by Paul Doiron
The road to Kathy’s house zigzagged up the side of the ridge through the blueberry barrens. Tumbled stone walls ran along the edges of the asphalt. I tried not to crash into them as I cornered the Bronco.
As I turned into the driveway, I leaned forward against the shoulder belt and saw the lights of the farmhouse on the hillside above me. Seeing the homey glow made me relax for a few seconds. There was something reassuring about the sight of the illuminated windows. Then I realized that one of the bright shapes I was looking at was a wide-open door.
I eased my foot off the gas pedal. The truck slowed to a crawl as I approached Kathy’s dooryard. The high beams searched ahead of me into the gathering darkness.
There was a black shape lying on the flattened grass where I had parked my vehicle a few minutes earlier. At first, I thought it was a bunched-up blanket or discarded coat. I braked hard as the headlights brought the object into view.
It was Pluto. He was lying in a pool of blood.
I shoved the shift into park with my right hand and reached for the door handle with my left. That was when the windshield exploded.
Everything happened in an instant. Broken glass filled the air. I felt the airborne shards tear at the side of my face and neck. Simultaneously, I heard the crash of the shattering windshield and the bang of a gun. Reflexively, I ducked down behind the steering wheel and dash.
My cheekbone stung. I clapped a hand to the side of my face, and it came away red with blood and glistening with powdered glass. The entire passenger side of the Bronco was coated with blue shards. The windshield was entirely gone except for a webbed section directly in front of me.
The second blast tore the rest of the windshield away.
This time I heard the distinctive pinging of shotgun pellets. Atomized glass rained down on my right arm. I had pulled the flap of my raincoat over my head to protect myself, the way a frightened child hides under a blanket during a thunderstorm.
My hair was matted and wet. Blood was pooling inside my ear and running into the corner of my eye. I hurled my body across the passenger seat, nearly impaling myself on the gearshift. I pawed at the glove compartment before realizing it was locked and that I needed to turn off the engine and remove the keys. I managed to drop the keys on the floor twice before I got the glove compartment open and saw my newly cleaned pistol inside.
My slick hand closed around the textured grip of the Walther. It was a .380. In the gravel pit where I practiced shooting, I could put all seven bullets in a tight cluster from a distance of fifteen yards. Beyond that, my aim got iffy. I pulled back the slide and chambered a round.
I stared at the heavy little pistol in my hand, trying to feel confident about it, telling myself that at least the Walther gave me a chance, while I waited for the next blast to come.
Rolling onto my side and looking up at the ceiling, I tried to make sense of the wreckage inside the vehicle. The first blast had angled toward the right side of the vehicle before the shooter had corrected his aim and taken out the rest of the windshield. The driver’s side window was also shattered. My quick guess was that the shots had been fired from that direction: up the hill and to my left.
I managed to get my entire body on the right side of the vehicle, then popped the handle on the passenger door. Even before it had fully swung open, I lunged through the crack and dropped hard to the wet grass. I landed flat on my chest and stomach, a belly flop in the mud.
I wriggled away toward the rear of the Bronco, hoping that my estimate of the sniper’s location was correct and that I wasn’t completely exposed now. When I’d crawled around to the rear of the truck, I pushed myself up onto my knees and then my heels, making myself as small a target as possible.
Blood was oozing between my skin and my shirt collar. With my free hand, I rubbed my right eye and found that I could see better. The pain in my head and face was sharp and stinging. The phrase “death by a thousand cuts” came to my mind, but if I died, it wasn’t going to be from these small wounds. It was going to be because the shooter got the drop on me for real and fired a load of heavy shot into my heart and lungs.
Where was Kathy? She had heard Pluto baying and had gone outside to see what had gotten him riled up. The front door was standing open.
I glanced around the yard, looking for better cover. There was an open stretch of unmowed grass and then a stone wall and a cluster of sugar maples. I hated to waste a bullet, but I didn’t see much of a choice.
I sprang to my feet, extended my arms across the cold, wet roof of the Bronco, and squeezed off a shot in the direction of the pine grove. I didn’t expect to hit anyone. In fact, I aimed at a tree, in the unlikely event that Kathy herself was up there, playing cat and mouse with our assailant. If I was lucky, the shot would catch the sniper off guard and the unexpected muzzle flash would cause him to duck behind whatever he was using for cover.
A second after I’d pulled the trigger, I took off across the yard. The sniper wasn’t intimidated by my return fire, because he let loose with another blast from the shotgun. I must have been correct about his position—somewhere between the house and the pines—because he didn’t have a clear line on me. I heard the blast and thought I felt the pellets ruffling the air behind my head, but the sensation might have been something I imagined.
I hurdled over the stone wall without breaking my neck and dived down behind the roots of the nearest maple. I had good cover here, and the sniper knew it. He also knew that I was armed. The question was, What would he choose to do with this knowledge? Would he try to reposition himself to take me down from a different angle—he obviously had some sort of night-vision scope—or would he cut and run, figuring that one of Kathy’s neighbors would have already called the cops?
The nearest house was probably half a mile away, but the sound of gunshots travels a long distance, and the people at the bottom of the hill would’ve heard them. A single shot after dark would have been cause for concern, but this was a full-on firefight.
I couldn’t wait for help, not knowing where Kathy was. I looked to my left for the next place where I could take cover and spotted Kathy’s bronze Nissan, which was parked in front of the old hay barn. Filling my lungs with air again, I jumped to my feet and sprinted as fast as I could toward the humpbacked SUV. As I ran, I wondered if I would feel the shot that would kill me or if everything would go suddenly black and that would be the end of the picture.
When I found myself crouched against the damp metal of the Nissan, I experienced a feeling of surprise; I hadn’t expected to make it. The gunman hadn’t fired another shot. That meant he was probably on the move—but was he coming toward me or running away?
I decided to risk a peek at the dooryard. Light was spilling out onto the long grass from the front windows and open door. It reached as far as Pluto’s unmoving body. The dog had never had any particular affection for me, despite the hours we’d spent together, but he had rescued lost children and located the bodies of frozen Alzheimer’s sufferers so their relatives would have something to bury. The heroic animal had deserved a better end than this.
It was hard to see past the illuminated patch. I began, calculating if I could make it through the door without getting winged. That was when I noticed the dark liquid on the front steps. It didn’t look red. The tricky light made it appear more like spilled motor oil. But I knew that it was blood, and I knew that it belonged to Kathy.
Without another thought, I leaped out from behind the SUV, firing a random shot back toward the pine grove and the orchard beyond. I might even have yelled something. I went leaping up the front steps, taking them two at a time, leaving my boot prints in the streaked blood.
I found her lying facedown in the hallway in a spreading pool of blood. One of her arms was outstretched; the other was at her side. Her right knee was drawn up. The position of her body was that of a swimmer doing the crawl.
“Kathy?”
The sniper must have caught her as she stepped out the door and on
to the front steps. She had let Pluto outside to chase his raccoon. Then came the shot that ended the dog’s life. I could only imagine the horror she’d experienced in that moment, watching her life’s companion slaughtered before her eyes.
The second shot must have come soon after. As shocked as she was, Kathy’s muscle memory would have kicked in and sent her diving for cover. She had too much training and experience to have remained frozen and upright when a gun was going off nearby.
The shotgun blast had struck her in the torso as she was turning back toward the house. Her fleece vest was shredded in the back and bloodstained along the side.
“Kathy?”
I dropped to my knees beside her and turned her over as gently as I could. I was more terrified than I’d ever been in my life. Her face was an unnatural color: a gray that was almost the color of bone. Her eyes were closed and sunken deep into their sockets. Her lips were a bruised shade of blue.
The front of her vest and turtleneck, from her left lung down across the abdomen, had been ripped by the pellets, but it was hard for me to tell how bad the damage was because her entire torso was painted with blood. I pressed two slick fingers beneath her jawline but felt no pulse. I tried again with a wrist. I thought I could detect a faint flutter.
“Kathy?”
I pulled up her shirt and saw the horrible patterned wounds below her bra and rib cage. The pellets had driven threads from her clothing into the ragged holes. Blood was still pumping from them. Her heart was laboring to beat.
As I tore off my own shirt, the buttons went popping everywhere. I wadded the flannel into a ball and pressed it hard against the multiple wounds. My eyes lost focus as they flooded with tears. I felt the warmth of my friend’s blood soaking through the knees of my jeans.
To this day, I can’t remember hearing the siren. The wail of the approaching ambulance was drowned out by my strangled cries for help.
14
What I didn’t see in my rush down the hall was the cell phone lying a few feet from Kathy’s outstretched hand. What I didn’t hear was the voice of the 911 dispatcher, who was still on the line, repeating with practiced calmness that help was on the way.
How had Kathy even managed to key in those three numbers? While losing that much blood?
The deputy sheriff and the EMTs arrived within seconds of one another.
The cop, whose name was Skip Morrison, had been more than an acquaintance but less than a friend when I’d lived in the district; we’d gone out for beers a few times. He was a long-limbed guy who bounced around like a marionette on strings and had freckles that multiplied when he spent more than an hour in the sun.
Seeing the dead dog and the blood smeared like a slug’s trail leading into the house, Deputy Morrison radioed for backup, then ordered the paramedics to stay put while he scoped out the situation. He unholstered his service weapon and darted across the yard. He flattened himself against the peeling clapboards of the house and edged into position so that if he craned his long neck, he could peek inside the building.
He saw me shirtless and covered with blood, crouched over the prone body of Kathy Frost, whose house he knew this was. From the back, he couldn’t identify the half-naked man. Nor would he have recognized me beneath my shaggy hair and stubbled beard. It was unclear from his vantage point what I was doing to the motionless warden. In his report, he said he’d heard me sobbing.
Deputy Morrison identified himself as a police officer and shouted at me to stand clear. I have no memory of him doing so. Evidently, it took me quite a long time to respond. Not knowing whether I was the attacker, Morrison considered shooting me. He would have been justified if he had, given my gore-splattered appearance and refusal to comply with a direct order. For all he knew, I was a homicidal madman still at work snuffing out a human life.
But something stayed his hand. Deputy Morrison had been with the Knox County Sheriff’s Department for ten years, and he had been the first officer to respond to many horrific events: babies dropped to their deaths by drunken fathers, car crashes in which not one of the unbuckled teenagers packed inside the station wagon had survived, boyfriends standing like exhausted boxers over the women they had just beaten to death. He had seen violence in all its shapes and sizes. When he looked upon my gore-spattered body, he might have reasonably concluded that I was the assailant. Instead, he chose to interpret the uncertain evidence of his eyes and ears with caution and compassion. He heard my sobbing and decided that I was also a victim of whatever shocking thing had just happened.
Morrison let his arm fall by his side and padded carefully up the steps to avoid the blood.
“Sir?” he said in a soft voice. “Sir?”
I moved my head. One eye was squeezed shut to keep out the blood; the other was bright with tears.
“Sir, I am a police officer,” Morrison said. “There are paramedics out in the yard. We’re here to help you. You and Warden Frost. Will you let us do that?”
“She’s been shot,” I said, my voice scarcely more than a mumble. “She’s lost a lot of blood.”
“Is she still alive?”
“I think so.”
“Then let me call in the EMTs so they can take it from here.”
“I can’t take my hand away. I need to apply pressure to the wound.”
“OK,” Morrison said. “You keep doing that while I get the EMTs.”
He turned and waved in the paramedics, a man and a woman, dressed identically in white shirts, tan slacks, and blue jackets with medical-looking insignias on the front. They were both wearing latex gloves and carrying boxes with lifesaving equipment. The man gripped my arm by the wrist and replaced my hand—the one I was using to clamp the blood-soaked shirt to Kathy’s side—with his own.
“Sir?” the female EMT said. “Can you tell me your name?”
“Mike.”
“Were you shot, too, Mike?”
“Yeah. But I’m OK.”
“I don’t think you are,” she said.
* * *
There is a period when you awake from a particularly vivid dream and your mind is afloat between sleep and consciousness. You’re not sure what is real and what is imagined. You might have memories of the dream that are so detailed and persuasive, you can’t believe they were only mirages. In those same moments, the physical world that you are reentering can seem unsettling and out of focus, everything blurred around the edges, as if it is not to be fully trusted, either.
My experience of the hour after I discovered Kathy’s body was like that. I place greater faith in what Skip Morrison told me about that time period than I do in my own recollections.
The first trustworthy memory I have is of sitting alone in the back of the ambulance with a blanket wrapped around my naked and shivering shoulders, pressing an enormous cotton bandage against the side of my head because the EMTs were in the house, doing everything in their power to save the life of my former sergeant. I must have said something to Skip about the shots coming from the direction of the pine grove, because he was gone, too, standing guard outside the farmhouse until other units could respond.
The lights inside the ambulance were as bright as those on a movie set. I was sitting on a gray vinyl seat opposite the rectangular place where the stretcher would be secured for the ride to the hospital. But the stretcher was not there. The EMTs had rolled it off the vehicle and taken it into the house. The ambulance door was open, and the overhead lights were drawing swarms of moths and mayflies inside the vehicle.
One of them landed on my wet knee. It was an Ephemerella subvaria. I hadn’t realized that Hendricksons were hatching. Soon all the guides in Grand Lake Stream would be swapping out their fly boxes.
I was a fishing guide now, no longer a warden.
And Kathy had been shot. The idea was having trouble taking hold. I raised my free hand, red and tacky with blood, to my eyes, and still I couldn’t accept it as reality. Then I remembered the peculiar grayness of Kathy’s face, and I had to clench my
teeth together to keep from vomiting. I expected the EMTs to return at any moment and tell me that my friend was dead.
“Bowditch?”
A man in a warden’s uniform was standing in the lighted aura of the ambulance door. Even through my tears, I saw the major’s oak leaf on his collar. He was in his late fifties and in extraordinary physical condition: flat-stomached, back straight as a fence post, with oversize forearms like Popeye the Sailor Man.
“How are you doing?”
“Some glass hit me when the guy shot out my windshield. How is Kathy?”
“A LifeFlight helicopter is on the way.”
When the first responders call in a medevac team, you know everything’s gone to shit. As a warden, I’d been required to train each year in emergency medicine. I knew that the EMTs would be doing everything possible to stabilize Kathy for the chopper ride. They would be applying clotting agents and pressure bandages to her wounds. They would have jammed an IV needle into her arm to replace some of the blood that she had lost. A woman’s body Kathy’s size holds eight pints of blood. If she’d lost 40 percent of that—three to four pints—she would probably die. How much had I seen spilling across the floor?
“I want to see her.”
I stood up and then found my head going empty. The next thing I knew, I was sitting down again.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said the major.
When I’d first become a game warden, Timothy Malcomb had been my division lieutenant, but he’d recently received a promotion after the retirement of the service’s second in command. His former job was still vacant. I’d been hoping that Kathy might apply for it. If anyone deserved to be rewarded for years of dedication, it was my former sergeant. But now she lay at the gates of death.
“Someone needs to call her parents,” I said. “They live in New Sweden, in Aroostook County.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
Malcomb was famous, or infamous, for his lack of expression. In my time, I’d heard him compared to a Roman statue, a cigar store Indian, and a wax museum replica. But in this awful moment, his agony was engraved upon his face. Like me, he cared deeply for Kathy Frost, although his relation to her was different from mine. He had been her mentor, just as she had been mine.
