Hard Ground (5 page)

“Nonsense, sweetie,” the sergeant said. “Want a pinch of my scone?” he asked.

Bite me, Rajala started to say, but thought twice and instead said, “No, thank you, Sergeant.”

“See?” Delain Max said with a mouthful. “Old Telford's already had a fine effect on you. Man, these scones are
scrumptious!
”

Paul Rajala cringed.

Checkmate

Penny Lositch called Wintermute at home last night. “Edwy,” she said in her needy-reedy voice, and right to the point, “Old Man Cramp is supposed to see me weekly, and it's been more than five months since I've heard from that damn reprobate.”

Lositch was a parole officer not known for efficiency, effectiveness, or compassion, a floater who sucked the state tit and performed a nominal job at a barely tolerable level and should have been canned years before. People in the cop community called her Penny the Loafer.

“You could check on him,” Conservation Officer Edwy Wintermute suggested.

“Don't think I haven't tried. Phone messages go unreturned, e-mails kick back, snail mail is undeliverable, his house stands empty, I'm told, and none of his crooked relatives claim to know where he is.”

“Maybe he moved out of state.”

“Maybe pigs will fly. Listen, Edwy, we have him on another warrant, sex with a minor, his granddaughter. He won't be getting out this time around.”

“Charges alleged or filed?”

“We're on the same side, Edwy; don't go weasel talk on me. You've arrested him more than anyone.”

“I'll try to take a look tomorrow. You want me to bring him in?”

“I'd prefer that you shoot that giant drain on my life so I could be done with him once and for all, but use your own judgment,” the PO said, ending the conversation. Translation: The man is in violation of his parole, and the rest of you have to figure out what to do and leave me alone.

Wintermute had spent ten years as a game warden, the whole time in Mackinac County, living in Gould City. The man in question, Jacques Cramp, was a lifelong fish and game violator, and over the years he had been frequently accused of incest and various sex crimes, none of which he'd ever actually been charged with, much less been found guilty of.

It seemed to Edwy Wintermute that in this state, once you were down, there were unseen forces that worked together to keep you there and made it impossible for you to climb back to any level of normalcy, never mind respectability. It was an aspect of the state that Wintermute loathed and lamented. In her experience, a lot of the complaints about Cramp came from his competitors, most notably the wing nuts and jamoke violators over in the Garden Peninsula.

Sure enough, Cramp's house looked empty. Wintermute called the county sheriff in St. Ignace to find out if new charges had been filed against the old man. Answer: verbal hand thumps to the bureaucratic forehead, followed by lugubrious silence. Translation: Charges had never been made out or had slipped into the proverbial red tape crack. Or it was all bullshit, which was her guess.

Jacques Cramp had bounced around the county for decades (not to mention parts of Chippewa, Schoolcraft, Luce, and Alger), but the one place he seemed to gravitate toward was a remote camp in Hulbert Township in Chippewa County, reachable only on unmarked, vague two-tracks that wound through monster cedar swamps, north toward the Tahquamenon River flood plain, roads that were impassable much of the year because of flooding and snowdrifts, or whatever.

Once she'd seen the roads covered with five inches of pure ice, and she had gotten a hundred yards in before sliding into a ditch. Not a big deal. By midday the ice melted, and she backed out. There were also deep sugar sand sections to contend with. Years ago Wintermute had hiked in on snowshoes from the East West Road, four miles up the railroad grade and southwest through the swamps to intersect a long finger of hard ground, where the old man's camp sat, built into the side of the ridge, isolated and largely hidden, like a small wilderness keep. Today Wintermute decided to chance the drive and got to the cable gate with minimal trouble (only two blowdowns and one boulder to be evaded).

She left her truck at the cable and walked a quarter mile back to the camp and three hundred yards in found the old man turtling along the two-track, both of his pant legs folded behind what remained of his legs and pinned in place. He was headed the same direction she was.

Wintermute said, “That looks like mighty slow going, Cramp.”

The old man stopped but didn't look up. “Good joke. Never woulda thunka that one, Edwy,” he said with a series of grunts and gasps.

“Penny misses your weekly
tête-à-têtes
.”

“Why God make miserable coose like dat?”

“Variety maybe. You seem to be short some appendages since last we met, Jacques.”

“Da sweet blood finally got to 'em. VA over Iron Mountain took 'em off. I told dat PO bitch I had surgery comin' up, and VA even sent letter. She said, yada-yada, yada-yada, sucks to be you.”

“You've been in Iron Mountain five
months?
”

“Dere t'ree and some, rest of time seein' old chums. Ya know, like R&R, eh?”

“Like a snowbird to Florida,” Wintermute said. “Lositch says there're charges pending, sex with a minor, namely your granddaughter.”

Cramp said, “Hell wit dat bullpuckey. You seen
paper
wit charges?” Only then did he finally look up at her.

“No.”

“Won't neither. Word out Lositch got her tight ass in sling. I hear she put on warnin' by state for not doin' her job, eh? Way I see it, I disappear, she does, too.”

Cramp stopped, twisted to his butt, took a pack of Camels out of his waist pack, and lit one after offering the pack to Wintermute, who accepted and sat down cross-legged, facing him. There was standing swamp water not four feet away, a carpet of Indian sweet grass between them and the water. The ground smelled vaguely of vanilla.

Normally, Wintermute didn't smoke, but today she sensed something momentous in the air and decided to partake. His violating ways aside, she'd always been oddly fond of Jacques Cramp, who never made excuses and always owned up to his faults and crimes once captured.

The two of them sat smoking mindlessly, exhaling, and watching blue tendrils hang in the summer morning air. “Your family know you're out here?” she finally asked.

Cramp showed the game warden his callused hands, which looked like leather baseball gloves. “Pal dropped me nort' of town, and I come up fum dere.”

“Crawled?”

“The hull way on old tote roads. She weren't too bad, hey. I seen bugs lots worse for sure, eh.”

She calculated the crawl had been twelve to fifteen miles. “Long way,” Wintermute said.

“Made it is da point; rest is just jaw-chew.”

True enough
. “Now what?”

“Get camp, settle in, live high on hog,” the old man said, laughing and gasping for air.

Wintermute laughed with him. The old man had always treated her with respect, as if they were the friendly opposition to be outsmarted. “Your camp provisioned?” she asked him.

“Got all I need,” the man said, flipping Wintermute a key. “Do me favor? Scoot on up dere, open 'er up, eh?”

“I could carry you,” Wintermute said. “Fireman's carry.”

“Come dis far on my own, reckon I can finish 'er dat way.”

She had no rejoinder and walked to the camp to open the door. Two floors, eighteen by twenty feet, kitchen and larder in front of the ground floor area. She opened cabinets and found nothing, which led to a heart-sinking realization as she heard a single gunshot, ran outside, and saw the old man on his back, not fifty yards from the cabin. He had scratched “thanks” in dirt he had smoothed. He was shirtless, ribs protruding, his shirt tossed up on a raspberry bush laden with ripening fruit. A second note in the dirt read, “My PO wunt see me.”

Wintermute thought she understood, and called Lositch, who answered with an irritable, “What is it?”

“No sign of Cramp. I've exhausted all my sources. I think he's disappeared.”

“Fuck he has!” Lositch swore and cut the connection.

Wintermute used her boot and a leafy branch to erase the man's “Thanks,” picked up their cigarette butts, and carefully put the wiped key into his shirt pocket, where she found a note like the one on the ground. “My PO refewds see me.”

Wolves and coyotes would make short work of the old man's body, spread the bones around. Cramp would truly disappear, but the shirt would be found, leaving a circumstantial mess.

The CO took a final look at the old man and his shirt and hiked back to her truck. Some violators weren't all bad, or even bad all the time. And some presumed good guys weren't good at all. Cramp had always been a great violator because he worked alone and planned meticulously, even his final act, it seemed. Wintermute admired the sheer audacity and remembered what some Hollywood star was supposed to have said, that revenge was a dish best served cold. She hoped Lositch would find hell.

Song in the Woods

In two years as a tribal cop on the Keweenaw Bay Reservation in Baraga, three years as a Michigan state trooper, and the last fourteen as a conservation officer in counties below and above the bridge, CO Foresta Quinn had never seen so much debris from a two-vehicle crash, never imagined there could be so damn many pieces, and wondered if manufacturers were doing something differently and hiding it from consumers. It wouldn't surprise her. Little did anymore.

First on scene, she called Central, the multicounty dispatcher who covered city cops, county sheriffs, conservation officers, and state police for Mackinac, Chippewa, and Luce Counties. Quinn asked for assistance with victims and traffic control. She used her own truck to block the westbound lane, then asked a civilian to temporarily signal vehicles to turn around, go back up the hill to Epoufette, and detour north and west through Rexton on the Hiawatha Trail.

Quinn went first to the eighteen-wheeler. The log hauler had been filled with two pups of ten-foot pulp logs, now spread all over the highway like squat pick-up sticks. She found the driver still seat-belted into his cab, multiple facial cuts, but nothing serious or life threatening. Still, he wasn't conscious, and that wasn't good. His pulse felt all right. He could hold for now. She glanced at the red oval Peterbilt logo gleaming on the ground, which she had first thought was blood.

The conservation officer looked for a second vehicle and finally got her mind to reconstruct the remains of what appeared to be a small foreign-­model pickup. She used her imagination to guess where the pickup cab might lie in the debris field, went to it, and there found a body still pinned inside. She stretched her arm as far as it would go and got two fingers on the neck, but there was no pulse. A troop came up behind her. “What we got?”

“This one's gone. Rig driver's out cold but alive,” Foresta Quinn said as a large houndy dog went to the wreck, sniffed loudly at the body she'd just examined, whined ruefully, and limped across US 2, holding up a bloody front leg. The dog's hindquarters were smeared in blood. The troop was seeing to the truck driver, EMTs from Naubinway were arriving, and a Mackinac County deputy and another troop were turning traffic back in both directions. Quinn saw the dog disappear into a copse of aspens to the north and made a decision. She told the EMTs she was stepping away and jogged after the animal, following a faint blood trail, which she eventually lost in dense ferns. She stopped to listen. In the woods your nose and ears were often better than your eyes.

A voice sang, “I thank God for this amazing day.”

The voice was sweet and high, soft as warm honey, and Quinn felt drawn to it, thoughts of the dog momentarily gone. The singing continued, “For the leaping greenly spirit of trees.”

Foresta stopped in a small clearing, the floor blanketed with forget-me-nots, and the voice went on, “And a true blue dream of sky, for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes.”

The conservation officer saw a woman ahead and approached her. The dog was approaching, too, whimpering ever so softly, and Quinn saw the woman reach out to the animal and caress its forehead and ears. The dog settled down by the woman's leg as she suddenly looked over at Quinn, smiled warmly, and sang, “Some say they're going to a place called glory, and I ain't saying it ain't a fact.” The woman closed her eyes and eased the dog into her lap and sang in almost a hoarse whisper, “But we been told we're on the road to Purgatory, and we don't like the sound of
that
.”

The woman hummed something Quinn couldn't make out and looked over at her. “We're okay, hon. She made it to me in time, and thank you ever so much.” With that, the woman slowly lay back, and the conservation officer moved quickly to her but found only the body of the brown dog. She rubbed her eyes, feeling like she wanted to cry, or maybe to laugh, or to applaud. She knew she'd seen and been part of something special and had no idea what or why.

She guessed she'd never know, and she knew that was often the way among people who dealt firsthand with life and death. Sometimes in the woods in this job you saw things, and there was no explanation. None.

Foresta Quinn took the dead dog into her arms, cradled it, and made her way back to the highway. EMTs had just pulled a woman's body from the wreck and had her on a gurney, and Quinn looked, blinked hard, and lost her voice.

A sobbing man came up to her. “My mom and that damn mutt were inseparable. They were always together, everywhere.”

Foresta Quinn couldn't look at the man, mumbled only, “They still are,” gently placed the departed animal in his arms, and walked away in tears.