In the Evil Day

by Richard Adams Carey

  He walked over to the picture window and looked at the Connecticut, its water a loamy green, moving in its imperceptible way past the ramparts he had raised against it. He wondered where Eric Stohl and Dan Ouimette might be. Parkhurst hadn’t been home, and neither was Ouimette at his shop. The Columbia town hall had been vacant as well. Stohl could be anywhere—but maybe the CO would come to him today. He drank in the beauty of the river and reproached himself for not calling Gerry Upton about that canoe trip down the Allagash.

  Now he’d need some kerosene—or diesel fuel, if he was short on kerosene. He had plenty of diesel and probably enough ammunition. With a sigh, he abandoned the coffee mug, the ticking clock, the sewing machines, the clean laundry, the sturdy benches. He went forth from the cabin into the blessed light and air.

  Kenneth Parkhurst might have died at fourteen, when he fell to the road out of his parents’ car on a trip to Groveton. He still has headaches to remind him of that. He might have died a few years later in Korea, on a freezing night in which he slept sandwiched between two air mattresses. These saved him from the artillery shell whose debris crushed the other four GIs in that foxhole. And he might have died a few minutes after Vickie, had he not had a dentist appointment that afternoon.

  Perhaps his wife, Isabelle, survived as well because of Kenneth’s preference for a dentist in Canada. The Parkhursts live in a one-story ranch home at the end of a cul-de-sac off Route 3 just south of Colebrook. Isabelle Parkhurst is an amateur musician, and on Tuesday afternoons her sister comes to play duets with her on portable electric keyboards. On that particular Tuesday, however—since Isabelle’s sister lives right on the way to Canada—they played at her sister’s house.

  During that week in August, Parkhurst had taken his screen door off its hinges to do some work on it. That left just the front door, which was stout and securely locked, but it took Drega only a minute to kick that in. He found the house empty, and there was no damage besides the ruined door that Lori Berry found. Lori was Isabelle’s niece and their neighbor across the road.

  “Drega was mad, though,” Parkhurst said later. “He drove out into the field, spun that cruiser around, and then took off out of here like a shot. You could see the tracks in the lawn.”

  Parkhurst considers his wife’s survival no less miraculous than his own. Isabelle demurs. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I don’t think he would have shot me.” In fact the former Columbia town clerk was one of those rare officials to whom Drega was usually civil.

  “He’d have done it just to spite me,” Parkhurst said. “You know that.”

  Steve Breton’s first thought was to disable the cruiser. He had told Dick Marini to slow down as they approached Drega’s place in south Columbia, and then Breton broke into a cold sweat to see 608 at rest at the top of the driveway, waiting to make a turn back onto Route 3. “Okay, let’s ram it,” he said.

  To the west a plume of smoke billowed into the sky. Something was burning on Drega’s land.

  Marini wasn’t so sure about a collision. “Then we’re out of action too,” he said, thinking this little Plymouth would crumple like a soft-drink can against that heavy Crown Victoria. “Maybe it’s just us out of action.”

  Instead they slowed enough to allow the cruiser to ease out ahead of them and to continue south. They followed at a distance of five or six car lengths. Drega observed the speed limit—fifty-five miles per hour—and drove with his right arm stretched over the passenger-side headrest. “Not in any hurry, is he?” Breton said.

  Marini was on the radio again: “This is Liquor 13 to Colebrook Dispatch. We’ve got 608 right in front of us. We’re following the suspect on Route 3, south, leaving Columbia—”

  It occurred to them both at once that Phillips had probably left his radio on, that the suspect could well be listening to this. Marini clicked his microphone off with a nervous glance at his partner. Up ahead, Drega still drove at an easy pace with his arm over that headrest. “Maybe we’re okay,” Breton said.

  As they approached North Stratford, Breton got to thinking about the bridge there into Bloomfield, Vermont—and they decided to risk the radio again. Marini couldn’t get through to either Colebrook Dispatch or Troop F. Finally he tried the dispatcher at the Lancaster Highway Department. Lancaster answered, and Marini reported their position and situation.

  Sure enough, in tiny North Stratford, the cruiser blinked a right turn onto the bridge. At the same time, Breton saw a Fish & Game cruiser approach from the other direction. Whoever was in that green Blazer popped his blue lights as he prepared to follow the stolen cruiser across the bridge. “Oh, shit,” Breton said. “I don’t like Drega knowing he’s being chased yet. This could get him shooting again.”

  Marini picked up his mic. “I’ll try Channel 2, see if I can tell him to snuff those.”

  COLEBROOK DISPATCH, 3:17 P.M.

  Dispatch: Colebrook emergency line.

  Caller 15: Hi, this is John calling from Channel 7 in Boston, Mass. How’re you doing? Is there something—hello?

  Dispatch: No comment.

  Caller 15: All right, well.

  Dispatch: Colebrook emergency line.

  Caller 16: Yeah, this is Dan Shallow at the Academy. Is it all right for people to leave the building?

  Dispatch: Um, I would—oh, gosh. I don’t know. Hold on.

  Caller 16: Are you there by yourself?

  Dispatch: Hold on—yes. Hold on.

  Caller 16: When was this? I haven’t heard about it.

  Dispatch: Hi, Dan.

  Caller 16: Yeah.

  Dispatch: If I—I think if I were you, I’d hold them for a while.

  Caller 16: Okay.

  Dispatch: He may be headed back this way. We’re not sure.

  Caller 16: Okay—you haven’t apprehended the suspect yet?

  Dispatch: No, we haven’t.

  Caller 16: Do you know the suspect yet?

  Dispatch: Yes, it’s Carl Drega.

  Caller 16: Okay—all right. Thank you very much.

  Dispatch: Colebrook emergency.

  Caller 17: Hi, this is Associated Press. We heard word that there was—

  Dispatch: No comment.

  Caller 18: Hi, this is Channel 7 News calling. Is there—

  Dispatch: No comment.

  Caller 19: Hi, it’s Donna calling from WBZ.

  Dispatch: Yes.

  Caller 19: You guys have two state troopers down somewhere?

  Dispatch: Ma’am, we have every emergency line lit up. I can’t talk to you right now.

  Caller 19: Thanks.

  Dispatch: Colebrook emergency line.

  Caller 20: Hi, ma’am. I know you’re busy. This is [inaudible] with Fox 25 in Boston.

  Dispatch: Bye. Colebrook emergency. May I help you?

  Caller 21: Yeah, this is Vern Reynolds down in Columbia. Has anybody called in a fire down by the T&T trailer park?

  Dispatch: Yes, sir, they have.

  Caller 21: Okay, thank you.

  The business center of Bloomfield, Vermont, begins and ends with DeBanville’s General Store, which, like the Green Mountain in Colebrook and the Blue Mountain in Columbia, is a combination snack bar/convenience store with gas pumps—except DeBanville’s also offers outside dining at umbrella-shaded tables. The store and its small parking lot sit opposite the bridge from New Hampshire and on the intersection of Vermont Route 102, which runs north-south along the Connecticut, and Route 105, which bears northwest to Newport and the Canadian border. A railroad trestle arches over 102 as it runs south out of Bloomfield, and a sprinkling of maple-shaded private homes spreads along both roads within walking distance of the store.

  Sharlyn Jordan had gone to DeBanville’s around two thirty that afternoon to pass some time with her friends Junior and Rose DeBanville. From the parking lot, she waved to George Nugent, who was up on a ladder against the second story of his house. “Painting up a storm, are you, George?”

  “Might as well,” Nugent said.
“Good day for it, don’t you think?”

  Inside the store someone called to say that something was going on over in New Hampshire and that Junior should turn on the store’s police scanner. Junior got around to that once someone else called with the same advice.

  When the scanner said that the suspect, a Columbia resident named Carl Drega, was heading toward North Stratford, Sharlyn said, “Well, if I was being chased by the law, I’d cut right over into Vermont.”

  The store was busy that afternoon. Rose was talking to a fisherman from Connecticut who wanted some live bait. The fisherman’s wife and two little boys were looking at a table full of sale items outside. Rose directed the guy to a store in Island Pond, a town twenty miles up Route 105. But the wife wasn’t ready to go yet. Other people were outside as well, and a few more inside the store.

  Sharlyn thought that with a shooting suspect on the loose, she ought to at least pull the keys out of her Ford Explorer. She fetched the keys and wound up leaning at the sill of an open window with Junior and Rose. Within a couple of minutes, Rose said, “Well, here comes a New Hampshire trooper right now.”

  “Wonder which way he’s headed,” Junior said.

  Sharlyn watched the cruiser bear left down 102 South, and then she knew. “That’s not a trooper! That’s the guy—look, he’s got no uniform on!”

  The cruiser, at moderate speed, disappeared under the railroad trestle. The next vehicle across the bridge was a green New Hampshire Fish & Game cruiser, also moving at moderate speed, as if nothing much were going on.

  This cruiser paused at the intersection of 102 and 105, and then turned south on 102. It slowed to a halt on the grade leading down to the trestle. Then its blue lights came on, like embers bursting into flame.

  Wayne Saunders was six when his father took him grouse hunting and they were met by a game warden in the woods down in New Hampshire’s Lakes Region. The ranger checked his father’s hunting license and wished them luck. The boy liked the hat the warden wore, similar to the Stetsons he saw in cowboy movies, and also the badge. He liked the woods too, with their unfenced whiff of the frontier he saw portrayed in those Westerns.

  Saunders was wearing just such a hat and badge right now, though instead of hiking through the woods, he was on a stolen-car chase, and the quarry had just popped up like a grouse in front of him. He didn’t know there were officers down. He shared Kevin Jordan’s concern, however, that this was Scott Phillips’s cruiser he was chasing. He had worked with Scott just last week, investigating a camp break-in down a dirt road in Stewartstown. As impossible as it seemed that anyone could make off with Scott’s cruiser, it seemed equally unlikely that harm could have come to a smart, affable cop like him.

  When Saunders caught sight of 608—a couple hundred yards ahead of him, too far to see the driver—he was surprised that the thief was traveling so slowly. He radioed Fish & Game in Lancaster that he had the suspect in front of him and flicked on his light rack—with scant expectation that someone in a stolen state police cruiser would pull over and show him his license. Before he turned left toward the bridge, Saunders heard something on his radio about lights, but he didn’t know what or from where. As he approached the river, a shout arrived through the half-open window on the passenger side: “Hey, kill your blues!”

  Saunders didn’t know where that came from either, but he was edgy enough to do just that. By the time he got across the bridge and in front of DeBanville’s, where there were about half a dozen people on the store’s outside deck, he’d lost sight of 608 and wasn’t sure which of three roads the suspect might have taken from there. But he saw dust floating in a cloud beneath the railroad trestle, as if a vehicle had just passed that way.

  He turned left again, pointing south, but with a feeling that something was going wrong. He eased the Blazer down the slope to the underpass. Route 102 went straight from there, and he should have been able to see the cruiser at that point. But the right lane was empty.

  Saunders remembered he was required to show his lights when chasing a felony suspect across a state border. He moved the Blazer into the middle of the road and flicked his blues on again. A Chrysler minivan came the other way, squeezing past him as if the cruiser were a stalled car in the road. Typical Vermonter, Saunders thought.

  He advanced a few more feet and then stabbed his brakes at this: a Toyota sedan stopped in the left lane on the far side of the underpass, the driver-side rear fender of Scott’s cruiser, which was pulled off to the right of the underpass, and a man standing next to the cruiser in a black ballistics vest and a state trooper’s Stetson. The guy in the hat was pointing the muzzle of a rifle square at his windshield. Distance? About twenty feet.

  Saunders experienced no pain as such. Instead—simultaneously—he heard the report of the rifle shot, felt the force of such a mule kick to his chest that he was sure he’d been hit by a shotgun slug, and felt his left arm go limp and numb.

  At the Police Academy, they had said the engine block is your best friend if you’re taking fire in your cruiser. Saunders fell to his right, behind the engine block and the dashboard. He took his right hand off the steering wheel to shift into reverse, then put it back on the wheel. He backed quickly, but under control, to DeBanville’s and its parking lot. Still pitched over on the passenger-side seat, he raised his head just high enough to see those people on the deck of the store and at the sale table. They stood frozen, as if enchanted. Saunders shouted as loud as he could, “Get the fuck out of here!”

  But they didn’t move. Not until the next instant, when six shots rang out in rapid sequence, leaving a spray of holes like carnation blossoms across the Blazer’s windshield, jolting the vehicle itself with the force of those mule kicks.

  Outside the store, people screamed and ran for cover. Saunders stomped on the gas pedal and sent the Blazer barreling blindly in reverse through the intersection, still taking fire. Glass burst from it like confetti as it hopped the curb, then churned across George Nugent’s lawn. The Blazer careened over the riverbank and would have fallen into the Connecticut were it not for the bank’s lattice of cottonwood, paper birch, and red maple.

  The vehicle bounced off a twin-trunk birch, bumped against a cottonwood, and hung in the brush, halfway down the embankment, with its front wheels off the ground and its lights still flashing.

  Junior DeBanville could set his watch by retired Vermonter Joe Lizzie, who lived five minutes down 102 and who arrived at the store at precisely 3:15 each afternoon to buy a newspaper. That day—at 3:14—Lizzie braked to a halt as he approached the railway trestle. He saw a New Hampshire State Police cruiser pulled off to the left and a man by its driver-side door, someone wearing a Stetson but not otherwise in uniform. He had a rifle trained at a New Hampshire Fish & Game cruiser only a short distance away.

  Once the shooting was over, and the other cruiser had backed out of sight on the other side of the intersection, the gunman turned and looked at Lizzie as he sat at the wheel of his Toyota.

  “Was that the bear?” Lizzie turned to see an old woman standing on the other side of the road. “Did you get him?” she said to the gunman. “The bear that’s been bothering people around here?”

  The gunman ignored her. He stowed his rifle, climbed into the police vehicle, pulled onto 102, and proceeded south as if sightseeing.

  On the other side of the underpass, a heavyset man in a button-down shirt was crouched behind a Plymouth sedan with a shotgun in his hands. The guy was waving his shotgun in the air and yelling at Lizzie to get the hell out of there.

  Lizzie put his car in drive, climbed a little more briskly than usual to the intersection, glanced at the green cruiser snagged in the shrubs and trees along Nugent’s riverbank, and turned east over the bridge.

  That day he bought his newspaper in New Hampshire.

  From where they were on the bridge over the river, Steve Breton and Dick Marini could see that 608 had never come out the other side of that underpass. As soon as they were across the
bridge and near the intersection, Breton said, “Stop the car. He’s got to be right here somewhere.”

  Marini pulled to the left shoulder and they both jumped out. Marini stayed behind the Plymouth, in a spot that gave him a clear line of fire with his shotgun through most of the underpass. Breton thought it likely that Drega meant to climb to the top of the trestle. From there, he could rain fire down on the whole area. Breton sprinted across the intersection, conspicuous in his blue shirt and pants, with his Ruger drawn, making for the nearest corner of the store. His plan was to scramble up to the tracks some distance west of the trestle and see if he could get Drega flanked this time.

  Meanwhile the CO whom Breton had recognized as Wayne Saunders was edging his cruiser down the slope. Breton didn’t like the looks of what Wayne was up to. He tried to signal him to back off, but he was behind the Blazer and Saunders never saw him.

  Then the first shot, the warning to the bystanders, the second flurry. The Blazer narrowly missed a Jeep Cherokee as it rocketed diagonally through the intersection and onto the lawn. Oh, God, he’s gone too, Breton thought.

  Marini would have had a shot at Drega had it not been obstructed by the man in the Toyota. Nor was further pursuit possible now with another officer down, an unsecured crime scene, and a lot of panicked bystanders on the loose. Breton saw 608 continue south as Marini backed his car into a roadblock position across the ramp to the bridge. Then Marini set about clearing the intersection and the store grounds, and Breton went after Saunders.