Killing a Cold One

by Joseph Heywood

  “I asked you along so you can see what you reported. You are curious, right?”

  “Am I in any danger?” the man demanded to know.

  “I don’t know. Are you?”

  “You know how Indians are,” he said.

  “No, why don’t you tell me about that,” she said.

  “Vindictive, a menace to civilized society, worse than radical Islamists.”

  “You lost me there, sir. Nobody will hurt you when you’re with us.”

  “But you won’t always be with me,” he complained.

  “True,” she said, tapping her forehead. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

  They parked the trucks at the mouth of the one-time campground and went in on foot: Service, Noonan, Treebone, Allerdyce, Denninger, and Folsom.

  “Where’s your sarge?” Service asked Denninger as they walked.

  “Sitting on Johnstone’s trailer.”

  “You think she’s coming back soon?”

  “I got an anonymous call that she’s gone hinkybird and is on the move constantly.”

  “Including her own hacienda?”

  “That was the word.”

  “You know what those pouches are?” he asked her.

  “No,” Denninger said.

  A trail led from the campground to the cliff. Service could smell the dregs of a fire. A pit was built not six feet from the edge of site number four, and dry deadwood had been stacked near the fire. Several peeled aspen poles had been placed in the fire circle, leaning into each other, tepee-like. A deerskin pouch was attached to each pole, and each pouch had a red stick figure on it. There were no footprints in evidence, but there were dark stains on the rocks around the pit. Noonan knelt, wet a finger, and swiped a rock, coming up with a red fingertip he lit with his flashlight. “The fuck is this shit?” he said.

  Service nudged Rod the Odd, who jumped. “Ideas?”

  “All I heard was there were some weird things out here.”

  “Heard from whom?”

  “I don’t recall. Hell, everybody’s heard the dogman stuff. It’s all over Baraga and L’Anse. You hear it everywhere—something about chopped-up dead bodies and such.”

  “Ojibwes up here don’t go in for this stuff,” Denninger said. “Most of them are Catholics and Methodists.”

  Noonan sniggered. “Means shit all. Santeros in southwest Detroit practice a form of voodoo combines African gods and R.C. saints. With religion, anything is possible.”

  Service said, “Let’s separate, spread out, and sweep the area.”

  It was Treebone who made the discovery: a red wooden figure, five feet tall and sticklike, eye-popping red, with an eerily lifelike face. It had been flayed, singed, and impaled on a white pine stripped of its branches. A black cloth was attached to the figure’s head, and snapped in a steady northwest breeze that smelled like snow was in the offing.

  “Like a giant party favor,” Treebone said.

  Service stood close to Allerdyce. “Seen anything like this before?”

  “No, I ain’t.”

  “What does it mean?” a very shaky Rod the Odd asked in a quavering voice.

  Denninger shone her flashlight around the damp ground. It had sleeted and rained that morning. “Just our prints. How did this thing get here?”

  “Maybe it flew,” Noonan offered. “Had a Santero priest one time tell me he could fly and shape-shift into other creatures.”

  “You believed him?” Tree asked.

  “Fuck no. I was pinching him for capping his old lady and I told him, ‘You gon’ fly, motherfucker, this be the time.’ He never moved.”

  Willie Celt called on the 800. “I’ve got Kelly Johnstone in protective custody. Says she wants to talk to you out there at the campground.”

  “Bring her,” Service said, and wondered why.

  •••

  Celt parked by the other trucks and led the woman to them. She was uncuffed, walking slowly and not talking. They met at the red effigy and Denninger lit it with her flashlight. “You’ve sure been gone a lot, Chairman,” she said.

  Suddenly Kelly Johnstone grabbed the effigy, ran straight to the precipice, and disappeared over the top into the night. No sound, no warning; just gone and over. Service and Allerdyce were behind her and heard only a dull splat as something struck the water below.

  “Check it out,” Noonan said. “She can’t fly neither.”

  Willie Celt said, “We’ll play hell recovering her body. Bad current, whirlpools, some deep-ass holes filled with sweepers and crap, snags everywhere down there.”

  “There an easy way down?” Service asked.

  “None I know of,” Celt said.

  “Lot of heavity here,” Allerdyce said to Service, who had no idea what he meant.

  Service looked at Sergeant Celt. “Did you tell her we were at the campground?”

  “Nope. She seemed to know that.”

  The sky began to spit ice pellets.

  24

  Friday, November 14

  L’ANSE, BARAGA COUNTY

  Service and crew took two rooms at the Hilltop Motel after the fiasco at the campground. County deputies put personnel there overnight, but no serious body-recovery effort could begin until they would have morning light, and perhaps the sleet and snow had let up.

  A cell phone buzzing under Service’s pillow woke him up. “What?”

  “Cale here; sorry to call so early, but I wanted to catch you.”

  “You have. Who the hell is this?”

  “Cale Pilkington, biologist.”

  “Sorry, Cale. We had some weird times last night. What have you got?”

  “Nancy Krelle is a paleobiologist and anthropologist with the Oregon lab. She geeked out when she got the tooth we sent. She’s seeking confirmation from a colleague at UCLA who works La Brea.”

  “The tar pits?”

  “In the vernacular. Technically, the substance is asphaltum.”

  “Cale, focus. Please.”

  “Sorry. Dr. Krelle is four nines certain your canine tooth is a specimen of a very large Canis dirus.”

  “English, Cale.”

  “Four nines means ninety nine point nine nine, or almost one hundred percent probability the tooth belongs to a dire wolf.”

  “Like the Grateful Dead tune?”

  “No, for real. They died out about nine thousand years ago.”

  “All but this one?” Service said. “How the hell does a nine-thousand-year-old tooth end up in a moose’s thigh in 2008?”

  “That is the question, isn’t it,” Pilkington said.

  Service said. “I can’t think. I need coffee. I’ll call you back in thirty minutes, tops.” He dressed and walked across the shared parking lot to the Hilltop Restaurant, which was just opening for breakfast, ordered a cup of black coffee to go, took it outside, lit a cigarette by the front entrance, and called the biologist back.

  “Okay, I’m afoot now. Talk. You’re not suggesting an extinct nine-­thousand-year-old animal is alive and among us.”

  “I’m not, but Dr. Krelle says there’s a chance. She says the crypto community has been talking like this was a likelihood based on reports of moose kills in Saskatchewan, all of them in the northern river watershed, big-time moose country.”

  “Creep-toe community?”

  “Crypto, as in cryptozoology, the study of hidden animals—you know, legends and shit, like Bigfoot and so forth.”

  “That’s real?”

  “The study, sure. Even though some of the practitioners are lulucakers and nutsawillies, there are plenty of legit people interested in the subject.”

  “I don’t believe in Easter Bunnies,” Service said.

  Pilkington said, “This Easter Bunny is about one and a half to two times the size of our gray wol
ves. Squatter build, wider, huge teeth and jaws. It lived exclusively off large game. When the large prey began to die off, the wolves died, too.”

  “There you go,” Service said.

  “Listen, please. What I’m going to say is speculative and highly theoretical, but that doesn’t automatically render it inaccurate or impossible, then or now. Follow me?”

  “I’m not sure. Keep going.”

  “The dire wolves were here at the end of the Pleistocene epoch—the Ice Age, if you will.”

  “Gimme a time estimate.”

  “Started twelve thousand years back, give or take, but we’ve recovered remains, and there are a lot of dire wolf remains. Suggests the wolves were still around three thousand years after that, give or take.”

  “People around then, too?”

  “Heavens, yes. The first Homo sapiens dates to about two hundred thousand years back, and some of the most recent fieldwork has put man in the New World possibly as early as eighteen thousand years ago. Now understand: The dire wolves were only in this part of the world. They’re not exactly wolves. More like a separate species, like a coyote or a hyena or something. The common time for man here is eleven thousand years ago, which could put dire wolves and mankind side by side in North and South America, and we’re pretty sure that man is responsible for the extinction of a great number of large mammals.”

  “Dire wolves included?”

  “We don’t really know. What you need to know is that there is anecdotal evidence of a dire wolf killed by Florida farmers in the 1920s, but no evidence or photographs, just several questionable newspaper accounts. There’s some possibility that was Canis rufus, the red wolf, but we don’t know. The reds were still being reported around the same time. And people still claim to see them, but it’s not substantiated and they’re considered extinct in Florida. Add to this the Inuit talk about Waheela, a giant white wolf, which some think is a relict Canis dirus, and the Sioux stories of Shunka Warakin, which translates roughly as ‘one who carries off dogs.’ Gray wolves, we all know, will kill any and almost all canid competition, so this Siouxan creature could certainly be a wolf. The thing is, if there’s a relict subpopulation contemporary to the present, it’s small and rarely encountered by man.”

  “Here, in the U.P.?”

  “Well, we have some fine, isolated areas that theoretically could hold such animals if there was adequate prey. There are undocumented reports of three U.P. trappers bumping heads with a giant white wolf in northern Iron County in 1918. All of this is hearsay, but hearsay often has some basis in reality, even if we can’t immediately find supporting evidence.”

  Service’s brain was spinning. “Cale, whoa. What the heck is your take-home here?”

  “I’m sorry, Grady. I’m so damn excited I’m about to wet my pants. What I’m saying is that we may have a dire wolf in the McCormick Wilderness. It may be indigenous, or it may be just passing through; we can’t know that yet.”

  “You base all of this on one goddamn tooth?”

  “A tooth you pulled out of moose remains. The moose didn’t fall on that tooth. The measurement from the tooth to the other fang puncture tells us this is probably not a gray wolf, as does the horrific damage to the remains. We don’t have anything that can do that to a moose . . . at least, nothing we know of.”

  “What the hell are we supposed to do, Cale? I don’t even know what to think,” Service said.

  “Neither do I, Grady. I mean, is endangered in the same regulatory status as once-thought-extinct? I’m clueless on the implications of what we’re supposed to do here. The only thing I’m sure of is that we can’t say anything until we’re certain. If we let this leak, every headhunting yahoo in the country will be up here trying to bag this thing. We don’t need that sort of crap in conjunction with the deer-season opening. We already have enough wolves being shot by allegedly frightened deer hunters.”

  “The governor wants me to find this thing and kill it,” Service said.

  Silence from Pilkington. Then, “Man . . . Why?”

  “What if it’s killing people?”

  “Listen, we think these things lived off carrion, not fresh meat they killed.”

  “You theorize. You don’t know for certain, Cale.”

  “True.”

  “What if you and your scientific colleagues are wrong?”

  The biologist gulped loudly and hung up.

  Grady Service dumped his coffee dregs and lit another cigarette.

  Dogman, dogshit, windigo, dire wolf, Waheela, Shunka Warakin, five dead (counting Nepo), and now Kelly Johnstone—three people reported missing, including the teacher and her two kids. The governor wants me to hunt down the dogman. Given all this, what does that really mean? Am I under orders to kill an animal that might be the last of its kind on Earth? Is there even a link between the killings and this animal? No satisfactory answers. Even fewer satisfactory questions.

  Service felt like getting back into bed and covering his head with a pillow. “This gets shittier and shittier,” he said out loud and headed back to the motel to get the others moving.

  25

  Friday, November 14

  L’ANSE

  The meeting took place at the L’Anse State Police post. Jerry Dove, the county’s medical examiner, was tall and slightly bent, with a cigar-shaped head and a razor-thin aquiline nose. Noonan took one look at the man and whispered, “Dye that fucker green or blue and he’s a dead ringer for a Muppet.”

  The ascerbic Dr. Dove had the antithesis of a sense of humor and lived up to Denninger’s premeeting descriptor of a “prick practitioner.”

  “I do not want an explanation for the presence of game wardens at my meeting,” the ME began. “I simply want them out of my sight. This is not a DNR case.”

  Baraga County sheriff Sulla Kakabeeke turned red. “Excuse me, Doctor, but they were witnesses to the suicide.” The sheriff was new to her office, a retired State Police sergeant Service had worked with in her previous life.

  “There is no suicide until I declare it so,” the doctor said officiously. “Nullum corpus, no regere.”

  “Dis guy don’t spick no ’merican?” Allerdyce whispered.

  “And who and what are you, sir? Identify yourself.”

  “Consultant,” Service said quickly.

  “Consultant in what area of expertise?” the doctor inquired.

  “Search and recovery,” Service said.

  Dove crossed his arms. “All right, Mr. Consultant, tell us where we might find the alleged corpus delicti.”

  Allerdyce didn’t bat an eye. “You want body, she down dere Blood Creek.”

  “If said location is so readily known, why has the body not been recovered?”

  Allerdyce said, “Mebbe ’cause youse stand up here in orifice pontious-piffleating ’stead climb butt down bloody cliff and do youse’s job.”

  “I beg your pardon,” the doctor snapped.

  “He’s suggesting that if you let us focus on body recovery, we can get things moving,” Service said. “The body is in an extremely difficult location to reach safely, much less to recover. There’s some chance, in fact, that you may have to descend with us to do your job, or you may have to authorize us to preliminarily declare death until we retrieve it.”

  “Do you know precisely where the remains are?” the doctor asked.

  “We know where the body was last night—not where the river might have taken it overnight.”

  “In other words, it has not actually been located.”

  “No, not yet,” Sheriff Kakabeeke said.

  Dove coughed. “I see no reason to continue this charade. Go do your jobs and inform me only when it is time to perform my official duty.” The ME departed without small talk or social grace and nearly collided with Tuesday Friday as she arrived.

  “You guys piss off
that man?” she asked, coming into the room.

  “Local ME,” Denninger said. “He lives in a permanent state of pissed-off.”

  “What’s the deal here?”

  Service explained.

  “Suicide, cut-and-dry, seems to me,” Friday said. “Did you hear the body hit?”

  “Heard something,” Service told her.

  “Had to be the body,” Treebone said.

  “We think,” Service corrected his friend. “But we don’t know.”

  “Why am I here?” Friday asked. She looked weary.

  Service hooked her arm and walked her outside into the parking lot where he lit a cigarette.

  “There’s no dogman,” he said after a couple of hits.

  “You know this how?” she asked.

  “Is there any extraneous DNA in the remains?”

  “In what regard?”

  “Human or animal.”

  “No,” she said, her voice trailing off. “What’s going on?”

  “You ever heard the word windigo?”

  She nodded. “Somewhere, I think.”

  “How about dire wolf?”

  This time she shook her head.

  Grady Service said sheepishly, “That’s all I got for now. We have to go find a body.”

  “You’re sure it’s a suicide?”

  He gave her a quick description of the events.

  “Hundred feet plus, straight down?”

  “Have to rope down to get her, I’m thinking,” he told her.

  She squeezed his arm. “Be careful.”

  PART TWO

  SKIRR OF THE IMPOSSIBLE

  26

  Friday, November 14

  BLOOD CREEK, BARAGA COUNTY

  Six inches of fresh wet snow had fallen. The scene at the campground was chaotic, the entrance blocked by the Baraga County Search and Rescue (SAR) team’s equipment and massive RV, multiple emergency vehicles, from fire department and county sheriffs to Michigan State Police, and a Bay ambulance pulling an elongated trailer. There was a steady flow of men and women in baseball caps, orange and electric-yellow Job Sight high-visibility vests, biking and climbing helmets, a rainbow of coats and colors and the clank of climbing harnesses and large bundles of ropes and lines. An ATV with four triangular tracks instead of tires pulled a blue, bullet-shaped Plexiglas trailer that looked like a stretcher on wheels. All together, just chaos, with a purpose visible only to those trained in the art of finding and recovering people, or bodies.