Dead by Dawn

by Paul Doiron

  My first thought is I’ve killed the poor guy.

  I hop off the idling Yamaha and glance up at the hill and see that my pursuer has stopped along the road. A nimbus of hazy light surrounds the sled. The rider stands silhouetted in the illuminated haze of exhaust and snow. Conscious of my shotgun, he or she must be waiting for reinforcements.

  When I pull at the van’s door handle, I expect a bloody corpse to tumble out, but instead I find the driver slumped away from me, into the passenger seat. He isn’t wearing a seat belt. Under the dome light I see a leather bomber; wide wale corduroys, a salt-and-pepper goatee; and a brimmed hat tilted forward over his brow as if he’d pulled it down to take a nap.

  The bottle of rum he’d been sipping from has shattered on impact. Bright bits of glass sparkle. The sickly smell of distilled molasses rises from the vinyl and cloth upholstery.

  “Sir? Can you hear me?”

  He groans and flaps his left arm. I detect no blood on him whatsoever.

  “Am I dead?”

  Every cop has a story about a drunk who impossibly survived a crash because his body was as limp as a rag doll at the moment of collision. I’ve always thought these tales were bunk, until now. It’s possible he has internal injuries, but I suspect a doctor would pronounce him in better shape than me were we admitted into an ER at the same time.

  “You’ve been in a crash. You slid off the road and hit some rocks. Can you tell me your name?

  “Reynolds.”

  This might be his first or last name, he gives no indication.

  I sneak a peek at the ominous sled waiting atop the hill. “Where’s your phone, Reynolds?”

  “Why am I all wet? Did I piss myself?”

  He means the rum. I have no doubt his urine would be close to eighty proof, too.

  “Your phone. Do you have one? Where is it?”

  “Somewhere.”

  His left hand finds the cigarette lighter in the dash and follows a spiral cord that disappears into the shadows beneath the passenger’s seat. He lifts the end of the charging cable. Nothing is attached.

  “I’m going to help you out of the vehicle,” I said. “Do you think you can stand?”

  “Of course!” His eyes are bloodshot, but he actually manages to flash some disdain at me.

  “I’m a Maine game warden. My name is Mike Bowditch. I need to find your cell phone and call an ambulance.”

  “I’ve been drinking, but I’m not drunk.”

  “I’m not arresting you, sir. I’m just calling for help.”

  “That bottle wasn’t open. You can see the glass broke.”

  “I’m going to take your arm, OK? I’ll support your weight.”

  While I am busy with Reynolds, another snowmobile has appeared along the road. The first one is still there but it has shut off its headlights. Now the second one does, too. They don’t want to give me easy targets.

  I begin to pull on Reynolds’s forearm as he steps gingerly down onto the snow, and for a second I think everything is going well, but he makes no effort to support his own weight, and the next thing I know, I have an overweight man, falling like a chopped-down tree on me.

  I try to catch him around the torso as he topples, but my hands are still feeling the effects of frostbite, and he doesn’t bother extending his arms to catch himself before he hits the ground.

  “Oh!” he says, less in pain than in surprise.

  At least he’s out of the way. I dive headfirst into the vehicle, heady with rum fumes, and feel around under the seats. I touch aluminum cans, a crumpled snack bag, a roll of duct tape, and what feels like a forgotten sandwich before my gloved fingers feel a rectangular device made of metal and glass.

  As I yank the phone out, my wrist trailing a ball of fishing line, the screen awakens with surprising brightness. And I see that it is cracked.

  I push the home button, and nothing happens.

  “Shit!”

  The phone is the one thing I need above all others, and of course it broke during the crash. Meanwhile its owner lies, seemingly uninjured, beyond my outstretched boots.

  Now I am pinned down, unable to call for help, and still bleeding out from the reopened wound on my leg. I managed to lose the bandanna and the clotted ice that had formed over the injury.

  What to do? What to do? What to do?

  The duct tape.

  I don’t have time for careful bandaging. But, given the blood I’ve lost, I would be a fool not to make use of it. I have to be quick, and I am, wrapping the tape as tight as I dare around my upper leg—it’s not quite a tourniquet, but close.

  I tuck the roll in my pocket and raise the useless phone again. It glows at me mockingly. As I do, a hole appears in the passenger door. The driver’s seat spits out stuffing where the bullet lodges above my head.

  The next round, fired seconds later, misses by a wider margin, merely glances off the top of the van.

  The third shatters the side window, throwing more glass down onto the already sparkling and booze-soaked floor.

  I withdraw from the van and drop to my knees as the scattered shots become bursts of semi-automatic fire, punching through the sheet metal frame of the van.

  My father speaks again from beyond the grave.

  Idiot.

  Despite the proof of the past hours, I keep lulling myself into a false sense of superiority; I keep assuming that the Dillons aren’t as intelligent as they have demonstrated themselves to be. Of course they’ve deduced I’ve been searching the van for a phone. Whatever else happens, I must not be allowed to call for help. The Dillons will abandon their plans to slow-roast me over a cookfire before I can identify them to a dispatcher.

  Under normal circumstances, every attacker prefers the high ground, but because of the slope of the hill and with the van as an imperfect barrier, the shooters can’t get the firing angles they need. Not unless they move, which I am sure they are already doing, flanking me on both sides. One or more will skirt the tree line while another will make a circle to come at me from behind.

  The suppressing fire keeps me from poking my head up to locate a target of my own.

  In movies people always take cover behind car doors and wheels. In real life, most parts of a car or truck offer no more protection than an aluminum can. Just about every rifle round in common use, especially those with a metal jacket, is capable of piercing the thin sheets of steel automakers wrap around their vehicles. The only reliable shelter is behind the axles, or even better, the engine block, and that is where I throw myself.

  Drunk as he is, Reynolds wants no part of this jackpot. He is crawling toward the river like some stomach-dragging reptile.

  “No! This way!”

  But he keeps inching away from the cover of his ruined van.

  I have to fight the urge to dart into the open and pull him to safety. But if the Dillons have night-vision scopes, as they must, they’ll spot me in a second. For the moment, Reynolds is probably safer the farther he gets from me.

  I try the spiderwebbed phone again. The glowing screen enrages me. I feel like I’m being mocked by a malevolent gremlin.

  I push the Home button and nothing happens. Touch the cracked screen and nothing happens.

  But, of course, Tori and the others don’t know the phone is broken. They have to presume that I am using these precious seconds to call dispatch for help and identify my attackers. Their one imperative is to shut me up.

  Out of desperation I shout at the fractured phone, “Hey, Siri, call 9–1–1.”

  To my shock, a mechanized voice answers. “Calling emergency services.”

  Out of my peripheral vision I spot Reynolds. He has managed to worm his way further into the open. Two red dots quiver along his shoulders and skull. The lasers, I see, are coming from different directions.

  Through the broken phone screen, I see numbers counting down, presumably to give a caller time to reconsider before they are patched through to emergency services.

  Three, two, one
—

  “Throw out the phone,” a female voice shouts from my left. I recognize it as Tiff’s.

  “Throw it out!” says a man.

  Then, to prove they mean business, one of the red dots veers to Reynolds’s right boot. There is a sharp crack. The crawling man screams as a high-powered bullet pierces rubber and flesh and pulverizes the bones in his ankle.

  32

  The woman who opened the door for me had skin the color of caramel. She was somewhere between stocky and shapely, with a buzzcut that on anyone else would have been her defining physical attribute. But Bazinet’s daughter, Felice, had beguiling eyes. They were extraordinarily large, and the irises were a mixture of greenish bronze and copper brown.

  “Hello?”

  She addressed me through the storm door. The glass was covered with enough small handprints to tell me at least one child resided inside.

  Her severe haircut gave her a military vibe. She’d gone all in on the bootcamp look with a white tee and green cargo pants. Her arms were toned and tatted.

  “You wouldn’t happen to be Felice?”

  “I think you know I am. What I can do for you, officer?”

  I sometimes fancied that, because of the middling length of my hair and the fact that I didn’t use a razor every morning, there wasn’t a sign above my head announcing to the world that I was law enforcement.

  I produced my badge. She squinted at it like someone who wore or would soon wear reading glasses.

  “I’m Mike Bowditch. I’m an investigator with the Maine Warden Service. Does Vic Bazinet live here?”

  “I think you know that, too.”

  “Is he at home?”

  “No.”

  “Do you expect him home soon?”

  “Why? What’s this about?”

  Inside a television was going. I saw the flickers of a screen and heard the tail end of a commercial warning that a certain prescription drug shouldn’t be used by women who were pregnant or planned on becoming pregnant.

  “I’ve been assigned to take another look into a case we investigated several years ago. A duck hunter drowned in the river above Gulf Island Pond. You knew him, I think. Eben Chamberlain.”

  “What is there to look into exactly?”

  “Could I come in? It’s not easy having a conversation through this door.”

  She glanced over her shoulder, considering.

  Now that I was looking at the side of her face, rather than head-on, I realized that she wasn’t as young as I’d first assumed. Late thirties. Maybe even forty.

  “I’ll come out,” she said finally.

  “It’s pretty cold out here.”

  I’d been hoping to warm up, as well as get a look inside the home of the mysterious Vic Bazinet. As if Chamberlain’s life vest would be hanging on display on a wall.

  “I’ve been cooped up inside all day and need some air,” said Felice. “My youngest has been sick. I didn’t know you could get Montezuma’s Revenge if you were three years old and had never set foot outside Androscoggin County.”

  “The truth is, I was hoping to use your bathroom.”

  “For real?”

  “Too much coffee.”

  “If you come inside, I can’t be responsible for whatever germs you pick up.” She undid the lock on the storm door.

  Unlike everyone I’d met on Pill Hill, with the possible exception of Arlo Burch, she seemed relatively at ease. She was alert, of course. That is the natural reaction to a strange man showing up on your doorstep with a badge and a gun, asking questions.

  The layout of the single-wide was cookie cutter. The door opened onto a living room, carpeted from wall to wall with a green rug that yielded beneath my boots like ancient moss. The floor was littered with school papers, discarded coats and mittens, boyish toys. Wheeled stuff, mostly, as well as figurines of superheroes and space warriors. An artificial Christmas tree, heaped with tinsel and wrapped with lights that flashed in a kaleidoscope of colors, asserted itself from the corner.

  The boy I’d met earlier, the companion of Tina’s daughter, Treasure, lay sprawled in front of a flat-screen TV, staring vacantly at the same wrestling show that the Cronk boys found so fascinating when they snuck over to my house to watch television. I was always disturbed by their obsession with steroid freaks yelling into microphones. It made me worried for their generation.

  “Say hello, Levi,” said Felice.

  “Hey, cop.”

  “Levi!”

  “It’s OK,” I said.

  “It’s not OK.” She didn’t sigh, but she might as well have. “Through the kitchen, second door on your right.”

  I passed a refrigerator decorated with paintings done by kids not destined for careers in the visual arts. The air smelled of soup cooking in a crockpot. Chicken or maybe turkey. As always happened when I was engrossed in my work, I had forgotten to eat. If Felice Bazinet had offered me a bowl, I wouldn’t have refused.

  I passed what I guessed was the sick child’s room, door closed, and entered the bathroom.

  I did my business without peeking inside the medicine cabinet because I try not to be that kind of person. My late mother used to say, “Integrity is doing the right thing when nobody is watching.” She attributed the quote to C. S. Lewis, but in the age of memes, when words float around social media detached from their authors, God only knows who said it.

  When I returned from the bathroom, I found Felice waiting for me wearing an expensive Canada Goose parka, pack boots, and a skeptical expression. I was taken aback by the fancy coat. It didn’t match the surroundings.

  “Find everything you were looking for?” she asked.

  She assumed I had pried.

  “Thank you, yes. But while we’re here, I understand your dad was the one who found Eben Chamberlain’s life vest.”

  “Who told you that? The Dillons?”

  “You wouldn’t happen to know if he still has it?”

  “He never had it. That’s just a lie the Dillons fed you. Which one of them told you? It was Tina, right?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  She laughed without any humor showing in her metallic eyes. “I figured as much. Never mind. I don’t want to continue this conversation here. Can you wait outside while I talk to Levi?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Felice closed the inner door behind me, but it was thin enough that I could hear everything she told her son:

  “Don’t open the door for anyone while I’m out. I don’t care who it is. Do you hear me? I’m just going to walk around the loop with this man. I won’t be long. Text me if someone comes to the door, and I’ll run back here. Are you listening to me, Levi? Did you hear what I said about texting me?”

  The welcome mat, I noticed, was upside down. I wasn’t sure what to make of that. Maybe they’d worn out the top side.

  Felice emerged from the house and locked the door behind her. She must not have trusted her son to bolt it.

  Our breath showed in the cold air beneath the outdoor light.

  “How old is he?” I asked.

  “Levi is nine. Noah, the sick one, is three.” She found a knit cap in her pocket and pulled it over her shaved skull. “Do you have kids?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Don’t is my advice.”

  If we were normal people, and this was a casual, friendly conversation, I might have asked how she’d come to hold that opinion. But the sky was growing darker every second and I needed to get down to business.

  “I realize I don’t know your last name,” I said. “What should I call you?”

  “Felice is fine. I’m married technically. But I haven’t used my husband’s name in a long time. Sometimes I go by Bazinet. I heard you were up here. On the hill I mean. Levi told me how Treasure held you up for five dollars.”

  “That little girl is the first Treasure I’ve met.”

  “It’s like Tina wants her to grow up to be a stripper. Well, she’s got the hustle down already,
I’ll give her that. Fortunately, she takes after Tori and Tiffany in the looks department.”

  “Actually, she only held me up for two dollars,” I said.

  Felice walked with her head bowed, but I could see she was smiling. “Would you have paid five?”

  “Probably. When do you expect your father to be home?”

  “Tomorrow. He’s on a bus trip with his buddies to Atlantic City.”

  This was a lie. Lynda Lynch had said that Bazinet ran a septic business. Who else’s pumper truck could I have passed earlier?

  Felice had seemed so forthright that my instinct had been to trust her. Knowing that I was dealing with a liar disappointed me. She seemed clever and good-humored, and I had wanted to like her.

  “Why go all the way to Atlantic City to gamble when there’s a casino half an hour from here in Oxford?”

  “The hookers. My dad doesn’t get sex anymore without paying. I feel sorry for him, but the pickings around here are slim.”

  As she’d intended, that remark shut me up for a minute.

  We began following the loop counterclockwise, past the blackened ruins of Jamal Marquess’s trailer.

  “Your father has lived here a while, I understand,” I said at last. “How about you?”

  “I thought you wanted to talk about Professor Chamberlain.”

  “I do.”

  “We never actually met, but he seemed like a piece of work. I’ve always been biased against eccentric people, though. They’re performance artists and scammers, in my experience.”

  Again, her response intrigued me, but I had to remind myself to stay on topic.

  “How did he and your father get along?”

  “They disliked each other, as I’m sure you already know.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s not the gay thing, if that’s what you’re thinking. My dad is open-minded for a man of his generation. He doesn’t believe in casting stones. Unlike Chamberlain who judged everyone and everything. Humans were a disappointment to him, I’ve heard.”

  “Did they get into arguments?”

  “I know where you’re going with that. My dad was hunting on the river the same morning the professor went overboard. But they didn’t have any interaction—my father kept his distance from the professor to preserve his peace of mind—and the wardens cleared him of any involvement.”