Blue Wolf In Green Fire

by Joseph Heywood

  Simon’s warning about the roads turned out to be not so much a joke as an understatement.

  Several days of steady rain had left the logging roads deep in mud and ruts. Grady could imagine four-G loads as his truck lurched and banged slowly along, scraping bottom, first pressing him upward against his seat belt, then dropping him down into the seat heavily, a compressed roller coaster that threatened to rip the steering wheel out of his hands. At least the sun was shining today, which helped his mood. In the old days officers could choose a vehicle that suited their individual needs, but now department policy offered no choice. All officers drove new Dodge Laramies with double cabs and loose transmissions. The old single-cab trucks had been better in the dirt; the Dodges were better on the highway, which was not where working wardens did their real business. The rough road turned the Dodge transmission into a kangaroo, making it pop out of gear into neutral and forcing him to drive with one hand on the steering wheel and the other hand on the gear shift. Focusing on the driving helped keep his mind off Maridly’s emotional state, and his own. The metal pedestal that sat between the front seats to hold his laptop computer rattled and clattered like the wagon of a Gypsy tinker. He had stuffed a heavy winter glove in the handle of the computer’s carrying case to mute some of the cacophony. It helped, but not much.

  Service reached the rendezvous in Section 14 before del Olmo and parked on a spot of dry ground. He buzzed down the electric windows and sat listening to the chucking and chattering of the dry autumn leaves and felt the breeze. This was more like early summer than late fall. Any day now they would get an infusion of arctic air and the snow would come and remain in the swamps into May. There had been four or five inches of snow on the ground before Halloween, but it was gone now, the ground still too warm to hold it. Nature did things in its own time and its own way. When you lived in the Upper Peninsula, you accepted this or found somewhere else to live.

  The report of a rifle broke his reverie. Not the big bark of a high-caliber weapon, but the sharp, toylike crack of a .22 mag or .223, a poacher’s tool. He grinned at the thought. It was possible that a squirrel hunter was in the hardwoods, but squirrel hunters nowadays tended to be kids or old men, and neither was likely to be out in an area like this. Instinct and experience suggested a violet—his own term for a violator.

  Service got out of the truck, carefully leaving the door slightly ajar, took his binoculars, and walked slowly through an area of blowdown toward the sound. He was in a relatively open stand of oak and beech, with a cedar swamp at his back. Deer were still in the hardwoods, pigging out on the mast crops, but soon they would head for heavy cover and stay there until overcome by the rut and the need to copulate, which put animals and humans on an even footing. Where sex was involved, dumb decisions could get made with disastrous results for either species. When you had your mind on sex, you didn’t have it on other things, a factor that led to human miscalculations and a lot of dead bucks. He made a mental note to remind Nantz of this, but she was so pissed off these days he doubted her libido was engaged.

  After a cautious ten-minute stalk through still-green ferns, Service spotted a figure at the base of some beech trees about a hundred yards ahead. He guessed by the way the figure was hunched over that he probably had a deer down.

  He circled the kneeling figure and got into a position that would put the sun in the man’s face.

  The man was gutting a gray-black buck with a handsome set of antlers, as thick as fists at their base.

  There had been a single rifle shot, but the orange-and-green fletching of an arrow protruded from the animal’s neck. Coincidence maybe, but Service doubted it. They were in an extremely isolated area, and it wasn’t likely that two hunters would be out here at the same time. Hunting deer with a firearm before November 15 was against the law. Killing a deer with an arrow was still legal. Poachers seeking heads liked neck shots. Bowhunters preferred lung shots.

  Service approached the man cautiously and silently. He looked to be midtwenties, with long scraggly hair, decked out in full camo.

  “Nice buck,” Service said.

  The hunter lurched at the sound of the voice and squinted to find the source of the voice.

  “DNR,” Service said. “Good shot.”

  “Yah, I been watchin’ dis galoot coupla weeks, eh. Seen him a half dozen times.” The hunter was nervous, his face twitching.

  “Get him from a tree stand?” Service asked.

  “Nah, brush blind.” The man’s eyes betrayed panic.

  “Where’s the blind?”

  “Back over dere.” The man nodded in a direction that could take in half the compass.

  “You hear a rifle shot?”

  “Shot?” The man said, shaking his head.

  “Could’ve been the wind,” Service said, knowing full well what he had heard. When you dealt with violets, it helped to put them at ease before you pounced. The best approach was to get them talking, then trap them with their own words, a contest he enjoyed. “The wind plays tricks on old ears. Can I see your license?”

  “See my license?”

  “Yah, your license.” When somebody started repeating your questions you could be reasonably sure they were trying to buy time to think.

  “She’s back in da blind, eh.”

  “Ought to have it on you so you can tag the buck.”

  “Dude, I was gonna to tag ’er.”

  Dude? “Let’s walk back to your blind and get that license. Your bow there?”

  “Yah.” The man got up and Service fell in a step or two behind him, letting him lead the way.

  “Where’s your vehicle?”

  “You mean da truck?”

  “Right, da truck,” Service said.

  “She’d be oot to da road. I walked in. Figured if I got lucky I could drive ’er in, pick ’er up.”

  It was not at all likely that a hunter who was after a specific buck, especially one with a handsome ten-point rack, would risk leaving it in the woods to be stolen by somebody else. Service had seen no trucks on the way in. The area had been logged over and was crisscrossed with a varicosity of tote roads. It would be easy enough to stash a truck somewhere close by.

  “How far did he come after he was hit?” Service asked.

  “A ways.” Service would check for a blood trail later.

  The hunter led him into an area of slash, and as Service looked for footing in a pile of fallen logs, the man bolted, running full out. Service scrambled through the tangle, barking both shins, and began to pursue, but stopped. The man had a good lead and was moving at a fast clip, his skinny ridge-running arms windmilling. Service knew he had no chance of catching him unless he fell.

  Service hustled back to his truck and got on the radio to Simon. “Three One Twenty-Two, where are you?”

  “Half mile southwest of your position if you aren’t lost.”

  “I’ve got a runner heading your way. He’s in his cammie-jammies. He ought to cross your path soon. You want to put the hook on him? He won’t be expecting two of us.”

  “You’re not in hot foot pursuit?”

  “Experience makes an officer smarter.”

  Del Olmo laughed. “Experience or age? Don’t worry, jeffe, I’ll nail his sorry behind. You want me to bring him to you?”

  “That would be peachy. Wait for me by my truck.”

  “Stopping now. I think I see your man. All camo?”

  “Yah, with hair like Samson.”

  “And the build of Barney Fife?”

  “That would be him.”

  “See you.”

  Service returned to the buck and knelt down. The arrow was not lodged in the way modern arrows tended to penetrate. He put on a latex glove and wiggled the arrow gently, suspecting that beneath it he would find a small slug or pieces of one, but to
be safe they would take the animal into Crystal Falls and ask a biologist at the district office to do the extraction.

  It was forty minutes before del Olmo appeared, his prisoner cuffed and sitting in the suicide seat beside him, the man’s head slumped, hair glistening, nose bloodied. Simon didn’t look much better off, his gray shirt torn, his green trousers stained with mud.

  Service helped the prisoner out of the truck. “Where’s your rifle?”

  The young poacher chewed his bottom lip and refused eye contact.

  Service studied the man’s jawline and guessed he was going to clam up.

  “Taking a deer with a rifle in bow season,” Service said. “Fleeing and eluding.”

  “Resisting arrest,” del Olmo added. “He wanted to wrestle. Add assault.”

  “Sounds like jail to me,” Service said. “’Course there’re easier paths, eh.”

  The hunter would not look at him.

  “Any ID?” Service asked his colleague.

  “Empty pockets.”

  “No hunting license? Not even a small-game ticket? You need that just to carry a rifle in the field now.”

  “Nada,” del Olmo said, running a hand through his hair. “Like Mama Hubbard’s cupboard.”

  “Let’s call Iron County, let the deputies transport our sport,” Service said, turning to the man. “Be a lot easier on you if you talk to us. Silence doesn’t take you anywhere but deeper into the cannibal’s pot.”

  The man said nothing.

  Service shrugged and looked at del Olmo. “Call the county.”

  His friend radioed the Iron County dispatcher and arranged to meet a deputy on the hardtop county road. There was no way someone could negotiate this terrain in a patrol car.

  Simon read the man his Miranda rights and had him sign a card. He signed with an X. The younger officer showed it to Service and raised an eyebrow.

  “Don’t be a jerk,” Service told the man. “We’re gonna find out who you are. That’s a given.”

  “Name’s Jason Nurmanski. I can’t write, dude.”

  The two officers looked at each other. This didn’t happen often, but neither was it a rare occurrence. “Makes things sort of tough, doesn’t it?” Service asked.

  Nurmanski shrugged and stared at the ground.

  Service said, “Okay Jason, we’re gonna take you out to the hardtop and a deputy will take you into Crystal. The deputies will get you cleaned up and get you something to eat. I’m leveling with you, Jason. You really screwed up, but your cooperation will go a long way toward making things easier. Where’s your rifle?”

  The hunter remained silent.

  “What about your bow? You leave that stuff out here and somebody will come along and that’ll be the last you’ll see of them. You got enough money to lose your gear?”

  The man shook his head and Service knew he wasn’t going to talk.

  “You can call a lawyer from the jail.”

  Again, there was no response.

  “I’ll be back after I drop him,” del Olmo said.

  Even with two of them searching it took most of the remainder of the afternoon to locate the rifle. It was a twenty-two magnum made by Remington, a new bolt-action single-shot model with a four-power Weaver scope mounted on it. There was no ground blind and no bow or arrows. It looked like the man had shot the buck with the rifle and carried in one arrow to try to disguise what he had done. No license either. Service found where the man had stood and one spent cartridge on some dead oak leaves. The serial number on the weapon had been filed off, an indicator that it was stolen, which suggested another reason for the man’s reluctance to talk.

  They took the weapon back to the truck. Service got out a thermos of coffee and lit a cigarette. “This kid is having himself a most shitty day,” del Olmo said. “Sandwich?” The two men unwrapped their subs and ate in silence, drinking coffee.

  “Pretty fast, wasn’t he?” Service said.

  “Had his adrenaline rockets lit full burner.”

  “He put up a pretty good scrap?”

  “Desperation—a flailer. Must be a nightmare to not be able to write or read,” del Olmo said.

  “He the one you got the tip on?”

  “Yep, but I didn’t want to let on we were tipped. Some of these young palookas got some strange values. A woman turns her old man in to a cop, she’s gonna be toast.”

  “New rifle,” Service said. “Somebody will have reported it stolen.”

  “Let’s hope,” del Olmo said. “It’s a big state.”

  “It’ll be local. Our boy doesn’t look like a traveling man.”

  “You want this?” del Olmo asked, holding out a dill pickle.

  “You dropped it on the ground, right?”

  “Five-second rule,” del Olmo said, grinning. “I love it when these yahoos want to wrestle,” he added. No matter how violent a scrap with a violator, conservation officers always called it wrestling, their typical understatement.

  “I like it when they don’t run so damn fast,” Service said, as much to himself as to del Olmo.

  The other officer grinned and nodded. “He was fast.”

  “Not fast enough today,” Service said. “It sucks to be him.”

  “You wanna go with me to talk to his lady?”

  They drove to the district office and put the deer in the truck bed of one of the district biologists. Service left his vehicle in the parking lot and rode in del Olmo’s truck.

  The woman lived in a trailer not far from the old Mansfield Mine, which had been the scene of the state’s worst mining tragedy back in the late 1800s. A tunnel had collapsed, and dozens of men had drowned. Many of the bodies were still entombed. The woman’s trailer was close to the road. There was a dilapidated Datsun parked in front.

  Simon knocked, and when the woman finally eased open the door, she said, “Go away! Geez, what’s wrong with youse guys, comin’ oot here in da daylight?”

  “There aren’t any neighbors,” Simon said.

  “Da woods got eyes,” the woman said.

  She stepped out onto the small wooden platform that served as a stoop and shielded her eyes from the sun. She wore a soiled white cardigan over a T-shirt. The sweater was buttoned once—up high—and a swollen belly protruded beneath. Her hair was disheveled, her skin broken out in some sort of rash.

  Service thought she looked to be seventeen, maybe younger.

  “We arrested Jason this afternoon,” Simon told her. “You can bail him out.”

  “Hell wid ’im,” she said. “Been porkin’ some chick over to Gogebic. You guys got ’im, you can keep ’im.”

  Service got the rifle out of Simon’s truck. “You recognize this?”

  “Da chick, she give it to him. She was gonna pay him.”

  “For a buck?” Simon said.

  “Only a big guy,” she said.

  “He told you this?”

  “Yah, get Jason in bed and he blabs, eh?”

  “Did he tell you the woman’s name?”

  She leered. “He’d a done that, I’d a cut off her tits. Bastard said wun’t be right to tell her name, so I called youse.” She quickly added, “You see ’im, don’t be telling ’im who called youse, eh?”

  They met Jason Nurmanski in a small room in the jail, which was attached to the Iron County courthouse on top of the hill in Crystal Falls.

  “So, Jason,” del Olmo said. “We’re looking at fifteen hundred dollars for a fine here, some jail time, and your rifle’s gonna be condemned.”

  “I got no rifle.”

  “We found a Remington twenty-two Mag out where you popped the buck.”

  “I used da bow, dude.”

  “There wasn’t any bow, Jason.”

  Nurmanski scowl
ed. “Some fucker musta tooken it. The woods’re filled with gankers these days.”

  “Who’s the woman who gave you the rifle, Jason? What was she going to pay?”

  Nurmanski looked angry. “You talked to that bitch Marcie!”

  “Who’s Marcie?” Simon said. “We’ve got a report from Gogebic. The Remington was stolen.”

  The young poacher glared and stared at the far wall. “I don’t know shit.”

  The officers got up to leave. Nurmanski said, “Tell that bitch Marcie I’m gonna superglue her mouth shut.”

  Out in the dark hall, Service said, “You played that nicely.”

  “Ironic,” Simon said. “It can be a crime to tell a lie, but it’s not a crime to tell a lie to catch a criminal. Some system, eh? You want to let him make bail?”

  “Can you talk to the judge, tell him we have a rifle without a serial number, get him to jack up the bail?”

  “No problem. By the looks of Jason, fifty bucks would be too high.”

  On the way home to Gladstone, Service got a call from del Olmo on the cell phone.

  “He’ll be arraigned tomorrow. We’re adding possession of stolen goods to the charges. The judge will boost bail, but I don’t think Nurmanski wants out.”

  “Did he call a lawyer?”

  “Says he doesn’t want one and I get the feeling he’s happy right where he is,” his young colleague said.

  Kaylin Joquist had been caught downstate with trophy heads and still sat in jail in Grand Rapids. Now this kid in Crystal Falls was acting the same way. Could the two men be linked? Grady Service wondered as he drove east.

  As he pulled into the driveway at the house his cell phone rang.

  “Service, Lars Hjalmquist in Ironwood. You know that fifty cal you asked us to keep an eye out for?”

  “You found one?”

  “I busted a guy named Cacmaki today. He took a shot at my grouse decoy from his truck. He’s one of my regulars, and this is the second time this fall he’s pulled this stunt. He told me he saw a fifty being used.”