by Paul Doiron
“What?”
“Those shell casings he fished out of the lake matched cartridges he collected from Khristian’s property. Not only that but the slugs he dug out of Morse’s walls matched a round Khristian fired into the sand at that guy Cronk. The ballistics techs are sure they came from the same AR. That son of a bitch Bilodeau-he actually made a case.”
My gaze drifted from the detective’s beaming face back to the crash site. The creeper had flown off. I was having trouble registering the news. “Khristian just gave up without a fight?”
“Bilodeau showed up at the smoke shop with two wardens and three deputies. I guess one of Rhine’s men had spotted his truck in the lot. Khristian came out of the store carrying a couple of bags. He must have figured he didn’t have a chance to reach for his shoulder holster.”
In my imagination I could picture the scene: the bald little man emerging from the tobacco shop, squint-eyed and sour-faced in the late-morning sunlight, to find himself staring down the barrels of half a dozen pistols and shotguns. For a moment, he must have wondered if he had time to drop the bags and draw the Colt 1911, or whatever death-dealing device he wore strapped beneath his armpit. For years, Karl Khristian must have contemplated that eventuality-one final shoot-out with the socialists. How disappointed and impotent the sovereign citizen must have felt to be denied his rightful blaze of glory.
“Those rounds only mean that KKK was the one who shot up the mansion,” I said.
“He also drives a Dodge Ram.”
“So you think he was the one who forced Briar off the road?”
“My vehicle techs will go over every inch of his truck to find evidence that he was.”
“Huh,” I said.
Zanadakis’s tanned face hardened. “You sound disappointed.”
“Just surprised.” I still couldn’t reconcile the notion that Khristian had been the one who’d killed the moose, not least because he must have had a partner in crime that night.
The look the state police detective gave me might almost have been described as friendly. “Sometimes this is how it goes down,” he said. “You kill yourself trying to solve a case, and then it breaks while you’re busy doing something else, and you miss out on the takedown.”
He flashed another chemically whitened grin and then went off to tell the officers from the Forensic Mapping Unit that he had an appointment with a nutcase at the Washington County Jail.
After a few minutes of watching the surveyors continuing with their measurements and waiting for that brown creeper to reappear, I decided that Khristian’s arrest had freed up my own schedule. I found myself suddenly at loose ends for the first time in what seemed like weeks, which meant that I should be able to visit my mom. On the way back to my cabin, I would follow Zanadakis to Machias. If I hung around the county jail and jawboned with the deputies, maybe this overwhelming sense of anticlimax I was feeling would wear off and I would come to accept that the monster I’d been searching for had been apprehended without my lifting a finger.
Unless the evidence techs could find a scratch of cherry-red paint on Khristian’s truck, then the only hope of holding him accountable for Briar’s death would be to get a confession. The wizened little man seemed like he would be a tough walnut to crack. And I sincerely doubted that Zanadakis would give me a chance to use my rubber hose. Hell, Rhine would probably bar me from the jail as a precaution against the two of us coming face-to-face.
I took the scenic route through the village of Grand Lake Stream because I needed gas again and figured a slice of pizza from the Pine Tree Store wouldn’t hurt, either. There seemed to be fewer fishermen in town than the last time I’d passed through the village. The cold might have discouraged the fair-weather anglers from making the trip to what seemed like the ragged end of the earth. They didn’t realize that spawning salmon grew more feisty as the temperature plunged. Maybe Charley and I could get together for one last evening on the water before the season closed at the end of the month.
Imagining my life returning to normal was a pleasant fantasy. My mother’s illness would make such a thing impossible in any case. I checked my messages to see if I’d missed a call from Neil, but my stepfather must have taken my belated voice mail as an insufficient display of concern. If the investigation was winding down, and if Karl Khristian was indeed the guy, then I would request time off before deer season to spend with my mom. Not that a few days of hanging around her bedside would make up for years of freezing her out of my life.
And sooner or later, I would need to make a decision about the Warden Service. I should have felt more of a sense of satisfaction at the thought of Bilodeau making his big arrest. No doubt Rivard had received the news with joy and relief. Knowing that the lieutenant might have just escaped an official ass whipping didn’t make my future as a warden seem any brighter.
Then there was Stacey, whom I had resolved to forget. How easy would that be with us both working in the same state agency and assigned to the same wildlife division? Whether I wanted to or not, I was bound to run into her in the course of my patrols or over her parents’ dinner table. Every time I passed Skillen’s lumber mill, I was going to think of her sitting in the passenger seat of my truck. And it wasn’t like Washington County, Maine-population twenty thousand or so-was the best place in the world for horny young men to go looking for new girlfriends. I had tried that before, to bad effect.
34
I had just crossed the bridge from Indian Township into Princeton, the one over the Grand Falls Flowage, when my police radio went wild.
“Shots fired! Shots fired! He’s shooting at me!”
“Is there a unit calling radio?” the dispatcher asked.
“Twenty-two fifty-seven.” Those were Bard’s call numbers.
“What’s your location, twenty-two fifty-seven?”
“Twenty-one Plantation. Near the corner of West and Pocomoonshine roads.”
My mind didn’t need to draw a map; I knew it was the half-cleared lot where Chubby LeClair had dumped his Airstream.
“I need units to the corner of West and Pocomoonshine Road in Twenty-one Plantation,” the dispatcher said.
I grabbed the mic. “Twenty-two fifty-eight en route.”
I hit my blue lights and pressed hard on the gas. A couple of kids jumped back from the side of the road outside the Princeton Food Mart as I went tearing down Route 1. Two other units-a county deputy and a state trooper-called in to say they were also on the way.
“I’ve been shot!” said Bard.
“Who shot you, fifty-seven?” the dispatcher asked.
“Chubby LeClair! He’s shooting at me through the window of his camper.”
“Bard,” I asked, “how bad are you?”
There was a long pause. “I’m secure,” he said. “But I need a medic.”
“Ten-four,” the dispatcher said. “Ambulance will be en route. All units be advised, suspect is armed and dangerous.”
Washington County is a big and largely empty place, with a few clustered towns and isolated homesteads strung like beads along the paved highways. The sheriff’s office keeps a grand total of eight deputies, working rotating shifts, in its patrol division. At any given hour, only three Maine state troopers are on duty. Seven district game wardens are assigned to the entire county. Add in the Passamaquoddy police, the DEA, and the border patrol, and you’re left with only a dozen or so law-enforcement officers available to respond to an emergency in an area three times the size of Rhode Island.
Most of these officers had just assisted in the apprehension of Karl Khristian, forty-five minutes away in Machias. What this meant, I realized, was that Bard would be alone until I arrived. There was no one else to help him.
Even at top speed, it took me nearly fifteen minutes to cover the distance, bouncing along gravel roads. Bard stayed on the radio, so I knew he was still breathing. He reported that he had returned fire into the camper. No subsequent shots had been fired since the initial exchange, he said i
n a strained voice. That detail didn’t sound good for Chubby LeClair. The Airstream had walls about as thick as a can of tuna and just as easily pierced.
What the hell had Bard done? Almost at the very moment that Bilodeau was arresting Karl Khristian on a felony terrorizing charge-when the case seemed finally on the verge of being solved and Rivard had reason to smile for the first time in a week-Jeremy had gotten himself into a shoot-out.
The blood was pounding in my neck and my underarms were damp with perspiration as I arrived at the clearing. I stopped my truck far enough down the road so that I could survey the scene without coming under direct fire. Bard’s patrol truck was parked directly across the road from the Airstream, which reminded me of a space capsule that had crashed to earth in the Maine woods. Chubby had chain-sawed down a stand of paper birches to make room for it along the hillside, leaving foot-high stumps scattered about like crude pieces of sculpture. Among the amputated trees were other objects: a rusty bicycle, several scorched oil drums, a careless pyramid of wood scavenged from a rotting barn. I also saw a forest-green Toyota Tacoma parked at an abrupt angle to the door of the camper, as if its driver had arrived in haste or was planning a quick getaway.
I radioed the dispatcher to tell her I was on the scene and to see whether I could raise my fellow warden.
“Bard,” I said, “where are you?”
“Bowditch? Is that you? I’m inside my truck.”
“Are you OK?”
“The bullet grazed my fucking head. The blood keeps running into my eyes.”
Head wounds tend to bleed heavily, so it didn’t surprise me that Bard had panicked. I probably would have, too, if I’d been shot.
“Is Chubby still inside?” I asked, aware that if he had a police scanner-and most rural Mainers did, especially the inveterate lawbreakers-that he might be eavesdropping on our conversation.
“He hasn’t come out the door, and there’s no back way out of there.”
I unfastened my shotgun from its holder. “Hang tight,” I said. “I’m going to come up to your truck.”
“Ten-four,” he replied.
I pushed open my door and hopped out, keeping my body low to the ground, holding the heavy Mossberg with its sling around my wrist to steady my aim. Across the road from the camper, the hill fell steeply amid birches, beeches, and poplars. I figured I could circle around through the trees, using the embankment as cover.
I had to steady myself against tree trunks to keep from sliding on the fallen leaves down the hill. My torso was slick with perspiration beneath my ballistic vest, and I felt both hot and cold at the same time. Once I’d swung around below Bard’s truck, I had to climb the hill again. The forest floor was wet from where the morning frost was melting away, and the leaves came off beneath my boots in layers. The air rising from the ground carried the nutty odor of decaying vegetation.
Eventually, I managed to pull myself out of the ditch beneath the passenger side of Bard’s truck. I knocked at the door. It swung open suddenly from the pull of gravity, and I nearly toppled backward down the hillside to avoid being clipped in the shoulder. Bard thrust his bloody face at me. He was sprawled across both seats, his feet jammed beneath the steering wheel, and he had clamped a raincoat against his wounded skull. He looked like he’d spilled a can of red paint over his head.
“Took you long enough,” he said, trying to blink the blood out of his eyes.
“How are you doing?”
“It stings like a motherfucker. But I’m all right, I guess.”
“So what happened here?”
Bard rubbed at his eyes but succeeded only in rearranging the smeared pattern on his face. “He shot me is what happened. Just opened fire out the window while I was sitting here. The glass exploded and the bullet clipped me in the head. Son of a bitch!”
The concept that LeClair had spontaneously started shooting didn’t strike me as persuasive. There had to be more to the story. At the moment, I needed to focus on defusing the situation or at least stalling until backup arrived. “You said you returned fire?”
“Yeah, I emptied my magazine into the camper. He hasn’t shot at me again, so maybe I got lucky.”
So, if I understood what Bard was telling me, he had pulled his sidearm and fired blindly into the Airstream. Self-defense excuses a lot, but law-enforcement officers aren’t supposed to discharge their weapons without knowing what else their bullets might strike. The attorney general had personally interrogated me when I’d shot a sociopath who’d cracked my head open with a crowbar. I’d barely escaped that interview with my badge.
“Stay here,” I said, pulling away from the door.
“Where are you going?”
“To see if he’s OK.”
He twisted his mouth and blinked several times in quick succession. “What about me?”
I didn’t answer that I expected him to live. I didn’t say anything, in fact, because at that precise moment a shot sounded from the camper, and I dropped, face-first, to the ground.
“He’s shooting again!” Bard said, as if I had somehow missed the news. He reached for his SIG, which he must have reloaded while he was waiting for me. Then he sat up and, with his bloody eyelids stuck together, shot at the camper through what was left of the driver’s window.
“Stop it! Bard, stop it!”
He gave no indication of having heard me. He didn’t stop shooting until the receiver ejected the fifteenth.357 cartridge from the magazine. One of the red-hot cases bounced off my leg, leaving a burn in the fabric.
A blue cloud of gunpowder smoke drifted over my head. “Goddamn it,” I said. “He wasn’t shooting at us.”
Bard continued to stare up at the Airstream. “What?”
“That shot was muffled.”
I rose from my knees and peered over the hood of the truck. Even from a distance, I could see the bullet holes in the metal skin of the Airstream. In his rage and blindness, Bard had mostly managed to miss the camper, but a few of his rounds had found their marks.
Holding the shotgun across my body, ready to bring the barrel up if need be, I darted around the front of the Sierra and ran in a straight line at the front door. If Chubby had been taking aim through one of the cracked windows, he could easily have ended my life with a single shot. But I was certain that the fat man wasn’t pointing a gun at me.
“Bowditch!” I heard Bard shout. “Bowditch! What the fuck?”
I grabbed the metal handle of the door and gave it a twist. An odor spilled out in my face: a miasma of dirty dishes, stale marijuana smoke, and unwashed bed linens. I craned my neck to see inside. The interior was dim except for where the sunlight filtered in through the dusty windows.
I didn’t recognize the Indian boy, although I found myself unsurprised to see him. There had been a reason Chubby didn’t want to let Bard see what was happening inside his trailer. The boy’s small body was propped against a blood-drenched cushion. He was naked except for his tight white underwear. There was a bullet hole in his neck from where one of Bard’s stray rounds had pierced the carotid artery.
Chubby lay on his back across the fixed table that occupied the center of the camper. He was wearing a stained T-shirt and denim coveralls, a strap loose over one shoulder. He was barefoot. His eyes were wide open. The gun he’d shot himself with had fallen from his burned mouth. I wouldn’t have pegged LeClair for a suicide, didn’t think he had it in him, but he must have known the torments that await child molesters in prison. In the end, the fat man had taken the easy way out.
35
The boy’s name was Marky Parker. One of the Passamaquoddy officers who arrived at the scene knew him. He said Marky had gotten into some trouble on the rez for drugs and alcohol, but nothing serious. He was a good kid, the policeman said.
“I didn’t know the boy was in there,” Bard told Sergeant McQuarrie. “Honestly, Mack, I had no idea.”
The paramedics had managed to staunch Bard’s wound with a powdered clotting agent and a linen ba
ndage wrapped tightly around the skull. They’d even managed to clean most of the dried blood off his pug-nosed face with alcohol swabs, although the process had tinted his skin orange in places. The EMTs made him lie flat in the back of the ambulance as a precaution. Bard had already fainted once when he’d attempted to look inside the camper himself.
The injured warden stared up at us with wide, imploring eyes that still had flecks of blood stuck in the lashes. He was such a muscular, energetic man, it was strange to see him in a posture of such helplessness. “There was no way for me to know that Chubby had a kid in there with him,” he said. “You have to believe me.”
McQuarrie wore the expression of a man who has just received a call from his oncologist. His broad shoulders seemed bent, and his chin kept sinking against his barrel chest. He had a wad of chewing tobacco in his cheek, which made me think of a chipmunk carrying a nut.
Bard gave me a twitchy, uncertain smile. “Bowditch, you can back me up here.”
I stared hard into his gray eyes; they reminded me at that moment of dirty nickels. But I didn’t say a word.
“Let me just tell you what happened from the beginning,” Bard said to McQuarrie.
The sergeant spat brown saliva onto the ground. “Stop talking, Jeremy.”
“But I’ve got nothing to hide.”
A vein began to pulse in my neck. “Listen to the sergeant, Bard.”
In a hoarser-than-usual voice, McQuarrie said, “You’ll have plenty of chances to tell it to the state cops and the AG’s office. They’re going to want a detailed statement on how this happened. I suggest you bring your lawyer to the interviews. In the meantime, my advice is to keep your trap shut.”
From his back on the gurney, Bard gave us a defiant glare. “They’re going to pay me while I’m suspended, though. I’m still going to get paid, right?”