He said we should go back to the hut where we could talk. We sat on our camp stools, and I asked Carlos to take off his ski mask so I could see his face. He did, and I did the same. I took off my mittens and rubbed my itchy head. Carlos’s blond hair stood out in spikes. He put his gloves on the stove to warm. Then he said he had a request as well, and he took a set of handcuffs out of his coat pocket and asked me to hold out my right wrist. I laughed. I wasn’t sure why—things had gone past funny a while ago. I refused. He took the gun—my gun—from his other pocket and held it to my forehead.
“You’re not going to shoot me, Carlos.”
“I’m not?”
“Put the gun away. Please.”
And then he hit me on the side of the head with the gun, and my brain exploded with a searing and lacerating pain. When I grabbed my head, he slid the cuff over my wrist, locked it, and then cuffed the wrist to the leg of the stove. My eye was already swelling shut; I was bleeding and I felt nauseated.
He apologized and said, “Promise me that you’ll take everything I tell you to the grave.” And he laughed. “I was not present when it all went down, but, yes, the Hallidays were dispatched.”
“By cops.”
“They were caught, you might say, in an unfortunate cross fire. Plans gone awry.” He shook his head. “A shame.”
“What did Halliday do that was so bad you all murdered his family?”
“It was something he was about to do.”
“So you know the future? Are you insane? What the fuck happened to you?”
“And, of course, I had your destitute friend dispatched.”
“Why?”
“For the halibut.”
“Making jokes? You set me up with the hidden gun?”
“And you got lucky and found it.” Carlos wiped his runny nose with the sleeve of his jacket and then picked up the hatchet I’d been using to chop the firewood. “And you knew enough to dispose of it. Give you credit for that.” He chopped at the ice where the wooden floor ended and the ice began, picked up a chunk, and handed it to me. “Put that on your face there. You’re going to need stitches.” He clapped a hand on his knee. “Time’s a-wasting.” He stood. “I just want you to know that I don’t enjoy any of this.”
“Save it for the priest.”
“That’s the beauty of the Catholic Church, isn’t it? I have been forgiven all my sins.”
“By whom?”
“By the only one who matters.”
“Why do you do it?”
“You get locked in. You make a decision when you’re young—to do a man a favor, to accept a token of gratitude—and that contract becomes the bedrock of your life. Everything you ever do from that moment on is like predestined. Still, I’ve got no regrets, Coyote.” Carlos raised the gun, pointed it at me, and fired a bullet past my head. “Loud, isn’t it?”
I was crying. I begged him to stop for the love of God.
“I always wonder if you hear that blast when you’re really shot.”
“Carlos!”
“I told you to back off a while ago.”
“What have I done?”
“If you dive into the shark tank and get shredded by the sharks, that’s not the sharks’ fault. That’s what they do.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You dove into the tank, my friend.”
“You invited me to the crime scene.”
“And then I dismissed you, but you wouldn’t go away.”
“So you’re a machine. You do whatever you’re told to do.”
“Our work is closely scrutinized, and failure is unacceptable. You don’t expect a man, Halliday, any man, to sacrifice his family to save his own skin.”
Carlos heard what I heard—the sound of an approaching vehicle. He opened the door. We saw the flashing lights of a state police cruiser slowly headed our way, maybe summoned by the last gunshot. Carlos turned to me. “Don’t wander off.”
“What happens to me?”
“If I die, maybe you live.” He headed out for the hole and the Ski-Doo, leaving the door open.
I knew the stove wasn’t bolted down. I rocked it with my shoulder. Burned my jacket, but I didn’t feel the heat, it was so thick. The police SUV headed for the hut and stopped. The trooper stepped out of the vehicle, holding his pistol with two hands and pointing it at the ice about five yards in front of himself. Where was Carlos? I yelled for help, said I was in the ice hut, which I then realized might sound like a ploy to the trooper, an invitation to an ambush. I yelled that I was alone and couldn’t come out like he was asking me to because I was handcuffed to a stove. You have to believe me, I yelled. He approached, gun raised. I begged him not to shoot. He crouched, pointed the gun inside, and swept it across the room. He told me to put my hands on my head. I put on the one I could and reminded him about the other. I said, “Thank god.”
He said, “You’re under arrest.”
“For what?”
“From the looks of the body on the ice, I’d say murder. And from the looks of your face, I’d say he put up a good fight.”
“I killed him and then cuffed myself to the stove?”
“People do funny things.”
I tried to explain, realized it would be quite a long story. He said I’d have plenty of time to tell it all. This was not the trooper from the traffic stop and accident, but he knew about us, apparently. Just what he knew he wasn’t saying. “Where’s your partner?”
I said the man who was trying to kill me was out there.
As the trooper walked back to his vehicle to call for backup, I heard a shot and then a thud, and saw the trooper collapse to the ice. I rocked the stove more desperately than before and was able at last to topple it off its stone pad, and when it fell to its side, I was able to free my hand. I tucked the loose half of the still-attached handcuff into the sleeve of my jacket. The broken flue stayed in one piece and was somehow still attached to the roof. I stood and looked out the window and saw Carlos kneeling behind the Ski-Doo. The trooper got himself up on one knee and fired at Carlos. Carlos fired back.
The trooper told Carlos to put down his weapon, to lie on the ice, and to lock his hands on top of his head. The trooper got to his feet, steadied himself, and stepped toward the vehicle. Carlos shot him again. The trooper dropped to the ice and seemed to be out, except that his right leg was twitching. Carlos walked up to the trooper, put the gun to the back of the trooper’s head, and pulled the trigger, but either the gun was jammed or he was out of bullets. Carlos put the gun in his pocket and walked to the hole. This was my chance to run for it. Carlos lifted the corpse of Kevin Shanks and slid it into the water. Apparently he’d widened the hole just enough. When he turned, he saw, and I saw, the trooper lumbering toward him, gun raised. Carlos looked almost amused. The trooper fired wildly and then fired again and hit Carlos in the foot. Carlos screamed and fell. He yelled, “Look what you’ve done!” He stood and limped a couple of steps, grabbed the auger, and started it up.
The hut was filling with smoke. I crawled outside and got out of sight behind the hut. Maybe Carlos would think I had died of asphyxiation and leave me alone. If I could make it to the SUV without being seen or shot, I could call for help on the radio. If Carlos saw me, however, even if he couldn’t get to me just then, he’d hunt me down. I knew the keys were in the ignition of the Ski-Doo. I could run, but I would never make it to the shore and the pine forest.
The trooper shot at Carlos. Carlos walked toward the trooper, dragging his right foot. He held the auger up in front of him and drilled it into the trooper’s gut, tearing into the jacket. You could hear the blades quit turning for just a second, while the motor continued to run, and then reengage. Carlos pushed the trooper off his feet with the auger. He landed on his back, screaming. The trooper reached for the auger’s blades, which seemed to grow like some spiral flower out of his stomach, but the blades sliced through his hands. Carlos leveraged his body against the handle and the engine hous
ing and drove the rotating blades through the body and into the ice in a spray of blood, cloth, and viscera. He reversed the auger and drew it out of the body, shut it off, dropped it, picked up the trooper’s gun, and fired a shot at the hut.
Then he lay back and moaned, and I ran to the SUV, but it was locked. I dashed back to the hut, covered my face, crawled inside, and retrieved the hatchet. I had to hope Carlos had passed out from the pain or the shock from the loss of blood. Then I could take the Ski-Doo and flee. But then what?
Instead, Carlos got up and dragged the corpse by the legs over to the hole in the ice. When he began sliding the body into the hole, I saw my only chance of getting out alive. I walked up behind him as quickly and quietly as I could, and when he leaned over the hole to push the head under the ice, I shoved him in the butt with my foot, and he went shoulder-first into the hole, but not all the way in. His right arm had grabbed the edge of the hole and his right leg was still on the ice. I stomped his hand and his broken foot, which I could see was a soup of gristle just above the ankle. I brandished the hatchet. He thrashed in the water, struggling to get out, and I let him have it. I hit him square on the head with the hatchet, with the blunt, not the blade side, because for some reason I couldn’t bring myself to split his head open. He slipped into the water rather quietly, and I fell to my knees, spent. Before I could stand, Carlos’s arm shot out of the water, and he grabbed the handcuff that had come loose from my jacket sleeve. It was locked so he couldn’t get his hand in, but he had a firm grip on the loop and tugged—trying to pull me in or himself out. His other hand gripped the lip of the ice. I got the hatchet in my left hand and chopped his hand with the hatchet and pinned it below the knuckles to the ice. He let go of the cuffs, got his elbow on the ice, and pulled his head above the water. I ran to the Ski-Doo, started it up, and drove toward Carlos and over the hole in the ice and parked. I heard Carlos call my name in the few inches of air he had above the ice. I heard him punch at the underside of the Ski-Doo. I heard him scream.
I didn’t know what would happen now, but I knew I had to move. I headed toward the hut where Carlos had parked the Yukon. It, too, was locked, and the keys were now under the ice with Carlos. I hoped that, after the initial feeling of his lungs being torn and the burning in his windpipe, Carlos slipped into a feeling of calmness and tranquillity. I knew that the shock of the frigid water would shut down his heart in minutes. I headed for the parking lot. From there I could find the road and then the highway. And from there, who knew? I started walking backward into the wind, and I saw the hut ablaze, the exhaust fumes in the lights of the police cruiser, the headlight of the Ski-Doo pointing off onto the ice, and above us all, the sheets of green lights in the shimmering sky. When I turned back to get my bearings, I saw headlights coming down the road, and I thought, So this is the way my world ends. I’ll just make it easy for them, easy for me—so I stumbled for the headlights. At least I’d be warm.
And when I finally got warm, when I thawed out and quit shaking uncontrollably, when I no longer felt the stabbing pain in my hands and feet, when I’d had a cup of hot coffee, then I’d tell my handlers the story of all the recent nasty business, and I’d tell it properly, with sufficient backstory, with eloquent and convincing detail, with the kind of keen psychological insight you’d expect from a guy with robust mirror neurons. I’d utilize all the appropriate and seductive narrative techniques so that, as improbable as it all might sound, they would have to believe me. My only salvation, then, would be to tell a compelling and credible story.
I might preface the story by saying that life does not always make sense, but a story does. And courtroom testimony must. And that’s what we’re after, are we not, gentlemen? Sense equals truth. They’ll ask me to begin. They’ll turn on their video recording equipment. I’ll speak right up. I’ll tell them how it came to be that a mild-mannered therapist from Melancholy, Florida, was able to survive a bloody vendetta that he did not understand at all, and survive that carnage on the frozen lake, and how he—I—had nothing to do with the deaths of the three police officers, not really. And here I’ll explain that Paul Kunkel was not a CPA, was not, in fact, a Paul Kunkel, was a Detective Sergeant Carlos O’Brien, an insidious member of the Eden, Florida, police department, as was the naked and heretofore unidentified victim, who was at first purposefully misidentified as a terrifying Russian assassin, like someone out of a Dostoyevsky novel, but who was, in fact, one Officer Kevin Shanks, a steroid- and citizen-abusing rogue cop, like someone out of a Charles Willeford novel. One of my auditors will make a note of the names in his memo pad, and I’ll caution myself about the further use of incendiary modifiers like insidious. Let the actions speak for themselves. I will not, for example, use the phrase death squad in the interrogation room or the word police as an adjective. I’ll explain how it all started on Christmas Eve, although the seeds of the chaos were sewn much earlier, and leave it at that. In life we always want to know what happened in the past in order to understand the present, but in stories we don’t need to know. We trust the storyteller, who does know. I will earn their trust. I will appear to digress but I will not digress. I’ll watch their eyes and their postures and gauge their involvement and proceed accordingly. Once I have set the plot in motion, I’ll follow the chain of surprising and inevitable events that resulted in the horrible deaths of three men. Along the way I’ll mention the fourth death—my father’s—because it is thematically resonant, revelatory, and tangentially but significantly related. I’ll explain—no, I’ll illustrate how Carlos fired the kill shot with my gun (actually, there’s no reason to include ownership) into Kevin Shanks’s forehead, how he savagely murdered the state trooper, and how, wounded and perhaps in shock, he … And perhaps here I would lie a bit to tell the truth, the truth of the story being the point, not the facts of the events.
As the approaching car drove onto the ice and toward me, I raised my arms in relief and in blessed surrender. The car slowed, the headlights blinding me, and stopped. The driver’s window lowered; I shaded my eyes; Bay said, “Looks like I got here just in time. Get in.”
I ran around the car and hopped in. I jacked up the heat and said, “What took you so long?”
Bay fumbled around in his knapsack, took out a lock pick, asked for my hand, and undid the handcuffs. He turned the car around. “I see you burned down the hut. Where’s Carlos?”
“Carlos is no more.”
Bay clapped my leg. “Good to see you.”
“How did you know I was in trouble?”
“I didn’t until I learned that Carlos was on his way to Alaska with a friend.”
“But the GPS.”
“A precaution. I snuck it into your vest when I tried it on at your house. Lucky you.”
“Carlos set me up.”
“Yes, he did.”
“I killed Shanks for him—”
“And he had you under his thumb.”
We drove to the Richardson Highway and headed south toward Paxson.
I said, “What time is it?”
“Four A.M.”
“I can’t feel my fingers.”
He told me we had a flight out the next afternoon, not this afternoon, from Anchorage. I told him all my stuff was back in Fairbanks. “All taken care of,” he said. “Your carry-on’s in the trunk with your computer. I checked you out of the lodge and left a note in your handwriting for your hosts.” He said he’d gotten the e-mail about Myles, of course, and was so sorry. I told him everything that had happened since the shooting at the lodge. I said we needed to call someone. I said I’d gotten his e-mail but hadn’t seen but a minute of the video. And I thought, Christ, if I’d taken the computer with me, it’d still be locked up in the Yukon, and I’d be screwed.
He said, “They’re all dead out there, right? Okay, then, let the dead bury the dead.”
“But the trooper was killed.”
“And won’t come back to life.”
“The family will want to know what happ
ened.”
“They can make up their own story.”
Fifteen minutes later, we saw several police vehicles, lights flashing, speeding north. A minute later an ambulance followed. Bay slowed the car and pulled to the shoulder. He told me to roll down my window and toss the cuffs as far as I could. I did.
We were met with a roadblock in Big Delta. Bay told me to put the hood over my bloody face and pretend to sleep and not to wake up. The trooper asked to see our drivers’ licenses. Bay explained how I was sleeping one off, and reached into my jacket pocket, after he’d asked the trooper if that was all right, and pulled out a wallet that hadn’t been there.
The trooper said, “Where are you and Mr. Clockedile headed?”
Clockedile?
“Northway and then on to Juneau.”
The trooper ran his flashlight through the car or at least past my eyes. “Could you open your trunk, sir?”
I heard some shuffling of bags and then the closing of the trunk. The trooper told Bay that he’d been to Florida one time. South Beach. “Not for me,” he said.
“It’s an acquired taste,” Bay said.
“A lot of salacious behavior going on.”
“Well, it’s surely not God’s country.”
“Amen.”
I heard the hissing of air brakes behind us. The trooper said, “You have a safe trip, Mr. Tremblay.”
Bay told me that Inez had filed charges against Carlos for domestic abuse and Carlos had been on paid administrative leave beginning the day I left.
“I thought she moved out.”
“She tried to.”
We stopped for gas in Delta Junction, bought coffees and stale cake doughnuts. I asked Bay what would have happened if the trooper had run the licenses. Bay said we were covered. He did business with the same folks Carlos did. At the fork in the road, Bay slowed, checked his rearview, and took the highway to Anchorage.
No Regrets, Coyote Page 25