by Paul Doiron
“The Sweet Caroline,” Gaynor answered, his smile gone now, his tone flat.
There was another silence, this one even longer.
“Which boat is really Luke’s?” I said.
From behind me a voice said, “Miss Conduct.”
It was Merrill. He’d been eavesdropping from the kitchenette. Now the tall young man came striding across the wet floor. He had blond scruff, a deep tan that probably ended above his short sleeves, and hair pressed down from wearing a baseball cap all day.
“How about we step outside?” I said.
“We can talk here,” he said. “These guys are just going to gossip about us anyway.”
I shrugged. “You were the driver of the yellow car, the one who chased down Tommy Winters on Route 9.”
“I never knew his name before today. But yeah, that was me. I knew he wasn’t no warden, and I was worried he might try to molest those girls. I caught up with him and set him straight.”
“With your fists?”
“No, I persuaded him with my silver tongue. You just said the guy offed himself. What’s this really about?”
“The drugs he stole are still missing.”
“And you think I know where they are?” He let out a rasping laugh. “Look, man, as far as I’m concerned, I performed a heroic act, beating the shit out of that gimp.”
“You wouldn’t happen to know Dylan LeBlanc, would you?”
“I might’ve heard the name.”
“You don’t know him personally?”
He studied me, then raised a finger to one nostril and expelled a snot rocket onto the floor. “If that’s all you’ve got for questions, I’ve got shit to do.”
He stepped through the bay doors into the sunlight. I watched him climb into a black Camaro. He revved the engine long enough for the noise to echo through the co-op. Then he peeled out.
“Well that went well,” Gaynor said.
I turned to the old man and found him grinning at me with ocher teeth.
Somehow, by having been the unwitting victim of Tommy Winters’s criminal prank and therefore a part of local lore, I had gained admission into Roque Harbor’s exclusive community.
“You understand why I’m taking a personal interest in this thing.”
“Luke and his brother don’t have half a brain between them.”
Another old salt piped up from the shadows. “I know Tim Winters. Never met that son, though. Heard about him enough.”
“What did you hear?”
“How he couldn’t keep a job or move out. Every week Tim had a new complaint about the boy. The day my son received a Bronze Star—everyone was buying me drinks at the range—Winters was so sour, I asked him what his problem was. He said he envied me, having a son who was a hero.”
“Sounds like my old man, may he rot in peace,” said one of the others. “Where did you say this Winters works again?”
“The Narraguagus Sporting Club over on Route 9,” said the old salt.
“Never saw the point in paying to shoot a gun when I can practice on gulls all day,” said the other lobsterman. “What about you, Twelve-gauge? You ever shot at that range? Oh, that’s right. You and firearms don’t get along so good.”
The other men broke into rough laughter.
“Come on, Twelve-gauge,” one of them said, “show the warden.”
Gaynor reached down the length of his pants to his knee. “The only reason I’m doing this, you understand, is to shut up these sons of whores.”
The lobsterman removed his rubber boot, revealing a stockinged foot that seemed somehow wrong in shape. He rolled down the sock to show the prosthetic that helped him to walk in lieu of his missing toes.
“My old man always said I ought to have taken a hunter safety course before I went chasing deer with a twelve-gauge shotgun,” he said with a stained smile.
* * *
I ate my bag lunch on the raised causeway outside Machias. Locals called it “the Dike.” During the summer, antiques vendors, basket weavers, even a doughnut maker, set up a little market there along Route 1. Tourists drifted from booth to booth. The festivity of the scene reminded me, strangely enough, of the events the prior morning in Roque Harbor, when the entire town came out to watch the recovery of a drowned body.
My cell phone rang as I was inspecting my teeth in the rearview mirror.
I didn’t recognize the voice. “You don’t know me, but I was shooting at the Narraguagus Sporting Club yesterday afternoon. My name is Pete Rawson.”
The dapper pistolero.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Rawson?”
“I’m outside the gate now. I decided to drive over here because I thought there was a chance that Tim might have come back to work. He hangs out at the club constantly and, well, I wanted to give him my condolences.”
“So what’s wrong?”
“When I got here, I found the gate locked. The thing is, Tim has a particular way of wrapping the chain and locking the padlock to keep someone from driving through the gate. We had a break-in a couple of years ago and some guns were stolen. The thieves dragged away an entire gun safe.”
Now that Rawson mentioned it, I remembered the care Winters had taken securing the gate behind us.
“Doesn’t anyone else have a key?”
“Just Bill Day, but he’s off in Yellowstone. I’m worried about Tim.”
He didn’t need to say more than that.
“Just stay outside the gate until I get there.”
I didn’t really believe that an anguished Tim Winters had returned to the shooting range to take his own life. More likely he had driven there—possibly drunk—because he had nowhere else to go. In his impaired state, he had probably failed to lock the gate behind him in his usual meticulous fashion. And yet, I couldn’t be certain about any of these suppositions.
I started the engine, flipped on my blue lights, and sped off in the direction of the Narraguagus Sporting Club.
Twenty minutes later, I found Peter Rawson standing along the road outside the shooting range: a trim, silver-coiffed man wearing a black polo and black slacks. I skidded to a dusty halt behind his SUV.
“Show me the lock and chain,” I said.
Even from a distance, I could see how lazily the gate had been secured.
Rawson kept up a running monologue while I made my examination. “I was sad to hear about Tommy. He worked for me for a while—it was a favor to Tim—but I couldn’t keep him on. His registers never added up at shift’s end. And he was inappropriate with some of my female customers.”
I glanced up. “Where did he work for you?”
“I own some hardware stores. Tommy worked in my Ellsworth location.”
“You don’t happen to sell honey buckets?”
“Yes. Why?”
Because Rawson’s store was another possible point of connection between Tommy and Dylan LeBlanc. It offered an explanation why the warden imposter had known to look for the drugs under Alvin Payne’s bucket latrine when he learned of its existence. Tommy might very well have sold the portable toilet to the smuggler himself.
I returned to my truck, removed my tactical shotgun from behind the seat, and locked the doors.
“What’s with the firepower?” Rawson asked.
“Suicidal people can be unpredictable.”
“The sad thing is Tim seemed to be happier lately, almost giddy at times. After all the bad luck he’s had in his life. The fall he took at the mill really did a job on his spine and pelvis. He was in traction for months. When he came to work here, you could see the pain it caused him to take even a few steps. Then Karen died, of course.”
“What do you mean ‘giddy’?”
“He’s always been so intense. Never cracked a smile. Lately, though, he’s been so mellow. I swear I heard him giggle the other day.”
Sudden weight loss, constricted pupils, violent mood swings.
I vaulted the gate. “Wait here!”
The driveway down to t
he shooting range was lined with trees. I kept stepping from patches of light into shadow, and back again. I was hot, then cold, then hot until finally the sun disappeared once and for all behind the towering pines. Then the sweat beneath my ballistic vest turned icy. I started shivering as if I’d just crawled up from the frigid waters of Roque Harbor.
There were two new sets of tire prints on the road, overlapping the marks we’d made leaving the range earlier.
I recognized one set of tracks. The vehicle was rear-wheel drive and had made frequent trips onto and off the property. They had to have been left by Winters’s Mustang.
The muscle car had driven down this road recently. But it hadn’t yet returned.
It was the other set of tracks that worried me.
They had been made by a larger, heavier vehicle: a half-ton pickup or SUV built on a truck platform. These prints clearly showed that someone had entered the club and then exited. My working theory was that it was the driver of this unknown vehicle who had carelessly locked the gate after he’d left.
Adrenaline made the blood tingle in my arteries. I pumped a shell filled with buckshot into the action of my shotgun.
Winters’s Mustang was parked oddly. It was neither in a designated spot nor parallel to the front of the building. The haphazard position of the car suggested the range master had been in a rush.
I approached the screen door and saw that the heavier door behind it was standing open.
“Mr. Winters?” I called.
There was no answer.
I stepped into the darkened interior. “Tim?”
I padded softly into the big room with the humming soft drink cooler and the list of guns for rent and the framed targets. The clock ticked off the seconds.
A soft breeze sighed through the screen door that led to the shooting range. The air smelled of sunburned grass and resinous pine cones.
I stepped outside and came to a halt at the first stall. I stared over the shooting bench before me, past the first set of bull’s-eyes, to the distant rifle targets. There, bent over the wooden rack used to secure the paper targets, lay the bloody body of Tim Winters.
Someone had used him for shooting practice.
Winters had been duct-taped to the wooden trestle, facing the club building so he could see the man or men aiming at him. There were nonfatal gunshot wounds to his arms and shoulders. And one to the pelvis he had shattered at the paper mill.
The fatal shot was a red hole the size of a dime in the center of his forehead.
I backed away from the dead man, called the dispatcher on my cell, and told him what I had found.
Afterward, I made a circle around the outside of the clubhouse. From this angle, I realized why Winters had parked his Mustang where he had. He’d hoped to keep the locked bin of gun cartridges from being noticed by whomever had forced him to drive here: presumably Dylan LeBlanc and his cronies, searching for the missing narcotics.
But Winters’s willpower had given out under the pain of being shot and shot again.
The doors of the bin stood open. Thousands of brass cartridges had spilled onto the dirt. It was here he must have hidden the drugs Tommy Winters had stolen for the man he’d called his father.
Read on for a sneak peak of
One Last Lie
Coming in June 2020
1
Before I left for Florida, my old friend and mentor Charley Stevens gave me a puzzling piece of advice. “Never trust a man without secrets.”
I thought he’d misspoken. “Don’t you mean a man with secrets?”
But the retired game warden only winked as if to suggest he’d said exactly what he’d meant to say. It would be up to me to figure out the meaning of his cryptic remark.
I went to Miami to do a background check on an air force vet who had applied for a job with the Maine Warden Service and about whose character I had vague yet creeping doubts. On paper and in a series of face-to-face interviews, Tom Wheelwright had appeared to be the ideal candidate to become our next chief pilot. A Maine native currently residing in Key Biscayne, he was a decorated combat veteran with more than enough air hours to qualify him for the position. He was quick on his toes, clear-eyed, and a family man with a presentable wife and three presentable children. When I’d asked him why he wanted to trade the salary of a Learjet pilot for that of a Maine State employee, he said he hoped to raise his kids somewhere that “still felt like a real place.”
It was a good answer.
Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Wheelwright was not the paragon everyone swore he was.
For the past week, I had been interrogating every aspect of the man’s life. I had started with the list of references he had provided. I spoke with his wife and parents, his brothers and sisters, his commanding officers in the air force, the management of the charter airline that employed him, former coworkers, neighbors, friends. I had reviewed multiple credit reports, paused over a criminal history that consisted of nothing but (frequent) speeding tickets, and found no red flags.
Everything checked out except for the familiar voice inside my head.
Never trust a man without secrets.
It was Charley’s dictum that had prompted me to keep digging until I unearthed a name conspicuous by its absence from any of the files I’d been given. Captain Joe Fixico now worked part-time running airboat tours out of Shark Valley in the Everglades, but during the first Gulf War, he had flown multiple sorties over Iraq as Wheelwright’s electronic warfare officer.
Captain Fixico had, coincidentally, also retired from the air force to South Florida. The two flyboys lived less than thirty miles from each other. And yet Wheelwright hadn’t included on his disclosure list the one man who could best speak to his coolness at the stick and his courage under fire.
Fixico himself seemed surprised when I finally reached him by phone. “Tommy listed me as a reference?”
“As a matter of fact, he didn’t.”
“Well, that’s understandable, I guess. We’re not as close as we were during the war.” He had a rough, rasping voice that made me imagine he possessed a fondness for tobacco. “I’m sorry, what did you say your name was again?”
“Mike Bowditch. Would you be available to get together tomorrow, Captain?”
“Of course,” he’d said. “And please, call me Joe.”
Then my new friend had invited me to his house in the outermost ring of the Miami suburbs.
The next morning, however, Fixico called back twice: the first time to push our appointment to late afternoon, the second time to change the location to a restaurant owned by the Miccosukee Tribe of Native Americans, out in the Glades.
“You can’t miss it,” he said in a voice that sounded even scratchier than it had the night before. “It’s across the highway from the national park entrance. Look for the sign advertising fried gator tail and all-you-can-eat frogs’ legs.”
When I’d laughed at what I’d assumed to be hyperbole, the line went quiet.
“Do you think I’m proud of it?” he’d finally said. “That I don’t know it’s a caricature? Just be glad I’m willing to meet with you at all, Warden Bowditch.”
I hadn’t realized until that moment that Joe Fixico was himself a Miccosukee. Nor did I understand why the formerly cooperative air force captain was now playing hard to get.
* * *
The temperature was eighty-eight degrees. The relative humidity was 90 percent. The swollen canal behind my airport motel smelled rank and diseased, like a mouthful of rotten teeth.
I was overdressed in a navy linen suit, a sky-blue cotton shirt, suede chukka boots, and a SIG P239 handgun holstered on my belt. I also carried a badge identifying me as a Maine game warden investigator. When traveling on duty out of state, I was required to present myself as a law enforcement officer. People assumed I was a plainclothes police detective, which, in a sense, I was, the difference being that most of the crimes I investigated back home were perpetrated against wildlife.
Not having anything else to do with my unanticipated free time, I decided to play tourist. I had never visited Florida. In thirty-one years on earth, I had rarely even left the state of Maine.
I was parochial enough, for instance, to think the name of the four-lane highway that carried me across the flooded saw grass prairie had an aboriginal music to it. The Tamiami Trail. Later I learned it was just a mashup of the highway’s starting and ending points: Tampa and Miami. The contraction was cooked up by a cynical developer to entice émigrés from Middle America to buy bulldozed swampland.
Florida had been built on a foundation of fraud and false promises as much as on a bedrock of limestone, riddled with holes and prone to devastating collapses.
In the lot outside the Shark Valley Visitor Center, I spotted dozens of cars and RVs, and I wondered, What kind of fool chooses to go wildlife watching in the heat of a late-June day when every breath you inhale feels like being waterboarded?
Then I caught sight of my sweating reflection in the glass booth where I paid my admission, and I knew what kind of fool.
The birds, though! Great and snowy egrets, blue and tricolored herons, anhingas posed cruciform in the mangroves, drying their wings, glossy and white ibises, roseate spoonbills, and purple gallinules walking across water lilies with their grotesquely oversized feet. Alligators lolled ridge-backed in the canals or sprawled in the verges between the paved walk and the stream. Enormous catfish, gar, and tilapia floated with a flutter of fins beneath the tea-colored surface. Never had I encountered nature in such glorious, riotous abundance. An eye-popping, caterwauling carnival of life.
I had probably lost ten pounds in water weight when, remembering my appointment, I returned to my rented sedan, buckled on my sidearm, pulled on my suit jacket, and drove across the street to the restaurant that served deep-fried reptiles.
When I stepped through the door, a blast of air-conditioning hit me in the face with the force of a meat freezer thrown open.
“I’m supposed to meet someone,” I told the host. His skin was the color of bronze, and he wore his black hair long and parted straight down the center.