by Paul Doiron
She removes a small revolver, a .38 snub nose, from her coat pocket. She presses the barrel against my hidden body armor. She feels the resistance of the ceramic plate.
“Now what’s this?” she says, then raises her scornful eyes at her family. “Didn’t any of you numbskulls think he might be wearing a bulletproof vest? He’s a game warden.”
If they strip me, they’ll find the knife. I have to divert her.
“Maybe you really can see the future.”
She thinks I’m mocking her. She jams the gun hard under my chin.
“What’s that?”
“Maybe all your wishing is what brought me to Stratford today. Maybe you made it happen.”
She takes half a minute to process what I’ve said.
“I know you think you’re mocking me, but that’s what happened. It was my intentions that blinded you to my presence. There was calculation, too. That Bazinet girl stalled you even longer than I wanted. I only said to keep you around till sundown. Instead she talked your ear off. I guess I’ll have to pay her a visit later and ask what she was trying to pull.”
“She did everything you asked,” says a deep-voiced man I can’t see. “You have no reason to be upset with her.”
“Don’t give me lip, Vic Bazinet,” Tempest says. “I won’t tolerate lip from you or your friend.”
“Can we get on with this?” says a familiar male voice. I’m guessing it’s the man she’d called Bazinet’s friend.
She waves her revolver in the air. “Are you really going to test my patience tonight after what happened to my grandbabies?”
I crane my neck. Bruce Jewett stands in his navy snowsuit behind an obese man in coveralls who must be Vic Bazinet.
Jewett looks drained; as bloodless as if he’d spent the night in a cave full of vampire bats.
Of course Tempest would bring Jewett here. She needed to keep the pressure on him.
It was Stacey, of all people, who had made me see the pattern in the scattered puzzle pieces.
Ever since the Dows learned that Burch had seen Chamberlain and Jewett arguing in the boat, they’d been blackmailing the Navy vet. It must have been Tori or Tiff’s idea, to convince their new boyfriend to give Jewett an alibi. After he was in Arlo’s debt, but still facing the possibility of a murder charge, they could steal him out of house and home.
“You can’t go back to the hill,” I say. “Not any of you. Jewett included.”
Tempest laughs. “Sure, we can.”
“I gave the dispatcher your names.”
“I know you’re lying,” she says. “But even if it’s true, it won’t matter. We’ll tell the police you visited us all and asked us questions. What happened after you left, we have no idea. My family knows how to keep a secret. Dows don’t ever crack—”
“What about Jewett, though? Or Lynda?”
This gives the old woman pause. She presses her thin lips together. Then rises creakily to her full height of four and a half feet.
My last-ditch hope is to provoke a confrontation between Tempest Dow and Bruce Jewett. The paranoid gun-sniffer has to be armed. If I can find some way to encourage him to draw down on the woman who has destroyed his life.…
But Lynda Lynch foils my plan.
“Tempie,” she says, almost whining, “You know I would never—”
Tempest swings on her as if to administer another pistol-whipping. “Shut up, you!”
Lynda recoils like a dog used to being kicked.
Tempest turns to Jewett next. “Make yourself useful, Bruce. Help Tanner drag the warden over there. And be careful. We’re going to have to go over all this ground with Oxy-Clean. There can’t be any trace of his DNA here. And we’re going to need to torch the Chevy to be on the safe side.”
She stands aside as Tanner and Jewett take me under their arms. God knows I am not going to make it easy for them. I refuse to take a single step toward my own execution. They drag me through the new-fallen snow to an enormous blue tarp spread out across it.
The whole time I am praying that I don’t lose the knife in all this jostling.
I spent the time Tempest was talking counting my enemies. There are only four men, Tanner, Jewett, Bazinet, and a guy on crutches, missing his lower left leg.
I can’t fathom why Felice’s dad is here until I see the truck.
A diesel pumper that is essentially one enormous tank chugs away beside the chicken coop. Black soot smokes from exhaust pipes that rise like dual chimneys behind the cab. Painted on the backside of the enormous machine are words I remember:
YESTERDAY’S MEALS ON WHEELS
It’s harder to dispose of a body than what you see on television. It takes weeks for most acids to turn bones to jelly. Not just any fire is hot enough to burn away DNA. You need a potter’s kiln or a blacksmith’s forge to pull off an impromptu cremation. Pigs are reliable dispose-alls, if you have enough of them and give them time to digest.
The method the Dows have chosen is to dump me, probably alive, more likely in pieces, into a tank filled with shit, piss, and every imaginable bodily fluid. To any K-9, even an experienced dog, my distinct odor will be lost in the miasma of scents. All that is uniquely me will decay, dissolve, and disappear into raw sewage in the tank of some treatment plant.
“Tori, you want to do the honors?” Tempest asks with new merriment.
“You bet, Gram.”
Behind me, I hear a chainsaw roar to life. I knew this was going to be bad. But this is worse than anything I imagined.
“Throw him there,” orders Tempest.
Tanner heaves me into the tarp behind the idling truck. I land on my chest but roll onto my back quickly. I don’t want them seeing the knife.
No one points a gun on me. Some of them have opened cans of beer. Tina has a fifth of Fireball. Others are passing around a gallon milk jug into which they’ve added coffee brandy. They’re getting ready for their show of shows.
“Please, please.” I put a weepy desperation into my voice. “Not this.”
What they don’t realize, as they’re howling with laughter at my pathetic display, is that they can’t see my hands. Behind my back I pull out the knife, push the button, and feel the high-carbon blade swing out of the handle. The edge of the Gerber 06 Automatic Knife is partially serrated above the finger guards. I saw through the plastic cable tie with quick strokes.
Tempest refuses an offered beer. “Tori, baby, I assume you want to take his leg first.”
“I’d rather take his dick, but it’s too small.” She advances fast on me with the upraised saw. The jagged chain whirs, smoke rises from the vents. “I’m going to make this slow, motherfucker. I’m going to cut off your legs and then your arms and then I’m going to make you wriggle on your stumps.”
Tempest says to Jewett, “Bruce, help Tanner hold him down.”
Jewett doesn’t budge. He seems on the verge of catatonia.
“You afraid of getting blood on you?” she snarls. “Don’t think you’re getting out of this without taking part.”
His voice comes out quieter than I’ve heard. “No, Tempest.”
She levels her revolver at the bridge of his eyeglasses. “What did you say?”
“I said, ‘No.’ I won’t help you kill him. I’m done.”
It’s the chance I have waited for. Distracted by Jewett, Tempest has stepped within reach. I jerk my arm out from under me, grab her ankle, and pull her off her feet. She goes down hard beside me on the tarp.
Tanner, nearby, is caught entirely off guard and doesn’t know what to do.
Some of the Dows drop their bottles, others fumble for their guns. Tori lifts the screaming saw above her head and holds it there.
But none of them move because I have a knife pressed against their grandmother’s carotid artery.
It figures that the only Dow with the presence of mind to act is Tempest herself. She casts around for the .38 special she dropped. But the gun has fallen beyond her reach—beyond my reach—bounce
d off the tarp and into the snow.
It is Lynda Lynch, of all people, who retrieves the revolver. Her hands shake as she points it in my direction.
Tanner stands like a tree. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Tori toss away the saw as she goes for the shotgun over her shoulder.
I’m on my backside, holding Tempest Dow around the waist, using her tiny body for cover, while I press the blade of Billy’s knife against the skin beneath her ear.
One of the less drunk Dows, a woman whose name I don’t know, has managed to get an AR-15 aimed. The laser activates when she closes her hand around the pistol grip. The red dot burns a hole in my forehead.
“Back off,” I say.
“Shoot him!” says Tempest, kicking my shins with her boots. It’s like trying to hold onto a starved bobcat. “Remember he’s wearing a vest. Shoot him in the head, you stupid—”
She breaks off in mid-sentence because she’s heard something. I have, too.
Then everyone does. Sirens, approaching fast.
How do they know where we are?
Even I don’t know where we are.
I can feel the moment building. The Dows, increasingly panicked, are all waiting for a sign from Tempest, telling them what to do. Vic runs off as fast as his fat legs will carry him. Jewett collapses to the ground like a marionette whose strings have been cut.
“Shoot him, I said, you miserable—”
The gunshot has a snapping sound, typical of a .38. All at once, the old woman goes limp in my arms.
More than one person screams.
“Oh God!” says Lynda Lynch. She drops the Saturday Night Special as if it burned her hands.
I push Tempest’s lifeless body aside and scramble across the tarp for the dropped gun. The roar of a shotgun tears through the night. Out of my peripheral vision I see blood spatter and Lynda crumple. She is missing part of her head.
The night has turned blue as the wailing cruisers pull up behind Tanner’s Suburban, bathing the scene in their pulsing lights. A sled whines as someone takes off into the trees.
My hand closes around the grip of the Smith and Wesson revolver. I raise my arm.
Tori swings the semi-automatic shotgun around. The flashlight attached to the barrel finds me in the darkness.
We pull our triggers simultaneously.
If you go into a gun store and tell the clerk you want a gun for personal protection, nine times out of ten they will try to sell you a revolver.
“The advantage of revolvers over semi-autos,” they will say, “is they almost never jam.”
The Benelli jams.
My Smith and Wesson doesn’t.
40
At the hospital I refused all visitors, but I couldn’t keep out the detectives.
The doctors had needed twelve stitches to close the gunshot wound in my leg and two pints of blood to replace what I had lost overnight. My toes were pale and swollen with second-degree frostbite, as were my ears. Ice crystals had formed beneath the skin, but I was unlikely to lose any body parts, the docs said. I had sustained multiple contusions, as well as abrasions to my thighs, shins, and chin from my Nantucket sleigh ride behind Tiff’s Yamaha. My ballistic vest had minimized injuries to my torso although my ribs were most certainly bruised. To no one’s surprise, my left wrist and elbow were sprained. To everyone’s surprise, I had sustained no broken bones.
“It’s because I drink so much milk,” I told my physician, a towering, long-faced man with a high forehead. He had a mossy gray beard and reminded me of a giant tree creature out of J. R. R. Tolkien, an Ent.
Somehow, too, I had not received a concussion from having my head slammed against the rock when Tanner’s Suburban nearly ran over me.
“Antibiotics are fine, but don’t shoot me full of painkillers,” I told the doctor when I heard him discussing the specific medications he planned on injecting into my veins.
“You need to sleep.” He had a deep, slow, Entish way of speaking.
“I can do that without being pumped full of opiates. Besides I need to be alert to give my statements. I want to get patched up and get out of here.”
He stared at me with deep-set eyes that had seen everything. “Is there somewhere you need to be?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact.”
I was thinking of Shadow.
The doctor said patiently and kindly something about how my body had suffered multiple traumas, including what sounded like hypovolemic shock, that I had lost a lot of blood, that my injuries would only become more painful as inflammation set in, et cetera, et cetera.
But I was already making plans to check myself out after they’d completed their sewing and wrapping and had refilled my circulatory system with O negative. I had no intention of spending a day and a night in the ICU.
“No one’s giving you a medal for suffering,” the giant doctor said, finally showing exasperation. “It’s not weakness to admit you’re in pain.”
I wasn’t playing the tough guy. I just hated hospitals.
The attorney general’s chief investigator stopped by first. Because I was a law enforcement officer who had used deadly force in self-defense, he was required to open an inquiry to determine if my actions were legally justified. Our union had hammered into us that we should answer as many of the AG’s questions as we could with monosyllables. Otherwise we risked talking ourselves into serious criminal and civil jeopardy.
I couldn’t have cared less. I treated the investigator to paragraph-long responses. My attitude seemed to worry him since he’d never encountered it after one of these police-involved homicides.
“Are you sure you want to do this now?” he said.
“I’ve got a hot date in an hour.”
My near-death experience had left me giddy, but I knew from past experience, that the emotion would be fleeting and darkness waited.
The investigator asked me to hand over my service weapon. I had to explain he was welcome to my SIG if he could find it in the river.
He then said I was on paid administrative leave as of that moment while the attorney general completed his investigation into my shooting of Todd Wayne Dillon (formerly Dow) and Tori Anne Dillon (formerly Dow).
The warden colonel and captain stopped by next. Because they had listened to the wise counsel of our union attorneys, they didn’t ask me for details of the shooting. The captain, however, teased me about not entering any beauty pageants in the near future. But I could see the colonel was deeply concerned for my well-being. Jock DeFord was a good man, and it was no less than what I’d expected of him. He said I should use my time off to heal. And he recommended I speak with the warden chaplain as soon as possible.
“Sorry about losing the Jeep,” I said.
“Knowing you,” Colonel DeFord said, “I’m sure it was just a ploy to get a better ride.”
It was the best he could do by way of a joke. But I appreciated it.
Next were the state police detectives who had come straight from the crime scene. They also needed to hear from the doctor that I wasn’t impaired by medications or suffering mental side-effects from my injuries, that I was capable of delivering a statement that would hold up if it was entered as evidence in a courtroom. They couldn’t believe I had refused opioids. They brought in the doctor to vouch for my refusal.
The state police detectives were people I knew well, Ellen Pomerleau and her jerkwater partner Roger Finch. I was glad Ellen had caught the case. She had been a mentor to Dani and would no doubt take the news of her job change hard.
As usual, Detective Pomerleau was dressed entirely in black—car coat, turtleneck, and slacks—which made the milkiness of her complexion all the more pronounced. Her eyelashes and eyebrows were so faint you needed to squint. Her shoulder-length hair, a little wet from the snow, was the color of old ivory.
“I know this isn’t the best time, Mike.”
“You need to know what you’re up against with the Dows. I heard some of them got away, but with Tempest and th
e Twisted Sisters dead, you shouldn’t have trouble rounding up the rest. Tina was the smartest of the survivors, and you’ve got her, I heard. You want to hear my story? Take a seat and grab some popcorn.”
“If I didn’t already know your sense of humor, I would think you’re not in your right mind,” Ellen Pomerleau said. “But I want to start at the beginning. Tell me what brought you to Stratford yesterday.”
What can I say? I told my tale, and by the end, the inflammation the doctor had warned me about was burning me up, and I was reconsidering my refusal of narcotics.
“Maybe we should stop for now?” Finch said, reaching for his herringbone topcoat.
“Not yet,” I said. “Now it’s time for you answer my questions.”
“Such as?”
He was a man of late middle age who dressed like detectives had forty years ago when his father had been on the job. The cleft in his chin looked like it had been drawn by a comic book artist. Finch had never approved of my methods, such as they were.
“Let’s start with Jewett,” I said. “You need to send a unit to his house to look after his mother. She has Alzheimer’s and shouldn’t be left alone.”
“Already done,” said Finch.
“A little bird told me he confessed to killing Chamberlain.”
When her colleague failed to answer, Pomerleau stepped in. “He claims it was an accident. He and Chamberlain were arguing, and the professor fell out of the boat.”
“Arguing about what?”
“Money Chamberlain had loaned him and wanted back.”
“That’s it? He didn’t mention any other reasons?”
“His motive doesn’t matter if he said he did it,” she observed. “And there’s no way he’ll get off with manslaughter since he refused to admit this for four years. Plus whatever other charges the AG decides to bring. Jewett’s going away for the rest of his life, Mike.”
That was true, but it didn’t satisfy my curiosity.
“I hope one of those other charges will be setting those spikes in the road for me to run over.”
“He claims he was ordered to do it by Tempest Dow. Her plan was to delay you on the hill until dark so you wouldn’t see the spikes until it was too late. From what you’ve said, I’m surprised she considered drowning an acceptably gruesome death for you.”
