Buckular Dystrophy

by Joseph Heywood

  They began to make their way from the gas station east to where the wolf-hater properties lay at the intersections of Delta, Marquette, and Menominee Counties.

  Service had just called into central dispatch and to Station Twenty when he got a cell phone call. He took the phone from its visor case and flipped it open. “Grady, Linsenman. Are you in service yet?”

  “Just.”

  “Where you at?”

  Service gave his friend an approximate location. “Why?”

  “We’ve got something we think you ought to have a look at. I’ll explain when you get here.” Linsenman gave him an address in extreme southern Marquette County, coincidentally in the same area they were heading toward, though he didn’t know the actual place. He wrote the address in his notebook and figured he would recognize it when he saw it. There were not many places in U.P. counties he didn’t know, at least by sight or reputation.

  “There a name there?”

  “Buckshow, first name of Jesper.”

  “No mood for deer season jokes,” Service said, sniggering.

  “It’s not a joke, Grady. The name really is Buckshow, and I don’t think you’ll be grinning when you get here.”

  “Guess where we’re going?” he asked his partner.

  “Ain’t no mood for puzzles, Sonny. Youse drivin’, I jes lookin’ outten window, eh. Ain’t had nuff coffee yet. What dat call ’bout?”

  “Linsenman has something he thinks we ought to see.”

  “Din’t hear youse tell ’im I’m witchyouse.”

  “I’d rather he get the full effect when you step out of the truck.”

  “Why dat boy so grumpy roun’ me?”

  “He thinks you’re the devil incarnate. You have that effect on a lot of lawmen.”

  “Not youse.”

  “Once somebody shoots you, the relationship changes.”

  “Was sort of accident,” Allerdyce said wearily.

  “You know and I know, but most cops are not so sure.”

  “Dat ’urts my feelin’s,” Allerdyce said, and added in the next breath, “Sure could use us some fresh bakery wit’ dis coffee.”

  All U.P. sweet rolls and doughnuts were lumped under the phrase “fresh bakery” and separated into two classes, holes and no holes. Grady Service loved this small wrinkle in local life. “No stop-and-robs down in this neighborhood. A good host would have made some fresh doughnuts.”

  Allerdyce grimaced. “I don’t do no woman’s works.”

  Service said, “Maybe Weasel will have bakery.”

  “Don’t t’ink he given me da sweat offen his nutsack, dat one.”

  “One can always hope.” The old man’s way of relating to the world escaped all known classifications.

  “I ain’t inna hope business. Dat way t’inkin’ got no teeths. Me, I like pick where I go and steer my own way.”

  “You’re not steering today.”

  “Youse is partner and youse steering, same t’ing iffin I do, eh.”

  Service wondered what Linsenman had for them. He and his partner had talked no more than fifteen minutes last night before sacking out. The old man had shown him on a map how he charted large animals and, by writing down dates, how over time he was able to roughly approximate travel patterns and timing. This had predictive value, which let him pop big bucks others only saw. “Never let me down, dis way din’t,” the old violator had concluded.

  • • •

  Linsenman had a smug look on his face, but it changed quickly to near-panic when he saw Allerdyce.

  “What the . . . ?” was all he could manage.

  “My partner for the season.”

  Linsenman scrunched his face. “Part of some wacky new parole program?”

  “I invited him.”

  “Doesn’t your department require an annual mental health check?”

  “Not that I’ve heard.”

  “It should,” Linsenman said.

  “Why the heck are we here?”

  “We got a complaint from Harry Pattinson. One of his nephews had his new pop-up blind stolen. Pattinson says this has happened before, but this time the nephew tracked a four-wheeler back to this house and there sits the stolen blind in the side yard.

  “Jesper Buckshow, yes? Never heard of him. Is he here?”

  “No, we just transported him to jail. We went to Pattinson’s last night, looked at the scene, and followed the tracks to here, just as the nephew did. We came here first thing this morning, and when Buckshow eventually opened his front door, a wave of dope smoke rolled out so thick it will have hunters high for a two-mile radius. Geez, Grady, that shit gave me and my boys a buzz, which reminds me, you guys bring bakery?”

  Service said, “We were banking on you having some.”

  “We did, but we got so damn hungry here we ate all the bakery and our lunches. Why am I so hungry?”

  “One of life’s small mysteries. You don’t have a drug test scheduled for today or tomorrow, do you?”

  “No, why?”

  “It’s gonna take your body several days to shed the secondhand dope.”

  “We should charge this asshole with tainting officers.”

  “I don’t remember a criminal code for that.”

  “Should be one.”

  “Your mind is drifting off course.”

  “Tell me about it,” Linsenman said. “I thought the family dog here was a wolf!”

  “What family dog?”

  “Biggest, loudest goddamn German shepherd I’ve ever seen, and it’s trained to put up a big-time defense.”

  “This is all fine and dandy, and entertaining and interesting and all that junk, but why are we here?”

  Linsenman grinned sheepishly. “Oh, yah, almos’ forgot.”

  “So Buckshow opens the door, got a cane in each hand. The smoke rolls out and we say, ‘Are you smoking dope in there, sir?’”

  “He goes, ‘Nope, and if I was, it ain’t none of your fucking business.’”

  “We ask him if we can we come in. He says, ‘You may not. This is my castle.’”

  “I tell him, ‘We don’t care about your castle; we’re here to talk about your neighbor’s hunting blind.’”

  “What’s he say to that? ‘I don’t hunt. I’m disabled. Go the fuck away.’”

  “Sir, we followed four-wheeler tracks from the complainant’s property. There’s no doubt.”

  “‘That don’t prove shit,’ Buckshow says.”

  “Sir, the blind is sitting in your side yard.”

  “‘Can’t be,’ he says.”

  “But it is. Step outside and look.”

  “He tells us he can’t do that because of his medical problems. ‘Why you think I’ve got these canes?’”

  “I tell him we’re sorry for his condition, but we have to deal with the stolen blind. And he says, ‘You should be sorry. This goddamn country makes no accommodations for special needs.’”

  Service listened, let his friend talk, knowing he was still a little bit jacked on dope smoke. It was kind of fun, the non-talker suddenly turned garrulous storyteller.

  Linsenman continued. “I said, ‘Mr. Buckshow, we can smell dope, we have a complaint, we have evidence, and we have enough probable cause to load a small trailer. Please let us in now.’”

  “Then he wants to know if we have a warrant. I tell him, no, but we can have one in half an hour, so stop acting the asshole, let us in, and let’s be civilized and talk about all this.”

  “Naturally, he insists on his rights and demands that we call his lawyer. ‘For what?’ I asked him.”

  “‘I have a severe, chronic medical condition that requires marijuana for palliative relief. I am under a doctor’s orders and prescription.’”

  “I thought you weren’t smoking.”

  “Says the man, ‘I ain’t.’”

  “What’s your doctor’s name?”

  “‘He’s not local,’” Buckshow says.”

  “How not local?”

&nbs
p; “‘Pakistan.’”

  “I told him, ‘We’ll talk about the dope in a minute, but first we need to talk about the stolen property.’ The dog was behind him and going apeshit the whole time, so I told him to secure the damn animal so neither it nor any of us got hurt. Bozo said, ‘Deano? He wouldn’t hurt a soul.’ That’s when we pushed him out of the way and grabbed the mutt. Understand, dear old Deano has a head the size of a donkey and teeth like a tiger, and he’s snarling and growling and drooling yellow goop all over the damn floor! Long story short, we finally got the dog secured in a bathroom and nobody got bit, and Buckshow called his lawyer. But before the lawyer got here, we found six hidden dope grows and almost two hundred plants.”

  “And strictly for personal use?” Service said. “Just a wild guess.”

  “There it is,” Linsenman said, “quote, unquote.”

  “What about the blind?”

  “Swears he’s never seen it before, and it’s in part of the yard he can’t really see unless he goes outside, which he can’t easily do because of his alleged but unspecified disability.”

  “Why are we here? You don’t need us for stolen goods.”

  Linsenman’s eyes narrowed. “Oh, yeah, come take a look.”

  Every room in the house, including the garage, was filled with deer antlers in various mount styles. Some of the antlers had tags with names that were not Buckshow’s. Six of the tags belonged to Sally Palovar, which stopped Service in his tracks. “Who’s this?” he asked the county sergeant.

  “Exactly who you think she is: Magistrate Kennard Dentso’s assistant is Buckshow’s wife. They don’t share a married name.”

  Service made a note of this then went around and very quickly counted more than eighty deer skulls and antlers, four full turkey fans, and two wolf pelts; with that he stopped. “When’s Buckshow getting kicked?” he asked Linsenman.

  “Not tonight. He’s going to be in jail at least until tomorrow morning; with dope charges, maybe longer.”

  “Where’s his wife?”

  “She’d already left for work when we got here.”

  “Has anybody informed her that hubby’s headed to the can?”

  “Not unless Buckshow or his lawyer called her.”

  Service knew that the way information traveled informally up here, she’d know pretty quickly.

  He left Limpy at the truck and made one quick circuit around the house and then one through the house, room to room, touching nothing. The place was a massive mess of evidence, and he was determined not to blow the case with hurried, sloppy work. The round count was now more than a hundred antler mounts. This deal was going to require the cavalry and the methodical, deliberate, fully thought-out evidence-collecting process the department’s detectives used more than field officers.

  His first call was to Sergeant Wooten, asking him to meet ASAP at the Roof in Marquette.

  Call two was to Lieutenant Livorno, to give him a quick head’s up. A third call went to a judge, deliberately avoiding the magistrate and his assistant for obvious reasons. The final call went to Dave Dejinois, the Wildlife Protection Unit’s newly promoted lieutenant.

  The case would be complicated somewhat by the marijuana. The legislature had last year passed a law that “sort of” legalized dope for qualified patients, but the law did not address how the stuff would be legally distributed or sold. The whole arena around legalized medical use was unsettled and in legal limbo, which put cops at a bit of a disadvantage in enforcing the law. Predictably, almost all cops were hearing the defense of legal medical marijuana in nearly all their stops with toking suspects. He wished lawmakers in Lansing would legalize the whole damn thing, soak the sellers with big taxes, and be done with filling jail cells with minor dope players and idiots. Meanwhile, he was determined to handle this case by the book: Create a team, map out what needed to be done, and write a seamless, thorough, airtight affidavit for a search warrant. His time as a detective was welcome now and would pay off. The Wildlife Resources Protection Unit had made sure he was thoroughly trained, and all the detectives were prickly about getting warrants exactly right. Buckshow would not get back here before late tomorrow afternoon. He checked his watch. They had just over twenty-four hours to prep, obtain warrants, search, and seize evidence. It was going to be a long night.

  He talked to his partner. “We’re going to have to come back here. You won’t be able to go in with us, but I want you to scour the property and see what you can see. If you find something you think we need to know about, you tell one of the outside officers and they’ll come and tell me.”

  “What’s dis jamoke done?” Allerdyce asked.

  “I found three inside shooting rooms with ports, connected to outside lights and visible bait piles, and more skulls, antlers, and full neck mounts than I can count alone. I stopped counting at over a hundred.”

  “Big deer?”

  “No; it’s weird. They’re all sizes, and a lot of them have the tags of other people. He’s even got some doe skulls mounted. There’s not one item with his name.”

  “What dis guy’s name is?”

  “Jesper Buckshow; you know him?”

  Allerdyce shook his head. “Stupid name like dat, I’d ’member.”

  Service made a point to look at the blind. According to Linsenman, the name on it belonged to Harry Pattinson’s nephew. He decided to call the camp owner and confirm this.

  “Harry, Grady Service. Do you know Jesper Buckshow?”

  “Don’t know him real well, but I’ve met him, and that’s for damn sure where my nephew’s stolen blind ended up. I heard the Buckshow’s got ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease, something like that, which limits his mobility. You think the thieves dropped the blind in his yard to point the finger at him?”

  Interesting notion. Why would someone do that? “I haven’t really thought about it yet. You should ask the deps that question.”

  “Why’re you calling me?”

  “To find out if you know Buckshow.”

  “Well, it ain’t politically correct, and maybe it’s his damn wheelchair. I don’t really know the man, but excuse me if I say he comes off as one very creepy fuck, and I’m sorry to say that about a guy with a terrible disease like he has.”

  Service hung up and called Linsenman. “Did you see Buckshow in a wheelchair?”

  “Negative, just with canes, which I thought he didn’t use all that much, now that you mention it. There’s a wheelchair downstairs somewhere, under the cellar stairs, I think. It don’t look much used.”

  Why was Pattinson talking about the wheelchair? What was it Sally Palovar had asked him? He shook his head. Too damn cobwebby. How does she fit into this crap? Did the thief abandon the pop-up blind, or had it been put deliberately in the yard, and, if so, why? And how exactly did it end up in the only blind spot Buckshow had from inside the house? You could see it from the road but not from inside. Coincidence? He did not believe in such things.

  “We grab bakery on way Marquette?” Allerdyce asked meekly.

  “Your need ranks right up there with starving kids in Africa.”

  “Youse’s bein’ what da codge boys call iron tonic, eh?”

  “You nailed me.”

  Service’s mind was occupied with other things. Goddamn dope and dopers. He’d once found a man in his tree stand by smelling dope curling to him a hundred yards away.

  He had announced himself to the hunter, who whined, “Dude, don’t go bustin’ my happy. I’m up here talkin’ to God.”

  “God, really?”

  “Yah, dude; the old Hebrooms, those motherfuckers called it kaneh bosm, the tree of life.”

  “I thought that meant roots in hell. Where’s your stash, dude?”

  “You can talk Hebroom?”

  “No, I made it up, foghead. You can’t hunt and handle a firearm when you’re high.”

  “But dude, I am so mellow, and mellow’s like safe, sayin’?”

  “Look at that buck,” Service yelled.


  The hunter neither moved nor reacted. “Wha?”

  “Get out of the damn tree, and do it carefully.”

  “Got ask God ’cause I ain’t making ’is one happen all by my lonesome, sayin’?”

  “I’ll help you.”

  “Only God can lift men up.”

  “You’re only half right, dude; give me your hand.”

  Dope and deer hunters: disgusting.

  CHAPTER 38

  Marquette

  TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 24

  The sight of the Roof tended to affect new officers and first-time visitors the same way. The architect had slapped a Chinese pagoda roof over the heads of DNR personnel. The public was puzzled, those under the roof embarrassed, and all officers pissed off every time they had to assemble in the peculiar building. Despite facing Lake Superior and the wind, the place was a total loser by feng shui standards.

  Slick Wooten was first to arrive. “What did you get?” he asked as he walked in.

  Service laid out the details quickly, seamlessly, efficiently.

  “What do you want me to do?” the young sergeant asked.

  “Help assemble a team to plan this deal: Superman, Simon, Sheena, Angie Paul, Volstaad.”

  “Volstaad and Paul are green.”

  “We were all green when we started. They’ve got good minds and good eyes.” Service had partnered several times with the young officers and found them good company, serious about their work, and consistent. Three or four different times, Volstaad had read angles on situations Service had missed on the first sweep. The young officer had unique insights and new ways of looking at things.

  “What about Duckboat?” the sergeant asked.

  “No, the Mosquito needs him where he is.”

  Wooten smirked. “Since you got back, the Mosquito’s been the most boring spot in the district.”

  Wasn’t the whole point of police work to pacify places? “We’re not here to debate trivia, Sarge. We have a case but not a lot of time. We need to stay focused. Get our team together.”