Widowmaker

by Paul Doiron

  The house itself wasn’t much better. Someone had once painted its cedar shingles bright blue, but the color had faded and had now turned a color I associated with the lips of people who’d frozen to death. The blinds were all drawn, as if whoever lived behind them was allergic to sunlight. A yellow plastic sign posted to a pine warned against trespassing. Another said BEWARE OF DOG.

  In the driveway were parked two trucks: a Suzuki Equator and a Mitsubishi Raider, both painted black.

  As I climbed out of my own truck, I removed my gloves and felt without looking for the canister of pepper spray on my belt. There were no dogs visible, but I did see prints in the snow, big ones like those I’d found in the woods behind Gail Evans’s house, and, the pièce de résistance, an enormous pile of shit.

  They hadn’t bothered to shovel the walkway, but had worn a path from the drive that required me to place one foot in front of the other. I heard music pounding through the front door. Screeching guitars and machine-gun drums. I pushed the glowing doorbell and waited. I gave it a minute, then banged with my fist.

  Eventually, the door was opened by a skinny guy who looked like he’d just walked off the set of a postapocalyptic horror movie. He had bleached hair, disk earrings that had stretched holes in the lobes wide enough to stick your finger through, and a bone-white complexion. He wore a sleeveless purple T-shirt, cargo pants, and leather boots with a surplus of nonfunctional buckles.

  When Goth fashion had finally come to Maine—everything came to my rural state long after it was passé elsewhere—it had lost something in the translation.

  “You wouldn’t happen to own a dog, would you?” I said.

  He turned and yelled over his shoulder into the darkened, thumping interior of the house. “Carrie!”

  “What?” came a shrill voice.

  “Do we own a dog?”

  “What?”

  “There’s a game warden at the door.”

  The music stopped, as if a plug had been pulled. I heard staccato footsteps on a staircase.

  “What’s your name?” I asked the Goth.

  “Spike.”

  “You don’t know if you have a dog, Spike?”

  “It ain’t my house, man.”

  A moment later, a woman elbowed her male friend aside to face me. She stood no more than five feet tall and weighed, I was guessing, no more than ninety pounds. She had a pixie haircut (dyed black), a painful-looking sore on her lip, and bile-green eye shadow. Like her beau, she was outfitted for the end-time in a leather vest, with no shirt underneath, and black jeans rolled above her bare ankles. She also happened to have a new tattoo on her forearm. It was poorly drawn and still scabbed, but it was unmistakably the silhouette of a howling wolf.

  “Didn’t you see the sign!” she said in the overloud voice people use who are hard of hearing. Her eardrums must have still been stunned from all that metal. “No trespassing!”

  “That doesn’t apply to law enforcement,” I said. “I also saw the ‘Beware of Dog’ sign. What kind of dog is it?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “A dog killed a deer down the road from here.”

  One side of her mouth—the side with the sore—twitched. “I don’t have a dog no more. That sign is old. Who told you I have a dog?”

  “You’re Carrie Michaud, aren’t you?”

  “So what?” Everything about this hostile, manic, hollow-eyed person shouted narcotics.

  “Look, Carrie, I know you own a dog. There are dog tracks and urine stains all over your yard. There’s a big pile of dog shit next to that snowbank. You need to stop lying to me. Now, why don’t you go get your dog?”

  “So you can give me a ticket? Ha! No way!”

  I was tired of playing coy about my suspicions. “It’s a wolf dog, isn’t it?”

  Before I could say another word, she slammed the door in my face.

  Wolf dogs are the hybrid offspring of wolves and domestic dogs, bred, mostly, for people who want the thrill of saying that they own the baddest animal on the block. They rank above pit bulls in that regard. They also happen to be illegal to possess in the state of Maine.

  I backed slowly away from the front door and looked at the windows. Sure enough, one of the blinds was lifted, and I saw the Goth’s tubercular face peering out.

  I made sure to be loud. “Open the door, please.”

  Carrie Michaud appeared in the next window. “Fuck you!”

  So much for negotiation.

  I retreated back to my truck and turned the key in the ignition. Once hot air was finally blowing through the vents, and my face was feeling less like a death mask, I picked up my phone and dialed a friend.

  “Kathy? It’s Mike.”

  “Grasshopper! Long time, no speak.”

  Kathy Frost had been my field training officer and sergeant when I joined the Warden Service. For years she had headed all of the Warden Service’s K-9 teams, until she was forced to take early retirement due to injuries she’d sustained from a gunshot. She still helped us out during search-and-rescue operations, directing the efforts of dog teams to cover the most ground in the fastest amount of time. No one I’d ever met knew more about dogs than Kathy.

  “How’s retirement?” I asked.

  “I’m thinking of buying a metal detector. What does that tell you?”

  “That bad?”

  “Worse.”

  “Listen. What can you tell me about wolf dogs?”

  “They’re illegal to possess without a permit.”

  “I’m wondering how I can identify one.”

  “You can’t,” she said. “Not by sight. I mean, you can look for certain features—long legs, slanted eyes, small ears—but you still might be looking at an animal that’s one part Siberian husky, one part Malinois. Breeders have gotten good at making fakes, since people will pay top dollar for an honest-to-Jesus timber wolf.”

  “What’s top dollar?”

  “Two grand for a high-content animal. Generally speaking, the more wolf DNA it has, the more expensive it is. Why do you want to know?”

  “I’ve got a situation with some tweakers. I think they’re keeping a wolf dog, and I am going to have to confiscate it. I was hoping there was a way I could tell if it was the real thing or not.”

  “The only way to know for certain is to do a lab test.”

  “I know it’s been chasing deer,” I said. “It killed a yearling this morning.”

  “That doesn’t prove anything. But it gives you cause to take it to a shelter. They can test it for you.”

  “What happens if the results come back positive—that it’s a high-content wolf dog?”

  “Usually, the department would try to find someone to adopt it. But if yours killed a deer, it’ll probably be put down.”

  “Anything else I should know?”

  “Are you going to try wrangling the animal yourself?”

  “I don’t have a carrier or catch pole with me today, so I’ll probably be calling an animal control agent.”

  “Be careful,” Kathy said. “There’s a reason why wolf dogs are illegal. Most of them are unpredictable and pretty near untrainable. They are superintelligent. I read somewhere that training a dog is like training a toddler. Training a wolf dog is like trying to train a thirty-five-year-old man.”

  “Thanks, I’ll let you know how it goes. When are you going to get a new puppy, by the way?”

  “I just haven’t met the right dog yet.”

  Kathy had once owned a coonhound named Pluto, whose nose was the stuff of legend, but he had died the night she herself was shot, and she hadn’t yet adopted another young dog to train. I had thought her grief for Pluto would abate over time, but as her period of mourning had stretched on and on, I began to worry about her.

  “Let me know how it goes,” she said.

  “Ten-four.”

  I glanced back at the house, certain that they had been watching me the whole time, worried about what I might be doing. That was good:
I wanted them to be spooked. For my plan to work, they needed to panic.

  I put the transmission into gear and started forward. I drove a hundred yards, until I was well out of sight of Carrie Michaud’s house. The snowplows had carved out a wide spot in the road where they could reverse direction. It was the perfect place to hide my truck. I wasn’t sure how much time I had, but I didn’t want to miss my chance. I reached into the backseat and rummaged around until I found the white poncho I used as wintertime camouflage. I pulled the hood over my head and got out.

  Moving from shadow to shadow, I made my way back along the frozen road, expecting to see one of the pickup trucks come roaring in reverse out of the driveway at any moment. When I reached the tall snowbank at the end of Carrie’s drive, I threw myself against it, then squirmed into position so I could peer over the top.

  I didn’t have long to wait. Within a matter of minutes, Spike emerged from the house, pulling a magnificent black animal behind him on a leash. Each dark hair in its coat seemed to shimmer as it padded along. Long legs, slanted eyes, small, sharp ears—I understood Kathy’s caution about jumping to conclusions, but there was absolutely no doubt in my mind that this creature was, in any meaningful sense, a wolf.

  And yet when Spike opened the passenger door of his truck, the animal leaped obediently inside, as eager as the family dog going for a ride.

  “Good boy, Shadow,” I heard the Goth say.

  He had pulled on a black trench coat and fingerless gloves to make his getaway. He moved with surprising speed and purpose for a man with so few functioning brain cells. He hurried around the front of the truck, pushing the remote starter button on the key fob. I heard the engine turn over.

  I tumbled down the snowbank and jumped into the driveway. “Hold it, Spike!”

  The Goth stopped in his tracks, his arms dropped to his sides, and his mouth fell open. For about ten seconds, he gawked at me. Then he reached for the driver’s door.

  “Hold it right there!”

  I sprinted forward as he climbed inside the running truck, and managed to catch the door handle before he could yank it shut. We played tug-of-war for a few seconds, and then he threw the truck into reverse. The pickup lurched away, forcing me to release my grip or be pulled along with it.

  I would estimate that the backward-moving Raider hit the snowbank at thirty miles per hour—enough speed to fill the bed with snow and bury the rear wheels. Spike tried to drive forward, but he was stuck now. An acrid cloud of exhaust fumes and burning rubber gathered around the truck as he tried in vain to dislodge it.

  I put my hand on the grip of my sidearm. I had reached the limits of my patience. The idiot might have dislocated my shoulder. “Step out of the vehicle!”

  He stared openmouthed at me through the windshield as I got myself into position parallel to his door. Just as I was about to repeat my command for him to get out, he threw himself across the seat and pushed the passenger door open, shouting, “Go, Shadow! Go!”

  The wolf dog gave a yelp when he hit the snow.

  But instead of running off, the beautiful animal stopped. He stood there, looking back and forth between us with his luminous yellow eyes. He seemed to have no idea what was happening. I couldn’t blame him. This whole comedy had me shaking my head. Wait until I told Kathy how it had gone down.

  “Step out of the vehicle,” I shouted again. “Step out of the vehicle now!”

  It was then that a dark shape swooped into my peripheral vision. I was so focused on the ridiculous man behind the wheel that I missed Carrie Michaud running up behind me. I felt the knife between my shoulder blades before I saw it.

  7

  The sensation was like nothing I had experienced: somewhere between a sharp poke and a hard punch. At first, my mind couldn’t connect the peculiar pain to a recognition of what had just happened.

  Then, as I turned, I saw the blade glint in the winter sunlight. And the neurons fired.

  She had just stabbed me in the back.

  Carrie Michaud lunged at me again. I brought my left arm up to protect myself and received a slash across the forearm. This time I felt the pain fully, knowing what it was. I staggered away, trying to get my legs under me, but I stepped on a patch of ice and went down on one knee. I fumbled for my sidearm but couldn’t find the grip.

  She came at me again, this time from above. Her lips pulled back from her sharp little teeth.

  All I could think to do was punch her. I jabbed with my left fist and hit her squarely between the eyes. Her head snapped back violently, the knife dropped from her hand, and down she went.

  I spun around frantically for a few moments, trying to feel with one hand between my shoulder blades, certain it would come back wet with blood. But all I could feel was torn fabric.

  The blade had sliced cleanly through my poncho and the parka underneath. My body armor had been designed to stop a bullet, not a knife. By all rights, the blade should have cut through my trapezoid muscle, severed an artery, and punctured a lung, if not my heart. Had I turned at just the right moment? I had no idea how I had been saved.

  My other hand finally found the grip of my SIG and pulled it free of its holster.

  Carrie Michaud lay crumpled on the ground. I had knocked her out cold, or maybe she had hit her head on the ice. Her body looked as delicate as that of a child. And yet this waif had come within inches of killing me.

  Under the law, I would have been justified in shooting her dead. It didn’t matter that she seemed to be unconscious. She had stabbed me, and that was all that mattered. I knew I could pull the trigger and end Carrie Michaud’s miserable existence and the state of Maine would claim that I had been fully justified. The legislature had granted me an indulgence to commit homicide.

  I lined up my gun sights at her narrow chest and slipped my finger inside the trigger guard. In shooting class, you are taught that is the point of no return. Out of the box, in single-action stage, the SIG Sauer P226 has a trigger-action pull rate of 4.5 pounds. The slightest squeeze and it would be done.

  But I couldn’t.

  Instead, I swung the pistol around on her boyfriend. If anything, the Goth looked even more helpless and pathetic. He was still sitting wide-eyed and slack-jawed behind the wheel of the immobilized Raider. Smoke from the exhaust continued to melt snow and fill the yard with oily fumes.

  “Don’t you fucking move!” I shouted.

  But his mind was afloat in some other drug-induced realm.

  I flipped Carrie Michaud onto her stomach and twisted her arms behind her back. I felt a cruel urge to snap her wrists but resisted the impulse. I reached behind my belt and found my handcuffs. When I heard the clasps click, I took a breath.

  The harrowing reality of the situation was slowly beginning to take hold. I had almost joined the ranks of the police dead, only there would have been no video to show the cadets at the Criminal Justice Academy. Just a cautionary tale to frighten the new recruits: “Did you ever hear about Mike Bowditch? Poor guy got knifed because he tried to take away a drug addict’s wolf.”

  The knife had fallen into the snow. It was a Gerber tactical model: black, with a tanto point and a serrated edge. The blade was wet.

  Blood was dripping from my arm. It spotted the smooth patch of ice at my feet. The cut wasn’t deep, but it stung as if it had been rubbed with salt. I couldn’t put pressure on the wound without reholstering my weapon, which meant I had to deal with Spike first.

  I used so much strength pulling him from the running truck that he sprawled on the ice at my feet.

  “Don’t hurt me,” he whined.

  “Shut up!”

  I used my second set of cuffs to secure his wrists. The effort pumped more and more blood from my arm onto the snow. When I was convinced that both of them were restrained, I finally put my gun away and clutched at the wound. Only then did it occur to me to raise my eyes to the house. For all I knew, there was someone else inside the building; someone else out of their drug-crazed mind, only
maybe this person was armed with a gun instead of a knife.

  I retreated back to a position of cover behind an oak tree at the edge of the drive.

  All the while, the wolf dog watched me with keen interest. He didn’t run off, nor did he approach. He just studied me with his eerie eyes while I called for help.

  “Can you describe your injuries?” the dispatcher asked.

  “She struck me in the back first, but the knife barely punctured the skin. Don’t ask me how. I’ve also got a cut across my left forearm. I’m losing blood, but I’ve got pressure on the wound, and it seems to be helping.”

  “You’re sure your back is all right?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  “Stay on the line until backup arrives. Nearest unit is five minutes away. Ambulance is right behind.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Keep talking to me.”

  “What should we talk about?”

  “Is there anything else we should know about your situation?”

  “You’re going to need an animal control agent, too. Make sure he brings the biggest carrier he’s got.”

  “Is there a vicious dog on the property?”

  Even from a distance, I could see his luminous eyes. They looked possessed of an intelligence I had never seen before in a domestic dog. “Not exactly.”

  Above my head, the dead leaves of the oak made a sound like whispers whenever the breeze touched them.

  The wolf dog kept watching me intently.

  * * *

  I lost count of the units that responded to my 10-74 call. That is what happens when a report goes out that an officer is down; every available cop—sometimes even those off-duty—rush to the scene.

  The first to arrive was a Cumberland County Sheriff’s deputy. He drove up with lights blazing and sirens wailing and emerged from his salt-splashed cruiser with his weapon already drawn. I think he was a little disappointed to find me alert and upright, albeit leaning against an oak tree, with only a bleeding forearm.

  The deputy’s name was Moody. He was about my age, black-haired, brown-eyed, with a smirky way of talking out of one side of his mouth. “You’re sure you weren’t stabbed in the back?”