Widowmaker

by Paul Doiron

  The trooper chimed in: “Also, his snowmobile is gone.”

  “What about Adam Langstrom?” I asked.

  “What about him?” said Clegg.

  “Is there any sign he was here?”

  “It’s a big house, and we’ve just started to search.”

  In the winter, before they begin to hibernate, certain snakes will gather together and roll themselves into a writhing ball. That was how my stomach felt.

  “I need to go find that dog before the snow covers its tracks,” I said.

  A phone rang in Clegg’s pocket. He glanced at the number on the screen and winced but answered anyway. “Yes, this is Clegg.” He made various affirmative noises to signal he was listening and then he covered the receiver with his hand. “A bloody dog just ran out onto Route Sixteen from the woods. Some of the reporters tried to approach it, but it ran off toward Redington.”

  I turned toward the broken-down door. “I’m going to get my truck. Maybe I can catch up with it before it gets hit by a plow.”

  From another room came a voice: “Lieutenant!”

  A deputy beckoned through the doorway. He pointed a gloved finger at the table.

  A stack of white computer paper lay in a perfectly neat pile. In a house littered with filthy socks, dirty dishes, and dog-chewed hambones, the pages were noteworthy for having been so carefully arranged.

  Standing behind the white-haired detective, looking down over his shoulder, I could read only the first paragraph:

  From: Logan Scott Dyer

  To: America

  Subject: Last resort

  As I do not expect to survive the coming days or have my appointed hour in court, I hereby leave this statement of purpose to explain why I have had no choice but to take drastic and shocking actions to protect the children of this community. I know I will be villified by the media as my father was, a great man dragged down by lesser beings. When the evil are allowed to prosper and go free while the pure of spirit are condemned to suffering and death, we must admit that this once-great country is sick with a moral cancer that must be cut out tumor by tumor.

  “Christ,” said the trooper. “It’s a goddamned manifesto.”

  “That’s why he left his dogs here,” I said. “He doesn’t plan on being taken alive.”

  Clegg covered his face with one of his big hands. When he let go, there were red marks in the skin from the pressure of his fingers. “This day just gets worse and worse. I’ve got to call Major Carter.”

  The detective stepped aside to place his call. The trooper and the deputy both remained fixated on the manifesto. I could tell they were itching to turn the page and read more but were reluctant to touch it, even wearing gloves.

  “It doesn’t sound like him,” I said.

  Both men looked at me.

  “Dyer has a speech impediment, which makes people think he’s dumb. I don’t think he is, exactly. But these words don’t sound anything like him. The man shovels snow for a living.”

  “Maybe he took courses online,” said the deputy. He hadn’t meant the comment to sound as stupid as it did.

  It wasn’t my job to deconstruct Dyer’s prose style, in any case. I needed to find his wounded dog and either save its life or end its suffering. I repositioned the snowshoes under my arm and stepped back outside into the picture-perfect winter evening.

  * * *

  The two frostbitten deputies were still standing at the intersection, directing traffic, but they had been joined by half a dozen vans and SUVs painted with the logos of television stations from across Maine.

  I didn’t want to roll down my window to ask which way the dog had gone. I knew one of the reporters would use the opportunity to stick a camera and microphone in my face. Fortunately, one of the deputies guessed what I was doing and pointed me in the right direction after he moved his cruiser aside for me to get out.

  As soon as I was past the last parked vehicle, I hit the gas until I began to fishtail. In the bed of the truck, the dog carrier shifted and Shadow yelped; I hadn’t secured it as well as I should have. I let up on the pedal. That would be the last straw: careening off the road on live television and sending a caged wolf tumbling into space.

  I shouldn’t drive too fast anyway, I thought. I didn’t want to miss a sign. The cold was probably crusting the blood on the dog’s pelt. But every once in a while, I caught sight of a print in my high beams. The wounded animal seemed not to want to leave the flat openness of the road for the deep snow. Only if it felt cornered would it seek cover in the trees. Or so I hoped.

  After a mile, I happened to glance in my rearview and saw headlights approaching quickly from behind. They seemed low to the ground. The car behind me accelerated when it was twenty feet from my rear bumper. I tapped the brakes to put a scare into the driver. But he just swung out into the passing lane and gunned his engine.

  It was a Mercedes coupe with a Thule ski box, a New York plate, and a Sugarloaf sticker. The idiot at the wheel probably hadn’t even realized I was a law-enforcement officer. The anger that had been simmering inside me for hours seemed to reach a sudden boil. I was just about to hit my blue lights and push the gas pedal to the floor when a voice in my head—Stacey’s voice—told me to take a breath.

  Of all the things that had happened throughout the day, this was what had finally set me off? An entitled asshole from out of state driving too fast on a snowy road?

  Rage could make a man so stupid.

  I thought of Logan Dyer, sitting in his dark, damp living room, pointing a pretend gun at a flickering television screen, imagining that the creatures he was blasting into oblivion weren’t aliens or monsters, but, instead, the real men living a mile up the road. At a certain point, he had stopped seeing his neighbors as human beings at all. In his twisted imagination, they had become tumors to be cut from the flesh before the corruption festered.

  If he was using the registry of sex offenders as his guide, then at least we might have a chance. We could be relatively certain the name of his next victim was on a list we already possessed. “Pick a pervert,” as Jeff White had said.

  But who said Dyer was using the registry?

  That had been the assumption we’d made after we’d gotten word about the other man, Ducharme. Because his name was on the list, we had leaped to the conclusion that the next person Dyer targeted would also be found online. It was the rationale Major Carter had used to deploy law-enforcement officers to the residences of every registered sex offender within a hundred-mile radius.

  But what if it wasn’t so? What if Dyer was merely working off his own local knowledge of who was and wasn’t a “pervert”?

  Pulsifer had said that Ducharme had been banned from businesses in the area as part of a coordinated campaign.

  Nathan Minkowski had also been banned—at least while in drag—from the Bigelow General Store.

  Except Mink wasn’t a sex offender. He was, to the best of my knowledge, a law-abiding person. He just happened to like dressing up in women’s clothes and parading around in public. In the eyes of a man like Logan Dyer, though, that made him a carrier of moral disease, a vector of contagion, a cancer to be excised. I remember the contempt in Dyer’s eyes when he saw Mink riding beside me in my Scout.

  If Mink’s name wasn’t on the registry, it meant no one was protecting him.

  The strange little man had no idea of the evil that might be headed his way.

  * * *

  The road up to Kennebago Settlement had a four-inch coating of snow unmarked by tire tracks. No one had been in or out for hours, at least by conventional motor vehicle. But a man on a snowmobile had other ways of gaining access to the isolated homesteads on the northern slopes of East Kennebago Mountain.

  As I crossed the bridge over the frozen Dead River, I put in a call to Pulsifer. I wanted someone to know where I was going and why. The phone rang for half a minute before it kicked me to voice mail.

  “Gary, it’s Mike. I don’t know if you’ve heard ye
t, but Logan Dyer is the shooter. He left a confession inside his house. The guy’s a vigilante on a suicide mission to assassinate sex offenders. I’m heading up to Mink’s house in Kennebago Settlement. No one was assigned—”

  The call dropped.

  I remembered how I hadn’t been able to get a signal until I had reached Route 16. Would Pulsifer even receive my voice mail? I could turn back and try again from the highway or take my chances and keep going.

  I kept going.

  The forest fell away as I climbed above the river floodplain, and I found myself passing through a vast white pasture. The windows of a farmhouse glowed, soft and warm. Wood smoke corkscrewed from the chimney. I was turning my attention back to the road when I caught sight of a light moving fast along the tree line. It was a snowmobile. I braked so hard that Shadow let out another yelp. The rider turned sharply in my direction. Then another bobbing light appeared: a second sled following in the tracks of the first.

  I kept my foot on the brake as two kids on pint-size sleds went zipping across the road behind me, their engines roaring like chain saws. The snow machines left an echo in my head long after they had disappeared into the far woods.

  I nearly missed the driveway up to Mink’s house. The last plow to come by had piled a particularly steep bank at the entrance, nearly as high as the top of my truck. I shut off my headlights and idled a hundred feet up the road before I turned a corner. Then I pulled over and parked in the shadows of the pines. I wanted to hide my truck from sight in case Dyer came up the road behind me.

  I lifted my shotgun from the backseat and stepped out into the cold, pulling the shotgun sling over my right shoulder. I tried to close the truck door as quietly as I could, but the night was so still, the sound of the latch catching was as loud as a rifle bolt being shoved forward.

  I whispered to the caged wolf, “No howling. Agreed?”

  I waited for my eyes to adjust to the low light. Then I began moving slowly forward, hugging the shadowy side of the road.

  When I came to the snowbank heaped in front of Mink’s drive, I had no choice but to scramble up it. The surface was hard with chunks of ice, but there were slick spots where my boots had trouble gaining traction. I dug my fingers into the frozen pile and pulled myself up and over the obstacle.

  The snow was deep on the other side, nearly up to my crotch. Did Mink not own a shovel?

  I labored forward up the steep drive, feeling sweat begin to soak my long underwear. I had no clue how far the cabin was from the road, but I could smell the tangy aroma of smoke from a woodstove. I found the odor reassuring. So far, I had seen no signs that Dyer—or anyone else on a snowmobile—had ridden this far up the mountainside. Maybe I had been mistaken about the next name on the vigilante’s kill list.

  The drive twisted and turned for another fifty yards before the cabin finally came into view through the trees. Mink had said something about it having been his father’s old hunting camp, and that was exactly what it looked like: a small peak-roofed structure constructed of hemlock logs and mortar. I couldn’t imagine that the inside was insulated, and I had no idea what Mink did for water. But there was a formidable pile of chopped wood not far from the porch, and a stump with an ax driven into the top.

  The windows were aglow behind faded curtains that looked like repurposed bedsheets. I paused at the edge of the little clearing and listened. I heard music playing, a recorded voice and instruments performing an old song I didn’t recognize. A man’s deep voice belted out the same tune karaoke-style. Mink had a bona fide set of pipes.

  I exhaled and watched the steam that had been building up inside me shimmer and dissipate into the air.

  I doubted the little man received many friendly visitors, especially on midwinter evenings—or on any evenings, for that matter. I had to assume he owned a gun, since everyone in this part of Maine seemed to, including ex-cons like Adam Langstrom, who were forbidden to possess firearms.

  “Mink!”

  He continued to sing at the tops of his lungs.

  “Mink!”

  His voice ceased. But the radio continued to play.

  “It’s Mike Bowditch!”

  One of the curtains was peeled back from the windowsill, and I saw half of his face peek out. Mink seemed to be wearing a white mask.

  “I’ve got a gun!” he shouted in his deepest voice. “You’d better not come up here!”

  “Mink, it’s Mike Bowditch. The game warden!”

  I stepped forward into the clearing with my arms raised over my head, my shotgun swaying by my side. There was no way Mink could see me clearly if he was looking out from a lighted room. But I hoped he could make out my silhouette and recognize the gesture as one of someone coming in peace.

  He stepped away from the parted curtain. The radio went silent. A moment later, the front door cracked open. He had changed from a 1970s blonde to a Jazz Age redhead.

  “What the freak are you doing here?” he demanded.

  “Can I come in? It’s going to take a while to explain.”

  “How do I know it’s really you?”

  “Go jump in a lake!” I said.

  The door opened wide, and I saw him in his full glory. He was wearing a kimono and fuzzy slippers. His new wig was styled in a pageboy cut. I seemed to have caught him in the middle of a facial.

  As I stepped forward into the light spilling through the door, the suspicion left his face. I plodded forward, kicking snow with my boots, until I reached a cleared path that ran around the woodpile. There was a big plastic sled tilted against the logs, presumably to be used to haul wood and other items up from the road.

  “I get gawkers sometimes,” he said as I climbed the stairs. “Kids mostly. They come up here on a dare to see the freak show.”

  “Kids can be cruel.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Tell me something I don’t know.” I hadn’t noticed the derringer in his hand until he tucked it into his pocket. “So on what account do I have the pleasure?”

  Crossing the threshold, I felt as if I had stepped into a sauna. The room was lit entirely by kerosene lanterns, which made an audible hiss as they burned. The decor wasn’t feminine in the least. There were outdoorsy watercolors on the walls of men fishing and shotgunning ducks. A trout creel hung from a nail beside a bamboo fly rod. An ancient deer head—a ten-point buck—stared down from above the fireplace.

  To my right was a kitchenette with a propane stove and a refrigerator. To my left was a big bed that had been expertly fashioned from shaved and shellacked logs. This was one of the coziest cabins I had ever seen.

  I had so many questions about his unique living situation, but they would have to wait. “Mink, you need to get out of here.”

  “Huh? Why?” He grabbed a cloth from the sink and began rubbing off the moisturizer or whatever it was that made his face gleam.

  “Logan Dyer murdered Don Foss and all his men last night. Then he tried to kill a registered sex offender named Ducharme over in Stratton. Dyer left a note saying he was going to kill all the ‘deviants’ he could find before the police stopped him. We don’t know where he is, but we think he’s riding a snowmobile on the backcountry trails. He’s definitely armed and dangerous. I’m here to get you to safety.”

  “So I’m a deviant, am I?” Finished with the facecloth, he tossed it into the sink.

  “Those were his words, not mine.”

  “I always knew that guy was a creep. He had a look in his eye, gave me the chills.”

  “You need to get your stuff together.”

  “Screw him. I ain’t going nowhere.”

  “Dyer is extremely dangerous. He’s killed eleven men with an AR-15—that’s the civilian version of a military rifle. You can’t protect yourself here with just a derringer.”

  “You don’t get it,” he said, his mouth tightening. “It’s the principle. I ain’t a coward.”

  “Taking precautions doesn’t make you one.”

  “Have you asked around about me?” He
sneered. “Yeah, I bet you heard stuff. How I’m a freak for dressing the way I do. Probably a secret flamer, too. But I know one thing: No one ever called me a coward.” He touched his bent nose. “You think I got this from being a coward?” He peeled up his lip to reveal a broken tooth. “Or this?”

  Perspiration had begun to slide down the side of my face from the heat of the room. “Mink,” I said.

  “I live the way I want to live, and people can think whatever the freak they want, just so long as they don’t treat me like someone to push around. I ain’t afraid of no one, including that jerk straw Dyer.”

  I couldn’t force the man from his home; this wasn’t a mandated evacuation.

  “What if I stay here with you, then?” I said. “Will you allow me to do that?”

  “You mean like as my bodyguard? Who am I, Whitney Houston? No freaking way. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I gotta go tinkle.”

  He opened a door at the rear of the room. I had a quick glimpse of a self-composting toilet and a copper bathtub like the ones you see in cowboy movies. Then he shut the door.

  What to do? I couldn’t just sit in my truck at the end of his drive. There were too many ways Dyer could slip past me, and if he was using a noise suppressor on his AR-15, as I suspected, I might never even hear the shot that killed Mink. Plus, I had no idea what I was going to do with Shadow. I doubted the cold bothered him, under his heavy wolf’s coat, but keeping him caged up in the tight confines of that carrier was cruel.

  I checked to see if I had a cell signal. No such luck.

  “Do you have a phone here?” I asked through the bathroom door.

  “The company won’t run the lines this far.”

  The door opened and Mink emerged. He had changed out of his kimono into a fuzzy pink sweater and blue jeans. He had straightened his wig and applied a thin layer of lipstick, red-orange to match his hair.

  “I think I gave you the wrong impression about what’s going on here,” I said.

  “I don’t want to be impolite, but—”

  “Just hear me out.”