Cutter's Run

by William G. Tapply

  Paris collapsed on the ground. I could see blood trickling down his cheek. He pushed himself up on his elbow. “You guys killed old Noah, too, didn’t you? What’re you dumpin’ in the water, anyway?”

  This time Leon swung the heavy butt of his shotgun. Paris managed to block it with his forearm. The crack of the impact and Paris’s sudden scream left no doubt that a bone had been snapped.

  “Hang on,” said Paul to Leon. “Lay off for a minute. I want to talk to this boy.” He ambled over to where Paris was lying on the ground and looked down at him. “What’s your name?”

  “Fuck off,” mumbled Paris.

  “This here is young Paris LeClair,” said Leon. “A dumb little local kid with a knocked-up girlfriend.” He nudged Paris in the ribs with the toe of his boot, then turned to Paul. “What’re we gonna do with this pitiful little critter?”

  “We’ve got no choice,” said Paul. His hand slipped inside his windbreaker and came out holding an automatic handgun. He pointed the gun down at Paris’s face. “Now you listen to me, boy,” he said.

  Paris started to sit up. He was cradling his broken arm with his other hand. “Up yours,” he said, and he lifted his chin and spat at Paul.

  Paul kicked his shattered arm. Paris screamed and fell back onto the ground.

  “You ready to talk to me?” Paul said softly.

  Paris’s eyes flickered open. He nodded.

  “Does anybody know you came here?”

  “Someone knows, all right,” Paris said. “He’s gonna come looking, too.”

  “Really?” said Paul. “And who would that be?”

  “Ain’t telling you, asshole.”

  “It’s too late to lie, I’m afraid. Not that it would’ve made any difference.” He aimed his automatic at Paris’s face. “You should’ve stayed home with Mommy and Daddy. Too bad…”

  Paris squeezed his eyes shut and turned his head away. He looked like a frightened little boy. Which, of course, he was.

  This was the kid who thought he’d knocked up his girlfriend and was proud of his manhood. The kid who was so affected by watching Schindler’s List that he couldn’t breathe. The kid who said my boys were lucky to have a father like me.

  And the man who I figured had killed Charlotte Gillespie and Noah Hollingsworth was aiming a gun at his face.

  I couldn’t hide in the bushes and watch Paul Forten murder Paris LeClair, too.

  I took a deep breath, got my feet under me, sprang forward through the hemlocks, and charged down the little slope directly at them, howling like an enraged bull elephant. I was vaguely aware of Paul’s head jerking around to look at me. His eyes were wide and his mouth was open. He brought up the gun and started to swing it around at me. I plowed into him, knocking him backward, and we both sprawled on the ground. One of his fingers gouged at my eyes, and I twisted away from his knee as he tried to ram it into my groin. I grappled for the gun with both hands. I got hold of one of his fingers, gritted my teeth, and bent it as hard as I could. I felt it snap. Paul screamed in my ear.

  An arm hooked around my neck and hauled me off him, and then something heavy and hard smashed into my kidneys.

  I lay curled on my side, swallowing hard against the terrible shafts of fire burning in my back.

  “You shoulda minded your own business, Mr. Coyne,” said Leon conversationally. “This ain’t got nothin’ to do with you.” He was standing over me. His shotgun was aimed at my chest.

  Paul came over. He was holding his right hand against his chest, gripping his wrist in his other hand. He peered down at me. “Brady?” he said. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “What’s in the van?” I said.

  Paul shook his head. “That’s none of your business.”

  “You’ve been dumping something poisonous in these old holding tanks,” I said. “And when the water from the beaver pond backed up, it started leaching into the stream. It must be nasty stuff. Charlotte Gillespie’s dog drank it and died. So did the beavers, probably, and it killed all the trout in the pond. What happened? Did Charlotte figure it out? Is that why you murdered her?”

  Paul looked over at Leon. “Come on. Drag him to the tank.” He gritted his teeth. “My fucking finger’s killing me. Son of a bitch broke my finger.”

  Leon leaned his shotgun against his truck, reached down, and grabbed me under the arms. He dragged me over to the fieldstone tank with the plywood top and let me fall to the ground.

  My knee was throbbing. I pushed myself up onto my hands and knees, and a sudden wave of dizziness swept over me. Then I felt my stomach clutch and heave. I bent forward and vomited on the ground.

  “Hell,” said Leon. “I didn’t hit you that hard.”

  “Get the top off the tank,” said Paul to Leon.

  Leon pushed and shoved at the plywood covering and managed to slide it off onto the ground.

  I tried to shake the dizziness out of my head. I was aware of a tingly numbness in my tongue. It felt swollen and hard. The ground seemed to be tipping under me, and I puked again.

  When I looked up, Paul was standing over me. He was holding his automatic in his left hand. I was looking straight up into the bore. “Sorry you’re not feeling well,” he said. “It’ll go away in a minute, I promise you. Come on, now. Stand up.”

  “Fuck you,” I mumbled.

  “Give me a hand here,” he said to Leon.

  Leon grabbed me under the arms and tried to lift me to my feet. I slumped there, too weak and sick to resist, as he wrestled me up onto the edge of the tank so that my head was hanging over the top.

  The odor that rose from it was more rank and rotten than anything I’d ever smelled in any outhouse. I gagged and retched again. I turned my head and aimed for Leon’s pants, but it just dribbled down the front of my sweatshirt. He muttered, “Jesus,” and dropped me onto the ground.

  Then Paul was there again, his automatic only inches from my face. I felt so sick that I almost welcomed the relief that was coming, and I couldn’t do anything except close my eyes and wait for the big white light to flash and then expire in my brain.

  The explosion made my ears ring, and it took me a moment to realize that it was not Paul’s gun that had fired, and that I was not the one who was screaming.

  Paul was writhing on the ground beside me, holding his thigh with both hands. Blood was oozing out from between his fingers.

  Paris was holding Leon’s shotgun in his good hand. It was braced on his broken forearm and pointing steadily at Leon. “Sit down there beside him, Mr. Staples,” said Paris. “Do it now or I swear to God I’ll shoot you, too.”

  Leon shrugged and sat down beside Paul, who was lying on his side, moaning softly. A big puddle of dark blood had formed on the leaves under him. His eyes were closed and his face looked pale.

  Without taking his eyes off Leon, Paris said, “Mr. Coyne, you okay?”

  “I’m awful sick,” I muttered.

  “You strong enough to hold a gun on these guys?”

  I closed my eyes against another wave of dizziness. “I don’t know.”

  Paris came over and handed the shotgun to me. “Just for a minute,” he said. “Come on. Hang in there. You can do it.”

  I braced my back against the side of the tank and held the shotgun in my lap, pointing it at Leon, who was sitting on the ground beside Paul about ten feet from me.

  I took deep breaths. I didn’t want to puke again.

  Paris reached down, picked up Paul’s automatic handgun, and tossed it into the vile-smelling tank. He was holding his broken arm against his stomach, and I could see the pain on his face.

  “I gotta go get help,” he said to me. “Can you keep the gun on them?”

  “I don’t know how long I can hang on,” I said. “I never felt so sick…”

  Leon was grinning. “So now what’re you gonna do, boy?” he said to Paris. “We gonna sit here lookin’ at each other until poor Mr. Coyne dies? Or you gonna let me go?”

  Paris look
ed at me. Then he shook his head. “Neither,” he said. He reached down, took the shotgun from my hands, turned, and shot Leon in the right foot.

  Leon screamed and grabbed at his foot. His boot was half gone, and it was a shapeless lump of oozing blood and raw flesh and splintered white bone.

  Paris tossed the shotgun aside and came over to me. “You gotta do this,” he said. “I only got one arm. Come on. Stand up.”

  He put his good arm around my back and helped me stagger to my feet. I leaned heavily on him while the woods swirled around me. I swallowed hard and took deep breaths, then managed to whisper, “I’m okay.”

  Paris half dragged me to the van and helped me into the passenger seat. Then he went around and climbed in behind the wheel.

  I slumped there in the front seat of Leon’s van, breathing rapidly. Suddenly, bile rose in my throat and spilled onto my lap. “I’m sorry,” I managed to say. “It was the water. I waded in it. Cutter’s Run…”

  Then I felt myself tipping and spiraling, and blackness closed in around me.

  CHAPTER 33

  THE IMAGE APPEARED through gray swirling mists, blurry and distant but vaguely familiar, and as I looked at it, the fog gradually dissolved, and the image came into focus.

  It was Jesus, up there on his cross.

  No, I thought. Couldn’t be. I’d never believed in any of that.

  Sometime later I heard a soft voice calling me.

  I felt a hand on my arm. I turned my head and blinked.

  Alex’s face hovered above me. I tried to smile.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey yourself,” I grunted. My head hurt with the effort to speak.

  “How do you feel?”

  “I thought I was dead. I saw Jesus.”

  She bent and kissed my cheek. “You’re not dead,” she said.

  “He was up there on his cross. I figured that was it. I’d passed over.”

  “You’ve been sleeping for quite a while,” she said. “It was a dream.”

  When I looked past her, I saw that Jesus was still there. I closed my eyes. I didn’t want Alex to be dead, too.

  The next time I dared to look, it was dark and shadowy and both Jesus and Alex were gone.

  A large man with a bald head and a close-cropped gray beard was bending close to me shining a light into my eyes. “How’re you feeling, Mr. Coyne?” he said.

  “Disoriented,” I said. “Fuzz-brained.”

  “Understandable,” he said. “You’ve been asleep for nearly thirty-six hours.”

  “I saw Jesus.”

  He flicked out his light. “Huh?”

  “I saw Jesus on the cross. I figured I’d died and had gone to judgment. Thing is, I’m not a believer.”

  He chuckled. It rambled from deep in his chest. “You’re in Mercy Hospital in Portland, Mr. Coyne. Look.”

  He straightened up and pointed. On the white-painted wall at the foot of my bed hung a crucifix.

  “This is a Catholic hospital?”

  “Right.” He smiled. “I’m Dr. Epstein. So either way, you’re in good shape. A Catholic hospital and a Jewish doctor. The best of both worlds, huh?”

  “What happened to me?”

  “They brought you in early Thursday morning. Your system was in toxic shock. Liver and kidneys on the verge of shutdown. You were semicomatose, dangerously dehydrated, vomiting uncontrollably. Fortunately the young man with you helped us identify the problem and we were able to treat it.”

  “What was the problem?”

  “You were poisoned,” he said.

  “I don’t remember drinking anything…”

  “You didn’t,” said Dr. Epstein. “This was something different. This you absorbed through your skin.” He straightened up. “You’re out of danger now. Looks like you’ll be none the worse for wear. In the future, be careful where you go swimming, huh?”

  He gave my shoulder a squeeze and disappeared. A moment later Alex came in. Behind her glasses, her eyes looked red and smudged.

  “How do you feel?” she said.

  “Thirsty.”

  She put an arm around my neck to prop me up and held a glass for me. I sucked in some room-temperature ginger ale through a straw. It tingled pleasantly on me way down, but it gave my stomach a little jolt when it arrived. I realized that I had an IV sticking into the back of my left hand, and beside my bed a machine was ticking and blinking.

  “I saw that Jesus hanging there,” I told Alex, “and I thought I’d died.”

  “You came close,” she said. “Paris LeClair saved your life. He drove you here and told them what was wrong.”

  “I need another drink,” I said. “Help me sit up, will you?”

  Alex cranked up my bed and bunched a pillow behind me. Then she handed me the glass. I held it and sipped tentatively through the straw. My stomach made a fist. I handed her the glass.

  “I still don’t feel so hot,” I said.

  “You were awfully sick.”

  “What time is it? I mean, what day is it?”

  “It’s Friday, a little after noontime. Paris brought you in here Wednesday night—well, Thursday morning, about three o’clock. It was Sheriff Dickman who told me what happened. He’s anxious to talk to you.”

  “I think I can tell him what he wants to know,” I said.

  “He says you were a hero. He says you saved Paris’s life and solved two murders and prevented a disaster from happening downstream from the tannery.”

  “Paris saved my life, too.”

  She nodded.

  “Wait,” I said. “Dickman called me a hero?”

  Alex smiled. “No. That’s my word. He actually called you a loose cannon. But I think he meant it in the nicest possible way.”

  Alex stayed with me for an hour or so, and then she said she was going home to change and clean up. She kissed my forehead and said she’d be back.

  The nurse took my temperature, listened to my heart and lungs, made notes on a clipboard, asked if I felt like voiding—which I didn’t—then helped me into a chair. I made it with just a touch of dizziness. She put fresh sheets on my bed and fussed around the room, and when she was done she asked if I wanted to get back into bed or stay in the chair. I chose the chair.

  A few minutes after she left, Sheriff Dickman came in. He was wearing a plaid shirt and chino pants. No sidearm, no badge. It was the first time I’d seen him out of uniform.

  “You look like roadkill,” he said.

  “That’s about how I feel,” I said. “I bet you want to know what happened.”

  He pulled up a wooden chair and sat in front of me. “I got a couple versions of it. I’d like to hear yours, if you’re up to it.”

  “The doctor said I was poisoned,” I said. “I got it from wading through Cutter’s Run below the beaver dam. I didn’t drink any of it. It gets you through the skin. The other day after I tried to catch a trout from the pond I felt a little sick. All I did then was dip my hand into the water to see how cold it was. I bet Charlotte Gillespie’s dog took a swim in that pond. That’s what killed him.”

  Dickman was nodding. “You’re right about the pond. See, here’s what—”

  “Wait,” I said quickly. “Let me see if I got it. That company—SynGen—was dumping some kind of toxic shit into those old cisterns at the tannery. When the beavers dammed up the stream, the water backed up into the tanks and the stuff leached out into the pond. The dog got into it and died, and Charlotte must’ve figured it out. Her note. She said she wanted to talk to me. That’s what she wanted to tell me, I bet. About the poison in the pond. But I was in Boston, and by the time I came back to Garrison, it was too late. They’d killed her.” I looked up at Dickman. “How’m I doing so far?”

  “Good,” he said. “They found the poor woman’s body in that cistern by the tannery. She’d apparently been strangled. The dog’s body was there, too, and several housecats. They’d dumped lime on them.”

  “Lime,” I said. “Like in an outhou
se.”

  The sheriff smiled. “To keep the smell down.”

  “After the dog died,” I said, “someone retrieved it from the vet. To make sure nobody ran tests on it, probably. I know who, too.”

  “So do I,” said the sheriff.

  “Paul Forten,” I said. “He killed Noah Hollingsworth, too, right? He strangled them both. Noah must’ve been out pissing off the back of his deck one night and seen the headlights from the truck going in there to dump their stuff. The day before he died, he took out his horse. Bet he went down to the tannery and figured it out. Probably let it slip to Paul Forten. Paul hung out there with Susannah all the time. He knew how Noah got up in the middle of the night. Waited for him and strangled him.” I paused. “What happened to him? And Leon? Paris shot them both.”

  Dickman shrugged. “That he did,” he said. “Forten had a big hunk of his leg blown away, not to mention a busted finger, and Leon Staples has got a mangled foot, and young Paris LeClair has a busted arm and a nasty gash on his face. They took Forten and Staples over to Maine Medical.” He arched his eyebrows. “Forten’s gone.”

  “Gone?” I said. “What do you mean?”

  The sheriff shrugged. “He’s gone. He’s not here anymore.”

  “You let him get away? You didn’t arrest him? He’s a fucking murderer.”

  “The feds claimed jurisdiction. They took him.”

  “The feds,” I said. “I don’t get it.”

  “We talked to a guy named Arthur Tate at an outfit called SynGen,” he said. “Mr. Tate was eager to be helpful. Turns out Forten’s the liaison for some federal agency that had a contract with SynGen to run tests on some new chemical they were evidently developing as a weapon. This stuff is a highly concentrated synthetic that works through the skin. In crystal form it’s inert. Mix it with water and it’s deadly. A piece the size of a grain of salt in a bathtub of water will kill anyone who lies down in it. Dump a scoop into a river and everything downstream that contacts it will die—or at least get damn sick. Supposed to be completely untraceable. SynGen was testing it on animals.”

  “They were dumping the dead animals at the tannery,” I said. “And those animals had this stuff in their systems.”