Running Dark

by Joseph Heywood

  “She’s in the Marquette County Jail charged with attempted homicide and felonious assault, and probably some counts of grand theft. Odd Hegstrom is her lawyer.”

  She ignored this as she walked out the door. Her departure was so abrupt that he wasn’t sure what to think. Only one thing was certain: He’d hit a nerve. He immediately began to question the jailed woman’s Garden connection and Cecilia Lasurm’s motives. She was their sole informant so far. Or was she? What if she was working for the other side? He refilled his coffee cup and took off his boots. Even if it was a setup, he knew he had to go to the Garden.

  16

  GARDEN PATROL (AIR RECON), JANUARY 31, 1976

  “ . . . look for shadows on da snow.”

  Joe Flap tended to the controls of his single-engine Beaver with a disinterest that had Grady Service in a cold sweat. They had taken off from Escanaba at 11 a.m., headed northeast, and looped south to run down the west coast of the Garden Peninsula. For the first time in weeks they had seen a cloudless, snowless sunrise, and though a bluebird sky surrounded them, the flight was anything but smooth. It was vaguely reminiscent of the chop-chop-chop of running a snowmobile across the ice of Big Bay de Noc.

  Joe Flap said, “Toivo-da-Yooper’s down Detroit for da Red Wings game, eh. It bein’ Detroit, dere’s flatlanders in da row behind ’im, and dis guy’s yackety-yack and says real loud, ‘Only two tings come down Canada: hockey players and hookers.’”

  Flap looked to see if Service was listening before continuing. “Toivo, he turns around real slow, eyeballs da jerk, and says, ‘Da wifey’s from Canada.’ Da flatlander’s eyes get real big an’ he says, ‘Yeah, what position does she play?’”

  Service let the pilot laugh himself out and said, “Three things come from Canada.”

  Flap scrunched up his face. “Eh?”

  “They send us snow, too.”

  The pilot clucked and shook his head. “Was a joke.”

  Service stared out at the Garden Peninsula as they cruised at 120 miles per hour. There was no wind at ground level, and not much at two thousand feet—when Flap cared enough to keep the altimeter needle steady. Service saw fields and farm sections and pastures, snow-covered roads, woodlots and rolling hills, the whole thing looking idyllic and benign, the picture of serenity from above; he pictured hardy people in their houses, fires crackling in their fireplaces and wood burners. Blue-gray plumes of wood smoke wafted from chimneys and corkscrewed straight up until the surrounding air skinned the heat out of the rising air.

  “What’re we lookin’ for?” Flap asked.

  “Nothing in particular. Just give me the Joe Flap special look at the Garden.”

  Flap considered this. “Well, I ain’t pranged here,” the pilot said, adding, “yet.”

  They crossed US 2 west of Garden Corners and headed south along the peninsula’s jagged western shoreline. Service had a map in his lap and traced their route: the wide half-moon arc of Jack’s Bluff and the insinuation of Valentine Point and Kates Bay, which barely jutted in from Big Bay de Noc; Ansels Point; the two-mile-long Garden Bay; Puffy Bay next; then the massif of Garden Bluff, and off to the west in the bay, Round and St.Vital islands. Ahead were South River Bay, Snake Island, and Middle Bluff, which marked the location of Snail Shell Harbor in the lap of Fayette State Park; Sand Bay lay south of the park; the jagged cliffs of Burn’t Bluff next, and Sac Bay tucked politely beneath the towering bluff’s southern bulge. Then, on down to Fairport with Rocky, Little Summer, and Summer islands off to the south, and farther out, the purple-gray silhouettes of Poverty, Gravelly, Gull, and St. Martin islands.

  Service used his binoculars to scan for nets or lift shacks on the ice, but saw nothing.

  Joe Flap braced the stick between his knees and flew with both hands on his own binoculars. “Sometimes you don’t see da lift shacks if dey got da good camo, so youse look for shadows on da snow. An’ look for foot trails packed down where dey move from hole to hole.”

  He added, “Dere at eleven o’clock, see the shadow?” They were near Ansels Point. Service looked and finally located the structure, which, like the one they had encountered on the patrol, was painted to blend in.

  “Can you land anywhere down there?” Service asked.

  “Almost,” Flap said, nosing the aircraft down.

  From two thousand feet the ice had looked smooth and smoky gray-blue. As they descended Service could begin to see the jagged rises, severe moguls, and precipitous pressure ridges that characterized the chaotic surface; by the time they were lined up for a landing, he was sure the ice below would shred the bottom of the plane, but Joe Flap eased the bird down onto the aircraft’s skis with an assertive thump. He let the plane skid and hop for a moment before slamming the throttle forward, jerking the nose of the aircraft into a steep banking climb with the engines screaming their objection. Service thought he was going to lose his stomach.

  The ride on the ice had been bumpy, the sound like an ironing board skimming across a rock garden, but the ride was not nearly as harsh as on a snowmobile or in Stone’s truck, there being more give in the aircraft’s skis and struts. “We’ll run up da eastern shore and cut back across da center,” Joe Flap said, banking the plane south and twisting the nose back to the northeast as they began to gain altitude.

  The one thing Service had seen on the way down was that the various bluffs along the west coast were close to sheer and at least two hundred feet high. Even with snow, he could see that the multihued limestone outcrops were pocked with holes and small caves, offering good places for shooters to hide themselves to ambush lawmen below.

  By contrast the east coast of the Garden Peninsula sprawled before them was more wooded and flatter than the west coast, and punctuated by numerous cedar and tamarack swamps that looked like black tumors from above.

  On their next run Service asked Flap to descend to five hundred feet and fly along the road that led from Garden down to Fairport as he studied the terrain where the rock-throwing had taken place. He saw two-tracks and snowmobile trails within a third of a mile of the cedar swales where the attackers had hidden. He made notes on his maps as they flew. There was little talk, and most of the time Joe Flap was watching the ground with his binoculars and not paying attention to anything that might be at their altitude.

  After nearly three hours of crisscrossing the peninsula, Flap turned the aircraft west toward Escanaba.

  “Do you make night runs down here?” Service asked as they flew along.

  “When dey ask,” Joe Flap said.

  “No, I mean do you make your own night runs down here?”

  “Sometimes I come up and just look around at night. You can see stuff good if dere’s a good moon, or if dey use any light at all. If we had enough people on da ground at night, we might make some good pinches, but dey don’t seem ta want ta do dat, and I can’t blame ’em. Hard enough to deal wit’ rats in daylight, eh.”

  17

  GRAYLING, FEBRUARY 1, 1976

  “All this over fish?”

  He had decided that using Brigid Mehegen to help him get a parachute would not be smart: too close to home, and her grandfather was nosy, eccentric, and unpredictable. Better to get help from someone he knew he could rely on.

  Grady Service and Luticious Treebone were about the same height, but Tree was considerably heavier, the difference being a lot more muscle. When the towering black man swaggered through the swinging doors of Spike’s Keg o’ Nails, all sound stopped—as if all the oxygen had been sucked out of a vacuum jar. The big man smiled, waved a hand regally, and announced, “As you were, people—I ain’t Jimmy Hoffa.”

  The patrons laughed and went back to their conversations.

  Treebone took a seat across a small table from his friend. “How come when you need something, I always gotta drive up to some whiteboy redneck roadhouse?”
r />   “Lots of Detroit people have places up here,” Service said.

  “Not of the brother hue,” Tree said. “You see why I couldn’t be no woods cop. I ain’t got the prejudice, but I gotta see my own people, you know?”

  “And Kalina hates small-town living.”

  Treebone rolled his eyes and nodded solemnly. “There is that.”

  “You bring it?” Service asked.

  “In the trunk. I ever leave you hang?”

  Luticious Treebone took reliability as a religion. Service had graduated from Northern Michigan where he had been a fair student and a competent hockey player. Tree had played football and baseball at Wayne State and graduated cum laude. They both had volunteered for duty in the Marine Corps, and met at Parris Island boot camp; they both took the same specialized training, and spent a tour in the same long-range recon unit in Vietnam, both of them coming back with numerous decorations and little desire to talk about what they had seen or done. Both had attended the Michigan State Police Academy in Lansing and spent two years as Troop road patrollers before transferring to the DNR. After just one year as a CO in Oscoda County, Treebone took a job with the Detroit Metropolitan Police. They had been friends for more than twenty years, and were closer than most brothers.

  “How’s Kalina?” Service asked. Kalina was his friend’s wife. It had been because of her he’d taken the job in Detroit.

  “Wonderin’ how the single life’s sittin’ with you.”

  “I haven’t bought a leisure suit yet.”

  Treebone howled. “They got that disco shit up there?”

  “Hell, we just learned about some guy named Elvis. You gonna ask what I’m up to?”

  Treebone shook his head. “I know you’re going outside the envelope and I really don’t wanna know more than that, man. You believe they give you your daddy’s old territory?”

  “I’m not spending a whole lot of time there,” Service said, and explained to his friend the situation in the Garden Peninsula. He did not talk about his surveillance assignment.

  “All this over fish?”

  “Fish is money.”

  “I hear you, but more money in fish than dope? The brothers hear that, there won’t be no fish left in the Detroit River or Lake St. Clair!”

  “We got dope too,” Service said. “Supposed to be a new thing. You want to see what you can find out about it? Street name is Garden Green.”

  “I heard of that shit, man, but even if they got supply, a buncha Yoopers not gonna be supplyin’ Motown, dig?”

  “If it turns out to be nothing, so be it.”

  “Kalina is dying to know if you’re dating anybody special.”

  “Nothing steady.”

  Treebone laughed. “I told her you’d be married to your job.”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “Bullshit. You gonna invite me up there this summer to chase some of those pretty little brook trout you don’t tell nobody about?”

  “You bet.” Trout fishing was a passion that both men shared. When they first met, Treebone had been a confirmed worm-dunker, but had since converted to fly fishing and—when he had time, which wasn’t often—was learning to tie his own flies.

  “From what you say, it sounds like you boys in green don’t have your act together up in the Garden.”

  “We’re trying.”

  “They sendin’ you in to do a snoop, am I right?”

  Service said nothing.

  “I know you’ll think it through before you commit,” his friend said quietly. “Just remember—this ain’t ’Nam, and you are no longer in the business of capping bad guys. It’s our job to catch ’em, gather evidence, and let the courts take it from there. End of speech. Now can we eat?”

  They were eating cheeseburgers when a young woman in a ski sweater came over to the table and nervously tapped Treebone on the shoulder. “I’m sorry to interrupt your lunch, but do you play for the Lions?”

  “No, ma’am; I just got out of the joint.”

  The woman scrambled away with a red face.

  Service looked at his friend and shook his head. “You just have to stir the pot.”

  “Just reinforcing the stereotype. A big black man’s either an ex-con or a jock.”

  “And everybody north of Detroit is a redneck.”

  “No man, north from Detroit to the bridge they’re rednecks; above the bridge, you motherfuckers are a whole different species—one they don’t even have a word for.”

  Service looked at his friend and saw he was not smiling. “I hope this is not gonna be an armed snoop,” Treebone said.

  When Service didn’t respond, Treebone grimaced.

  “Be cool,” his friend said as they embraced. “You need somebody to get your back, you call.”

  18

  PREACHER LAKE, FEBRUARY 6, 1976

  “Once people take on a deep notion about something, you can’t change their minds.”

  His old man had driven him to the Mimolov swamp when he was thirteen. They had parked on a jack pine plain and walked nearly a mile through muddy swales and cedar tangles until they got to a single ruined building standing on a hummock of high ground. The building’s roof had rotted away, but most of the walls of lime- and fieldstone still stood.

  The old man sat on the stone sill where a window had once been, lit a cigarette, popped the cork of his pocket flask, took a long pull, and said, “What do you see?”

  Service had no idea what the old man wanted; he rarely did.

  “Guess what this place was?” the old man asked with slight irritation.

  “A church or a school?”

  “Church,” the old man said. “Good. Now, what do you see?”

  “The roof’s gone, windows too. Porkies, probably.”

  “Okay. What else?”

  Service saw nothing and leaned against a wall, wishing the old man wouldn’t pull this stuff on him. The stone floor was littered with chunks of stone that had broken off under years of freezing and thawing, and there were holes between the fieldstones, but no sign of nests. He looked along the base of the wall. No spiderwebs, no animal droppings, no tracks in the dust, no sign of animals at all. It was normal for animals to move into abandoned structures almost immediately.

  “No animals,” Service said.

  The old man nodded. “Right. A preacher named Proudfit built a church here, all by himself. Back then the loggers were thicker than mosquitoes. He hired a guy to go round to the logging camps to announce services, and one Sunday the loggers came and found Proudfit hanging. Nobody knew if somebody had hung him, or if he’d done himself in, but the church got marked as dark and people stayed away, and over time it came to be a place where scores got settled. Two men had a beef, they came here and fought it out—sometimes to the death, sometimes with spectators—but usually it was just the two men alone with their hatred. Some say hundreds have died here. More likely it wasn’t anything close to that, but people were afraid of this place. At one time there were a thousand people living within a mile of here. They called it Preacher Lake. Within six months of Proudfit’s hanging, they were all gone, abandoned their shacks and cabins and moved on. The Indians still claim the place has spirits all around it, which is why animals won’t come into it—not a bird, not a snake, not an ant.”

  “There’s no lake,” he told his father.

  “Never was. Just a string of beaver ponds, and they’re long gone.”

  “Do you believe in spirits?” Grady asked his father.

  “Makes more sense to me that Proudfit built this place on bad ground—that there’s something here animals can’t tolerate. ’Course, porkies ate the wood, so not all the animals are afraid of it, right?” The old man dropped a cigarette on the floor and mashed it with the heel of his boot. “Once peop
le take on a deep notion about something, you can’t change their minds. Don’t matter if what they believe makes sense or not,” his father said.

  “Do people still come here?”

  “Not to kill each other. Your great-grandfather showed me this place, and I’ve been comin’ since I was a tyke. I’ve never seen another human being except those I brought. You ever need real privacy, this is your place.”

  Service had never forgotten that day. He had visited the place regularly over the years and had never seen anyone, which he attributed to the area’s isolation and inaccessibility rather than fear of evil spirits.

  It was the perfect place to meet Cecilia Lasurm.

  During his time in Newberry, he had gotten to know the waitress Nikki-Jo Jokola, pals without romantic involvement. When he was ready to place the ad in the Manistique paper, Nikki-Jo took care of it, and they’d put Nikki-Jo’s phone number in; when Lasurm called her, Nikki-Jo told her to dress warm and where and when to meet him.

  He had selected the site so that she had to negotiate a long, almost perfect oxbow in the road, and he had placed himself so that he could make sure she wasn’t being followed. He had arrived three hours before their meeting to wait for her. When she drove by, slipping and sliding, he could see her talking to herself and fighting the steering wheel, but she was alone. He had quickly trotted back to his vehicle to wait for her to reach him.

  When she pulled up, he was waiting on his new Rupp, the motor running. Lasurm looked tired and nervous.

  “You mighta picked an easier place to get to.”

  “We don’t want easy,” he said.

  The snow was knee-deep, the surface crusted over. He had a sled behind the snowmobile, which was loaded with gear. He had already broken trail into the old church, stacked firewood, and arranged an area for their arrival.

  He started the snowmobile and held out his hand for her to get on behind him.