Deadfall

by Robert Liparulo

  Beyond Dirty Woman lay the Fond du Lac River, half a mile wide where the town touched its banks. In the other direction, due north, Provincial Street passed, among other businesses, a restaurant, a boardinghouse, St. Bartholomew’s Church, and finally a small school that serviced forty-three students, K through 12. Just beyond the school, the community’s only paved street crumbled into dirt. Before long it devolved into grassy ruts, marking the passage of hunters, fishermen, and other souls brave enough to venture into Canada’s northern backcountry. It was the town’s widest street, one lane north, one lane south, with room at both curbs to parallel park. Townies rarely bothered to drive, since a mile walk connected any two points in Fiddler Falls.

  Tom saw that Provincial was occupied now. A block and a half from where he stood, directly in front of Kelsie’s General Store, a car sat twisted and burning. It looked like the newscast images he’d seen of car bombings. A few people—likely everyone in the vicinity at that hour of the morning—had come out of the stores and businesses to watch from the sidewalks. Others were closer, in the street.

  Hurrying forward, he yelled to the people standing around it. “Back away!”

  The asphalt around the rear of the car appeared to be burning with a low blue flame. He guessed that meant the gas tank had already ruptured, but he didn’t want another explosion to prove him wrong and take out the closest spectators in the process.

  The first scent he recognized was ozone, a powerful sterilant that destroys bacteria, viruses, and odors. Lightning strikes and fastflowing water create the chemical, which accounts for the fresh smell after thunderstorms and around waterfalls. In a drug enforcement course, Tom had learned that affluent pot users were known to use ozone generators to eliminate the smell of the drug. Ozone always reminded him of freshly laundered sheets.

  As Tom inhaled, the ozone gave way to the pungent odor of gasoline, burning rubber, and a putrid reek he could not identify. It stung his nostrils, drawing tears from his eyes.

  He coughed and yelled, “Step back!”

  No one did. He realized that those nearest the car were not townies but the group of six young people who’d arrived by floatplane the previous day. They’d picked up the bright-mustard Hummer, which had been sitting at the service station since the week before. According to Lenny Hargrove, the station’s owner, the driver had been from a transportation service and had hitched a ride on an outfitter’s plane back to Saskatoon.The Hummer’s appearance had caused a flurry of speculation about who was coming. The group had moved into the B&B on Shatu’ T’ine Way.

  Tom spotted the Hummer just beyond the wreckage. One of the visitors stood at the curb opposite Kelsie’s, in front of the used-book and curio store. Maybe twenty, he was sloppily dressed in a Rolling Stones T-shirt that skimmed over a fat belly and hung straight down. Pudgy, sweatpants-clad legs appeared from under the stomach’s overhang. Wisps of hair clung to his cheeks and chin in patches. A baseball cap was turned backward on his head. He lifted a professional video camera up to his eye and pointed it at the burning car. Another man—bald, black, young—nudged the cameraman, spoke to him.The camera panned to take in Tom’s approach.

  A teenage girl clung to the arm of a man in his late twenties. Flawless skin, freckles, and short-cropped brown hair could have conspired to make her seem more youthful than she was. Still, he didn’t like the idea of a girl so young paired with such an older man. It was an observation he would not have made had the contrast between adult and child not been so acute.While the man appeared smug and insouciant, the girl bounced excitedly. She bore a broad, open-mouthed smile, which she reined in by biting her lower lip when she saw Tom appraising her.

  A glance around revealed smiles on all of the visitors’ faces. Except one: a young boy with ruddy cheeks not yet ready for a razor stood away from the rest. Frowning, he fidgeted from one foot to the other and went from clasping his hands to crossing his arms and back again.

  “What happened?”Tom asked, eyeing the car. Instead of the outward rending of metal he had expected, the roof had been crushed in by something circular, as though a peg-legged giant had nailed it as he strode past. The four corners had buckled upward. The wheels and tires—the two in Tom’s view were ruptured—canted out, as if they’d experienced an unbearable weight before rising with the fenders. The vehicle rested on its undercarriage. Every window had shattered onto the street. Thousands of tiny squares of safety glass sparkled with reflected fire like diamonds. Flames filled the roof’s concavity, reminding Tom of the cauldron that held the torch fires during the Olympic Games.

  “This looks like Roland’s Subaru,” he said to no one in particular. Roland was a local hunting guide and trapper. His all-wheel-drive station wagon boasted more dings, bangs, and chips than a space shuttle after reentry. He peered into the passenger compartment, through the slits that once were side-window openings. Flames owned that space as fire did a crematorium’s furnace. Heat radiated out with more intensity than seemed right to Tom; he wondered if an accelerant had doused the interior. Bending at the waist, he sidestepped around to improve his view.

  “Was anyone—” he started. The next word jammed in his throat. On the street behind the wreckage, the charred remains of . . . of what appeared to be a smoldering human body. It looked like tightly packed ash over burnt wood, positioned to somewhat approximate the shape of a man. One arm jutted up out of the cinders, as though in a final grasp for salvation. Its fingers were gone.

  Tom backed away. The evidence of violent death sent his hand automatically to his holster. He unclipped the retaining strap but did not withdraw the weapon.

  “Musta been lightning, Sheriff.”

  He turned his head. The cradle robber was watching him. His twisted half smile seemed calculated to either intimidate or provoke. The man wore gray denim pants, tight on his legs and hips, flaring a bit where they covered the tops of gray-and-black boots. The boots were square-toed and made of some scaly reptile hide. A black T-shirt clung to his torso, accentuating his physique: sinewy muscles, no fat. He wore an expensive down vest, black and unzipped. It was insufficient protection from the fall climes in northern Canada. A twisting chain of black gems hung around his neck, and another necklace made, it seemed, of old rotting teeth. A big watch clung to his wrist like a pet beetle. Resting against the watch and rising three inches up his arm was an assortment of bracelets, some metal, some thread, braided and knotted. More bracelets adorned his other wrist, stopping before they reached a colorful Oriental dragon tattooed on the underside of his forearm. His hair, the brownish color of spruce bark, appeared coifed into an intentionally messy tangle. A faint golden shadow hued his cheeks, chin, and upper lip.To Tom, he could have been one of those grunge models he’d seen in magazine ads: fashionable, edgy, not quite groomed to perfection.

  This guy said lightning? Tom thought. He had detected ozone, but the sky was cloudless. No way lightning. He straightened.

  “What do you know about this?”

  The man shrugged. “Where are the wieners and marshmallows when you need them?”

  Someone laughed.

  “You were in the Hummer?” Tom’s head inclined toward the big SUV. His pistol’s grip felt solid under his palm. He considered freeing it from its holster, despite these visitors’ lack of threatening gestures. Tom was even more disturbed by their nonchalance. But equanimity was no reason to draw a weapon.

  The man turned his head to look at the Hummer, as if there were so many of the expensive vehicles in town, he wanted to make sure.

  “Yeah,” he said slowly, “that’s ours.”

  “Let me see some ID.”

  The man reached behind him.Tom tensed. The hand reappeared holding a money clip. The man slipped a driver’s license from the folded bills and handed it to Tom.

  “Declan,”Tom read, giving the name a sharp e.

  The girl snickered. “Deck-lan,” she corrected.

  “Declan Gabriel Page.”Tom eyed him. “Seattle?”


  “The Emerald City,” Declan agreed.

  Tom returned the license. He scanned the scattered visitors, then gestured to them. “All of you come on over here. If you came into town with Declan, step over, please.”

  No one moved.

  “Come on now!”

  Tom’s eyes moved to Declan’s. They were flat, emotionless.

  Declan’s smirk bent up slightly. Keeping his gaze on Tom, he called out, “Come say hi to the nice sheriff, boys!”

  They shuffled closer.

  Declan extended his hand to Tom. “I didn’t catch your name.”

  Tom gave a curt nod. “Constable Fuller, RCMP.” He added, “Royal Canadian Mounted Police.”

  “Ahhh,” Declan said. “A Mountie.” He turned to the girl. “See, I told you we’d run into them up here.”

  The cameraman—still filming—and the black man stepped beside Declan. A teenage boy he hadn’t seen earlier appeared behind the girl. His thick dark hair fell to midear, curling up at the ends. Gold loops pieced an earlobe and the left side of his bottom lip. A gold rod, bent into a rectangle at the top like a sardine-can key, harpooned his right eyebrow.

  Tom wanted to know everything at once.What were their names? Why were they in town? What did they have to do with Roland’s car exploding, with Roland’s death? He wanted to tell the fat kid to get the camera out of his face. But because everything at once was a bit beyond his pay grade, and because he was already looking at the teenager, he asked, “Shouldn’t you be in school?”

  “We’re tutored,” the boy said. “We have flexible schedules.”

  The girl giggled, and Tom wondered how deep this weirdness was going to get. He took in the gathering of visitors. Missing one: that other boy, the youngest of the bunch.

  “Where’s—”

  “Tom!” someone yelled—screamed—to his left. It was Old Man Nelson, who’d named the mercantile after his daughter. He stood in the doorway of the store, looking as if he might have seen Roland, burnt beyond recognition, get to his feet and skip into the ice cream parlor. He pointed, but Tom had already caught the object of Nelson’s concern in the corner of his eye and was spinning toward it.

  Looking straight into it, the diameter of the gun barrel appeared as big as a tank’s. The boy pointing it at Tom looked as terrified as Tom felt. Big eyes, quivering bottom lip. The pistol wavered and shook, but at a distance of three feet, any shot at all would have taken off Tom’s head.

  3

  “Now, son,” Tom said. “This isn’t the way to—”

  Fingers gripped his wrist, firmly lifting his hand away from the butt of his gun. Declan.That nasty little smile.

  Declan pulled Tom’s service pistol from its holster and moved to the boy’s side. “Good job, Julie.”

  The boy lowered his weapon, obviously relieved to do so. Sweat had broken out on his brow beneath long bangs. He closed his eyes. He said, “It’s Julian. Don’t call me Julie.” He strode off toward the Hummer.

  Tom expected a wisecrack from Declan: Guess you’re done asking questions, or even a simple Well, well, well. But the man only watched him, seeming to read his thoughts and intentions in the contours of his face. After a moment he called out, “Bad, round up these people. Put them where we talked about. The community center.”

  The black man—had Declan called him “Bad”?—brushed past Tom, beckoning to Old Man Nelson, who was backpedaling into the shadows of the general store. Bad held a pistol high above his head, as if to say, I got the power now. Listen to me!

  “Cortland, you and Julie put out this fire,” Declan said.“Kyrill, get the phones.”

  The older teen jogged toward the store. He stopped to let Nelson and Kelsie exit, prodded from behind by Bad. Then he disappeared into the store.

  Tom’s stomach knotted. The phones. He was certain Declan was referring to the town’s satellite phones, their only means of quick communication. This far north, in a part of the world too sparsely populated to warrant a major investment by any corporation not mining for uranium, there was no mobile phone service, no landlines, no cable or satellite television, no Internet.

  This isolation, this snub at time’s technological force-feeding, was part of Fiddler Falls’s charm. On Thursday nights the Elks Lodge hosted a movie night on its big-screen TV. Trouble for the movie hero often originated or was compounded by a cell phone or e-mail, and inevitably a townie would pipe up with “Wouldn’t happen here!” or a “tsk tsk.” Few residents wanted the telecommunication revolution to find Fiddler Falls. Even the businesses that would benefit from selling their goods online or touting their services on a Web site recognized the negative sea change to the community’s appeal that technology would bring. Several businesses had contracted with a company in La Ronge to host their Web site or online store.

  Tom knew of only four satellite phones in town. One he had left charging in the storefront that acted as the RCMP’s substation—so close the Hummer was stopped in front of it. Janine Red Bear, the conservation officer, maintained another phone. She had left two days ago on a weeklong trek through the district. Old Man Nelson kept a phone in his store. He charged a buck a minute to use it, which was low enough to prevent townies from investing in their own phone. John Tungsten owned one. He ran Tungsten’s Outfitters and Fishing Lodge outside town.Tom had not seen John; John’s wife, Margie; or Billie, their part-time cook/part-time guide, for a few days. Most likely, they had taken advantage of the change-of-season lull to make repairs on their wilderness cabins or travel to Wollaston for supplies.

  The kid named Kyrill hurried out of the store, brick-sized satellite phone in hand. He navigated around Roland’s metal pyre and jogged directly to the RCMP office across the street. Finding the door locked, he used the phone to smash the front window. At the sound, a woman screamed. She was part of a group of about a dozen people Bad was herding toward the community center, which occupied an entire block on the RCMP side of the street.The teen kept striking at the glass until only the top crown of the force’s logo was visible on a shard clinging to the upper molding. Then he stepped through.

  These visitors knew precisely where to find the phones. They knew what was needed to cut the town off completely. Even the time of year aided them: fall, after the summer tourists departed; when rainy weather made the long, unpaved roads between communities all but impassable; before the winter freeze, which paved the roads, lakes, and rivers with ice, making them more traversable than any other time of year.

  A grim realization came to Tom: this had been researched and planned, this—what was it?—taking of the town, holding its citizens hostage, terrorizing them, murdering them.

  He closed his eyes, then opened them to the visage of Declan’s devil-may-care attitude. The man acted as though he did this sort of thing every day. No big deal. I’m in control, and there’s nothing you can do. So just relax and enjoy the ride.

  Tom’s gaze dropped to the Sig Sauer semiautomatic he knew so well, now turned on him like a recalcitrant Doberman pinscher. He recalled the words Laura had directed at Dillon less than ten minutes ago.

  So what are you going to do about it?

  What are you going to do about it? he thought. With that, he could go no further. Mental constipation, his mother had called it. A puzzle so confounding, options so numerous, the mind simply paused. And paused.

  Declan’s eyebrows rose as though he understood Tom’s predicament and wondered how he would resolve it . . . as though any resolution Tom considered was fine by him. I’m in control, and there’s nothing you can do.

  Think! Tom told himself. But unable to grasp how his world had changed in ten minutes—six hundred seconds!—with the odor of Roland’s burning corpse in his nostrils and the cries of the citizens he had sworn to protect in his ears and his own service weapon pointed at his head, he stopped trying to think.

  He took action.

  He just did it.

  He leaped for the gun.

  4

  Chin resting
on his chest, John Hutchinson—“Hutch” to just about everyone—had let the drone of the helicopter’s engine lull him into a fitful half-sleep when he felt a hand on his shoulder. He ignored it until the nudging became hard raps. He emerged into full consciousness to find Phil’s arm reaching around from the seat directly behind him with firm and insistent fingers. He twisted to face his friend.

  “Look!” Phil called out, pushing his soft lips into a big grin. His cheeks lifted wire-frame glasses off the bridge of his nose. He nodded toward the side window.

  David, seated behind the pilot, had his forehead pressed against the glass. Next to him, in the middle rear seat,Terry was unbuckled and half standing to see past David.

  Hutch looked. As perfectly as a mirror, the lake below reflected the sky and, around its edges, Precambrian granite cliffs and staunch evergreens, like fairy-tale sentinels. Hutch watched a breeze ripple the surface, making the clouds below appear to dance in air currents unfelt by those high above. Green and brown and gold wilderness, unscarred by man, fanned out from the lake as far as he could see; it rolled over the terrain like a rumpled blanket, upon which rested a flat, glistening gem.

  The Bell JetRanger glided between water and sky, and for only the fourth time in his life, Hutch felt beauty snatch his breath away. The first time it had happened, he had been shocked to realize that the concept wasn’t simply the province of songwriters, but that it really, physically, literally happened. His eyes had followed the long aisle and caught sight of his bride stepping through the church door, her arm hooked through her father’s. She had been halfway to him before he had remembered to breathe again.The first sight of his children, each just seconds old, had been breath-stoppers two and three.That it happened here, now, caught him off guard, not only because it was the first time the love for a human had not elicited the response, but mostly because he had been so downright ornery lately. How could anything, let alone landscape, have penetrated his sour disposition? It validated his decision to come up here, to get away from it all and just be.