KILLING MAINE

by Mike Bond

  “Then you bumped that wasp nest.”

  “How could I know it was there?” I grabbed my seat belt as we howled through several significant changes in the road’s direction.

  “So you love me?” she repeated, hitting eighty-five in second and dropping nonchalantly into third. “But you’re not going to stop fucking other women?”

  “Of course I’m not going to stop fucking other women. And you shouldn’t stop fucking other guys.”

  She hit fourth, reached over and grabbed my privates. “We’ve got a deal.”

  She double-shifted down to third, engine screaming happily as we took the cutoff for Lexie’s farm. “Don’t you ever get tickets?” I added, hoping this might slow her down.

  “Nah,” she grinned, and in her lovely grin I saw again the seventeen-year-old girl with the barnyard freckles who’d seduced me on her way to Harvard. “I just buy them off.”

  “How’s that?” I says, curious, as this is a subject of much prison talk.

  “Every cop has his price.” She put a hand on my thigh. “Though most of them don’t know it.”

  I thought of her naked on the bed a few nights ago. With enough time, I reflected, she could probably swing the Supreme Court, at least the men. I pointed at a logging road that cut left into heavy timber. “Go there.”

  “What?” she geared down, “I don’t have snows!”

  “Just a few feet.”

  She pulled in, killed the engine. “You nut!”

  “Jail makes me so horny.” I couldn’t stop kissing her. “And you know I can’t have sex with Lexie,” I nipped her ear, “so I’m stuck with you.”

  “We can’t do it in this car, it’s too small.”

  I leaned closer, dizzied by her smell. “Like we learned in Special Forces: Never say it can’t be done.”

  LEXIE AND ERICA WERE NOT PLEASED to meet each other. But Lexie made coffee and we sat round the kitchen table eating Country Kitchen doughnuts and drinking the coffee with fresh cream and I got used to being a badminton cock unmercifully shuttled back and forth between them.

  “They key is Abigail,” Erica said finally. “She shows up dead is one thing. She returns to the living is another.”

  At this point any chance of her returning to the living seemed gone.

  To avoid being confronted by Lexie after Erica left, I went out to split wood, trying once more to figure who would kill Abigail, and for what reason? I didn’t put it to myself that way, but that’s what I meant.

  You don’t take the risk of killing someone unless they represent danger. For whom was Abigail a danger? How could I know, when I didn’t know what she knew?

  1. If she knew who killed her husband, she’d be at risk from them.

  2. If she admitted she was with Bucky the night her husband was killed, that would also put her at risk from the killers.

  3. If she was about to blow the whistle on some huge Legislative scam, she’d be at risk from whoever was behind it.

  4. A funny thought just hit me: What if she killed her husband?

  It was one of those off-the-cuff cerebral perambulations that often turns on lights in the rest of the brain. Which in my case is always a good idea. But made no sense at all.

  Except she’d said she didn’t love him, was preparing for divorce, that they didn’t make love, which is the primary force, the gravity, that holds a relationship together.

  Then I remembered how she was – fiery, ruthless, smart, and despite herself very caring, not a person who hurts anyone. Not even her husband, twit as he may have been.

  Abigail, I begged, please come home.

  THAT’S WHEN Mitchell called. “Ought to be some way,” he says, “to do a flyover –”

  “A flyover?”

  “Concentric circles out from where this girl disappeared. Like in the Panjshir, we had tons of sat data but nothing beat a close-up look from a thousand AGL.”

  “All it did was get guys shot down –”

  “You worried about that in Maine?”

  What he was saying was true, that low overflights, like a thousand feet about ground level, might show things satellites didn’t, particularly side angle stuff. Not that we had real time sat data for Maine. Nor did we have to worry, hopefully, about a plane getting shot down. Though any plane was at risk from wind turbine towers, some of them over half that height.

  “So I checked,” Mitchell goes on, always one step ahead, “see if any of our guys was up there…”

  “Yes, Mitchell.” I yawned.

  “Remember Clarence True?”

  I rubbed my scalp, hoping to encourage my brain. “Yeah maybe.”

  “Air Force Intel –”

  “Oh them.” There was a deep rivalry between SF and AF Intel. Not that we didn’t work together and protect each other, but… I stopped rubbing my scalp to slow the blizzard of dandruff into my eyes. When Air Force Intel guys were with us they got to paint the targets for our planes to hit. When they weren’t, we painted the targets, but they thought they did it better.

  “So I checked addresses,” Mitchell says. “This Clarence True, first loot, lives someplace called Gorham, works for FAA.”

  “That’s near Portland. Near the airport.”

  “Got a pen?” Mitchell took another swallow. “His cell number’s 333-7429.” He drained his glass and slapped it on the table.

  “What you drinking?”

  “You ever try Reyka? Icelandic vodka? Goes down like water.”

  “I remember a stopover there, before we pulled out in 2006. Naval Air Station Keflavik.”

  “The women,” Mitchell said. “Tall, blonde and beautiful…”

  It twisted my heart he could reminisce about women after losing his legs and privates saving me from that RPG in Afghanistan. But Mitchell was not a man to feel sorry for himself, or make others grieve for him. “I remember you dead drunk in bed with two of them,” I said. “All I could see was your olive drab socks sticking out from under the covers.”

  “I can’t believe you can remember anything from then.”

  “Yeah, maybe even memory’s a fiction.”

  “So call Clarence. Maybe you and he might see something.”

  Something might be just what I didn’t want to see. Abigail’s car, abandoned. A body at the edge of a field, half covered in snow.

  “OF COURSE I remember you,” Clarence chuckled. “Are you still a wiseass?”

  “Probably.”

  “You got that nasty rap pinned on you…” He was referring to when I shot the Afghani woman to put her out of her agony, like I already explained you.

  “An Army lawyer, West Point grad, she got me out.” I didn’t bother to tell Clarence I’d been back Inside thereafter, for saving Mitchell’s ass. “You got a little time, I could come down, see you?”

  “Of course.” You could hear the broad heavy smile in his voice. “You Special Forces guys, we always got time to help you out.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Whoa, you in a hurry? Okay then, how ‘bout seven-thirty?”

  ON THE WAY DOWN I stopped at the Stroudwater graveyard. Nothing had changed except the snow level had gone up a foot or two. When I reached the pines on the knoll a doe dashed over the side and across the frozen river, and somehow it seemed a bad omen.

  Nothing had changed with them while everything had with me. “The woman I told you about from Hallowell,” I said, “she’s missing. She may be dead. The cops seem to think I did it. And they think I shot out the four turbines at Paradise Lakes… The whole thing sucks…”

  Wind blew snow crystals back and forth between the graves. The ancient pines creaked overhead. “Pa’s sick. He’s dying… And now Don and Viv got killed and the cops are looking at me for that too…”

  They popped right into my head, Winston Churchill’s words. When you’re going through Hell, keep going.

  GORHAM WAS ONE of those places that had been a village when I’d spent my teenage summer in Maine, and was now a huge suburb of Po
rtland, as everyone was moving north from congested southern New England and congesting Maine in the process. Clarence was an older version of who I remembered, with gray now in his black curls, a little heavier round the middle, but still not a guy you’d want to mess with.

  “So what’s it like, the FAA?” I says. Portland Airport was where the Saudi 9/11 terrorists had entered the US on their way to fly our airliners into the World Trade towers, but that was long before Clarence got there.

  “We’re playin catchup right now.” He pinched his lower lip between thumb and forefinger, figuring how much he could tell me. “This ISIS shit, man, they’re determined to take down our civil flights… new bomb techniques, new materials we can’t identify.” He looked out across a back yard of bare maples and half-melted snow toward the distant airport and the huge shopping center beside it.

  “My family,” I said, “once owned all that land.”

  “You’d be a rich boy now. ‘Stead a showing up in that old pickup.”

  I had explained him what I wanted. He’d nodded at once. “Sure thing. Though chances are we won’t see much except clearcuts… Man they are tearing up this place.”

  “Maine?”

  “Even in the five years since we come here.” He nodded toward the kitchen where his wife was checking homework for their twin seven-year old daughters. “You want another Guinness?”

  I shook my head, back to thinking of Abigail. “I know it’s a long shot.”

  “Never know what we might see.”

  I stood. “Thanks, man. See you tomorrow.”

  “Seven hundred. Augusta airport.”

  “Can’t thank you enough.”

  “What you did back then, for everybody, that’s thanks enough.”

  HEADED NORTH in Bucky’s truck I reflected on the powerful link among those of us who have put our lives on the line for our country, that we need to make no other judgment than that about each other. Even Bucky, who’d helped put me Inside, to whom I was nevertheless bound by ancient ties because he’d once saved my life, and now I was determined to save his. They were both comforting and perilous, these ancient links, but I couldn’t imagine any other way to live.

  Whores, Cutthroats & Priests

  IT WAS A NASTY morning, dusting snow at 06:45 when I parked Bucky’s truck by the old Huey on display outside Augusta airport. Clarence was already there, his prop turning slowly to keep the engine oil moving in the minus twenty cold.

  “How was it, coming up?” I said.

  “Windy.” He hunched his shoulders in his airman’s leather jacket with its furry collar. “You getting in, or standing outside to chat?”

  I climbed aboard and belted in. “You know how to fly this thing?”

  “Not really. But us black folks is fast learners.” He placed his hand on my knee briefly as we accelerated down the runway, the Cessna hopping all over the place in the side gusts. “Don’t you fall out now.”

  “You crash this thing you’ll really piss me off.”

  We started concentric circles over Abigail’s house in Hallowell, Clarence trying to keep us tilted so I could look down on the snow-clad rooftops, the chimneys trailing smoke, snow-tufted cars and pickups in driveways, a few crows agitated by our passage over their heads, scattered trees then the wide slopes of my ancestor’s cow pasture, the empty Maine Turnpike in its cocoon of ice, dirty downtown Augusta and its frozen river, the two malls and acres of empty asphalt blasted out of the granite hills, then abbreviated meadows and cut-down forests, the slow throb of the Cessna’s engine and the propeller whack, the jiggle of belts and buckles, and spreading to the horizons all around us the vast landscape of Maine.

  “Musta been Ungodly beautiful,” Clarence said, watching his instruments and the sky around us, chewing on his lower lip. “Longfellow’s forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks…”

  From this height the tragedy of Maine grew clearer, the few islands of older forest in a sea of clearcuts and denuded saplings, the crisscross of logging roads, the mounds of logging slash, the trailer homes tacked to back roads like rowboats haphazardly moored in stormy waters. It was early Saturday morning but already the logging trucks were flitting to and fro like busy ants bearing their newly dead forest to the firewood sellers and pulp mills. “What they gonna do,” Clarence said, “when all the trees are gone?”

  “Burn camel shit,” I snickered, “like our friends in Afghanistan?”

  “Yo, what’s that?” he said, tilting us on one wing so the horizon was suddenly at ninety degrees.

  It was a white car, half snow-covered under pines at the end of a logging road. “Go lower,” I said.

  “I’m on the deck now.” He circled again, just over the treetops. There was so much snow on the car I couldn’t be sure but it looked like a Saab.

  “That could be it,” I said, a catch in my throat. “Climb higher so I can locate this.”

  Clarence took it back to thousand AGL till I could see the logging road tailing away from the black line of the Augusta-Belgrade road. “I’ve got it,” I said, a bleak calm settling over my heart and making it hard to breathe.

  Clarence swung back toward Augusta. “You want me call it in?”

  I thought a moment, suppressing the fear and pain. “Let me check first.”

  We landed in a flurry of new snow, Clarence dismissing me quickly. “I need to get back before this snow gets meaner.”

  “Thank you, Bro.” I slapped his shoulder. “I owe you.”

  He gave me a quick hug. “No you don’t.”

  IT TOOK AN HOUR to get there. The logging road was too deep in snow for Bucky’s truck so I parked and trudged through knee-deep drifts for maybe a mile till the stand of pines appeared. There’d been no recent car tracks, so the car Clarence and I had seen had been there long enough to tie in with Abigail’s absence.

  Not that I wanted it to.

  The stand of pines had somehow escaped the loggers, standing tall and windy in the driving snowstorm like a memory of the past, not that I gave a damn about that now.

  There it was under its blanket of snow, the white car.

  An old Audi down on its rims, similar enough when covered with snow to a Saab, with a bullet-cracked side window, and needles and leaves on the passenger seat where squirrels had made a winter home.

  “Dear Abigail,” I said into the teeth of the snowstorm, “if you’re out there please come home.”

  ON THE WAY BACK I drove through the growing blizzard to Don’s and Viv’s place, not wanting to be there but hoping the signed agreements they’d wanted to give me might somehow have survived the fire.

  After Erica’s attack yesterday on the cops they’d backed off and now said it was a kerosene fire. Like how some folks have a kerosene stove in the living room to supplement the wood heat in the basement when it gets real cold, and sometimes the pilot goes out and the kerosene vapor keeps seeping into the room and pretty soon while you’re sleeping you die and don’t even know it.

  Don’s and Viv’s once-beautiful log home was a shambles of charred spars, burnt drywall, twisted plumbing and blackened trash. The snow was picking up again, soft large flakes that made your skin feel cold when they stuck to it.

  I wandered the carbonized kitchen knee-high in scorched appliances and heat-shattered dishes. Some things seemed hardly touched: a toaster handle, a butter dish, a carving knife with Vivian and Don engraved in the handle.

  The basement stairs had burned so I had to climb in a lower window. The room was waist deep in half-burnt joists that had collapsed from the floor about. In one corner were the carbonized remains of what had been two metal file cabinets. With nothing inside but ashes.

  I had squeezed halfway out the window when I hear a crunch of boots. “Get out of there!” a woman yelled.

  She was early fifties, tall and very thin with a jutting jaw, angular face, fierce eyes and dyed black hair, in a sheepskin vest, narrow jeans and lambskin boots. Her head arched forward on her skinny neck like Cru
ella de Vil’s in 101 Dalmatians. I wiped my hands on the snow and stood. “Who the hell are you?”

  “I am an attorney and my client owns this place. And I want you out of here. Unfortunately the police released you when there was evidence you caused this. Even if this case goes nowhere in criminal court we intend to pursue you for civil damages.”

  “Civil damages?”

  “This house was my client’s property. We think you destroyed it. That’s arson, and it’s property damage and loss.”

  “Who’s your client?”

  “WindPower LLC.”

  “You people,” I could barely speak, “are just plain evil.”

  “Once you’re jailed,” she called as I walked toward the 150, “I’m going to attend every parole hearing you ever have. And make sure you never get out.”

  Heading back to Lexie’s I had five more things to think about:

  1. Who would risk killing two people just to destroy evidence?

  2. What difference did it make who owned the property when it burned?

  3. But since WindPower owned it now they could restrict access, inhibit investigation, and steal evidence?

  4. What had been in those signed agreements that was so dangerous for them?

  5. Or had it just been a sorrowful accident?

  That’s when Mitchell calls to say he’s been able to pick up tons of police conversations, and that I’m a frequent subject. “The word is to get you,” he says amiably. “Any way they can.”

  “So who’s putting heat on the police?”

  “Look, I’m just your IT consultant, sweetheart. Take those questions to your lawyer.”

  “Can you zero in on the police and fire and rescue radio traffic, night before last?”

  “Does the Pope pray?”

  Wasn’t twenty minutes later he calls back. “Get me something serious to do.”

  “What you mean?”

  “The fire hit 911 at 23:51. Called in by a neighbor.”

  “So it started before midnight.”

  “Yeah. While your dead friends still owned the house.”

  LEXIE WAS IN A FOUL MOOD when I got back to her place. I felt heartbroken and defeated by Don’s and Viv’s deaths. But I did the usual, made martinis and sat her down at the kitchen table.