Ragged Lake

by Ron Corbett

  He would have been in his late twenties. Perhaps early thirties. Well-muscled under the parka. He stared at Yakabuski for a few more seconds, then shrugged his shoulders, as theatrical as could be, turned his eyes to a point on the floor six inches ahead of his feet, lowered his head, and said nothing.

  “Yep. That’s what I thought you’d do. Well, you’re just a sorry sack of shit, ain’t ya, François? Making me do all the work. We should have shot you and kept the other mutt.” Yakabuski walked over to the handcuffed man, stopped a few inches from his face, turned around to look at the people in the bar, and said, “Has anyone figured it out?”

  His eyes travelled around the room. The bartender seemed to be chuckling under his breath. Holly and Gaetan were raising and lowering rock glasses. Buckham was whispering something to Downey. The waitress was staring out the back window. The cook was trying again to dry a rock glass with a wet towel. Nothing in the room seemed quite right. Quite on point. They’re tired, thought Yakabuski. Two days now since the bodies had been found in the squatters’ cabin outside their town. Two days of bad sleep and worry and now a major storm moving in and they were stuck in a dark bar with three cops and a man in handcuffs, dead bodies lying to the east and west of them. Fatigue. Stress. Confusion. Yakabuski was probably looking at a lot of things when he looked around this room.

  “Are you going to tell them, Frankie or am I?”

  He finally got a reaction from the man. A flash of anger that crossed his eyes for only a few seconds before retreating. It reminded Yakabuski of the eyes you saw sometimes on old muskies when they were brought to the surface chasing a lure only to see danger at the last moment then dive back to the bottom. The look a muskie like that would give you before it disappeared.

  He didn’t like to be called Frankie. Yakabuski almost laughed.

  “My Lord, Frankie, are you really going to make me do all the work? Is this what you’re telling me, Frankie?”

  Yakabuski stared at him hard, trying to get another reaction. But the moment had passed. There was nothing in the man’s face now but indifference. Millennia’s worth of old-fish indifference. Yakabuski gave his own languid and theatrical shrug of the shoulders, reached into the pocket of his parka and pulled out a Buckmasters hunting knife. He flipped open the blade and put it to the side of the man’s throat.

  A slight reaction this time. But not much. After leaving the knife there for several seconds, Yakabuski made a quick slicing motion down the man’s left arm. Took two more slices, and then he started pulling goose feathers from the sleeve of the parka. Ripped open the sleeve like it was a rib cage on an operating table. When he bent over he let out a soft whistle and said, “Christ, you got two of them.”

  Buckham and Downey had moved closer and could clearly see what Yakabuski was talking about. Two red thunderbolts. Tattooed on the man’s left forearm.

  “Yep, you’re looking at a read badass, boys. Ain’t that right, Frankie?”

  The man in handcuffs said nothing.

  “Ragged Lake. You must have loved this one.” Yakabuski started laughing.

  “Detective, do you mind telling us what the hell is going on?”

  John Holly. The old fishing guide having enough of the games. Of the pissing contest between the cop and the biker. Yakabuski couldn’t blame him. He was getting tired of it, too.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Holly. What we have here, in Frankie, is an officer-class enforcer of the Popeyes Motorcycle Club. And what you had there, in that survival school out back, was probably one of the biggest methamphetamine labs on the northeastern seaboard.”

  Finally, there was a reaction. The waitress gasped. Buckham and Downey let out near identical loud exhales. Gaetan dropped his rock glass, the ice cubes sliding across the bar. No one made an effort to grab them.

  “I’m guessing it was that big from the size of the explosion. And because good ol’ boys like Frankie were willing to shoot at some cops just for knocking on their front door. But most particularly, I’m guessing because of Frankie himself, a not one- but two-thunderbolt Popeye assassin, sitting right here in the bar.”

  Yakabuski kept on laughing. He knew he shouldn’t be doing it, that it was sending every wrong message he could — to the cops under him, from whom he didn’t want any frivolity for the next few days; to the others in the room, who were confused and scared and wouldn’t know what to think of the officer-in-command laughing like a lunatic; to the man in handcuffs most of all, who might feel emboldened by a captor who lacked balance, who was prone to bouts of extreme emotion. But he couldn’t help it. Maybe he was as tired as everyone else.

  “One last question for you, Frankie,” said Yakabuski, managing to stifle his levity. “It would have been your job to protect the lab. You were the security. How does your boss normally react when someone fucks up as badly as you’ve just fucked up?” The old muskie eyes came back. Yakabuski looked at them and said quietly, “Yep. That’s what I thought.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  During the Second World War, Ragged Lake was a prisoner-of-war camp. The place you sent German sailors plucked from sinking U-boats in the St. Lawrence River. Spies caught red-handed. Nazi sympathizers who got close enough to bad ideology to need to pay a price for it. They were all sent to Ragged Lake to work in the bush camps.

  The prisoners were housed in two bunkhouses built next to the mill. A wooden fence was built around them and barbed wire placed atop. Soldiers from the Rangers reserve unit in High River provided sentry duty in the evening. But in the daytime, the prisoners had the same run of the town as anyone else. They worked in the bush next to men who had been working the camps all their lives. Ate meals in the same cookhouses. Any minute of any workday, the Germans could have made a run for it. The POWs were called Krazy Krauts by people on the Northern Divide, but not a one of them was crazy enough to try to leave. There were nearly three hundred miles of bush between Ragged Lake and the nearest town of any size. How could you escape?

  So Yakabuski was being overcautious in his selection of a cell for the Popeye enforcer. He inspected a dry-goods storage room and a janitorial closet. The storage room had a small ground-level window that didn’t look large enough for a man to crawl through, and the janitorial closet was good and sound but had a hollow-frame door, so Yakabuski chose neither. Instead, the prisoner was put in the walk-in freezer. It had a metal latch you could lock and hard plastic walls. No windows. If you turned off the power, no one would freeze to death and there was a pipe that vented outside.

  With the power cut to the freezer, the light was off even with the door open, and the prisoner stood in the shadows like some back-door-of-the-church penitent, silent and needy, hands tucked behind his back until Yakabuski closed the door with a swoosh and he disappeared. Yakabuski walked back to the bar, and with everyone staring at him, said, “I have to use the phone.”

  . . .

  “Fuck, Yak, what have you stumbled on up there?”

  O’Toole had barely stopped swearing since Yakabuski had reached him. The line this night sounded frail and tenuous, the chief’s voice hollow and distant despite the anger of his words.

  “It’s the Popeyes,” Yakabuski said one more time. “They’ve been operating here four years, I figure. They used the train to ship everything in and out. It was pretty slick. Someone at BMR has to be in on it.”

  “Four years. That’s quite a coincidence.”

  “I know.”

  “The drug boys thought it was coming up from Boston.”

  “Dead wrong. Tell ’em I said that.”

  “Fuck. And you’ve taken out how many of them?”

  “One that we know of. We didn’t actually take him out. It was his buddy who shot him. I would think there are bodies inside the lab. And I’ve got one guy locked up in a meat freezer.”

  “How are the kids doing?”

  When Yakabuski had left to make his phone
call, Downey was sitting in a chair pulled close to the walk-in freezer. He was staring at the metal door with a sneering satisfaction, the sort of smile you see on the face of some hunters posed beside a kill, a look of mean-spirited superiority. Yakabuski had felt compelled to tell him not to try and talk to the prisoner. Buckham was sitting at the bar, where he had sightlines on everyone else. Only occasionally did he look at Downey sitting in the kitchen. And then, as though he didn’t like the person he had suddenly seen, he looked away.

  “They’re all right.”

  “So, the squatter family, they stumbled on what was happening and the bikers killed them?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “It would take a bastard like a biker to kill a little girl.”

  “All sorts of bastards in this world.”

  “Fuck, Yak, you know that better than anyone. What a fucking mess you’ve got on your hands. You have reinforcements coming tomorrow. I’ll call BMR and tell ’em we need our own fuckin’ car. Are you good till then?”

  “I’m good.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The cook made sandwiches in the kitchen while the waitress set up three tables. When people were finished eating, Buckham and Downey began escorting them back to their rooms. The Tremblays went first, the old woman holding onto Buckham’s proffered arm, the old man walking with a limp Yakabuski had not noticed before. Then the guide, with a half-bottle of Scotch cradled under his arm that Yakabuski allowed him to take to the room, making sure Holly understood he could not leave the room until morning.

  “No exceptions this time, Mr. Holly,” he said. “We expect you to stay in your room.”

  “I’ll be fine, thank you.”

  Then the Sports. Even though Yakabuski knew now that they were not Sports, it was hard for him not to think of them that way. They so looked the part. The youngest one looked glum and put out as he was led to their room; the older one read a newspaper, looking up only occasionally to see where he was going, like a business commuter walking beside a morning train. Then the bartender, the cook, and the tree-marker, who seemed to have stopped drinking and brought to his room only apple juice, water crackers, and a badly bound copy of Riders of the Purple Sage he had found in a box set aside for such books in the lobby. The waitress was the last one to be escorted to her room. The last because she had insisted on cleaning tables, stacking the dishwasher, working even though Yakabuski told her it was unnecessary. But the girl received such obvious solace from her work that he let her finish.

  “Thank you for your help today, Marie.”

  “You’re welcome, Mr. Yakabuski.”

  “I hope you sleep better.”

  “Thank you. So do I.”

  After everyone was gone, the three cops stood in the gloom of the empty bar, and Yakabuski said, “You boys have a preference on the shifts?”

  “No.”

  “No.”

  “All right. I’ll go last.”

  . . .

  Yakabuski took his time walking to his room, stopping to read the brass plaques under the mounted fish. There was a large pickerel halfway down the hallway, caught thirty-two years ago, according to the plaque. The fish glowed like a Japanese lantern in the darkness.

  From behind the closed doors, Yakabuski heard rustling sounds and running water, short bars of whispered conversation. He picked out the voice of Madame Tremblay. The young Sport. He was not sure if they felt relief yet that the murder had been solved, that the killer of that squatter family was now sitting handcuffed and locked inside the freezer. He doubted it. They would still be taking it all in, what had been happening in Ragged Lake the past few years, the people they had been living among — hard thing to process when you find out you’ve been living cheek-to-jowl with true evil. Or working for true evil. Which was something lots of people had to process. It took time.

  Smaller fish were mounted in the hallway. Not the muskie and pike you had in the bar and the lobby. Framed black-and-white photos were placed between the fish, archival photos of Ragged Lake for the most part. There was one showing a giant log boom that took up half of Northside Bay, a half-dozen cabins, and a permanent cook fire in the middle of the raft. A POW cabin with a half-dozen men posing with some Rangers, arms thrown over shoulders, a man in the middle holding an old-style football.

  Yakabuski suspected that if he took a photo of Ragged Lake today, it would look archival. Right from the outset, he’d be looking at something lost. Out of focus. Half-forgotten. The town had that sort of feel to it, the same feel other mill and lumber towns had these days. When he was in them, Yakabuski felt like he was walking around in the past tense, everything around him retreating and moving backward.

  He continued down the hallway, patting a pocket of his parka almost unconsciously to make sure Lucy Whiteduck’s journal was still there. Before entering his room, he stopped to look at one last archival photo. It showed the front gates of the Ragged Lake mill, men gathered around the fence, a large banner hanging from a smokestack in the background that he couldn’t quite read. Standing in the middle of the knot of men was Charles O’Hearn. Yakabuski recognized him from newspaper photos. He had died about ten years ago. To his immediate left was a tall Cree man wearing a sports jacket and tie. A handsome man with his arm thrown around O’Hearn. Standing to the other side of the lumber baron was another man, tall and thin, his skin pale and sallow, a young man who might even have been a teenager, dressed in a suit that fit him perfectly. Yakabuski stared at the face and thought he had seen it somewhere. He leaned in to have a close look, nodded his head, and entered his room.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  That night there was no gently twirling snow on the lake. There was utter chaos. A maelstrom of snow and wind that churned over the frozen lake and then charged fast and hard to strike the north wall of the Mattamy like artillery rounds. The timbers in the old building trembled and moaned. The lights flickered and seemed at risk of being extinguished.

  Donnie Buckham sat in a chair he had placed near the reception desk, the spot giving him three angles of surveillance. The view out the front windows was a confusing mess of shadows and shifting shapes, nothing he could make out clearly; but out back, because of lights kept on at the biplane dock, there was distinction. Buckham could see the snow billowing and crashing on the lake like waves on an ocean. See a midnight horizon that was remarkably clear and distant because of the blanket of snow. He had never shot a man. His second shot had landed right where he’d aimed, taking out the man’s knee, and he knew there would be operations to make him walk right again. If such a thing were possible. He had likely crippled him. A man like that. A Popeye assassin. He sat in his chair with an hour and forty-five minutes to go before Downey relieved him. It seemed an interminable length of time. He was restless, and he sat there trying to grab onto one of the many emotions coursing through him — make one of them stick — so he could relax and concentrate on his work.

  Matt Downey had no doubts. He lay in his bed wishing he had been the one Yakabuski had sent to the survival school, the one who had helped destroy a meth lab and shot a Popeye assassin. He knew there would be commendations waiting for Buckham when they returned to Springfield. He had moved his career ahead five years. Maybe more. He would be working robbery, first-class detective maybe, when Downey was still powdering rooms at Holiday Inns in Cork’s Town. It wasn’t fair. Nor was the rebuke Yakabuski had given him on the trailhead the other day. It had seemed a fair question. Can we just make sure there’s a crime before heading all the way to the Northern Divide?

  Downey sat there thinking life was unfair, until the thought occurred to him there might be some refracted glory in all this. Which cheered him. It was a hell of a story, what had happened here in Ragged Lake. Downey lay in bed and started practising it, seeing how much of a role he could safely give himself.

  John Holly poured himself another drink. Last one tonight, he told hims
elf. He had thought briefly about getting hammered, then decided against it. Comfortably numb would have to be enough for tonight. He needed to keep some wits about him. He sipped the Scotch, closed his eyes, and listened to the wind raking its way up and down the exterior walls of the lodge, like the scratching, thumping, and braying of some predator animal. There may be no better feeling in the world. To be sheltered from a bad storm.

  He wished he had taken a book from the lobby bin. He read most nights, as he had told the cop, history for the most part, any sort of history book, although if it was a book about the North Country, he liked it more. The week before, he had read for the first time the story of Henry Hudson and how the great English explorer had been betrayed by his crew after they had endured a tough winter on the shores of James Bay. The captain had wanted to explore the New World for another summer, but the crew wanted to return home. And so there was a mutiny. Hudson, his son, and seven others were set adrift in a shallop that tried for four days to keep pace with the sailing ship Discovery, rowing until they could row no more, and then they had faded away on a retreating horizon of ice and water, never to be seen again.

  For days afterward, Holly wondered how it would have felt to be put into a boat and set adrift, to stare into the eyes of the men who had betrayed you, who had measured and weighed your fate, and decided your time had come. He wondered if Hudson had been surprised. Betrayal seemed to be a constant in history. Some sort of oxygen, almost. So Holly didn’t think there should have been any great surprise. He wasn’t sure if the men who had pushed away the boat would have even felt guilt.

  William Forest stood in front of a full-size mirror looking at his naked body. He made muscles ripple up and down his arms, his legs, then stroked his groin so his member stood upright, and then he stood side to side, looking at that as well. It was time to leave Ragged Lake. That’s what he was thinking as he stroked himself, his back turned to the window, the lights low so no one could see him from outside, a habit he had not thought to break, even on a night like this. He wondered about the prisoner in the freezer. A part of him wanted to take the initiative; another part knew that would not be wise. He was here if they needed him. They knew that.