by Ted Wood
"I'd like to talk to Misquadis," Gallagher said. "Or at least make sure that bastard didn't kill him."
"Me too. "D'you think he'd have crossed the river and baited for bear somewhere?"
Gallagher nodded. He was sharpening a twig to make a toothpick and he finished and started probing before he answered. "That's what he was up here for. I'd guess he'd want to kill one close to the river, it's less distance to lug the pelt."
"You don't think he'd go into the bush near the lake back there? Then he could drop the meat on the island and everyone would believe he'd caught the one the bounty was on."
"Nah." Gallagher sucked his teeth and threw the toothpick into the fire. "No need to bullshit people. Nobody's coming up here till spring now. The wolves and foxes would eat the carcass, wherever it was left, drag the bones off somewheres, no need for that kind of trick."
"Well, we know he's not this side of the river, not close, anyway, or Sam would have flushed him out. I figure we should cross and see if San can find him," I said, and Gallagher stood up and stretched.
"May's well. The chopper won't be here for a while yet." He stooped and picked up the pot and went down to the river for water to drown the fire.
While he went back and forth until the fire was dead out, I unlashed the paddles from the canoe and got ready to launch. Then we loaded Sam in and pushed off into the current.
The river was only fifty yards across and we were over in a minute, grounding our canoe at the base of a big spruce on the edge of a flat rock. We lifted the canoe out and tied it to the tree, making sure it was visible from the clearing opposite, in case the chopper came while we were out of sight.
The bush was dense, with no sign that anybody had ever been into it. North of Superior it's all like this, not like the semicivilized bush of the provincial parks farther south, with their wide portages and campsites maintained by park staff.
Gallagher said, "I didn't bring my compass. You got one with you?"
"Yeah. I figured I'd be in the bush," I said, "so I came equipped." I took it out and checked. The river ran southwest, but aside from that I couldn't see deep enough into the bush to pick out a landmark we could march on. "I figure Misquadis wouldn't go far without picking up a deer trail or something. He'd do all his trapping close to the river."
Gallagher fed himself a piece of gum, his last, then crumpled the pack and stuffed it into the pocket of his parka. "I figure that, too. I think we should send Sam in, see what he finds. No sense draggin' our asses through this for no reason."
I nodded and spoke to Sam, holding his big head between my hands and fussing him a moment, then telling him "Seek."
He faded into the bush, nose to the ground, and we sat on the upturned canoe and waited.
"If he was after bear, he'd likely hang up something dead from a tree on the riverbank, then watch from the other bank until the bear came for it," Gallagher said.
"Right, and he'd wait downwind, which means the bait would most likely be on the other bank and he'd be this side."
We looked at one another and nodded like a couple of guys in a bar agreeing that the Toronto Maple Leafs needed more muscle on defense, and waited for Sam to come up with our answers for us.
It took him twenty minutes. We had both been sniffing the air, trying to pick up any scent of decay from Misquadis's bait, but had smelled nothing. Meanwhile, Sam had gone a quarter-mile circle around us and was sounding off at the end of our hearing range.
"Sounds close to the river, down there," Gallagher said. "Let's take the canoe."
We relaunched and set off with the current. This time Gallagher took the stern while I watched the bank, rifle at the ready. He knew what to do. If I raised the gun he would back the canoe so I could shoot over the bow and not tip us into the cold water. I didn't think it would happen, but so much was going on that I wouldn't have felt safe without the precaution.
We followed Sam's bark for three minutes by water, paddling silently as the sound grew louder and louder. Then, suddenly, as we came almost up to him, I caught the scent of something dead.
When I got the first whiff I turned upwind and saw a porcupine hanging by its tail from a tree on the far bank, its guts hanging down from the slashed abdomen. I pointed and Gallagher nodded and headed closer to the near bank where Sam was waiting for us, barking restlessly, bringing us to the sight I had hoped not to see. It was Jack Misquadis, lying at the water's edge, and he was dead.
We beached the canoe, running it right up the bank. Then I told Sam "Easy," and we crouched over the body. It was still dressed in the same blue jeans and denim jacket he had been wearing when I met him. There was no obvious injury, but an empty rye bottle lay beside the body.
"I thought he didn't drink' I said.
"He didn't." Gallagher was checking the head for marks. "See this, he's been hit." I knelt and checked. There was a bruise over the ear.
"It didn't kill him outright or it wouldn't have swollen," I argued.
Gallagher knelt closer, sniffing around the dead mouth. Then he got to his feet and his dark eyes were blazing with anger. "You're right. What's happened is, somebody cold-cocked him with the bottle, then poured it down his throat. He was out and couldn't do anything so he got drank and drowned in his own vomit."
"That's a lousy way for a nice guy to die," I said. I was filled with a cold anger for the man who had done this. It figured to have been Carl Tettlinger. I could imagine him laughing as Misquadis thrashed and kicked and gagged, try-to live. "Have we got enough on Tettlinger to charge him with this?"
"I think we do," Gallagher said. "We caught the sonofa-bitch with Jack's rifle. How much more do you need?"
"Yeah, he told me he'd bought it off Jack for a jug of rye. That sounds like a setup for finding Jack like this," I agreed. "And yet, I'm not convinced. Tettlinger's mean enough to do this, but he's not motivated. I figure it must be Mob people, maybe that guy I saw at the motel."
Gallagher nodded. "You're right. People don't just knock one another off like this unless there's big money at stake. What I'll do is get onto the claims office first thing Monday. That's where we're going to find the really important answers." He sniffed. "But for now, let's do a little police work, check this murder scene out like it was the first one we'd come across in a while, instead of the third."
We did the best we could without equipment. Gallagher checked the dead man's gear, a kit bag tied with a strip of rawhide. He had no pelts, it was too early in the season. They don't get valuable until the winter fur grows in.
Meanwhile, I searched the surrounding area. It was a mechanical, almost a meaningless thing to do in this case, with a prime suspect already in custody, but it yielded one thing.
I looked up from the ground and called Gallagher. "Hey, I've found a footprint."
He stood up and came over, planting his feet carefully as I indicated the space to avoid. "If it's a size fourteen work boot, it's Tettlinger," he said.
"No, this one is a lot smaller, smaller than mine, maybe a size ten at most." I pointed at the indentation in the scuffed surface soil where the mat of dead vegetation had been taken aside by some animal or by a careless foot. "Look. Give me your notebook a minute."
He passed me his book and a pencil. I measured the length and the width of the heel, using the line spacing on the page as a scale. Then I sketched the heel pattern as well as I could. "Any chance your guys will bring an investigation kit when they turn up this evening?"
"Not sure. Jackaman's a pretty dead-ahead guy. He'll make sure the men are ready for the bush, but I doubt he'll remember to send anything subtle."
I finished my drawing of the heel, then marked it "Sketch of heel print found at site of Jack Misquadis's death," added the date and my signature, and handed the book back to Gallagher.
He looked at the sketch. "It's about the size of Prudhomme's boots. Could it've been him?"
"His heel pattern was different," I reminded him. "He had those thick, thick soles, the kind of
boots geologists all wear in the bush. Heavier and fancier than a worker would buy."
We built a little cairn of rocks around the heel print, saving it in case we could get a cast later, then went over the whole area again, twice more, pushing back as far as we could easily get into the bush, but we found nothing. We decided that whoever had killed Misquadis had come by water, not through the bush. And that made us stop and do some reckoning.
"Where's the canoe?" Gallagher wondered. "Tettlinger came into the bush by canoe. Misquadis came in by canoe. Now we think there was another man. He must've come in by canoe. Only there's no canoe here, There's just the one you found with Prudhomme's body."
"That could mean the murderer is heading downriver in one canoe, maybe pulling the other with him," I said. "If we could get in touch with the station we could search the river by air. We could catch the bastard."
"I've got Onyschuk's radio. It worked before," Gallagher said. "You want to try again?"
"Not a lot, but it's the only hope, I guess." I climbed the handiest tall tree and called for ten minutes. Nobody replied so I gave up on talking. Instead I pressed the transmit button three times quickly, then waited, then did it again. I wasn't sure how good their equipment was at Olympia, but if they got the signal they might realize we had a problem and dispatch the chopper that much sooner. I kept it up for half an hour, but nothing happened so I gave up and climbed back down the tree.
In fact, it was four p.m. by the time Kinsella showed in the clearing where we were waiting. He was packed with help, carrying two well-equipped uniformed policemen. I stood back and watched while Gallagher took charge. He dispatched Kinsella to drop the men downstream, checking all the way to the Trans-Canada Highway bridge first, then back to leave the policemen upstream where any escaper would have to pass on his way to the highway and freedom.
That took thirty minutes. In that time, Gallagher and I recovered Misquadis's body from the other bank and wrapped it in a blanket, then waited for Kinsella to return.
He touched down at the edge of the clearing, the slipstream fanning everything loose across the ground and into the trees behind us. I was glad we hadn't lit a fire. It would have burned the woods down.
Kinsella stopped the rotors and stepped down into the thickening darkness. "A stiff." He whistled. "This is gonna be one hell of a lift. I think I should come back for at least one of you."
"I'll wait. Can you make it tonight?" I asked.
"I don't like night landings. But if you take three lights and set them out in a safe triangle, I'll try it."
"Right. I'd like Sam to go out on the first load, in case you can't land and we have to winch up."
Kinsella nodded. "Good idea. I'll come back in the other machine, with the winch. D'you have three lights?"
"I've got a couple, mine and the chief's. If I can't get another, I'll line them up north and south where it's safe to set down between. That be okay?"
"Three's better," he said, then grinned. "But I've landed with less." He turned away to supervise the stowing of the body in the rear compartment. It was stiffening, and finally we had to stand it in like a board behind the front seat. Gallagher and I worked on it, sweating with the effort. When we had finished it was almost dark, and I saw Gallagher whisk his cap off and sketch a quick cross over his chest. It surprised me. I hadn't figured him for a religious man.
I handed Sam over to Gallagher and he put him behind the body, under strict command, in the backseat. Then Gallagher got in the front and they lifted off, leaving me with my two flashlights and my rifle. I turned the lights off and went to sit quietly against a tree on the edge of the clearing. I figured it would take an hour for the chopper to return, and I wondered whether the man who had killed Misquadis was going to come drifting out of the bush to check whether we had left anything behind. Sam hadn't checked this side of the river for three hours now; someone could have filtered back close to the area without being detected.
I've done a lot of waiting in my time. This was like Nam, only colder. I sat on my pack, the tree sheltering my back, my rifle across my knees, the big flashlight at my feet turned face down into the dirt so the luminous afterglow wouldn't show. Nothing stirred. Far off I heard an owl huffing away, but nothing was moving on the floor of the bush. I began to relax. Whoever had killed Misquadis was gone, down the stream and out to the highway. I was alone and safe.
As my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness I could see the ring of treetops in the gloom, black against the medium gray of the moonless and cloudy sky. After a while I began to hear the small sounds of the bush, the ones you don't hear when you're with other people, listening to words instead of the wild. The steady rush of the rapids faded into the back of my consciousness, like the noise of a car when you're driving a long distance. Over it I began to hear the tiny rustlings of mice and the slow, scuffly dragging of a porcupine somewhere close, probably heading for the spot where the men who had camped here had urinated, craving for the salt. But there were no snapping twigs, no coughs or groans, nothing to indicate that there was another man anywhere in the woods.
From time to time the clouds parted far enough for me to see the stars. I had picked out the Big Dipper and the pole-star when I sat down and I judged the passage of time by the slow rotation of the Dipper. It also showed me where north lay and when I heard the whup-whup-whup of the chopper's return I set down the first light, then shut my eyes to protect my night vision, switched the light on, and paced twelve paces north before setting down the second light and switching it on. Then, with my eyes raised away from the light, I stepped out to the river's edge and crouched to wait for the chopper.
I felt the same kind of tingling anticipation I used to know in Nam. I knew this wasn't the same. Tonight it was just transportation, a ride back to the place where a long night of work would start. But there was something about that sound that stirred responses I had thought were buried. Without conscious thought I clicked off the safety catch on my rifle. I was ready for anything.
It seemed to me that the sound hesitated somewhere downriver. The slow, steady Doppler effect of the approach lagged for a moment. I wondered whether Kinsella had seen something on the ground, some natural luminescence that had made him think he was on target. I waited with mounting tension, not knowing why I felt so strained. And then the chopper ambled into my section of sky and hovered, about eighty feet up, well above the treetops.
I went to the flashlights and picked one of them up, using it as a signal, flapping the light down to the ground, then waist high, then down again, calling him down. The down-draft was washing all around me, kicking up all the debris that had been loosened in the earlier arrivals. I clenched my eyes shut and listened until I could hear the changed beat on the blades and feel the slipstream intensifying as he let down, almost on top of me.
I set the light down and moved to one side, kneeling, automatically facing away from the chopper as it descended, my rifle at the ready. I could have laughed out loud at myself except that instincts stronger than laughter had taken hold of me. I was alone on patrol and the night fears that I had kept off while I was alone were rushing in to haunt me.
Behind me something clattered on the ground. I turned and saw it, the rescue collar, lowered from the chopper. Kinsella wasn't coming all the way down. I wondered why he didn't put his lights on and come down, but guessed he was fighting his own personal demons. I hung one strap of my pack over my head so the load hung in front of me, out of the way, then slipped the collar over my head, put my arms through it, and tugged the loose section three times.
At once it started to crank in and I rose from the ground, swinging like a kid's puppet. And as I climbed, by inches it seemed, a light shone from the edge of the clearing, playing on my swinging body.
My instincts saved me. Without thinking I fired, in front of the light and low, but close enough to scare whoever was holding it so that his answering shot just missed me, thumping harmlessly into the backpack as I swung sideways to h
is line of fire under the recoil force of my rifle. Then my shoulder bumped the edge of the skid and I hooked one leg over it and banged on the plastic side of the chopper with the muzzle of my rifle.
Kinsella got the message. He stood the machine on its side and howled away, over the trees, out of sight of the man in the clearing. I fired again as he flew, just banging away to make noise and keep the guy's head down, two more shots, then slung the rifle and clambered into the open door, pulling it shut behind me.
Kinsella's face was stretched by the light from his instruments. He looked impossibly Irish. I couldn't tell whether he was horrified or laughing.
"Sonofabitch," he shouted. "I thought we left all that bullshit behind us in Nam."
19
I shrugged off the harness and my pack, dropping them on the coil of rope that lay in the backseat, then strapped myself in and sat very still, staring blankly ahead, clutching my rifle with the same kind of superstitious force I had hugged my M16 in an earlier day. It had saved my life— it, and my own Marine's instincts. I had been as good as dead. If the guy on the ground hadn't flashed his light to be sure of my position, if I hadn't fired so quickly, if Kinsella hadn't acted like a trained combat pilot—if, if, if.
Kinsella called Olympia tower and told them he was taking me direct to the police station, to let Gallagher know. They rogered and he spoke to me for the first time since I'd settled in. "Who the hell was that?"
"Answer that one and we've got this case bagged," I told him. I was still jumpy. I haven't been shot at so many times in a day since I came back to Canada after the war. I was shaken.
Kinsella took his left hand off the controls and patted his side pocket, coming up with a heavy pewter flask. He handed it to me and said, "Take a taste of this."
