KILLING MAINE

by Mike Bond

  “You know it’s a lie.”

  She poured the last Tanqueray into our glasses and sat astride my lap. As perfect there as always, her slim thighs wrapping mine, her silky hair in my face, her mouth so perfect in the corner of my neck.

  To kiss her had always been a joy, a melting into each other, lips to lips, tongue to tongue, the hot sucking sharing taking exploring and caring all wrapped in lustful exciting reaching deep inside each other – to kiss her now was bliss, not only recapturing our every past erotic instant but also devouring her anew, a stranger, another new lover on the star-crossed path of life.

  I could no more have stopped it than to stand below Niagara Falls with one hand raised to halt the water. Soaring happiness filled me – this gorgeous person opening up to me and I to her and no matter what the cost I had to have her and she me, stumbling into the bedroom chilly because the door’d been shut to keep heat in the kitchen, Lexie falling back on the bed as I kneel sliding her clothes and mine away, naked in the glorious hot throb of life.

  Her lovely sex so familiar in my hand, her slim body all muscle and fire igniting mine, skin to skin. I pushed away. “No.”

  “Yeah.” She patted my arm, gasping. “But God I want you.”

  “I want you too. But it ain’t happening.”

  “Yeah,” she said again, turned across the bed and sat on the edge, her back to me. “Some day in another life I’m going to fuck you blind.”

  I ran my hand down the knobs of her spine, her sleek skin. “You already did. Many times. A wonder I can see a damn thing.”

  She turned back, that devilish laugh in her eyes, a beautiful breast aslant, pink-nippled. “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

  Getting dressed I felt like a man who has been saved at the last moment from a firing squad. Only to be placed in front of another. If we’d made love, Lexie and me, even though it would’ve been wonderful it would have poisoned the rest of our lives.

  Not while Bucky was in prison.

  After he got out we’d see.

  Though his chances of getting out were nil.

  “WHO’S YOUR GIRLFRIEND?” I said in Pashto next morning through the mike in the wall of bulletproof glass.

  Bucky gave me an angry glance. “I don’t have one,” he said in English. “Or you mean Lexie? You already fucking my wife?”

  “Your girlfriend?” I said again in Pashto.

  He looked down. “It ain’t like it seems.”

  “It never is.” I glanced at the mike. Our every word was recorded and listened to. It would take them a while to sort out the Pashto. But in English there was nothing I could ask, nothing he could say.

  “You remember Tora Bora?” Bucky said in English.

  “Like it was this morning.” Fourteen years ago.

  “We ought to talk more, about Afghanistan. In memory of the guys who died.”

  “I remember. Every day.”

  “You should write that book about Bush, how he let Bin Laden get away at Tora Bora –”

  “Somebody should write it.”

  “Remember that source we had in Waziristan? He’d tell us what their plans were, and try to steer their strategy to what we wanted?”

  “So we could hit them.”

  “Karim.”

  “We thought he was a double.”

  “You should put it in your book, how one of their guys got killed and they blamed it on Karim and burned him alive?”

  “We were told not to go in on that.”

  “Because he wasn’t ours.”

  “So?”

  “So this time, that guy is me.”

  LEXIE AND I took my Expedition back to Portland, rode home in her ancient Volvo, and she gave me the key to Bucky’s ’86 Ford 150 pickup that hadn’t been driven since he ended up Inside.

  I went out to the barn to look at it. The wind was howling through the slats and snow had blown in and covered it. A lot of mud had hardened on it, and it had plenty of corrosion from Maine’s salted winter roads. Part of the floorboards had rusted out, the tires were a little bald, and the heater didn’t work.

  But it was a glorious truck. In the entire human history of trucks the Ford 150 four-wheel drive three-quarter ton may be the greatest. It is so perfectly engineered that after many years of loving them I can think of few improvements. The engine is easy to work on, the ride hard but secure, and the bodies will take all manner of abuse from a ton of rocks to cattle to logs and even a mattress with two teenagers on a starry summer night.

  Second place in the pickup hall of fame would have to be the ’49 Chevy half-ton, but that’s another story.

  When we got back to Lexie’s it was 13:21. Time to go up the mountain and search the area where Bucky’d hid the .308.

  USING THE TRAIL Lexie and I had broken the day before, I reached the top in barely an hour, crossed the dead industrial zone and headed down the north side to the overhung cliff where Bucky had hid the .308 after he’d shot the three turbines.

  Someone had been there since Lexie and me yesterday. Brand new tracks, no crumple in the side walls, no snowshoes, boots a little smaller than mine, size 10 maybe, with a little imprint on the sole that said Irish Setter Work.

  He had come across the slope to where Bucky’s .308 had been hidden then returned, stepping in his own tracks.

  A hunter, maybe, for at one place he’d knelt and rested a rifle butt down in the snow, leaving a little imprint that said BROWNING.

  But deer season had ended late November, and anyway Lexie’d said no one hunted here any more, the animals had all been chased away by the turbines.

  The sun had slid behind dark clouds, the woods shadowed and deep. A mean wind sifted down from the slopes above knocking ice crystals off the frozen boughs. Tree trunks were cracking with cold. His tracks left mine so I followed his up the mountain through steep conifers and beech where I had to dig my snowshoe edges into the crust to keep from skidding downhill.

  Fifty feet below me the slope dropped over a granite cliff. Here if my snowshoes slipped I’d skid downhill fast and the only way to stop going over the cliff was grab a tree. But they were icy and far apart and by the time I’d slid that far I’d be going too fast.

  The wind in my face was razor cold – just its touch caused pain. I reminded myself why I was here, rubbed my stinging cheeks and pushed on.

  That’s when the bastard took those shots at me.

  Two for One

  AFTER THE FIRST SHOT and I’d skidded down the ice slope and over the cliff while more shots hit all around me, and I’d slid and scrambled another half mile down the mountain, found an oak limb and circled back on my trail to wait in hemlock scrub, I sat holding my oak limb in my good hand and cradling my dislocated finger atop my frozen, bloody foot and pretending the pain was happening to someone else.

  Once an owl called, faraway. There was a distant hum of traffic on 220, the slow settling of forest into arctic night.

  Since the snowmobile had left there’d been no sound of my shooter. But I couldn’t risk that the snowmobile had been someone else and that my shooter was still waiting.

  Chickadees chattered briefly as they roosted in the hemlock over my head. The boughs creaked with their burden of ice. Wind swept away the broken snow from my back tracks, leaving a darker trench.

  Hypothermia makes you forget how cold you are, makes you feel warm and relaxed, almost welcoming it. When this began to sink into my consciousness I knew I had to move.

  I traversed sideways up the ridge away from where the shooter had been, then back to find my missing boot and snowshoes, and circled the blasted ridgetop down to Lexie’s where Lobo gave me a joyous welcome and Lexie threw me in a hot bath and plied me with whisky. “I should take off my clothes and jump in with you,” she said longingly. “Sex is the best treatment for hypothermia…”

  After five whiskies I diligently took my dislocated finger in my other hand, gave it a hard jerk and passed out from the pain.

  Lexie pulled my head out
of the water. “Idiot!”

  “That’s what I’ve always loved most about you,” I coughed, “your empathy.” My finger was unfortunately still sideways.

  Footsteps clattered up the stairs. A tall rangy woman in a blue parka. She scowls down at me naked in the tub and shakes her head. “No wonder I’m a lesbian.”

  I was very high from the five whiskies and Lexie’s home-grown and from the joy of having survived attempted murder, but there was no way I could interpret this as a compliment. “So who the fuck are you?” I says, friendly as I can.

  “This is Jane,” Lexie says. “She’s a neighbor. And the county midwife.”

  “I don’t think I’m pregnant,” I says, looking down to make sure.

  Jane inspected my dislocated finger. “Nice.”

  “Can you fix it?”

  “You have to twist it as you pull,” she said to Lexie as if I weren’t there. And gave it a great yank and turn half pulling me out of the tub.

  This was not pleasant but it worked. My finger settled back into its joint, and the lessening of pain was blissfully religious. Jane departed to bring another human into the world – God knows why – and after more whiskies and hamburgers in front of the cook stove I began to warm up, that lovely feeling of survival, being with Lexie, re-gifted the joy of life.

  It took only a couple minutes online to identify the “Irish Setter Work” boot print. It was a Red Wing, a very good American-made work boot that lots of people wear.

  “I think you’re crazy,” Lexie said, “not going to the cops.”

  “Don’t want them knowing I’m here.”

  Now that I was safe my fear had turned to anger. Having been shot at many times I’d been acting as if it was normal. But this isn’t Afghanistan, I reminded myself. This isn’t Iraq. No one allegedly has the right to shoot you here.

  If the coyote hadn’t called and I hadn’t stopped to listen I’d be dead now. I couldn’t imagine dead now. Mysterious and horrendous.

  The more I thought the angrier I got.

  It was time to call Mitchell.

  MITCHELL CAN SOLVE any IT problem, tap into anybody’s life as deep as he wants. He can use your phone while you have it and take pictures with it, can record all your conversations and tell where you were at any instant and what you were doing.

  If your computer’s hooked to the internet he can wander around inside it and copy, destroy or alter anything he wants. Even if it isn’t hooked to the internet he can climb inside it using external radio waves, and hang out there, invisible. He’s “an independent data researcher”, engaged by DOD to patrol the borders of our virtual world, hunting interlopers, hackers, leaks and Muslim terrorists.

  The same way he and I once hunted al Qaeda in the nasty mountains of Afghanistan and Islamic jihadi in the gritty deathtraps of Falluja. And as I’ve said elsewhere he’d give anything to be like me, and I’d give anything not to be like him. Because in the northern Afghanistan hills he took the RPG meant for me, and on Oahu three years later I took the heavy time meant for him.

  But that’s another story.

  “HOW’S THE SURF?” Mitchell says, answering as always on the second ring.

  “Fantastic. I’m out every day.”

  Having grown up in South Dakota, Mitchell hates snow. If he hadn’t lost his legs in Afghanistan he’d be like me back home, surfing all day and rocking all night. Except he would’ve stayed in SF, and I never had the chance. But now I was in Maine in January, when the surfing’s lousy unless you’re dressed like a wet polar bear.

  I explained him about this guy in Red Wings shooting at me.

  “You fuckhead,” Mitchell says encouragingly. “You shoulda seen that coming.”

  “What I can’t figure is how did he know I’d be there? Or was it just chance? But why shoot at me?”

  “You’re digging yourself into deep shit again, Pono –”

  “So what you recommend? That I head back to Hawaii and leave Bucky in this shit?” I didn’t add, and Lexie too? “So the wind companies planning to wreck Maine with thousands more turbines will win, and soon Maine will look like New Jersey? Actually,” I calmed down, “I’d love to go back to Hawaii and surf, but it’s not about to happen.”

  “Course not,” Mitchell said.

  “So what you suggest?”

  “I’ll see what satpix I can find for those coordinates, if there’s any real time the last twenty-four hours, if I can identify anything. Depends if we have a fix on that area – even if we do the res won’t be good.”

  “I need to find this guy.”

  “Look, Pono –” Mitchell’s voice took on a strained tone, like when you’re trying to reason with a determined idiot – “you can’t kill him.”

  I reflected on this. “Not yet. Not till it’s clean.”

  “Pono, you got to start thinking, not reacting.”

  I took this in. “Yeah,” I sighed, slowing down. “You’re right.”

  “So what else is going on?”

  “Bucky needs a lawyer. But I can’t find anyone to defend a guy who shoots out turbines and supposedly killed some environmentalist – Maine’s full of what the locals call knee-jerk greenies –”

  “What’s that?” Mitchell says, a little suspiciously.

  “People who support industrial wind power without understanding anything about how useless and destructive it is, who want to be green but want the towers on other people’s mountains. Like Connecticut, that has outlawed wind turbines there but is putting up thousands in Maine. Or the Dems in southern Maine, who love wind power as long as it’s in northern Maine, ruining other people’s lives not theirs.”

  “So Bucky won’t get a fair trial?”

  “The whole thing’s rigged. Whoever killed Ronnie Dalt did it for two reasons: one, to tag Bucky with it and jail him before he causes more trouble, and two,” I was thinking it out as I spoke, “they must’ve wanted to get rid of Ronnie too.”

  “If he was still useful to them they’d have kept him around.”

  “So the people who killed him got two for one.”

  “And who would those people be?”

  “The list has to start with the wind companies, particularly WindPower LLC –”

  “Same old same old,” Mitchell said. “What else you want?”

  “Can you get contribution records?” I said.

  “Who?”

  “Let’s start with Senator Artie Lemon. After he was governor he helped write the Expedited Wind Law, and then made millions developing wind projects. He then used some of the proceeds to buy himself a US Senate seat where he’s now pushing taxpayer welfare for industrial wind.”

  “So he made millions on his own wind project and now getting more money from other wind companies to push the same agenda? So he’s getting two for one too.”

  “Be good to know how much he gets, and how much of it’s under the table.”

  “Under the table’s hard to find.”

  “And Maude Muldower, the US Congresswoman whose husband is financially connected to the wind industry and who owns most Maine newspapers.”

  “Let me guess: those papers are pro-wind? Who else?”

  “And Maine Audubon, nearly half their major contributors are wind industry. Doesn’t matter that wind turbines slaughter birds. And other enviro groups with big money from the wind industry. To say nothing of public radio, with their wind commercials in return for tons of money from WindPower LLC –”

  Mitchell chuckled. “We nailed those WindPower guys so bad, last time.”

  “Yeah, and I’m the one who almost got killed.”

  “Only because I’m in a fucking wheelchair and you’re not.”

  That made me feel guilty. “And I’d be dead how many times without you?”

  He chuckled again. ”I’m still not going to marry you.”

  “That’s a gross thought. To wake up every morning looking at you.”

  “You should be so lucky. But if you ever do get married, Pono,
though I wouldn’t wish that on any girl, your IQ’s gonna go way up. And hers’ll go way down.”

  This was insulting so I ignored it. “So I’m trying to figure who wanted Ronnie Dalt dead and Bucky blamed. And how we might track it.”

  “Tracking it’s easy.” Mitchell’s words made me think of tracking the guy who’d just shot at me. “It’s proving that’s hard.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  “It would be poetic justice,” Mitchell said, “if Bucky ended up Inside after helping send you there.”

  “That’s the trouble with doing your duty. Instead of what you know is right.”

  “Whatever you do,” Mitchell says, “stay off that mountain.”

  Nirvana

  TWO HOURS BEFORE DAWN I put on Bucky’s smelly damp boots, took a .243 Winchester and a white camo jacket from his closet and a couple of plastic sandwich bags from the kitchen and headed up the mountain. It was minus 27 according to the thermometer outside the kitchen window but felt a lot colder.

  I didn’t want to be here but had no choice. My shooter would be back at daylight, looking for a blood trail on the snow or hoping I’d return.

  But by the time he arrived I’d be waiting for him.

  Yesterday’s cuts and bruises hurt with every step. My right toes were still numb, not a great sign. I had to keep the .243 in my right hand because the splinted finger of the left hurt too much to use. But having had a night to dwell on being shot at, I was pumped.

  At the top I stood catching my breath in a spruce thicket watching the snowy denuded ridge as the red strobes of the towers flashed luridly across it. The turbines were silent, unmoving, though there was plenty of wind. Curtailment, I remembered it’s called.

  But I was glad they were silent, because to hunt somebody in all that racket would be doubly dangerous. Not that I knew what I’d do if I found him. Even though he’d tried to kill me, it was technically against the law for me to kill him. So what was I going to do – arrest him at gun-point?

  And hope maybe the cops would listen, this time?

  No, I’d decided, find out who he is. And who’s paying him to kill me.