or goggles, it constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. I find myself squinting through crusted eyelashes to lessen the sting. My ears are numb. My cheeks are burning.

  But at least I’m on a road, albeit an unpaved one. The skis make a god-awful racket, and the lugs churn up buried gravel. This is as far from a joy ride as you can have on a snow machine, but I have no other choice.

  I’m looking for a house, preferably inhabited. But the first one I encounter is a darkened ranch with an unplowed drive and a general air of vacancy. The vibe I get from the place isn’t of snowbirds gone to Florida but of old people who have disappeared into a nursing home forever.

  Lig
hts appear as pinpoints in the mirror. I cast a glance over my shoulder and see that one of my pursuers has managed to avoid the pile-up. They are hundreds of yard behind, but gaining steadily.

  When I turn back, I see another set of headlights—larger, brighter—approaching through the storm. Since we’re on a collision course, it’s hard for me to gauge the vehicle’s speed, but I have the impression it’s crawling. It doesn’t seem to be traveling in a straight line either.

  Chances are the driver will have a cell phone to call 9–1–1. And hopefully the presence of a witness will make the Dillons think twice about gunning down a law enforcement officer. I flash my headlights.

  Without warning, a cleared field opens to my right, a gentle hillside sloping into darkness.

  When I refocus on the road, I see that the driver hasn’t slowed, stopped, or pulled over. He has to see my lights. So what is he doing? Trying to engage me in a game of chicken I can only lose?

  As I’m about to turn into the field, the strangest thing happens.

  The vehicle—which I see now is a van—begins to sway as if blown by a tremendous gust of wind. It loses its grip on the road and goes sliding off into the field almost in slow motion and somehow without flipping over. While I watch, the errant van manages to find the single pile of fieldstones in the field. It plows into the ancient cairn, sends rocks tumbling, and stops dead.

  A voice in my head that sounds a lot like my dead father’s speaks to me.

  “Keep going,” it whispers. “Don’t be an idiot.”

  Instead I brake and pull hard on the right handlebar. I almost spin 180 degrees around so that I am looking at the sled chasing me, a quarter of a mile behind and a closing.

  I give the engine gas and leave the road, bouncing over icy ruts. The field is deeply furrowed beneath the deceptive blanket of snow. The sensation is like riding across a corrugated tin roof.

  I come up to the crumpled, steaming van on the driver’s side. It is a commercial vehicle: a Ford Transit Connect. The left door is ajar, and I see a man’s leg hanging out. The foot, visible in my headlights, is wearing a rubber boot.