Terrorist attacks on the United States. How did you go about your business in the wake of that?
The phone rang again. It was Nantz, sobbing. “There are going to be thousands of dead, Grady, thousands! Another plane has crashed into the Pentagon, Grady. My God!”
She hung up before he could speak.
2
Commercial radio stations had abandoned their computer-fed formats for call-in chaos. Jocks were yapping about Pearl Harbor, pounding the war drums and talking to anyone who would add a shrill voice to the hype and hysteria, all without a single shred of evidence of a crime, much less a suspect.
Service fiddled with his tuner and switched to the National Public Radio station out of Marquette, and listened carefully to a retired defense intelligence analyst, now a professor at the University of Michigan, discuss the possible involvement of Muslim extremists. The professor ended his report by warning listeners not to jump to conclusions, reminding them that the Oklahoma City bombing was reason enough for such prudence. That disaster had been spawned by homegrown terrorists, whom he described as fundamentalists in their own right, there being zealots and extremists in all cultures and religious faiths.
Then NPR had opened its phone banks and even the station’s liberal callers were expressing a desire for justice and payback for the perfidy in New York, though only if the government could clearly identify the perpetrators.
Service heard shock in callers’ voices. He could feel it himself and in Nantz’s calls. Surely something being seen as Pearl Harbor would demand national political action, and he had no doubt that given what George Bush Senior’s administration had done to mobilize public opinion in favor of liberating Kuwait, President Bush Junior’s crowd would do no less in pulling public opinion into their corner, for whatever lay ahead. You couldn’t use military options without public support.
There had been no such mobilization of public opinion by Washington during Vietnam, and by the time politicians understood the need, it had been too late. But this was different from Vietnam. If this truly was terrorism, America had been attacked and citizens would demand both justice and revenge. Without a draft, war now would fall only on the shoulders of a few, all of them volunteers.
In McMillan, at the intersection where he intended to turn north, he saw a silver Lexus SUV nosed against a telephone pole, which looked ready to topple. A battered gray Ford pickup was jammed into the trunk of the Lexus, and a white Luce County sheriff’s cruiser was hanging over the curb of the parking lot of the Shanty Bar. The bar’s sign was in bright red letters several feet tall. Underneath there was a motto: where good times and old friends meet. A crowd of people milled around, looking agitated, not exactly the atmosphere advertised on the sign over their heads. Service thought about driving past to get to his meeting, but instinct and a sense of duty to a fellow officer told him otherwise. He pulled over and got out of his truck.
A deputy stood with three men in suits. Another man hung back from the fringe of the four. One of them had a sleeve ripped off and was holding a handkerchief to a bloody nose. The other two looked equally disheveled.
Service looked at the deputy and nodded. “Got a problem here?”
The deputy was unfamiliar, a short emaciated man with thinning hair. His black baseball cap was on the ground, his bony face flushed.
“Idiots,” the deputy said. His metal nameplate read telemansky.
“This is patently unfair,” the man with the bloody nose grumbled in pain. He was of average height, with a dark complexion, silvering black hair, and scraggly beard. “We were passing through and trying to stop to get coffee when that animal rammed my vehicle and drove us into the pole.” He pointed to a man in a faded and threadbare green plaid wool jacket.
“Fucking terrorists!” Green Jacket shouted, surging forward, but Deputy Telemansky blocked his way and pushed him back. “You’re the animals, towel head!” Green Jacket screamed in rage.
“I am American,” Bloody Nose said forcefully.
Service saw more vehicles arriving, people drifting into the parking lot, a gawking crowd growing restless.
“Camel-fucker!” Green Jacket shouted, shaking his fists. “We liberated fucking Kuwait and this is the shit we get in return? How many Americans did you murder this morning?”
Bloody Nose turned to Service and fumbled, trying to reach into his suit coat, and Deputy Telemansky tried to stop him, but Service blocked the deputy’s hand. The man brought out a crumpled business card and handed it to Service. It read judge samir baaz. The address was Dearborn, a suburb of Detroit. “My friends and I are going to Marquette for a meeting. That man,” he continued, pointing at Green Jacket, “rammed us.”
Service passed the card to Telemansky, who looked at it and raised an eyebrow.
“Are you all right, Your Honor?” Service asked.
“My nose isn’t broken.”
“Did that happen in the vehicle?”
“No,” the judge said. “After the collision I got out to see what this fool was doing and he attacked me.”
“I’ll do worse, you don’t get the fuck out of America,” Green Jacket said with a snarl.
Service stared down the loudmouth. “Did you ram this man?”
“Fucking eh,” Green Jacket said proudly. “Pieces of shit like this don’t belong in our country.”
“I was born in Marquette,” Baaz said, his voice breaking. The judge’s companions remained quiet and looked frightened.
“Your blood ain’t ours,” Green Jacket snapped back.
“Telemansky?” Service said.
“Yah, I got ’er.” He turned to Green Jacket. “Verlin, you asshole, you can’t be trying to kill people.”
“I didn’t want to kill him, just run his sorry Arab ass out of town.”
Telemansky took out his handcuffs. “You’re under arrest, Verlin.”
“Fuck off, Deputy Dawg,” Green Jacket said, earning a laugh from a few of the onlookers.
Service reached over to the man called Verlin and pinched a nerve in his neck. The man’s knees buckled. “Stick out your hands, Verlin.” The man tried to resist, but Service tightened the hold until the man relented and stuck out his hands so that Telemansky could cuff him.
“This ain’t over,” Green Jacket said.
“It is for you, Verlin,” Telemansky said.
“Break it up,” Service said to the onlookers. “This show’s over.”
The crowd began to disperse, and several people came forward and put blankets over the shoulders of the judge’s companions. “Don’t judge our country by the actions of a few,” an elderly woman said.
“I am American,” the judge growled in exasperation.
Service stayed until Verlin was in the back of Telemansky’s county cruiser and a tow truck summoned from Newberry to haul the damaged SUV there for repairs.
The judge’s nose had stopped bleeding by the time arrangements were made. The owner of the bakery across the street from the bar escorted the men inside and gave them coffee and cinnamon rolls, the Yooper equivalent of chicken soup.
Service told the judge and his companions that their vehicle would be towed, another Luce County deputy would drive them to Newberry, and a room would be arranged until their vehicle was repaired.
“Or,” he continued, “we can get someone to take you on to Marquette so you can make your meeting.”
Judge Baaz looked at Service. “The meeting can be rescheduled to tomorrow,” he said, adding, “I never expected to be rescued by a game warden. Thank you.”
“You were in good hands with Telemansky,” Service said. The deputy had been bewildered by Verlin’s attack, and though Service didn’t know the man, he wasn’t certain he would have reacted any better or faster than Telemansky in quelling the situation.
“All I know
is that the situation was not getting resolved until you arrived,” the judge said. “This tragedy in New York . . .” He didn’t finish the thought. “Thank you.”
Service nodded.
“This is the start of a terrible chain reaction,” the judge said.
Service nodded again, and thought the judge was right.
“I never felt like a foreigner until today,” Baaz said with sadness in his voice. “Never.”
Service patted the judge’s arm. When their escort arrived he made his good-byes and headed for his meeting with Griff Stinson.
The old hunting guide was sitting in his truck at the end of a two-track, listening to the radio when Service pulled up behind him.
“Have you heard?” Stinson asked with a nod at the radio.
“Yah.”
“Sometimes it seems like this bloody world wants to pull itself apart,” Stinson said.
He took Service to a green tarp. When he lifted it, Service saw a large black bear with coarse, matted fur. Griff got down on one knee and lifted the animal’s front left leg to show its chest cavity. “One round put her down. All they took was the gallbladder,” he said.
They both knew what it meant. There were several cases a year of the same thing. The gallbladders were shipped to agents on the West Coast for sale to Asian customers who believed that powders from the organs had aphrodisiac powers.
Griff poked at the entry wound and rolled the bear over. The bullet had torn a massive exit hole. Stinson had fought in Korea and been decorated. “I’d say a fifty-caliber. Not your usual poaching weapon.”
Not just unusual, Service thought, but unprecedented. Still, he reminded himself, people up here loved their guns, so no doubt there were some strange and illegal weapons floating around, or somebody had bought himself a single-shot fifty-caliber from one of the many specialty manufacturers who played to male fantasies about being mercenaries or soldiers of fortune. One kill didn’t amount to anything, but it was something to file in his memory. Something related might pop up down the road. First thing tomorrow he’d put the word out to U.P. COs and tell them to keep a watch for a fifty-caliber weapon.
“Thanks, Griff.”
The old guide touched the bill of his faded Red Wings hat and took out his pipe. “You think this world will ever get to the point where there are no more wars?”
Service didn’t answer.
“I guess a cop has to think that way,” Stinson said. “Thanks for coming over.”
When Service called Nantz, she was sobbing. “Come home, honey,” she said. “Please.” It was a one-word order disguised as a plea.
Just east of Seney there was a portable marquee propped on a flatbed trailer in front of a church. The sign said pray: god answers knee-mail.
Grady Service doubted God answered anything. He probably sat in heaven shaking his head at the shit he saw back on earth. All the way home he noticed that American flags were sprouting in front of homes. They hadn’t been there on the way to McMillan. If the intent of the people who’d attacked New York City and Washington, D.C., had been to arouse American emotions, they had succeeded. Maybe this was another Pearl Harbor, he thought, shuddering at the implications.
3
Nantz had awakened him before daylight, her soft lips trailing butterfly kisses across his chest. After a long embrace, flesh against flesh, Maridly had straddled him the way she liked, holding her hands gently against the sides of his head, making love to him slowly, relishing the sensations and the buildup, lingering with each movement, sliding downward almost lazily, and when they came together she lay her head next to his ear and whispered, “I love you Grady. Just you, in all ways, always.”
Later they had gotten into the shower together and she was as relaxed as he had seen her in the almost three weeks since September 11.
In the shower she held him tight as water cascaded over them. “You are a great fuck, Service. For an old guy.” She punctuated the punch line by tickling him. He retaliated until she squealed for mercy, and they ended up outside the shower with Nantz sitting on the counter, her legs wrapped around him, raptly watching them in the mirror.
“I thought it was men who’re visually stimulated,” he said as they moved together.
“I’m New Woman,” she said, her breath coming in bursts. “And I am close. You there?” she asked, her words clipped. “Grady, there?”
“When you are,” he said, keeping cadence with her hips.
“Yep,” she said. “Yes, there she is, there she is . . . God!”
All the while Newf was scratching on the bathroom door trying to tell them to hurry up, that she had her own needs to tend to.
After they had finished Nantz began to run water in the tub. “I’m gonna take a long soak, hon. I hear they don’t give you time for real baths at the academy.”
They both laughed.
Tomorrow Nantz would depart for downstate to attend the nine-month DNR Law Enforcement Academy in Tustin, a town south of Cadillac. By next spring she would be in her probationary year as a new CO. They had been living together since July, and Service had enjoyed their routine and closeness. Now they would be apart for much of the coming twenty-one months.
Maridly had a good idea of what lay ahead. She had talked at length with Kate Nordquist, who had graduated from the academy the previous spring and was now field-training with Eddie Moody, the CO in Manistique. Moody had a nose for finding illegally killed animals and was known in the force as Gutpile. He was an immense officer who could charm people one moment and petrify them with fear an instant later. Nearing forty, Gutpile still attacked his job like a new officer. Kate Nordquist, twenty-three, told Nantz that he was “way cool.”
Nordquist had been to the house in Gladstone several times, and she and Nantz had become friends. The new CO was tall and lean, an attractive woman with a good mind and a model’s face, an attribute that could work for or against her, depending on circumstances. Gutpile told Service that Nordquist was “solid,” high praise coming from him.
“Kate says the school’s tough,” Nantz said as she tested the water with her toe and slid into the tub. “They make you stand at attention and spray Mace in your face.”
Service had heard. The DNR Law Enforcement Academy had been created three years before under their state training officer Captain Chamberlin, who looked faintly like a sleeping owl but was a raptor in his work; he was called Blood Hawk behind his back. Chamberlin was a longtimer who had made it clear to all who would listen that he intended to make the academy far more demanding than Troop School—the vaunted Michigan State Police Academy. The DNR academy would be longer and tougher.
In Service’s day new recruits could graduate from any police academy program where they learned basic law enforcement, then join the DNR for specialized fish and game training. Blood Hawk had put together a program that combined basic police work with fish and game law enforcement, and so far it seemed as tough as advertised. The idea was to put new officers into the field with a much stronger preparation for the job and to test them early and often in order to weed out those who didn’t belong. Service and Gus Turnage had been asked to serve as instructors for the tracking module. And Service would also teach the search and rescue section—if his new job would allow it, and if his suspension had not turned Chamberlin off to him. Chamberlin was fanatical about appearances.
He had heard about the Mace-in-the-face drill and wasn’t happy that Maridly would have no choice in undergoing this. In his Troop School class it had been strictly voluntary; not undergoing it had not been held against trainees.
But he felt like he knew Nantz well, and he knew she could handle it. He had seen her in action as a fire officer. Despite all the wealth inherited from her late father, she had shown an incredible devotion to the resource and her work.
But Blood Hawk had a different
notion of how the world was, and Nantz would have to endure it.
“Did you get Maced at Troop School?”
He nodded.
“Was it awful?”
“Yah.”
“If you can do it, I can do it,” she said.
While Maridly lolled in the tub he took Newf downstairs and let her out, made Nantz’s favorite almond-flavored coffee, and started the batter for lemon-raspberry muffins.
There would be no work today. He had one mission and that was to heap his attention on Maridly and help her to pack. She would depart tomorrow after lunch and drive to Cadillac, where she and several other recruits would spend the night at Jerry Openlander’s Cast-and-Blast Inn. Jerry was a longtime officer who had retired with a medical disability after a nasty snowmobile crash near Mesick. He had moved smoothly from law enforcement officer to hotelier and his business seemed to be working out. Monday morning all recruits were to report to Tustin to begin their ordeal.
This would be their last full day and night together, perhaps for months, and Service planned to shower Nantz with affection, good food, and good wine. Only sex took priority over food in Maridly’s scheme of life. She would say, “Great sex, great food, and humor make for great love, and a couple with great love and challenging work make for a great life.” She never talked about children or motherhood, which he found curious, but he didn’t press her on it. They had not discussed marriage, and if this was how she wanted it, then he did too. She was thirty-two and he was nearly fifty, an eighteen-year difference. He wondered if there would soon come a time when she began to feel her biological clock running out.
He set the oven to 425 degrees, took frozen raspberries out of the freezer, dumped them in a bowl, and strained away the syrup. After dolloping the muffin mixture into a pan, he slid it into the oven, set the timer for nineteen minutes, poured a cup of coffee, and started preparing the crabmeat egg casserole. When the buzzer sounded, he took the muffins out, reset the oven temperature, and put the casserole in.
Blue Wolf In Green Fire Page 2
