Bellows Falls (34 page)

My pursuit through the crowd was like running underwater. As I’d hoped, I could track Bouch’s progress by the effects of his passage—people complaining of being shoved aside, a few still regaining their footing, others noticing to their horror the blood he’d smeared on their clothes. I didn’t endear myself to any of them with my barely gentler version of the same treatment, despite holding up my badge and muttering constant apologies. It became a chase made surreal by its molasses-slow movement, regularly pierced by strobe-like flashes of violent primary colors. My vision was reduced to a tight series of still pictures, each following the other by several seconds, and each tinged with a different hue.

Despite the pace, however, I could tell I was gaining, at times catching sight of people being jostled just a few dozen feet ahead of me. I also knew by now where we were headed. Steering up the middle of the jammed railroad yard, Norm had reduced his options to two, both of them train trestles. One was a short span over the mouth of the canal, leading directly into downtown Bellows Falls. The other, closer by, was the much longer bridge to North Walpole, parallel to and twenty feet downstream of the dam. It wasn’t until we were almost at the top of the yard that I saw Bouch cut right and head for the latter.

Still pushing through the crowd, I brought the radio once more to my mouth. “Suspect’s heading for North Walpole across the railroad br—”

I didn’t get to finish. Easing by a huge bearded man, I was seized by the shirtfront and almost lifted off my feet. His whiskers tickled my chin and his beer-soaked breath enveloped my head as he bellowed, “Goddamn it, you assholes, stop pushin’,” before tossing me away like a small discarded toy. He sent me piling up against a half dozen others, all of whom absorbed my fall with a chorus of angry yells. I lay sprawled on the ground as people milled about, trying not to step on me. Another man, smaller but just as irritated, finally bent over me and yelled, “What the fuck’s your problem?”

In response, I merely shoved my badge in his face. He backed up, said, “He’s a cop,” and a small clearing instantly formed around me. I regained my feet and took off toward the bridge.

The delay, though brief, had been crucial for Norm Bouch. By the time I reached the wooden police barricade blocking the bridge, all I could see was an empty steel trestle, its shiny metal rails glittering from the lights high above. I dropped my hand to the radio clipped to my belt and found it missing, a victim of my encounter with the bearded man.

I looked around frantically, seeing if Bouch could’ve taken another route. But the bridge, being just downstream of the dam, spanned a cauldron of lethally churning water, and the riverbank dropped straight into it.

I quickly turned to a woman sitting on the barricade. “I’m a police officer. Did you see a man go onto the bridge?”

She took her eyes off the fireworks to look at me angrily. “Sure I did. He almost knocked me over doing it. I told him he’d get busted.”

“Where did he go?”

She looked over my shoulder, her eyes blank with surprise.

Then her hand rose to her mouth. “Oh, my Lord. Did he fall in?”

It was a pertinent question. The recent rain had swollen the river almost to its crest, and the dam’s Tainter gates had been lifted to spare the canal upstream, and the hydroelectric plant it fed, from being totally overwhelmed. The tradeoff was that the bend around Bellows Falls’ man-made island—the peaceful midsummer stream I’d visited just days earlier—was now a rampaging, heaving, tumultuous torrent. Survival in its throes, and especially over the falls, seemed impossible.

I thanked the woman and stepped out onto the trestle, keenly aware of the water crashing over the dam a few yards to my left. The farther I got from shore, the more the sound of water all but eclipsed the loudest explosions overhead.

I stuck to the middle of the tracks, mindful of how the bridge’s intertwined superstructure afforded all too many hiding places, playing my flashlight into every dark corner I came to, my gun at the ready. Feeling increasingly exposed and isolated, I kept glancing ahead, hoping to see reinforcements approaching from the far shore.

But it didn’t happen. As inevitably as fate, Norm Bouch emerged as from the metal itself, an instant transformation from angular shadow to seething bundle of human rage—punching, scratching, kicking, and gouging with a fury I’d never before encountered. In my efforts to simply stay on my feet, both my gun and light went flying. Locked together like boxers in a clinch, suddenly caught in a blinding flash from the heavens, we tumbled off the bridge into the steaming waters.

· · ·

We landed in a bubble bath, the water so aerated it was more foam than liquid. It drew us deep under, not supplying any resistance to swim against, and twisted us about like laundry. But while the notion of air surrounded us, it was water nevertheless, filling my nose and mouth and wrapping me in a cool, smooth, smothering cocoon.

Bouch was unaffected. His dark outline still blocking my blurred vision, he kept his hands clamped around my neck and began trying to hook my legs with his own, as if hoping to suck me into himself, oblivious to his own need to survive. He was all revenge now, the manipulator out of tricks, his only remaining goal to make sure that in death, as in life, he didn’t go alone or without making somebody pay. I ran my hands along the sides of his face and pressed both my thumbs as hard as I could into his eyes, feeling the heat expanding in my lungs as my oxygen neared depletion.

The effect of my efforts seemed negligible at first, and far, far too slow. Norm began to thrash, his head tossing from side to side, which only made me hang on tighter. The water was a swirling screen of whitewash, subtly highlighted by the muted colors of the fireworks display. But my vision began to dim as I ran out of air, and slowly I felt a numbness overtake me.

At which point, Bouch desperately released my throat to grab at my hands.

Stimulated by the sudden freedom, I placed one foot firmly against his chest and pushed with all my remaining strength, tearing myself loose of him.

The result was dramatic. From a crashing, twisting whirlwind of froth, I was thrust into solid fluid. The resistance all around me doubled, and I swam to the surface, searing my lungs with warm summer air. The noise of rushing water was overridden once more by the dizzying crash of exploding pyrotechnics.

The respite was short-lived. No sooner had I taken in one big restorative breath than I was dragged underwater again, this time by the weight of my waterlogged armored vest. Pulling at my shirt and fumbling with the clinging Velcro straps, I felt once more my brain closing down. With one final effort, I stripped the vest and pushed at the water around me with my hands. This time, when I broke to the surface, I stayed put.

I lay on my back for a few stunned seconds, the undulating stream rocking me gently, my vision—moments ago shot through with frantic pinpricks of fading neurons—now filled with wondrous flowers, star-bursts, and radiating wheels of light.

All riding on the growing thunder of the falls just ahead.

My mind clear at last, my heart pounding against the coming onslaught, I twisted about, looking for something to hang on to. But all around me, moving with ever growing speed, I could only see leaping, silky, multicolored water. Ahead, the twin portals of the bridge spanning the falls arched high overhead, doorways to oblivion. And above them, like marbles balanced on a wall, the shapes of spectators’ heads all craned away from me, their eyes fixed on the sky.

I stared at them, my last glimpse of humanity, until I was sucked down into the cataract.

I’d been told years before that survival in fast water often depends on one’s position—that if you keep flat on your back, with your arms spread out and your legs held before you, the descent of a rapids can approximate a sled run down a mountain.

It had seemed reasonable at the time—appealing to my human ego that helplessness could be defeated by mere proper positioning. The reality was I felt like a leaf in a torrent, and just as likely to be pulverized.

I was thrust about, tossed up, sucked under, and twisted around with no regard for my own efforts. The force controlling me was absolute. I breathed when I could, and otherwise gave in to whatever would decree my fate. I was aware of the rocks. They loomed enormously to all sides. I felt them gliding beneath and beside me, the slippery texture of them brushing my outstretched fingers. But the water, while trying to outlast the air I held tight, also buffered the blows and helped whisk me away from the sheer mass of solid granite. At one point, near the end, when I was thrown like a salmon from the water’s embrace, it gathered me again into a deep pool, softening a two-story free fall with the yield of a down pillow. From there, I bobbed into gentle rapids, beside the outwash from the hydroelectric plant, and, more by instinct than with any remaining energy, I slowly paddled into the gravel-strewn shallows.

There, my hands and feet touching bottom like branches protruding from a log, I floated, barely conscious, and watched a parade of firefly-sized flashlights snake their way down the distant shore to the river’s edge.

GREG DAVIS STOPPED NEAR THE ENTRANCE
to the railroad trestle. It had been two days since my swim in the Connecticut River—and an overnight stay in the hospital for observation—and the water level had dropped back to where the hydroelectric plant could take everything the river had. The Tainter gates were closed, and only a thin film of water coated the downstream side of the dam.

Davis pointed to where Norm Bouch and I fell in that night. “That’s where we found him. Looks like a fun place to swim right now—under a small waterfall—but we couldn’t grab hold of him till they lowered the gates a few minutes, and then we had to move fast. Before that, he just kept bobbing out of sight… I don’t know how you made it.”

I stared at the placid scene, no more dangerous now than a backyard pool. Sensitive as always, Davis didn’t say any more but stared off with affection in the other direction, across the canal at the gritty, timeworn, ugly backside of his home town.

I broke away from my daydreaming and followed his gaze. A small group of carpenters was working on one of the buildings overlooking the canal, reinforcing a balcony the length of a city block. “I hear congratulations are in order,” I said.

He turned to me and smiled, embarrassment mixed with pride. “The Chief thing? Thanks. It’s only a recommendation. The powers-that-be have still got to rule on it.”

“Latour’s backing can’t hurt, especially now that he’s the hero of the hour.”

Davis went back to the view. “Yeah… He had that coming, though. He put his whole life into this town, and he did a good job. It wasn’t his fault he got tired. Not that he’s taking off… He told me yesterday he’ll stick around to help the town rebuild itself, and that Shippee’ll be his first project. He thinks he has enough on him to encourage him to go job hunting. So there may be light at the end of the tunnel.”

“How’s Emily doing?”

He laughed. “There’s someone who learned a lot in a short time. You don’t speak ill of the chief around her.” He looked at his watch. “You want a ride back? I gotta get to work.”

I shook my head. “It’s a pretty day. I’ll walk. Thanks.”

I watched him drive slowly across the tracks and down the yard toward the road. Emily Doyle had been an easy fix. She was a young enthusiast, dealing with the world in black-and-white terms, unconcerned with such inconsistencies as a contradictory alliance with Emile Latour.

Brian Padget was another matter. I’d started today’s pilgrimage to Bellows Falls with a visit to his home, to formally let him know that all charges had been dropped, and that the papers would be running a full explanation of the circumstances in a few days.

Not surprisingly, this had not affected him like the wave of a magic wand, eradicating the past and healing all wounds. He’d merely moved to the window and stood there, sightlessly staring out, fingering a curtain in one hand.

“What are you going to do now?” I’d asked. “Latour said you can pick up where you left off with the department, if you want, once you’ve paid the piper for playing maverick. Probably not a bad idea, at least for the short run. Give you time to think things over.”

He hadn’t answered, and I’d been forced to think of the differences between us. Despite the despair and the growing sense of futility that had nagged me early on, unconsciously I’d been bolstered throughout by stalwarts like Greg Davis and Jonathon Michael and even Emile Latour, who’d finally risen to the task at hand. I’d also had a lifetime of experience to call upon, and in Gail the backing of a friend on whose support I could count.

Padget had benefited from nothing like this. Manipulated into disgrace, he’d been just as passively extracted from it, and like any piece of manhandled baggage, while he’d survived the trip physically, he’d been forever scarred by the process. Watching him stare out into space, his options unknown, I’d mourned my inability to be of much use. I hoped he’d stay in law enforcement, but I knew that might be expecting too much.

I turned away from the river and walked toward the village, my reborn optimism attracted by the repair work being done on that old building.

Ignoring the clearly written sign not to do so, I crossed the canal using the short railroad trestle, and cut left along the opposite bank until I was standing at water’s edge, in the grass, looking up at the imposing structure. From this side, it reached four stories to the sky—stained, rusting, disfigured by an ugly fire escape, and yet oddly regal. Beneath the grime were ornate cornices and fancy moldings—details of an ancient attention to care and pride—the murmurings of the old Bellows Falls.

One of the carpenters paused in his work to look down at me from the balcony. “How’re you doin’?”

“Okay. Fixing the place up?”

“Yeah. Been empty longer than I been alive. Still in good shape, though. They want to turn it into a teen center, a restaurant, who the hell knows?”