In the Evil Day

by Richard Adams Carey

  Julie Roy, once her husband had relieved her at the counter of J.R.’s Minimart in Pittsburg, was pleased to learn that her friend Kim Richards had a lot of shopping to do in Colebrook. Julie needed to get some coffee at LaPerle’s IGA, and she had other errands to run as well, all of which combined neatly with Kim’s. They left after lunch in Kim’s husband’s Nissan pickup and with her six-year-old son, Cody, and they made the rounds: the First Colebrook Bank, Dickson’s Pharmacy, Hills Department Store, and then Collins Video & Photo on the corner of Bridge and Main.

  It was around 2:25 p.m. when they turned north out of town to the IGA supermarket. Opposite the Congregational church, they passed Clarkeie’s, a much smaller grocery story with parking in front on Main. There Julie noticed an orange, rusting pickup she had seen before a number of times around town.

  “Do you know who that belongs to?” she asked Kim.

  “That piece of junk? Not a clue.”

  “I can’t believe the cops let that thing stay on the road.” Julie gave a short laugh. “Whoever it is, he must have friends in high places.”

  New Hampshire forest ranger Bert von Dohrmann had come downtown for several reasons: he needed Scott Phillips’s signature on some papers about a timber theft; he wanted to ask Vickie Bunnell to write up a deed for some property he meant to buy; and he hoped to talk to Dennis Joos about the manuscript of his novel. Dennis had asked von Dohrmann to check the story for accuracy regarding the logging practices it described, and the ranger had some suggestions to make.

  He found Phillips in his cruiser parked driver-side, window-to-window with Les Lord’s shiny new rig next to the police department. He got Phillips’s signature and learned that he and Lord were on a low-key sort of manhunt. Von Dohrmann didn’t know Carl Drega, but he had heard about him from Eric Stohl. “Yeah, you want to be careful with this guy,” he said.

  Phillips left to run another lap around town, and Lord stayed to chat. “Let’s get off the road,” Lord suggested. “Want to go to Howard’s and get some coffee?”

  That was when Phillips broke in on Lord’s radio. “Hey, I got him,” he said. “He’s at Clarkeie’s. No, wait—he’s just pulling out of Clarkeie’s. Heading north. I’ll just follow him for a bit. Any time you’re ready, we can use you here.”

  “Duty calls,” Lord said.

  “You want one more? I’ll come with you.”

  They both looked at Lord’s passenger seat, which was always mobile storage space: a cellular bag phone, a portable radio, and piles of forms and documents garnished with old food wrappers. “Not unless you’ve got a shovel,” Lord said.

  Von Dohrmann grinned. “No shovel.”

  “We’ll be all right. What time is it? Two thirty or so? I’ll meet you at Howard’s in twenty minutes.”

  Von Dohrmann nodded, and as swiftly as that Lord was gone.

  Linemen Woody Crawford and Mark Monahan of the New Hampshire Electric Cooperative, both in their forties, were on their way to investigate a power outage on Hughes Road, which branched off Route 3 just north of LaPerle’s IGA. Monahan was at the wheel, coaxing the big truck up Cooper Hill. As they came over its crest and in sight of Brooks Chevrolet, they found themselves behind a state police cruiser and—ahead of that—a logging truck. “That’s Les, isn’t it?” Monahan said.

  Crawford smiled as he remembered the time Lord and Frank Prue had pulled him over in this very truck. Lord scrambled under the truck to check the slack adjusters on the brakes and came out dabbing tears from his eyes. “Damn, I just lost five dollars,” he blubbered. “I bet Frank this would pass.”

  They got the brakes adjusted there on the side of the road, and it didn’t cost Crawford any money. He leaned forward, but the cruiser didn’t look as battered as Lord’s. “I don’t know. The cruiser kind of looks like Scott’s—Scott Phillips, I mean.”

  Then the cruiser flashed its blue lights. “It must be Les,” Monahan said. “He’s going to pull this logger over.”

  “Nope,” said Crawford, watching the cruiser glide ahead of the logger. Then its lights went off, and a mile up the road, they saw the cruiser take a right turn behind an orange pickup. At first Crawford thought the cruiser was turning into Hughes. Maybe there was a power line lying across the road? Instead he saw that both the pickup and the cruiser were headed down the entrance ramp into the parking lot of the supermarket. Meanwhile the logging truck and the line truck slowly caravanned in tandem past the Green Mountain Snack Bar—which sat on a bluff overlooking the east end of the parking lot—and a little girl riding her bicycle on the road shoulder.

  Crawford watched the girl dwindle in his side-view mirror. Then he cocked an ear toward his open window and looked quizzically at his partner. “What’s that noise?” he said.

  About thirty miles south of Colebrook, in Groveton, Fish & Game conservation officer Kevin Jordan (no relation to Charlie in Colebrook) was enjoying a day off in the pretty cedar-clapboard house that sat on Route 3 opposite the Northumberland Cemetery and the Connecticut River. His wife, Louise, and their teenage children were working. With the place to himself, Jordan had devoted the day to errands around Lancaster and to sorting out color slides to give to Wayne Saunders at Fish & Game’s public information booth at the Lancaster Fair, which was running this week. The slides were shots Jordan had taken of other officers at work, all illustrating the different things Fish & Game did each season. By the middle of the afternoon he was finally outside, washing the new cruiser he had just been issued, a four-wheel-drive Chevy pickup with an extended cab.

  The Chevy didn’t really need a washing, but Jordan liked to do so on every day off, and this particular day was the sort that had its own chrome gleam to it. Jordan had just finished with the cruiser and moved on to his four-wheeler when Saunders—relieved of his duty at the fair—pulled into the driveway in his own cruiser. Saunders lowered the window of his Jeep Cherokee, just handed down to him from Eric Stohl, and said, “Hey, Kevin, you got your radio on?”

  “Nope. Not today.”

  “I’m not sure, but I think I just heard a Code 1000 come across mine.”

  “From where?”

  “Like I say, I’m not sure, but I think the Colebrook PD.”

  A Code 1000 signal was for emergencies. Jordan trotted up to Saunders’s window, but the signal was fogged by static. They could hear talk from the state police dispatcher at Troop F in Twin Mountain, but they couldn’t figure out the content.

  A pickup rolled by on Route 3, stopped and turned at the next driveway up the road, and then came back to Jordan’s driveway. Jordan recognized the two men in the truck: John Wimsatt and Jim Kneeland, Fish & Game conservation officers (COs) from Newfound, down in central New Hampshire. They pulled in next to Saunders, exchanged greetings, said they were on their way to Quebec for Wednesday’s Field Day, a program of competitive events and socializing for the COs of northern New England and Canada. They saw Jordan and Saunders in the driveway and realized they had just passed a house known throughout the agency as the “Groveton substation,” so frequently did Fish & Game people stop and congregate there. Today it was their turn.

  The men talked about Field Day and the events of the summer while Saunders’s radio coughed and gargled in the background. At last something popped clear from Troop F: a stolen state police cruiser heading south on Route 3 in Colebrook, badge number 719. Jordan and Saunders exchanged glances and broke into laughter.

  “That’s Les Lord’s cruiser,” Jordan explained. “And let me tell you, that’s just the sort of thing would happen to that guy.” Jordan suggested that Lord might have left it running while he ducked in for a brownie somewhere, and now some kid was taking it for a joyride. Or maybe someone in law enforcement owed him a prank, and this was payback.

  The laughter spread. Would the cruiser get as far as Groveton? Should they set up a roadblock with Jordan’s four-wheeler? Saunders described the day last spring when he got his cruiser stuck in mud on a back road in Stewartstown. Lord came to pu
ll him out, but not before snapping a bulletin-board photo of the stuck vehicle. “You got your camera today?” Jordan asked.

  “Oh, man, I wish.”

  Saunders, the only officer on duty, started his motor and prepared to join the hunt for Lord’s cruiser. Then another announcement, a correction—the stolen cruiser was not 719, but rather 608. Jordan swallowed his laughter. “Uh-oh, that’s Scott Phillips,” he said. “That’s not something that would happen to Scottie—no way.”

  “Scott? You sure?” Saunders said. “So what do you think’s going on?”

  “I don’t know. Shit, I can’t imagine—but it’s got to be serious, knowing Scottie.”

  “Okay—well, I’d better get going.”

  “Wait a minute,” Jordan said. He stepped up to Saunders’s window. “Maybe I ought to come with you.”

  Saunders was just twenty-eight, sweet-tempered and personable, the perfect guy for that booth at the fair, and brand new to Fish & Game. Jordan was nearly a generation older but in fact was relatively new himself, a CO just since 1994. He had grown up in Whitefield, a little south of Lancaster, had worked as a mechanic twelve years in the family business after high school, and then put in four years as a Whitefield cop. He had made sergeant, and he took a pay cut when he joined Fish & Game, but he was glad to get out into the woods and onto the rivers. He couldn’t help feeling responsible for an even newer guy like Saunders, and had taken to him immediately anyway. Other officers used to say that Saunders was at the Groveton substation enough for Jordan to claim him as a dependent.

  “No, it’s your day off,” Saunders said. “Whatever’s going on, I’ll have help.”

  Jordan was about to insist, but he didn’t want to abandon Wimsatt and Kneeland—or suggest to Saunders that he didn’t have confidence in him. Still . . . “Listen, don’t go chasing that cruiser yourself, okay? If you see it, just put out a bulletin.”

  “Got it.”

  “Hey, I’ll have my scanner on in the house. Make sure everybody knows where you are, all right?”

  “Yeah, Mom.” Saunders laughed and waved, backing out of the driveway, and turned up Route 3 toward Colebrook.

  Jordan looked up that way and then said, “Louise made lemonade. You guys want some?” They weren’t quite up the front steps before a state police cruiser shot by the house with its blue lights flashing—then two more.

  Jana Riley heard it first on the scanner at the News and Sentinel: Code 3, said Colebrook Dispatch, which meant a shooting. Location—LaPerle’s trailer park, out near the supermarket, in a lot behind the Chevy car dealership. That was a rough place, prone to domestic violence. A shooting there wouldn’t be extraordinary, exactly, but it was still a big story, and one more example of the stuff John Harrigan hated to have happen on a Tuesday.

  Claire Lynch wasn’t surprised at all, and she was already on her way out the front with her camera and notepad—“Dennis, you want me to cover this, right?”—as several other staffers rose from their desks and gathered around the scanner. Susan was in the newsroom, busy with pasteup, and she wasn’t so sure about Claire covering this; she worried about Claire’s safety. But Dennis was at the scanner, and on his okay Claire bolted out the door.

  Vickie Bunnell was still in her office because that airplane ride with her pilot friend had been pushed back until later in the afternoon. She and Susie Sambito came to the scanner as well.

  Someone guessed it was a drunk shooting into the air. After a few tense and quiet moments, there was a correction: “Code 3, Code 3 at LaPerle’s IGA. That’s LaPerle’s IGA. Please note—the supermarket, not the trailer park.”

  “What?” said Jana. “The supermarket?”

  Vickie felt a sudden chill and whispered to Susie, “Sounds like Carl’s doing his shopping today.”

  Then: “Code 3! Officer down! LaPerle’s IGA! All units respond!”

  Bookkeeper Gil Short used to work at a city hospital, where doors were routinely locked during any sort of police emergency in the surrounding neighborhood. He was in the habit now, and he turned the lock of the Sentinel Building’s front door. Then he rejoined the crowd around the scanner. Its silence seemed more fateful with each passing second.

  The scanner erupted again: “Officer down—get a fucking ambulance!”

  Outside, Claire was barreling up Main Street in her Chevy Blazer with sirens going off in shrieks around her. Near the foot of Cooper Hill, she was surprised—maybe more like shocked—to see Scott Phillips’s cruiser heading toward her in the opposite lane, without siren or lights and moving at a wholly moderate speed.

  She was even more startled to see that three holes had been punched into its windshield, that the back window had been blown out. Scott had a way of sitting behind the wheel with ramrod posture, just like the military police officer he used to be, and Claire saw through the pocked windshield at least that sort of posture as she whipped past the cruiser. She couldn’t imagine why Scott would be headed south right then, and dawdling as he did so, but she’d have to quiz him about that later.

  PART TWO

  8

  WHEN BOTH ANSWERS ARE WRONG

  CARL DREGA HAD DREAMED about Rita the night before. The dream, or some parts of it, came back to him as he pulled out of Clarkeie’s and headed up Cooper Hill. He was in their house in Bow, but it was different, and bigger, a maze of dark hallways and plunging stairwells. Rita needed him for some reason, but he couldn’t find her. Finally he came into a low-ceilinged room that contained a table and an empty chair. Playing cards were spread across the table in an unfinished game of solitaire. There was also an invoice for a payment on Rita’s life insurance—stamped “PAST DUE”—and a note signed by Rita: “Don’t forget the groceries. I’ll see you tonight.” He woke with cuts in his palms from the nails on his fingers as they had clamped and knotted into fists.

  He glanced at the bag of groceries on the passenger seat of his truck—chicken breasts, a gallon of milk, frozen peas, a bag of red grapes, some cucumbers—and all else heaped on that seat and in its foot well: tools, assorted receipts and bills, a greasy Colebrook House of Pizza box, a manila envelope plumped with his seventy-nine pages of grievances, his 9 mm P85 Ruger pistol and its holster, wrapped in a towel, and the Colt AR-15 he had bought in Massachusetts last February. He was done walking around with just pepper spray, he had decided. No more handcuffs in a parking lot. Drega didn’t know, but except for the weapons the front seat looked a lot like Les Lord’s.

  The AR-15 rested on its stock in the foot well, its muzzle against the door handle. The sun fell in splinters of light along the road ahead, and Drega handled the wheel in something like nervous euphoria. He wondered if it was because he had slept so badly. Nothing different about that, though. There was glare off the grill of the logging truck behind him, off the windshields and fenders of passing cars and trucks. Even with his sunglasses, it all felt like phosphorus in Drega’s eyes.

  He broke into a cold sweat at the sight of the stabbing blue lights of the state police cruiser that swept into the opposite lane around the logging truck. Then the cruiser snuffed its lights as it came up close on his rear bumper. At first the driver was just a dark form behind the windshield, but then Drega saw the crisp Stetson, the upright carriage, the forehead that flashed in the sun for just an instant like a bleached bone. By then he knew it was Scott Phillips, but he didn’t know if Phillips was pulling him over or not.

  Drega decided to turn off the road to see what Phillips did, to swing into the parking lot of the IGA, a mile north of the business district, as though he needed more groceries. The cruiser did the same, and as it did so, an odd sort of feeling swept over Carl Drega: a sense that his truck, amid its vapor of blue smoke, was traveling on iron rails, navigating on automatic pilot—down the entrance ramp and straight along the median divider, with its shrubs and stunted trees, and then left and past some parked cars to a stop, straddling two empty spaces near a tan old-model Thunderbird.

  The cruiser followed, sti
ll with no lights, drawing to a halt twenty feet behind the truck at a diagonal between the lot’s first two rows of cars. Drega sat at the wheel of his pickup and took a deep breath—the air was veined with scents of salt and earth. In his rearview mirror, he watched Phillips throw open his cruiser door and in that crisp Stetson take a—swaggering?—step this way, the light prickling in thorns from the handcuffs on his belt.

  That feeling—was it Drega’s own hand, or someone else’s, that pushed the groceries aside and reached for the barrel of the loaded assault rifle? He felt somehow lost to himself, as though he had been the occupant of that empty chair in the dream—and at the same time, after twenty-five years and at this precise moment, never had he felt so true. The pain in his eyes? Their scales had fallen away. Why should he be surprised that suddenly it was now, in a supermarket parking lot with this hammer in his hands?

  He wondered at the last moment if he had sent his August check to the Monastery of the Precious Blood. He mailed twenty-five dollars each month, in good times or bad, to that small order of nuns in Manchester. In his check register he wrote “GIFT” under each such entry. But last month, July, he had written “PEACE OF MIND” instead. It was like a prayer.

  A voice from his childhood, a nun’s voice pitched to a whisper, rose like the April roar of the Connecticut into his mind: “Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of death.”

  What you thought you heard inside the supermarket at 2:41 p.m. depended on where you were. Head cashier Rachel Hurley thought it was someone pounding on an outside wall. In the produce section, shopper Eleanor Goddard thought someone was using a nail gun, while in the deli section, server Linda Leduc heard banging on the roof. In the bakery, Patsy Smith glanced up at what seemed to be pinging from the metal pipes in the kitchen. Store manager Lance Walling, busy with paperwork in his office, heard a rapid series of thumps.