Dead by Dawn

by Paul Doiron

  To me it sounded like a well-prepared story, which didn’t necessarily make it a lie.

  “Were you living with him at the time?”

  “I was still with my ex down in Savannah. I had learned I was pregnant when he ran off. It seems a lifetime ago.” She gazed up at me with an embarrassed smile. “We were supposed to be talking about my dad.”

  “We’re just talking.”

  “No, offense, but I dated a cop once. Police never just talk, whether they’re on duty or off.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Not that you had to work too hard to get me going. So many of my conversations are with kids, it’s a novel experience to talk to an adult. Anyway, I moved back up here two and half years ago, with my belly about to burst. It wasn’t my plan, coming back to Maine. Nothing in my life has ever gone according to plan.”

  “Whose does?”

  “Bibi Chamberlain’s. You were about to ask me about her, right? You know we’re friends.”

  “How well would you say you know her?”

  “What does that mean?” she asked with sudden sharpness. “You’ve been talking with Tina Dillon, haven’t you? Because Bibi’s gay, everyone up here assumes I am, too. I think there may be a little projection going on. Did you know that the most popular porn watched by women is girl-on-girl?”

  Felice Bazinet had a talent for shocking me into silence.

  “What else did the Dillons have to say about me?” she asked.

  I cleared my throat. “That you’re Bibi’s drug dealer.”

  “You’ve found me out. Now you understand how I pay for this lavish lifestyle. The Porsche is in the shop being detailed, by the way. And you didn’t see the cases of Cristal I got hidden behind the trailer.”

  The jokes were funny, but they didn’t add up to a denial.

  “Can I ask you a personal question?”

  “If that isn’t what you’ve been doing, I’m eager to hear what you consider an actual invasion of my privacy.”

  “How’d you end up here, Felice?”

  “On the hill? I already told you. Pregnant. Bankrupt. A couple of bench warrants out for me in Georgia. Not drug-related. My hubby forgot to pay certain taxes on our business. I should’ve taken the hint. When you marry a snake, he’s bound to turn on you, too, eventually.”

  “Where is he now? Your husband?”

  “Somewhere in the Caribbean would be my guess. One of those islands where his income can’t be garnisheed for child support. I picture him on a boat with a twenty-two-year-old in a bikini. Meanwhile I’m back home, waiting tables, living in a rat trap. I thought I’d seen the last of Maine after I left college. The day I graduated from Bates, I loaded a van and never looked back—until I ran out of money and chances.”

  “You went to Bates? I went to Colby.”

  “Good for you.”

  I waited for an apology, but none was forthcoming.

  “Colby, huh,” she said. “That explains a few things. The other wardens I’ve met have trouble speaking in complete sentences. Yeah, I majored in theater, but my thing was dance. A lot of good that did me in the working world.”

  “For some reason, I thought you’d been in the military.”

  “For some reason? I’ve got a buzzed head. The truth is Noah came home from daycare with lice, and I had to chop it off. Then I decided I liked the look.” She pointed at a well-trampled path that led off through a cleared area, a vacant lot that was waiting for a new mobile home to be deposited there. “You want to see a view?”

  “A view of what?”

  “The river. The fields. Everything below.”

  Normally, I would have, but the bleary sun had descended into the skeletal treetops to the west.

  She didn’t give me a chance to object, though. She dug her hands into her pockets and began to trudge along the well-beaten footpath. Among the boot tracks were paw prints and the occasional urine stain. The route was favored by dog walkers.

  “Watch your step,” Felice said as she skipped over a crusted turd.

  The trail entered some scrubby underbrush—sumac, willows, and speckled alder—the usual bushes that spring up at the edges of fields. A thorny sprig of multiflora rose tried to snag my arm as I pushed it aside.

  When we came to the edge, we had a view down the winding road that led to the summit, past some of Jewett’s land, and all the way to the professor’s experimental orchard.

  It wasn’t a cliff, per se. But it was a place where you wanted to watch your step. Neither the drop nor the rocks below had stopped the neighborhood kids from sledding down the slope.

  “Levi comes here to play,” Felice said. The breeze tore the breath from her mouth. “I tell him he’s going to kill himself, but Treasure Dillon eggs him on—that girl is as mean as Tina.”

  “What’s your connection to the Dillon family?”

  “None, thank God.”

  “I’d heard everyone here is related.”

  “My dad isn’t, and I’m not. Arlo isn’t. There’s also—”

  “Who?”

  “Some others.”

  In the blue-gray light I could see fissures running down the Androscoggin where the river hadn’t yet frozen over. There were patches along the edges of these open channels that looked like they’d melted when the sun had hit them but were hardening again in the twilight.

  Beside me Felice put a hand to her mouth. “Oh, God.”

  She had fixed her attention on Jewett’s land. The devastation caused by the skidder was even more horrifying when viewed from above. The three young loggers had left for the evening, gone drinking probably, abandoning their savage machine in the wasteland.

  “They totally destroyed those lovely woods,” she said.

  “I met the guys with the saws on the way up,” I said. “I don’t think they knew what they were doing.”

  “You’re wrong there. They knew exactly what they were doing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That they’re assholes like the rest of them.”

  “You mean the Dillons?”

  She extended her arm toward the edge of the clearcut where the stone wall followed the road. “Is that a deer down there?”

  My father hadn’t been blessed with much in life, but he’d always had spectacular eyesight. He could make a headshot on a buck, without a fixed scope, from a distance of half a mile. I’d inherited his blue eyes and his 20/10 vision.

  “It’s a man,” I said.

  He was too distant for me to make out beyond his form (short and wiry) and the color of his clothing (navy blue), but those details were all I needed to make an identification.

  “It’s Bruce Jewett.”

  “I shouldn’t say this,” Felice said, “but I’m almost glad they made a mess of his land. The racist piece of shit. I tell Levi not to go down there because he’s probably got it landmined. That’s not legal, is it? To booby-trap your property?”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  Not that it didn’t happen. Years earlier, I had been present when a fellow warden tripped a wire strung along the perimeter of a marijuana grow and set off an improvised explosive device. The horrific memory—of a man torn in half—still visited me on bad nights.

  The nightmarish image stuck in my mind now. Earlier I had been reminded of that botched raid on the dealers’ compound. It must have been the horror stories people had been telling me about Pill Hill. There was something of the same hateful vibe here as I’d encountered in those trip-wired woods.

  From the top of the bluff, Felice and I watched the solitary figure standing amid the stumps and waste. In Jewett’s stillness I saw the posture of a man trying to process a sight that defied belief.

  He didn’t want this to happen.

  “What else do you know about Jewett?” I asked.

  “His crazy mother lives with him. She got out once and was running around naked. People still laugh about it. Misfortune is cause for great merriment among the Dillons.”

  �
��You disapprove?”

  “Of course I disapprove. I’m not a monster.”

  Jewett wandered out of view. A minute later, I heard a four-stroke engine roar to life. A yellowish snowmobile appeared and disappeared where the road curved below the woodlot.

  “I’m surprised he dared leave her alone again,” Felice said. “Although maybe it would have been for the best if she’d frozen to death.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “My worst fear is that my dad becomes like that—although maybe it’s not the worst thing, to forget the pain of your life.”

  I was having a hard time taking the measure of this woman. On the one hand, I enjoyed our conversation. She was witty and intelligent, and although she was more cynical than I was, her life story made a compelling case for her worldview.

  On the other hand, Felice had deceived me about her father being in Atlantic City. And knowing she had lied had colored everything else she’d told me. I suspected she might indeed deal drugs, as Tori and Tiff claimed. She’d said something about waiting tables, but that parka she was wearing had easily cost a thousand dollars. So if she had a sideline selling candy, why was she living in her father’s dumpy trailer and not a home fit for human habitation?

  “There’s Bibi’s house,” she said.

  At the bottom of the hill, the Chamberlain house twinkled with tasteful lights. I wondered if Mariëtte had given up waiting for me to return. I had no intention of giving her a “report” of my day, in any case.

  “One last question about Professor Chamberlain,” I said. “I’m trying to determine who might have wanted him dead.”

  “Some people are easy to dislike.”

  “But you said you’d never even met him.”

  “I heard the stories, though. Like how he’d be out in his orchard plucking apples by lantern light until midnight, and then before dawn, my dad would see him, walking backward up the hill for exercise.”

  “Backward?”

  “Bibi told me he alternated each day, backward and forward, in order to exercise all the muscles in his legs. What kind of asshole does that? And that tired old dog of his struggling to keep up.”

  “He might have been an odd man,” I said. “But it’s clear Bibi really loved him.”

  She seemed puzzled. “Loved him? No, I wouldn’t put it that way.”

  “How would you put it?”

  “Bibi hated his guts.”

  33

  Reynolds was feeling no pain when he ran off the road. Now he lies in the snow, beating his fists against the ground and screaming questions at God.

  “I don’t understand, I don’t understand. Why is this happening? Why are you doing this?”

  Meanwhile the glowing laser dots have moved to his head. One of the shooters has steady hands. The red spot never quivers more than an inch from Reynolds’s hairline. The other is shaky.

  A man’s voice speaks from the phone. “What’s the nature of your emergency?”

  “This is 2154 Augusta. I’m a Maine game warden, taking fire from multiple assailants. My name is Mike Bowditch. One bystander has been shot. Situation is 10–74. Send help.”

  “2154 Augusta, what is your location?”

  “Leeds? Greene? Ping the phone for God’s sake!”

  “Say again, 2154,” says the dispatcher. “I’m not receiving you well.”

  Then a woman’s voice calls from the darkness, “Throw out the phone, Mike!”

  Even if I don’t say another word, the dispatcher is required to ping my location. He’ll send a nearby unit to check it out, possibly a state trooper, possibly a deputy sheriff. Either of those officers would be driving into a turkey shoot.

  Steady Hands very deliberately moves her red dot a foot from Reynolds’s thrashing head and fires into the ground. The shot echoes across the field.

  What choice do I have?

  “Send every available unit,” I shout into the phone.

  And because I am afraid for Reynolds, I softly toss the cell at him. My aim is too good. It bounces off the poor guy’s chest and lies glowing on the snow beside his flailing elbow.

  The red laser finds the screen and a second later the phone disintegrates in a small explosion of glass, metal, and lead fragments.

  The state police will have at least three cruisers roaming northern Androscoggin and western Kennebec counties, more with the bad weather. I can also count on at least two sheriff’s deputies in the vicinity. Maybe a warden on patrol. Lewiston and Auburn have patrol officers working their streets, but the Twin Cities are half an hour away on these slick roads. Everyone else will need to be called out of their homes.

  Can I stall for five minutes?

  Maybe.

  What about ten?

  Not a chance.

  “Now, throw out the shotgun,” shouts a woman. I think it’s Tori.

  Law enforcement officers are told never to give up your gun. The idea is drummed into our heads so hard it leaves a permanent scar on the cerebellum. Our first week at the academy, we’re taught about the famous Onion Field incident where two LAPD detectives made that mistake and found themselves transported to a farm outside Bakersfield for summary execution.

  I have only one card to play.

  Tori, whom I am imagining as the leader, is betting I will comply with her demand rather than watch helplessly while they execute poor Reynolds. But if they kill their only hostage, they will have lost their leverage over me. I can hunker down, return fire, and wait until I hear sirens approaching. They’ll be the ones fighting the clock, not me.

  Those same thoughts must be going through her mind, too, because she locates the significant flaw in my logic.

  Steady Hands fires another shot, into Reynolds’s collarbone.

  His scream tears a hole in me.

  “Throw out the gun or the next one’s through his face,” Tori says, and her voice sounds even nearer. Thirty yards at most. She’s left the cover of the trees, darted into the field.

  Reynolds’s cries are no longer even words.

  My throat burns with acid that I can taste in my mouth.

  I want to scream obscenities. But I can’t let them know they’re weakening my resolve. I have to remain dead silent for Reynolds’s sake as much as mine.

  They can’t risk killing him, I tell myself. But I am not sure I believe my own reassurances.

  Tori’s strategy isn’t working. She knows they’re running out of time.

  I hear a radio squawk to my left. Then her voice again: “Finish it!”

  Now comes the hailstorm.

  Bullets tear through the sheet metal and smash the windshield and the windows. They skip off the steel axles and puncture the tires. They whine and thud and crash. They dislodge snow that has settled on the roof. I make myself as small as possible behind the engine block.

  There is a pause in the shooting, and I raise my head. Snow and broken glass fall from my shoulders.

  I look over at Reynolds and the twitching of his ruined foot has stopped. I doubt anyone deliberately tried to kill him. They simply didn’t care enough to avoid hitting him.

  I will make them pay for that.

  The Dillons are going to wait to see if they got me before they close in on the van. Maybe I’m as dead as Reynolds. But they won’t wait long because they can’t be sure what I told dispatch. Dozens of cops may be on the way. If I identified them to the dispatcher, Pill Hill might soon be under siege by the State Police Tactical Team and the Violent Crimes Task Force.

  Did I give their name to the dispatcher?

  Just then, I hear a war whoop, then footsteps coming toward me. Some foolhardy gunman plans on ending the stand-off single-handedly.

  A fast-moving figure in Carhartt coveralls slides past the end of the van and, from his side, brings a black carbine up to the ready position, the sights searching for me in the shadows.

  I pull the trigger. Double-ought buckshot punches a hole through his chest, shredding his heart and lungs. Lifeless, his bod
y continues its slide, among the bits and pieces of the dismantled van.

  “Todd!” a female voice screams.

  My young attacker comes to rest so that only half his face is visible in the beam of the tactical flashlight. I see milk-white skin, a half-grown goatee.

  It’s the kid I spoke with earlier. The logger who was cutting down Jewett’s woods.

  What happens next happens fast.

  A big-engined vehicle comes roaring along the road, and my heart rises with the hope that it’s a state trooper. But if it’s a cruiser, why don’t I hear a siren? Where are the blue strobes?

  I hear but don’t see the over-powered truck leave the road and come skidding and sliding down the hill, and I understand that it is about to ram Reynolds’s van and crush me in the process. The realization comes almost too late. There is not enough time to throw myself clear. When the moving vehicle hits the stationary one, the best I can do is fall in the direction of the cairn, where my head strikes stone, and in an instant, everything becomes nothing.

  34

  Felice led me back to the darkening playground. The crows I’d noticed before were still hanging around, and more were flying in by the minute. The growing mob reminded me of the scene from The Birds where crows gather ominously on a jungle gym while the oblivious heroine smokes a cigarette. I had never seen the entire movie, but I knew the sequence, and I suspected that if I watched the whole film, my sympathies would lie entirely with the birds.

  Felice perched her butt on a swing. She gripped the chains holding the seat to the crossbar and began to rock back and forth.

  “I’m sure Bibi told you she adored her grandfather,” she said at last. “That’s been her line since he went missing. She didn’t tell you he was changing his will, leaving most of his estate to the college he used to run.”

  I tried to keep disbelief out of my tone. “He was rewriting his will?”

  “It sounds like Miss Marple, I know.”

  “Did Bibi tell you why he was doing this?”

  “The current president of Bollingbrook—that’s the college where he was dean—had flown to Maine with an appeal. They were going to name a new library in his honor if he made a big enough donation. Chamberlain was too much of an egomaniac to resist. He wasn’t going to disinherit Bibi completely or anything. He knew she makes decent royalties off her books, and she’ll get money when her mom dies—if she dies. Lady Mariëtte told you she’s Rhodesian, right? That woman counts herself as part of the master race. She plans on living to 120.”