KILLING MAINE

by Mike Bond

  She killed the phone and dropped it on the table. “There’s nothing they won’t do.”

  “Yeah,” I nodded. “Nothing.” I thought a moment, picked up the phone. “and that’s how we’re going to get them.”

  She looked at me comically. “You’ve lost your mind.”

  “I often do. But not this time. I want you to turn on this phone and call me.”

  “Call you? You’re right here.”

  “And tell me you’ve got the copy you made of the little green book, and what do I think we should do with it.”

  AT NOON I called Mitchell in Honolulu. “Time you were up,” I said.

  “Up? I been up two hours.”

  “Wanted to get you before you started work.”

  Ice cubes clinked. “Yeah okay.”

  “That the usual?” I was referring to his daily breakfast of three raw eggs and two shots of vodka in a tall glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice.

  “What else?”

  “If somebody’s got a bug on a cell phone, can you trace them?”

  He grumped. “Not easy.”

  “I didn’t ask if it was easy.”

  “Lemme try.”

  “One more thing?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Go back to last December 29, the day Ronnie Dalt was killed. Can you get the calls of all the top WindPower guys, find who they called, get the live stuff?”

  “Jesus you asshole, anything else you want?”

  “Through the next day too. I want to hear what they’re talking about.”

  “They’re all ex-Enron guys, they’re talking about scams. About screwing people.”

  “I want it. Word for word.”

  “Anything else you’d like, your Highness?”

  “Tell me the cure for existential angst.”

  “It’s right here, sweetie.” He rattled the glass. “That and a little of the good green.”

  “Mitchell, you’re going to get yourself piss-tested.”

  “Navy doesn’t give a shit. Long as I produce.”

  “Speaking of that, what’s the latest? That you can tell me?”

  “You lost your clearance. I can’t tell you shit.”

  “C’mon, I need to sell it to somebody –”

  He chuckled. “Fucking Iranians’ve almost finished their bomb, ISIS is ready to take over Baghdad, the Muslims are planning more attacks in Europe, Libya’s going over to ISIS and starting raids into Tunisia and Egypt, the Saudis and Qataris are sending ISIS another five hundred million bucks, Al Shebaab and Boko Haram are terrorizing Africa, al Qaeda and the Taliban are taking over Afghanistan, our President is assuring us that Islam is a religion of peace and these terrorists aren’t really Muslims, and most Americans are worried about who’s on the next episode of American Idol.”

  “We’re ripe for the plucking.”

  “C’mon, buddy, don’t lose your faith.”

  “Faith seems to be all we have right now.”

  “I’ll get back to you,” he said, and was gone.

  UNDETERRED, Abigail started calling journalists one on one and in late afternoon I went to see Bucky. He, Lexie and I sat at the kitchen table where she and I had disinterred our love, examined the corpse and buried it again. If he knew he didn’t say.

  He put his hand on my wrist, a very unlike-Bucky gesture. “I can’t tell you what it means, that you came back for me.”

  “You came back for me, don’t forget,” I answered, embarrassed, remembering when Bucky had crossed a field of flailing bullets to grab me. There was such appreciation in his face it shamed me in a way I didn’t understand. Perhaps, I wondered, he knows Lexie and I didn’t fuck, that we honored him?

  “Lexie and me been talking,” he said. “That maybe we should part.”

  “None of my business,” I looked at her, “but I don’t think you should.”

  He smiled slightly, toying with the coffee cup that seemed tiny in his hand. “Why not?”

  “Because you love each other. You’ve been through Hell – the windmills, losing the farm, prison –”

  “The windmills… We were fine till then. Farm was running great. We were even making money,” he tried to laugh, “which is almost against the law in Maine.”

  “A lot of people are trying to find lawyers,” I said, “to sue the wind companies for driving them from their homes and wrecking their property values.”

  “Lawyers,” he rubbed his thumb and forefinger together, “want money. The one thing those of us hit by the windmills don’t have.”

  I thought of WindPower’s nasty woman lawyer Cruella, that she would probably sell her mother to win a case. “This ain’t the country we fought for.”

  Bucky nodded, drained his coffee. I stood up, wanting to go. “You need a better alibi,” I said, “for the night Ronnie Dalt was killed.”

  “I went to see Abigail.” He glanced at Lexie and her fingers tightened round her cup as if she might throw it at him. “She wasn’t there.”

  I had to say it. “She says she was. On the sofa watching House of Cards with her married state senator boyfriend.”

  He sat back chewing on his lower lip. “That ain’t true.”

  “And after you found she wasn’t there you came home?”

  “Yeah.” Bucky looked at Lexie. “Right.”

  I looked at her. “Right?”

  She nodded. “Right.”

  “Then why the fuck wouldn’t you see me, when I came to prison?”

  “I knew what you were going to ask me and I didn’t want to implicate her more.”

  “You think she did it?”

  He turned away, shook his head. I sighed, disgusted, weary of it all.

  “All those weeks in jail,” he said, “I kept thinking I’d helped to send you to prison, after Afghanistan.”

  This was a subject I didn’t want to touch. “Forget it.”

  “I can’t. Never will.” He stood clumsily, this hulking muscular guy who seemed such a weird mix of determination and gentleness, came across and hugged me awkwardly. “I can never make it up to you.” He stared into my eyes. “But it changed me. I don’t think principles are worth a shit. All that counts is love.”

  I felt embarrassed by his emotionality and unshaven nearness, repulsed by his smell of coffee and prison. “Don’t let it get you, man.” I went out and sat on the snow with Lobo, looking for early stars between the towers’ flashing strobes. The turbines were silent, the twilight cold and deep. “Tell me,” I said to Lobo, “what the hell is going on?”

  She reached out a snow-wet paw and patted my cheek, one of the most loving gestures I’ve ever received.

  “Okay, you win,” I laughed, and went back inside. Bucky and Lexie were sitting at the table, his hand on hers. “Me and Lobo, “I said, “we’re going up the mountain.”

  She smiled but there was venom in it. “Don’t get shot.”

  Eagle Killers

  A BRIEF THAW had crusted the snow that Lobo trotted over while I broke through noisily. This made for slow going so it was dusk when I reached the top.

  I cleared a soft place in the snow and sat thinking of Pa. He was dead now and I’d never know where. Feeding the fish, he’d said. They feed us all our lives so when we go, we should return the favor.

  Why was I up here? I could say it was to give Lobo a run, but she had the run of the place anyway, and like her wolf ancestors would travel miles every day, seeing what was new, hanging out with friends, avoiding the turbines and enjoying the beauty of life in the Maine woods and mountains.

  I’d been here enough times before: first with Lexie looking for where Bucky’d hid the gun he’d used to shoot out the first three turbines, then when I’d returned and been shot at by someone I later assumed was Titus McKee, then tracking the shooter’s snowmobile, then chased from the Missalonkee Hard Riders clubhouse, then following Titus to the top to be astonished when he shot out two more turbines. It seemed my life was going in circles with no progress, while my enemie
s wove a web tighter and tighter around me. My enemies? I didn’t even know who they were.

  Ronnie Dalt had been killed with a single bullet in the chest while he was standing or walking across the Maine Environmental Resources parking lot in Augusta. Someone had fired from a line of trees uphill on the edge of a little park, and the bullet had hit the wallet in Dalt’s chest pocket, mushroomed and smashed its way through his rib cage. Because the bullet had allegedly matched those from the three turbines Bucky’d shot out, he was the obvious suspect. And the shooter had been careful to pick a firing spot where the bullet would be found, thus implicating Bucky.

  Abigail had told the police, and later me, that she didn’t worry when Ronnie didn’t come home because he often slept on the couch in his office when working late. And the back story, of course, that she didn’t tell the police, was that she had company at home, and didn’t particularly want to see Ronnie anyway.

  Or he her, perhaps. It was, unfortunately, too late to ask him.

  Bucky’d said Abigail wasn’t at her house so he’d gone home. She said she had been there, with her state senator boyfriend. One of them was lying.

  Or maybe both.

  Maybe there was no state senator boyfriend and she and Bucky shot Ronnie?

  I called Lobo and we started back downhill. In five days was the Tahiti Tsunami. You’ll be there, I told myself, but didn’t believe it.

  That’s when I found the male eagle. He lay headless on the bloody snow, shattered wings spread ten feet apart. I knelt beside him but of course there was nothing I could do… turbine blades spinning at two hundred miles an hour had cloven him in half and thrown him all the way here.

  I held his frozen, clenched claw, as if somehow I could transmit that I would fight for him, for him and his mate whom he’d grieved for all those months of lonely tall circles above the turbine that had killed her.

  Sickened and empty-hearted I trudged back to Lexie’s. Couldn’t not tell her. She sat on with elbows on the table and face in her hands, nodding her head. The way you acknowledge the death camps, other extinctions, all human evil.

  She went to the sink and washed the tears from her eyes. “Obama’s thirty-year eagle kill permit racks up another score.”

  How sad that after Rachel Carson helped bring America’s eagles back from near extinction, that we should lose them now to the illusory politico corporate scam of wind “farms”.

  All we were doing, really, was killing the symbol of America. Our icon, our metaphor. Who we are.

  “YOUR STATE SENATOR BOYFRIEND,” I said to Abigail. “It’s time to drag him out of the closet.”

  She turned her face up from my shoulder and scanned me irritatedly. “No way.”

  “You’d rather go to jail for murder?”

  “Oh I’ll get free,” she said offhandedly, snuggled against me.

  “By letting Bucky take the fall?”

  She shook her head, her hair tickling my face. “He’ll be okay.”

  “Look, Abigail –” I wanted to wake her from this weird complacency “– your husband was murdered. So somebody did it. Somebody’s going to be blamed and hopefully go to jail.”

  “The Wind Mafia. Has to be them.”

  “Unless it’s Bucky?”

  She half-hid her face under the covers. “No, it isn’t him.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Bucky wouldn’t do that.”

  I knew this was true but pressed her anyway. “You know him that well?”

  “I told you, we had a thing –”

  “You said you’d told me you were sleeping with him so I wouldn’t love you.”

  “He was afraid of his wife.”

  I thought of Lexie’s simmering ferocity. “She says he was with his Uncle Silas when Ronnie got killed.”

  “That bitch? You going to believe that bitch?”

  This stunned me. “You hardly know her.”

  “He told me a mouthful.”

  “About her?”

  She rolled over, her naked back to me. “He couldn’t stand her.”

  My head spun. Was everyone lying to me? All I could see was a twenty-foot wave, green-gold in the dawn off Oahu’s North Shore, a huge warm and frothy tunnel I could ride to nowhere anyone had ever been. Why was I here?

  I’D BEEN ASLEEP an hour when Mitchell called. “I’m going to kill you,” I said.

  “No you won’t,” he chuckled. “Not when you hear.”

  “Who’s that?” Abigail mumbled.

  The floor was freezing under my naked feet. I wrapped a coat around my bare shoulders and ducked into her office, stubbing my sore toe on her computer table and sending her laptop crashing to the floor. “Fuck!” I yelled at Mitchell. “Fuck!”

  “You shouldn’t use such words.”

  I bent to pick up her laptop and the table fell on my toe. Now I was really mad. “What is it?” I seethed.

  “Maybe I should call you back,” he teased. “When you’re in a better mood?”

  I sat on the floor gripping my ruined toe. “Mitchell, what is it?”

  “You asked me to check on Ronnie Dalt’s phone the day he was murdered?”

  “Yes! For Chrissake what is it?”

  “Well, I only found one interesting call.”

  My toe was clearly broken, sending out throbs of pain with every heartbeat. Biting my lip in fury I waited.

  “Well…” Mitchell said.

  I waited, damned if I was going to give him the pleasure of begging.

  You could hear his mouse clicking. “What time is it, Mitchell?” I finally said.

  “Here? Oh, about 21:00.”

  “That’s two a.m. in Maine. Do you know that?”

  “Ah, here it is… Ronnie got a call at 22:50 the night of his murder, from guess who?”

  “Mitchell I’m really going to kill you.”

  “Dannon Ziller.”

  “Who the fuck is Dannon Ziller?”

  “VP of WindPower LLC. He called Ronnie at almost eleven pm, cell to cell. And a few minutes later Ronnie was dead.”

  “Maybe I won’t kill you after all,” I muttered. “At least not right away.”

  “I’m not worried. We’re all going to die some day.”

  “Who was that?” Abigail murmured when I came back to bed.

  “I knocked over your computer,” I said, “but it seems okay.”

  She reached a soft hand against my chest. “Who was calling you at this hour?”

  “You ever hear of Dannon Ziller?”

  “He’s an exec at WindPower, was an Enron crook. A total schmuck. Why?”

  “Did Ronnie know him?”

  “They worked together on turning Legislators. Dannon supplied the money and Ronnie supplied the foot soldiers.”

  “Foot soldiers?”

  “The enviros who would go out and knock on doors, begging people to vote for the Legislators who backed the Wind Mafia. And they wrote letters to the editor, all that crazy stuff. So what about Ziller?”

  “Nothing. Mitchell just mentioned him, that’s all.”

  She folded herself tighter against me, already half asleep. “He should learn to call in daytime.”

  I lay there, my brain afire. There were too many questions, one of them being why I hadn’t wanted to tell Abigail the truth.

  WHY HAD ZILLER at WindPower telephoned Ronnie Dalt just before he was killed? That was the million-dollar question, but I couldn’t figure out how to ask it, or whom to ask. Did he want to know where Ronnie was, so he could tell the shooter? Or was he verifying that Ronnie’d changed sides, was no longer going to provide the Wind Mafia with his environmental foot soldiers, and thus it was time to kill him? Or was he the shooter?

  “What more can you tell me about him?” I asked Abigail over breakfast.

  She looked up from her four fried eggs and half a pound of bacon. “I told you, he’s a jerk.”

  “That doesn’t tell me anything. All wind power people are jerks.”

  She
dipped her toast in a yolk and bit it off, crunched on more bacon. “He’s one of the ones that goes to towns promising ‘community benefits’.” She took another long slab of bacon, dipped it into her eggs and ate it with a big slug of black coffee. “Paying off all the locals who can be bought. Buying town governments new fire trucks and other stuff. Bribing folks who dreadfully need the money.”

  I told her about Don and Viv Woodridge, how they’d had to take the WindPower money and then sell their house for nothing to WindPower and then died in the fire that no one seemed to be investigating. “Even if it was just that the pilot flame died,” I said, “why did it die?”

  “They really trying to charge you with that?” she said through her toast and coffee.

  “Seems so.”

  “I had a chat with Barbara Lloyd yesterday. She’s a reporter for the Portland Times, didn’t want to come to the press conference…” The Portland Times, also called the Pravda of Wind, is one of the Maine papers owned by Congresswoman Maude Muldower and her husband, derivatives billionaire Irvin Goffman. In fact they own nearly all the print media in Maine, and use it to push their own brand of industrial wind politics and enrich their friends.

  “So this reporter, Barbara Lloyd,” Abigail said, “she finally told me why she didn’t attend press conferences about the wind scams. Said she’d lose her job if she wrote an anti-wind story. And blacklisted. She’d never get another job in journalism.” It had been made clear by the owners – Congresswoman Maude and her billionaire husband – that no anti-wind reporting was allowed. The line to follow was that any anti-wind opposition was funded by the Koch brothers and the folks who don’t believe in climate change.”

  “But Congresswoman Maude,” I countered, “is the fifth-richest person in Congress – why does she need money from the Wind Mafia?”

  Abigail spread half a jar of Rose’s lime marmalade on her toast. “Funny about the very rich… they always want more money.”

  I couldn’t help smiling at Abigail as she devoured her breakfast like a starving mountain lion. It’s been my experience that women with big appetites are wonderful in bed, and conversely, those who eat like mice are less so. “And Congresswoman Maude wants to be Senator Maude?”

  “For that you need powerful friends, and lots of dollars in your Super Pac to buy other pols and helpful cronies…”