by Paul Doiron
He was small enough to have been a jockey. Unblinking eyes glared up at me through black-framed glasses. His complexion was as gray as his hair.
“Would you like to see my badge?” I asked.
“Anyone with half an ounce of brains can recognize you as a LEO.”
By which he meant law-enforcement officer. Bruce Jewett was wise to the jargon we used.
“Would you mind if I came inside?”
“Why do you think I’m holding the door open?”
I stepped into a mudroom devoid of boots and coats. Just a bare bench and a row of naked hooks above it.
The door beeped when Jewett closed it behind me. Locks were engaged. Alarms were armed.
Mariëtte had described him as paranoid survivalist. Bibi had said he was preparing himself against the coming race wars.
To me, he appeared unremarkable. Like some former military men, he was fit for his age. I suspected the skinny old bird could do twenty pull-ups without taking a breather. He was dressed in a blue chambray shirt buttoned at the wrists and tucked into dark-wash dungarees; his black boots were polished, as was his belt, as was the holster holding a Glock 17 handgun. I had no doubt that the barrel of the weapon was polished, too.
“I was headed out to my range to do some shooting. Care to join me?”
“I’d rather we talk somewhere we could sit down. I promise it won’t take long.”
An odor came off him of some grooming product from a bygone era; an aftershave or deodorant I’d only ever smelled in barbershops that cut the thinning hair of old men.
“I’m going to the range with or without you. So if you want to have a conversation, that’s your choice.” He worked hard to mimic a human smile. “I’ll happily let you out again.”
“All right.”
He led me through a kitchen that was as clean as a frigate’s galley, down a dust-free hall, and into what would have been the entryway if he ever received visitors through the front door. Then he stopped.
“It was the African Queen who sent you here.”
His black-framed glasses held my attention. There was a smudge, a thumbprint, on the left lens.
“I’m sorry?”
“The protector of the late professor’s memory. Mariëtte Chamberlain. Don’t bother lying. I know she did. What’s she saying about me now? That I’m a crazed crackpot?”
There seemed no point in being cagey when he could see through my lies. “She didn’t use that particular word.”
He grinned like he’d won five dollars on a scratch card. “You’d think, given her personal history, what happened to her family in Rhodesia, she’d want to prepare herself. She lived through her own Boogaloo when she was younger. But some people don’t have brains to pound sand into a rathole.”
The house had the drafty feel of a place that had sat on the market so long the Realtor had stopped showing it.
Jewett caught me surveying the room with my peripheral vision and showed his teeth again. “I suppose you want to talk about the day Eben died. There’s no other reason for another LEO to show up on my doorstep.”
“I realize you’ve been over it many times.”
“And each time, I’ve told the truth. My story hasn’t changed. But I accept I’m an easy target.”
“For what?”
“Suspicion. Harassment. Censure by TPTB.”
“TPTB?”
“‘The Powers That Be.’ What happened to Lieutenant LePeau?” he asked, resting his hands on his thin hips.
“Lieutenant Rivard is no longer with the Warden Service.”
“I didn’t think it was possible to fire a state employee. You people are dug into the body politic tighter than ticks.”
“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather sit down for this conversation?”
“We’re going to the range. But first, I’ve got to water my horse.”
He correctly interpreted my vacant expression as not understanding.
“I need to take a piss. Don’t go anywhere. I’ve got mines hidden in the floor. Step on the wrong flagstone and ka-boom.”
After he’d left, I took my chances and explored the entryway. My footsteps echoed. The walls were blank. Paintings or portraits had been removed. There was subtle shading in the paint where the frames had been, and a few hooks remained in the drywall. Maybe I’d gotten it right the first time, and Jewett was preparing to vacate.
As I turned from the wall, I was startled to find myself face-to-face with an ancient woman. She wore a flannel bathrobe with dried food down the front, and underneath, she was as thin as a bundle of sticks. She had limp hair, a bent spine, and the same gray complexion as Jewett. Her brown eyes were wide with fear.
“Tom?”
“No, ma’am. My name is Mike.” I made a guess. “Are you Mrs. Jewett? Bruce’s mother?”
There was not the faintest flicker of understanding.
“Tom, you need to help me. I’m being held prisoner by a strange man.” She pressed her veined hands against my chest and clutched the fabric as if she feared it being torn loose. “Quick, before he finds us. We have to escape.”
Very carefully, I folded her frail, trembling hands in mine. I wanted my touch to be reassuring. She was so scared.
“No one is going to hurt you, Mrs. Jewett.”
A tear ran down her wrinkled cheek. “But he is hurting me.”
I had seen enough cases of elder abuse not to shrug this off. “Are you talking about your son? How is Bruce is hurting you?”
“He’s poisoning me.”
“Poisoning?”
“It doesn’t taste right. Shhh! He’s coming.”
Jewett appeared in the hall with an expression that mixed exasperation with embarrassment. “Mama! I told you not to leave your room.”
She clutched my sweater again. “Please, Tom.”
“She thinks you’re poisoning her.” I wanted to see how her son reacted.
“It’s medicine for fuck’s sake! Cholinesterase inhibitors. Mama, you know I’m not poisoning you. Let’s get you back to your room.”
He took her upper arm, but with more gentleness than I might have expected from his raised voice.
Could there be anything more sorrowful, I wondered, than a mother not recognizing her own son?
Yes, there was. Seeing him as her mortal enemy.
Just when I was feeling sorry for Jewett, thinking I’d been too hard in my judgment, he turned to me and hissed, “If you leave this room while I’m putting her away, I swear to Christ I’ll shoot you in the face.”
15
Not until I’ve crawled under a fallen log and taken shelter behind the stump of what must have been a massive pine do I notice the trail in the snow. It looks black in the half-light. But it’s just a trick of the shadows. Everyone knows blood is red.
I’m hit.
It can’t be true. I never felt a thing.
Panicked, I slap my torso, but find nothing, move my hands down to my pelvis and groin until I find a spreading wet stain on my left leg. I feel the ripped fabric and find a deep gouge along the outer thigh. The instant my fingers touch the exposed tissue, I feel an electrical charge that causes me to bite my hand to keep from screaming.
The light coming from my dying, distant fire is too faint. I have no choice but to probe with my fingertips. If the bullet—it had to have been a hollow-point—nicked the femoral artery, I’d be spraying blood like a dam without a Dutch boy. The slug has carved a burrow along my upper leg half an inch deep and four inches long. Blood pumps through my fingers when I clamp my whole hand over the wound, trying to use pressure to slow the hemorrhage.
I left home that morning with a fully stocked first aid kit. It contained antibiotic gel, a packet of hemophilic clotting agents, and an adhesive combat bandage invented by the Israeli army, not to mention a surgical stapler that can stopgap a wound long enough to find a doctor. That first aid bag is probably halfway down the river to Lewiston now.
In the dark I can’t even t
ell how badly I’m bleeding. Shock worries me. Blood loss worries me.
The wound has to be dirty. Bullet fragments, cloth from my jeans, maybe dirt and bits of wood. But I have nothing to irrigate the exposed tissue. Add sepsis to my list of worries, although an infection won’t kill me in the next hour.
Snow maybe? Pack snow into the wound? Let the cold constrict the blood vessels and slow the outflow of blood.
No, that’s a stupid idea.
Ideally, I’d have a clean absorbent cloth to use as an improvised bandage.
Ideally, I’d be a hundred miles from here with no perforations in my person, enjoying a bourbon neat beside a crackling stove.
I fondly recall the magical time, two minutes earlier, when hypothermia was my major concern in life.
I keep pressing my hand against my thigh. I clench my teeth so hard, it’s amazing the molars don’t crack.
I need to get gravity working for me. Sitting up, I try to elevate my injured leg by resting it on a fallen log.
Meanwhile Jewett is out there with his rifle, waiting for me to poke my head up. The kind of scope he is using matters a great deal. Does it rely on image intensification, active illumination, or infrared thermal imaging? It’s one thing if he has to pick out my fuzzy shadow from amid the monochrome trees. It’s another if he can see my heat signature glowing red and yellow against a magenta backdrop.
Does he know he hit me? How long will he wait before he crosses the river to finish the job?
The blood, pumping through my fingers, shows no signs of slowing.
There is something truly awe-inspiring about how fucked I am.
My campfire continues to blaze away happily beyond the brush. I did a good job building it. That ice shack might become a bonfire yet.
If I were John Rambo, I’d crawl out there, thrust my knife into the coals and cauterize my wounds with red-hot steel. And then I’d pass out from shock or be dead from blood poisoning in a matter of hours. Because Rambo is a bullshit macho fantasy.
But the image of an over-muscled Sylvester Stallone with his signature headband slaps me awake.
Where’s my bandanna?
Did I leave it drying over the fire?
I pat my pockets, unzip every zipper, dig everywhere, it seems. But the bandanna is nowhere to be found.
I sure as shit am not using my belt or bootlaces for a tourniquet. Not just because I’d rather not lose my leg, but because the only way out of my predicament is to go mobile. I know that the medical thinking on tourniquets has done a 180-degree turn because of lessons learned during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan where lives were saved from their quick application. Many limbs were also lost though. I’m not going to attempt a tourniquet until I begin feeling woozy from blood loss, by which time it will probably be too late.
As I bring my free hand to my face to stroke my chin, I brush cloth at the hollow of my throat. It’s the bandanna. I tied the damned thing around my neck because I was afraid of losing it.
I undo the knot, shake out the cloth, fold it into a triangle, roll it tight. I slide the bandanna under my leg and grab both ends. I pull hard and tie off the ends with a square knot.
I recline against the stump and look at my leg but, of course, I can’t see anything. I reach down and find the cloth already warm and wet with blood. But there seems to be less of it.
And, if the situation turns dire—can it get any more dire?—I can slide a stick under the bandanna and begin to twist and make a last-resort tourniquet.
Suddenly, I hear a gunshot. I throw myself to the frozen ground.
Another shot.
I sit up again against the stump.
What the hell?
There were no bullet impacts anywhere near me. No bursts of bark. No snow kicked up from the laden pine boughs. Jewett wasn’t blasting away around the shack, hoping to get lucky.
What was he firing at, if not me?
It must have been Shadow, I realize.
Jewett caught sight of the wolf in his scope. The second shot sounded fast, unaimed. Both misses, I hope and pray.
As racked with pain as I am, as hard as it is to think straight, I need to put myself in my enemy’s head. Jewett is a careful man. He will wait patiently for me to crawl into view, hoping for a clean shot. But he won’t wait long. He can’t chance me slithering away into the woods.
Sooner or later, the son of a bitch is going to have to cross the river and come looking for me. What other choice does he have? He needs to be sure I’m dead. He needs time to hide my body where it can’t be found. Because, as far as Bruce Jewett knows, game wardens will be swarming all over this river come dawn, and when they find my bloodless corpse, they will be lining up outside his door with tac gear and Windham Weaponry AR-15 rifles, fighting one another to be the first through the breech to exact revenge.
If I am going to see the sunrise, I have no choice but to go.
I need to run until I can run no more.
And then I have to find the strength in myself to keep running.
16
When Jewett reappeared, he was wearing a U.S. Navy command cap and a nylon windbreaker over his button-down shirt. The front of the hat bore the name of a ship, the USS Thresher, above an insignia of two fish, facing each other, above the hull classification: SSN-593.
His boxer’s face had the pugnaciousness of a fighter climbing into the ring. “I bet you enjoyed that pathetic, pitiable tableau.”
“Your mother has Alzheimer’s?”
“No, I’m actually imprisoning her downstairs. Of course she has Alzheimer’s. She’s ninety-four.”
“Who’s Tom, if you don’t mind my asking.”
“I do mind. I mind everything about your being here. Did you have enough time to snoop around my house while I locked my mother in the dungeon? Did you find the bags of nitrogen fertilizer I’m using to build my truck bomb?”
“Mr. Jewett—”
“Are we going shooting or not?”
From the start, I had misgivings about being in the same room with this high-strung man while he engaged in active-fire target practice. His heightened agitation now had me on the verge of bowing out altogether. But he barged out of the room so fast that I found myself pulled along, like a needle after a magnet.
The general sense of emptiness was pervasive throughout the house. Every footstep echoed. There was not a single Christmas decoration to be seen. It was worse than my home in its utter lack of cheer.
As we passed through the kitchen again, we came upon a tomcat.
He was big, the size of a lynx, with scratches across his gray face and a milky eye that may or may not have been functional. He hissed at me from the chair on which he’d been resting.
“What’s his name?”
“Nemo. Why don’t you pet him? He likes being scratched behind the ears.”
We passed again through the mudroom, but instead of stepping outside, continued along an ell that had been added after the farmhouse was built. It provided a sheltered walkway to a barn behind the main building.
“I love these old Maine farmhouses,” I said.
“Sorry, but I’m not selling.” He kept walking.
“How long have you had it?”
“A hundred-and-fifty years, if you mean how long has it been in my family. The Jewetts were the original settlers in Stratford, Turner, and Keen’s Mills. Would you like to see the family plot when you’re done grilling me? It’s over there in the trees.”
I ignored the provocation. Better to remain friendly. “You must have a nice view of the river from upstairs.”
“I’m not inviting you into my bedroom.”
He had to pause at the next door to tap a code into a keypad, and then we entered his personal shooting range, inside the barn. The floor was solid concrete with drains against floods and leaks. The lights were dim, as they often are in indoor pistol ranges, with a spotlight focused on a berm at the far side of the barn. Jewett had dumped a couple of tons of sand there to serve
as a backstop to the bullets and bullet fragments.
There wasn’t a shooting stall, per se; the whole interior functioned as a firing lane. But there were three separate target retrievers mounted to the ceiling. Jewett could attach a paper target on any or all of them, push a button, and watch them be carried along on chains to the back of the room, twenty-five yards away. There was also an upright reactive target—a man-shaped sheet of upright steel—if he wanted to take out his anger on a hunk of metal. Granted it was early in our acquaintance, but it was my impression that Bruce Jewett might have a bad or two day occasionally.
This personal range couldn’t have been cheap to install. I had shot at commercial facilities that felt more makeshift. Maybe he had hocked the rest of his household possessions to pay for it.
The barn was unheated, and I could see my breath. “This is quite the setup.”
“Coming from you, Warden, that means the world to me.”
He busied himself at a locked locker. When he turned to me, he had swapped his black-framed glasses for a pair with yellow lenses. He held two sets of cupped earphones that would cushion the sounds of the gunshots. He put one around his neck and tossed the other to me.
“We’re not going to be able to have a conversation wearing ear protection,” I said.
“That’s the plan, Stan.”
“Come on, Jewett. I just want to ask some questions, and then I’ll leave you alone to take out your anger at humanity at your paper people. This can all be over in ten minutes.”
“Paper people?” The turn of phrase provoked an actual smile from him. “I’ll give you your interview—but only after we each take a turn. I want to see how poorly you wardens are trained.”
He removed a military surplus ammo can from the locker and dropped it at my feet. The metal rattle of loose rounds rose from the container. “You guys still use .357 SIG cartridges, right?”
“Yes.”
“Figures the state would pay extra for the most expensive, least necessary caliber out there.”
Inside the can I found loose frangible rounds, designed to reduce ricochets. This kind of ammo was standard issue at shooting ranges.
