Almost Midnight

by Paul Doiron

  “Could you talk to Aimee for me? She still don’t believe this is for real. She thinks the governor’s promise is for shit and he’s going to screw us over as soon as the camera lights go off. What do you think about that? Should I be worried? I’m trying not to get my hopes up.”

  I’d been planning to drive straight home, to give myself time to pack for an extended stay at the luxurious Tantrattle Cabin and get some much-needed sleep. But hearing my friend’s bearish voice made me wish to see him again in person. I checked the clock. No way was I going to make it back to the Midcoast in time for visiting hours at the Bolduc Correctional Facility. But again, maybe Billy’s heroism and provisional pardon had earned him special treatment.

  The other messages weren’t urgent or important.

  I had hoped for an update from Dr. Holman concerning Shadow. I was doing my best to manage my expectations about his survival. The clinic was surely closed now, and while the veterinarian had given me her personal number, I was loath to call lest I hear bad news.

  It also worried me that I’d heard nothing at all from Dani.

  I had been reckless, letting our relationship get physical so quickly, assuming she would be content with an extended period of no-commitment nights together while I got Stacey out of my head. But Dani had been clear that she couldn’t continue with the status quo. I knew she would want to hear about Shadow, but I wasn’t ready to give her an answer about my feelings, if the conversation took a turn in that direction. I would call her when I got home, I decided.

  Coward.

  As I crossed the bridge and entered the outskirts of Farmington, I spotted the gun shop Pulsifer had mentioned over breakfast. My plan was to canvass the area hardware and sporting goods stores in the vain hope that my unknown archer had purchased the bolt locally. But for a variety of reasons I was reluctant to step through the doors of Fairbanks Firearms.

  A few wet flakes of snow landed on my windshield as I pulled into the parking lot. The faux log cabin was ringed by concrete Jersey barriers to prevent a determined thief from doing a smash-and-grab. A large orange banner across the door shouted WELCOME ANGLERS! A smaller one pasted inside a dusty window whispered BUSINESS FOR SALE BY OWNER.

  I had never visited my uncle’s shop, but I had heard from one of my informants that Denis Cormier was not fully following federal and state laws pertaining to gun sales.

  A buzzer sounded as I entered. The store resembled any number of backwoods businesses catering to fishermen and hunters. There were racks of spinning and bait casting rods, some as tall as the ceiling. Camouflage clothes for men, women, and children on hangers. Rifles and shotguns cabled together along the wall behind the counter. The room smelled of the bait tank bubbling in the back of the room: algae and fish.

  “We’re about to close,” said a deep voice from behind a display case of hunting and combat knives.

  “Uncle Denis! It’s Mike.”

  “Who?”

  “Your nephew. Marie’s son.”

  He peered out from behind the register: a short man with narrow shoulders, an olive complexion, silver hair, and a black mustache. If there was a men’s petite clothing size, he was wearing it. This shrimp was my mother’s oldest brother.

  I hadn’t seen Denis since her funeral. After the burial, at the reception held at the Prouts Neck Country Club, he and my other uncles had gotten drunk enough to send my mom’s tennis friends running for the exits. Next they had surrounded my hapless stepfather and begun arguing that my mother would have wanted her birth family to share in her bequest—never mind that the terms of her will explicitly excluded them.

  “What do you want?” asked Uncle Denis, keeping his distance.

  “I was in the area and thought I’d stop in and see your new business.”

  Like all the Cormiers he had delicate bones and moody brown eyes. My mother’s had been as bright and lovely as opals. His were the color of unpolished agates. “You just missed the grand opening.”

  I think I must have blinked. “Really? When was that?”

  He glanced at the “Time to Fish” clock on the wall. Then he turned to me with a stone-cold expression. “Two years ago next month.”

  Denis and his brothers had once worked high-paying union jobs at Madison Paper Industries. Then, like the mill in Pennacook, the papermaking factory had shut down. Suddenly the Cormier brothers—who had never saved a penny in their lives—found themselves in the unemployment line. Gary Pulsifer had been the one to tell me that Denis had opened a gun shop. Gary had also informed me about an illegal sideline he’d heard my uncle was involved in.

  A paperback book lay on the counter; clearly my uncle had been reading it in the long intervals between customers. His choice of titles surprised me. It was Green Hills of Africa by Ernest Hemingway, one of my favorite authors.

  “How are you liking that?” I asked, trying to shift the conversation onto a smoother track.

  “The guy doesn’t know shit about guns.”

  I could see how this was going to go. In a way, no longer having to work at being courteous made it easier. “I saw the ‘For Sale’ sign out front.”

  “You want to buy the place? I happen to know the owner.”

  “Actually, I’m looking for a crossbow. What do you recommend for coyote hunting?”

  “A rifle.”

  “But if someone wanted to use a crossbow?”

  “Still a rifle.”

  Denis carried three brands of crossbows, and only one of them—the Blood Eagle Tactical—took sixteen-inch bolts. It was secured by a bicycle cable to a standing rack. I lifted it from the hook on which it was hanging, and my fingers came away dusty. “You sell many of these?”

  “Hell, yeah. Dozens and dozens. We can barely keep them in stock.”

  In a bucket at my feet were crossbow bolts, fletching side up. I picked out a Spider-Bite X2 identical to the one that had pierced Shadow’s lung. “How about these?”

  “You want to tell me what you’re really doing here, Warden Bowditch?”

  “I’m looking for the names of anyone you might have sold sixteen-inch Spider-Bite X2 bolts to.”

  He leaned his scrawny ass against the glass case holding used revolvers. “You think I keep those kinds of records?”

  “I think you have a good memory and always have.”

  “Flattery.”

  “I’m serious, Denis.”

  “So am I. How long do you think I’d be in business if it got around I was ratting out my customers to my nephew the game warden?”

  “It looks like you’re going out of business as it is.”

  “Touché.”

  The man was such an unrepentant wiseass. He always had been. I had never met a person who wielded humor as a rapier the way he did. You left every encounter bleeding.

  “Rumors have been going around about you, Uncle Denis. There’s been a lot of gossip.”

  “It’s all true,” he said, unsmiling. “I really do have a ten-inch dick.”

  “The thing I keep hearing is that, for the right price, you’re doing illegal modifications to AR-15s for customers who want full autos.”

  “So now you’re trying to bully me into helping you?”

  “I’m just sharing the gossip I’ve heard. If there’s any truth to it, you might consider turning your talents as a gunsmith in a direction that doesn’t lead to federal prison. But I’m not here to report you.”

  To my surprise Denis crossed the room. For half a second I expected him to punch me in the crotch. Instead he fishhooked a finger inside his mouth to reveal a dental bridge where several of his molars should have been.

  “Do you remember how I got this?” he mumbled, finger in mouth.

  “I’m afraid I don’t.”

  “No surprise since you were running around in a diaper that night. Your dad did it to me when we were camping over at Long Falls on the Dead River back before they ‘cleaned it up.’ He accused me of having scratched his truck when I opened my door. But th
at was a lie. That scratch was already there. Jack was looking for an excuse to beat the shit out of someone because he was bored. He shattered my cheekbone, broke my jaw, and knocked out three of my teeth.”

  “I’m the last person to defend my father’s actions. And you weren’t the only one he assaulted.”

  “Says his defender in chief. I should have known Jack Bowditch’s boy would grow up to be a bully. Like father, like son.”

  “I was hoping you’d willingly help me out.”

  “And what made you think that?”

  “Because we’re family.”

  The intensity of his laughter provoked a full-body coughing fit. “I’ve got to close up,” he said after he’d finally caught his breath.

  24

  I had made the turn to Augusta and home, with that feeling of having escaped the mountains and their cruel weather.

  Then the snow squall ambushed me from behind.

  One second, the road ahead was clear, the next, a heavy cape of ermine had fallen across my windshield. Moments later, my Jeep was buffeted by a gust of wind so strong it nearly pushed me into a ditch. Heart hammering, I clicked on my headlights and hazards and pulled over onto the shoulder to wait out the microburst.

  This was April.

  The cruelest month? More like the most sadistic.

  I thought about my mean-spirited uncle. The state was full of men like Denis Cormier. In the past decade alone, seven papermaking facilities had closed, forcing thousands of people out of work. Most of these proud hardworking individuals had painfully learned that running pulpers and after-dryer machines were not marketable skills in the so-called information economy. Consultants advised them to go back to school and learn coding or nursing—middle-aged men who might never have even graduated high school but had been collecting six-figure paychecks since they were in their twenties.

  I had to remind myself that Denis had been an asshole even before he lost his job at the mill.

  The bucket of arrows in his store intrigued me. Spider-Bite was a popular brand but not so popular that their products were available in every Walmart from here to San Diego. Also, most modern crossbows used longer bolts than sixteen-inchers since lengthier shafts offered greater accuracy in the field. That Denis stocked sixteen-inch Spider-Bite X2s suggested that the crossbowman had been a customer. Perhaps even a regular one.

  Now if I could only persuade my scumbag uncle to give me a name.

  After fifteen minutes, I saw the flashing yellow lights of a snowplow in my rearview mirror. Because the snow hadn’t accumulated more than a few inches, it wasn’t plowing so much as sanding and spraying the asphalt with brine. I followed the big, flashing truck for the next twenty miles until we came to a stretch of road the squall had bypassed.

  Twenty miles back it had been blizzard conditions.

  But here the asphalt was dry, the moon was rising, and it was a smooth ride all the way home to the Midcoast.

  * * *

  The Bolduc Correctional Facility had been opened during the Great Depression as a farm barracks to feed the prisoners housed in the old penitentiary. Over time, it had expanded to become one of the largest beef and dairy farms in Maine. There was still a silo and fields where the inmates grew broccoli, tomatoes, and squash for sale at a roadside stand.

  These days, though, most of the minimum-security prisoners held work-release jobs in the communities—as construction workers, road-crew flaggers, even firefighters—and returned to the prison to eat and sleep. The Farm was famous for not having fences. Yet every once in a while, some inmate with only weeks left on his sentence would walk off into the night. Inevitably these convicts would be recaptured and returned to the main prison, with years tacked onto their sentences for their brief, inexplicable flights of fancy.

  It was after eight P.M. when I pulled into the lot. Two other vehicles—a black SUV and a small hatchback—were parked under the pole lights. The main building resembled an elementary school more than a penal institution. There were even picnic tables on the brittle lawn. The contrast with the state prison up the hill couldn’t have been more stark.

  I had already concluded I had little chance of being admitted. Hero or not, Billy was subject to the rules of the institution. When it came to visiting hours, jails never made exceptions.

  Or so I assumed.

  The guard behind the admittance desk responded to my request with exasperation. “You’ll have to wait. There’s already someone with him now. I swear to God we’ve never had a more popular inmate than Killer Cronk.”

  “Who is with him?”

  “I’m not at liberty.”

  “Is it his attorney?”

  “I told you I’m not at liberty. If you want to wait, be my guest.”

  He gestured toward a row of chairs against the wall. I had barely settled my butt down before an interior door opened and through it stepped Novak Rancic. The suspended correctional officer was dressed in a black leather jacket, gray jeans, and motorcycle boots. His unshaven jaw was blue with stubble.

  He froze when he caught sight of me. I rose to my feet. With the cold-blooded intensity of a cobra being stalked by a mongoose, he watched me cross the room.

  “Officer Rancic.”

  “Warden.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  His tone remained flat. “Extending my best wishes to your friend. He’s quite the hero. Pardoned and everything.”

  “You disapprove of the governor’s decision?”

  “It’s not my place to approve or disapprove.”

  “I was under the impression you were on administrative leave, pending a decision by the attorney general on whether the shooting was justified.”

  He smelled of cologne, and not the cheap stuff either. “That’s right.”

  “Watching you at the hospital, it seemed to me you were pretty quick on the draw.”

  “Chapman was a murderer. He’d already cut up that nurse. He would have cut you if I hadn’t discharged my weapon.”

  “You might have hit her or me.”

  “What can I say? I’ve always been a good shot.”

  “Where are you from, Rancic? Not from Maine, I’m guessing.”

  “What gave me away?” He exaggerated his New York accent. “I’ve lived here a while. Not that it’s any of your business.”

  “How long have you worked in corrections?”

  He smiled for the first time—if you can call an infinitesimal upturn of the lips a smile. “Have a pleasant evening.”

  He retrieved his keys from the guard at the desk and continued outside. I followed him as far as the door and watched through the reinforced window as he remotely started the engine and lights of the SUV at the end. As the big vehicle pulled forward, I thought I caught a glimpse of someone in the front passenger seat. Whoever it was must have been waiting there in the dark and seen me drive in.

  “You’re up, Warden,” said the admittance guard. “You know what to do with your sharp objects.”

  * * *

  Billy was waiting for me in a small, glass-enclosed classroom that seemed to host the prison’s group-therapy and AA meetings. The books on the table had titles such as Living Sober and Relieved from the Bondage of Self. The volumes looked as if they had never been opened.

  He just about leapt to his feet. “What are you doing here, man?”

  “I thought I’d look in on you.”

  “It’s been a parade all day.” He hugged me so hard I thought I heard one of my ribs crack.

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea—hugging people? I have this vague memory of your having been stabbed in the gut thirty-something hours ago.”

  He actually patted his abdomen with one of his big hands. “They stitched me up pretty good.”

  Incredibly, I seemed to feel more tired than he did. I dropped into a cushioned chair as he returned to the head of the table.

  “So I met Rancic on the way in. I didn’t realize you two were on friendly terms.”

&n
bsp; “We’re not.”

  “So why was he here?”

  “Beats me. He said he wanted to shake my hand and thank me for coming to Dawn’s aid.”

  “Now you and she are on a first-name basis?”

  “Nothing like that. I actually expected her to come by today. People say she’s out of the hospital. But I haven’t even seen her since the ER.”

  I was taught that it’s polite to thank someone for saving your life. “Maybe now you can tell me why you wanted me to investigate her background.”

  “I wasn’t thinking straight. I thought she was coming on to me, if you want to know the truth.”

  That possibility didn’t strike me as remotely delusional. I had known many women who lusted after Billy Cronk. Why shouldn’t the sergeant be one of them?

  “It’s got to have been more than that.”

  “She said she could make my life inside better than I could ever imagine. When I told her I loved my wife, she got all offended. Actually, she kind of threatened me. She told me I would prefer to be her friend than her enemy. I figured it was because I hurt her feelings, until Mears started hassling me, big-time. He reported to the sergeant so I figured the payback was coming from her.”

  “I still don’t understand why you said it was a matter of life and death.”

  “I guess I was confused.”

  It seemed to me that Billy wasn’t so much holding back the suspicions that had caused him to summon me. Instead—in light of what had happened in the prison laundry room—he had convinced himself that he had been as paranoid as I’d accused him of being.

  I leaned my elbows on the table. “If she was such a bitch to you, why did you protect her from Chapman and Dow?”

  The answer seemed so obvious to him it was as if he hadn’t heard my question clearly. “She’s a female.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  There was no deeper meaning to Billy’s response. The man clung to outdated ideals that were either chivalrous or sexist, maybe both, maybe neither. If a person was being assaulted by someone stronger than she was, he felt a moral duty to step into the fray.

  “It won’t be long until you’re free.”