Running Dark

by Joseph Heywood

  The door opened three steps above him, and Lasurm’s big blue eyes peered out into the darkness at him. She held the door open and he stepped up and past her onto a landing. Stairs led up and down from where they stood.

  “Up to the kitchen,” she said.

  He shrugged off his pack and carried it upstairs into a kitchen with twelve-foot-high ceilings. The only light came from a few scented candles, and he smelled smoke from a fireplace.

  “The lights,” she said, hopping up to the kitchen behind him. She was not using her cane. “Word went around that people should keep their external lights off at night. You’d better get those wet clothes off. There’s a fire.”

  He peeled down to his sweatpants, wool undershirt, and socks, and left his outer clothes in a pile on the kitchen floor.

  She poked him in the lower back. “Straight ahead.”

  The only light in the room was from the fireplace. He felt around for something to sit on and eased into a stuffed chair.

  She brought a bottle of Hartley’s and two glasses and poured a generous brandy for each of them. “Why did they want the lights out?” he asked.

  “People down here don’t ask questions,” she said.

  “When did this happen?”

  “A week ago,” she said. “Are you thinking they anticipated someone like you might come?”

  “Possibly,” he said, but he didn’t want to jump to conclusions; likewise, he didn’t believe in coincidence.

  “How did you get here?” she asked.

  “I fell down a rabbit hole,” he said. She didn’t need to know the details.

  She chuckled audibly in the darkness. “Does that make me the Queen of Hearts or the Mad Hatter?”

  “That jury’s still out,” he said. He had an overpowering sense that he was being watched, but when he looked around he could see only the two of them.

  “Hungry?” she asked.

  “No thanks.”

  “Nonsense. I was so nervous all day I couldn’t eat. When I saw the paper, I couldn’t stop staring at the ad. Now you’re here,” she concluded, “and I’m starved.”

  Service followed her into the kitchen, watched her mix vanilla extract and heavy cream into pancake mix. When the pancakes were done she garnished them with orange peel and fresh mint, and he ate a couple and realized he was hungrier than he had admitted, and gobbled down six more.

  He was reaching for syrup when he detected movement and heard a low snarl from the living room doorway. He instinctively looked without moving his head and felt his blood run cold.

  The dog was the color of wet cement and splotched with black spikes of hair sticking up haphazardly. It had a long, pointed nose, its ears were flat against its head, and its intense yellow eyes were locked on Service. The dog’s lip was curled back, showing a mouth full of menacing teeth.

  Cecilia Lasurm said, “Miss Tillie, I see you’ve decided to join us.” The animal crawled forward on its belly, keeping its eyes on Service. “She’s paying homage to you,” Lasurm said.

  “It feels more like I’m being measured,” he said. For a meal.

  “Everything is fine, but please don’t move until I tell you to,” Lasurm said, adding, “She’s never killed anything bigger than her.”

  He tried to force a smile, but failed. He didn’t even nod as Lasurm got up from the table and came around to him, using the table edge for support. “Look at me,” she ordered, and when Service turned his head she leaned down and kissed him on the mouth with a soft, lingering wet kiss. When she pulled away she looked down at the animal, which had gotten to its feet and was walking forward, wagging its stump tail. “Reach down with your hand,” the woman said.

  The hairs on his neck were electrified as he let his arm dangle.

  The dog moved her head against his hand, and, summoning all the willpower he could, he rubbed once between her ears and let his arm dangle again. The animal’s fur was as coarse as a Brillo pad.

  “Miss Tillie is paying her respects,” Lasurm said. “I’m afraid she’s a bit overprotective.”

  The dog slunk back into the darkness of the living room.

  “I found her on the highway ten years ago. She’d been shot several times with a pellet gun and she was starving, but she let me put her in my truck and take her to a veterinarian. She’s been with me ever since. But she doesn’t like guests, and all the locals know to stay away. Coffee or tea?”

  “What the hell is going on?” he asked.

  She said, “I’ve never allowed a man in here before. I had to find a way to let her know you were okay, so I kissed you.”

  “You knew that would work.” Was her mind all there?

  “I didn’t know it wouldn’t,” she said sheepishly.

  “It was my arm hanging there.”

  “She didn’t bite,” Lasurm said. “Dogs make you uncomfortable?”

  He nodded, did not want to talk about it. Dogs scared the shit out of him, and he had been petrified of them as long as he could remember—all sizes, all breeds, all temperaments. He would willingly approach a criminal with a gun or endure a close encounter with a sow bear and her cubs, but when he confronted a dog, he was always in danger of falling apart.

  “Let’s be clear on this: The kiss was strictly for Miss Tillie,” Lasurm said. “Am I making sense?”

  “No,” he said. “Yes.” He had no idea. She was an odd woman in all ways, and his stomach knotted as he considered that coming here was a mistake—potentially a big one.

  She sat down across from him. “You’ll have all day tomorrow to get acquainted with Miss Tillie. She’ll alert you if anyone gets within a hundred yards of the house, and if they get to the door she will be there to greet them. All you need to do to settle her and have her back off is to say, ‘Gentle.’”

  “Gentle,” he repeated. “I won’t be answering doors.”

  “Some females like to please,” Lasurm said. “Will you go out tomorrow night?”

  He nodded. Some females like to please? What the hell had he gotten himself into?

  “Do you want me to drop you various places? I routinely visit some of my students at night.”

  “No, I’ll do better on my own.”

  “All right, then, let me show you something.” She went into another room and came back in faded, stained Carharts with one leg folded up. She had gotten her crutch and carried a small flashlight.

  She led him into the basement where there were two furnaces. One of them was ancient, and she fiddled with something on the side and opened it like a door. “Strictly a facade,” she said, switching on her flashlight. “It’s level in here, but sometimes it can get a little icy.”

  He followed her down the dark tunnel, bending over to keep from bumping his head. The tunnel was less than six feet high and a little more than three feet wide. They walked for five minutes before entering a wide area. She found a switch and turned on a light. “My great-great-grandfather built the house in 1890. This was the storehouse. The tunnel allowed my grandmother to get to their supplies when they were snowed in. I’ve added heat, which vents all the way back to my chimney at the house. If you have to make yourself scarce, you’ll be comfortable enough down here.”

  She left the light on and continued down the tunnel. He glanced at the compass pinned to his jacket and saw they were walking almost directly west. They walked for another fifteen minutes and came to a smaller underground room. There were some steps leading upward and boulders piled against the west wall. She patted one of the boulders. “Behind here there’s a natural cave that leads all the way out to the bluff’s face,” she said. “When I was a kid I played down here all the time, and my mother insisted my father block off the cave to keep me out. Burn’t Bluff is a honeycomb,” she said.

  “Limestone,” he said.

  She
smiled. “Above us there’s a small stone structure that looks like a pump house. The door is steel and bolted from the inside, with a padlock on the outside.” She handed him a shoelace with a key dangling from it. “That will get you in. When you come back each night, coming in this way will make it easier for you.”

  “There will be signs where I’ve opened the door,” he pointed out.

  “It’s winter,” she said. “You’re going to leave signs wherever you go, but this is set back in the woods and it’s nasty, cluttered footing with a lot of windfalls. In summer people sometimes drift through here, but not in winter.”

  He followed her back to the other room in the tunnel, and she showed him how to work the heat before they trekked back to the house.

  She led him through the kitchen to the front of the house, told him to grab his bag, and took him upstairs to a small bedroom. “It’s an old house,” she said, “but it’s warm. We have to share a bathroom, but that shouldn’t be a problem.”

  The room was narrow with a single bed and an old dresser. The floors were wood, with two faded throw rugs.

  “You know if they find you here, you could get hurt,” she said.

  He nodded as she turned on a light and used the rheostat to lower the brightness. The house might be old, but it had been modernized.

  “I’ll be awake at six-thirty,” she said. “I have to be at school by eight-thirty. If you want breakfast, it will be ready at seven-fifteen. If not, you’re on your own.”

  He nodded dumbly, and she paused at the door and looked back. “I invited you here to do something positive,” Lasurm said. “I hope you don’t disappoint me.” Miss Tillie glared at him with her yellow eyes and followed Lasurm.

  “Fucking dog,” he mumbled, but his mind was already shifting more to the mission than the threat of the animal. The next two weeks threatened to take him into a state of weirdness, but he was sure he was ready for whatever got thrown at him. Lasurm was strange and so was her ugly dog, but if the mission went the way he expected it to, he would not have to see much of either of them over the next two weeks.

  25

  THE GARDEN PENINSULA: FIRST RECON, FEBRUARY 15, 1976

  He needed not just to out-rat the rats, but to temporarily become one.

  The outside door of the fake pump house was jammed by snow and ice, but Service managed to wedge it open with a shoulder. He was glad to be free of the house, despite it being warm and comfortable. Miss Tillie had followed him around all day, growling and snarling and making various sounds, none of which sounded particularly amicable. He had said the word gentle to her so many times, it was stuck in his mind like what Germans called an earworm.

  When he got up to have breakfast with Lasurm, he had reviewed the list of names she had provided at the last meeting, and sat with her and his plat books making pencil marks by the homes and hangouts of the Garden rats. Before coming to the Garden he had contacted Lansing and gotten the registration numbers for snowmobiles, boats, and wheeled vehicles for the people on the list. If he encountered them during his travels, he would have some notion of whom he might be dealing with.

  The weather had improved, but not significantly. The temperature had gotten up to eight during the day, and snow continued to fall, but the sun had not come out to melt and form a thin surface crust on the snow.

  Lasurm would not be home for an hour. They agreed last night that she should maintain her regular routine during his time with her. It was 5:30 p.m. when he crawled out of the well house, cinched up the ruck he had carried in his equipment bag, and began his trek northward. He intended to skirt the edge of Burn’t Bluff going north and veer inland toward the village of Garden, coming up on it from the south and inland. Lasurm said a lot of the troublemakers hung out at Roadie’s Bar at night—the same place where he had been attacked by rock throwers.

  The village was ten miles north of her place, and at his normal walking pace he could do ten-minute miles almost endlessly; but there was fifteen inches of fresh snow and deeper drifts, unfamiliar rolling terrain, fences and roads to cross. He would have to make numerous stops to make sure he was not seen. Because of all this, he decided to figure on a conservative rate of thirty minutes per mile. This meant he would need five hours to get to the village and five hours to get back. If he gave himself two hours in the village itself, he could still be comfortably back by zero five thirty, well before morning twilight. If something held him up in the village, there was high ground east of South River Bay, and no well-traveled roads for almost a square mile. Lasurm had shown him where an abandoned sawmill was located, and if he ran out of time and night, this would be his layover destination for the next day.

  Knowing how far he had to walk and the pace he wanted to maintain, he wore long johns under his snowmobile suit and carried the rest of his layers in his ruck to put on when he stopped for breaks.

  Once clear of Lasurm’s tunnel, he crawled and walked northward through the slash for the first mile before aiming northeast to skirt Sand Bay, his mind lost in thought, and relying on his instincts to watch for any potential contact with others. Law enforcement was being used as an instrument in a state plan to eliminate commercial fishing in Lake Michigan in favor of sportfishermen and their wallets. Most of the conservation officers risking their asses in the Garden probably didn’t have a clue about what was really going on, and this thought put him in a nasty mood. To counter his temper, he kept repeating the goals of his mission: identify the rat leaders and their followers; determine how and where they stage their operations; observe their landside tactics, where they meet, and how they behave. Overall: observe and learn. Most of all, do not act and do not enforce—observe only. He and Tree had gone on many missions in Vietnam that were similar to this. More often than not they went into the jungle to find and watch the enemy, not to kill them. This is not Vietnam, he reminded himself as he pushed through the deep snow. Your Vietnam was eight years ago. Your Vietnam is history—finished.

  South of Fayette he angled through the woods east of the Port Bar and increased his walking speed, the wind hard out of the north. Initially his eyes had been filled with tears from the wind, but now that was finished. His balaclava seemed to protect his face as he walked on, not dwelling on the conditions. His job kept him outside year-round, making the weather largely irrelevant.

  Why the hell did he keep thinking about Vietnam? He remembered meeting an air force master sergeant at the NCO club at Danang one night. The KC-135 boom operator had been in the Strategic Air Command during the Cuban missile crisis, and had told him how all of SAC’s bomber and tanker crews had been briefed before being put on the highest alert level. They were told that President Kennedy was going to give the Soviets an ultimatum: Get your missiles out, or we’ll take them out. Every airman understood that such an attack could lead to a nuclear exchange, but back then, every fighting man understood the stakes and his duty. The boomer couldn’t understand how one president could trust fighting men with such a secret, while the troops being killed in Vietnam knew little or nothing about what the national intent was. They were losing the war through attrition and lack of national will.

  The mess in the Garden felt too much like Vietnam, Service decided. Lansing was not leveling with the troops on the ground about what their actual objectives were, and as a result, conservation officers were left trying to enforce a toothless law for goals that might be specious at best. Lasurm had explained the economics of sportfishing versus commercial fishing, and Fahey had confirmed this in Lansing, which left him feeling somewhere between anxious and ambivalent.

  The rats were waging a guerrilla war—an insurgency for personal economic reasons. Yes, insurgency was the right term, he thought as he walked north. The rats were insurgents, pure and simple, conducting what his old commander Major Teddy Gates called a low-intensity conflict. Gates had taught his marines how to think about—and, more importantly, how to
think like—the enemy. As a result, they had enjoyed many more successes than failures compared to other American units fighting against NVA troops. Insurgents in Vietnam, he remembered, attacked police in small units, using speed, surprise, and terrain to shock the government and force them to concentrate their troops and expend more resources. The more the government did this, the more impotent it looked.

  Nobody was getting killed in the Garden, he knew, but Lasurm made it clear that intimidation of residents surely was taking place. Evidence: In an area with almost one thousand people, you might expect more than one person to step forward and complain, but so far only Lasurm had shown the requisite gumption, which reinforced how effective intimidation was in keeping the locals in line for the rats. Lasurm’s actual motivation remained in doubt. She had given him reasons, which sounded good but didn’t bite. And how did her daughter fit into this? The woman was in jail, Odd Hegstrom was her lawyer, and Lasurm denied that her motives grew out of her daughter’s situation. Replaying this information, he concluded that the less contact he had with Lasurm, the better for both of them.

  The situation here was perplexing. The DNR and police authorities had so far reacted classically: COs no longer conducted solo patrols. Delta County deputies and the Troops made no routine patrols at all, and came into the Garden only when there was a reported emergency or a formal complaint. Even in these circumstances they tended to drag their feet in responding. In essence, the lawless had gained control of the peninsula, and Service had seen firsthand their harassment tactics.