Shadow of the Wolf Tree

by Joseph Heywood

  Kragie said, “I think we’re wasting time. These people seem almost anal about procedures and upkeep.”

  “Humor me,” Service said. “If you wanted to use a rifle to scare off someone, how would you do it?”

  “Offset the aim a few feet to hit branches and make some noise, close enough to frighten, but by a wide-enough margin to make sure a piece of bark didn’t kangaroo and hit the target. I’d shoot off a stand to make sure I hit what I intended,” Simon del Olmo said.

  “Branch?”

  “Something less flexible. The fence might work, especially against a post.”

  The fence again. Who had installed it, and when?

  “Swap sides on the way back, Simon north along the east, Junco north along the west. Look for a manufacturer’s name, a brand, lot number, anything.”

  “What about you?” del Olmo asked.

  “I’m heading for the dam.”

  It was just after 2 a.m. when he released his partners to head back to the north. They were all tired and frustrated, but he welcomed some time alone to think without distraction. When they got back to the main building they would go outside and circle the fence to look at the area where the shooting allegedly had taken place.

  The warrant was a one-time shot. Probably he could stretch it for another day, but Mears and Art Lake were strict constructionists, and it would be a battle to extend it.

  He zigzagged his way north up the middle of the property, shading east a bit with the intention of intercepting the outlet creek where the dam was. How the hell had the Tahtis gotten inside? Is the setup different now than it was back then? Had the Art Lake people plugged a security hole?

  He became aware of his shadow about fifteen minutes after separating from del Olmo and Kragie. The shadow had exquisite sound-suppression skills, but his night vision gave him an edge, letting him pick up motion where most people couldn’t. Paralleling me? Mears? The other one? Choice to make: Confront or be aware, and watch the watcher? No. Stupid to conduct solo recon and try to guard your six. Safer to deal with it head-on. Course of action decided, he began angling toward the shadow, trying to calculate a place where he could pinch off the route along the fence, and pounce.

  Workable plan, he told himself, just as something caught him hard and low behind his head and dumped him straight down into pine duff and dirt, mashing his nose and causing his eyes to flood involuntarily with tears.

  A female voice, right at his ear, whispered, “What the fuck is your problem, man?”

  Not the shadow. He was still seeing the shadow when this happened. Someone else, someone he’d not seen. Two people out there. He tried to will the cobwebs out of his brain, touched his upper lip, felt blood, tasted salt, spit quietly. “If you wanted to talk, you just had to say so,” he whispered. “Penny Provo, right?”

  “I was warned you’re stubborn.”

  Warned! “You are Provo,” he repeated. “Warned by whom?”

  She popped his head again. “Man, names mean shit.”

  “You’re undercover,” he said softly.

  “Keep your fucking voice down,” she whispered back.

  “Things have been bugging me since the beginning. As good as the army says you are, you’ve left more tracks than a moose at a muddy waterhole in a drought. I asked myself, why is she so sloppy? Hike Funke showed up in Kenton, which is right next to Left Testicle, Mars. We have good photos of you, know about your interactions with the meth chef in Big Bay, have a perfect description from your Guard mates. There had to be a reason beyond gross incompetency. The army says most walkaways are caught fast. You’ve been away for almost a record length of time. Finally it dawns on me: You’re laying tracks for a case. The question is why, and what case?”

  “Stubborn and imaginative,” she said. “You’re sabotaging the gig.”

  “I haven’t done anything.”

  “Being here, inside, that’s everything. All the silent alarms are going wacka-wacka dingdong. Lots of questions will be asked. I’d gotten past all that shit; now it will start up again.”

  “I could help,” Service offered, and thought he heard her chuckle.

  “There was all sorts of optimism and confidence at the Little Big Horn and the Alamo, and it didn’t mean shit for either,” she said. “You have no idea what is going down.”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “You want to help, get out and stay the fuck away from here.”

  “What’s in it for me? I’ve got cases to deal with. A man was killed on the river, shots were fired from this compound, and another man was murdered.”

  “Shot at and shot are not synonymous,” the woman said. “All locals need to stay the hell away from here.”

  “Who did the shooting?”

  “Who do you think? I did, and I always hit what I shoot at.”

  “Even with spring guns?”

  “Jesus, that shit down on the river? Those guns had nothing to do with this, nothing.”

  “There was more on the river than spring guns.”

  She said, “You need to back off. The spring guns were set by someone else, not us.”

  “You used the word this.”

  No response this time. “What about the wolf tree?”

  “The what?”

  He described the cause of Dani Denninger’s injuries.

  “No clue, man. There’d be no point.”

  “Deterrent?”

  “If so, didn’t work for shit, did it? It’s got you and your people crawling all over the place.”

  “Mears runs the show here?”

  “Hardly.”

  “Let Fish Live Free.”

  “They’re real,” she said. “And totally irrelevant.”

  “What is relevant?”

  “Man, this is not a bonding moment. You need to get the fuck off the property and stay away before you destroy everything we’ve done.”

  “I’m not good at walking away.”

  “No shit, Sherlock.”

  “Why approach me at all?” he asked.

  “Professional courtesy—I don’t know. If you leave now, this may settle down for me.”

  “This—you keep saying this. What about Rankin Box?”

  “What about him?”

  She doesn’t know. “Dead, and not of natural causes.”

  He heard her breath catch. “Not in the media,” she managed.

  “You know the drill on murders.”

  “I saw Box. Nice old man. He was fine the last time I saw him.”

  “Why did you see him?”

  She sighed with frustration. “Spring guns.”

  “You said—”

  “Original plan called for spring guns with blanks, but we dumped that notion. The plan changed direction. Then some asshole set up spring guns with live ammo. Bad serendipity, man. Karma of the sucky sort. Without those guns, I doubt you’d ever have shown up here.”

  He couldn’t argue. “Allerdyce?”

  “The old pervert?”

  “Says he sold you some traps.”

  “Bullshit. I wanted information and he wanted to get it on, and I told him to get lost.”

  “You met with him?”

  “No, it was all done by phone.”

  So Limpy had lied. Somehow he found this comforting, a natural law being obeyed. This he’d have to follow up on. “Hike Funke showed up in Kenton, no explanation, but there had to be a reason. The only thing I can think of was you, or someone like you.”

  “Control freaks,” she said with disgust. “This thing is close to finished. You need to move out and stay away.”

  If this was all legit, he could understand her concern. “You’re not inside alone,” he added.

  “This is not a group exer
cise,” she countered.

  “Fooled me. I saw your shadow, but missed you.”

  “My shadow . . . ?”

  Palpable fear in her voice, borderline high alert, not fear. “To my right,” he said. “Our right. I was angling for an intercept when you jumped me.”

  Moments later, silence only. Mosquitoes buzzing languidly. She’s gone, just like that; here, not here. The shadow shadowing a shadow, or something like that. Which one am I?

  He got up, brushed himself off, blotted the bleeding lip, which had begun to swell, and resumed trying to intercept the dam. Just five more minutes and he might have had more information from Penny Provo. Had he blown her cover? No way to judge.

  He had just reached the dam when a voice ahead of him declared, “That’s it. You’re done here, Detective.”

  It was Ginny. “You’re into the next day, and you’re finished. You want back, get another warrant.”

  “After I look at your dam,” he said.

  “That is not going to happen.”

  “I say it is.”

  “Sorry, Grady,” a voice said, and Service turned to see Pinky Barbeaux. “Warrant says for yesterday. It’s tomorrow by that standard. People have their rights. It’s time for you to go.”

  Service looked at the sheriff. “Just on my way out.”

  Ginny Czuk said, “You’re a twisted piece of work.”

  “You admire that,” Service told her. Funny shift in attitude. Mears made Czuk out to be her hireling, but she wasn’t acting the role right now, was nowhere in sight, and the sheriff was clearly taking his lead from Czuk. The stuff you learn, he noted in his mind.

  “Get out,” she said. “Now.”

  “I’ll be back,” Grady Service said.

  “I don’t think so,” the sheriff said.

  “You talk to the judge?” Service asked.

  Barbeaux shook his head.

  “I will be back,” Service said icily to Czuk.

  53

  North Bear Town Road, Baraga County

  SATURDAY, JUNE 17, 2006

  As Grady Service drove away from Art Lake just after 5 a.m., a man stepped calmly onto the road and held up his hands. He was small and compact, with long gray hair, wearing blue jeans, work boots, a camo boonie hat, and a badge hanging from his left shirt pocket.

  Service stopped the truck in the middle of the road and got out. “Joe Kokko,” he said, greeting the man.

  “Bojo, Twinkie Man. What’re a couple of old warhorses like us still doing stumbling around the woods?” Joe Kokko was a full-blooded Ojibwa from Isabella County in the lower peninsula, a longtime federal law enforcement man for the Ottawa National Forest, a former helicopter pilot in Vietnam, with two tours and a chest-full of medals for heroism, and a one-time state trooper who had graduated in the same Academy class with Service and Treebone. They had known each other for a very long time and had rarely worked together. Service couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen the man.

  “You lost, Joe?”

  “Nah. I was working my way down an old two-track, stopped to take a piss, and heard your tires. Glad it’s you. Been looking to run into you for coupla weeks.”

  “I have telephones.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe I had some thinking to do before I got in touch. Pinky told me you might be down this way.”

  “So, here I am. What’s up?”

  “Maingan mitig,” Kokko said.

  “Wolf something? My Ojibwa vocab ain’t what it once was.”

  “That wolf tree bit one of your officers?”

  Kokko was known as a plodding but thorough officer.

  “You got something for me on that, Joe?”

  “Young fella, Keweenaw Bay lad.”

  “He got a name?”

  “Not ready to say it just yet.”

  “Because you’re missing some facts?”

  “Because he’s fourteen—just a kid.”

  “He’ll be treated as a juvenile, I’d think.”

  “White juvie ain’t the same as tribal juvie.”

  “I don’t think the law makes such distinctions, Joe.”

  “The courts do,” Kokko said.

  Service couldn’t argue. An Indian kid in a white court would fare about as well as a black kid. “What do you want?” Service asked.

  “Cops write the charges.”

  “You want a deal? Is that what we’re talking about?”

  “Let the tribal courts handle it. Probation, released to the care of his grandmother, and to me as his P.O.”

  Service took a guess. “His grandmother special to you, Joe?”

  “My old lady without the paper.”

  “One of our officers was seriously hurt, Joe.”

  “I know.”

  “I can’t promise anything till I talk to the boy.” He felt Kokko studying him.

  “Both the boy’s parents,” Kokko said, putting a thumb in his mouth and tilting his fist upward to mimick a bottle. “Bad lushes, hopeless. Kid’s a good boy, and smart. Get him away from his parents to his grandma and me, he’ll do fine.”

  “We’re not social workers, Joe.”

  “Way I see our job with kids is, if we can keep one going in the right direction, we need to do whatever we can to make that happen.”

  “Do I get to talk to the boy, decide for myself?”

  “Go easy on him. He’s scared to death of you, heard you’re the windigo warden, out for revenge.”

  The Ojibwa believed that windigos stalked the land in winter and were cannibals. “Wonder where he got that notion?” Service said.

  Kokko smiled. “Let me go get my truck out of the woods and you can follow me. We’ll cut west through Baraga, then north all the way to the north end of Bear Town Road. Betty’s got a small place on Kelsey Creek.”

  “Betty?”

  “Betty Lachoix.”

  • • •

  Thirty minutes later they were standing in front of a small house that sat on a low rise over a sparkling creek. A boy with blond hair was standing on the porch with an older woman.

  Kokko said, “Officer Service—Betty Lachoix and William Satago.”

  The woman said, “I’m okomissan, his grandmother.” She touched the boy’s shoulder. “You look the man in the eye and tell him what it was you done.”

  The boy looked up from the floor. Service could see him trembling. “I set them traps that hurt the lady.”

  “What traps?” Service countered harshly.

  “For the wolves,” the boy said.

  “Wolves are sacred to your people.”

  “Din’t do it for my people,” the boy said. “Did it for the lady with the money.”

  “The lady with the money?”

  “She give me the traps, said she’d give me five hundred dollars for a dead wolf.”

  “Any dead wolf?”

  “Any wolf come into the area where I set my traps.”

  “She say why?”

  The boy shook his head and looked at the ground again.

  “He figured if he got enough money, he could give it to his mom and dad and they’d let him move in with me,” Lachoix said. “He wanted to buy his freedom.”

  “They wouldn’t wonder where the money came from?”

  “Gawashkwebidi,” the boy mumbled.

  “Alcoholics,” the woman translated. “Drunkards. They’re never gonna get loose.”

  Service rubbed his eyes and tried to think. A wolf tree set by a fourteen-year-old-boy who was being paid by an unknown woman who wanted wolves dead? Pretty damned outlandish, but this was the U.P., and outlandish sometimes seemed perfectly feasible. “You get any wolves?”

  The boy shook his head. “Your
lady got hurt and you took my traps.”

  “How long had it been there?”

  “Just that day.”

  This jibed with the estimated time of death for the deer the boy had used as bait. “You kill the deer?”

  The boy nodded.

  “The traps belong to your father?”

  “The woman give them to me.”

  “This woman have a name?”

  “She didn’t say one.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “Short, dark hair, old.”

  “How’d you meet her?”

  “Fishin’ the Slate River with my friends. She give us beer.”

  “You drank beer?” Betty Lachoix asked, alarm in her voice.

  “My friends, not me,” the boy said quickly. “She told me just before she left the river she wanted to see me later, not my friends, because any underage kid that would drink beer from a stranger couldn’t be trusted.”

  “Did you meet her again?”

  “Just outside the state park.”

  Just north of the town of Baraga. “She make the wolf tree offer then?”

  “No, first time we just talked. We met again about a week later, and I said yes, and she give me the traps and a hundred dollars. She drove me to where she wanted the trap set and told me to put a red mark on a tree outside the state park if I got a wolf, and she’d get in touch with me.”

  “How?”

  “She never said, and I never got no wolf.”

  Service looked at Joe Kokko, who raised an eyebrow.

  Service said, “The wolf tree was set all the way down by Art Lake. How’d you get down there?”

  “My old man’s four-wheeler. He’s always too drunk to use it.”

  “Did the woman give you any idea why she wanted this exact location?”

  “Nope.”

  “And you didn’t ask,” Kokko added.

  “What’s going to happen to me?” the boy asked.

  “A woman was seriously injured,” Service said. “A conservation officer. She almost lost her leg.”

  Tears began to dribble from the boy’s brown eyes.

  “She’ll keep the leg, but it’s serious, and I’m not going to kid you, William.”