Ghost Point

by James A. Hetley

  ‘Nam. How would Ms. “That’s Doctor Tranh, thank you” survive out here? A tempting image crossed his mind, her orange Bauer parka almost visible in the gusting snow. Invite her out to check on those nests, nests too big for osprey, and give her a short survival test.

  Serve the bitch right.

  Dennis shook off the image. He had his own survival test to pass, one he’d lived through dozens of times before but each one still could be his last. It was simple pass/fail scoring, and you couldn’t appeal your grade to the department head.

  Price of living alone. Never hike alone, never climb alone, never sail alone, never dive alone, never ski alone. Advice of caution, ’specially if you’re a cripple gimping along on one foot. Screw ’em. Life is dangerous. Terminal disease, no exceptions proved to science. I’d rather freeze to death than rot for fifteen years bedridden in a nursing home.

  Ghost trees turned solid around him as the snow thinned, gusts still shaking mini-avalanches loose from the spruce and pine but less new snow falling. The squall seemed to be blowing out to sea. Another half-hour, hour, and he could be walking through dead calm under clear skies. Or through the heart of a blizzard. You could flip a coin to make your forecast—odds would be just as good as believing the radio.

  The toboggan snagged on a spruce seedling poking through the snow, the hundredth time. He turned and cleared it. He shuffled on, snow squeaking under his feet now that the wind had quit howling in his ears. A red squirrel chattered defiance from the spruce thicket to his left, warning the wind to stay away.

  The first pens loomed ahead, most empty for the winter. Bimbo should be tucked behind her windbreak, might be buried under drifted snow with just a tunnel melted through where her breath warmed the air. Cassidy and Pete would be denned up away from the wind as well. Welcome home, the mighty hunter. He should stay away from Bimbo, pass downwind so he wouldn’t spook her with any lingering stink of her dead cousin.

  But the gate to her pen stood open. Open and rattling in the gusts, torn loose from the top hinge and sagging into snow scraped into a heaped arc by its swinging.

  She’s blind. She’s scared of the world outside her pen, scared of Cassidy and Pete, scared of me even when I smell of cedar tips. She wouldn’t break out.

  Spetsnaz, or whatever. He shifted into Warrior again, pulse speeding, as if the jungle had crept into Maine’s winter woods. Dennis dropped the toboggan’s tote line and crouched next to an ancient spruce. He unslung his M-1, dusting snow off the sights while his eyes searched the shadows and light around him. Unbroken snow, fresh snow, tracks an hour old would be hidden, no more than dimples in the whiteness.

  A furrow led out of the pen. Holding low, awkward on the snowshoes, he shuffled nearer by one step and another while listening for any sound out of place. Pete whined from his pen, the coyote picking up Den’s scent on the breeze but too nervous to come out and play. No sign of Cassidy, gates to both pens still closed, no fresh marks in the snow, bobcat probably sleeping through the day in his straw nest.

  Dennis wasn’t a tracker, not like Rick. The furrow looked like something had been dragged through the snow, before this latest squall. Something deer-sized, something doe-sized. He knelt and dug at the snow with his left hand, right hand holding the M-1 against his hip with the safety off ready for a snap shot.

  He came up with blood, crimson snow frozen in lumps. Deer hair. A lot of blood and hair. Poacher. Fucking murder, killing a deer in a pen. Killing a blind deer in a pen. He felt a moment of red rage, then swallowed it and fed it to his senses as adrenaline.

  Stay to one side of the trail, leave evidence untouched, get to the boathouse and call Rick on the CB radio. This will piss him off.

  Eyes ahead, eyes behind, eyes to each side and overhead, searching for any trace of danger, anything out of place, listening, sniffing the air, crystal clarity of senses, Dennis dropped back into full stalking mode and crept across the snow. The furrow led toward the sea, toward the landing. Step by slow stalking step, he came in sight of the boathouse. The furrow swung wide of it, as if avoiding. But tracks, fresh tracks, came up from the sea on a separate line, turned to the side door, ended.

  Vanished inside. Snowshoes stood by the door, aluminum frames and neoprene pads, fancy high-tech strangers. Dennis crouched next to the trunk of a pine, a hundred feet from his door, slid flat behind the trunk and the mound of a boulder under the snow. Someone, someone probably not the poacher, had entered his house minutes ago, after the snow ended. Dennis didn’t know anyone who owned snowshoes like those.

  His finger toyed with the safety. Part of him wanted to stomp across the snow and roar through his own door, rifle at the ready, and execute a little berserker rage. Part of him remembered how he’d cleared brush for an open field of fire around the place, just part of feeling comfortable in the world. No way anyone could sneak up on that boathouse without being seen. He felt eyes peering out his own windows, alert and armed. He’d learned to pay attention to that Warrior sense.

  Spetsnaz? Russian commandos, same ruthless training and black-ops missions as Bouchard?

  He settled into the snow, the iron blade of his rifle sight steady on the door with the snowshoes next to it. His enemy would come back out the way he went in. Besides, the other doors were still blocked by snowdrifts—he hadn’t shoveled them out yet. And if Dennis slogged back to the gatehouse telephone and called the cops, he’d be waiting for at least an hour before a deputy showed up. The burglar, the whatever, would be long gone.

  He could wait. He was dressed for the cold, and hadn’t sweated.

  He waited. Chickadees chattered from the trees, waves humped and boomed on the shore, wind shook snow loose from the branches overhead. He waited. His toes complained of the cold, both the flesh and plastic feet. He wiggled the flesh toes inside the boot inside the snowshoe binding, waking the pins-and-needles of circulation, but he couldn’t do a damn thing about his plastic foot, the phantom pain.

  He waited. His rage cooled and became calculation. He probably would not shoot that bastard the instant he stuck his nose out the door—wait and ask some questions first. The tracks came from the water . . . .

  He waited. He wiggled his toes.

  Sounds focused on the door—scuffling feet, the grunt of tugging the door open from its frame winter-warped by cold and dryness and frost-heaved foundation stones. He settled his finger against the trigger and relaxed his breathing.

  A man showed in the darkness of the door frame, a man dressed in winter camouflage of blotched white and gray and black, a man carrying an assault rifle. Military weapon, military clothing, military stance. Weapon looked like a sawed-off M-16, not AK-47, stock just the bare gray metal of the buffer tube with a butt-plate attached. A careless man, total stranger, didn’t look around and study the woods over the sights of his weapon, not acting like Bouchard would. That man turned his back on the woods to tug the main door shut and then close the storm door, made sure they were tight just as if he cared. He squatted on the porch steps, next to his snowshoes, leaned the weapon against the cedar shingles of the boathouse wall, started the fiddling-dance of strapping snowshoes to his boots.

  Spetsnaz? The picture read strange to Den’s eye, warrior sense just wound up to the edge and not over it. He shifted his sights to the rifle leaning against the wall, against his wall, centered on the receiver just behind and below the ejection port. Damnfool cowboy-movie trick, shooting the weapon rather than the man. Hundred feet, match rifle and target ammo, piece of cake. He squeezed the trigger.

  The crack of the M-1 echoed and re-echoed, turned hollow from the stone cliffs across the bay, and his sights recoiled and then settled back on the man. That assault rifle cartwheeled into a puff of fresh snow fifteen feet down the boathouse wall, well out of the man’s reach, and he’d have to wade through snowdrifts four feet deep to get to it. Dennis lay still, sheltered by the pine trunk and the boulder, hidden behind snow.

  He waited.

  The man had jerked t
o his feet, hand clawing at his parka over his right hip but not diving inside. Now he stood still, hands in the open, scanning the forest around him. Body language said he hadn’t spotted Dennis. Body language said he had a sidearm belted under that parka.

  Long range for a pistol. “Hands on top of your head!”

  The man obeyed.

  Good first step. He understood English and seemed willing to behave. The scene still read strange.

  “You’ve got a sidearm. I can put three rounds through your heart before you reach it. Unzip your parka and show it to me, move slow, I’ll let you. Move an inch too far or too fast, I’ll shoot. You want to take that weapon out slowly and lay it on the steps. Understand?”

  The stranger had zeroed in on Den’s voice, staring toward his tree now. He nodded, licking his lips from fear. Dennis kept the sights hard on the man’s sternum.

  “These are hollow-points, match bullets. No small neat holes, and it’s a long way to the nearest hospital. Move like you want to live a while longer.”

  The man nodded again. His hand lowered to his zipper, an inch at a time, tugged it down, spread the parka wide to show a khaki web belt and holster underneath. He lifted a black automatic out of it, looked like an army .45, thumb and two fingers holding the butt, nowhere near the trigger or the grip safety. He crouched, slow and careful, and laid the pistol down on the porch landing. He stood up again. He’d finally spotted Dennis, identified the lump beside a tree with a barrel sticking out of the snow and looking like a branch stub.

  “Naval Security.”

  That clicked with the rest of the picture. Dennis nodded to himself but didn’t relax. “Take out your ID card and drop it next to the pistol. Walk away from the building. Walk over to that crooked spruce and stand in the middle of the snowdrift.”

  The man moved slowly again, pulling out a wallet and then a card from the wallet and dropping the card. He stepped down from the porch and waded through snow, no snowshoes, slower and slower as it rose above his knees and then his waist.

  Time for the acid test. Did he carry a holdout? Cops usually did, soldiers might not.

  Dennis struggled to his feet, leaning on the tree, awkward with the snowshoes and the plastic foot and the long waiting, and the man stayed still in his snowdrift even when Den’s rifle strayed off-target.

  The stranger studied Dennis for a minute, took in his stance and cover and the way he held a weapon, then lifted an eyebrow. “Nam?”

  “Army. Iron Triangle.”

  “Khe Sanh.”

  Den nodded at the lodge recognition, sign and countersign. He stopped short of giving his unit and dates in-country, though. “Semper Fi, Marine.” He didn’t lower the Garand, kept the iron sights centered on the intruder’s chest. The man had no business here, wherever he might have served. “What the fuck you think you’re doing?”

  “Naval Security, like I said. We’ve got a . . . situation . . . over at the base. Commander ordered a coast check.”

  Dennis shook his head. “Land’s posted, signs every twenty feet along the shore. What gave you the brilliant notion you could poke into private houses?”

  “Naval Security.”

  Okay, one of those. Certain jobs bred certain kinds of assholes. “That won’t even buy you a cup of coffee off the base. You got any kind of badge from a civil authority? State, county, local? You got a search warrant?”

  Dennis didn’t expect an answer. He didn’t get one, either. He shuffled across snow to the boathouse, picked up the ID card, and studied it. One Edward O. Johnson, USMC, card gave his rank as second lieutenant, if he’d been at Khe Sanh and was still a butter-bars he must have come up through the ranks and OCS. And lost all sense in the process. Lieutenants shouldn’t be let out without a keeper, a senior NCO by choice.

  Dennis dropped the card, squatted on the porch, and pulled out his Webley for backup before leaning the M-1 against the wall. He picked up the .45 auto and cleared its action, field-stripped it, and tossed the barrel forty feet off into the snow. Then he retrieved that sawed-off M-16, a model he’d never seen before, and tried the action. It was jammed—the .30 cal slug had taken it exactly where he’d aimed.

  He stared over at the waiting Marine. “Round in the chamber?”

  The man hesitated. “No.”

  “You don’t lie very well. Work on it. You’ll need practice, the way you’re going.”

  Dennis snow-shoed closer to the man where he stood mired in the drift, centered the M-16’s sights between the man’s eyes, fiddled with the safety and trigger guard, and shook his head at the wince. No blood on the cammies, no deer hair. There’d been a lot of blood and hair.

  He pointed the muzzle at the sky and pulled the trigger. A flat crack echoed off the sea cliffs again, thinner and lighter than the boom of the M-1. No ejected cartridge—action truly jammed. He dumped the crippled M-16 in the snow and retrieved his old Garand.

  “Take your Mattel toy and .45 back to the armory and explain just what happened to them. I ought to keep your ID card and hand it over to your CO in person, but I won’t. I don’t like officers and I don’t like shitheads. Get the fuck off my land and don’t come back. Don’t slow down, don’t look around. I might be following you. And next time, I aim at the man rather than the weapon.”

  But he wouldn’t follow the Marine. He needed to call Rick on the CB. Call him about whatever took Bimbo.

  That was the real enemy.

  VI

  Rick Bouchard waved his hand close above the snow, glove off and fingers aching with the cold, dusting the fresh loose flakes to each side as much by the wind of his hand passing as by touch. Like an archaeologist, he thought, brushing dirt from an ancient posthole shown only by the difference in soil color and texture. Exactly like. Someone had dragged something across this snow, heavy, limp, smooth, packing the surface. The snow was going to tell him who dragged what and when. He just had to read it with care and interpret what he read.

  Even outside of the dragged trail, a trained eye could find distinct layers in the white cold mass that others would dismiss as “snow.” Not just snow. Snow changed, minute by minute and hour by hour, as the sun and wind and dry air and later flakes packed earlier snowfall down, as the crystals sublimed directly from ice to vapor, as points and corners rounded and drew back from lacy new flake into the tight rough lump of old snow granules, as soot and spruce needles and dust settled on the surface and formed lines like the pages of a book.

  Texture, too. The snow of the previous few days, the blizzard’s snow, showed a different texture than the three or four inches of today’s snow squall. It even had started out different. The wind-driven blizzard snow had been battered before it touched the ground, and then it bounced and rolled and rose up in swirls and fell again before it found its home for the next four months. Today’s snow had fallen light and fluffy and perfect for the photo album, cotton-balls rather than ice.

  Texture. “God is in the details,” like that German architect guy said.

  Texture showed the dragging weight of a body, covering and packing tracks made an instant before. Rick tried to shove what he already “knew” to one side, taking only what the snow wanted to tell him. He might think he knew that the body was a dead deer, but the snow might know otherwise. He’d only hear that different story if he listened with an open mind. For all he knew, the deer had killed a poacher. Or aliens had landed and abducted another specimen for their flying-saucer labs.

  A long groove continued along one edge of the packed surface, possibly a dragging hoof. Deer hair scattered in the packed snow, loose single hairs rather than clumps, pulled loose rather than cut ends from a wound or the blade of a skinning knife. Drops of blood. Smeared drops, the body had been dragged over the drops fresh and hot.

  Blood from the body, or from whatever dragged it?

  He shuffled forward, careful, crouching hunched over in an awkward duck-walk on cross-country skis, always remembering that he destroyed evidence as he moved. The move gave
him more footprints, smeared and packed by the dragged weight, always smeared, as if whoever dragged that weight used it to wipe out the prints. But poachers always made mistakes. Criminals always made mistakes—that was one of God’s gifts to the cop or game warden. If the perp had half a brain, you’d never even know there was a crime.

  Rick stood, stretching and bending, working kinks out of his spine. He glanced over at where Carlsson leaned against a white-pine trunk, well clear of the trail, watching with the patience of someone who had seen tracking done right. Rick shrugged, Carlsson shrugged back. No need for words, with nothing to report.

  Standing also allowed Rick to measure the spacing between the footprints, gave him perspective to visualize the stride. Even dragging a deer—full carcass, not gutted out, no half-frozen pile of heart and lungs and stomach and intestines—even dragging a maybe deer, the stride was that of a full-grown man. A heavy man, a strong man, but not maybe a healthy or a sober man. The prints didn’t line up quite right, showed slips and staggers.

  Back into the crouch, he slid the skis forward another foot, dusted back another layer of light fresh snowflakes. He found more blood, off to the edge of the trail, not quite as smeared. Not from the same wound? Or showing that it came from the dragger rather than the drag?

  Deer rarely hurt hunters, man bites dog, but the scrambled tracks and other signs in the pen had been flat-ass weird. As if whoever, whatever killed the deer had gone in mano a mano, not even a knife. Sort of thing Rick had done in Special Forces survival training—rabbit-sticks, sharp rocks, snares braided out of grass or vines.

  Rick flexed his fingers, turning numb and stiff with the December wind. He scooped under the blood, lifting it and the chunk of snow it stained. Something about the blood nagged at him, something about the color or the stiffness even freezing in the snow. He’d seen a lot of blood. Human blood, deer blood, moose and bear and rabbit and woodchuck blood, fish and snake and lizard blood. A lot of people would tell you that blood was blood, but he’d learned subtle differences that didn’t need a microscope or a forensic lab. You are what you eat. Or what eats you.