Running Dark

by Joseph Heywood

  “If these two don’t behave, if they try to get up or cause any trouble, shoot them.”

  “You can’t do that!” the smaller man said.

  “Yessir,” Mehegen said.

  Service went out into the clearing and found the animal. It had collapsed next to a fallen log on the edge. Heat rose into the night air, blended with the stench of burned hair. Service put the light on the animal. The raccoon was still breathing shallowly. He took his backup piece, a .38 snub, out of his pocket and put one round in the animal’s head. He used a stick to knock the top off the glowing barrel and wedged two more coon carcasses out of the hot coals and went back to the patrol car.

  “County in twenty minutes,” Mehegen said.

  “Good.”

  Service undid the cuff from the little man’s leg and told both men to get up. He snapped the cuff on the little man’s other arm and led them around the patrol car. “In here,” he told the smaller man. He opened the passenger seat door, put his hand on the top of the man’s head, and pushed down, helping him to get in. The big man remained docile.

  “Shoot him if he even sneezes,” Service said.

  He heard Mehegen say, “Yessir.”

  He led the larger man to the steps that led onto the porch of the small cabin.

  “You’re Gumby, right?”

  “Yeah, Gumby.”

  “Your partner’s Ivan Rhino, right?”

  “Yeah, Ivan.”

  “Gumby, how about we go inside and look around your place.”

  “Got weren’t?”

  “Why would I need a warrant?”

  “Ivan said.”

  “I don’t need a warrant if you invite me in. You want me to see your place, right?”

  The man thought for a moment. “Okay, yeah.”

  Service reached for the door, but the boy balked. “What?”

  “Him-her inside?”

  “Somebody’s inside?”

  “Him-her?” Gumby said, his head nodding rapidly.

  “Did you guys shoot some deer, Gumby?”

  “So’s him-her can eat ’em,” he said, smacking his lips.

  “It’s good to eat deer,” Service said. “You like to eat deer?”

  “Him-her does,” he said with a nod at the door.

  “Your mother?”

  “Her.”

  “Got a name?”

  “Cunt.”

  “The woman’s name is Cunt?”

  “Ivan says,” Eugene said.

  “You want to tell her we’re coming inside?”

  Gumby opened the door a crack. “Comin’ in, Cunt!”

  “Turn on the lights,” Service told the boy.

  “Turnin’ on light!” Gumby shouted before reaching gingerly inside the door.

  “Retard!” a muted female voice bellowed from somewhere in the cabin.

  Gumby tried to go in, but Service restrained him and eased through the door first, into a messy living area.

  “Ma’am, this is the DNR. Please step out here so we can see you.”

  No answer. “Where are the deer, Gumby?” Service asked the boy.

  They walked into a dining area off a small kitchen. There were four deer heads on the floor, several severed legs on a table covered with newspaper, ragged haunches, blood and deer hair all over the floor, piles of guts overflowing buckets, the place an abattoir.

  “Deer,” the boy announced.

  “You use a gun to kill them?”

  “Robin Hood,” the boy said.

  Robin Hood? “A bow and arrow?”

  “Yeah, Robin Hood.”

  “Can we talk to the woman you live with?”

  “Her-him? Got weren’t?”

  “I’m inside now; I don’t need one, remember? You invited me in.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “I’ve been nice, haven’t I?”

  “Hit Gumby’s head.”

  “Because you tried to grab my gun.”

  “Yeah,” the boy said.

  Service toggled his brick radio. “Two-one-thirty, let me know when you see lights from the county boys.”

  “Ten-four.”

  “Ma’am?” Service called out.

  “She’s not here,” a female voice called back.

  “How are the Agostis?” Service asked the boy.

  He shrugged.

  “They own this place.”

  “We found,” the boy said, shaking his head.

  “What the hell are you doing out there, Eugene?” the woman yelled from a darkened room at the end of the cabin.

  “Gumby!” Eugene shouted. “Not Eugene!”

  He stepped toward the room with Service behind him.

  “Turn on the light, ma’am,” Service said.

  “Him got badge!” Gumby shouted.

  “Dummy,” the woman shot back with disgust.

  “Show Robin Hood,” Eugene said, stepping gingerly into the darkness before Service could stop him.

  “Get the light on, Gumby.”

  Service heard movement and what sounded like a scuffle. The boy stepped out of the room, looked back, said, “Her-him hurt me!”

  He took one step forward and fell on his face. Service saw a knife handle sticking out of the lower right side of the boy’s back.

  “County’s coming,” Mehegen announced over the radio.

  “Call an ambulance,” Service told her.

  “Are you okay in there?” she asked.

  “Get an ambulance!”

  Where was the woman? He looked at the boy, knew the wound was serious, but he couldn’t do anything to help him until he knew where the woman was. The boy looked like he had gone right, so Service crawled on his knees to the door, reached inside with his left hand, groped for the light switch, flipped on the light, and stayed outside the door to the room.

  Two deputies came through the living room, guns drawn. One of them reached for the knife in the boy’s back. “Don’t touch him,” Service said.

  “He’ll bleed out.”

  “Let the medics handle it!” Service said forcefully. He had seen knife wounds in Vietnam.

  Service peeked in the door. A woman sat on the bed holding a sheet up to her chin. There was an unassembled double-barrel shotgun on the foot of the bed and a crossbow and brass lamp on a side table. “Where are the bolts, ma’am?”

  The woman had long stringy blond hair, didn’t answer.

  “Ma’am, if you’re armed and you try something, you are going to be shot dead—do you understand what I am telling you?”

  She looked at Service and smiled fecklessly. One of the deputies stood on the other side of the door opening, his revolver drawn.

  “Ma’am, please lower the covers.”

  The woman leered. “You wanna see my titties!”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Why not? I got real nice titties,” she said, crestfallen.

  “Cunt got big ole titties,” Gumby mumbled from the floor.

  The woman lowered the sheet to reveal pendulous breasts hanging off an emaciated frame.

  The deputy pointed his pistol at her. Service stepped gingerly inside and snapped the covers off the bed. There were two crossbow bolts by the woman’s left leg.

  The deputy handed Service a pair of cuffs. Service handcuffed the woman, got her up, and draped a blanket around her shoulders.

  The other deputy was still staring at the knife lodged in Eugene’s back.

  “You okay, Gumby?” Service asked, trying to soothe the boy.

  “Her-him punch,” he said.

  Service knew what a stabbing felt like initially. “Just once?”

  “Two, three t
imes. Her-him don’t punch hard. How come hurts?”

  Service knelt beside the boy, asked the deputy to help him. They tilted the boy slightly, got his shirt untucked. In addition to the knife stuck in him, there was a stab wound and a slash. The slash wasn’t bleeding much. The stab wound was bleeding steadily, but not spurting. Artery intact, he told himself, and steady but not heavy flow from the protruding knife, which looked to be in deep. Was there organ damage? No way to tell. Most vital organs were buried deep inside the body and not easily reached by anything other than cataclysmic force. In Vietnam a chaplain once proclaimed this was by God’s design. If so, Service told the man, God must have planned on people wreaking violence on each other, which made humanity’s flaw either a screw-up on the part of humankind’s creator, or a matter of malevolence, neither of which he thought much about. The chaplain called him a blasphemer. So be it, Service thought: To live you had to deal with life as it came to you, which meant bumping heads with assholes and understanding you were mortal.

  Mehegen was suddenly kneeling beside Service, her hand on Eugene Chomsky’s face. “Don’t move. It’s gonna be okay.”

  The boy stared up at her with wide eyes as she continued to talk softly to him. Mehegen glanced at Service and gave him a look that chilled his blood.

  “Where’s the fucking medevac!” Service screamed.

  Mehegen took his arm and led him out to his Plymouth. The ambulance was coming up the road, bumping and sliding, lights flashing. Service leaned against the grille while Mehegen poked in his pockets until she found his cigarettes. She lit one for each of them.

  The ambulance attendants moved quickly, and Service half-listened to them barking orders at each other and the deputies as they brought Eugene out of the cabin, loaded him, and raced away.

  “Medevac?” Mehegen asked. “Did Scotty beam us elsewhere?” Service had no idea what she was talking about. “Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Star Trek . . . on TV?” she prompted.

  He shrugged. He didn’t own a television. He walked over to the sheriff’s cruiser where Ivan Rhino sat glowering in the backseat, and then moved on to the next vehicle where the woman was in custody, the blanket still draped over her.

  A deputy interrupted him. “You’d better step back inside,” he said.

  A second bedroom in the cabin was littered with firearms, fishing rods, a couple of salmon nets, boxes of ammo stacked up, two chain saws, and piles of tools. Service studied the mess, said, “There’s a boat on a trailer, a couple of snowmobiles, and an Indian motorcycle under tarps in the wood line behind the next camp.”

  He went back outside and opened the door of the car where the woman sat. “Ma’am, what’s your name?”

  The woman turned her head away and he turned to a nearby deputy. “Find any ID?”

  “Not yet.”

  No ID, and where was their truck? How did the caller know the men’s names, and identify the truck, but not mention the woman? Was she a late arrival? If so, how did she fit in?

  Service told the deputies he would drive up to Marquette later and write up his report. They discussed charges and decided they would start with stolen property, illegal deer, and the raccoons. Once they got more on the stabbing, that would become primary.

  Not thirty minutes later another deputy, a sergeant, came up to him. “The boat and motorcycle in the woods match the descriptions of stuff stolen from some lake camps this summer. We’ve had camp break-ins since last June, more than thirty of them, and probably a bunch not yet reported because the owners are down below and don’t know. Just last week an old guy over in Carlshend got the shit beaten out of him and ended up in the hospital—broken arm, jaw, lost some teeth, broken rib. The descriptions he gave us were pretty discombobulated, but we’ll put together a lineup and see what he says. You should have waited for backup,” the sergeant added.

  Service grunted and shrugged. The man was right, but it had been his call to go in alone, and you did what you thought you had to.

  He went back into the building with evidence bags and began bagging animal parts. Mehegen worked alongside him. The sergeant and his deputy concentrated on the bedroom where the stabbing had taken place. Service examined each piece of meat and saw that one of them had a hole near the shoulder joint. He took out his pocketknife, dug around in the hole, and, using gentle leverage, pried out a slug.

  Mehegen said, “What’s that?”

  “Slug. Let’s check all the meat again.”

  They eventually located a second slug about the same size as the first one. Service slid both into plastic envelopes and they hauled all the evidence, including the crossbow and bolts, out to the Plymouth. Service also bagged the raccoon carcasses from behind the cabin.

  The sergeant and his men were still working when Service and Mehegen began an external search.

  Two hours later they were still traipsing around the woods and swamps that abutted the pond and camps. “What the hell are we supposed to be doing?” Mehegen demanded to know.

  “Looking for their truck,” he said.

  “Shouldn’t we be looking near a road?”

  “My God!” he said, bumping his forehead with the heel of his hand. “I never thought of that.”

  “Dial down the sarcasm,” she said.

  “The tip I got told me about a truck. The camp was filled with contraband, and they didn’t exactly go to great lengths to hide any of it, so where is their ride?”

  “Are you always so suspicious?”

  “It’s in my wiring.”

  “My feet hurt,” she said. “Can we like . . . you know?”

  “Not yet,” he said. “I have to get up to Marquette to do the paperwork, and drop evidence at the district office in Escanaba. You want me to drop you back at the Airstream? This will be a rest-of-the-night deal.”

  “Not a chance,” she said. “In for a dime, in for a dollar.”

  “What exactly does that mean?” he asked.

  She shrugged and grinned. “It’s a cliché. When I’m tired, clichés pop out. Aren’t you tired?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Then show it,” she said. “It will make me feel better to know I’m not the only one dragging.”

  Mehegen remained in the patrol car while he put the evidence in the district office locker, and she slept on the drive to Marquette and while he went into the county building, wrote his report, checked on Eugene Chomsky’s condition, and talked to deputies. Chomsky had already undergone a transfusion and almost two hours of surgery. The knife had not touched vital organs, but there had been heavy internal bleeding and he had gone into shock. He was listed as critical but stable.

  Service asked that Ivan Rhino be brought into an interrogation room. Rhino looked even more cadaverous and disheveled than he had looked at the camp, his eyes sunk in his head, his skin yellow. Service offered the prisoner a cigarette, which he accepted. Service lit it for him.

  “What was the deal with the raccoons?”

  “Ask the dummy.”

  “Burning them alive was Chomsky’s idea?”

  “Everything was his idea,” Ivan Rhino said.

  Service looked at the man. “Eugene’s not going to die,” he said. “What about the woman?”

  “What woman?” Rhino said, exhaling a cloud of smoke.

  “I suppose you don’t know anything about a pickup truck?”

  “I don’t know squat, man, and I don’t talk unless there’s a lawyer sitting here holding my swinging dick.”

  Rhino had not asked how Eugene was. If Eugene died, everything would be dumped on his shoulders.

  Service left the prisoner and went to find one of the deputies who had been at the camp. He found one huddled with a detective named Kobera, who looked like he’d been jerked out of bed and dropped into the room. The deputy said, “Everything we f
ound out there is on a list from the camp break-ins. There’s other stuff too, not on the list, which says they’ve been busy again.”

  “Arraignment?” Service asked.

  “Gotta get lawyers for them and give the old man a look at Rhino. We’ll arraign tomorrow afternoon, late,” he said. “Rhino says he has no money for a lawyer.”

  Service mashed out his cigarette. “The woman talking?”

  “Total lockjaw.”

  “Anything in the system on Chomsky and Rhino?”

  “Not yet. We’ll give you a bump when we get our shit more together,” Kobera said. They exchanged phone numbers.

  Mehegen slept until they were ten minutes from his place. She didn’t snore, but cooed like a pigeon. When she woke up she asked, “What time is it?”

  He had no idea. “The sun’s up,” he offered.

  Back in the trailer he poured a glass of champagne for each of them. They toasted the new year, got undressed, ignored the shower, and crawled into bed. Sometime later she put her head on his shoulder. “Do they expect you guys to live like this for twenty-five years?”

  He smiled, but his mind was back in the camp. They had a crossbow, so why the bullets? And how the hell could they interview Gumby? His language was awkward, his thoughts jumped around, and he seemed to have the emotional stability of a child. The boy’s jumbling of pronouns left Service wondering if he had missed something. Service thought, the boy seemed to have gotten my gender right when he talked about my badge, so why the other confusion? The case had looked cut and dried last night. It didn’t feel that way this morning.

  11

  GARDEN PATROL, JANUARY 8, 1976

  “Dat ain’t no confetti!”

  Just like last time, Service was alerted in the middle of the night for a Garden patrol, but this time the caller was Acting Captain Attalienti. Despite webs of sleep-induced fugue, he questioned the advisability of showing his face—given the pending recon.

  “Don’t sweat it,” the acting captain said. “Meet Stone at the Fishdam boat launch. Be there at zero-nine hundred.”

  “I take it we’re not checking nets,” Service said. He had heard that snowmobile patrols generally met well before daylight.

  “Think of it as a parade,” Attalienti said. “No snowmobiles.”