by Paul Doiron
We climbed the steep hill that led up to the main road and the Square Deal Diner and Motel.
“I’ve been asking you a lot of questions,” I said.
“No shit.”
“I figured you might have some for me. You don’t want to know about my mysterious past?”
She gave what sounded like a snort. “No need.”
“Why’s that?”
“I already know all about you, Bowditch. You’re a living legend.”
I grinned. “Is that so?”
“But not in a good way.”
* * *
Faces turned toward the door when we entered the Square Deal, and the whispering started just as fast. Dani Tate and I had both become infamous personalities in Sennebec. She kept a blank look on her face as we settled into a booth, but I could tell from the rigid way she was holding her shoulders that she already regretted her decision to accompany me here.
There were paper place mats on the lacquered wooden table, featuring boxed advertisements for a variety of local businesses and organizations. The Shear Perfection Beauty Salon (“Because you deserve nothing less”); the Lighthouse Pentecostal Church (“Sin sees the bait but is blind to the hook!”); Big Al’s Gun Shop (“Offering 10 percent off all muzzle-loader supplies”).
God, how I missed this place.
I’d looked for Dot Libby when I’d come in but hadn’t seen her. The talkative plumber I’d spoken to a few days ago, Pulkinnen, was hunched at the counter. He’d been the one complaining about Dani Tate to me. He’d said the local poachers were unafraid of her, but I’d come to the conclusion that the rookie was facing much bigger challenges if she was ever going to be a successful warden.
The new waitress, Destiny, came over with a pot of coffee. She must have just received a perm at Shear Perfection; her hair was twisted into ringlets tighter than any I’d ever seen on a poodle. She filled our coffee cups without asking.
“How are you two doing today?”
“Fine,” said Tate. “I’ll have the oatmeal.”
“You want any raisins or brown sugar on top?”
“No.”
“I’ll have a molasses doughnut,” I said.
“Healthy choice,” said Dani Tate.
I leaned back against the creaking booth and spread my arms along the top. “My body is a temple.”
She kept her mouth clamped shut as she surveyed the room, so she seemed to have no lips at all. She made fierce eye contact with every person who tried to sneak a peek at our booth. The woman might have been antisocial, but she was hardly a shrinking violet.
“Can I give you some advice?” I said.
“This is going to be good.”
“Stop trying to intimidate everyone you meet. Giving people the stink eye won’t make them afraid of you.”
“I’m a woman, and I’m five-four. How do you expect me to intimidate anybody?”
“By knowing their secrets.”
“The arrogant asshole returns,” she said.
“It’s not arrogance,” I said. “It’s experience. You need to talk to people if you’re going to be an effective warden. Cultivate a few informants. There are dozens of feuds going on around here—neighbors who hate their neighbors—and they’ll happily rat each other out if they trust you with their secrets.”
She made a penciling motion with her empty hand on the place mat. “Should I be taking notes?”
“There’s an old woman named Reetha Gee who lives with her clan on Maple Grove Cove,” I said. “She has something like twenty teenaged grandkids. The boys all have rap sheets and the girls are all dating guys with rap sheets. You should pay Reetha a visit someday and give her some deer meat as a bribe.”
“I know who Reetha Gee is. She’s basically the matriarch of a heroin-dealing organization.”
“She’s also a useful informant. If you’re nice to her, she’ll call you with incriminating evidence you can use to make a bust. It’s how she gets rid of her enemies.”
“You don’t have a problem doing business with someone like her?”
“Not if I bust some bad guys along the way.”
She threw her elbows on the table and tried the alpha-dog thing with me, staring hard into my eyes.
“You know what?” she said. “I do have a question about your ‘mysterious past.’”
Her irises were the color of shale fragments, I decided. The woman was made entirely of stone.
“Fire away.”
“If you were such a kick-ass warden, why did you quit?”
An answer came out without my being able to stop it. “I’ve been asking myself that question every day.”
The frankness of my response seemed to surprise her. She slunk back into the booth but kept the muscles in her jaw clenched. “I still don’t understand why the colonel didn’t fire you a long time ago.”
“Maybe it was because I had the highest conviction rate in the service two years in a row.”
She crossed her short, strong arms. “Big whoop.”
“I also had Kathy Frost looking out for me for a while. She seemed to think I was worth holding on to.”
“I don’t know why.”
“When she wakes up, you can ask her.”
My comment was an unwelcome reminder that a woman we both respected was still in a coma. Tate’s face flushed red. She pushed herself violently out of the booth.
“I need to take a piss,” she said.
The other diners stopped what they were doing in order to watch her. I wasn’t sure what I’d hoped to learn from Dani Tate, but I had blown any chance of getting her to open up. When she returned, she would tell me it was time to go, breakfast or no breakfast.
Destiny returned with our orders. The last time I’d been to the diner, she’d mentioned something to me about the Gammon shooting; she’d used an unusual phrase. But my mind was drawing a blank. She set the doughnut down on its little plate in front of me and the bowl of oatmeal on Tate’s place mat. She said, “That woman you’re with, she’s the one who shot that wounded soldier in Camden?”
“She and another warden,” I said.
“They couldn’t have just wounded the poor guy or something?”
“He pointed a shotgun at them. They were in fear for their lives.”
“It’s all people are talking about here. Some people think they should’ve shot him, and some people don’t. There ain’t many on the fence.”
Suddenly, the previous conversation I’d had with Destiny came back word by word.
“Do you remember me?” I asked. “I was in here the other day, talking to Dot.”
She gave me a coquettish smile and raised her left hand to show me that there was no ring on her finger. “I absolutely remember you, dear.”
“You said there was a big guy in here asking questions about Kathy. The word you used to describe him was ‘Neanderthal.’ What did he look like, exactly?”
“I don’t have a memory for names and faces.” She leaned in close enough for me to smell the cinnamon chewing gum she was snapping between her teeth. “Unless a guy is wicked cute, I mean.”
I tried to play dumb and pretend she wasn’t flirting with me. “Why did you call him a Neanderthal?”
“He was just wicked big, and he had gross hair all over his arms and neck. I remember thinking he looked like he should have been dressed like Fred Flintstone, you know, in a tiger skin.”
Kathy’s neighbor Littlefield was a large man, but I hadn’t seen his face. One of Jimmy’s buddies from the 488th was also a big dude, the guy who lived up in Aroostook County: Ethan Smith. Even Kurt was a sizable human being. Maybe if Destiny described the mystery man to Dani Tate, the warden could tell if the description fit any of the local lawbreakers Kathy had been investigating.
More likely, Take would just punch me in the heart, as she’d already threatened to do.
“What sort of questions was this Neanderthal guy asking?” I said.
“Like if that warden sergeant was
a regular. If she came in every morning. He wondered if she lived nearby. Someone at the counter said, ‘No, she lives in Appleton.’”
“Do you remember who it was at the counter who told the guy where Sergeant Frost lived?”
“Sorry, honey. Like I said, I don’t have a memory for names and faces.”
I dug out my cell phone and typed the address of the Portland Press Herald into the browser bar. The site came up and I searched for the name Ethan Smith. The article appeared, along with a miniature version of the picture of Jimmy Gammon, Angelo Donato, and Ethan Smith horsing around at Camp Sabalu-Harrison. I held the phone up so Destiny could view the tiny screen.
“Could this be the Neanderthal?”
She squinted her already squinty eyes. “Maybe if he had longer hair now?”
I’d missed seeing Dani Tate return. She’d taken a circuitous route to avoid a busboy who was clearing one of the tables. She loomed over my shoulder, seeming taller than five-four.
“What the hell, Bowditch?” she said.
“Destiny may have talked to the guy who shot Kathy. He came in here the day of the shooting, trying to find out where she lived.”
Tate scowled at me. “You just can’t help yourself, can you?”
“She said he looked like a Neanderthal—big and hairy, with a unibrow. Does that describe anyone you and Kathy were investigating? A poacher or a pot grower? Someone dangerous?”
Tate reached into the kangaroo pocket of her sweatshirt to find her key fob. She pushed the button to unlock the truck.
“I think this is significant,” I said.
“And I think you can hitchhike back to my house.”
She turned on her heel and made for the door.
I barely had time to pay for our uneaten breakfast. The bell rang loudly as Dani slammed the door. As I passed Pulkinnen on his stool by the door, I thought I heard him mutter “Bitch” beneath his breath. I glared at him, but the Finnish plumber spun away to face the pie case.
32
I honestly thought she was going to drive off without me. As it was, I had to chase her truck halfway across the parking lot. She stopped long enough for me to open the Tacoma’s passenger door. I started to climb onto the nerf bar, using the interior handle to pull myself up into the cab.
“I’ll take you back to your car under one condition,” she said.
“What is it?”
“Don’t say a fucking word to me until we get back to my house.”
I slid silently into the passenger seat and fastened the belt buckle.
Leaving the parking lot, Tate gunned the engine, raising a spray of sand and gravel behind the rear wheels. She cranked up the police scanner the way a teenager listening to the radio might if her favorite song suddenly started playing. I leaned my head against the padded headrest and watched the blur of green scenery. Deb Davies’s revolver pressed uncomfortably against my tailbone.
I figured that maybe I would drive back to the Square Deal and ask around at the counter to see if someone else there remembered Destiny’s Neanderthal. I could also prod Soctomah again. I no longer felt the need to be respectful of the detective’s seemingly stalled investigation.
We hadn’t driven more than half a mile when a call came over the radio. The Knox County dispatcher was reporting a 10-55—a vehicle accident—on the Old County Road in Rockland. “All available units please respond,” she said. “A car went into one of the quarries.”
“We need to take that,” I said.
Tate looked at me with disbelief. “What do you mean, ‘we’? I’m suspended, and you’re not even a warden.”
“You know those quarries. The cliffs are fifty feet high, and the water is who knows how deep. We’re only a few minutes away. The people inside could drown by the time first responders arrive.”
She didn’t slow down or turn the wheel.
“What’s more important to you, Tate,” I said, “keeping your nose clean or saving someone’s life?”
Tate braked so hard, I nearly got whiplash. She threw the truck into reverse and executed a perfect three-point turn. In ten seconds, we were speeding back up the hill in the opposite direction.
I had passed through Rockland’s stinking quarry land on my drive south, and the image of a car crashing through the guardrail had been vivid in my mind. I might have taken it as a premonition, but vehicles were going off that winding road all the time. Coincidence is a master of disguise.
It took us less than five minutes to reach the accident scene. There was no question we’d found the right quarry. The gaping gash in the steel barrier would have been hard to miss. Other vehicles had stopped where they could—the road was narrow, with few places to pull over—and bystanders were gathered along the cliff, gazing down into the pit. As I had predicted, Tate and I were the first responders to arrive.
Tate slowed, looking for a place to park her truck without it being sideswiped by rubberneckers. I took the opportunity to unfasten my shoulder belt and jump from the idling Tacoma.
“Jesus Christ, Bowditch!”
I ran up the road until I was shoulder-to-shoulder with the other people who had stopped. There was an old couple and a woman with a baby in her arms and a group of teenagers, some with cell phones pressed to their ears, others crying hysterically. I looked down at my boots and saw a steeply sloping limestone cliff. At the bottom of the quarry was a man-made pond filled with water as blue as the Caribbean, and in that water, twenty feet from the shore, was an overturned car. The undercarriage and wheels were completely exposed, and it was clearly sinking.
“Help her! Somebody, please!”
I hadn’t noticed the soaking-wet girl at the bottom of the cliff face. She was clinging to the rocks with bloody hands, trying to pull herself out of the water. Her upturned face was a white oval, framed by strands of dark hair.
I didn’t pause to remove my boots. I just took three running steps and hurled myself off the cliff wall. I seemed to hang in the air for half a second like a cartoon character who has just walked off a precipice, and then gravity grabbed me by the ankles. I fell fast and hit the water hard. I felt the impact all the way up my legs and spine. If the cliff had been any higher, I would have broken a dozen bones and spent the rest of my life in a wheelchair—assuming I’d even survived.
My body had somehow remembered that my arms should be folded across my chest, so I went in like a missile. The force of the drop plunged me deep into the aquamarine water. It was much colder than it looked. The shock caused my heart to clench tighter than a fist.
I found myself staring up at a blur of blue light, which I knew to be the surface but which seemed to be receding faster and faster. I thrust my arms out to stop my descent and gave two powerful kicks. My Bean boots weren’t heavy enough to pull me down, but they didn’t make swimming any easier, especially as my clothes became waterlogged.
My head popped up like a fishing bobber. I splashed around, gulping air and trying to get my bearings. My ears were stuffed up, but the injured girl’s screams were loud enough to grab my attention. I followed the line from her pointing finger to the roiling rectangle of water where the overturned car was going under. All that remained above the surface were the rear wheels, and they were disappearing fast.
I put my face back in the foul-tasting water and began kicking my legs and pulling myself ahead with my arms. I tried to pretend I was back in the lukewarm pool at the Criminal Justice Academy, but my mind wasn’t so easily tricked. Someone was in that sinking car, and that person was dying.
I reached the frothy spot where the car had been moments ago and ducked my head, squinting into the depths. There was a dark rectangular shape beneath me. I did a half somersault and began swimming for the vehicle. It seemed like I’d never catch up to it, that the car would disappear into a bottomless abyss, but it must have caught on something—an outcropping, a submerged tree, maybe even a junk vehicle someone had pushed over the edge—because it came to rest abruptly. A cloud of gray sedim
ent rose around me.
The light was murky. I couldn’t see more than a few feet, especially with the billowing mud, but I found the back bumper and was able to pull myself along the vehicle by moving from the exhaust pipe to the rear wheel to the handle of the back door and finally to the driver’s window.
Inside was a thrashing girl.
She was stuck, her body upside down in the seat. I wasn’t sure if she was just panicked or unable to release the buckle of her seat belt. The blobby air bag was pulsating in the water like a cuttlefish that had wrapped its tentacles around her chest. It was hard to see inside the vehicle itself, but I had a thought that the other girl must have squeezed out the passenger window, which was why there was no air left inside the car.
The girl had long reddish hair that was moving around in the water. When she saw me, her eyes widened and she made a yelling motion with her mouth, which only filled her lungs with more water. She reached with both hands for the window, flattening her palms against the glass. I tried the door handle, but it was locked. When I looked at the girl again, her eyelids had begun to flutter. I held on to the side mirror with one hand, feeling a nerve pinch in my brain as my own oxygen supply started to run out.
I needed a hammer, something to break the glass. When I’d been a warden, I’d bought myself a special emergency tool designed for that purpose. It was in a box back in Elizabeth Morse’s cabin now.
I had my pocket jackknife, but it wasn’t big enough to use as an awl. What else?
Deb Davies’s revolver.
I reached around my back, worried the gun had fallen out during my jump into the water, but I found the handle pushed down into the ass of my jeans. I drew the revolver out and pressed the barrel against the corner of the window, well clear of the girl. Most people think a gun won’t fire underwater, but gunpowder contains its own oxidizer and a bullet casing is waterproof. The slug won’t travel far pushing H2O instead of air. I just needed it to crack the glass.