Blue Wolf In Green Fire

by Joseph Heywood

  “All I know is Kate from Wakefield.”

  “You’re putting me on,” Service said.

  Jason Nurmanski made the sign of the cross. “Honest, dude. Says she lives in Wakefield. She’s got my snake in her hand under da table. I’m gonna ask for ID, dude? I never met a woman who give it up da way she did.”

  Service looked back at del Olmo, who shrugged.

  “What’s she look like?” Service asked.

  “Long red hair, dude. Straight like a hippie. Big tits, bush-hair same color as da hair on her head. Bright red, man. You oughta see dat!”

  “So this woman hired you, but you don’t have a contract or the money, right?”

  “No, dude. Tings don’t get done like dat. C’mon, you know dat, right? I bring back da goods and she pops da cash.”

  “You think this is enough to get you into federal witness protection?”

  Nurmanski leaned forward. “Dude, she told me she works da whole Midwest, see? Dat’s like federal shit, over state borders an’ such? Dudes pay big cash for racks an’ she gets ’em. She gets da guys like me to do da work. Buck horns, bear paws and gallbladders, all sortsa shit. Do I get da deal or what?” Service thought about it. Antlers and bear gallbladders. Could this finally be a link to Griff Stinson’s bear in McMillan? Not likely. McMillan was nearly 150 miles east. In twenty years he had known only one poacher who ranged across the entire U.P. and that was Limpy Allerdyce.

  Service pushed a cassette recorder in front of the prisoner, took out the old tape, put in a new one, and pressed the on button. “Tell the whole story, Jason, from the time you met the lady and she offered you the money through her visit yesterday. When the tape is done we’ll have a court recorder type it up. Your lawyer will read it to you and you can sign your X to verify it’s the statement you made.”

  “No lawyer, dude. Specially not dat wop Tavolacci. She sent dat little prick to me. I don’t want nobody. Just read it ta me and I’ll sign.”

  “No promises, Jason. You give us everything you’ve got and we’ll see what we can do. That’s the best we can do for now.”

  “I gotta get outta here,” the man said. “If she can reach a dude down below, she can get ta me.”

  “The Kent County death was a suicide.”

  “Right,” the prisoner said. “And Santy Claus don’t scromp wid ’is missus all summer.”

  If this mystery woman had the reach to get somebody inside, her operation had to be large, powerful, and well protected. Sending Sandy Tavolacci was an indicator of clout and provided an explanation of how and why the lawyer had hooked up with Nurmanski. And she had identification that depicted her as Nurmanski’s sister, which suggested some sophistication, if there had actually been ID. “We’ll see what we can do to move you,” Service said.

  “Cool, dude.” Nurmanski began talking into the recorder.

  Service and del Olmo stepped outside.

  “Paranoid,” the younger CO said.

  “Maybe, but check yesterday’s visitor roster and see if you can get a description.”

  “I doubt the person who admitted her saw her pubic hair,” del Olmo said with a grin.

  Service winced. “I’m gonna call Barry Davey in Grand Rapids.” Davey was the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agent responsible for the U.P. Unlike the FBI, the BATF and USF&WS had their agents live elsewhere and travel into the area. “Sit on our boy and make sure he doesn’t fuck up the tape.”

  “On it now.”

  Service went to his truck, got his cell phone, and called Barry Davey.

  “Grady Service, I’m in Crystal Falls.”

  “Howyadoin Service?” Davey had a thick New York City accent.

  “Good. Listen, we have a prisoner up here who claims he was hired by a commercial poaching operation. He claims that someone from the organization told him yesterday morning that someone was going to be taken out in the Kent County Jail yesterday afernoon. This morning he heard there’d been a suicide.”

  “Kaylin Joquist,” Davey said. “It was a suicide.”

  “Our guy thinks otherwise. He’s under the impression that Joquist was trying to cut a deal and somebody decided to shut him up. Have you or your people been talking to him?” Davey’s office was in Grand Rapids, and there were federal aspects to Joquist’s crimes.

  “He’s jerking your chain for a deal.”

  Davey hadn’t answered his question, which was an answer in itself. “This guy has a room-temp IQ, Barry. His dipstick barely reaches oil. His mind doesn’t work deep or fast. He believes what he’s saying.”

  “Most nuts and cons do.”

  “He wants out of the Michigan system and I’m inclined to go with it. Can you work something out?”

  “What do we get?”

  “Look, I’ll need undercover help. If this op is as big as this kid makes it out to be, they’ll have resources. Maybe you can send one of your people to give us a hand.” Sending in a fed as an undercover in this case didn’t sit well with Service because he had never had full confidence in federal agencies. He knew his own people and what they could do and couldn’t do, but his gut told him this was the way to go this time.

  “You got a target?”

  “Yes.” Wealthy Johns and Skelton Gitter were not part of the Nurmanski deal, but what the hell, he could use undercover help. Nothing else had developed from afar. It was time to try to put somebody in close. Davey wouldn’t admit to dealing with Joquist either. Maybe Wealthy Johns was Kate from Wakefield. He smiled at the irony, then dismissed it and told himself to keep his mind on the puck.

  Davey asked, “What’s the scope of this alleged operation?”

  “Midwest at least.”

  “That’s not peanuts,” Davey said. “Here’s what I’ll do. We’ve got an arrangement with South Dakota, and we can put your boy out there until we dope this thing out and see if it’s worth more trouble. I’ve got an agent named Pidge Carmody. I can send him up to scope out the situation. He’s the best I’ve got, and I was just about to give him a break after he finishes something he’s doing for me, but he likes to work.”

  “How quick can you get him up here?”

  “Let me get back to you tonight.”

  “Fair enough.” Service gave him Nantz’s home phone number and rejoined del Olmo and Nurmanski, who was slugging from a bottle of Classic Coke and smoking another cigarette.

  Simon handed him a Xerox copy of the guest log. A name was highlighted in yellow. Name: Kate Cunny, Wakefield, Michigan. Relation to prisoner: sister. Service wrote a note to del Olmo on the back of the paper: “Find who checked her in, get a description, and see if there was ID.” He doubted there would be. Security in county jails was notoriously lax.

  While del Olmo took the tape out to get it transcribed and to find the person who had checked in the visitor, Service sat with Nurmanski. “We’ve got the start of a deal, but still no promises. We’re looking at moving you to another state. Nobody will know you’re there. You won’t even know where until you get there.”

  “She knew da guy was in Kent County.”

  “This is federal, Jason. When they bury you, you’ll stay buried.”

  “I don’t like dat word, dude,” Nurmanski said.

  “Keep telling your story and we’ll see what we can do for you, Jason.”

  “I appreciate it, man. I can’t believe a little pussy got me into dis mess.”

  “Shit happens,” Service said. “Sometimes the fucking you get isn’t worth the fucking you get.”

  “I hear ya, dude,” Nurmanski said disconsolately.

  Simon returned after Nurmanski was returned to his cell. “She never showed an ID. Visitors are supposed to, but it didn’t happen this time. The description matches. Straight, long red hair. The guy I talked to said she’s a knockout.”<
br />
  That night Barry Davey called back. A copy of Nurmanski’s statement had been faxed to him. “Okay, Service. Carmody will come up across the bridge. You got a meeting site in mind?” Service did. “Carmody’s the best,” Davey said, but his tone told Service he was trying to sell him something.

  “What about Nurmanski?”

  “A federal marshal from Minneapolis will drive over and pick him up. They’ll fly from St. Paul to Rapid City. He can sit out there until we see how this is going to go down.”

  “Thanks,” Service said. “When can I meet Carmody?”

  “November ninth is the earliest. He’s got something to finish for me first. He’ll call you, and you two can set the time and place for a meet.”

  Service gave Davey his cellular number. Service had just slid under the covers when Nantz called. “Guess what?”

  “What?”

  “I think I can get away from Lansing for a couple of days.”

  “When?”

  “Friday through Sunday before deer season opens,” she said.

  “Really? What’re the dates?”

  “November ninth through the eleventh,” she said.

  “You’re sure about those dates?”

  “What is it with dates, Service? Aren’t you more interested in the fact that our drought is going to end?”

  “Of course. Are you sure you can get away?”

  “Right now it looks that way. I hope so, don’t you? I love you, Grady.”

  “Good night, babe.” Why couldn’t he tell her how he felt about her?

  What a fall this was turning out to be. Still, November 9 was beginning to look like a day to look forward to.

  The next morning he was at his office in Marquette and stepped into the break room to get coffee. The radio was on. “Bombs,” a voice on the radio said and Service immediately reached over and turned up the volume.

  “A Michigan Tech public safety officer discovered two explosive devices at three thirty-five this morning before they could be detonated on the campus of the university in Houghton,” the announcer said. “One device was outside the school’s forestry school and the other outside the adjacent U.S. Forest Service Laboratory. A Michigan State Police bomb squad is on the scene now.”

  Service returned to his desk and immediately called his friend Gus Turnage, the CO in Houghton. They had joined the DNR the same year and worked together ever since.

  “Turnage, DNR,” Gus answered.

  “Hey Gus. Are you involved in that bomb thing at Tech?”

  “Not yet. Wink Rector called me a couple of hours ago and asked if I could be available for tracking if the need arises. I told him sure.” Rector was the FBI’s resident agent for the Upper Peninsula, a one-man office in Marquette. “The FBI and BATF are here. Wink is going to lead the investigating team: FBI, BATF, Houghton city police, Troops, Tech public safety, Houghton County sheriff, what a bloody monkey-fuck that will be, eh? Glad I’m not part of it.”

  “Real bombs?”

  “Damn straight. Five-gallon pails filled with flammable liquid and wired to igniters. Wink says it looks like work typical of some environmental loonies, the Earth Liberation and Animal Liberation Fronts.”

  “The ones who burned the federal forestry lab in Wisconsin last year?”

  “Yah, and they claimed responsibility for putting the torch to an ag biotech program at Michigan State the year before that. Wink says both groups like incendiaries. They like fire. They say it purifies.”

  “Good thing the university cop was paying attention.”

  “No kiddin’. A professor up to the college told Rector one of the buildings had enough chemicals stored inside to leave a six-story hole in the ground.”

  “This has been one fucked-up fall,” Service said.

  “You betcha,” Turnage said, “and BOB will soon be upon us.” Blaze-Orange Brigade was the term some conservation officers used to refer to hunters who were required by law to wear hunter orange during the firearm deer season. “Guess we’d all better have eyes in the backs of our heads from here on.”

  “Nah,” Service retorted. “We’ll just let technology take care of it.”

  Gus Turnage laughed. “Yah, technology, that’s a good one.”

  It was an inside joke. Under the previous state DNR law enforcement chief there had been a move to make up for the shortage of law enforcement people with increased technology, but so far not a lot of it worked as advertised and budget constraints were such that there weren’t enough maintenance personnel to keep the equipment working. When equipment malfunctioned or failed, it could be a long wait to get it back.

  Every CO in the state knew that technology could never replace officers. The same thing was in evidence in Afghanistan, Service reminded himself. The United States had satellite pictures out the wazoo but few assets on the ground to tell them what terrorists were thinking. Current state law enforcement chief Lorne O’Driscoll was not as enamored of technology as his predecessor, but his hands were tied by Bozian’s budget cuts, and even replacements for retiring officers were slow.

  “Be careful,” Service told his friend.

  A minute later the phone rang again. It was Nantz. “Well?” she said in her confrontational I-told-you-so tone.

  “You were right.”

  “I wish I wasn’t,” she said, softening her voice. “Have you heard anything?”

  “I talked to Gus. They found two devices, now disarmed. No casualties. Wink Rector is handling it. They’re thinking ecoterrorists.”

  “Ecoidiots,” Maridly Nantz said. “They’d burn the whole world to save it.”

  Echoes of Vietnam, Service thought. “People with passions don’t necessarily have their brains fully engaged.”

  “You mean like when we’re rattling the bedsprings—not that I can remember what that’s like.”

  “Hang in there, honey,” he said. “November ninth, right?” He didn’t want to think about their situation now. It was too depressing and he missed her more than he was able to adequately express.

  “It’s been more than a month, Service. When I was at the academy I didn’t have time to think about sex and now all I have is time and that’s all I think about. What’s on your agenda today?”

  “I’ve got choices: illegal minnows, stolen timber, and rattlesnake trafficking. Or I can rattle a lawyer’s cage.”

  “I miss you, honey.”

  “November ninth,” he said.

  “Yah, yah, don’t you go trying to disarm any bombs, you hear me?”

  “No problem.”

  “I mean it, Grady. My wants have merged with my needs and we are talking burgeoning, do you hear me?”

  “I hear you.” Did she think their separation wasn’t affecting him?

  “Okay, you may now go chase your little fishies and snakes.”

  He laughed out loud, hung up, and filled his coffee mug. Weird fall was an understatement. September 11 had been followed by the yet-unexplained anthrax contamination and now there were bombs at Michigan Tech. How much weirder could it get?

  He decided to call Sandy Tavolacci.

  It took ten minutes for the lawyer’s receptionist to put him through.

  “This is the son of the asshole,” Service said when Tavolacci finally picked up.

  The lawyer laughed. “Okay, okay, I was out of line on dat one. I apologize.”

  “Who’s Kate from Wakefield?” Service asked.

  “Da fuck should I know?”

  “She hired you to take Nurmanski’s case.”

  “Prove it,” Tavolacci said defiantly, hanging up.

  Captain Grant walked into his office. “Bad day, Detective?”

  “Lawyers,” Service said.

  “Look at the bright side,” his
boss said. “You won’t have to deal with them in heaven.”

  7

  November 9 had arrived, Nurmanksi was gone to South Dakota, Grady Service had reluctantly arranged for his former girlfriend Kira Lehto to take care of Cat and Newf at her veterinary clinic until he got back on Sunday, and the days had dragged as he tried numerous avenues to develop information on Wealthy Johns, getting nowhere. Today he would meet the federal undercover agent, stop to see a troublesome old friend near Brevort, and finally see Maridly Nantz at a B&B in Mackinaw City. He could hardly contain his anticipation.

  Pidge Carmody had called two days ago and Service picked a place for their meeting, a nameless roadside rest area two miles east of Naubinway, which in Ojibwa means “place of echoes.”

  The meeting site was only an hour from St. Ignace and the bridge. Twenty-five years ago the shoreline south of US 2 and west from Rapid River to Naubinway had reverberated with the sounds of clashes between white and Native American commercial fishermen. The DNR had been caught in the middle of what was now known as the Garden Wars, and had absorbed the anger and frustration of both sides as judicial rulings earmarked large areas of the Great Lakes exclusively for Indian fishermen, thus sealing the fate of the white operations, which were marginal under the best of conditions. Yooper distrust of government was never far from the surface, but the court rulings had caused an explosion of pent-up violence. With a lot of luck and professionalism, law enforcement had gotten through the mess without a fatality.

  Service remembered a night in the late 1970s in Big Bay de Noc off Garden Bluff when he and Sergeant Blake Garwood had boarded an illegal fishing tug in total darkness. They had drifted in with their lights out and gone over the gunwales. The captain immediately cranked his engines and tried to run while his crew turned on the two COs. Blake had been thrown over the side during the melee, managing to yell before he splashed. Service screamed for the captain to come about, and when he kept the tug racing away from Garwood, Service fired two shots through the cabin roof. There was a heavy fog on the water and Garwood, a veteran of the Garden conflict, always carried a maritime flare gun attached to his life vest by a lanyard. He used his flares to help them find him and get him aboard. The captain and his crew had gone to jail, but Service still shuddered when he remembered how close he had come to losing his sergeant. Garwood had since retired to the mountains of Tennessee with no desire to be near, much less in a boat on the water. A sign of age, he told himself, when you start remembering the old days.