Bitch Creek

by Tapply, William

  Calhoun chatted with Amy Sousa for a few more minutes, but learned nothing else. So he thanked her and scratched his name and phone number on a scrap of paper.

  She looked at it. “Where’s this?”

  “Dublin.”

  “Wherever that is.” She frowned at the piece of paper, then looked up at him. “That other deputy, he gave me a business card.”

  “I ran out,” said Calhoun.

  “Well, that’s okay. I’ll sure call you if I come up with something. Maybe if you catch that old man, we can get paid for them two nights, huh?”

  “We’ll sure work on it, ma’am,” he said. He gave her a nod and turned for the door.

  “Keep me posted, mister,” she said. “You come by any time. Any time at all. I’m always here.”

  He hesitated, then looked back at her. “Good luck with your baby,” he said.

  Back in the truck, Calhoun blew out a long breath. “I don’t know what’s worse,” he told Ralph. “Not knowing anything about what’s happened in your life up to now, or having a clear picture of everything that’s going to happen to you for the rest of it.”

  Ralph was staring intently at a couple of gulls that were pecking at some trash alongside the pool. He apparently had no opinion on the subject.

  Calhoun started up the truck, pulled onto Route 1, and headed north. He crossed the long bridge that spanned a tidal river and turned off on a gravel road that curved back down to the river, where a dozen fishing boats were parked at an H-shaped dock and, out in the river itself, several moored sailboats were facing downriver into the flowing tide.

  A few picnic tables were scattered in front of a small, square, shingled shack near the water where, according to the sign, you could get fried clams, boiled lobsters, and cold beer. Alongside the paved boat ramp sat another somewhat larger shingled shack—no doubt the work of the same builder. Its sign read BLAINE’S CHARTERS, DEEP SEA FISHING, WHALE WATCHING, BAIT AND TACKLE.

  “Sit tight,” Calhoun told Ralph, who was peering out the side window, scanning the skies over the river for more gulls.

  He got out of the truck and went into the shop. It was cluttered and dirty and dimly lit, and it smelled vaguely of dead fish and wet seaweed.

  A middle-aged man with a bushy black beard sat behind the counter reading a newspaper. Without looking up, he said, “Bait’s out back. You git it yourself and pay for it here. All we got left is eels and sandworms.”

  “I need some information,” said Calhoun.

  The man lifted his eyes. “Mostly what we got is bait and tackle here.” He dropped his eyes to his newspaper. “See where the Sox lost another one, huh?”

  “Are you Mr. Blaine?”

  “Depends on who needs to know.”

  “Do you remember a man named Fred Green, came in maybe a week ago looking for a guide?”

  “Nope.”

  “White-haired guy in his late sixties, early seventies? Big ears. Southern accent.”

  Blaine turned a page. “Eels and sandworms,” he said. “That’s all we got today.” He continued to squint at his paper.

  Calhoun placed his elbows on the counter and leaned close to Blaine. “I’m talkin’ to you, sir,” he said.

  Blaine glanced up. “I heard you, pal. You’re botherin’ me. If you don’t want to buy somethin’, I’m busy, okay?”

  Calhoun reached across the counter, grabbed Blaine’s beard, and pulled him up from his chair. “I ain’t got time to fart around,” he said. “A friend of mine got killed and I’m in no mood. Understand me?”

  Blaine reached up and gripped Calhoun’s wrist. “Let go, man.”

  “I’d be happy to hurt you,” said Calhoun. He gave Blaine’s beard a sharp tug.

  “Okay, okay. Jesus. Whaddya want?”

  Calhoun released his grip on Blaine’s beard and patted his cheek. This was the second time in the past couple of days he’d bullied somebody. The other one was the bartender at Juniper’s restaurant. He wondered where in his training, or pre-lightning personality, that came from.

  “Sorry about that,” he said to the bearded guy. “I’m pretty upset, my friend getting killed and all. I just need to know, did you talk to a guy named Fred Green about a fishing guide? It would’ve been on Monday, a week ago today.”

  Blaine sank back into his chair and stroked his chin. “I don’t know that name”—he glanced up at Calhoun, who was staring hard at him—“but maybe I remember an old guy with funny ears and a southern accent.”

  “What’d he want?”

  “He was lookin’ for a guide. Told him we did charters, but that ain’t what he was after. He wanted someone to help him find some damn pond. Near as I could figure, it was down around Sebago somewhere. I told him pond fishin’ ain’t worth spit these days, but he seemed to know exactly what he wanted. So I told him he better find someone else. I even give him a recommendation.”

  “Who did you recommend?”

  “Hippie college kid down in Portland. Works out of a shop down there. Kid name of Lyle McMahan.” Blaine peered up at Calhoun. “Maybe you know Lyle?”

  Calhoun nodded. “Might’ve heard of him.”

  “That boy knows them woods down there better’n anybody,” said Blaine. “There’s another guy, supposed to be pretty good, works in the same shop. Not as good as McMahan, I hear. Don’t know him personal. Calhoun’s his name.”

  “Did you mention this Calhoun to the old guy, too?”

  “Ayuh. Told him either one’d prob’ly suit him.” He gazed up at the ceiling for a minute. “Funny thing,” he said. “That old fella, he didn’t seem much interested in fishin’.”

  “How so?” said Calhoun.

  “Well, I asked him what he was lookin’ for, and he kinda shrugged, and when I mentioned brook trout, he got this look on his face, like that was some kind of brilliant idea I had, and he goes, Yep, that’s what he’s after, all right. Brookies.”

  “And did Mr. Green indicate he was going to look up Lyle?”

  “Oh, sure. I give him the address of the shop down there. Kate’s Bait and Tackle.” A grin glinted from inside Blaine’s beard. “If you ain’t done it before, worth droppin’ in, just to catch a look at Kate, if you know what I mean.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-THREE

  THE IMAGE OF BLAINE’S LEERING BEARDED FACE stayed with Calhoun as he drove back down Route 1 to Portland. It made him want to drive directly to the shop, enfold Kate in a big hug, and tell her the hell with all of it, he just wanted to be with her.

  What had gotten into him, yanking on the man’s beard? He didn’t know where that sudden, angry aggressiveness had come from. It made him realize that he was still learning things about himself. He didn’t like everything he was finding out.

  On the other hand, it worked. The man had talked. Now it seemed clear that Fred Green had come to Maine specifically to find the millpond in Keatsboro. He’d known exactly what he was looking for, but he needed someone to help him find it. He hadn’t actually cared about the fishing.

  If Calhoun had it figured right, Mr. Green had come to Maine to dig up something beside the Potters’ old cellar hole on the hilltop in the woods. It must’ve been something important and valuable—gold, if Calhoun wasn’t mistaken. Green had needed a guide to find it, but he felt he couldn’t leave the guide alive afterward. So he’d killed Lyle.

  And when Calhoun had persisted in snooping around, Mr. Green came in the night to kill him, too.

  Calhoun had been wracking his poor excuse for a brain, trying to think of a jeweler he knew and trusted. The closest he could come up with was Stanley Karp, who owned a pawnshop on Route 9 in the Stroudwater section of Portland. Stanley was an unskilled but enthusiastic fly fisherman whom Calhoun had guided a few times.

  Calhoun had begun by calling him “Mr. Karp.” It was his rule to address all clients his age or older formally unless they instructed him otherwise, although he didn’t remember ever warming to any of the few who didn’t quickly corre
ct him.

  Mr. Karp had turned to him and said, “For goodness’ sake, call me Stanley. How would you like to be called some kind of ugly fish?”

  He had insisted on calling Calhoun “Stonewall.”

  When Calhoun had asked him how much fly fishing he’d done, Stanley had grinned and said, “You’d probably call me an aspiring novice.”

  It was a little after one in the afternoon when he pulled up in front of Stanley Karp’s little shop. When he went inside, Stanley plunked his elbows on the glass-topped counter, leaned forward, arched his eyebrows, and said. “Well, bless my soul, if it isn’t Stonewall Jackson Calhoun. I hope you have not come here to transact actual business with me. My clients, unlike yours, are desperate, pitiable souls, for which reason I do not like my friends to become my clients, and I never allow my clients to become my friends.”

  Calhoun grinned, went over to him, and held out his hand, which Stanley engulfed in both of his. “Actually, I need your expertise, Stanley,” he said. “I’ve got something here I can’t identify.”

  Stanley Karp was a tall, gaunt, absolutely bald man, with a long, beaked nose, pendulous ears, bushy gray eyebrows, and a wide, lopsided smile. He knew very little about fly fishing, but he knew everything about fly-fishing equipment. “You would be astounded,” he’d told Calhoun the first day they fished together, “at the wonderful stuff people find in their cellars and attics and garages and closets. They come in here with armloads of bamboo fly rods, and they ask me if I’ll give them anything at all for this old junk. They bring me gorgeous Paynes and Leonards, even an occasional Garrison or Gillum, genuine treasures, and when I tell them what they’re worth, Stonewall, they laugh at me.”

  Under the glass counter where Stanley was leaning lay jumbles of gold watches, pearl necklaces, diamond rings. Behind him in a locked rack stood a row of shotguns and rifles. The bookshelves along the walls were jammed with old-looking, leather-bound volumes, and there were tables piled with lamps and vases and crockery, computers and cameras and television sets, bowling balls and ice skates and, yes, fishing equipment.

  Every item, Calhoun imagined, told a sad story.

  Stanley Karp swept his hand around the shop. “Whatever you have,” he said to Calhoun, “I assure you, I’ve already got ten of them. Here, let’s have a look.”

  Calhoun fished into his pocket and came out with the plastic bag that held the lump of gold he’d found in the ground beside the cellar hole. He put it on the counter. “It looks like a piece of something,” he said, “not the whole thing. Something that broke. I’m wondering what it was. It’s gold, isn’t it?”

  Stanley held the bag up to the light and squinted at it. “Hmm,” he mumbled. He opened the bag, reached in with a tweezers, and took out the little hunk of gold. Then he twisted a jeweler’s loupe into his right eye and peered at it intently. “Huh,” he said. “It’s gold, all right.”

  “Well?” said Calhoun.

  Stanley was rotating the tweezers, looking at the gold lump from all sides. “Interesting,” he murmured. He dropped it back into the bag, removed the loupe from his eye, and looked up at Calhoun. “Have you been robbing graves, my friend?”

  Calhoun thought of that foot sticking out of the ground, and he thought of Sam Potter, who’d died up there in the fire almost sixty years ago. He shook his head. “I found that in the dirt,” he said. “But I don’t think it was anybody’s grave. Why?”

  “I could be wrong,” said Stanley, “but I think you’ve got yourself somebody’s gold tooth here.”

  “A tooth?”

  “Not a whole tooth, of course. A gold crown. Take a look.”

  Calhoun plucked it from the bag with Stanley’s tweezers and peered at it through the loupe. It did indeed look like a piece of tooth, although if Stanley hadn’t said it, Calhoun probably wouldn’t have figured it out. The top was flat and irregular like a molar, and the bottom had sharp, jagged edges, as if it had broken off.

  Calhoun dropped it into the bag, sealed it, and stuffed it back into his pocket. “Thanks, Stanley,” he said. “I owe you.”

  “I suppose it would be impolitic to ask why you are carrying somebody’s gold tooth in your pocket.”

  Calhoun shook his head. “I wish I knew myself,” he said.

  Kate’s Bait and Tackle was less than a mile from Stanley Karp’s pawnshop. Calhoun was tempted to drop in. He’d like to talk to Kate about his conversations with Amy Sousa and Blaine up in Craigville, and maybe he’d show her the gold tooth he’d dug up from beside the cellar hole in Keatsboro. He’d tell her that he’d seen Stanley Karp. Kate liked Stanley, referred to him as “that sweet man.” She’d have to smile when he mentioned Stanley.

  He’d ask her to speculate with him, help him invent scenarios, and maybe he’d tell her about how Ralph had found that foot the other night, but how when he’d gone back there with the sheriff, it wasn’t there, so he guessed it wasn’t real.

  But it had been Calhoun’s idea that they stay clear of each other until it was all over with. Fred Green was trying to shoot him. He didn’t want Kate involved.

  So he headed west and drove home.

  About the time he pulled into his driveway, he realized that he was exhausted. He’d hardly slept for the past couple of nights, and now his eyes burned and his head ached and his stomach churned.

  He bounced up the rutted driveway, and when he pulled up in front of the house, he sat there in his truck for a minute, looking around.

  Nothing looked different.

  He slid his Remington out from behind the seat, took the box of shotgun shells from the glove compartment, and loaded up. Double-ought buckshot this time, serious ammunition that could kill a man at sixty yards—the hell with that birdshot that wouldn’t even break the skin. Then he and Ralph went inside. Nothing looked different inside, either.

  It was a hot summer afternoon, but inside, with the roof shaded by the pines and a breeze sifting through the screens, it was cool and dim.

  He found the portable phone, sat at the kitchen table, and called Sheriff Dickman. He told the woman who answered that it was important, and when he gave her his name, she put him through.

  “What’s up, Stoney?” said Dickman.

  “I’ve got some information for you,” said Calhoun. “But you’ve got to promise me something first.”

  “Oh?”

  “There’s something I want to take care of by myself. Promise you won’t interfere with that.”

  “How can I promise that if you don’t tell me what it is?”

  “I’ll tell you after you promise,” said Calhoun.

  “And if I don’t, you’ll hang up, right?”

  “You got it.”

  He heard the sheriff blow an exasperated breath. “Okay, Stoney. We’ll do it your way.”

  “You promise?”

  “Sure.”

  So Calhoun told him how somebody—Fred Green, he assumed—had come in the night and had taken a couple of potshots at him with a .22. He also summarized his interview with Amy Sousa up in Craigville and his conversation with Blaine. He told him that Stanley Karp had identified the gold nugget as part of a tooth.

  The sheriff listened without interrupting, and when Calhoun finished, he said, “I’ll send a deputy up there to protect you, Stoney.”

  “No,” said Calhoun. “I can protect myself. I want to handle this. That’s your promise. That you’ll let me take care of it. The sonofabitch shot Lyle, and now he’s coming around here, Sheriff. Do you see?”

  “I see that you are pigheaded and stupid, my friend.”

  “You promised.”

  Dickman sighed. “So I did.” He chuckled. “I assume it would not be breaking any promise if we happen to find the man and take him into custody before he manages to shoot you dead.”

  “No,” said Calhoun, “that would be okay. I wouldn’t mind that at all.”

  “I’ll get the word around that he’s armed and dangerous. Every state cop and sheriff’s department
in Maine will get that word.”

  “Okay,” said Calhoun. “Good.”

  “Stoney?”

  “Yeah?”

  The sheriff cleared his throat. “Nothing. I just hope to hell you know what you’re doing.”

  “Actually,” said Calhoun, “it’s funny, but I do. I am pretty confident that I know exactly what I’m doing.”

  After he hung up with the sheriff, Calhoun went to the bedroom and leaned the shotgun against the wall beside the bed. He picked up the alarm clock from the bedside table. It was a few minutes after three in the afternoon. He wound up the clock and set the alarm to go off at six, to give him time to shower and have a cup of coffee before he had to meet Millie. Then he shucked off all his clothes, threw back the covers, lay down, and pulled the sheet over him. The pillow smelled like Kate.

  Ralph was sitting on the floor beside him with his ears cocked, staring at him, wondering what in hell he was doing, going to bed in the middle of the day.

  “We’re probably going to be up all night,” Calhoun explained to Ralph, “so I need to grab a nap. You be sure to bark if you hear anything. This is your watch. I’ll take over in three hours.”

  Then he rolled onto his belly and went to sleep.

  The alarm clock in his head went off before the one beside the bed, as it always did. It interrupted a jumbled dream in which Calhoun seemed to be running through a swamp. Children who shouted in some foreign language were chasing him and shooting at him, but in the dream that wasn’t what frightened him. He was naked in the dream, and every step he took rubbed him against big scythe-shaped leaves with sharp, jagged edges that sliced his skin. He ran awkwardly with his scrotum cupped in both hands and his feet sinking into the mucky earth while bullets rattled in the canopy of dense foliage overhead and high-pitched children’s voices echoed in the humid swamp. He was sweaty and out of breath. His legs and chest and arms were bleeding. Finally he flopped to the ground and slid onto the wet black earth under a bush with leaves as big as elephant ears, and there, lying on her back under that bush, was a woman, also naked, with her arms open to him, smiling and beckoning.