Castle Danger--Woman on Ice

by Anthony Neil Smith

  “S’up?”

  “Dude, I’ve been waiting, like, fifteen minutes. You forget to wake up?” Gerard, my partner for just over a year now. He annoyed the living shit out of me. We would never be friends. I wasn’t sure he understood that. Yet.

  I grumbled something.

  “Come on, I’m right outside. Don’t make me start this.” The siren whooped once.

  “Hey, G, my neighbors!”

  “Hurry your ass up!”

  I threw the blankets off, sat up, and immediately wished I could fall back into bed. I’d rather piss himself than risk hypothermia. But it was time to work. Time for me to put on the uniform and pretend to give a damn for the rest of the day.

  From when I got into that fucking squad car at headache o’clock in the morning until the end of yet another mind-numbing shift, Gerard never stopped talking. It was eight hours, sometimes ten to twelve, of constant chatter. He’d repeat things three different ways to fill blank air. He’d ask too many questions. He picked at whoever he was talking to, jabs and insults, nothing serious, but once they piled up into hours and hours of worthless shit, you realized you didn’t remember any of what he’d said, and he probably didn’t either.

  I wondered if he acted the same around his wife, around his parents. He delivered it all with this expression that made him look like he was always asking a question, always the same passive-aggressive question: “You mad at me, bro?”

  Today he said, “You look tired. Up all night? You staying up? You can’t sleep?”

  I rubbed my palm across my eyes. He was driving too fast on icy roads. I was used to it. “It’s fine.”

  “Seriously, are you tired? Are you sick?”

  “Listen—”

  “I saw your ex. I saw her at Blackwoods last night. She was with some people I didn’t know. Might have been a double date. She looked hot, man. Jesus. How long has it been? You still hung up on her?”

  “Gerard, please, just shut up. My head … God, it feels like it’s made of glass and your voice is like a fucking jackhammer.”

  “Need some coffee? Something stronger?”

  “No. Thank you.” He was right. My brain craved the caffeine. It was cursing me in colorful Italian. Unfortunately, I don’t understand Italian unless it comes with pictures on a food menu. My brain, pissed, yelled Pepperoni! Mozzarella! Beef-a-roni!

  “So what’s for lunch today?” He didn’t give me time to answer. He never did. “High school girls or nurses on lunch break?”

  “Gerard-”

  “We should scare a few high school girls for smoking. I mean, goddamn, fifteen now isn’t like what fifteen was when we were fifteen.”

  He came across like a creep, always talking about women as if they were blow-up dolls, but as soon as the shift was over, he raced home for his wife’s approval. He had three girls; eleven, nine, and four. He was always the first to leave when the boys went drinking. At least he had been before my porn habit kept me away.

  That was funny because one reason I’d stopped drinking with the boys was that their way of talking about women — especially the “badge bunnies” who got their thrills blowing cops — was making me feel like I was wired differently. As they shouted at girls across the bar, or reduced one of them to a pair of tits and a pair of lips, like furniture, I wanted to hide in the shadows, or apologize to each and every lady in the joint.

  I didn’t want to listen to Gerard. I rarely ever did. Seemed like his entire purpose in life was to agitate the living shit out of anyone he ever spoke to, with no self-awareness of how close he kept coming to getting punched in the face. I was amazed he had been married ten years, happily. I was amazed he was a good father, if indeed he was. All signs pointed to yes. But, Jesus, to the rest of us …

  What you should know about Gerard is that he was a decent cop when it mattered. That said, in many ways the job was fantasy fulfillment for him. It was for many guys. They were in it for the stories. They were in it for the rush. And of course they were in it to feel like heroes. And to unlock pussy with their golden badges.

  Now ask me why I was in it.

  Because it was like Halloween all year long.

  What I really wanted to do that morning, if only Gerard had a mute button, was take in the lake, frozen over, foggy. Duluth is a bowl, and as they say, “everything ends up downhill” here if you give it enough time.

  Winter is a killer — for driving, for slipping on ice, for cracking through into the coldest hell, for isolation — but it’s unbelievably gorgeous. The trees, either covered in snow or hoarfrost, hide the long view you get in the fall, when the leaves go blazing yellow and red before they give it up and all that’s left are branches and miles of fair warning. Get out while you can. Why would anyone live through what’s to come?

  But we do. We love it, we hate it. It’s complicated.

  The lake is hypnotic. Some days it’s easy to forget this is a lake and not a sea, an ocean, the edge of the world. The lake is magical. It understands me, probably better than I understand myself.

  That morning, I tolerated Gerard talking back to the dispatch calls as though they could hear him, and with a shitty thing to say about every officer on duty. Every one. So I watched the lake, free of all the international barges that kept their distance from early February until the ice gave way enough to let them through again in the spring.

  The only interruptions, the Lift Bridge, the brick buildings of Canal Park, and off to the west, factories, industry, smoke, blight. A necessary evil. Dull gray, dirty, but necessary. For the unspoiled beauty and whatnot, you had to ride up the North Shore until you couldn’t see across to the other shore anymore.

  I digress. But don’t you love the embellishment? It gives a real sense of atmosphere, I think.

  Then the call came in, the one we all received at one point during the winter. Sometimes tragic, sometimes a close one, and sometimes a fucking laugh riot. It awoke me from whatever malaise had dragged me down. Possible snowmobile through the ice in the harbor.

  I hated those calls. There was never a happy ending.

  Gerard and I were already sweating through our winter gear in that hotbox of a squad car. I would’ve kept it colder if I was driving, but a deal is a deal. Harder to move in the winter gear, and to hear or smell or see with your peripheral vision. Harder to get a feel for the situation. If you commit a crime in the winter — outside — in Duluth, and you try to fight the cops, you’re a determined scumbag, I’ll give you that.

  We drove slowly over the Lift Bridge onto Park Point, surrounded on both sides of the narrow road by houses of all types — nailed-together cabins, a few small modern beauties, and McMansions that filled every square inch of the lot and stood three stories tall to make up for what the macho owners seemed to consider an emasculatingly small property footprint. Gerard pulled into the lot at the park.

  The ice fishers — only a few out in the rough winds — were already crowding in. We had to use our cop voices to get them out of the way. I didn’t know these men, mostly older, mostly bearded, mostly quiet. Gerard did, though. Slapped a few shoulders and traded a few barbs. The wind was its own thing, constant and regrettable.

  My nose ached, everything inside my nostrils going icy. You never quite get used to it. But then you get the urge to look up through squinted eyes and marvel at the bowl all the way to the top of the hill, the buildings, the neighborhoods, the smokestacks and columns of smoke, and then follow it down to the lake’s surface and see the land fade away and think about how much nothing is between you and the opposite shore.

  The ice fishers kept a respectable distance, but we could tell from the way the ice was eaten up, the block of it, the ragged hole that had been cut quickly, that they had helped whoever caught the woman get her above ground as quickly as they could, even after realizing she was already too far gone. They had left her lying on the side of the hole, her legs hovering above the open water, frozen solid. Oversized leather boots, but black fishnet pantyhose
up to a black miniskirt, a long leather jacket that was splayed out above her like a cape, and a too-small, too-thin t-shirt. On her head — a snowmobiler’s helmet.

  The ice fisher who had snagged her stood apart from the crowd, near his bucket, fishing rig, and gas-powered auger. Just a day fisher, not one of those with an icehouse set up big enough for a couch and a generator for their satellite TV, the kind who didn’t so much do it for the fish as for their own portable bar-away-from-home. This fisherman — frosted mustache, jolly cheeks, eighties metal-framed glasses — told them how he almost lost the whole rig when the body got hooked up, just a slow pull at first, before the damn thing nearly jumped out of his hands.

  “Thought I’d lose her, once I saw what it was, I did, I did. I called these other fellows to give me a hand right quick. Couple of them had chainsaws.”

  Gerard nodded along. “Why’d you say it was a snowmobile?”

  He pointed. Took a moment for our eyes to adjust, but maybe a couple hundred feet away was a hole in the ice, already beginning to fill with slush. “I just assumed. That hole, the helmet.”

  “She sure as hell ain’t dressed for a snowmobile ride.”

  Fisherman shrugged. “Well, if someone picked her up in town, was taking her back to his shack out here …” Another shrug.

  I called it in. Said we needed a van to take her to the morgue. But there wasn’t much else we could do. If there was a snowmobile and another rider, maybe another fish hook would eventually snag one of them. Otherwise, maybe they would show up in the spring. If it had been another lake, smaller and out in the woods, then it might’ve been easier. But this was the harbor, sandwiched between Duluth, Minnesota and Superior, Wisconsin, a shipping and tourist jewel in better weather, and still pretty popular in the dead of winter.

  I took a closer look at the fisherman. His nose and cheeks on fire, I assumed due to the beer and bourbon on his breath. His eyes a little crusty, as though he’d been crying for his catch. I couldn’t deal with it. So I turned to the “victim”, as anyone must surely deserve to be called if they died under unusual circumstances. A victim of death himself, perhaps. Or of alcohol, simultaneously our savior and our end. It started to make a lot of sense. Ice fisherman takes the party onshore for the evening, gets a steak and onion rings, gets even more loaded, starts talking up a woman in the bar, one dressed for a night on the town, and somehow he convinces her to stick around, come see his icebound paradise and join him for a few more beers and whatever that might lead to.

  I snapped pictures of the scene with my phone. I circled closer, as close as I dared on the ice, perfectly solid at a distance, but perhaps broken and unstable the closer I stepped to her.

  I got within about six feet before I felt wobbly and heard the cracking intensify beneath me. Then I backed off. I started towards the larger hole, scanning all-around on the ice for snowmobile tracks. I mean, there were plenty, but I wanted something, a straight line to the hole, something to stand out.

  At my feet, the snow swirled across the top of the ice like it was alive. Footprints. Truck tires. Snowmobiles. By the time I’d come to the edge of the hole, definitely large enough for a snowmobile, I still wasn’t seeing what I wanted. No tracks that led into the water. Maybe it would take someone with a sharper eye to find it, a tech or another cop.

  But my face was growing numb. It was a few degrees below zero this morning, and not as cloudy as usual. We would call this pretty decent weather, actually, and still I couldn’t stand much more of it. If I took a few swigs from the fisherman’s bourbon, maybe. If I fattened up my belly with beer — which wasn’t too far-fetched an idea anymore — maybe I could hang with these guys. But this morning, I was embarrassed. This was my home, my weather, my way of life, and I was shivering like a kid on the playground without a jacket.

  When I turned back, there was Gerard, on his knees beside our lady popsicle. Inches. The goddamned—

  He unstrapped the helmet, tugged it, then again. Harder and harder until it gave way. Released so hard it sent Gerard to his ass. The hair beneath, blondish-white page boy with a weak, pink glow, looked askew. Not right at all. Gerard caught that, too, but he shouldn’t be doing any of this. He should wait for our back-up. It was obvious the woman had been dead for long enough that reviving her would be a fool’s errand. So our job was to leave her the fuck alone until we got some back up. I sped up my steps and shouted at him to wait.

  He waved at me. Idiot.

  “No, no, no, get back.”

  Too late. He had already grabbed her chin, tried turning her head left and right. He leaned closer. “Hey, Manny, this is wild!”

  “Get back! I already made the call! Get away from her.”

  He tugged her hair, and it looked more wrong than it had a moment before. He pulled it all the way off. A wig. Short brown hair beneath.

  Gerard’s eyes went wide and he turned to me, shook the wig. “Dude, she’s a man! This guy’s a man!”

  The ice fisherman crowded a little closer and I started running, because they would sure as fuck contaminate the scene.

  They did more than that. Two or three stepped over to see what Gerard was shouting about, and one slipped, hit the ice hard, and the block the body laid upon went sideways dumping her — or him — back into the lake, with Gerard going in right after, and the third fisherman about to duck under before his friend made a grab and held on to his arm.

  “Goddamn! I can’t keep a grip! You’re too fucking heavy!”

  “I can’t! I can’t! The cop’s got hold of my legs!”

  “Jesus, kick him off!”

  “I can’t! He’s got both my legs!” He dropped lower, to his shoulders, “Jesus, fuck, please, Tom, don’t let go!”

  I slid the final few feet and grabbed the fisherman’s other arm. I don’t know what good that did, because I couldn’t find any traction to help pull him up. I was going in, too. Tom’s arms were slipping. My hands were already under, trying the find a grip. The other fisherman cleared farther back as our thrashing and kicking caused more ice chunks to fall into the lake, more water to splash up all around, knocking over the fisherman’s bucket and carton of empty Grain Belt cans.

  “Hold on!” I shouted. Then, “Somebody, come grab my legs, goddamn it! Pull us out!”

  “I’ll go get a rope!”

  “I don’t have time for a rope! We’re losing him!”

  The man’s mouth was bobbing up and down in the chop, sputtering. He was going into shock. Some fishermen rushed back to their trucks to fetch ropes, while a couple of others finally got a boot apiece behind me and pulled, lifting me in the air between my frozen hands and feet.

  With no warning, the submerged fisherman got a lot lighter and bobbed high like he was bait and the fish had got off. I knew what that meant. His lightness shocked me, and I let go without thinking, fell on my face, and the men at my feet didn’t know what to do. They held on. But the man in the lake had gotten a better hold on Tom, halfway up on the ice and crawling along back to safety.

  But no sign of our frozen, well, whatever he or she was. And no sign of Gerard. With a little help I finally got back on my feet, crossed my arms to warm my severely ice-burned hands, and dared step to the edge of the now-enormous hole, just as I saw a handful of fellow Duluth officers heading onto the ice. I turned back to the water. There was nobody there. Gone … until the thaw.

  Gerard had finally shut the fuck up.

  2

  Up in the woods north of Little Marais, a man I hadn’t met yet was crouching in the snow, had been for hours. Probably hunting Bambi’s dad, all the while thinking how fucked up America was due to too much Obama, not enough Jesus.

  To be fair, I would never understand what it was like to live in Joel Skovgaard’s head. He never said much. He was a cold and angry son of a bitch, and smarter than he let on. Smarter than the people he voted for, that was for sure … which made me wonder why he voted for them.

  Still, to tell his story, I had to try figuring
him out.

  And no, he wouldn’t be hunting deer in the middle of February. Probably rabbit instead.

  Joel relished the cold. It soothed him. Four tours of duty in Iraq had made him hate the heat. He would never live someplace without a winter, he was damned sure of that now. He needed someplace cold to cool his blood, cool his mind, and especially the anger.

  Hunting. He squeezed down the heat and rage into a pinpoint dead center of his scope. The smaller the target, the better. He’d bagged two nice sized bucks in the fall, as soon as he got back from the final tour, but he didn’t know what to do with them. His younger brother and his dad congratulated him, whooped it up, but Joel was confused.

  He’d hunted from age eleven until now — fifteen years — but this was the first time he thought, Do we leave them there? Will other deer come to take them away? Will they pray to some Northern Deer God for revenge? But no, they set them in the back of the truck and took them home to be cleaned and turned into steaks, trophies for the wall, photos for the laptop wallpaper.

  He had wanted to be a sniper.

  Focus. The rabbit had no idea he was there.

  Instead, up to their ears in snipers already, they’d made him just another Marine. Nothing special. He did become a Lance Colonel a few weeks into training because his Sergeant saw leadership potential, but then he languished there because he didn’t want to lead anyone into anything.

  It meant he had guarded places he didn’t want to guard — shops, food stalls, markets. It meant he had acted like a traffic cop. He had stepped in to calm disputes between angry, dusty men on the streets. He had been spat on. He had been humiliated, called by kids to apparent “IEDs” or suicide bombers only to find an empty box, or a fat old man deeply insulted to be stopped and frisked, while the kids pointed and laughed.