Almost Midnight

by Paul Doiron

  He was an anonymous man dressed in black tactical clothes and a balaclava. But I thought I recognized his posture of all things: the stiff military straightness with which he carried himself.

  One click and I could have put a bullet through Beta’s head—assuming the Bushmaster had been sighted in accurately, assuming he didn’t flinch, assuming Emma didn’t raise an arm in front of his face, assuming all kinds of things I couldn’t assume.

  And even if I managed to kill him, what then?

  Alpha had demonstrated he was willing to execute an innocent mother and daughter for the sake of silencing Tyler Pegg. With a trigger pull of his own, he could shoot Aimee Cronk dead, and he would still have five Cronklets to use as bait to draw their father in for the kill.

  “Turn on your radio, Bowditch,” he called. “I’m tired of yelling.”

  I did at the lowest possible volume, afraid that even that setting might give my location away.

  Emma continued to cry, and now her brothers were trying to rush to the rescue, too, so that poor Aimee was forced to drop her knife to corral them, lest Beta start shooting.

  The littlest boy, Brady, picked up the knife and waved it in the air like a cutlass.

  He was Billy Cronk’s son, all right.

  The whisper in my ear was like the hissing of a snake: “Mike, you’ve got to realize that we’ve got the upper hand here.”

  “Who is this?”

  “You don’t know?” He started to chuckle. “And all this time I’ve been assuming you were smart.”

  “Rancic?”

  A single laugh came in response.

  “I take it that’s a no.”

  “Throw out your weapons. If you have Crossman’s radio, then you must also have his rifle and revolver. Plus your own sidearm of course.”

  I remained motionless.

  “You know I have no problem killing one of those brats.”

  “Please, Mike!” Aimee had managed to keep her boys from rushing to their sister’s rescue. They huddled within the comfort of her arms, except bold little Brady, who refused to relinquish his blade.

  “Do you really need a demonstration of my resolve?”

  His resolve. The last occasion I’d heard the strange turn of phrase eluded me. Then the memory arrived with a forceful immediacy. Me sitting at a table in the hospital cafeteria. Him across from me, toying with a salt shaker.

  How had I been so blind?

  Alpha was Angelo Donato, deputy warden at the Maine State Prison.

  42

  The man in the black balaclava had to be Donato’s right-hand man, Sergeant Hoyt. He displayed the same ramrod posture I’d noticed when we met at the hospital. I should have been able to identify Beta from the stick up his ass alone.

  “I have a question for you, Angelo.”

  Hearing his name, realizing I had belatedly deduced his identity, gave him pause.

  “What?”

  “When did you start using your own product?”

  Every minute I could keep Donato off-balance was a minute when I didn’t need to start voluntarily disarming.

  He dispensed with the radio: “Just throw out your goddamn guns!”

  Hoyt followed his commanding officer’s lead by shouting, “Do it, Bowditch!”

  Somehow I needed to take both men out before they could harm any of the Cronks. My mind kept attacking the problem, looking for an opening. But every option resulted in one of Billy’s family being shot.

  “I could see how unhealthy you looked when I saw you at the hospital,” I said, playing for time. “When you and I first met—how many years ago was that?—you were as strong as a bull. When did you get hooked on the heroin you were smuggling into the prison?”

  “Do you want us to kill them all?” Donato answered. “Keep talking and we will.”

  “Mike, please!” Aimee said.

  “Is that why your wife left you—because of your drug use? I noticed your wedding ring was missing. She took the kids, right? I remember you have kids.”

  “Hoyt,” said Donato. “Shoot the boy.”

  Aimee rose from her crouch. “No!”

  The prison guard dropped the girl to the ground, and then, to everyone’s surprise, Brady Cronk lunged with the knife at Hoyt’s wounded shin. The man found it impossible to get the barrel of his carbine in the right position to take a shot without firing into his own leg. He stumbled away from the boy berserker.

  I never formed a plan. It all happened too quickly for me to apply my rational mind to the unfolding events. I think I intended to shoot Hoyt, who stood fully exposed in the scope.

  But before I could squeeze the trigger, the strangest thing happened. In that eerie-green circle of my scope, I saw Hoyt arch his back sharply, almost as if he’d received an electrical shock. His masked face lifted toward the hazy sky and he lost his grip on his rifle, which swung and danced on its bungee sling.

  Then his head dropped in amazement and confusion.

  An arrow was sticking through his chest. The broadhead had pierced his back and ribs and was protruding through the soft tissue beside his sternum. He pressed a hand to the strange object that had impaled him and only succeeded in puncturing his palm on its razor edges.

  Seconds later, he was dead.

  I turned toward the spot I had last heard Donato’s voice and began squeezing off rounds.

  I had expected to receive fire in return, but Alpha was a combat veteran of Afghanistan and not prone to dumb panic. The moment he saw Hoyt collapse, he must have realized that he was outnumbered. Worse, he didn’t have a clue who had fired the arrow or where the archer was hiding.

  I was pretty sure I knew. But I didn’t want to get my hopes up.

  I swung the scope around for a peek at the cabin and found, to my relief, that Aimee and the kids had scooted under cover.

  Donato must have had an escape vehicle stashed somewhere. He would be making for it now. The truck would have to be parked far enough down the Tantrattle Road that I hadn’t seen it from the gate.

  I gambled that the men had all ridden in together, except for whoever had guarded their sacrificial lamb, Peaslee. I wasn’t sure how Gorman could have known where I was holed up, but he was a local with all kinds of connections, and it didn’t matter who’d told him.

  A bullet ricocheted off the trunk above my head. Then another, ripping loose scales from the pine.

  Donato had somehow circled around behind me.

  I rolled over and over, trying to get the tree between us again.

  For all my time stalking game and the tactical training I received each year, I had only been in a few firefights. Compared to a war fighter such as Donato, I was out of my depth. Pride had always been the chief of my vices, and now it was going to get me killed.

  Except that Donato had other plans than to finish me. Maybe he feared the archer was too close.

  I heard his heavy footsteps as he sprinted down the trail.

  Those two shots had been suppressive fire; he’d needed a moment of me ducking my head to get past.

  Leaves and pine needles stuck to my muddy clothes. Blood had plastered the knit cap to my head wound. I clawed my way to my feet.

  I followed Donato down the trail. My pace was brisk: a jog not a run. I made sure to pause and scan the woods ahead in case my target had stepped off the path to attempt another ambush.

  There were multiple sets of bootprints heading into the camp, but only one set heading out. From the depth and the heaviness of the toe marks, I could tell that Angelo Donato was running all out.

  I picked up speed.

  Suddenly I heard a single gunshot ahead.

  I stopped short, raised my rifle. I became a Cyclops; my one eye was the scope.

  Careful, careful.

  Even before I reached the place where I’d knocked Crossman cold, I could guess what I would find. Donato had executed his unconscious collaborator. One less witness who might testify against him.

  A moment later I heard a met
allic screech. Donato, unable to vault the gate, had swung his legs over. He was opening his lead on me. I picked up my pace.

  Once he got past my Scout, and Peaslee’s Ram, it would be a straight shot to his vehicle if it was hidden where I expected it to be hidden.

  I had yanked the earpiece out of my ear minutes ago. But the pigtail wire was still attached to my body. When the radio crackled, I fumbled to push the receiver in place again. What I heard was a long scream.

  Then groans, labored breaths, curses.

  I advanced carefully, hearing only Donato’s side of the conversation, the words he could barely spit out.

  “I should have known.”

  Something unintelligible muttered in response.

  “Fucking fool. She played you. She played everyone.”

  Something more. Through the earpiece it sounded less like human speech and more like the grunt of some beast.

  “Do it!”

  The microphone picked up the thump of the arrow as it pierced Donato’s throat. There was some gurgling, then a crash, then a long stretch of nothing.

  I trotted forward, but I was farther behind than I’d realized.

  Because, before I could reach the gate, another man spoke through the radio. “Do you read me, Mike?” said Billy Cronk.

  I fumbled to turn off the muting function. “I’m here.”

  “Are they all OK?”

  “Yeah, they’re safe, Billy.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Donato?”

  “He won’t be getting up again.”

  “I’m coming down.”

  “I need to see Aimee and the kids. I’ll meet you halfway.”

  He did.

  43

  Billy was still dressed in his prison blues, still wearing his size-fourteen sneakers. The crossbow was the one I had purchased at Fairbanks Firearms. He’d found it inside my Scout when he’d arrived and grabbed it as the only lethal weapon available.

  “How did you get ahead of him?” I asked.

  “You kept running toward where he was. I ran toward where he was going to be.”

  Billy’s long blond hair hung loose about his shoulders. His cheeks were scratched from fighting his way through the underbrush. But his eyes were clear and bright. He seemed recharged.

  “So you cut through the woods to get in front of him?”

  “Barely did so. He was a fast mother.”

  “I have so many questions, Billy.”

  “I need to see my family first. You’re a smart guy, though. You’ll find a few answers down the road. We’ll be up at the cabin waiting for whatever comes next. It looks like a cozy place.”

  “It is.”

  He left me with the crossbow and a set of car keys. Then he strode up the trail, his broad shoulders visible for less than a minute before the fog dissolved his silhouette.

  I continued downhill until I came to Donato’s lifeless body. I inspected the corpse. One crossbow bolt had pierced his lung. The other had split his Adam’s apple with the accuracy of William Tell.

  Under his black jacket and shirt, Donato had been wearing a Class III ballistic vest not unlike the one I wore when on duty. Hoyt had probably been wearing similar protection. Irony of ironies: Kevlar vests, being woven of superfibers, are exceptionally effective at stopping blunt objects, including bullet slugs, from penetrating them. They do less well against pointed weapons and are nearly useless against blades. A broadhead arrow fired by a crossbow with even a moderate draw weight was just the thing to have stopped these armored men.

  Standing over his cooling body, I recalled Donato’s last words. “She played you. She played everyone.”

  He must have meant Dawn Richie. But how had she fooled anyone when she’d come within inches of having had her throat slashed?

  I placed the crossbow in the back seat of my Scout and, this time, locked the doors.

  The key fob Billy had handed me had a button you could push to remotely unlock the vehicle. I pressed it and heard a tinny beep ahead.

  Maybe a hundred yards down the road I found the Land Rover Defender in which Donato and his men had driven into the forest. Parked behind it, bumper to bumper, was a white Honda Fit that had seen better days. The car looked to be half the size of the sport utility.

  I could understand why Aiden Cronk, seeing the subcompact turn in my driveway, had described it as “Real small. Like the smallest car I’ve ever seen.”

  The registration clipped to the driver’s visor was in the name of Tyler Pegg. What was it that he knew that had cost him his life—that it was Donato who hired the two prisoners to assassinate Dawn Richie before she ratted him out to his superiors?

  Seeing the car answered one question, at least.

  Billy must have hiked from the Bolduc Correctional Facility to the Peggs’ house, hoping to catch a ride with the one guard he considered trustworthy. Or maybe he had intended to “borrow” the vehicle.

  According to Klesko, the fingerprint and footprint evidence showed that Billy had never gotten farther into the house than the mudroom, where, presumably, he’d found the keys he needed to abscond with the clown-size Honda. He might have arrived while the Peggs were slowly expiring from carbon monoxide or after they were dead. Because the gas is odorless, and he was there so briefly, he might never have noticed anything was amiss. He might still believe that Tyler Pegg was alive. That would be hard news for me to break to him.

  I didn’t consider it to be disturbing the crime scene to back the stolen car down the road until I could get a cell phone signal.

  Charley had tried calling me eleven times before he broke down and left me a voice mail with the big secret he had dug up and had hoped to spring on me “in person.”

  “Sometimes I wonder if I taught you too well, young feller. You were right to have me check the transfers out of Machiasport in the months prior to the closing. Turns out that one foresighted guard managed to find work at the Maine State Prison six months before Sergeant Richie made the leap. You might recognize his name: Novak Rancic. I’d call that quite the coincidence, wouldn’t you?”

  * * *

  I met Steve Klesko and his detectives, along with the chief medical examiner and technicians from the Evidence Response Team, halfway along the Tantrattle Road. I hadn’t minded waiting alone, listening to the birds awaken in the predawn darkness: first a cardinal, then the robins. I figured the Cronks could use every second together as a temporarily reunited family. I also needed time to get my story straight.

  Because I would be damned to hell before I gave evidence that might send Billy Cronk back to prison.

  Let the Warden Service fire me.

  If the attorney general offered me immunity, and I still refused to testify, I was more than willing to go to jail to protect my friend.

  While I’d been waiting for the first responders to arrive, I returned Charley’s call and told him the actions I was prepared to take if need be.

  “Are you sure you’re willing to pay that price?” the old man had asked. He had been a prisoner of war in Vietnam and knew something about the toll incarceration took upon the mind as well as the body. “Are you willing to trade your own freedom for your friend’s?”

  “In a heartbeat.”

  “It won’t matter if they have evidence that he committed felonies beyond those for which he was pardoned.”

  “Then Billy and I can share a cell.”

  “I’m proud of you, Mike.”

  As it turned out, Charley had congratulated me on my brave decision too soon.

  Within minutes of his arrival, Klesko had presented me with a cell phone and asked me to look at the image displayed. The screen showed a document affixed with the state seal. The detective directed me to the last paragraph:

  WHEREFORE, upon full consideration of the facts previously stated, I do hereby grant William James Cronk a FULL AND FREE PARDON respecting all such offenses of which all are to take notice.

  The Penguin’s florid signature follow
ed.

  “He commuted the sentence, too,” added Klesko.

  “When did this come through?”

  “The same night Billy walked out of Bolduc.”

  “So was he free to go or not?”

  “Do you want the technical answer or—never mind. In light of what you told us, I wouldn’t expect pushback from the governor for Billy jumping the gun.”

  “What about the attorney general, though? Isn’t it up to Hildreth to determine whether the statutes were followed?”

  “Hildreth has enough to worry about. It’s in everyone’s best interest for your friend Cronk to disappear from the news. The deputy warden of the Maine State Prison orchestrated a conspiracy resulting in multiple homicides and the attempted murder of Cronk’s wife and kids. There isn’t a politician on earth who’s going to say the man was wrong to protect his family after having demonstrated his heroism—especially with an election looming.”

  “In other words?”

  “I’m not a lawyer, but I have it on good authority that if Cronk tells the truth about everything he did and why he did it, he’s going home a free man before the night is over.”

  I didn’t bother to mention to him that the Cronks were basically homeless.

  * * *

  “Why don’t they stay at the camp?” Ronette Landry suggested.

  I had returned to the cordon at the base of the road after having walked the state police detectives through the crime scene. The clouds above the mountains were swirled red and gold from the rising sun.

  “Stay here?” I said.

  “Unless it would be too traumatic after what happened.”

  “One thing I can say about the Cronks is that they are a resilient family. I’m sure they’d be delighted to accept. I honestly can’t think of a better place for Billy to reenter the outside world. Are you sure the colonel will go along with this, though?”

  “I think it will depend on who asks him.”