Ice Hunter (Woods Cop Mystery 1)

by Heywood, Joseph

  Kira asked, “What’s wrong?” after he hung up.

  “Rollie Harris died today. Heart attack.”

  She looked shocked. “He’s so young.”

  “His number came up.”

  “Fatalism,” she said sarcastically, “from the same fool who jumped in front of his grandmother’s shotgun.”

  He said, “I’m going to let Newf out,” He needed time alone.

  Kira didn’t object.

  Rollie had been a grunt at Khe Sanh and had seen men killed for nothing. As an LT in the DNR, he would not allow history to repeat itself, even when his people were eager to take chances. Survey after survey showed that COs were eight to ten times more likely than any other kinds of cops in the country to be assaulted and injured in the line of duty, and the inherent risk was high enough without his people pushing the envelope. Service didn’t doubt the surveys. He touched his face, which served as a reminder of the uncertainties the job held.

  Rollie Harris would be hard to replace, as a boss and as a friend.

  Service wondered when his number would come up. Newf watched him for a while, then loped into the woods with her nose down, sniffing everything until she halted in the darkness and began snarling and barking.

  Service made his way to the dog, found her staring up, and and saw three black bear cubs on branches. They were staring down like live teddy bears.

  “Shit,” he said out loud. “Newf.” The dog looked over at him. “Come!” he said. The dog obeyed. His head ached and he looked around carefully before backing slowly away. He was certain the sow was nearby, and if she thought he was threatening her cubs she could get aggressive.

  Sows were unpredictable. Male bears, like male gorillas, put up an aggressive front but rarely attacked. Females with cubs attacked without warning—maternal instinct at its deadliest.

  They got back to the house without incident and Service made sure that Newf was inside. The bear would take her cubs and move on. He needed time to think, but he was tired and dozed off in his chair, only to be awakened by a motorcycle roaring by the house and headed down the trail where he had seen the bear.

  Christ almighty! He grabbed a 12-gauge shotgun and a spotlight and ran after the dirt bike. He found it in a heap not far from where he had seen the cubs. The motorcyle was on its side, the front fender bent, handlebars twisted, front tire popped.

  “Help me,” a voice called weakly.

  Service pointed his light up and saw a young man in the tree, frantically trying to climb. A large bear was behind him. Oh fuck, Service thought. Was this day never going to end?

  Service moved closer to the tree and shone the light up, but the bear ignored him. He checked the ground, found a rock, and threw it, hitting the bear in the rump. She looked down and clacked her jaws angrily, a warning for him to butt out.

  Then the animal turned and came straight down the tree. Service backed away.

  “Help!” the man shouted again from above.

  “Be quiet!” Service ordered.

  The female landed hard on the ground and shook as she looked at him. Her eyes were red in his light beam. He braced the light against the forestock of his shotgun and fired into the dirt under the bear, spraying her with dirt fragments. As dry as it was, the bits would sting like shrapnel. The bear took a couple of steps toward him, shaking her head from side to side, then pivoted suddenly, cut sharply right, and crashed through tag alders. He heard her land in the creek with a splash as loud as a depth charge. And as deadly.

  “Climb down fast,” he told the climber. “Now.”

  Before the man got most of the way down, he fell and collapsed on the ground. He was bleeding from the head and whimpering. Service couldn’t tell if the bear had gotten to him or if the injuries came from the accident and the fall. This was no place or time to make an assessment; he had to get the guy to safety. Now.

  “I hurt,” the man said.

  Service grabbed him by the collar, lifted him up, and dragged and helped him toward the cabin. When they got there, Kira took his flashlight, took one look, and went into action rendering first aid while Service called the county sheriff and an ambulance. The man was bleeding badly from slashes from the bear’s claws, but worse from a compound fracture in his leg. An hour later the man had a ticket for riding without a helmet, trespassing, riding off a designated trail, and reckless driving; he was on the way to the hospital. It would take the surgeons hours to put his leg together, but at least he was alive.

  “My God,” Kira said. “What happened out there?”

  “Tomorrow,” he mumbled wearily, waving her off. No time to even mourn Rollie. He was exhausted, and he would worry about the bears and the broken motorcycle when he had daylight and backup. Right now, he needed sleep. Just sleep.

  As soon as he felt himself sliding into deep sleep, an ORV roared up his driveway and he was up again, dressing and out to his truck and following at breakneck speed, but he lost the trail within a mile. Goddamn assholes. North woods summer fever was setting in.

  Back to bed again. The phone rang. This time it was central dispatch at the county. A deputy had a B&E and a possible intruder at a house near Skandia and needed backup. He was closest. Service got dressed again, drove down to the house four miles away, and met up with the cop, a man named Avery. Service took the back of the house and Avery went to the front door. Minutes later, Avery was yelling for him. Service went back to the front and found the deputy shaking his head and lighting up a smoke.

  “No B&E,” Avery said. “The woman’s granddaughter came home late from bowling and the old lady panicked. Sorry.”

  “No problem,” Service said. It was always something in this job.

  Less than a mile away from his cabin a van raced up behind him, fishtailing back and forth. Service pulled to the right and slowed, and when the van finally passed it was swerving all over the road ahead of him.

  Not my day, he thought angrily. He turned on his blue lights and followed, careful not to press too close. No siren. That could spook anybody on a dark, country dirt road. The van didn’t get far. Rounding a tight curve, Service saw dust rising and headlights pointed up into some oak trees and blue spruces. The damn thing had flipped on its side. A wheel spun lazily. The van was baby shit brown and badly rusted. Dust hung in the air.

  Service scrambled up on the van and jerked a door open. He could smell gas and fumes. Not good. The engine was still running.

  “Shut the motor off,” Service barked.

  A male voice said, “I know, I know, I shunt drink an’ drive. Jus’ had one, I swear.”

  One: a bottle, a keg, a tanker off the back of an eighteen-wheeler?

  At least he got the engine off. Service helped the man out and down. He stank of alcohol and had a nasty cut on his forehead. He was seeing a year’s worth of blood today, and summer was just starting up. The man tried to stand but fell.

  “Are you alone?”

  “Yup.”

  But Service heard more sounds from inside the van. He climbed back on top and used his light. There was a woman in back.

  “Are you hurt?”

  “Where’s Roy? I need Roy.”

  “The driver?” Why had the man said he was alone?

  “Roy!” she shouted. “You know Roy?” she asked Service.

  The light showed a nasty knot on her forehead, and it was growing. Drunks. He helped her out and looked for the man, but he was gone. Service took the woman to his truck.

  “Stay right here.”

  The woman began to sob and shake. “Where’s Roy?”

  He wanted to tell her that the chickenshit was trying to leave her high and dry, but he kept quiet. Using his light he spotted the man on the road, stumbling along and falling every few feet. He ran to Roy, who suddenly turned and held up his hands and toppled backward on the loose sand road, raising a small cloud of dust.

  When Service got him to his feet, the man stuck his hands in his pockets and weaved. Service led him back to the truck
and put him inside with the woman.

  The woman said, “Where’s the van, Roy?”

  “I don’t know nothing about a van,” he said. “I was taking a walk.”

  She began to slap him and he struck back in defense. Service wedged himself between them and immediately became their joint target. The woman punched him hard three or four times on the back of the head before he could subdue her. He held the man off with one hand on his bloody forehead; he was too drunk to resist.

  Service radioed for Avery, who this time came to his assistance.

  They administered Breathalyzers. The woman blew .22 and the man .31. They were way over the legal limit. The man’s name was Boven, the woman Daviros, both from Mackinaw City.

  Service read them their rights and Avery drove them away.

  He was glad that Kira seemed to be asleep when he got back. It was nearly 4 a.m.

  “Everything under control?” she asked in the dark as he crawled onto the bed beside her. Everything except the world, he thought. Nights like this were a lot more common for a CO than most people could imagine, much less cope with.

  “It’s fine,” he said, kicking off his boots.

  She tried to caress his face. “Well, we’re awake . . . ?”

  He said, “I need sleep, Kira.” She rolled over with a loud sigh.

  He knew Kira was miffed and he lay there for a few minutes, then got up and called Candy McCants. They quickly made a plan for the morning.

  McCants pulled up to his house before sunrise, as promised, towing a steel barrel trap, which they moved down into the woods and baited with a mesh bag loaded with smoked bacon.

  “You think she’ll come back?” she asked.

  “I hope not,” he said. It was depressing how much time was wasted trapping and moving nuisance bears in summer. August was the worst because the tourist traffic was heaviest, and they all had food along and didn’t know how to take care of it. Bears and idiots: It was a bad combination.

  “Your face looks like a waffle,” McCants said.

  “You ought to see the other guy,” he said, trying to make a joke.

  McCants stayed for breakfast, which Service cooked. While bacon fried, he awoke Kira, who came to the table in her robe and eyed them sleepily.

  “Did I miss something?”

  When breakfast was done, Kira whispered to McCants, “Tell him to take the day off.”

  McCants said, “You tell him.”

  Kira was cool when he and McCants went out to their trucks.

  “She up to this life?” she asked.

  “Is anybody?” he answered.

  His formal workday began at the Marquette County Sheriff’s Department, where he made out reports on the drunks and cycle rider. Avery, of course, was off duty and home sleeping, while he was back on duty. Normal. The drunks had told Avery they had left Mackinaw City, “just for a drive,” and begun drinking road beers. They had come well over a hundred miles and were still alive. God watched over drunks. Sometimes.

  The cycle rider was still in the hospital in serious but stable condition.

  After writing his reports and affixing it to Avery’s Service called Sergeant Parker and told him about the bear and the trap and asked for a suggestion of where to put the sow and her cubs if she cooperated and got into the trap, which was far from a given. Parker told him he expected COs to handle such problems on their own initiative. Classic Parker, never taking responsibility, just credit.

  He went to Rollie Harris’s house in Marquette to see Jean and Lanny. Several COs and neighbors were already there, and the kitchen was piled with food. In an emergency people tended to pull together. Why couldn’t they behave this way when there was no emergency?

  Jean Harris hugged him tight but didn’t cry. A CO’s spouse was the same as a soldier’s spouse. You kept it together.

  “Rollie said you were the best,” she whispered. “He said no matter what happened, no matter how crazy things got, he could always count on you.”

  That shit again. “We’ll miss Rollie,” Service mumbled. He thought there might be a creator, but doubted heaven or hell. Dead was dead.

  He talked to Lanny for a while. She had puffy eyes but was trying to be brave. Service left Harris’s and went to a pay phone, using a prepaid phone card. He was always picking them up in convenience stores: They were impossible to trace.

  Simon del Olmo reported that he had visited the Iron County deeds office. The Knipes had a quite a number of small parcels and lots, all located haphazardly around Lake Ellen, the general area where diamond-bearing structures were rumored to be.

  “They’re in the hunt, compadre,” del Olmo said.

  “Find out if they’re trying to peddle or lease their parcels, okay? And find out if they have mineral rights for the properties.”

  “Bueno, Bubba.”

  Service stared at the phone. Bueno, Bubba? He laughed out loud. Del Olmo was brash.

  The next call went to Joe Flap.

  “How we doin’ on that chopper?”

  “Hey,” Flap said. “I got the beer. That Nantz broad is a real dilly.”

  Dilly? What the hell did that mean?

  “No blue chopper yet, but I’m not a quitter,” Flap said.

  Service rubbed his eyes and called Gus Turnage but got his machine; he left a message asking him to call tonight. The way his luck was running, Gus would wake him up.

  McCants met him for lunch at a pasty shop called Shovels. It wasn’t far from Marquette Prison, where the worst prisoners in the state penal system were housed.

  “You had a hell of a night,” she said. “You see Jean?”

  He nodded.

  “I was over there earlier,” she said. “Pretty damn sad. I can’t believe the LT’s gone. How come death always takes the good ones first?”

  “Thanks,” he said. He was nearly a decade older than Rollie.

  “Not you,” she said. “Don’t be so sensitive. You think Lisette will get his job?”

  He hadn’t thought about it. “Only if no other LT wants it. She’s low man on the totem pole.”

  “But she’s perfect for the job, yes?”

  He nodded. It was true.

  They ordered gravy with pasties. Service drank three cups of black coffee and smoked several cigarettes. The pasties were too dry, but filling. Brought to the U.P. by Cornish miners in the previous century, they were the area’s dish of choice. In essence potpies filled with pork, rutabagas, and onions, the pies folded over to form a half moon, a shape that let miners heat them in the mines on their shovel blades over fires and torches. Service ate only a few bites of the pasty and lit another cigarette.

  “You need to cut down on the smokes,” McCants said.

  “Are you my mother?”

  “You never had a mother,” she said, putting out her hand. “You were born of wild animals in the woods. Can I have one?” she asked meekly.

  Lemich would meet him tomorrow morning. How much should he tell the man? Without the hockey-crazy professor’s knowledge, he wasn’t likely to learn much. He thought momentarily about inviting Nantz but decided against it.

  He stopped at Silver Creek on the way south and checked the licenses of three men using Mepps spinners for brown trout. They had two seventeen-inch dandies. Their fishing licenses were fine and they were respectful. They were up from Mount Pleasant for a few days and happy to be fishing instead of working.

  Service was glad it was summer. In late spring and into June warm-water species spawned and made people crazy. In fall cold-water fish moved up the streams and hunters started in. More craziness. Summer had its share of nuts, but the weather was better.

  His thoughts about weather told him he was getting punchy on too little sleep and too much caffeine.

  Central dispatch in Lansing called him on the radio when he was on US 41 and told him a man in Ladoga wanted to see a CO right away.

  “About what?”

  The dispatcher wasn’t sure, which was typical. Lansing want
ed control, but didn’t have a clue about what COs needed in the real world where they operated. He got the name and address and headed for Ladoga.

  The village, such as it was, was east of US 41, south of Gwinn. The call came from a two-story house across from a fourplex that looked like a cheap motel that had been modified. When K. I. Sawyer Air Force Base had been active the locals had built apartments, hoping to harvest some easy military cash. Now the Air Force was gone, the base decommissioned, and most of the apartments vacant.

  The man at the house was named Alping. He owned the fourplex.

  “Something I want you to see,” the man said. He was short and obese and badly needed a haircut. He wheezed and puffed as he walked.

  There was a terrible stink coming from an end apartment. “Have you been inside yet?” Service asked.

  “No way.”

  The smell was organic, rotting, but not human. In his experience, dead people had a unique scent.

  “Open it.”

  “You gonna take out your gun?”

  “No.” When people looked at a uniform they tended to see only the badge and sidearm. TV made it seem as though cops shot people every day. Unlike cities, up here everybody was armed. There were fewer burglaries than in cities because northern property owners knew how to shoot and would. The downside was that there were more accidental shootings too.

  The smell that rolled out the open door was nauseating. Definitely not human, but definitely something dead and decomposing.

  The owner remained outside.

  The smell was strongest from the cellar door. Service flipped on the cellar light and crept gingerly down the wooden steps. The floor was littered with the carcasses and viscera of skinned raccoons. Service counted up to twenty and stopped. Skinned and dumped. He trudged back up the stairs and looked at the carpet runner, looking for blood. None was in evidence, meaning they had been brought downstairs and skinned. Where were the pelts? None of this added up.

  “Who’s the tenant?” Service asked Alping.

  “An asshole four-flusher named Bowin, behind in payments. I told him he had till the end of the week or he’d be evicted. Then he run off and didn’t pay.”