by Paul Doiron
Somewhere out in the channel, a big fish thrashed in the water, chasing bait—it could only have been a muskellunge.
“You’re the only warden she knew,” I continued. “She wanted you to tell her that her mom had no connection to Pellerin’s murder. Children hate to believe the worst about their parents.”
“You know, Bowditch,” Chasse said, “not all of us are as bloodthirsty as you are. How many lives do you have on your conscience now? I have never personally killed another human being in my life. Besides which, I have an alibi for the time of Angie’s death.”
“Does your son C. J. have one, too?” said Charley with some of the old menace. “I bet he doesn’t.”
“You sent C. J. to meet Angie at the motel,” I said. “Maybe you just wanted him to get some information out of her, but he took matters into his own hands, so to speak. You’ve raised a fine boy, Chasse. You’re the father of the year.”
“You can’t prove any of this.”
There was a catch in Chasse’s voice as he spoke these words. He had been so careful himself, but he knew what a hothead his son was.
“We can prove that C. J. was the one who ran me off the road the other day,” I said.
“I was there,” said Charley. “I was too late to intervene, but I passed his truck going the opposite direction and got a decent glance at the driver.”
This, I happened to know, was a lie, since Charley had been following me, but Chasse wouldn’t have known.
He seemed rattled now. “How are your eyes these days, old man? Sharp enough for a jury to believe you could ID someone speeding in a pickup on a rainy day?”
“I’m sure the paint on Mike’s bumper matches your boy’s bigfoot.”
It was slang for a pickup modified for off-roading.
Some of Chasse’s cockiness returned. “My son doesn’t own a bigfoot.”
“Oh,” said Charley. “I am sure you ditched it in some bog where it won’t be found. But when the state police start asking around about your son’s recently disappeared pickup, I’m sure plenty of people will recall certain identifying details.”
Now Chasse’s smile became arrogant. “You’ve always been a talker, Charley. But you can’t prove any of this. If you could, we’d be having this conversation in an interrogation room and not on a sandbar in the middle of nowhere.”
“Let’s have Detective Zanadakis take a shot at your son, then,” I said. “How confident are you that C.J. won’t slip up?”
I wasn’t sure what I expected. I thought his self-confidence might waver for a split second. Instead Chasse Lamontaine somehow had his gun in his hand, pointed at Charley. He had the quickest draw I had ever seen outside a western.
My reflexes took over. I drew my own sidearm and leveled the barrel at his Adam’s apple. There is a hollow at the throat left exposed by the ballistic vest. From this distance, I couldn’t have missed the mark.
Charley kept his revolver aimed at the ground.
“Probably a good time for you two guys to drop your guns,” said Lamontaine.
“Can’t you count, Chasse?” I said. “You’re outnumbered here.”
“Am I?”
Suddenly, Charley collapsed beside me like a marionette whose strings have been cut. A split second later, I heard the rifle shot.
44
The night became electric with gunfire. It seemed to be coming from every direction, from places it couldn’t possibly be coming.
Without a single conscious thought, I threw myself on top of the old man. I would take whatever bullet came next before I allowed him to be shot again. I landed pretty hard.
I raised my head and swung my gun around in an arc, trying to find Chasse Lamontaine. But he had disappeared. My thought was that he’d ducked down into the water behind his Grand Laker or possibly even Egan’s boat.
Then came a cry from the bridge above. “I’m hit, Dad!”
Charley groaned in my ear. “Get off me, you damned fool.”
I realized that his body, under the ill-fitting coveralls, felt as hard as a suit of armor.
“You’re OK?”
“I’ll be better if you let me breathe.”
I rolled onto my backside and held my sidearm in a two-handed grip, trying to find a target in the water. Egan lay on the ground, his knees drawn up to his chest like a pill bug rolled up on itself.
Charley’s leathery face was contorted with pain. I wasn’t sure if it was from the rifle shot or how hard I had landed on him.
From my seat in the sand, I could see Egan’s Grumman drifting downstream. In the confusion, Chasse must have pulled the boat off the sandbar. He wanted to deprive us of a means of escape or pursuit.
He had to be hiding in the water now behind his Grand Laker. I could have started firing at it—the cedar planks wouldn’t have stopped the sixteen hollow-point bullets in my Beretta, although I would have preferred jacketed rounds. But I wasn’t as blasé about murdering a man as Lamontaine had accused me of being.
“I know where you are, Chasse,” I said.
Another burst of gunshots: suppressing fire, in the language of the military. When I dared raise my head again, I saw that the Grand Laker had also come unmoored. It was moving away in the river, pinwheeling in the current. As it drifted farther from the island and the glow of the campfire, I saw Chasse pull himself up from the water over one of the gunwales.
I fired three shots.
One of them must have struck, because he fell backward out of the boat before he could gain his balance.
He was at the mercy of the water now. He wasn’t wearing a life vest. His gun belt weighed somewhere between fifteen and twenty pounds. His body armor, assuming he was carrying the full complement of steel-core plates, might have weighed forty pounds.
He was a strong man, but not stronger than the river.
Charley worked his shoulder in a rotation, but the movement only made him wince. “Where’s Lamontaine?”
“In the river. I think I might have winged him. He’s going to drown, Charley.”
“Where’s Egan’s boat?”
“Gone,” I said. “But there’s one left.”
Charley could have let Chasse Lamontaine die, just by hesitating. Instead he sprang to his feet like a man half his age. “Let’s go.”
We trotted back up the spine of the island.
“I had figured out he was smarter than he pretended to be,” said the pilot, behind me. “I should have realized he’d set his son up as a sniper, the same as I did with Nick.”
So it was Nick Francis up there on the ruined bridge, or wherever he’d made his nest, who had saved us from being picked off by C. J. Lamontaine.
I found the canoe in the light of my headlamp.
“That’s not much of a watercraft,” said Charley.
“And there’s only one paddle.”
“Better let me take it, then.”
There was no argument. As old and injured as he was, Charley Stevens was one of the best boatmen I had ever known. I had seen him pole a canoe up Class III rapids: a feat I had believed impossible until he accomplished it.
I’d barely taken my seat in the bow before I lurched forward. Charley, running, pushed the boat along the sand. I heard the splashes of his boots and then the forward shove as the keel scraped free of the gravel and floated into the current. There was barely a wobble as the injured old man leaped into the stern.
He rarely sat in a canoe, preferring to stand (if he was poling) or kneel, like the Penobscots and Passamaquoddy did in their slender birchbark creations. Kneeling was an ancient way of paddling, and there was something holy about it beyond the churchly posture. It was how you demonstrated humility before the power of the river.
I fired up my headlamp. As we drifted past the south end of the island, I turned my illuminated gaze on the dying fire. Egan was wriggling around on the sand. I wished I’d thought to cut him free.
“You all right there, Jon?” I asked with real concern.
&
nbsp; “Fuck you,” was his reply.
* * *
As the bowman, it was my job to shout out the obstacles ahead and spotlight the water for signs of Chasse Lamontaine. I focused on the nearly phosphorescent froth.
Running water appears dark above channels and certain eddies but bubbles white where it gains speed in the narrows. Follow the waves and shoot the vees between the rocks and you should be fine. Steer even a little off course and you might crash against a boulder and flip over. If you’re particularly unlucky, you might find yourself held beneath the surface by the hydraulics of a falls, doing endless somersaults. Or you might be pinned between the overturned canoe and a rock by the force of the river until your crushed lungs fill with water.
I saw no personal flotation devices in the canoe—a violation I used to cite paddlers for every day when I was a patrol warden. We’d be in the same tough spot as Chasse if we spilled in the rapids.
Spray, tasting of wet moss, exploded in my face. I kept watch for the missing boats.
Even before we came to the serious white water, the river had already begun to step down—I experienced the sensation of descending, the top half of my body tipping forward. The current guided us through the first of the real rapids and sucked us forward and faster into a white expanse of waves.
“On your left!” Charley said.
I swung the light around but not before the hull knocked against the submerged part of a boulder I had missed seeing. The impact might have been enough to turn us broadside if not for Charley’s expertise. Somehow he made a series of strokes that centered us once more in the white water.
I wished I had a paddle to help him.
It wasn’t just that we needed speed to find Chasse before an eddy sucked him under. Navigating the stepped falls without spilling required us to keep pace with the current.
I never even heard the crash.
But all at once we were upon the wrecked boat. The unmanned Grand Laker had failed to navigate two boulders—Scylla and Charybdis in miniature. The bow had gotten stuck, wedged between the rocks, while the hydrodynamics of the river had lifted the stern clean out of the water. Within seconds, the front had swamped, and now the upended boat loomed ahead of us, on the verge of breaking apart. Of Chasse, there was no sign at all.
To our immediate right was a ledge. Behind it was a protected eddy. Charley spun our canoe around into the calm water with a grace that seemed effortless.
“Do you see him?” I called above the thundering falls.
“Get out!”
“What?”
He gestured with his paddle at the boulder as we turned alongside it. I reached out with both hands and did my best to keep my center of gravity low to avoid upsetting the canoe. The next thing I knew, I was hanging from the rock with my legs dangling in the water. The surface was slick in places. I nearly lost my handhold as I began to climb. And my waterlogged boots were all but useless when I tried to involve them in my ascent.
I stood atop the ledge, squinting downstream. I saw something pale. A hand perhaps.
I shouted down at Charley, still holding his position in the eddy, “I think I see him!”
“Run to shore.”
“What?”
The ledge ended ten feet to my right. Beyond lay another, smaller ledge. Then a clump of bushes overhanging a dark, still stretch of stream. We’d cut across the river as we’d descended, and this was the far bank.
“I’ll meet you below,” the old man said.
I crept forward to the end of the ledge and found myself facing a gap of at least five feet. Under normal conditions, it would have been an easy jump. But in the dark, leaping from a slippery bit of stone, with the landing place likely to be just as slick, I had no choice but to throw myself across the divide and hope for the best.
The opposite ledge was as mossy and as treacherous as I had feared. I fell hard but not into the water.
The next leap was even farther. Easily ten feet, which meant I would be swimming, carried by the current while I tried to grab hold of one of the frail alder branches overhanging the river.
Without pausing to remove my boots, I dove in. The impact pulled the headlamp off my head.
I came up spitting, already twenty feet down the river from where I’d gone under and not at all close to the shore. I kicked and crawled and continued to drift, seemingly making no progress.
Then I saw a branch protruding from the water. I lunged and grabbed hold of it, and my momentum swung me around until I was floating on my back, facing my boots downstream.
The dead tree had toppled from the shore when its roots had been eroded. It had lost most of its branches, but I was able to use the snags that remained to pull myself along until I was looking up a leafy willow. Soon I was clawing through the waterside puckerbrush, reopening cuts on my hands and skinning my shins on hidden logs.
The wind was up, and the sky was clearing fast. Hundreds of stars had come into focus. I caught a glimpse of the Milky Way.
Eventually, I broke free of the brush and found myself standing on an almost impossibly beautiful sandbar. Over the eons, the river had twisted and turned like a restless sleeper in its bed. I stood upon a low ridge and scanned downstream only to realize that my journey to shore had carried me past the place where I’d spotted Chasse’s hand.
Just below the rapids where the Grand Laker had wrecked was another bar of gravel, almost an island, complete with a grassy crest and even a few wildflowers glowing white in the starlight. The river below was rippled but unbroken by obvious rocks. If Chasse had just made it through the last stretch, he might have washed up, alive, on this bar amid the orchids.
But there was no sign of him. Nor of Charley.
I waded out as far as I could, then plunged into the river again, using the lee of the island to avoid being caught in the current. I walked the length of the bar, following its weedy crest, my boots so full of water they squished. My movements startled a sleeping snake. It was dark, the length of my arm. I watched it take off across the surface of the water in a series of S-shaped motions. A northern water snake, native to this land.
“Mike!”
I looked up and saw Charley making his way toward me in my borrowed canoe. The sky had become luminous with constellations. My eyes had adjusted to the night. But my vision was anything but sharp. It took me a moment to realize that the old man had Chasse Lamontaine in the boat with him. The tall warden lay awkwardly, unmoving across the thwarts and the center seat.
“Is he—?”
“Alive, yes. Had a heck of a time pulling him aboard, though. The son of a bitch weighs as much as a moose calf.”
45
We laid Chasse out on his side along the sandbar. The water had leeched the color from his skin. His fingers were icicles. Because he was still breathing, albeit shallowly, we didn’t administer CPR. We stabilized his neck in case he’d sustained a spinal injury in the rapids.
I found three burn holes in the fabric of his uniform: a tight cluster over his heart. Every bullet I had fired had struck him and bounced off the armored plates. If I lived long enough, I might someday become a decent shot.
Then we waited.
Like a man with an itch, Charley tried unsuccessfully to reach for the one spot on his back his fingers couldn’t touch. I turned him around and found the hole in his coveralls where the bullet had pierced the fabric. The projectile had flattened itself against the combat vest Charley had been wearing, concealed beneath his mechanic’s disguise.
“Which letter did he hit?” he asked.
It took a moment for me to understand that he was referring to the reflective words on his black. “The L in AL’S.”
“He was a true marksman, then, Chasse’s boy. I guess I’m lucky he didn’t go for a head shot. But few gunmen can resist an easy target when it’s offered.”
The flag newly sewn on the chest and the slogan on the back of the coveralls made sense now—Charley had chosen the outlandish outfit to give a shoo
ter something to aim at. While I watched, my friend slipped off his monkey suit to remove the armor he’d been wearing underneath. The steel carapace must have weighed a hundred pounds, but it had saved his life.
“C. J. called out that he’d been hit,” I said.
“I told Nick not to hurt him bad if he could avoid it. That’s better than he deserves for what he did to the Bouchard girl.”
We’d landed on the south shore of the St. John. Above us, a steep hillside, nearly a bushy cliff, rose to Route 161, the lone road from Allagash to Fort Kent.
It must have been Nick Francis who’d called in the gunfight on his CB.
The first officers to arrive were Chief Plourde and one of his men from Fort Kent, followed by EMTs, sheriff’s deputies, and Border Patrol agents outfitted in tactical gear and carrying Colt M4 carbines. The feds even sent a helicopter with a floodlight brighter than the noonday sun.
The last of the principals to arrive was Detective Zanadakis, who wore a suit but no tie and without any product in his hair. I had never seen him so casually dressed. Then again, it was the middle of the night.
“What happened to Egan?” the detective asked.
“Hopefully, he hasn’t rolled himself into the river by now.”
Zanadakis frowned. I explained that we had left him tied up on Musket Island.
The detective left to confer with his troopers.
Charley was sitting on a log, chewing on a hunk of jerky and drinking from a canvas-covered canteen.
“There’s a lot about what you’ve been doing in the Valley that you need to explain,” I said. “And not just to me.”
“There’ll be time for that.”
“You beat John Smith to a pulp.” My intonation was almost that of a question; I was still hopeful I might be wrong.
Instead Charley turned ornery. “I don’t suppose he mentioned that he maced me first. I hadn’t even raised my voice and he sprayed me in the eyes. The next thing I knew, I was half-blind and he was raining punches down on me. But no one taught the man to box. I defended myself.”
