Pot Shot

by Gerry Boyle

  Bernie. Please take me with you. Luv ya. Tanya.

  Bernie? Coyote didn’t seem like a Bernie.

  But if he was, in fact, Bernie, I had just learned one thing. Tanya loved him, or at least at one time had said she did. And she had expensive letterhead.

  I folded the bill and put it back in the pocket of the shirt. The shirt, I folded the best I could and slid back in the drawer. The stack of shirts went on top of it. I closed the drawer and looked over the rest of the room. There was a stack of folded dungarees on the floor by the door. I checked the pockets but didn’t find any money, inscribed or otherwise. Next to the dungarees were two pair of work boots, one black, one brown. There was nothing in the shoes. Nothing up my sleeve. Presto change-o.

  I went back to the kitchen and up the stairs.

  The stairs were narrow and steep, like stairs on a ship. I walked up slowly and quietly and stood in the center of the master bedroom, the honeymoon suite. There were windows on three walls and a crude skylight fitted into the sloping roof. Drywall had been hung on two-thirds of the ceiling, but there was one section where the foil backing of the insulation showed. The place was not plush.

  Bobby and Melanie slept on a double-size futon on the floor. There was a puffy black quilt folded neatly on the end of the futon, and the sheets were arranged neatly, too. Next to the bed were shoes, his and hers. There were books in wooden crates, two crates on Melanie’s side and one on Bobby’s. I scanned the titles. Melanie read books about holistic health and herbal remedies, and travel books, which seemed odd. Europe on a budget, Australia’s Barrier Reef, backpacking in Thailand. Bobby read spy novels and, curiously enough, a book about “maximizing your assets.”

  The first step was to go to Lewiston and get the guy who was holding some of your assets to cough them up. The rest was easy.

  I played the light across the room. Along one wall there were hooks that held pants and shirts, all lined up like raincoats at the fire station. Boots and shoes and sneakers on the floor along that wall. A small, beat-up bureau, painted blue. I pulled on the top drawer and it stuck, so the whole thing started to topple. I caught it. Turned the light out and listened. Turned the light back on and eased the drawer open.

  It was women’s underwear, mostly cotton, mostly white, with some black mixed in. I overcame my embarrassment and burrowed my hand under the pile. Pulled out a tube of something, and it wasn’t toothpaste. Feeling like a pervert, I put it back.

  The next drawer was for her socks. The one below that was for Bobby’s boxers, mostly dark colors. The bottom drawer held his socks. Nothing more.

  I stood for a moment and gave the room a last glance. Looked back toward the books. Bobby’s. Melanie’s. There was one in one of her crates that looked like a journal. I walked over and bent down and pulled it out. It was a small photo album, one picture per page.

  A younger Melanie with long shaggy hair and bangs, standing in front of a stoop. A younger Bobby with hair longer than Melanie’s. He was wearing mirrored sunglasses and sitting on a motorcycle. An old Honda. A big one. Two pictures of a little kid. Stephen with a plastic tricycle. Stephen just standing there, hands hanging down in front of him, looking lost. Melanie and Bobby, arm in arm, and Stephen off to the side, as if he’d snuck into the picture. The same faraway eyes. I looked at them.

  Then heard something. Outside.

  I turned off the light and listened. Couldn’t hear anything. I went down the stairs in the dark, eased my way into the kitchen and waited. Still nothing. Then a rattling. Chickens clucking.

  The back door was off the kitchen. I went to it and slid the latch up. It was open. I stepped out and closed it behind me. Stood there and watched. Listened. The chicken house was off to my left. I walked to that corner of the house and peered out. They were still clucking but I didn’t see anybody. I went as far as the front of the house and stopped again. There was no one in sight. No vehicles. No lights. Just the amorphous blackness. I walked toward the driveway. Something moved in the brush to my right and I jumped.

  A raccoon. The chickens clucked.

  “Sorry, girls,” I said. “You’re on your own.”

  I walked up the road in the dark, watching the woods and thinking. I considered why it was I had come here. I was looking for something, anything, that would tell me that Bobby and Melanie weren’t what they seemed: a couple of small-time pot growers, maybe not as naive as I’d thought at first glance, but likable in other ways. Bobby, up here in the woods but still running on streetwise chutzpah. Melanie, small and resilient, living without electricity and running water, independent of everything but her husband. Stephen, misplaced and resentful, being groomed for a career as a jungle sniper.

  And, of course, Coyote—Bernie to his friends—living in exile in the Maine woods, getting his big-city fix by reading classified ads in the Boston Herald.

  Were they all what they seemed? Or when I started knocking on doors in Lewiston, would I uncover yet another layer?

  I walked faster, silent as I stepped from rock to rock. Missing a rock, I stumbled and considered turning the light on. Then there was a pale shadowed opening up ahead and I could see the space that was the road. I went off the road to the left and got in the truck and rolled the window down and waited. There were no lights showing, and on this stretch of road you could hear a car a mile away. I didn’t want to be caught in Melanie’s headlights. For that matter, I didn’t want to pass her on the road. The timing was going to be tight.

  I’d have to find another route home, I thought, as I eased the truck out of the woods. Maybe over to Farmington, then east on Route 2, south to Fairfield and Waterville. If I was going to Lewiston anyway, maybe I’d drive down to Portland and spend the night with Roxanne, wake up fresh and—

  Headlights came out of nowhere and lit up my rearview mirror. Then they wigwagged and a blue light blipped on.

  “Shoot,” I said.

  I pulled the truck over, and the lights hung behind me, close, and then more lights shot out of the darkness in front of me. They rushed toward me and I squinted against the glare and doors began opening. First theirs. Then mine.

  “Out of the vehicle,” a voice shouted, behind me, to my left. “On the ground. Hands above your head.”

  “Hey, I don’t know what—”

  “Out of the truck and down, please,” the voice shouted again, and I swung my legs out and saw a guy in jeans and a dark windbreaker that said MAINE DEA in stenciled white. He was holding a gun, on his right side, pointed at the ground.

  His hand grabbed my shoulder and he guided me to the pavement and I said, “Hey, come on,” but put my hands against my ears as hands ran across my back, my legs, fingers muscled down inside my boots.

  “Thank you,” the guy said.

  “He’s clean,” a voice said, and another voice said, “Okay, sir, we’d like you to stand up.”

  I stood and they were on each side of me, two cops, one young and thin with a month-old beard and very light blue eyes and another, older, big and thick and sort of pudgy. The older one was wearing a jacket, too. His face was flushed.

  “I’m going to ask you to come this way, sir, and get in this vehicle,” he said.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “Special agent. Maine Drug Enforcement Agency.”

  “Let me see a badge or an ID or something.”

  He hesitated, then fished inside his jacket and pulled out a leather wallet and handed it to me. I opened it up. Inside was a gold badge that said “Maine Drug Enforcement.” It looked real. So did he. I handed the wallet back to him and he shoved it back inside his windbreaker. Then he told me to come with him, so I did.

  I followed him and went and sat in the front passenger seat of his truck, a red-and-white Chevy Blazer with New York plates. When he got in, he put his police radio on the dash. There was no police radio in the truck and the blue light was on the floor, connected to the cigarette lighter by a cord.

  “You have some ID, sir?”
>
  I took out my wallet and handed it to him. He opened it and my driver’s license flopped out. He studied it for a moment. Outside, the younger guy was looking inside the cab of my truck with his flashlight. The cops behind my truck had gotten out of a black van and were shining their lights into the back window of the camper cap.

  “This isn’t a Ranger,” I heard one of them say.

  “It’s red, though. Black cap,” the other one said.

  “What about the warrant?”

  The older guy handed me my wallet. I held it in front of me on my lap.

  “You’re a long way from home, Mr. McMorrow.”

  “You’re Johnston.”

  “Small world,” he said.

  “No, just a small town.”

  “I thought you didn’t want to come all the way to Somerset.”

  “Something unexpected came up,” I said.

  He looked at me. I looked back at him. He had gray in his sideburns. Broken blood vessels near his cheekbones.

  “You got the wrong guy, didn’t you,” I said.

  “Yup.”

  “Your search warrant is for somebody else, a different truck.”

  “Yeah, but I’m going to ask you for permission to look through yours.”

  “Go right ahead. All I’ve got is empty beer cans.”

  “Have you been drinking?” he asked.

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  He picked up the radio from the dash and said, “Go ahead. And kill all those lights.”

  The headlights went out, replaced by the glow of orange parking lights and fingering flashlight beams. I saw the back window of the cap swing up, heard the tailgate creak.

  “So what’s the deal, Sergeant?” I said.

  “We’re involved in an active investigation.”

  “Beats an inactive one.”

  “How ’bout you, Mr. McMorrow. What are you doing up this way? You don’t have to tell me.”

  “I know that.”

  “I thought you knew that,” he said.

  “I’ll tell you anyway. Just like I said. I’m reporting. Doing a story on the marijuana legalization movement up here. For the Boston Globe.”

  He looked at me. The look in his eyes told me to prove it.

  “Oh yeah?” he said.

  “Oh yeah,” I said.

  “What’s your editor’s name?”

  “Tom Wellington. New England editor.”

  “Where’s he work?”

  “The Globe’s main office. Dorchester.”

  “You got his phone number?”

  “Matter of fact, I do. I’ll give it to you. You can call him. Tell him I deserve more money.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No, just tell him the story’s going well and—”

  “No, do you have anything else you can show me?” Johnston said.

  “An old press pass.”

  “Could I see it?”

  I took it out of my wallet and handed it to him. While he put a light on it, I dug out the scrap of paper with Wellington’s number. I handed that to him, too. He turned the press pass over and read the back. Then looked at the front one more time.

  “New York Times?”

  “Five years ago.”

  “You got more miles on you now, huh?”

  He looked at me, his eyes glancing over the long scar on my cheek.

  “Where’d you get that? Covering a war?”

  “In Kennebec County.”

  “Your name’s starting to sound familiar,” he said.

  He handed the card back to me, then rubbed his nose. The younger cop who had been with him walked up and Johnston hit the button and his window zipped down.

  “Nothing,” the younger cop said.

  “No shit,” Johnston said. “Mr. McMorrow’s a reporter. Boston Globe.”

  “Just a freelancer,” I said. “I live in Waldo County.”

  I tried to look harmless. The younger cop was not reassured.

  He looked at Johnston. Johnston stared straight ahead. The younger cop looked at me.

  “How ya doin’?” he said.

  I reached into my jacket pocket and took out a notebook and pen.

  “Just fine,” I said. And I grinned.

  The younger cop sat in the backseat. I sat with Johnston in the front. The van that had pulled me over left, heading north where there was nothing but woods and darkness. After a few minutes, Johnston turned on the heater.

  They said they had information from a confidential informant that a load of marijuana was to be taken by truck from this property sometime this week. The pot was supposed to be in a load of vegetables bound for a farmers’ market. The vegetables were supposed to be in the back of a red Ford Ranger pickup or similar pickup with a black aluminum cap. My truck was a red Toyota and the cap was dark blue.

  Close enough in the dark. “How much pot?” I asked.

  Johnston shrugged.

  “A few pounds. We wouldn’t sit up here for a couple ounces. We have information that people up here are moving moderate amounts, mostly to buyers down south.”

  “And I didn’t even have a rutabaga.”

  “Nope. But I’m still going to ask you some questions,” Johnston said.

  “Likewise, I’m sure.”

  He asked me how I knew the Mullaneys and I told him. He asked me if I had any knowledge of marijuana being grown in the area and I said I wouldn’t comment on that. He asked me if the Mullaneys were home and I said no. He asked me if I knew where they were and I said Melanie had gone to get her son at school, but she’d be home soon. He asked me what I was doing at the house and I said “Nothing.”

  My turn.

  I asked him how many cops he had working this part of Somerset County and he said a few. Scrawling in my notebook, I asked him how this area compared with others in the state in terms of marijuana growing, and he said it was probably the most active, but not for long. I asked him why he said that, and he said police had turned up the heat in Somerset County.

  “So you arrest a few?”

  “And some of the others decide it isn’t worth the risk. The hard-cores just move.”

  “Why Maine?”

  “Look around you, McMorrow. This is one of those places where you can do just about anything and nobody’s gonna notice.”

  “And the ones who do leave you alone,” I said.

  “Right. The law up here is something very far away.”

  “But you’re here.”

  “Now we are. But when we first started doing operations up here, turning informants, some of these people we arrested couldn’t believe it. It was like we had no right to enforce the law here.”

  “You believe in what you’re doing?”

  He paused, his eyes narrowing. “Yeah, I do.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “ ’Cause I’ve seen what drugs can do to people.”

  He paused, staring off through the windshield. I waited. Waited some more. I could feel it coming, and it did.

  “I’m gonna tell you something before you go out making these people out to be a bunch of hippies. Peace, love, and all that. My father was a drunk. My oldest son ended up in a friggin’ rehab hospital. He’s a great kid, but he started getting high in high school, and he liked it. That was it. Quit football, had to repeat tenth grade. Then he started doing coke and it just latched right onto him like I don’t know what. Something about his chemistry, you know? Body chemistry or something. He just couldn’t shake it. It was like this thing eating him up inside.”

  He stopped. The cop in the back was frozen in his seat, listening. I scrawled in my notebook.

  “So what happened?” I asked.

  “He went through hell. The family went through hell. He’s okay now, but I don’t know for how long. Once that stuff has its claws in you, it never lets go.”

  “But that’s not marijuana.”

  “It’s the same friggin’ thing,” he exploded. “Same idea. You take a drug to go
somewhere else from where you are, from reality, the real world. The pot didn’t ruin David, but it sure as hell started him down the road. Like I said on the phone, this goddamn bullshit about nature and all this sacred herb shit. Poison ivy’s an herb, for God’s sake. Heroin comes from goddamn flowers. Pot wasn’t good for him. He didn’t learn. He didn’t talk. He threw away all the things he’d been working on for so long.”

  I waited a moment as his mind raced through the past.

  “But what about tobacco? Alcohol? They do more damage.”

  He looked at me. Hard.

  “I can’t do anything about that, Mr. McMorrow,” he said. “They’re not against the law.”

  We sat there for a minute in awkward silence.

  “I’d like to use that,” I said, finally.

  “No names,” he said. “Just ‘one police officer.’ ”

  “I don’t even know your name.”

  “Fine.”

  He looked toward the Mullaneys’ driveway. “

  So Batman and Robin aren’t in there, huh?”

  “Nope. Not that I could see.”

  “You know who his sidekick really is?” he asked.

  “Coyote? No.”

  “We don’t either. But we’re gonna find out.”

  12

  The road from Florence to South Portland was a long dark strip that meandered through blackened woods, past blank shadowed fields. The woods were interrupted by sudden little towns. A cluster of streetlamps, a store with a neon beer sign, light flickering dimly in the windows of houses and trailers like candles in sod houses. And then there was more road and the tunnel chiseled out of the dark by the headlights as if everything else had been taken over for the night by birds and bugs and animals.

  I drove in silence, fighting off the urge to stop in one of the outpost stores for a beer. In between fighting, I replayed the events of the day over and over in my mind. Melanie. Stephen’s room. Johnston and his son. Over and over, and then I got on the interstate at Gray, and ten minutes later a silvery glow began to appear in the sky to the south, and then, out of nowhere, there were the lights of Portland, shimmering like Las Vegas.