“I sensed something was wrong. She had never met Minnis but swore she was in the movement. I called the Brits and told them about the contact. After that, the Brits left me alone. Just before I moved back to the States a representative of Her Majesty’s government came to visit me. She told me that the information about Haloran had caused her to flee the country and that this had undoubtedly saved more lives. I was given the gratitude of Her Majesty’s government—sub rosa and off the record of course.”
“And you continued to see Minnis here in the States. Carmody.”
She nodded. “I did.”
“Haloran ended up working with Minnis. She shot him.”
Genova edged forward in her chair, but said nothing.
“I’m sorry, but they amputated one of his legs, SuRo. He’s done working for the government. Haloran didn’t know who he was until the very end. He slipped up and made a comment that tipped her, but her target was Bridget Galway, who had come over to the Brits with information about CARP,” he said. “Her name was Larola Brule here. Carmody was a bonus for Haloran but she may not have known he was Minnis.”
“I told the big lug his mouth would get him in a fix,” Genova said.
“You were off with your wannabe warriors the night of the killings at Vermillion.”
“Yes,” she said. “We were planning the next event in our campaign. Vermillion wasn’t ours, Grady.”
She had just intimated leading the effort that had led to all the damage done the night of the Vermillion incident, but he knew he would not use that against her. Service said, “Minnis asked me to tell you he was sorry he couldn’t tell you in person.”
“Where is he?”
“In a VA hospital in California and no, I don’t know which one, but you’re clever. If you want to find him, you can.”
She gave him a hug as he prepared to leave. “You’re okay, rockhead.”
“We’re still going to blast you for that stunt in Trout Lake,” he said. “And the rest of it, if we develop evidence.”
“Once a cop, always a prick,” she said, grinning from ear to ear.
They were in the Mosquito Wilderness, nearly five miles from the spot where Grinda had shot Haloran. Service had driven to the house in Gladstone, picked up Nantz, and headed for the Mosquito.
“Where we goin’, hon?” she asked.
He told her about his conversation with Rector and Genova, and she listened without asking questions.
“Genova confessed?” she asked.
“It was off the record and right now I think she’s had enough heat from the government. She’s a zealot, not a criminal.”
As they rolled slowly down a muddy lane, an animal suddenly appeared in the headlights, paused, glanced at them, and darted into a field. Service stopped the truck. A second animal loped past, not even slowing down.
“Long tails,” Nantz said. “Feline heads, rounded ears, long tails. Cougars.”
Service remembered the publicity from November, stared straight ahead, and put the truck in gear. “I didn’t see anything,” he said.
“I saw something,” Nantz said, “but they sure weren’t breeding.” She leaned across and kissed him on the cheek. “Though I know a pair who could use a little practice.”
Service immediately jammed the accelerator down.
“Can’t you make this heap go any faster?” Maridly Nantz asked, laughing.
EPILOGUE
It was two weeks before Christmas, and the heavy snows that had fallen during the clash in the Mosquito had melted away under sunny skies and fifty-degree days. Service and Nantz had the truck windows down as they bumped along the eight-mile-long two-track to Gutpile Moody’s camp in the swamps surrounding Duck Creek.
Nantz sat quietly, taking in the scenery. Service sensed her anxiety. Ordinarily spouses and significant others were not invited to end-of-deer-season howls, but Lisette McKower had called and invited her. She had already started one academy class and would start again next fall, and she had worked with Service in the capacity of a VCO—and the district’s voluntary conservation officers were all invited. She belonged. She was already one of them.
It was nearly 11 a.m., the temperature in the midfifties, the sun brilliant in a cloudless sapphire sky.
One small piece of the puzzle had lingered until last night when Lars Hjalmquist called.
“That shirt Gus found on the dead wolf?” Lars said. “It belongs to Brakelight Bois. That day we visited Horns he took a shine to Wealthy Johns, called her up and went out with her and—”
“I get the picture,” Service said. “She ganked his shirt.”
“Even better,” Hjalmquist said. “She talked him into giving her one of his old ones, and then when the shit hit the fan he was scared shitless to admit what he’d done. He says it’s a black mark on his career and he’s going to put in his papers. I don’t think it was a black mark. I think it was getting under the covers with a murderer that made his decision for him. His mind’s locked in the what-if game.”
Service thanked his friend. He’d told Nantz about Brakelight’s shirt and she had just shaken her head and said, “That was one busy woman.”
A mile from camp, they began to see vehicles parked along the ribbon of shoulder of the camp road. Farther along they encountered Joe and Kathy Ketchum walking along with their black powder rifles in cases slung over their shoulders. Joe’s arm was over Kathy’s shoulder, her arm around his waist. Service stopped the truck beside them.
“Hey there, armed lovebirds, what’s with all the traffic?”
“Officers are in from all over the state,” Joe Ketchum said. “They’ve even got tents set up at the camp.”
From all over the state? Most howls were limited to a district’s personnel with a few flop-overs from adjacent territories. He wasn’t sure what to make of this.
The closest they could get to camp was a quarter of a mile. Vehicles were parked helter-skelter.
“Looks like a freeway accordion,” he said. “We’ll need a cop to untangle this mess when it’s over.” Nantz smiled and squeezed his hand.
They walked the rest of the distance to the camp gate, which was made of stripped cedar logs. Service had stopped counting vehicles at ninety. Something very strange was afoot, but he had no idea what. There was a huge weathered sign above the entrance: camp swamp court. The camp was one of several in the U.P. that passed from CO to CO. Service had been to Camp Swamp Court with his father when he was a boy. In those days the camp had belonged to Pegleg Riordan, a veteran with a wooden leg who had been notorious for his brutal treatment of poachers. Legend held that more than a few lawbreakers had been “interrogated” at the camp. Now the place was Gutpile Moody’s. It consisted of a two-story log cabin and an outhouse. There was hand-pumped water and no electricity.
It was not yet noon, but a bonfire was already crackling and hissing from a deep pit near the cabin. The fire was being built of five-foot logs stacked in piles. More white oak was stacked in neat rows not far from the fire. Several officers were lugging fuel logs while others supervised their placement.
“Damn,” Nantz said quietly to him. “I forgot the s’mores.”
Service found Gus Turnage and Simon del Olmo near one of the tents.
“What is all this?” he asked Gus.
Gus looked around the gathering and said, “Got the smell of something above the working-warden level, eh?”
Simon handed beers to Service and Nantz.
“Have a nice visit to the morgue?” del Olmo whispered.
Service said, “Nurmanski wasn’t lying about Kate from Wakefield.” Simon began to laugh.
“What?” Nantz said.
“It’s not important,” Service said.
Groups of officers walked around, visiting, shouting greetings and laug
hing, happy to see colleagues they had not seen in a long time. The camp was built on the only significant hummock of high ground in the Duck Creek Swamp.
McCants came jogging over to them, hugged Nantz, and nodded one of her big grins at Service.
Sheena Grinda was standing with Betty Very, who worked Ontonagon County. Betty had handled more problem bears than any other officer and had scars on her face to prove it. She was known throughout the DNR as Bearclaw. Service escorted Nantz and McCants to the two women and introduced Nantz.
“You and Lars hit the jackpot at Gitter’s cabin,” he said. Skelton Gitter had already pled guilty to several charges surrounding the poaching operation and was trying to cut a deal with the feds on the eagles. But he refused to cop to the wolf killing.
“You found Joe?” Bearclaw asked.
Service nodded.
“Sorry. He was a helluva man.”
Service had not allowed himself time to think about Joe Flap.
Nantz’s hand patted his buttock.
“Died with his boots on,” Bearclaw said. “Can’t ask for more than that.”
Service saw retired officer Eino Hultinen and left Nantz with the women.
“Yo, Marquis,” Service said. During his twenty-year career Service was aware of six fistfights between conservation officers and Hultinen had been in all six of them, usually as the instigator, if not always the winner. Officers had named him Marquis for the Marquis of Queensbury.
Hultinen grinned his crooked-tooth smile and shook hands. Eino had been a horseblanket.
“Looks like Heikki Luunta’s takin’ ’nother vacation, eh,” the retired officer said. Heikki Luunta was purported to be the Finnish god of snow.
“Heard it was a quiet season,” Marquis said, choking back a laugh.
“We had an acute outbreak of lawfulness,” Service said.
Sergeant “B. P.” Lyrone Bolden joined them. Bolden had been one of a dozen Detroit cops who transferred to the DNR one year. The other eleven had gone back to their Detroit jobs eventually, but Bolden had stayed on in the DNR and now worked out of Grand Rapids. As a rookie he had been sent in as the point man to stop illegal commerical fishing on the Garden Peninsula. This had been a time when Indian and white fishermen and the DNR were on the verge of open warfare and bloodshed. Bolden had been wearing a black leather coat over his uniform and had marched right up to the fishermen and their boat at sunrise. They had simply stared at him with open mouths as he pulled back his jacket to show his badge and announce, “Fish cop and you motherfuckers are busted!”
The six men involved all had records of violence, but they had given up without protest as Bolden’s backups streamed out of the woods. The fishermen had rarely seen a black man in the cities of the U.P., and never in a CO uniform on the Garden. When his supervisor asked how he had done what he had done, Bolden had said the men had never seen a Black Phantom before. He had become B. P. on the spot.
“Tree comin’ up?” B. P. asked.
“Doubtful,” Service said. “What’re all you flatlanders doin’ up here?”
“Word just sorta got around,” B. P. said. “When I told Tina I was coming back to the Yoop, she like to have fainted.” His wife had hated living in the U.P. and had been the reason B. P. moved downstate after five years in the Soo.
Venison stew simmered in pots while officers talked, swapped stories, and drank beer from kegs. CO Dutch Vohl told of his encounter with a downstate hunter who had shot a wolf out of self-defense—at seventy-seven yards, four times broadside.
Most of the officers had laughed and shaken their heads, but Vohl, a thoughtful man, didn’t laugh. “People come up here to the woods and get spooked. The guy did a stupid thing, but I think he was really afraid.”
Maybe, Service thought, but if he was afraid, what was he doing in the woods with a rifle?
The feed started around two in the afternoon. The officers lined up before gallons of venison stew, huge bowls of salad, and plates filled with grilled partridge and woodcock breasts, smoked whitefish, moose jerky from Ontario, smoked elk from Wyoming, all sorts of fish and game all simply prepared and washed down with beer and whiskey.
By dark the bonfire’s flames were up to thirty feet, and those gathered around the flames backed up to keep from being singed.
Nantz and Grinda were hanging out together, drinking beer, laughing and talking the way women do, giving full attention to everything the other one had to say.
Lis McKower arrived just before the stew was served and wedged her way into line between Hultinen and del Olmo.
“No cuts,” Hultinen complained.
“Harassment,” McKower said with a grin.
The retired officer cringed. “Glad I didn’t have to deal with that shit.”
CO Bryan Jefferies drifted over to them and, at McKower’s prompting, regaled the group with the story about the opening-day skirmish between the Amish and Mennonite hunters. By the time he finished, his audience was howling.
Turnage looked over at Service. “Incompetent discharge of a firearm?”
“We should write more of those.”
“If it was a violation,” del Olmo said, chiming in.
Service grinned. “Problematic.”
His former lieutenant shook her head.
It was long after dark when vehicle lights appeared at the camp gate and pulled up to the cabin. Most of the celebrants were gathered around the fire.
Chief Lorne O’Driscoll got out of a green Tahoe and went back to talk to drivers of several trucks that had followed him in. People got out of the trucks, began opening doors and unloading huge cardboard boxes. Service saw Blood Hawk Chamberlin and several senior officers from Lansing.
Captain Ware Grant appeared from the other side of the Tahoe and walked unsteadily to the edge of the fire, his head up, back straight.
Nantz weaved her way through the crowd to be at Service’s side. She gave him a questioning look, but he had no answers.
Service had downed only a few beers, but the alcohol and warmth of the fire had made him logy. Maybe the letdown after the incidents at Vermillion and in the Mosquito contributed. He stared at the captain and the chief and blinked several times trying to figure out what they were doing here. The chief did not approve of howls. “We’re busted,” he whispered to Nantz before he noticed that Grant and O’Driscoll were wearing the old wool overcoats officers had called horseblankets. The coats had been retired years before, and Service had been told several times to stop wearing his father’s coat, which he had worn for years. He had reluctantly obliged only the year before.
The chief stood quietly beside the captain, the two of them silent.
Some of the people from the trucks began to move through the crowd handing out narrow-stemmed plastic glasses with dnr logos stuck on them.
Bottles of champagne were passed through the crowd. Corks popped like muted gunshots.
Gutpile Moody brought glasses to the chief and captain and poured champagne for them.
The chief held up his hands and the buzz in the crowd tailed off.
“Joe Flap died doing the thing he loved most. That he was grounded is irrelevant. Joe Flap never played games. He was a horseblanket and his passing requires a fitting tribute. Effective today, these coats are again part of the official uniforms and we will wear them with pride.” He pointed toward boxes. “There is a coat for each of you. Please get one now.”
Service was amazed at the orderliness of the process. Boxes were labeled with letters for last names. When Service got to the truck with the box marked “S” he saw someone step out of the shadows.
Luticious Treebone smiled and held out a new coat for his friend. Service slid it on, and noted it smelled new and felt stiff and heavy. He decided he preferred the old one his father had left to him.
&n
bsp; Treebone and Service embraced, two old warriors who had seen so much together.
“You always crash the best parties,” Service said.
“Learned it from you,” his friend said. “Word’s out on what went down in the Mosquito. You almost got your ass shot again.”
When Nantz saw Treebone, she hugged him and introduced Service and Tree to three people in badgeless DNR shirts. “They’re my classmates from the academy!” she said.
Service felt the trainees staring at him as Nantz hung on his arm and made quiet jokes with them.
Chief O’Driscoll walked over to Service and nodded for him to follow.
They stepped back into the trees. “Cigarette?” O’Driscoll asked.
Service dug out his pack, gave one to the chief, and lit it for him.
“Filthy habit. Been battling the damn things for years,” he said. The chief lowered his voice. “I doubt Senator Timms would approve of Officer Sensitivity’s behavior in the Marquette morgue.”
“I can explain that, Chief.”
O’Driscoll chuckled. “I’m sure you can,” he said, and walked away to join Captain Grant.
Reassembled around the fire and in their new coats, Chief O’Driscoll raised a glass and looked to his right. “Ware?”
Captain Ware Grant scanned the officers until he saw Service. “Grady, you were with Joe at the end. What were his last words?”
Service started to mumble, but Nantz poked him in the side. “Sir, he asked me how close he was to the runway and when I told him he said, ‘Goddamn shoulda made ’er.’”
The crowd laughed and cheered.
The captain let the noise subside. “I submit that Joe Flap did make it. He and all those like him made it by helping make us what and who we are.”
His voice seemed to catch on his words and he paused to regain his composure.
“Joe made it and each of you has made it. Most people don’t know what you do, but you know and that’s what matters. Just as Joe and his contemporaries paved the way for you, you will set the example for those to follow. We have more than one hundred years of tradition in the force, serving people, making sacrifices, getting the job done. Tonight we are all here to say good-bye to Joe Flap and to salute each other.”
Blue Wolf In Green Fire Page 39
