Running Dark

by Joseph Heywood

  “Jimmy,” the boy said. “Okay. Him there,” he added, looking down at Kobera.

  “Detective Kobera is helping us. He wants to play pretend.”

  “Not him-her, him-Cap’n,” Chomsky said.

  “Jimmy won’t hurt you.” Service held out his hand and Kobera tossed the badge to him. Service pinned it on the boy’s shirt and the boy stared down at it, beaming with pride. Him-Cap’n? They were close to something, he could feel it. But what? The boy had something firmly in his mind, but how could he get it out of him?

  “Badge.”

  “Gumby?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Pretend one more time?”

  “Okay.”

  They went through it again, and his lawyer declared, “That’s enough, Eugene!”

  Chomsky glared at her and said defiantly, “Gumby!” He tapped his chest. “Badge.”

  Linton’s head dropped.

  “Thanks, Gumby. You did great,” Kobera said.

  Service patted the boy’s massive shoulders. “You see where we are?” he asked Kobera.

  “If this reenactment is even halfway close, there’s no way Anise Aucoin stabbed him.”

  “Do I get an explanation?” Linton asked.

  “When we have one, Counselor,” Detective Kobera said.

  “Badge mine?” Gumby interrupted.

  “Yes, you earned it,” Kobera told the boy. “Thanks.”

  “Let’s talk to the surgeon who patched him up,” Service said when they were outside the room.

  “I’ve got all the medical reports.”

  “I want to hear the words come out of his mouth.”

  The surgeon met them in the doctor’s lounge and immediately lit a cigarette. There was dried blood on his scrubs and his hair was greasy. “Jimmy,” the doctor said.

  Kobera said, “Dr. Guild, Grady Service of the DNR.”

  “It’s Fred,” the doctor said, shaking hands. “What can I do you guys for?”

  The man had a powerful grip. Service reminded him of the case.

  “I remember,” the surgeon said. “It’s all in the medical records.”

  “I just wanted to hear it from you.”

  “Sure. The stab wounds were upward and from the boy’s right.”

  “Based on?”

  “My eyes and ten years in Detroit Receiving Emergency. They like blades down there almost as much as guns.”

  “Why didn’t the blade hit something vital?” Service asked.

  “The third wound was more parallel than the other two. It was still slightly upward, but basically parallel. Up a little bit more and the kid would have had serious problems.”

  “Parallel to the floor?” Service asked.

  “Or the ceiling—take your pick.”

  Service got down on his knees and feigned two quick thrusts into Kobera’s buttocks; then he extended slightly upward and struck again.

  Dr. Guild said, “I think that looks pretty close to what happened. The third blow was meant to go deep. The assailant probably lifted a little to get additional leverage.”

  They thanked the surgeon and walked outside. “You got somebody in mind?” Kobera asked.

  “You agree it couldn’t have been Aucoin?”

  “Theoretically. The assailant was in the closet. If not the girl, who?”

  “I’m working on that,” he said.

  “You going to tell Hegstrom?” Kobera asked.

  “In time,” Service said. Where the hell had he put the damn rifle slugs?

  42

  TRENARY, MAY 16, 1976

  “Who’s the ‘Cap’n’?”

  Joe Flap had vacated his house for the night to visit a friend in Ishpeming.

  Cecilia Lasurm arrived around 8 p.m. and stood in the dining room, shaking her rain hat like a wet dog. “U.P. weather,” she said.

  “It rains everywhere,” he reminded her.

  “Not in the Gobi Desert,” she said, tilting her head back to kiss him. “I was beginning to think our time had passed,” she said, hugging him gently, and after they lingered in the embrace, she turned away and sat down at the dining room table. “You pushed it too close out there on the lake,” she said.

  “Thanks to Moe,” he said.

  “Word is he never touched you.”

  “Not with his hands. He tried to give me the last rites with a weighted priest.”

  Lasurm’s eyes were locked on him. “That’s Moe. I’ve been visiting Anise,” she added. “I do most of the talking. Near as I can tell, she’s been on junk since she left.”

  “How’re you?” he asked.

  “My diagnosis is the kind that doesn’t change. I’m coping.”

  “Anise didn’t stab the boy that night,” he said. “I think I have proof.”

  “Actual evidence?” Her eyes were intense.

  “The detective on the case buys it,” he told her.

  “She refuses to talk about it,” Lasurm said. “Odd had a psychologist talk to her. He thinks she was too high to remember any of it.”

  Service remembered the blank look on the girl’s face that night. “Maybe she will now.”

  “Have you told Odd?” Lasurm asked.

  “Not yet. We know Eugene didn’t stab himself. We know Ivan Rhino was in custody in the patrol car at the time, and we’re pretty sure Anise didn’t do it. All we know for certain is that the boy got stabbed.”

  “You’re not boosting my confidence,” she said. “Nobody else was there.”

  “Who’s the ‘Cap’n’?” he asked. Gumby and Ivan Rhino had been involved with Anise Aucoin, who was a Garden woman, and Gumby was now talking about “him-Cap’n.” It was a stretch, Service knew, but maybe there was another Garden link—and who would know better than Cecilia?

  Lasurm lowered her eyes. “The army ranger captain or the fishing boat captain?”

  “There’s two of them?” Shit, he thought.

  “Just one. For a while he claimed he served as a ranger in Vietnam, but I knew he was a cook with a habit and he never made it to Vietnam. They booted him out on a general discharge.”

  “A step above dishonorable,” the said.

  “I suppose,” she said. “When he got into fishing with the rats, he insisted whoever worked with him address him as captain. It’s Moe,” she said. “Moe is the Cap’n.”

  “Moe Lapalme?” Service said.

  “Moe Lapalme,” she echoed. “What’s Moe got to do with this?”

  “Everything,” Service said. If he could find the damn slugs and get a match.

  43

  MOSQUITO WILDERNESS, MAY 17, 1976

  “Aren’t we a little young for brain farts?”

  It was cold again, in the mid-forties and raining, and Service spent the day looking for trout fishermen, but few were out. Most native trout-chasers preferred live bait or spinners, and wouldn’t get serious about their fishing until after July 4 when the rivers would be down and clear again.

  John Voelker, the former state supreme court judge turned writer, was a legend in the fly-fishing community, but locals thought of him as eccentric and still clung to their old ways. Too bad for them. Just after noon there was a two-hour hatch of dark Hendricksons over a riffle in the Mosquito, and just downstream in a long run the surface was alive with feeding fish catching emergers and cripples. On the walk back to his vehicle he saw a sow bear and three cubs. She woofed and sent them up a tree before loping away. He knew she would be close and watching him, but it just proved that not every mother bear turned psycho when people came near her cubs.

  He was still taking heavy doses of ibuprofen, and the headaches were finally more or less under control. The bug hatch had gotten him in the mood to fish, but the fly rod he usual
ly kept in the trunk of the Plymouth Fury wasn’t there. His memory was just not working. This morning he could not find his boots, and was forced to wear the old pair that pinched his feet. He already felt a blister building on one of his heels, and told himself it was his own damn fault.

  There were two worm-dunkers working Lilah Creek just north of the wilderness. Service watched them while Hendricksons came off, the men oblivious to the hatch and rising fish. Once people got locked into a method, they were blind to other possibilities. Everyone had blind spots. He wondered how many he had.

  Service knocked off at five. The fishermen could have the rivers tonight. His feet hurt, and the missing slugs were still eating at him.

  Mehegen’s truck was parked by the Airstream and she was sitting on his stoop. She wore boots, tight jeans, a hooded gray sweatshirt, and a faded Detroit Tigers ball cap.

  “Hey sailor, buy a girl a beer?” Her grin disappeared as he approached. “You don’t look well at all.”

  “I’m better,” he said.

  “Than what?”

  He opened the door and let her in. “Couple of beers in the fridge,” he told her. He sat down and took off his old boots and peeled down one sock. There was a puffy redness the size of a dime on his heel, a blister for sure.

  “Grady?” Mehegen said. She was holding the fridge door open, looking inside. “What’s this all about?”

  She pulled out his boots and held them up. She was smiling.

  “Is there also an evidence bag in there?” he asked, joking.

  She leaned over, looked around, and pulled out a plastic bag. It dangled from her hand. “Aren’t we a little young for brain farts?”

  44

  BOAT-EATER SHOALS, MAY 19, 1976

  “You ready ta get your feet wet again?”

  Sergeant Blake Garwood was silent as he steered the twenty-foot Fat Rat out of Gladstone, across from Squaw Point marine navigation light, and headed south toward Little Bay de Noc. Grady Service adjusted the straps on his life preserver and grimaced in the icy mist. Yesterday he had taken the slugs up to the state police lab in Negaunee, and met with Detective Kobera to share his thinking—that Moe Lapalme had been in the room with Anise Aucoin and was the one who stabbed Gumby. If the slugs from the poached deer in the cabin matched Lapalme’s rifle, they had a good shot at tying Moe to Aucoin and Ivan Rhino, and the prosecutor could use this information to work a deal with Rhino—in return for evidence against Lapalme. He was headed out onto the big lake again for another marine patrol, but his mind was behind him, on land, when Garwood interrupted his thinking. “Coast Guard reports a trawler on Boat-Eater Shoals,” the sergeant said.

  “Long way from the Garden,” Service said. “For rats.” From what he had seen, the rats tended to cling to the waters off the Garden Peninsula. The Boat-Eater Shoals were a few miles off the Stonington Peninsula and just northeast of Minneapolis Shoals. As usual, Stone had called the night before and asked him to go with Garwood.

  “You ready ta get your feet wet again?” Stone had asked.

  “Not literally,” Service told his LT.

  “Blake’s solid,” Stone added.

  “Good,” Service told the man. He was still having headaches, but they were lessening in their severity, and work was work. You couldn’t do the work only when you felt okay.

  He had thought it would be a routine patrol until the Coasties called in to give them a heads-up. The icy drizzle and a growing wind didn’t help.

  “Doubt it’s rats,” Garwood said. “We’ve had some reports of unlicensed Wisconsin boats working our waters. They probably figure we’re so busy over to the Garden that they can slip in and pick up a couple of bonus loads. Should be easier than a rat patrol,” he added. “You okay with this?”

  Service nodded.

  Garwood throttled back to idle a couple of miles from the shoals and let the boat drift, pushed by a steady north wind. “We won’t be able to turn a trawler if we have to chase,” the sergeant said. “And they won’t be able to out-fast us if we catch them pulling nets, so we’re just gonna take ’er easy, work our way in slowly, and look for their lights.”

  “Then what?” Service asked, thinking about the botched assault on Moe Lapalme’s boat.

  “Depends on what we see,” Garwood said with a shrug.

  Why was this stuff so unplanned, so off-the-cuff? The department needed more people for marine patrols, and more and better boats to do the job. At least tonight they had the rat boat to give them some speed. What hurt most was a strong sense that Lansing didn’t really care: In time, commercial fishermen would be bought out, and only tribals and sportfishermen would remain. All this effort and risk was for nothing but principle. But at least he had found the slugs. That was a definite plus for today.

  “Lights to port,” Garwood said. It was a few minutes before midnight, and the drizzle had turned into a blustery rain with variable winds going from soft breezes to powerful gusts.

  Garwood had his binoculars up. “Barely moving, but their stern is lit. I think we got lucky. They’re lifting nets. We can board her.”

  Service cringed at the words, asked, “Numbers?”

  “Boat that size, three, maybe four total crew. We’ll try to come in quiet, run dark and silent, tie up to them, and go aboard.”

  This sounded better than a high-speed chase and the Errol Flynn approach. “What’s the layout?”

  “Forty-footer. They bring nets up along the transom and over the starboard gunwale. Power and controls are forward. I’ll angle us in and slide over. You go first and make straight for the helmsman forward. I’ll take the crew aft.”

  “And if they cut their nets and run?”

  “Not likely—nets cost too much. Remember, they’re all about the money.”

  Service had his doubts, but Garwood was in charge, and not all keyed up like Colt Homes had been the other time.

  As they drifted in, their sounds were masked by the sound of winches in the trawler, which was shaped like a double-decker baguette. When their nose rubbed the wooden planks of the larger boat, Service went over the gunwale into the opening. Two men on the opposite side were peeling fish from green nylon netting. Two other men were standing forward at the controls.

  The eyes of the two men ahead of him widened and one of them shouted, “Oh shit!” Before Service could announce himself, Blake Garwood came vaulting across, bumped him, and stumbled forward into the two men working the net. Service watched as Blake suddenly lifted up and went sprawling over the gunwale of the other side—and was gone. The two men with the nets stood up and looked at him and at the men up front, and nobody seemed to know what had happened or what to do.

  “Drop nets!” bellowed one of the men up front as he slammed the twin throttles forward and the boat surged. The two aft crewmen started doing something to the nets.

  “Michigan Department of Natural Resources!” Service screamed. “DNR! Stop the fucking boat!”

  “Don’t stop, boys!” the man at the throttles shouted over the roaring engines.

  Service went forward, pulled out his revolver, and ordered, “Stop!” He fired two rounds through the roof. The captain immediately pulled the throttles back and the boat lurched as it lost momentum and gave way to the waves coming onto the bow.

  Jesus, Service thought, Where was Blake? They had to get him. Fast. The men stared at him and he stared back. No sound. Shit—the jerk had cut the engines off completely. “Start her up again,” Service ordered, the revolver still in hand. “You’d better hope my sergeant is all right, or you are in deep fucking shit.”

  “We never touched him,” one of the men in back said.

  “You got spotlights?” Service asked.

  “Somewhere,” the captain said. He was small with a ratty white beard tinged red in the low cabin light. “Find them and
get this thing turned around. Take her slow and easy.” He could picture the stinking tub running over Garwood.

  Ten minutes later a green flare shot up into the night sky and fizzled.

  Service saw the origin and had the captain steer toward it. Since firing the shots, the crew had been cooperative. They soon spotted Blake Garwood and hauled him in, placing a blanket over his shoulders.

  “Nobody touched me,” the sergeant said sheepishly. “I slipped on something, caught my foot, and went over the side. I heard shots.”

  “I needed to get their attention,” Service said.

  “You two scared the bejeezus outta us,” the captain said. “We come for fish, not to hurt nobody.”

  “Why’d you run?” Service asked.

  “Reflex,” the captain said, avoiding eye contact.

  Garwood had managed to secure the Fat Rat to the trawler before making his dramatic entrance—and exit. Now they headed north to Escanaba, towing the smaller boat. The captain was not happy, but resigned himself to having his trawler impounded until he could post a bond and get a lawyer to work out the return. He made coffee for Garwood, and Service sat smoking and studying the layout. There was a door in the center of the deck. “What’s that?”

  “We call it the kiddie hole,” the captain said. “Guy owned the boat before me used to take his kids out and pull up on shallow shoals and open that door and let his kids dip smelt with nets.”

  As they approached Escanaba, Service said to his sergeant, “You had marine flares.”

  “No shit,” Garwood said. “I had nightmares since you took your swim, and figured I’d add a little insurance. I bought ’em myself. I got two years until retirement,” he added. “Then I’m moving to the mountains in Tennessee and I don’t ever want to see another bloody boat.”

  45

  ESCANABA, MAY 26, 1976

  “You’re dead when I get out.”

  Serverino “Sandy” Tavolacci was standing outside the Delta County Jail chewing a cigar stump. He was short and wide and built like a wrestler. It was fifty degrees and overcast, but he wore dark sunglasses and a black trench coat with the collar turned up. His hair was brushed straight back and glistened. Tavolacci, Service had learned, was becoming the mouthpiece of choice for major poachers in the central and western Upper Peninsula.