One Last Lie

by Paul Doiron

  A prosecutor might argue that he had defended himself with excessive enthusiasm, but Smith had fired a bullet at me, and I found it hard to fault my friend for cleaning his clock.

  I was more concerned about the fallout from his subsequent actions. “You kidnapped Egan. That’s a felony.”

  “I took a risk and am willing to live with the consequences.”

  “What will happen to Ora if you go to prison?”

  The grim prospect made him fall silent.

  “I could be charged as an accessory,” I added.

  “You tried to get me to let him go. You’re in the clear.”

  “You’re not worried?”

  “Worry’s for people who think blowing on the dice will change their luck.”

  I never even heard Nick Francis coming. He wasn’t there. And then he was.

  Most of my adult life, I had dismissed the romantic notion of Native Americans being able to move silently as a kind of reverse racism. But the fact remained that I was hyperalert, still pumped on adrenaline, and yet Nick Francis got past my personal perimeter without setting off any alarms.

  The old Passamaquoddy wasn’t wearing hunting camouflage or the pixelated pattern of greens and browns favored by the armed forces. He’d had no need of it, clearly. He was dressed from head to foot in denim: a western leisure suit. On a sling over his shoulder was the lever-action Winchester 94 rifle he had used to ambush C. J. Lamontaine. He’d done his shooting in the dark, without a night-vision scope, using only iron sights.

  I was glad not to have the man as my enemy.

  Charley had noticed how I’d jumped when his old friend appeared. “Nick’s a stealthy son of a bitch, but it’s not on account of him being a Native.”

  “I’ve just learned to be quiet around white people,” said the former Passamaquoddy chief. “You folks are too unpredictable.”

  “Thanks for taking care of C. J.” Charley offered his jerky to Nick who bit off a chunk.

  “Stupid kid,” he said, chewing.

  “Murderous kid,” I added.

  Charley picked a piece of meat from between his teeth with a fingernail. “Where’d you shoot him anyway, Nick?”

  “In the ass. It seemed the appropriate spot.”

  Seeing the two old men joking together made me think of Wheelwright and Fixico again. How many losses are greater than the loss of a good friend?

  Nick explained that C. J. Lamontaine had made a sniper’s nest for himself atop the broken bridge. He had come equipped for the ambush with a .30-06 Browning outfitted with a night-vision scope that showed heat signatures. And yet he’d still managed to miss seeing the septuagenarian Native crouched calmly in the bushes nearby.

  C. J. wasn’t the only one feeling ambushed.

  “So you’ve been spying on me since Houlton,” I said.

  “Keeping tabs,” said Nick.

  “We took turns,” said Charley. “I was flying by the seat of my pants. I realized no one up here would talk to me, even with this brilliant disguise.” He ran a hand over his shaved head. “I knew word would get out who I really was eventually. People in the Valley remember what happened in St. Ignace and what I did to Pierre Michaud. The only way I was going to get information from certain parties was through a surrogate.”

  I turned to Nick. “Which was why you sent me to see Kellam.”

  “Don’t blame me,” the Passamaquoddy said, lighting a cigarette. “I’m not the Lone Ranger in this scenario. Or any scenarios.”

  “They’re going to keep us here all night, answering questions,” I said.

  Nick exhaled smoke. “You have someplace to be?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes. A person I care about is in the hospital. And I have been stuck up here instead of doing what I should have done and gone to see her.”

  Charley rose to his feet, looked me straight in the eyes, and rested one of his oversized hands on my shoulder. “Dani?”

  “The last I heard, her temperature was through the roof.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “The Border Patrol can patch you through if you can’t get a signal.”

  “Good idea.”

  The Fort Kent Fire Department had lowered ropes for the first responders to use climbing up and down the incline. I refused the offer of being pulled up and made my way under my own power to the road above. Between the rollover and the river, my body felt as if it had been pounded between a mortar and a pestle.

  I caught sight of Zanadakis standing outside an ambulance, talking to someone seated in the back. It had to be Chasse. The disgraced warden had revived quickly under our care. I was too far away to overhear the conversation, but the detective seemed barely able to contain his rage.

  Another ambulance had already taken the son to the hospital for emergency ass surgery.

  I glanced around for a familiar face among the Border Patrol guys. My phone showed no bars. The feds always get the best toys, including satellite phones for isolated backwaters like this one.

  Then I saw the imposing form of Stanley Kellam, making his way through the scrum. His shoulders were hunched, his hands dug in the pockets of his GoreTex jacket. Despite the fact that he had given up his badge years earlier, not a single law enforcement officer stopped him. The aura of command surrounding the man was that overpowering.

  When he caught sight of me, he came to an abrupt halt. We stared at each other through the kaleidoscope of emergency vehicle lights. I remembered Vaneese’s warning. Instinctively, my right hand fell to my side where I had holstered my Beretta.

  “Kellam!”

  The lieutenant started forward again.

  I realized where he was going.

  There were cruisers of various kinds now between Kellam and me. Huge metal obstacles with groups of men between them, gabbing as cops do at scenes where there are too many of them assembled and not enough tasks to go around.

  “Hey, Kellam!”

  Two Border Patrol trucks were parked nose to tail, with less than a foot separating them. I stepped onto the bumper of one of the Tahoes, heard its driver shout an obscenity, then threw myself forward.

  Kellam had reached the ambulance. Zanadakis had become aware of him. The detective turned toward the former warden with a questioning look on his face.

  “Detective! Stop him!”

  Zanadakis heard my voice but didn’t catch my meaning. He stepped clear of the open doors, and I caught a glimpse of Chasse Lamontaine gazing out of the brightly lighted ambulance, handcuffed, and with a blanket around his broad shoulders.

  The officers nearby must have thought me a madman. I threw myself at Stanley Kellam as he leaned inside the ambulance, pulling the Heckler & Koch pistol from his jacket. It was a point-blank shot with a .45-caliber bullet.

  There was only one reason it missed. The second Kellam’s finger curled around the trigger, I slammed his forehead against the door frame. His hand jerked, and the pistol fired into a defibrillator. The hollow point exploded the glass monitor.

  By now, I had one hand on Kellam’s thick wrist, trying to keep him from regaining his aim, while I snaked my other arm around his throat. I pulled with all my strength.

  The second shot passed over Lamontaine’s bent shoulders and careened off something metal.

  The detective, having regained his wits, stomped on Kellam’s Achilles tendon. The lieutenant staggered as I tightened my arm around his throat, but I wasn’t in position to choke the breath out of him or cut the supply of blood flowing to his brain. The big old man kept fighting.

  Zanadakis delivered a punch to the back of Kellam’s thigh, to the nerve bundle between his hamstrings. The lieutenant should have crumpled, but he only dropped to one knee. He fired a third shot, this time into the air.

  In the end, it took five officers to disarm Stanley Kellam and bring him to the ground. I was pinned atop him by the weight of bodies. One bonehead even punched me in the kidney by mistake.

  The cops, local and federal, finally succeeded in cuffing the
retired warden and standing him upright. His face was coated with mud from the roadside. He glared with blazing eyes out of the brown mask, his anger directed now at a single person. Me.

  “Why?” he demanded.

  “Because Chasse didn’t kill Pellerin,” I said.

  “It doesn’t matter!”

  Stan Kellam had heard the call go out over the police radio. He had sped here to exact vengeance for his dead investigator. It never occurred to him that the person he really wanted to punish was himself.

  46

  The Border Patrol patched me through on a sat phone to Dani’s hospital room, where my call was answered by her mother.

  Nicole Tate was a widow whose husband, a laid-off mill worker, had died before his fiftieth birthday. She was a hairdresser and cosmetologist by trade, and one of the great sadnesses of her life was that her daughter had turned out to be a tomboy who didn’t own a single tube of lipstick.

  “How is she?” I asked.

  “Asleep.” Nicole was a kind woman by nature but made no effort to hide her frustration with me. “Her temperature is down. She doesn’t remember how she got here and doesn’t understand how sick she is. She keeps telling everyone she wants to go home.”

  “Have they figured out what’s wrong?”

  “Encephalitis.”

  The word might as well have stabbed me in the eardrum. “What?”

  “They think it might have been from the tick that bit her.”

  “Dani has the Powassan virus?” Encephalitis was one of the diagnostic symptoms.

  “They’re not sure.”

  The disease was rare and often fatal, and many of the survivors suffered permanent neurological damage. Now it was my turn to gasp for breath.

  I had been in Florida for a full week, where half a dozen “new” tropical diseases, from yellow fever to West Nile virus, were sending people to hospitals and graveyards. And yet I had emerged from the Everglades with mosquito bites that had already stopped itching.

  Meanwhile in Maine, a state everyone assumed was safe from such insect-borne plagues, my girlfriend had seemingly contracted a rare illness that might yet kill her after a single tick bite.

  The situation was simultaneously ironic and terrifying. What made it worse was the likelihood that Dani’s case was a harbinger of American life as we would experience it in the coming decades, with death’s emissaries breeding in every backyard birdbath and in every unmown plot of grass. If she even lived to see that dystopic future.

  That disquieting sensation of not having escaped the swamps of South Florida returned. I felt nauseous. But the sickness might have been as much out of guilt and fear for Dani.

  “I am so sorry for not being there, Nicole.”

  “She wouldn’t have known if you were. Well, maybe she would have. She was delirious when I got here and thought one of the nurses, a young man, was you. She was mad at him. She said she knew he cheated on her. She was delirious, like I said. It didn’t mean anything.”

  Like hell it didn’t.

  “I’m headed back in the morning. I’ll catch a plane first thing.”

  “Did you find your friend, at least?”

  “Yes.”

  “I hope it was worth it.”

  * * *

  Afterward, I caught a ride with Chief Plourde to my Scout on the far side of the river. During the drive, he regaled me with the culture and tragic history of the Acadians in the St. John Valley.

  “We are a displaced people,” he told me.

  Plourde might have made a good tour guide if my thoughts weren’t so haunted.

  I wondered if anyone had contacted the warden colonel yet with the news about Chasse Lamontaine and Stanley Kellam. The duty was mine by all rights, but I found myself hoping that someone else had reached him first.

  Tim Malcomb would be livid. Knowing the man’s sense of honor, I imagined that he would feel it necessary to resign over the inevitable scandal. He had stayed too long in the colonel’s job anyway, and it had eroded some of his better qualities.

  I didn’t envy the man who succeeded him. The Maine press would rake the Warden Service over the coals for what our two officers, Lamontaine and Kellam, had done.

  Maybe Chasse was right; this valley had never been a good place for game wardens. Borders are always places of temptations. Drawing a line creates an open invitation for people to cross it. Not just men like the Michauds but Charley, too. I found myself impressed by his courage and ingenuity—everything he’d done had been for Scott Pellerin—but I was disappointed in him, as well.

  In an odd way, he had paid me a compliment; he had respected my abilities to do what he lacked the capacity to accomplish himself. My love for the old man was close to unconditional. But this day signaled the end of my apprenticeship. I had no doubt that Charley Stevens would continue to teach me life lessons, but only small boys and fools worship other men. The point of life is to find heroism in yourself.

  Plourde dropped me at my truck.

  The police were still mopping up the crime scene when I returned. Too much had happened that needed to be recorded and collected. A trooper directing traffic told me that the attorney general himself was flying to Fort Kent to be debriefed. No doubt Colonel Malcomb would be accompanying him. For once I was glad not to have cell service.

  I found Charley and Nick again by searching for the silver Jeep. They were seated side by side on a guardrail, waiting to be interviewed by Zanadakis. Nick held a cigarette pinched between his fingers.

  “How’s Dani?” Charley asked. “That tick virus is the real deal.”

  “How did you—?”

  “I just got off the phone with Ora, who spoke with Kathy. You must’ve been worried sick.”

  “Not as worried as I should have been.”

  When a mosquito circled my head, I caught it in midair and gave it a squeeze. I opened my palm but found that it was too late. The insect had already drawn blood.

  “Ora and I often say we’re ashamed of the overheated world we are leaving our grandchildren.”

  “You’re no more responsible for the dismal state of affairs than anyone else.”

  “No less responsible neither.”

  “You’re never going to be able to make this up to Ora, you know. The fear you put her through the past few days. You’ll need to clean out an entire flower shop.”

  “She’s forgiven me for worse,” he said, meaning the crash that had left her paralyzed. “But you’re right that I have a lot to atone for.”

  “I need to catch a plane as soon as possible.”

  “Of course, but Zanadakis will need to interview us first.”

  “Do we have a story we’re sticking to?”

  “The truth.”

  “Which truth?”

  He showed me that jack-o’-lantern grin. “That’s always the question, isn’t it? I’m sure we can get going by midmorning at the latest. Hopefully soon.”

  “I don’t suppose you have a buddy with a plane, willing to give me a ride down to Portland.”

  “As a matter of fact, I do.”

  Then he rested a hand on my shoulder. Sometimes I forget the simple power of human touch to soothe one’s anguish.

  * * *

  After our interviews, Nick Francis drove Charley and me to the grass airstrip outside Fort Kent. I had left my Scout in the care of Plourde. The chief said his nephew was a prodigy when it came to auto-body repairs. I would find my véhicule better than new when I returned to Fort Kent, Plourde proclaimed with characteristic grandiosity. I didn’t dare hope.

  Nick pulled to a stop outside the single hangar and long strip of grass that comprised the Fort Kent airport. An orange sock was filled with a cool breeze streaming to the rescue from Canada. The sky was crisp and blue with only a few sheeplike clouds bouncing along.

  I’d turned off my phone before I’d gotten service again. My superiors could wait for my attention until I’d seen Dani.

  Nick, however, had calls to make—some
thing about his jailed son. He remained in the Jeep while Charley and I unloaded the gear we would be taking back home with us. I had waited for a private moment to discuss the events of the past days with him. Friend or not, he owed me a reckoning.

  “That letter you left me? You must have suspected Chasse from the start. He was the patient man you warned me about.”

  “Yes and no,” Charley said. He looked more himself dressed in green Dickies and a green tee. He was a wiry man whose forearm muscles still showed when he lifted the bags. “The truth is, I didn’t know what to think when I saw that badge on Smith’s table. I’d always assumed it had been buried—burned—with Scott’s body. I couldn’t believe my eyes at first.”

  “In your letter you said you’d been duped.”

  “If someone had the badge all this time, it meant everything I thought I knew about this case was wrong. I started to turn it over in my mind again, wondering who I’d misjudged. There was Roland, of course, still running wild. And Egan, I learned, was out of prison. Even Kellam has always been such a prickly pear—I was sure he had kept information from me. But it was to Chasse, yes, that my suspicions first went. It just seemed so unthinkable, though, given his sterling character. He would’ve had to have been a master manipulator…”

  “He’s a hell of an actor,” I said. “I’ll give him that much. I still don’t believe he failed to recognize Scott when they crossed paths at the Valley View.”

  “He might be telling the truth about that,” said Charley. “There was something odd about Scott—he had a quality about him—he could seem like just another face in the crowd. Sometimes I can’t fully recall his features, and my memory isn’t that full of holes yet.”

  The sound of a plane passing overhead made us look up, but it was just the Border Patrol on another aerial reconnaissance mission.

  “I think what happened,” said Charley, “is that Kellam sent Scott here incognito. Probably he told the warden who’d hired Chasse as his deputy, but the information hadn’t gone further than that.”

  “So the first time Lamontaine even learned there was an undercover investigator in the area was when Pierre confronted him with the screwup.”