Knife Creek

by Paul Doiron

Instead of struggling, I dropped to the floor. I focused all of my energy on my hands. I needed to find the key. I felt my way along the smooth concrete, hoping that Becky would be distracted enough by Dani’s presence outside not to notice what I was doing. An ache was growing in my skull, as if a clamp were closing around my temples.

  My little finger touched something. But the force of the touch pushed the object away.

  My blind fingers scrambled to recover it.

  I could feel the last of the oxygen bleeding through the walls of my lungs into my bloodstream as I closed my hand around the metal ring at the top of the handcuff key.

  I dug the key into the lock and turned it clockwise.

  Nothing happened. Of course they had double-locked the cuffs.

  Suddenly, I heard a shriek. “What’s that? What’s he doing?”

  The walls of my lungs—all those air-sucking alveoli—seemed suddenly aflame. I reversed the key and used the nub at the top to push the pin in the keyway. Then I tried the lock again. I never heard a click, but the spring opened, and suddenly my left hand was free.

  “You bitch!” Becky said. “What did you do?”

  As I tore the plastic bag off my head, I heard another scream—but this one was different, higher pitched.

  Before me, Casey was directing a mist of pepper spray directly into Becky’s eyes. The older woman tried to block the stream with her left forearm, but she still had hold of my gun. She swung her right arm around in Casey’s direction to fire it at her.

  As she did, I pressed my feet against the floor and pushed off. The handcuffs were still attached to my right hand. I used them now as a weapon. I brought the metal bracelet down like a nunchaku on Becky’s gun hand. The force must have shattered half the bones because she couldn’t keep her grip on the pistol. The SIG dropped to the concrete and spun away.

  I stepped forward and whipped the handcuffs across Becky’s face. Blood drops splattered from her nostrils as her nose shattered. She collapsed to the ground, sniffing, groaning, clawing at her injuries—not unconscious, but incapacitated by the acid burning her eyes and the fragments of cartilage stopping the air from entering her sinuses.

  I scarcely felt much better. Still gasping, I gathered up my .357 from the floor and spun around on Casey.

  She stood behind me, hunched over, crying again, with the empty can of pepper spray still clutched in her quivering hand.

  “Stay here! If she moves—”

  I was at a loss what to say. For Casey’s sake, I prayed that Becky would remain down for the count until I could return from saving Dani.

  45

  The blows to my body had robbed me of all grace. I lurched more than I walked. My dripping wrists left a trail of blood on the stairs.

  I paused at the top to ready myself for what I might encounter beyond the door.

  First choice: I could move quickly to maximize the element of surprise.

  Second choice: I could take a quiet peek.

  I had never been one to choose the cautious option.

  I bulled my way through the door and found myself on the first story of a house under construction. The air was still and dusty and hot. The floors were plywood with nails scattered about. The windows were opaque sheets of plastic the color of a blind man’s eyes. There were no walls yet between the support beams. I could see from one end of the building to the other. Leave it to Nisbet to finish his dungeon before he tackled the rest of the house.

  The blower was on merely to create noise. The big machine sat in the middle of what might eventually be a living room, whipping up siroccos of sawdust and causing the plastic nailed to the windows to ripple and snap. Tracks were all over the dusty floor: from Casey’s bare feet, Becky’s hiking boots, Nisbet’s tactical footwear, even drag marks that must have been my own trailing toes as the two women had pulled me through the house and down the stairs into the torture chamber.

  I used the key to remove the handcuff from my other wrist and let the manacles drop to the floor.

  The sawdust told me where to go. A set of Nisbet’s prints led to the front door. They were the steps of a man proceeding confidently, a man who knew exactly where he was going and what he intended to do.

  I followed the tracks into the future foyer. The front door was large, windowless, and made of steel. I stepped to the nearest plastic-sealed window and cocked my head to listen. The blower behind me was so damn loud. But not so loud I couldn’t hear them shouting at each other outside.

  Dani: “Drop the gun! I said, ‘Do it now!’”

  Nisbet: “If you shoot me, my girls are going to kill the warden.”

  Dani: “Drop the gun and get down on the ground!”

  Nisbet: “It’s your choice whether he lives or dies. Because I’m not dropping the gun.”

  Dani: “I will shoot you!”

  Nisbet: “And I will shoot you. And they will shoot the warden. That’s how this is going to go if you don’t do what I say, Trooper. Now put down your gun.”

  I pulled at the edges of the plastic over the window, trying to pry it up enough to get my bearings. But the sheet was nailed fast to the casement. I was as senseless to what was happening—where they were standing and how far apart—as if my eyes were still blindfolded.

  Dani would have taken cover the moment Nisbet stepped through the door. If she had found her way to his house, she would have known he was suspect, if not dangerous. Nor would she drop her firearm now. Every police officer is taught the same lesson: “You lose your gun, you lose your life.” Besides, how could she be sure I was even inside the house?

  I tried the next window. Also firmly fastened. Blood dripped down my forearm as I reached up, looking for a loose corner.

  Through the backlit plastic I heard Dani repeat her command with the same fierceness: “I said, ‘Drop the gun, Nisbet.’”

  “Sorry, Trooper. Not going to do it.”

  “Last chance.”

  “Kill me and you’ll never find the others.”

  For the first time, there was hesitation in Dani’s voice. “What others?”

  “Eileen Lafferty for one.”

  I recognized the name. Years earlier, a young woman had vanished from the side of a road during a rainstorm when her car had hydroplaned into a swale of phragmites. I remembered because I was at the academy at the time, and it happened in the town of Scarborough, where I had gone to high school. Eileen Lafferty still hadn’t been found.

  I didn’t hear any response now from Dani.

  “Throw your gun out,” said Nisbet. “Toss it onto the dirt.”

  Don’t do it, Tate.

  Then came the first gunshot.

  As soon as I heard it, I threw my weight against the plastic sheet and fell forward into space. I heard the answering shot before I hit the ground. I landed hard on my left shoulder. The impact was as excruciating as every other injury I had suffered that day. The window was more than six feet above ground level. I was lucky I hadn’t landed on my head and snapped my neck.

  The brightness of the full sunlight blinded me a moment. Then I felt a puff of dirt in my face. Followed by the sound of a gunshot.

  Have I been hit?

  Even as my brain was answering the question in the negative, my body was responding. I rolled away from where I’d felt the bullet strike the dirt and kept rolling. I heard multiple shots from what must have been Dani’s gun. Suddenly, I collided with a heavy object. It was a wheelbarrow. My sun-dazed eyes recognized the shape. With all my strength, I reached up, grabbed the nearest handle, and pulled. The weight of the steel barrow fought me for what seemed like seconds, then the cart toppled over my prone body.

  Nisbet’s next shot struck the metal and ricocheted into space.

  I had cover now. Most of my body was still exposed, but my vision was clearing. And Nisbet, wherever he was, was returning fire against two opponents. If he’d had a moment to take aim, there was no way he would have missed hitting my legs at least.

  “Mike?” I h
eard Dani shout.

  “I’m all right.”

  Another shot caromed off the wheelbarrow. I curled up in a ball behind it. At the same time, I tried to triangulate Nisbet’s location. Somewhere behind me and to my right. He had taken cover against the stairs leading up to the front door.

  I peered around the edge of the wheelbarrow and saw him there, crouched against the concrete stoop. In that position he was protected from Dani for the moment, which was why he had been firing at me. A bright red splotch had appeared below his right collarbone where she had shot him. He had emptied his spent magazine and was fumbling as he tried to reload another.

  “You’re not getting out of this, Nisbet,” I shouted.

  He glanced up at me, his hair powdered gray with sawdust, his face sweaty and flushed with panic. He said nothing as he hammered the base of the magazine hard into the grip of his gun.

  I steadied my right hand and squeezed the trigger of my SIG.

  The shot struck him in the meat of his thigh. He fell back against the landing and began to writhe on the ground.

  Dani came sprinting up on my left, shouting at him. “Show me your hands!”

  I used the handle of the wheelbarrow to get myself up onto my knees—and nearly pulled it over again.

  “Just shoot him!” I shouted.

  “Both hands, Nisbet!”

  Dani was standing with her legs apart and both arms outstretched, aiming her .45 at Nisbet. He was now sitting against the basement cinder blocks. He had his dirty left hand in the air but, despite the wound to his shoulder, was somehow supporting his considerable weight with his right.

  I climbed to my feet and began to stagger toward them, my own pistol aimed at his center mass now. “Where’s his gun? Can you see it?”

  “Both hands!” Dani said again. “Let me see them.”

  His response was the last thing I expected. He flashed us a smile. “I wasn’t lying about Eileen. Ask Becky.”

  “Bullshit,” I said. “You’re bluffing. You lost, you son of a bitch.”

  “No,” he said with surprising calmness, “I won.”

  “What?” Dani said.

  “It was my choice. Remember that. I made you do this. You did what I wanted you to do.”

  With his hidden right hand, he lifted the pistol from the ground.

  Dani fired three shots before I could fire one. If she had been shooting at a paper bullseye, she couldn’t have hoped for a tighter pattern.

  * * *

  Dani found no trace of a pulse in Nisbet’s carotid artery. I watched her with one hand clasped around the bloodiest of my wrists.

  She’d shot a man to death, and she was struggling to pretend the experience had left her unaffected. I felt sorry for her because I knew what a pernicious lie it was: the widely held belief among cops that you could just tough out these moments, and everything would return to normal. From my own experience I knew that the ghost of Jeff Nisbet would be making unscheduled visits to Dani’s dreams for the rest of her life.

  “How did you find us?” I asked, still out of breath.

  She raised her head from the lifeless corpse at her feet. “The Smiths.”

  “Who?”

  “You told me to stop a blue T100 with Pennsylvania plates if I saw it.” She finally, belatedly, reholstered her weapon. “They passed me out on 302 this morning, so I pulled them over. I asked them about ‘John Blood.’ The wife is a piece of work. But I kept pushing. The man they described sounded a lot like the Fryeburg cop who showed up at Fales Variety after I found Connie dead.”

  “Nisbet was there?”

  “He must have thought he could get away with seeing Becky’s handiwork for himself, being a cop. I called the Fryeburg PD, and asked about him. I got the sense he wasn’t very popular in the department. His sergeant told me he was building a house down here. I thought the location was interesting, being so near the cabin you said burned down. I decided to drive out to see for myself.”

  If only I’d had the same insight—to ask Prudence and Jackson for a physical description of the man who claimed to own the land—what other calamities might have been averted? Not that it mattered. I hadn’t asked them, and now Nisbet was dead. Unless Becky talked, the family of Eileen Lafferty would never know had happened to their daughter.

  “When he was taunting me downstairs,” I said, “I finally realized how Casey met Nisbet in the first place. He was actively looking for her. When the search started, the Fryeburg police sent out every officer to comb the riverbanks. But Nisbet knew the side roads better than just about anyone.”

  I could see the horror dawning on her. “When she saw his police car, she must have been so happy. She thought she’d been rescued.”

  “Nisbet understood that no one knew where she was. He could do whatever he wanted with the girl. He could take her back to John Blood’s old cabin, where he’d stashed Becky, and no one would ever know. And that was what he did.”

  “He was supposed to be her savior,” said Dani. “I wish I could kill the son of a bitch again.”

  I limped my way back up the concrete steps and through the front door. I had only glimpsed the half-built house through the eyes of someone eager to escape it, but now I had a moment to take in the entire scene: the stuffy, overheated interior; the electrical wires dangling from the unfinished ceiling; the sweet smell of recently sawn pinewood; the dull roar of the construction blower. I dragged myself over to the electrical outlet and jerked the cord of the fan from the wall. The blades slowed—whup, whup, whup—then came to a stop.

  The bloody handcuffs lay where I had dropped them. I picked them up.

  I made my way to the basement door. With my index finger I ejected the magazine of my sidearm to see how many bullets I had left. There were ten, not counting the one in the chamber. Then I slammed the magazine back into the grip with the heel of my hand. I tucked the gun into the front of my pants and took a breath, preparing myself to descend back into the torture chamber.

  I opened the door and found myself gazing down an unremarkable set of wooden stairs no different from those I’d seen in dozens of other family playrooms. Fluorescent lights glowed dull white below. I saw the sealed concrete flooring at the base, streaked crimson where I had come through and speckled elsewhere with spots of blood.

  “Casey?” I removed my SIG from my waistband and took a step onto the first stair. “Casey, where are you?”

  No answer.

  Had I screwed up leaving her here with Becky? Self-doubt was as heavy as a stone in my belly.

  Step by step, I made my way down into the brightly lit basement. I ducked my head and focused on the pole to which I had been chained. The scuffs on the floor from my heels around it, the crazy marks in the sawdust, all that blood.

  But no plastic bag. I expected to see it where I’d dropped it: a washed-up jellyfish.

  “Casey?”

  As I descended below the level of the joists, I peeked to my left and saw Becky’s feet, then her legs. She lay prone on the floor exactly where I had last seen her. She lay motionless on her chest, her arms at her sides. She lay with the plastic bag pulled tight around her head.

  I bounded down the last few stairs until I stood over the lifeless woman.

  I could see Becky’s eyes open through the smothering plastic. All the capillaries in them had burst. She looked finally, in death, like the demon she had been in life.

  Casey was a huddled ball in the corner of the room, clutching my forgotten dagger lest Becky arise from the dead. She was shaking silently, like an injured animal. I wanted to say something to her; I wanted to gather her up in my arms. But I recognized that it would take more than soft words and human touch to bring her back from the hell that had been her home for so long.

  46

  Stacey was waiting for me at the hospital in Portland. She met me outside the emergency room when the cruiser pulled up to the door. Pomerleau had arranged for a trooper to take me down to the city after I refused to go in an amb
ulance. I would have preferred to have driven myself but for the inconvenient facts that my patrol truck was hidden in the barn of an abandoned farmstead, miles from the crime scene, and my eyes kept zooming in and out of focus.

  “You stupid asshole” were Stacey’s first words to me. Then she hugged me so hard I thought I would lose consciousness again. She stepped back, eyes glistening, and touched one of my still-swollen eyelids. “Oh, baby, what did those monsters do to you?”

  “Trust me. You don’t want to hear it.” I sounded like someone whose lungs had been scorched by volcanic ash. “Where were you? I was worried that something had happened to you?”

  “You were worried about me?”

  She had merely decided to run on a different path, she said. She’d run up the Knife Creek Trail to the Burnt Meadows highland and found a barren overlook where she could sit and contemplate her life and the choices before her.

  She pressed her hand to my cheek again. “Your face looks like you were attacked by killer bees.”

  I walked myself into the emergency room after refusing help from the hospital staff. Under no circumstances did I want to be pushed around in a wheelchair or, worse, strapped to a gurney. My resistance wasn’t macho bluster. It was just that I had been beaten up enough in my job—shot, stabbed, and clobbered—to know that I was in no danger of dropping dead, despite how ghastly I might have appeared.

  I didn’t need a doctor, either, to tell me that I had a concussion, but there was no getting out of the tests. Was my vision blurred? No. Was I suffering from mental fog? That depended. Did a light mist count?

  I was told to avoid physical exertion and any activity that might involve thinking and mental concentration.

  “Why are you laughing?” the ER doctor asked me.

  Miraculously, I had no broken bones. The lacerations and contusions left by the handcuffs did not require stitches, but I ended up wearing a pair of white bandages around my wrists that made me look as if I were a tennis player from the sweatband era of John McEnroe.

  Two hours after being admitted to the Maine Medical Center, I was released into the custodial care of my girlfriend.