by Paul Doiron
The gunshots informed me that I’d gone too far, that I’d circled all the way around the pit and was now well above it. I slowed my pace to a steady walk and ducked my head. The last thing I needed was to find myself standing suddenly at the cliff’s edge, in full view of the armed men below.
Up ahead, I saw a curtain of light where the trees abruptly ended and the ground fell away into the pit. I dropped to my hands and knees again and began to crawl like an animal through the forest. The dangling binoculars kept snagging on branches, so I removed them and left them on a flat, mossy stone where I could find them again. I’d run too fast up the hill and my pulse was overloud in my ears. I worried that my labored breathing might give me away. I paused, closed my eyes, and focused on my breath, trying to bring down my heart rate.
I could hear voices, laughter. I flattened myself against the dead leaves and wriggled behind a small boulder that was perched atop the rim of the gravel pit. I kept my head down and listened. They were standing at the far end of the pit, maybe thirty yards away, and I had to concentrate hard to piece together the conversation.
“You like it?” said the man I recognized as Pelkey.
“Reminds me of the M4s we had in Afghanistan.” The voice was unmistakably Billy’s.
“Those Colts are sweet guns,” said Beam.
“Personally, I prefer these Noveskes,” said Pelkey. “Nothing against the Colt ARs, but the craftsmanship here is just fucking superior.”
“Three grand is pretty steep,” said Billy.
“But that includes your optics and your flash suppressor and your magazines.” Pelkey seemed to be the designated talker. “You can always build your own if you want to go low-budget-and we can help you with that, too. But my philosophy is, you get what you pay for. Now see, I can fire this Blackout all day without the barrel warping. You said you didn’t currently own a black gun?”
“No.”
“How’s the recoil?” Beam asked. “Pretty gentle, right?”
“Firing one of these puppies makes it hard to go back to a bolt-action,” said Pelkey. “My thirty-aught-six kicks like a fucking mule, and the two-forty-three ain’t much better.”
“What about twenty-twos?” said Billy. “You guys got any of those?”
“We’ve got everything, man,” said Beam.
“I thought we were here to discuss ARs.” Pelkey sounded suspicious. “On the phone you said you were looking for a black gun.”
“I am.”
“So why ask about twenty-twos? You want one of those, go to Wal-Mart. We took time away from work to come out here today.” Pelkey’s voice rose.
“I was just asking,” said Billy. “I’ve been thinking about getting a twenty-two Mag, too.”
Suddenly, I realized why my friend was here and what he was trying to do. He’s not smart enough to pull it off, I thought. They’re going to see right through him if he keeps asking questions.
Pelkey had already adopted a different, more brittle tone. “What are you planning to use a twenty-two for? Squirrels?”
“Coyotes. Maybe deer.”
“You need to be a wicked good shot to bring down a buck with a twenty-two,” said Pelkey. “Why not stick with a big-ass thirty-thirty?”
“I’m looking for something … quiet.”
“Check it out, Lew. Billy here is a poacher.”
“Takes one to know one.”
Shut up, Billy. Stop talking, I ordered silently.
Out of nowhere, a song started to play, a few bars of music. Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog.” A ringtone. “I gotta take this,” Pelkey said.
“So are you interested in this Noveske or not?” Beam asked with some heat. “Because we’re busy men.”
“Maybe you should take it easy,” Billy said.
“Maybe you should shut your mouth.”
As formidable as Billy Cronk could be, two against one is never good odds, especially when one of your adversaries is armed with an assault rifle. I reached my right hand down and pressed the thumb lock, releasing the SIG Sauer from its holster. There were fifteen.357 SIG cartridges in the magazine. I pulled the hammer back into single-action mode.
I stuck my head around the rock and spied down into the pit. Billy and Beam were standing toe-to-toe. I’d forgotten what a hulking guy Beam was and how white his platinum-blond hair looked in the sunlight. From this angle and distance, he resembled an albino ogre. The black AR rifle hung on a sling over his shoulder.
Billy was wearing the same camo jacket I’d seen him in the night before, probably the same clothes. Except that he’d strapped his KA-BAR knife to his thigh.
Pelkey had paced away a few steps to have a private conversation. He was dressed in his mill clothes: canvas shirt and pants, a Carhartt carpenter’s jacket. When he turned around again, there was a pistol in his hand. Aimed at Billy.
I rose to my knees, pointed the SIG into the pit using a two-handed grip, and shouted, “Police! Put the guns down!”
Then all hell broke loose.
Pelkey fired a shot, which caromed off the boulder beside me.
I squeezed off a round that must have clipped his jacket, because he raised his left arm as if to get a whiff of his deodorant.
Beam tried to swing the barrel of the Noveske up, but Billy grabbed the rail with both of his big hands and drove his forehead into the other man’s skull. It sounded like two rams knocking horns. As Beam fell over, he drove his boot into Billy’s groin. My friend let out a howl but somehow kept hold of the rifle, and both men fell hard to the ground.
My pistol had drifted off target from the force of the recoil. I brought the barrel down again, blew out half the air in my lungs, as I’d been trained to do, held my breath, and took aim squarely at Todd Pelkey’s center mass.
But he was a much faster and better shot than I was.
I saw the blur of his hand coming up and then felt a pain in my chest, as if someone had driven a sledgehammer into my ribs. I found myself staring up into an achingly blue sky that seemed to be getting farther and farther away, as if my body were dropping down a mine shaft. It’s true that you don’t hear the bullet that gets you.
Holy shit.
The wind had been driven from my lungs by the concussion.
I’ve been shot.
Barely able to breathe, I clutched at my chest and found a smoldering hole in my shirt, just inches from my heart. I held my fingers before my wobbly eyes, expecting to see blood, but there was none. The bullet had flattened itself against the ballistic vest I wore beneath my uniform. A little lead pancake fell loose as I rolled onto my side. I tried to gulp down air, but expanding my chest only made my ribs ache.
Through the pain, I heard a shot fired. Then another.
Billy.
Gasping, I found the SIG where I had dropped it and fired a wild shot into the air. I wanted them to know I was still alive, still a danger to them. I wanted to give Billy half a chance if he wasn’t already dead.
Each breath I took burned my insides, as if I were inhaling air from a blast furnace. I rolled toward the edge of the pit again and tried to see down to the gravel floor. My vision was blurred. I could make out two dark shapes thrashing about: Beam and Billy. I rubbed my eyes frantically with the back of my hand, trying to clear them. I blinked and blinked again. The AR lay in the dirt about ten feet from where the men were wrestling with each other. Billy was trying to wrap his arms and legs around his opponent’s neck and pelvis. Beam was gnawing on my friend’s forearm while his bent fingers searched desperately behind him for an eye to gouge out.
Pelkey had disappeared.
I fired a shot into the gravel near the feet of the struggling men, hoping it would cause them to stop, but they just kept rolling around.
Beam’s hand found a rock. He drove it against Billy’s forehead again and again. Even from this distance, I could see the blood. To protect himself, my friend was forced to loosen his grip, and the other man squirmed free. Beam spun around and tried to drive the rock into Billy’s
nose in an uppercut motion. If he had connected, he would have sent splinters of bone into Billy’s brain. But Billy caught his opponent’s wrist with one hand and delivered a jab to the jaw that snapped Beam’s head around.
Where was Pelkey? I scanned the far end of the pit, but there was no sign of him. I hoped to hell he had run off.
I brought my left hand up to my aching ribs, but the slightest pressure caused white-hot needles to jab into my heart. I propped myself against the boulder, trying to use it as a brace to steady my aim. If Beam and Billy separated themselves by a few feet, I might get a clean shot. Panting like this, with my eyes watering, I didn’t have confidence in my marksmanship.
I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. It was just a brief impression of something blue. And then a shot echoed.
I ducked my head-as if I could actually have dodged a bullet-and brought the pistol around.
Pelkey was creeping along the edge of the gravel pit. He had scrambled up the other side and was moving from boulder to boulder. I fired and heard the round careen off stone. Pelkey showed his face for an instant, and there was a smile on it. He leveled his pistol, and I flattened myself to the ground. He didn’t bother firing this time, not wanting to waste a round.
He was getting closer and closer. I felt a bubble of fear rise in my stomach. At least one of my ribs was broken. My breath was ragged, and my hands were shaking. This man was an expert shooter. I wasn’t sure I could stop him before he drew a bead on my head. If I rose to my feet to run to the nearest trees, he would easily knock me over again, even if he failed to hit my brain. After that, it would just be a matter of delivering the coup de grace.
I peered around the boulder, but I didn’t see him. Maybe he was circling into the pines, planning to come up behind me. No, there he was. Behind that stump. I let off a shot and saw splinters fly up where the round dug into the pulpy wood.
Pelkey took the opportunity to rise to his feet and lunge across the open space between the stump and a nearby boulder. He was almost across, almost safe again from my bullets, when there was a single sharp crack. I saw Pelkey straighten up. He had the oddest look on his face; his eyes were wide and his mouth was open. I think he was already dead when his body fell off the cliff. He tumbled down the steep gravel wall as if his bones were all loose inside the skin and not connected. His lifeless corpse came to rest in a cloud of dust beside the man-shaped target they’d been using to test the AR-15.
Billy lowered the black rifle and looked at me. One of his eye sockets was swollen and bleeding. His forehead looked like it had a red dent in the middle of it. His long hair had been torn loose of the braid. And his entire body was coated with gray dust.
He threw his head back and let out a scream like nothing I’d ever heard. I didn’t know if he was back in Fallujah or Waziristan, but wherever it was, it was somewhere very far away from the warm home he shared with Aimee and his children. He spit a gout of blood on the ground and advanced on the broken man trying to crawl away from him through the weeds.
I had the impression that both of Beam’s arms were broken. It was something about the way he was using his knees to lurch along. He would get himself into a kneeling position, like a man facing Mecca, and then he would flop forward with a whine. He used his shoulders to throw his arms ahead of him, but his wrists were curled in on themselves, and his hands were boneless things unable to assist his movement.
“No, Billy,” I said. The words came out like a parrot squawk. “Billy, don’t do it.”
I watched helplessly as my friend unloaded a magazine into the back of Lewis Beam’s head, reducing it to an unrecognizable mass of red jelly.
38
I gingerly removed my jacket and shirt, then loosened the Velcro straps holding my ballistic vest in place. There was a bruise the size of a paper plate on my chest. I traced the map of broken blood vessels with the tip of my finger. In a few days, when the skin turned green and yellow, I was going to look like a card-carrying member of the walking dead.
Billy had told me that his people came from the marshes of Holland, not the fiords of Scandinavia, but after having witnessed what I just had, I had a hard time believing the blood of berserkers didn’t flow through his veins. After I’d gotten my voice back, I called 911. I told the dispatcher that there had been a shooting and that two men were dead and a third man was in custody, and then I went down into the pit to arrest my friend.
He sat motionless on a rock, his head bowed. His hair hung like a hood around his face, and the rifle rested on his knees.
“Billy?” My voice sounded wheezy from the injury to my ribs.
“Yeah?” he mumbled.
“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you for saving my life.”
He kept his blood-soaked head down. “I thought you were going to say something else.”
I stood over the headless body of Lewis Beam. My mouth went as dry as if I’d stuffed it full of cotton. “You came here for the reward,” I said. “You thought they might sell you one of the twenty-twos they used to kill those moose. Or maybe you figured you could trick them into admitting what they’d done. That was your plan, wasn’t it?”
He didn’t answer.
Every word made my ribs hurt. “But you didn’t know they’d already gotten rid of their guns. Last night, after they heard about Chubby LeClair, they dumped the rifles in a bag behind his camper. As long as the twenty-twos couldn’t be traced back to them, they knew they were in the clear.”
Billy raised his head and showed me his one good eye. The other was swollen and scratched, and he kept it clenched shut. I wondered how much lasting damage Beam had managed to do to it in that fight. “I guess I can forget about that reward,” he said.
I wasn’t sure if he’d meant it as a joke. “Why, Billy?”
“Why what?”
“From the moment we found those moose, you’ve acted like another person. I don’t know who the hell you are anymore.”
He brought his hand up to stroke his beard, as he often did, and found the hair matted. He stared at his bloodred fingers with his good eye. “I left the gate open.”
“What?”
“The night of the shootings, I left it open. It wasn’t the first time I forgot to lock it. I was thinking about the toy fishing rod I was going to buy Logan, how I needed to use the ATM in Machias to get cash first. I was worried about being late for his party. So this is all my fault for being stupid.”
I wanted to tell him that he shouldn’t blame himself, but I was in no position to offer him absolution. However this mess had begun-whatever Billy Cronk did or didn’t do on the night those animals were slaughtered-no longer mattered. What mattered were the corpses. Briar Morse, Chubby LeClair, Marky Parker, and now Todd Pelkey and Lewis Beam. The state would demand a reckoning for them all.
My gaze drifted to the body lying against the wall of the pit. Billy had taken out Pelkey with a well-placed shot to the head. Half-blind, clawed to pieces, with a chunk bitten out of his arm, he hadn’t hesitated to save my life. The recognition made what I had to do next that much harder.
“You didn’t have to kill Beam,” I said. “He wasn’t going anywhere after all the bones you’d broken.”
“I know,” he said.
“The state police are going to be here soon. They’re going to see what happened to his head. There’s no way you’re going to be able to claim self-defense.”
Lots of men would have played upon my emotions and asked me to lie. They would have pleaded with me to concoct some crazy story that explained how a man’s head had been reduced to raspberry Jell-O. But not Billy Cronk. My friend just nodded and rose to his feet with a sigh. He handed me the AR, and I slung it over my good shoulder. He removed the KA-BAR from its sheath and set it on the rock behind him. Then he held out his wrists. “You’d better cuff me,” he said.
“I’m not going to do that.”
“Yes, you are,” he said. “You know why? Because you’re a good cop.”
Wincing, I reached for the handcuffs I wore on my belt. The locks made a ratcheting sound as I adjusted them around his thick wrists.
“I’m going to testify on your behalf,” I said.
He kept his arms outstretched. “Take care of Aimee for me while I’m away,” he said.
“You know I will.”
I led him to the entrance of the gravel pit to await the arrival of the police. As we stood there, side by side, I noticed a metal object lying in the trampled weeds. It took me a few seconds to register that it was Todd Pelkey’s cell phone.
The next day, I paid a visit to the Crawford Lake Club at lunchtime. I’d swung by the mill first, and the helpful gatekeeper had told me that Matt Skillen was spending his day off with his fiancee. He even told me where to find them.
I would have preferred to speak my piece without Stacey present, but anger had kept me awake all night, despite the codeine the ER had prescribed for my broken ribs. I needed to drag the truth out into the light of day, even if I doubted it would make a difference.
As I drove east beneath low-hanging clouds, I looked out at a world that had seemingly grown old overnight. The hills had a grayish cast from the exposed trunks of the hardwoods, and the color was draining out of the fallen leaves at their feet. Where once there had been splashes of brightness along the forest floor-yellows and reds and oranges-now there were just varied shades of brown that would eventually darken into a uniform russet. Defoliation had swept across the land like a forest fire or a plague, stripping all but the oaks and beeches of their ragged leaves. In the hollows and along the riverbanks were dark islands of conifers, but even these seemed more black than green this morning. Soon it would be winter.
I had to remind myself that this was just a seasonal change and not a permanent transformation. The color and warmth would return in April, and the majesty of these woods would reannounce themselves to a doubting world. In the meantime, I needed to keep faith, knowing that this seeming wasteland was the same beautiful place Elizabeth Morse believed must be preserved at all costs-if she even believed that anymore. Would she return to Moosehorn Lodge now that Briar was dead, or would the regret be too much to endure? There were other wild places she could save: forests and lakes that were not stamped with bad memories. I wondered if I would ever speak with her again.
