When the boy in red came back into the driveway about twenty minutes later, he shut off the ATV and started to get off, but Service ran from hiding and grabbed the kid’s arm, scaring him.
“W-w-where’d you come from?” the kid stammered.
The father came running out of the trailer, huffing, his fists cocked.
“There’s no truck,” the kid squealed at his father, his eyes wide.
Service looked at the father. “Sir, I want to see your license and this vehicle’s registration.”
“Don’t you have poachers to chase. You gotta pick on a little kid?” The man was angry and hyperventilating.
“A child’s safety is as important as our work gets, sir. License, please.”
The man looked for a moment like he would lose his cool and take a swing, but he managed to get back some control of himself and fumbled to dig out his wallet.
Service asked the boy if he liked riding and the kid said it was “cool.” Service lectured him gently about safety and wrote the father a ticket for several offenses, including failure to supervise a minor, no helmet, riding off a designated trail, and no spark arrestor on the ATV, a mandatory device designed to stop the vehicle from starting grass fires that could spread.
The man looked at the ticket and said, “Jesus H. Christ. How much will this shit cost me?”
“Less than a funeral for a dead child,” Service said.
“Don’t give me that horseshit,” the man said. “You’re stealing from me.”
Service had had enough. “Sir, if this happens again—if anything happens again—you’ll do time and the court will condemn your machine.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means the court will confiscate the ATV and sell it at a public auction.”
“Geez, I just bought that thing,” the man said with a whine.
“Good, now you know how you can keep it.”
When he got into the truck he called dispatch to tell him where he was and looked over at Newf. She was panting from the heat. He knew he couldn’t keep bringing her along like this and locking her in the vehicle.
Treebone called on the cellular as he drove east.
“You cruising the boonies?”
“I think of it as immersing in a population-challenged environment.”
“That’s a fact. Scaffidi’s only other business is Wixon Inc., a company that sells heavy equipment to construction companies.”
“What sort of construction?”
“Mostly highways. Apparently that’s what got the feds to bite on the shit floated by the Jersey boys.”
“Anything other than highways?”
“That seems to be it. Scaffidi is the majority owner, but he stays out of day-to-day stuff.”
“Thanks, Tree. Any decision on pulling the plug with the DMP?”
“Gonna stick for now. You want to hear a good one?”
Treebone loved his stories. “Woman named Shelley used to work the line at Ford, turning tricks during her shifts. This got her canned, but I guess she liked the institutional biz. Worked herself a deal at Hopewell Receiving. Rented an exam room for her johns, eighty to a hundred a day. The hospital administrator took half. Shelley was there three years. He billed her out as physical therapy, made themselves major green, see. Somebody got onto it and at the arraignment the judge asks Shelley if she’s licensed for PT and she looks at the judge and says, ‘I was born with all the license I need, Your Honor!’ ”
Treebone laughed so hard he began coughing. “How could I leave all this? By the way, Scaffidi’s company just won a big contract up your way. Equipment for a mining company.”
Heavy equipment and a mining company? No link to Jerry Allerdyce there. Service drove slowly down the dirt roads of southern Marquette County, looking for illegal trash dumping activity. He did this every couple of weeks. It was fairly mindless duty and for the moment didn’t put him jaw to jaw with some idiot with a room-temperature IQ. It would be nice, he thought, to have the freedom to stay on one case, but his duties were varied and you had to do what you had to do. When it came to trash, locals were worse than tourists. They would pull any scam to draw welfare, but they wouldn’t pay a penny for legitimate services. Down one of the roads, on a crescent moon pull-around, Service saw a green trash bag and got out and opened it. Newf sniffed the bag briefly and trotted off to find something of more interest. The bag was filled with glossy four-color porn mags. He stacked them up. Thirty-one, and all but two with the subscriber’s address carefully cut away. Two were enough.
Henty Digna came to the door of his house.
“Can you step outside?” Service asked.
Henty reluctantly followed him out to the truck. Service showed him the bag of magazines and told him where he had found it.
“Sure it’s my subscription, but I didn’t dump that stuff. No fuckin’ way. You know how much those rags cost? I think my brother copped them. He’s an asshole. Your people know him.”
“Harry Digna?” Service fought back a smile. He knew Harry very well indeed.
“Yah, can I have my books back now?”
“Sorry, I need them for evidence.”
Harry Digna. Service grinned as he started his truck. Harry was a hard-luck cheater and a harder-luck hunter. Twice in six years, as COs stalked him, Harry had fallen out of a thirty-foot-high treestand and broken both his legs. Service had gotten him the first time and Candy McCants had gotten him the other time. Both times Digna had been found with a Chinese assault rifle slung around his chest. Both times during bow-and arrow season when all guns were illegal. Assault rifles were illegal at all times. Now Harry walked with two canes and worked as a butcher at the IGA in Gwinn.
When Service walked into the grocery store, people stared at him. A woman at the meat counter had silk forget-me-nots braided into her hair and greeted him. “What’ll it be today?”
“Is Harry Digna around?”
“Out back. We got a load of beef in today. What’s he done this time?”
Service ignored the question and went to the back of the store. Digna was splitting beef carcasses with a band saw. He wore goggles and leaned against a sort of metal sawhorse for support.
“Turn off the saw,” Service said, making a hand signal. The butcher’s white apron was greasy and spattered with blood. “How they hanging, Birdman?” Digna’s pathetic tree accidents had earned him the nickname among COs.
Digna looked irritated. “Don’t call me that. I don’t even hunt no more.”
“What you mean to say is that your hunting privileges no longer exist. Did you steal your brother’s skin mags?”
The butcher’s eyes narrowed. “He loaned ’em to me. What’s it to you, eh?”
“Harry, I have your mags in my truck. They were dumped on Blue Spruce Road. Your brother says you took ’em, and you admit to having had them.”
“My word against Henty’s,” Harry said defiantly.
“You’re the one with the record.”
Digna’s shoulders slumped. “We’ll get prints off them and we’ll know that you dumped them. That’s against the law, Bird. Why’re you always breaking the law?” This was not exactly true, but Service knew that with many suspects a bit of pressure would pry the truth loose pretty quickly.
“Illegal dumping isn’t a small thing, Bird. There’s a big fine and we make sure it gets into the papers.”
“You mean like the Mining Journal?”
“That one and others. Maybe TV too. Your name will be right out there for everybody to see. Think about the headline. ‘Birdman Dumps Onehander Mags.’ ”
“You can’t do that. My old lady will flip out.”
“Did you dump them?”
Harry Digna’s chin dropped and he mumbled, “I couldn’t dump them in the
garbage at the house. The old lady wouldn’t like that. You gotta give me a break.” The butcher held up a chunk of frozen meat. “You like steaks?”
“Are you trying to bribe me?”
“No, no—no bribe. I’m just making conversation.”
“It sounded like a bribe.”
“Swear to God, it wasn’t a bribe.”
“Good,” Service said, “a bribe is serious and can land you in jail. You’ve got enough problems as it is.”
“No bribe,” Birdman said, dropping the meat like it was on fire.
“You know Jerry Allerdyce?”
“Yah, sure. So what?”
Of course he knew him. Birdman ran with a bad crowd and he was known as a loose-lipped gossip.
“He’s been logging with someone. I want you to ask around, get me a name, and we’ll leave this deal with you returning the magazines to your brother.”
“If Jerry hears I’m asking around, he’ll kick my ass.”
“Would you rather have this in the papers? It’s your choice.”
“No, man. I’ll do it.”
“You’d better come through for me, Bird. Either I get a name from you and it checks out, or we take you to court and everybody will know about this.”
“You’ll get a name, I swear.”
“It has to check out.”
“I know, man. It will.”
Service said, “Bird, Jerry was murdered a couple of nights ago, so you’re going to have to be real careful.”
Digna grabbed the edge of a metal table to steady himself up.
“I’ll be in touch, Bird.”
Afterward, Service returned to patrolling the back roads. Birdman was too stupid to be a professional violator. Limpy was bad, but he wasn’t stupid.
When he called in to dispatch he learned that Nantz had called.
He reached her at HQ on his cellular. His, not the DNR’s.
“I got the pix,” she announced. “You want to take a look?”
They met at a roadside park between Marquette and Escanaba.
They used a picnic table to spread out the photographs, anchoring them with sticks and stones. Newf kept prodding Nantz’s hand with her nose, wanting attention.
“You can’t quite see the upriver outcrop,” she said to Service as she tapped one of the eight-by-ten black-and-white photographs. “All you can see is the area around the log slide where the fire cleared it out.”
Service took his time. “It forms a sort of a rocky circle in the burn area.”
“Yep,” she said.
“You’d think that rocks in a shape like that might mean something.”
“Could be,” she said. “I took geology, but it was boring.” She rolled her eyes.
“You make a lousy grade?”
“Nah, I aced it. I aced everything in college. Four-point start to finish.”
“Really?” he said with a laugh. Somehow he wasn’t surprised. “I guess we need to get these to an expert on geology.”
“No, what you want is a petrologist. They study the history of rocks.”
“It’s that specialized?”
“How many angels can do the horizontal dance on the head of a pin? Science advances in stages. Experts think they know all there is to know and some upstart sees things differently and this changes the whole shebang. It’s always been this way. When Columbus sailed to America, navigators had known for a hundred years that the earth wasn’t flat. But the crowns of Europe financed voyages and they wouldn’t finance anything the church didn’t approve as being theologically sound, so the navigators knew the truth and ate shit from the church so that they could do their jobs. Sometimes science knows the truth, but politics and religion complicate things.”
Service suddenly wondered how long chasing fires would satisfy Nantz. “Quackademics are a pain to deal with. Where do I find one of these petrologists?”
“Try Tech.”
Michigan Technological University was in Houghton. It was one of the top engineering schools in the country, its specialty mining in its various forms. The college had grown up out of the prosperity that followed iron and copper discoveries in the central and western U.P. in the last century.
“Just call the geology department, tell them you’re with the DNR and you want photo identification help.”
It irked him to have her telling him how to do his job.
“If you tell them you need a petrologist, they might even think you know what you’re doing.”
Service grinned. “That would fool them.”
“Do you and Newf want to get a beer and stuff?” she asked.
“No time now,” he said.
“Well, I’m gonna keep asking,” she said. “I don’t quit easy.”
Was she coming on to him? Since his wife had left him, he had gone through long spells without women and other times when he was seeing several at the same time. When he was a boy, sex had seemed a mysterious and sacred thing, but as an adult it seemed as if the act was no different than eating; when you were hungry, you got yourself a meal. But now that he and Kira were growing closer, he had this old feeling coming back, one that told him he needed to be true to her. Even so, he had not told Nantz about Kira. Keeping his options open was an old habit he wasn’t proud of.
Lonnie Green was at his office at the Delta County Airport. “This is Service. Any luck?”
Green coughed to clear his throat. “Well, the good news is that we had a radar paint all right, right where you said it would be, and when you said it would be there. The return is intermittent, but we estimate that the chopper was there more or less for forty-five minutes. That’s the time between the first paint and the last one.”
“What’s the bad news?”
“We can’t find a blue Huey, which doesn’t surprise me, but we did make an effort. There’s no call sign, of course, and no flight plan. But I sent a bulletin to airports in the Yoop, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and downstate Michigan. Nobody can tell us about a blue Huey. The thing is that there are lots of small airports and no towers and one hell of a lot of VMC fliers. Hell, there are farmers who fly small fixed-wings off grass strips built in their hay fields, and businesses that have their own birds for local stuff. Unfortunately, ATC is primarily concerned with commercial traffic, so that’s where we focus. The rest, well, they’re just out there, and as long as they’re not low-flying, buzzing, causing trouble, or about to bust the Canadian border, we don’t pay much attention to them. Like you guys, we’ve got limited resources and we can do only so much.”
“Meaning that’s it?”
“Not entirely. We could still get lucky. Other stations are on alert. If this bird flies again, somebody will eventually see it and report it.”
“You think we should take this thing to the media?”
“If your bird is involved in something illegal, the bad guys will also hear the report and repaint the chopper, stop flying, or take it apart, crate it up, and ship it somewhere else in the country.”
Service felt consternation. The chopper painted on radar, which meant it existed, but not officially. It made him wonder how safe air traffic and passengers really were and how much ATC boiled down to window dressing. Why was it that the stuff he got involved in was never easy?
“Thanks,” he said.
“Listen, instead of the media, why don’t you alert the Coast Guard, state police, hospitals with choppers, and your own people and ask all of them to watch for your bird?”
“Good advice. Thanks for the help.”
Service tried to call Lisette McKower but was told by the district office that she was “not available,” a standard answer designed not to pin down an officer’s location when the officer didn’t want to be disturbed. Before he could get off the line, his call was passed
to Sergeant Charlie Parker. This he didn’t need.
“Officer Service?” Parker said officiously. “Geez, I used to have a Service who worked for me, but he disappeared.”
“Lay off,” Service said.
“You’re not the Long Fucking Ranger, Service. You’re part of an organization and I’m sick of your bullshit. Check your spelling: There’s no i in team.”
“It’s ‘Lone,’ ” Service said. “Not Long.”
“What was that? Are you correcting a superior officer?”
“How am I not doing my job?”
“You’re not keeping me informed, that’s how you’re doing. I hear all sorts of shit second and third hand.”
“You’re getting all my reports on time, right?”
“Don’t give me that passive aggressive junk. I had my way, you’d be out. We need team players, Officer Service, not dinosaurs like you.”
Which all boiled down to Parker wanting information from his subordinates in order to horn in on the credit for what his people did. As a CO, Parker had been a loner and not overly effective, doing only the easiest jobs and avoiding any sort of dangerous work. How he had gained rank was one of the DNR’s great mysteries. And now that he was a sergeant he wanted total control over everyone under him. It wasn’t that Parker was a bad guy; it was just that he wasn’t up to the standard that Service felt should define the CO force.
“I’m doing something wrong,” Service said, “you know what you can do.”
“What I know is that stunt you pulled with Limpy.”
Service said nothing.
“I’ve also heard that you’ve been interfering in a murder investigation and carrying around an unauthorized animal. You’ve gone too far this time.”
Somebody must’ve complained about Newf. “Charlie, I’ve got work to do.”
“Don’t hang up on me, Officer Service. I’m warning you.”
Service hung up and took a deep breath. What a doofus. He looked at Newf and said, “Don’t sweat Parker.”
Ice Hunter Page 16