Straw Man

by Gerry Boyle

  “Fine,” I said.

  We got undressed and climbed into our beds. I took the clip out of the Glock and squeezed it under the mattress on the wall side. The gun I put under my pillow. In the dark I didn’t see what Roxanne did with the knife.

  And then we were lying there, both of us awake.

  “Tomorrow,” I said quietly.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you going to school?”

  “It’s the safest place I know.”

  “I’ll follow you over,” I said.

  “And then what?” Roxanne said.

  “The search will be under way,” I said. “Of the woods. And there’s the funeral in the afternoon. For Abram.”

  “Are they going to want you there?”

  “No,” I said.

  Roxanne didn’t answer.

  Sunrise was at 6:15. I was out of the house at 5:45, Heather and Maria coming into the kitchen as I finished making tea and filled my mug for the ride.

  They were chipper, like they were trying to cheer me up. I said I’d be back by 7:30, and was out the door.

  It was cool, everything wet with dew. The goats were milling against the gate that led to the pasture, and they bawled at me but I ignored them. I drove down the drive to the road, remembered Billy and Baby Fat parked there, yanking Billy out of the truck, Welt hanging back.

  Was that what Roxanne wanted? Police had a term for it, the cop who’s the last to join in when there’s a brawl. Last man in.

  I ran through our conversation of the night before, couldn’t find any angle that made it anything but bleak. Yes, we were going in different directions. No, it wasn’t easy for her to stick with me anymore.

  I drove south, descending the ridge in zigs and zags. In brief glimpses I could see morning mist hovering over the facing hills, the pink-seeped sky creeping up to the east. It was beautiful, the tableaux anyway, until you started zooming in, like you were clicking the PLUS button on Google Earth.

  Mountains and rivers. Click. Roads and houses. Click. Cop and criminals. Click. Perverts and snipers.

  I made it home in eleven minutes, including a stop to let a flock of wild turkeys cross the road. As I approached, I could see the assembled police: cruisers and SUVs parked in our driveway, in front of the house, K-9 handlers corralling their dogs, snapping on leads. Cops—troopers and deputies and at least two game wardens—were tucking their trousers into boots, slinging semiautomatic rifles and shotguns over their shoulders.

  As I got out of the truck the dogs bounded around the side of the house, straining against their leads, pulling the handlers along. I walked over as the wave of searchers followed, guns out. In their wake were a couple of troopers, a Warden Service officer, and the state police sergeant, Rousseau. He looked up as I approached, then back down at a map, spread out on the hood of his SUV. He kept his head down as I joined them, nodded to the troopers.

  “Mr. McMorrow,” Rousseau said, without looking up. “Describe to me the trails on the property, which ones would be the best traveling for somebody trying to escape.”

  I came around to the side of the truck and looked at the map. He gave me a pencil and I traced the trails on the map. One was wide enough for an ATV, hard enough for a mountain bike. But it petered out a half mile in, dumped off at a swamp that was bordered by a stream. There was no trail on the far side. To reconnect, you’d have to go upstream for a quarter mile and know exactly where to climb the far bank, cut through the brush, and rejoin the next trail. That trail, narrower and rougher, eventually merged with another that led to the main road, but not directly. To make it all the way out, you had to take a right-hand turn and backtrack for a couple of hundred yards. Then take a left and head north.

  They listened to my explanation, the Warden Service guy making notes on the map. He then got on the radio and relayed much of the information to whoever was coordinating the search in the woods.

  “Thanks,” Rousseau said.

  “Sure,” I said. “Did they tell you what my friend Louis saw? Twigs broken off six or more feet up? Close to the road?”

  “Could be a moose browsing,” the Warden Service lieutenant said. “With that bog in there, this area is chock-full of moose.”

  “One of the possibles is six six, six seven,” I said.

  “Even a deer will browse way up high,” he said.

  “So you think he’s still in there?”

  “Have to run like a deer to get clear before we set up the cordon on the road,” Rousseau said. “We’ll flush him out. A night out in the woods, he’ll be cold and hungry. Hopefully, he’ll come out peacefully.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  We all knew what the alternative was: a shoot-out in dense woods, potential for all sorts of injury.

  “He’ll either surrender or we’ll take him down in the woods,” Rousseau said. “Or he’ll pop out on the road, trying to run. We’ve got that covered, so it’s just a matter of time.”

  He waited with a couple of troopers at the rear of the lawn. The dog handlers went in first, three abreast, about fifty yards apart. They were flanked, ten feet back, by eight SWAT guys in camo with rifles and shotguns. There was a swishing sound of cops and dogs moving through the brush at the edge of the woods, then that diminished and they were gone.

  We waited. Listened. I turned to the house and eyed the bullet holes in the window, turned, and tried to picture where the shots had come from. Had he been on his belly on the grass? Standing in the underbrush? Why hadn’t he charged in to get me at close range?

  Because I would have shot him? Or because he didn’t want to kill me at all?

  I heard a yelp, a hushed voice on the cop radio, looked to Rousseau. He murmured something into his shoulder mic, then asked if everyone had it.

  “What?” I said.

  “Stickley and Blaze,” he said. “His K-9. They’re on the track.”

  “Does the dog get body armor?” I said.

  “No. His life is on the line.”

  “Him, too, huh?”

  We stood and listened. Somebody following Stickley was reporting his position. There was thumping in the background, the dog and cop at full run on a trail. Then thrashing.

  “Back in the woods,” Rousseau said, then, “Forty-five, forty-eight, stay in a line. We don’t want him flanking us, or getting between you and Stick.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Quarter mile from the road, due north of here.”

  “They see him?”

  “No, just tracking.”

  More waiting, listening hard to every word and sound from the radio. A small plane passed overhead and the pilot said something and Rousseau said, “Roger that.”

  “For when he pops out?”

  “If he pops out,” Rousseau said.

  We waited, more back-and-forth on the radio. And then, after a half hour, the camouflaged cops started popping out of the woods. First to our left. Then to our right. We heard voices from the center, then Stickley and the dog came pushing through the brush. Blaze was back on his lead, head and tail high, hyped and proud.

  “Good track,” Stickley said. “Right to the road. Then gone.”

  And then there was a new urgency with the police, Rousseau hurrying away, the cops conferring. Rousseau came back around the shed, stopped in front of me.

  “Your gun guy, the one who’s MIA,” he said.

  “Semi,” I said.

  “You know his truck?”

  “Sure. Older Chevy. Red, with black spoke rims.”

  “They just found it.”

  “He’s not with it?”

  “Hard to tell, McMorrow,” Rousseau said. “It’s underwater.”

  “Huh,” I said.

  “You know where Turner Pond is?”

  “Sure,” Clair said. “Five miles east, off Route 137.”

  “Come with me,” Rousseau said. “You, too, McMorrow. Just so I can keep track of you.”

  He turned and started walking and we fell in beside hi
m, one on each side.

  “Your perp in the closet,” he said. “He’s hanging on.”

  “Aren’t we all,” I said.

  33

  It wasn’t really a pond, not in September. By then it had dried up into more of a cattail swamp. There was a two-wheel track through the woods, scraggly grass three feet tall in the middle. The track went for a hundred yards and then stopped. There was a big field pine, the ground underneath it glittering with broken glass, the blackened embers of an old campfire at the center.

  A sloping bank.

  And the top edge of a tailgate poking out of the pea-green water.

  Rousseau said they didn’t have a diver available, the closest ones looking for a drunk who tried to swim to an island in Hermon. But there was no need. The wrecker driver, a skinny, barely bearded kid, backed his truck up to the clearing, got out, and yanked the winch cable off of its spool. Holding the cable, he waded into the water up to his waist. Reached into the murk and hooked the cable onto the rear bumper.

  He waded back out, stomping muck from his boots. Went to the side of the truck and pulled a lever. The truck motor idled up and the spool began to wind. The cable tightened, the winch motor whined. The pickup lurched and then started to emerge, the tailgate coming out of the water.

  Then the wheels, the black spoke rims. And the cab of Semi’s truck, the driver’s window shattered, two bullet holes in its center.

  “Is it his?” Rousseau said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  The truck was draped with weeds and coated with green scum. Water ran from inside the cab and back down the slope into the swamp. The whole thing smelled like muck and algae. And then it started to smell worse than that.

  We moved closer as the wrecker driver stepped to the driver’s door. He looked to Rousseau and Rousseau nodded and the driver grabbed the door latch and yanked the door open.

  I saw boots. Legs. And when I moved closer, Semi slumped on the seat, most of the back of his head gone. Another guy in the passenger seat, his head thrown back like he’d fallen asleep. His neck gaped open, white flesh spilling from the gunshot wound, the skin gnawed by turtles.

  It was one of the guys from the Miriam video, the one who had touched her face with his penis.

  “Know him?” Rousseau said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Who is he?”

  “Friend of Semi’s. He was at the party.”

  Rousseau stared at the sodden bodies.

  “Too bad, huh?” he said, then looked at me.

  I shrugged.

  There was only the one lane in, so the vehicles stacked up. Rousseau’s cruiser. The wrecker. The crime-scene guys’ SUV. The coroner’s Suburban. Cook’s unmarked Impala. Deputy Staples’s brown Charger. She walked over as the crime-scene guys leaned into the still-dripping cab. I was off to the side with Clair—no clear role, but no way to get home.

  Staples sidled up, looked at the pickup, and wrinkled her nose. “Been there a while.”

  “Probably since he went missing,” I said.

  “Two shots, two kills. Not exactly spray and pray.”

  “One in the head. Other one in the neck.”

  “These boys play rough,” she said.

  “Somebody sure does,” Clair said.

  “Boom, boom, then put the pickup in neutral and give it a shove,” Staples said.

  We stood there, picturing how it would have happened.

  “I wonder why they didn’t get out of the truck?” I said.

  “Because they never saw it coming,” Staples said.

  “Arranged to meet somebody here, were waiting for a car to roll up behind them,” Clair said.

  “But it didn’t,” she said. “If it had, they would have seen a gun and tried to get out, you would think. I think somebody stepped out of the trees and popped them.”

  “Park on the road and walk in?” I said.

  “Or just know the woods,” Clair said, because he did. “Come in from another direction.”

  We turned and looked past the pine. The clearing gave way to bushes and brambles, some poplar and birch, small pines and hemlock scattered here and there. Rousseau was still poking his head in the truck cab so we walked away, past the big pine to the edge of the thicket. There was a hint of a path, a trail where deer had walked down to drink.

  “Could be the way in,” Staples said.

  She was cheerful, familiar. Like we were buddies. Good cop, bad cop. And a third who pretends to be your friend?

  I turned back from the path, walked back toward where the cops were gathered. Clair lingered, looking into the trees. Staples stayed with me. When I stopped to watch, she stood beside me.

  “You think they deserved it?” she said.

  I hesitated, then said, “The death penalty? Probably not.”

  “How ’bout your friends? They seem to take things to a different level.”

  “They aren’t murderers,” I said.

  “Is it murder if you consider it just another war?” Staples asked.

  I looked at her, looked back at Clair, still standing at the edge of the woods. Thought of Louis, suddenly MIA, and fought back the words What the hell have we done?

  It was Staples who drove us back to my house, pulling out as the first TV news truck rolled up. It was from Bangor, and the reporter, who had covered arsons in Sanctuary, recognized me as we drove past. I turned around to see her writing in her notebook.

  Great.

  It was me and Clair in the back of the cruiser, me wondering if this was prescient. Staples turned out to be into horses, so we talked about Sophie’s pony, the difference between a pony and a horse, different places around the world where ponies were used for work.

  And then we were home and she let us out. There were no cops.

  “See you later,” Staples said.

  “No doubt.”

  She drove off, and we stood for a minute, somber and distracted.

  “Well,” he said.

  “Execution-style. My guess is Boston hired it out. And his buddy there was in the wrong place.”

  “How would Boston know about that cart path?” Clair said. “You’d have to be very local.”

  “Maybe Semi’s idea of a place for a meet. Set up by Boston as another drug delivery. Shooter gets there early. Semi and Nub pull in and park. And bam.”

  “Pretty cold-blooded.”

  “And your point is? These gang guys’ll kill you for talking to their girlfriend. Losing two guys, a dozen guns, and bringing the ATF down on their heads—that’s gotta be worth the death penalty.”

  Clair looked at me.

  “I hope not.”

  “I didn’t rat them out,” I said. “ATF was already here.”

  “The computer? The phone?”

  A sinking feeling.

  Clair said he’d head home, see if Louis had shown up. I said I’d go back to see Roxanne and Sophie.

  “How are they doing?” Clair said.

  “Sophie’s okay,” I said.

  He looked at me.

  “Stay with her, Jack,” Clair said. “Don’t let her go.”

  “Trying,” I said.

  “Try harder,” he said.

  Clair started up the road. I slipped under the crime tape and went into the house and upstairs to our room. It looked like pictures of places where civilians had fled a war. What was the saying? With the clothes on their backs. The bloodstain was black and crusty, but the smell had dissipated some. Drawers were still open where I’d gotten Roxanne some clothes. I wondered if she’d ever come back for more, or just buy new.

  I went to the bureau and took out a pair of khakis, then to the closet, stepping over the stain, sliding the bullet-riddled door open wider. When I pulled the clothes aside, I saw blood spatter on the back wall, drips on the closet floor. Four of the shots had gone clean through, and the slug holes were marked by numbered tags on the wall.

  Flipping through the shirts, I wondered if Baby Fat was worried, if he’d
go underground. He didn’t seem to be part of the gun ring, but neither had the kid from the party. Had Semi talked in the woods? Had Baby Fat been the snitch? Worse for him, would somebody else think so?

  The thoughts still circling, I took out a blue Oxford cloth shirt, reached for a dressier belt from the rack. I looked at my shoes, lined up against the wall. There was blood on my dress loafers, so I picked up a pair of well-worn desert boots.

  What did one wear to go near an Old Order Mennonite funeral?

  Grabbing socks from the drawer, I gathered up the clothes and headed downstairs. The kitchen was silent, the glass still on the floor. There were two more tags on the wall of the study—same house, different crime. I looked at the big slug holes in the wall, a .30-30 bigger than Billy’s .25, the rifle slugs mushrooming.

  What had been used to kill Semi and Nub? Something big, by the looks of them.

  I took the clothes and a small duffel from the closet, stuffed them in as I went down the stairs. In the hallway, I went to the closet, pushed boxes aside, and reached down a box of nine-millimeter ammo—eighty rounds. If that wasn’t enough, we were in serious trouble indeed.

  On the way to the truck I called Roxanne.

  It buzzed, then went to voice mail. I texted her, said I was on my way back to the farm, be there in fifteen.

  No reply.

  I called Clair and he answered.

  “Any sign of Louis?”

  “No,” he said.

  “He’s probably back home, walking the woods with the dog.”

  “Yes,” Clair said. “Trying to think things through.”

  “Like the rest of us,” I said.

  “Like the rest of us.”

  A pause.

  “You get hold of Roxanne?”

  “Not yet. On my way.”

  “Remember what I—”

  “I did. And I am. And I will,” I said.

  I powered through the gears, jumped the potholes, clung to the turns. There was no reason to think that the person or persons who killed Semi would keep going. Message was sent. The remaining loose end of the team after Abram.

  Payback complete.