Hard Ground (13 page)

Fences

Ex-wife Paula had swept up the kid last night and headed to the Mall of America, wherever in hell that was.

“You think maybe the kid's a hair young to learn a shopaholic's habits?” he had asked.

Paula, with a million-dollar book-learning mind and not ten cents' worth of common sense, fluffed her thick hair and said indignantly, “Her name is Star, and I am not now nor have I ever been a shopaholic.”

“Our credit cards and bank accounts tell a different tale.”

“I told you the first time you dipped your wick out to my old man's camp I wasn't good with the numbers.”

“You're a CPA and a lawyer! I thought you were joking.”

“Now you know,” she said curtly, took Star's tiny hand, and flounced out to her new red Hummer.

“At least I'm not paying for that piece of shit,” Conservation Officer Ivan Bouffardi said to her back.

The only pain in the divorce was having Star only half the week. To her credit, Paula had asked for no assets (there were none) or alimony. Her own income was six figures, multiple zeros over his own salary after ten years working for the state in uniform.

What ate at him most was the faint possibility of his being transferred to the eastern Upper Peninsula. Living here in Kingsford, she was too damn close to the Mall of America in Minneapolis and to the big malls in Milwaukee and Green Bay. He had filed the request before the divorce, hoping that the lack of shopping to the east would reform his then-wife, though deep in his heart he'd known it probably wouldn't work. Now if he got transferred, Paula wouldn't be going, and she would make it impossible for him to have Star at all.

It was too bad, because he really wanted to move. The family hunting camp on the South Branch of the Two Hearted River was his and about as isolated a spot as one could hope for, but the chances of transfer to Mackinac, Luce, or Chippewa seemed slim to none, and after ten years in Dickinson County the truth was that he was worn out. There were days when he had dozens of contacts per day, more than some officers in the UP encountered in a year, and knowing this, it would be nice to have a more human pace, though he wasn't sure he could adapt to it. Over here there were more lawbreakers, more assholes per capita, and the bottom line was that Bouffardi liked enforcing the law, right over wrong, no gray, yes-no, binary decisions, up-down, one way or the other, and life went on. Above all else, he loathed the differences in legal outcomes that people of wealth seemed to buy for themselves. The inequity drove him crazy, but what could he do about it? He didn't make the laws or adjudicate them; he simply enforced laws on the books.

Today's patrol would take him out to Perry Anka's 400-acre impoundment in the extreme north of the county near Wild West Creek. Christ Perry Anka was Ironwood-born but had made a fortune in the business of home health care and durable medical goods. Anka, now pushing eighty, had been on the state's Natural Resources Commission for the past twenty years and was hailed as the state's premier conservationist, so much so that newspaper headlines around the state had only to refer to “Perry” for readers to know who the piece was referring to.

Anka was said to evaluate his life based on the number of enemies he'd accumulated. He brooked no fools, toadies, suck-ups, or slackers.

Once a week in the fall, Ivan Bouffardi took a drive out to Anka's private hunting ground. Not that the patrol would produce results: Perry had his own private security setup to protect his scientifically managed, fenced-in deer herd. But Bouffardi loved the property and seeing all the humongous animals prancing around.

Once in a while some local jerkoffs from Norway, Channing, or Sagola would try to get through the wire, but it was futile. Perry's fence had electronics that would be state of the art even at the dang Pentagon. Anka once told him, “That system tells me when a chipmunk farts,” and chuckled until he was red in the face. The chance of finding an intruder on Perry's property was close to nil, but it would make for a relaxing day in the truck, some time to not think about Paula and Star or the transfer deal.

Leekie Annisdottir was on duty at the gate. A onetime downstate Pontiac cop, for several years Leekie had been on Perry's security force, which consisted of six people, three men and three women. The compound was guarded and monitored twenty-four/seven.

Annisdottir buzzed open the gate and ambled over to the truck. “Walking or driving today?” she asked.

“Driving.” Bouffardi looked at his watch. “You on till fourteen hundred?”

“Had the nights last month, twenty-two hundred to oh-six. That shift's not for me. How's your kid?”

“Went with Paula to the Mall of America,” he said, groaning.

“I feel your pain,” the attractive guard said. “Sounds like your ex is starting your little one early.”

“Seems like,” he said.

“How long the girls gone?” she asked.

“Four days, back Monday.”

“Got no plans myself, case you're up for a diversion,” she said.

Surprised, he said, “I'll keep that in mind.” Several times over the past months, it seemed to him that she had hinted at the possibility of seeing him, but this was different, blunt, right to the point. He always answered in the negative, begging off. This time he said, “Your place or mine?”
What the hell; I'm divorced, right?

She arched an eyebrow. “You sure?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Don't make me no never mind,” she said, “but I got a fully stocked fridge and kitchen, I love to cook, and there's even a king-size bed, not necessarily in that order.”

He felt himself blushing. “Your place, then.”

“Two miles out of Foster City on C.R. Five Oh Nine . Bright red house, the only one for miles,” she said. “

“That's close to work,” he observed.

“What Perry demands.”

“For you or for everyone?”

“
Everybody
on the security team lives within twenty miles.”

“How come?”

Annisdottir shrugged. “The rich don't explain themselves.”

“I hear you,” he said.

“Till later, take care, Ten Days.”

“Say what?”

“Everybody in the county knows, Ivan. How you caught some filthy rich shithead from Green Bay with two illegal does, and he hired big-shot lawyers who kept getting postponements after you got to court, and that started eating up your duty time. Ten times, dude. That was damn stubborn, the stuff of legend. Word is the judge called you into his chambers the tenth time, but nobody knows what got said.”

What the judge had said was, “Son, this damn defendant's got pockets so deep his hands brush the heads of Chinamen. He can outlast you and me, and the whole damn state, if need be.”

“Not me, he can't,” Bouffardi told the judge.

“Gonna irritate your management some, I guess, all that field time lost.”

“The man wants his day in court. And I do, too,” he told the smiling judge.

The trial began on the eleventh date. The jury was out exactly sixteen minutes and found the man guilty on all counts. “Not important what got said,” Bouffardi told Annisdottir.

•••

Ten minutes later, Bouffardi found himself unable to focus. All he could think about was Leekie and her alluring voice. Shouldna said nothing, he chastised himself.
Shoulda left things the way they are
.

Perry had twin trout ponds on the property, one of them planted with big brown trout. Bouffardi liked to walk to the larger trout lake, have a pipe, enjoy the solace at a shed Perry called the Gillie Hut. Here he would take off his boots and socks when the weather was nice and relax.

His family on his father's side descended from one Corporal Jean Nepoma Bouffardi, a soldier in Napoleon's Grande Armée. At the battle of Friedland, his ancestor had both arms and legs blown off by artillery, but a day later one of his arms had been found, still clutching his pipe. From then on French soldiers called their pipes
bouffardes
. Ivan liked to think Jean Nepoma's singlemindedness came down to him genetically, as did his love for a good, relaxing smoke.

Ivan's pipe had been made for him before his old man passed on. His grandfather had made his father's pipe, and he hoped one day to make one for his own son. He couldn't imagine there wouldn't be a son. Paula was gone, but he was still young.

His
bouffarde
was large, made from hundred-year-old French briar root,
Erica arborea
, the word briar a bastardization of the French
bruyère
, for “heath tree.” His pipe had been fashioned from
bruyère blanche
and brought home from World War II from Saint-Claude, where the world's finest pipes were made. His pipe was in the pot style, with a fat bowl. His father had taught him to puff, not inhale, the latter causing health problems. The French government had raged against the evils of smoking as a poison and a drug—until the government nationalized all tobacco businesses in the mid-seventeenth century. Since then? Rarely a government criticism, revenue being altogether more relevant and real than theoretical, pie-in-the-sky, or real health risks.

Bouffardi wiggled his toes in the morning air and puffed contentedly, wondering if this was what it felt like to be old and tired in retirement.

Movement across the pond caught his attention as a large doe came bounding along the north shore and collapsed in the water with a dramatic splash. Bouffardi saw blood pooling in the shallows, hurriedly put on his socks and boots, and tapped the dottle into his hand with two sharp taps of the bowl. He pressed the tobacco remains into the dirt with his boot heel, making sure there were no lingering embers. He carefully put the pipe in its leather carrying pouch and hung the cord around his neck. In the truck the pipe had a special box. He grinned at how the tobacco business in France paralleled marijuana here. By 1635 Parisian policy allowed the sale of tobacco only with a physician's prescription. It was said that Napoleon in 1810 was at a party in Paris and saw a woman festooned in diamonds. He asked an aide who she was and was told she was the wife of a tobacconist. At the time, the government tobacco monopoly had been more or less “resting,” but Napoleon drafted new regulations reestablishing the state's power over such sales, and little had changed since then.

The conservation officer pulled the doe to shore. A crossbow bolt protruded slightly. Hard to believe the animal hadn't fallen when it was hit, but the desire to live, whatever the species, often overrode theoretical and sometimes even real physiological limits.

Bouffardi suppressed a smile. A date with Annisdottir, a fine smoke, a nice day, and finally what appeared to be a violator
inside
Perry's fence, all of this contributing to a rush that left him feeling almost giddy.

Having examined the deer, Bouffardi moved immediately into the wood, offsetting a few feet from the animal's blood trail, which was clear in places, sporadic in others. The shooter would no doubt eventually follow the animal or move to another target. Bouffardi stopped and decided to wait.

Soon came a man in full camo creeping low, carrying a crossbow. Bouffardi stood up. “Conservation officer.”

“Motherfucker,” the man said with a groan.

“Discharge the bolt into the ground by your right foot,” Bouffardi ordered.

“I can just take it out,” the man said.

“Do what I say,” Bouffardi said. “Now.”

The bolt made a thunk as it struck the hard ground. “Crossbow down, and off with the camo mask.”

The man complied.

Oh, shit.
It was L-Sun Banks, one of Perry's longtime security men. Banks pretentiously spelled his name L-Sun, which made Bouffardi roll his eyes, and he had no idea why he reacted so. The man was black. Maybe that was why. He couldn't be sure.

“Banks.”

“Your eyes is good.”

“Got an explanation?”

“How about I got six kids, and they like to eat meat.”

“You have a job.”

“You know what Perry pays? Minimum fucking wage is what, no benefits, no cost of living, no change for inflation, I'm talkin' barebones, and he dictates where we live or can't. And here he got all this damn meat right here, all these old bucks making his old Johnson stiff, and I don't bother none of his damn trophies. Can't eat antlers.”

“You've done this
before
?”

“Ya think?'

“Jesus, Banks, that animal is your boss's property.”

The man countered, “What that doe is, is food for my old lady and kids, nothin' more, nothin' less.”

“You can get one legally elsewhere in the state season.”

“That old man got us tied up all the time. Not slaves, see, but indentured servants, and like that.”

Bouffardi started to say something about finding another job but held back. There weren't any jobs these days.