Straw Man

by Gerry Boyle

  Other books by Gerry Boyle

  Jack McMorrow Mystery Series

  Deadline

  Bloodline

  Lifeline

  Potshot

  Borderline

  Cover Story

  Home Body

  Pretty Dead

  Damaged Goods

  Once Burned

  Brandon Blake Mysteries

  Port City Black and White

  Port City Shakedown

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  STRAW MAN

  A Jack McMorrow Mystery

  First Islandport Edition/ May 2016

  All Rights Reserved.

  Copyright © 2016 by Gerry Boyle

  ISBN: 978-1-939017-94-9

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015945356

  Islandport Press

  P.O. Box 10

  Yarmouth, Maine 04096

  www.islandportpress.com

  books@islandportpress.com

  Publisher: Dean Lunt

  Cover Design: Tom Morgan, Blue Design

  Interior Book Design: Teresa Lagrange, Islandport Press

  Cover image courtesy of iStock.com/sakhorn38

  Printed in the USA

  For my growing family. Life is good.

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Postscript

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Heartfelt thanks go to my editor, Genevieve Morgan, whose insights on Straw Man were spot-on; to Punch, who read the manuscript closely (It takes a village . . . ); and to Melissa Hayes, for her eagle eye. Lastly and especially, thanks to Vic, who made this book possible. As always.

  1

  The sun slipped behind the ridgetop to the west, the woods darkening at midday like Waldo County, Maine, was Alaska in winter.

  Mosquitoes were stirring, deerflies backing off. Crows harried something high in the trees, and I saw the flash of a hawk’s silhouette, then wing-flapping shapes in pursuit. And then the crows were gone and it was the buzz of bugs and the snap of Clair’s lunchbox latch.

  Our break was over.

  Clair climbed up and into the cab of the skidder, under the roll cage. He got situated and I started his big Ford pickup, waited for Louis to hoist himself up onto the seat. We pulled out, the truck lurching over the ruts we’d worked into the forest floor. Clair started the skidder and it clacked to life with a puff of diesel smoke, and he followed us up the rough path through the dark, dappled trees.

  We’d been hired to do a careful cut of forty acres of hardwood—maple and oak, mostly—for sawlogs. The parcel was part of more than a thousand acres owned by Mrs. Hodding, who was eighty-seven and in assisted living in Rockport, twenty-five miles to the east. Mr. Hodding, who was ninety-one, and for a quarter century had had Clair look after these woods like they were the king’s forest, had suffered a stroke. In the time it took for the blood clot to move to Mr. Hodding’s brain, assisted living turned to acute care.

  Mrs. Hodding needed money, and fast.

  She called Clair. He called us. We put down everything we were doing and loaded up our gas and oil and chain saws. In my case, that meant temporarily trading writing newspaper stories for dropping sixty-foot trees. Louis came up from his hideaway in the deep woods near Sanctuary, twenty miles to the south. Clair left his tractor at home, loaded up the skidder, and we went to work.

  Cutting massive trees, their crowns crashing to the forest floor. Limbing them until the trunks looked like the torsos of dismembered bodies. Wrestling heavy steel cable around the logs and jumping back as Clair skidded them away to the wood yard. Stepping up to the next trunk with a chain saw, leaning into the spume of chips and exhaust.

  This was the third day in the late-September heat and we were bone-tired. Dirty. Smelled like oil and gasoline. The truck lurched and rocked.

  “Iraq, women used to spend a whole morning looking for wood, come back with this pathetic little bunch of sticks,” Louis said, looking out the truck window at the wall of trees.

  “What a few thousand years of human habitation will do for a place,” I said.

  “It isn’t all desert,” he said. “There’s farms and orchards and groves of these weird olive trees. Not what people think.”

  “Most things aren’t,” I said.

  “You’d think you’d figured it out, even a little,” Louis said, “and it would change in an instant. Kaboom.”

  And then he was quiet. We drove on.

  The logging road was blocked by dead trees, the debris of ice storms and lightning, the passage of time. With Clair following on the skidder we stopped every twenty yards or so and got out and hacked our way through brambles, sawed the skeleton-dead limbs and tossed them to the side of the trail. We could have rammed the stuff out of the way with the skidder but this was cleaner, the way Mr. Hodding liked it.

  The trail eventually emerged in Hyde on the other side of the hardwood ridge, the northeast corner of the Hoddings’ land. We drove a quarter mile and crested a rise—and there was a wall of fresh slash.

  It was a pile of branches ten feet high and it blocked the trail forty yards ahead. We heard the sound of distant chain saws and the roar of a diesel, saw blue smoke wafting through the green-brown woods to the right, like the wrong color in a painting.

  “The old lady hire two crews?” Louis said.

  “No way,” I said.

  “Then what—”

  “Outlaws,” I said. “Figure nobody will notice.”

  Louis and I turned as Clair rumbled up behind us on the skidder and climbed down, leaving the motor running. He walked up and Louis said, “We’re not—”

  “At the end of the parcel?” Clair said. “Not even close.”

  “There must be some confusion,” I said.

  I smiled. Clair smiled back.

  “Well, let’s go see if we can’t straighten that confusion out,” he said.

  Clair took point, then Louis and me, the two of them—Marine and army veterans—moving easily in single file. I tromped along like a reporter and tried to keep up. We passed the brush piles, the leaves shriveled at the edges but the centers still pale green.

  “Two days,” Clair said.

  We kept walking, down the trail to the left, and eventually came on a truck, a dented primer-black Ford one-ton with dual rear wheels and ratty stake sides. Up close we saw a red dump sticker from Monroe, a couple of towns to the west. The truck bed was full of prime oak sawlogs, twelve-footers someone had winched up a makeshift steel ramp. There was a stack of logs off to the side. Thirty yards beyond the truck, a battered flatbed trailer was parked to the side of the pa
th.

  And just beyond the trailer, a small bulldozer was rumbling out of the woods.

  The bulldozer was painted camouflage green, like army surplus, and it was dragging a foot-thick log, leaves dragging at the end of a jagged limb. The driver’s back was to us, as he turned to watch the tree. He dragged the trunk out onto the trail and then reversed to slacken the cable, and jumped down.

  Looked up.

  Saw us.

  Froze.

  2

  He was six six, maybe taller. Wide shoulders over a catcher’s pad of a gut. A black beard and a shock of dark wild hair. His barrel chest was swathed in a black T-shirt, sweat stained at the armpits. Steel showed through the toes of his worn logger’s boots. His eyes darted back and forth, and I could see him trying to peg us: friend or foe, looking for help or trouble. He turned back to the clacking dozer and reached over the seat and shut it off. We heard chain saws from the woods.

  The guy turned back to us while the cooling motor ticked.

  Clair strode up, stopped six feet short. “How you doing?”

  The big guy nodded.

  “Working this parcel from the south,” Clair said. “Taking out some hardwood.”

  He looked at the log cinched to the end of the steel cable.

  “Nice piece of oak you got there,” Clair said. He smiled, but there was something very hard behind it, and I could see the guy stiffen, eyes narrowing. Trouble it was.

  “Looks like your crew is doing the same,” Clair said, glancing toward the oak log.

  “Yup,” the big guy said.

  “But you know, you’re either not where you think you are, or there’s some”—Clair paused—“misunderstanding.” He let the words float a bit, like diesel smoke.

  The guy reached for the back pocket of his jeans, pulled out a pack of Marlboros. He shook one out and took a lighter from a front pocket. The flame flickered, he sucked, and then he blew a cloud of smoke in Clair’s direction. Clair didn’t flinch.

  “Maybe you boys are the ones with the misunderstanding,” the big guy said.

  “I don’t think so,” Clair said. “We were hired to cut from the Prosperity line straight through to the Hyde line. Been working this woodlot for ten years, maybe more. You sure you started in the right place? Where you boys from?”

  “Around,” the guy said.

  “Who hired you?”

  “A friend of mine.”

  “Is that right?” Clair said. “Well, you’re either on the wrong land or have the wrong friend. ’Cause I talked to the owner day before yesterday. There aren’t two crews working this parcel.”

  “Well, you better talk to him again, old man. ’Cause I know we’re working here.”

  “No doubt about that. Question is, are you lost—”

  A pause.

  “—or are you just helping yourself?”

  The words lay across the big guy’s cheek like a slap. He tilted his head back, thrust his chest out. Spat to the side and turned to the bulldozer. I braced myself, expecting a wrench, but he picked up an air horn from under the seat, the kind in an aerosol can. He held it up and blew it, two long, loud blasts. One chain saw shut down. He blew the horn again and another saw went quiet. A third blast and the third saw went quiet. I could hear the guy breathing, huff and puff.

  He put the horn back behind the seat, turned back.

  “Don’t care much for being called a thief,” the big guy said to Clair.

  “Something tells me it isn’t the first time,” Clair said. “But if your feelings are hurt too bad, we can just get the sheriff and he can sort it out.”

  There was a crashing from the woods and three other guys emerged, saws in hand. We waited as they drew closer.

  One of the loggers was a younger version of the big guy, chubby like a bear cub. He was flanked by an older guy, lean and hard, his whiskered face flushed and sweaty. His T-shirt was emblazoned with a skull, his arms smeared with grease that blurred jailhouse tattoos.

  The fourth guy was just a high school kid, maybe a little older, tall and lanky, big hands dangling from long sinewy arms. His head had been shaved, but not recently. His eyes were set in deep sockets, and he looked like a boot-camp recruit. They put their saws on the ground and stood beside the big guy, a united front.

  “What’s the problem, Beefy?” the jailhouse guy said to the tall one.

  “Nothing we can’t handle,” Beefy said.

  The lanky kid—camo T-shirt and greasy jeans—was facing me. The lean, hard guy lined up across from Louis. Baby Fat stood alongside his dad.

  “These guys is calling us thieves,” Beefy said.

  The others looked at us and scowled. Up close the older one had a jagged scar on his neck, like he’d been slashed with a broken bottle. There was a long knife in a sheath on his belt. Next to him Baby Fat was clenching and unclenching his fists so his biceps flexed and his knuckles cracked.

  Clair grinned.

  “Oh, I know. It’s a little awkward. But the thing is, the old couple who owns this land, they’re good people, worked hard all their lives. She’s logging some of it off so she can pay his hospital bills. So I’ll be damned if I’ll let some two-bit yahoos take their money.”

  A long pause.

  “Nothing personal,” Clair said.

  “Kiss my ass,” the big guy said.

  We stood there, guys with their hands on their hips. Deerflies buzzed but nobody swatted. Clair took a deep breath and let it out slow. He looked at the big guy, nobody else.

  “Not worth getting hurt over,” Clair said.

  “Then turn around and go back the way you came,” the big guy said.

  “You tell him, Pa,” Baby Fat said.

  “You gonna let ’em go, Beefy?” the lanky kid said.

  Clair smiled, reached up, and slipped his Stihl hat off, then back on. “My fault for not speaking more precisely,” he said. “I meant it’s not worth you all getting hurt over. So collect your gear and go back the way you came, and we’ll just call it a day.”

  The big guy was silent, calculating what they’d gotten into.

  It was the lean guy who took a step forward, chin out, hands low, palms spread. A half-smile. A guy who loved a fight.

  “Come on, chickenshit,” he said to Louis. “I know one when I see one.”

  Louis didn’t answer, just stood and stared, an emotionless gaze that slowed things way down. The lean guy said, excited now, “I’m gonna tear your head off.”

  Still Louis stared, no tension showing. Placid. Calm.

  “You deaf?” the guy said. “I’m saying I’m gonna tear your friggin’ face off.”

  “I got this guy, Billy,” the lanky kid said. He moved toward me like we were playing pickup basketball. Shirts and skins.

  “And I got this one,” Billy said, his eyes alight, wired like a meth head but probably all adrenaline. “Chickenshit here—cat got his tongue.”

  “Listen, old man,” Beefy said to Clair. “Why don’t you just get the hell out of here while you can still walk.”

  The voice of reason, Beefy seeing something in Clair and Louis that made him hesitate.

  “Too late,” Billy said, eye to eye with Louis. “Call me a thief? You only do that once.”

  He wanted this. The crazy one. Louis still said nothing, stood stock-still.

  “Too scared to talk, you son of a bitch?” Billy said, his eyes bright, smile locked on.

  From the trees, a woodpecker’s drumroll. A pileated. Billy snorted phlegm and then spat. The skinny kid said, “I think they’re all chickenshits.”

  “You got that goddamn right, Semi,” Billy said. And then he took two quick steps, shoved Louis with two hands. Louis staggered backwards a step, then another. Billy was smiling now, then laughing, his bared teeth yellow like a dog’s. He kept coming. Another shove. Louis staggered. Another shove and he backed up again. Rope-a-dope. Luring the guy away, where it would be one-on-one, plenty of room to—

  The skinny kid rushed me, gra
bbed my shirt, his right arm swinging, hitting my ear, the top of my head. I bulled him back. The big guy grabbed for Clair’s shoulders and swung and Clair twisted right and elbowed him in the throat. The guy coughed and grunted and Clair jammed his palm under the guy’s nose. Blood spurted. The son waded in to help.

  Semi was still punching my shoulder—my neck, my eye. The eye stung and blurred and he kept swinging, long arms windmilling. My temple, my mouth, my neck. And then I pulled back and he missed and I caught his forearm, held on and spun him around. I tripped him and he fell backwards and I rode him to the ground, a knee driving into his groin. We hit and he gasped, mouth open, and I punched him once in the teeth, again in the belly. He blew air again, the smell of tobacco and vomit. His fingernails clawed at my face, and I ducked low and hit him in the mouth, felt teeth jabbing into my hand. He was still raking at my eyes when I hit him, the soft part just under his rib cage. One, two, three.

  His arms went limp. He was sucking air as I rolled off.

  The big guy was on his hands and knees, gasping, blood running down his chin. His son was on the ground, too, and he scrambled up and threw himself at Clair, who sidestepped, kicked the kid’s legs out from under him, dropped him onto his back like it was a drill at Special Forces school, which it had been. The kid bounced back up again and charged and Clair absorbed a wild punch, stepped inside another, and wrapped his arms around the kid’s shoulders. He spun the kid loose, backhanded him across the face. More blood. Twice more, forehand and backhand, hard slaps, bone on bone. A quick step in close and Clair hit him hard in the belly.

  The chubby kid staggered, wavered, crumpled. Semi started crawling for the truck.

  I started after him, then glanced back. Louis was on top of Billy, arms pumping like pistons. Billy’s face was all black blood, his eyes and nose and mouth. He flailed weakly and then he fell back. Louis kept punching, a smacking sound like he was pounding meat on a board. I ran to him, said, “Enough, man. Just stop.”

  I grabbed Louis by the shoulders, but his arms kept pumping up and down like an oil rig. I pulled him and he kept punching, blood spattering. I put an arm around his neck and yanked, couldn’t move him. Finally I just held on and backed away, dragging him off. His expression hadn’t changed from the first exchange, placid and emotionless.