But he hated jets flying low, worse than Hueys. The Hueys just made him nervous and woke the memories, while low-level jets flat-ass scared the shit out of him. Closest he’d ever come to death, closer even than that last day in the paddies and jungle, was a fucking Air Force jet-jock. Bastard had dumped a 500-pounder right on the squad, impact so close it bounced Den right out of the mud where he’d been trying to dig his way back to the States. Fucker would have shredded him if it hadn’t been a dud, pieces too small to earn a body bag.
And then the flyboy’s wingman had lined up for his run, Red on the horn screaming “AbortAbortAbort!” and the squad throwing up every bit of lead they carried because they’d rather shoot down their own air-support than die from “friendly fire.” The FAC had finally gotten the message through.
Dennis grimaced as he holstered the pistol, calming his heart and breathing again. Those ancient Carlsson combat reflexes hadn’t caught up with military technology and the passing centuries. Shooting would have been a waste of ammo, the plane flying faster than the heavy slugs.
What the fuck was going on over there?
He’d ask Bouchard when they met for coffee and that dead deer. Ranger Rick had contacts.
Dennis stood up and leaned on the tree and took slow breaths, in and out, washing adrenaline out of his blood. Well, at least he’d have something to talk about at the next veteran’s outreach. He hadn’t been this twitchy in years. Combination of smells and sounds, he guessed, and ghost bears, and maybe the air-pressure changes of the storm overnight. Wood-smoke came downwind, rotten wet wood or maybe trash in the stove, smelled like burning thatch mixed with a whiff of JP-4 from the choppers. He still felt those Hueys in his guts.
He concentrated on the cold. If anything would snap him out of those memories, it would be cold.
And then he turned his back on the base and the sweep of the icy horizon and those thumping choppers. Playing war games. Toy soldiers. He shook his head. Hell, they didn’t even use Marine guards over there, just civilians from some security company in Virginia with political connections. Strangers, all of them—the company didn’t want to hire locals because they’d talk with their families about what they saw and heard. From what he’d seen, that meant a bunch of fat slobs who’d die of a heart attack if you ordered them to hump a weapon and a combat pack through the boonies all day.
Miles to go and promises to keep. He slogged along the driveway, counting spruce limbs down on the snow, one whole tree uprooted and sprawled across the driveway, sixteen, eighteen inches through, chainsaw bait come the spring thaw, almost worth sending to the mill. Not a bad toll, as storms went. He’d see worse before he saw better.
He let the choppers fade from his hearing, concentrating on the slow interrupted beat of a pileated woodpecker drilling for pine beetles, the even-slower but steady thump of the waves pounding on the rocks below. Sounds of peace, nothing like them in ’Nam. Cold wind. Smell of fresh spruce sap from the storm damage. Whiff of acrid fox.
The white path of the snow-covered driveway curved inland, away from the thump and spray, and the gatehouse took form through brush and branches. Andy Page had been out with his snowplow—cleared the road up to the locked gate, swung close past the gatehouse garage door to leave it nearly free. That gatehouse was a Carlsson bit of whimsy, nothing fancy like castle towers, French Chateau or English Manor look. Granddad had built a clam-digger’s shack and shed to guard his lair.
It looked like it was worth ten bucks total, 1920s dollars. From the outside—inside was rather more civilized. But any stranger poking down the road wouldn’t think twice about it, wouldn’t think one of them damned New York millionaires summered further in. Granddad saw no point in advertising for burglars, not when the place might sit empty eight-nine months out of the year. Sure, the locals would know about the place. Granddad trusted the locals. Not that they wouldn’t steal, given half a chance, but that they wouldn’t be able to get away with stealing from him, and knew it.
Sure, Granddad had good stuff in the old house, paintings and antiques and silver, but nothing a clam-digger could sell anywhere in Sunrise County. Any trouble for miles around, people would know who did it. That defined small town life. With feuds kept up for generations, if people knew, someone would tell, out of spite. Granddad used to say, the best detective in the State ’O Maine was a nosy fishwife cutting herring down at the cannery.
No, Granddad had been worried about thieves “from away” bringing in a truck and loading it full of Louis XIV chairs and Chinese vases big enough to hide Ali Baba’s gang. So instead they lost the place to an inside job, either the butler or the woodcutter.
Dennis shook his head and unlocked the garage doors, heaved them open on the crude strap-iron hinges that had been built with forty years of sag in them, hung his snowshoes out of mouse range, and cranked up the old GMC pickup. While it warmed up, he shoveled drifted snow away from the gatehouse doors, tidied up from the plow, and checked how the place had weathered the latest storm.
He unbuckled the belt and holster and pistol, hanging them on a peg next to the snowshoes, don’t take your guns to town. Then he glanced up into the shadows over the garage door header, inside, a place nobody would ever think of looking. Dad’s old M-1 Garand rifle hung there, a shadow deep in other shadows, ammo box full of loaded 8-round clips next to it. That war relic worked—he cleaned and tested and fired it as a salute each Veterans Day, a ritual Dennis carried on in memory of absent friends.
Maybe he should haul the rifle back with him this afternoon, keep it in the boathouse. That damned bear still had him spooked. Not that he thought bullets would touch it, but just in case . . . . He climbed up into the driver’s seat and threw the GMC into gear and four-wheel-drive. Automatic transmission, he didn’t have to fight a clutch with his plastic foot.
Maybe Ranger Rick had some ancient Naskeag wisdom to offer on ghost bears.
III
Dennis pulled the GMC into a slot in the haphazard parking of Shirly’s Coffee Pot, the few pickups and fewer cars scattered even more randomly than usual because the parking lines still hid under a skim of snow left behind from plowing. Ranger Rick’s official green State O’ Maine DIFW pickup was already waiting, blue tarp over something lumpy in the bed. It should be the roadkill deer, flash-frozen by the biting wind, more meat for the critters.
That wind ambushed Dennis when he climbed down from the heated refuge of his truck. He ducked his head and squinted against the swirling ice crystals that were doing their damnedest to rebuild their snowdrifts and erase even the hint of paving. The sudden cold drove an ice-pick into his sinuses. Winter had arrived, a few days early on the calendar and anxious to make a name for itself.
Shirly’s Coffee Pot served as a daytime focus of the tiny Winter Cove community. Time was, the old wood-framed building had been the general store, two stories of creaking swaybacked floors, walls lined with shelves holding anything from canned apricots to zither strings, back when a trip to the booming metropolis of Warren’s Mills could take two hours and Naskeag Falls was a vague rumor of the far frontier. Easier travel had killed that business.
Leaking tanks had killed the gas pumps, too, leaking tanks and Tracy’s Truck Stop and the cut-rate chain self-service station up on the highway. Even the naval bases hadn’t done anything to help business—they had their own PX and family housing, even a school. Self-contained, they turned their starched-uniform backs on the village.
Winter Cove was dying inch by inch, family by family, like half the backwoods communities in the state. The car and the arrival of good roads were killing them. They were killed by the arrival of choice. Why stay here, when you could go someplace warmer that had jobs? Even if you wanted to farm, there were rumors of good black soil that didn’t even have rocks stacked five feet deep. Flat land, someplace called Ohio or Indiana or some other furrin land in the Boston States.
Shirly’s was dying, too, didn’t even draw enough business to stay open the full day. They jus
t served up breakfast and lunch and coffee in between, with a generous side-order of gossip and tall tales when the water was too rough for hauling traps. Afternoons and nights, social functions slid down the road three miles to the crossroads bar and grill out on the Federal Road. Meanwhile, Shirly lived upstairs, fired up the griddle and started the coffee at 3:00 AM to catch the bachelor lobstermen before the morning tide.
Dennis rattled through the outer door, stomped snow off in the airlock, and then shouldered past the steamed-up inner door while pulling off his gloves and hat. He glanced around for Rick Bouchard’s red Game Warden jacket with all the shiny badges. Rear corner, as usual, never sitting with his back to any doors or windows. Dennis sometimes wondered if there were enough protected corners in the entire state for all the combat vets to feel comfortable at once.
“Mornin’ Shirl. Coffee, two creams.” The Coffee Pot served Navy-style boiler cleaner, and this batch would have been simmering for a couple of hours by now. Stick a spoon in it and the poor abused silverware would snap to attention and salute. No way Dennis would drink it black.
She already had it poured and mixed, had seen him pull into the lot and recognized the truck and knew what he’d order. Carlssons had lost the “from away” label a good number of generations back, so he was “local” enough to earn that courtesy even if he wasn’t related to half the town. He grabbed the mug, dropped his dollar, and nodded thanks.
Actually, the current “Shirly” was Roz Guptill, slinging hash-browns and hamburgers while her husband crewed a dragger out on the Georges Bank. Made it home from Gloucester every month or so, carrying a paycheck. That was the Sunrise County way to make ends meet. All the locals still called whoever stood behind the counter “Shirl,” even though the original owner had been dead for twenty years.
Den’s second glance added a dark head with a baseball cap sitting across from Bouchard, back to the door, looked like Indian complexion from here. Rick was full-blooded Naskeag—might be a cousin of his hitching a ride from the state.
Or maybe a delicate and oblique talk about poaching and poachers, in from the cold wind. Some few of the Naskeags weren’t too particular about seasons and bag limits, ignored the boundaries to tribal lands when they wanted a bit of extra meat for the winter. After all, the whole damn state had been their hunting ground before the English stole it. That was one reason why Augusta assigned Rick to this district—insider on the moccasin telegraph.
If he got a hinted name, then some aunt or grandmother would set the alleged perpetrator down across a kitchen table and ritual coffee and proceed to blister his ears off about tribal honor and stewardship of the land and respect for the spirit of the animal he hunted. No rules of evidence—judge, jury, and executioner rolled into one, Tribal law, oral and hard. The matriarchs ruled. You didn’t want to cross those old ladies. They’d tan your hide and use it for a drum-skin.
And Naskeags were a funny bunch. For starters, they weren’t “Federal” Indians. They’d signed a treaty with the Massachusetts Bay Colony, sometime before the revolution, and managed to make it stick. Tribal lands weren’t a reservation—they belonged to a tribal corporation that also dated back to colonial times. Royal charter.
How they’d finagled that, he didn’t know, but the tribe lived scattered in pockets throughout the white community and carried a lot of clout in Sunrise County. They kept quiet, didn’t throw their weight around, but if one of those aunts or grandmothers got on your case, the whole tribe and half the whites would shun you like an Amishman on the outs with his church. Dead meat. Might as well leave the state, or just shoot yourself.
Dennis paused and stood in the aisle, sniffing his coffee and blowing off the bitter steam. You learned some basic rules at a young age, in a town like Winter Cove. If Rick was talking tribal business, he wouldn’t want whiteskin ears picking up any names and places.
But Rick looked up, spotted Dennis, and waved him over. That meant no secrets passing across the table.
And the dark head turned to see why Rick had waved, and it wasn’t an Indian head, it was a Viet head, a hard-faced scowling brown girl under a broad conical straw hat, transplanting rice in the paddy mud, and she reached inside her black pajamas and pulled out a pair of grenades and pulled the pin on one and Den lit up his M-16 and blew her shit away and the rest of his squad did the same number on the other women who were all pulling out guns or grenades.
Ambush! And the snarl of battle died back into echoes and squawking birds before he had time to even think about what was happening, and he lifted his head out of the mud where he’d sprawled flat, and all the Cong lay quiet leaking blood into the rippled filthy water. The slow pop-pop-pop of single head shots made sure they stayed dead. Atrocity. Murder. War crime. But every troop in the squad had lost buddies KIA by dead Cong.
Dennis squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again, staring down at the shattered mug and splashed coffee the color of paddy mud dripping off his boots to trickle along the slope of the old cracked linoleum. Jesus fucking Christ! More flashbacks. He blinked and blinked again, erasing memories.
Shirly’s Coffee Pot. Not a paddy dike. And Roz handed him a mop and dustpan.
“You broke it, you bought it.”
He’d looked back, something twitching a sixth sense at just the right split-second to see the first hostile move, time going weird again and every bullet finding its mark. They broke the ambush without a single casualty. Broke the coffee mug. Dennis cleaned up his mess, slowly, methodically, mopping and sweeping and dumping the clanking bits of crockery into the garbage, quieting the shakes, breathing deep and concentrating on now.
And then he looked again. He saw that same face again. Not just a generic Southeast Asian face, Viet face, but a particular face burned into his memory. This woman could be her twin. His brain had taken those eyes, that vertical nose, that permanent scowl, that sharp chin, and done a pattern match from hell. The Red Sox baseball cap even threw the same shadow line across her forehead and eyebrows.
Baseball cap, in December, in Maine. Freeze your fucking ears off. Army language, part of the memories.
“You okay?” Rick was looking at him funny.
Dennis shook himself. “Yeah. Splashed a bit of hot coffee on my hand, jerked, lost the handle. That’s all. Sorry about the noise and mess.”
‘Nam vet, Green Beret, Rick had seen at least parts of the same elephant. Minus the berserker bit, maybe. Then he’d worked with the DEA, something or other, still Army but civilian status, rode one of those last choppers off the Saigon embassy roof. He’d quit active duty and came home and got his badge as a game warden, veteran’s preference hiring, job where he could line things up so he didn’t need to see more than a dozen people in a typical day’s work. Some things they didn’t talk about, like getting really twitchy during hunting season.
The woman just sat there wrapped in a blaze orange Eddie Bauer parka, glaring. Frown wrinkles made it look like that expression was a permanent feature. Dennis turned back to the counter and collected another cup of toxic mud, leaving two dollars this time to cover the damage, and then slid into the booth next to Rick. That woman sure was giving off vibrations that she didn’t want company on her side.
“Dennis, this is Susan Tranh. She’s doing a census on bald eagle populations, nesting success, that sort of thing. Doctor Tranh, this is Dennis Carlsson. Does wild mammal rehab, has some eagle nests on his property. Thought you might want to compare notes.”
Susan Tranh? Probably Suyen or some other Viet name. Although some of the Vietnamese Catholics gave their children Western names. He nodded at the introduction, got a bare minimum recognition back. Screw her.
“Yeah, we have three active nests, fledged six youngsters last summer. They’ve spread out now, no way to tell how many survived once they left the nest. Couple of abandoned nests, as well.”
The frown got deeper, narrowed eyes pulling a line between her eyebrows. “Three active nests? Six fledglings? You’re shitting me. Nobo
dy’s reported that kind of nesting success since DDT. How much land are you talking about?”
He’d expected her to speak the kind of sing-song Pidgin English he remembered from ’Nam, “Hey GI, you numbah one! Maybe screw my sister? She virgin.” She gave him a drawling Hahvahd accent instead, complete with the supercilious nose-in-the-air you associated with Cabots and Lodges. It set his teeth on edge. And you didn’t go asking people how much land they owned. Rude.
He made an effort to be civil. “Three nests, six fledglings. Counted them all, first flights off the nest and hanging around for a week after. The nests are all within about fifty yards of each other. Including the abandoned ones.”
She shook her head. “Ospreys. Eagles don’t nest in colonies, not in Maine. Wasting my time.” She started to slide out of the booth.
One more try. “Ms. Tranh, I know the difference between ospreys and eagles. Pure white head on the adults, no mask, white tail. Wings held flat when they soar. Bald eagles.”
“That’s Doctor Tranh, thank you. Show me the birds and I might believe you.” She slid to the end of the booth and then paused. “Mammal rehab. You a veterinarian?”
“State licensed rehab. Any animal that needs medical care, I’ve got three vets I can call. Most of the critters come to me from vets.” He left a little bit of intentional ambiguity there—Rick was a “vet.” But she was really getting on his nerves.
She scowled, worse than before. “What are your qualifications?”
That did it. “State licensed rehab. Take it up with the governor.”
“I just might do that.” She turned and stalked away through the front doors—must have driven herself here rather than catching a ride with Rick.
Dennis stared at her back and then at the door closing behind her. “Where’s La Migra when you really want them? That woman needs her green card punched.”
Rick drew a swallow from his mug of coffee, put it down, and shook his head with a wry grimace. Dennis couldn’t tell if the face was for the coffee or the conversation. “Won’t do you a damned bit of good. She was born in the USA—says her father was some kind of diplomat under the Diem gang, stationed in Washington. Can’t kick her out.”
Ghost Point Page 3