Running Dark (9 page)

He went back outside and opened the door of the car where the woman sat. “Ma'am, what's your name?”

The woman turned her head away and he turned to a nearby deputy. “Find any ID?”

“Not yet.”

No ID, and where was their truck? How did the caller know the men's names, and identify the truck, but not mention the woman? Was she a late arrival? If so, how did she fit in?

Service told the deputies he would drive up to Marquette later and write up his report. They discussed charges and decided they would start with stolen property, illegal deer, and the raccoons. Once they got more on the stabbing, that would become primary.

Not thirty minutes later another deputy, a sergeant, came up to him. “The boat and motorcycle in the woods match the descriptions of stuff stolen from some lake camps this summer. We've had camp break-ins since last June, more than thirty of them, and probably a bunch not yet reported because the owners are down below and don't know. Just last week an old guy over in Carlshend got the shit beaten out of him and ended up in the hospital—broken arm, jaw, lost some teeth, broken rib. The descriptions he gave us were pretty discombobulated, but we'll put together a lineup and see what he says. You should have waited for backup,” the sergeant added.

Service grunted and shrugged. The man was right, but it had been his call to go in alone, and you did what you thought you had to.

He went back into the building with evidence bags and began bagging animal parts. Mehegen worked alongside him. The sergeant and his deputy concentrated on the bedroom where the stabbing had taken place. Service examined each piece of meat and saw that one of them had a hole near the shoulder joint. He took out his pocketknife, dug around in the hole, and, using gentle leverage, pried out a slug.

Mehegen said, “What's that?”

“Slug. Let's check all the meat again.”

They eventually located a second slug about the same size as the first one. Service slid both into plastic envelopes and they hauled all the evidence, including the crossbow and bolts, out to the Plymouth. Service also bagged the raccoon carcasses from behind the cabin.

The sergeant and his men were still working when Service and Mehegen began an external search.

Two hours later they were still traipsing around the woods and swamps that abutted the pond and camps. “What the hell are we supposed to be doing?” Mehegen demanded to know.

“Looking for their truck,” he said.

“Shouldn't we be looking near a road?”

“My God!” he said, bumping his forehead with the heel of his hand. “I never thought of that.”

“Dial down the sarcasm,” she said.

“The tip I got told me about a truck. The camp was filled with contraband, and they didn't exactly go to great lengths to hide any of it, so where is their ride?”

“Are you always so suspicious?”

“It's in my wiring.”

“My feet hurt,” she said. “Can we like . . . you know?”

“Not yet,” he said. “I have to get up to Marquette to do the paperwork, and drop evidence at the district office in Escanaba. You want me to drop you back at the Airstream? This will be a rest-of-the-night deal.”

“Not a chance,” she said. “In for a dime, in for a dollar.”

“What exactly does that mean?” he asked.

She shrugged and grinned. “It's a cliché. When I'm tired, clichés pop out. Aren't you tired?”

“Sure,” he said.

“Then show it,” she said. “It will make me feel better to know I'm not the only one dragging.”

Mehegen remained in the patrol car while he put the evidence in the district office locker, and she slept on the drive to Marquette and while he went into the county building, wrote his report, checked on Eugene Chomsky's condition, and talked to deputies. Chomsky had already undergone a transfusion and almost two hours of surgery. The knife had not touched vital organs, but there had been heavy internal bleeding and he had gone into shock. He was listed as critical but stable.

Service asked that Ivan Rhino be brought into an interrogation room. Rhino looked even more cadaverous and disheveled than he had looked at the camp, his eyes sunk in his head, his skin yellow. Service offered the prisoner a cigarette, which he accepted. Service lit it for him.

“What was the deal with the raccoons?”

“Ask the dummy.”

“Burning them alive was Chomsky's idea?”

“Everything was his idea,” Ivan Rhino said.

Service looked at the man. “Eugene's not going to die,” he said. “What about the woman?”

“What woman?” Rhino said, exhaling a cloud of smoke.

“I suppose you don't know anything about a pickup truck?”

“I don't know squat, man, and I don't talk unless there's a lawyer sitting here holding my swinging dick.”

Rhino had not asked how Eugene was. If Eugene died, everything would be dumped on his shoulders.

Service left the prisoner and went to find one of the deputies who had been at the camp. He found one huddled with a detective named Kobera, who looked like he'd been jerked out of bed and dropped into the room. The deputy said, “Everything we found out there is on a list from the camp break-ins. There's other stuff too, not on the list, which says they've been busy again.”

“Arraignment?” Service asked.

“Gotta get lawyers for them and give the old man a look at Rhino. We'll arraign tomorrow afternoon, late,” he said. “Rhino says he has no money for a lawyer.”

Service mashed out his cigarette. “The woman talking?”

“Total lockjaw.”

“Anything in the system on Chomsky and Rhino?”

“Not yet. We'll give you a bump when we get our shit more together,” Kobera said. They exchanged phone numbers.

Mehegen slept until they were ten minutes from his place. She didn't snore, but cooed like a pigeon. When she woke up she asked, “What time is it?”

He had no idea. “The sun's up,” he offered.

Back in the trailer he poured a glass of champagne for each of them. They toasted the new year, got undressed, ignored the shower, and crawled into bed. Sometime later she put her head on his shoulder. “Do they expect you guys to live like this for twenty-five years?”

He smiled, but his mind was back in the camp. They had a crossbow, so why the bullets? And how the hell could they interview Gumby? His language was awkward, his thoughts jumped around, and he seemed to have the emotional stability of a child. The boy's jumbling of pronouns left Service wondering if he had missed something. Service thought, the boy seemed to have gotten my gender right when he talked about my badge, so why the other confusion? The case had looked cut and dried last night. It didn't feel that way this morning.

11

GARDEN PATROL, JANUARY 8, 1976

“Dat ain't no confetti!”

Just like last time, Service was alerted in the middle of the night for a Garden patrol, but this time the caller was Acting Captain Attalienti. Despite webs of sleep-induced fugue, he questioned the advisability of showing his face—given the pending recon.

“Don't sweat it,” the acting captain said. “Meet Stone at the Fishdam boat launch. Be there at zero-nine hundred.”

“I take it we're not checking nets,” Service said. He had heard that snowmobile patrols generally met well before daylight.

“Think of it as a parade,” Attalienti said. “No snowmobiles.”

Service arrived at 8
a.m.
and waited. Colt Homes was first to pull in; he parked next to him and got in. “Heard you pinched some camp raiders,” he said.

“I got a tip that a couple of guys whacked some deer with crossbows.” He didn't mention the recovered slugs because he still hadn't worked out what had actually happened.

“Don't you
love
dis shit!” Homes chirped. “You never know where it will lead. I heard da value of da recovered goods is around forty grand.”

Service hadn't heard this. What he had heard was that the old man who'd been beaten up had positively identified Ivan Rhino in a lineup, and Eugene Chomsky by photograph. Neither man had a record. Rhino was twenty-two, from Peru, Indiana; Chomsky not yet sixteen, from Milwaukee—a juvenile runaway. Rhino had a court-appointed attorney and was not talking. Chomsky was still in the hospital, his condition raised from critical and stable to just stable. He would live.

Because the robbery and break-in charges were far in excess of what the men would get from illegally killing deer, or even for burning raccoons alive, Service had not attended the arraignment. He was glad the Chomsky boy would live. The only lingering question for him was the identity of the woman. So far, she remained in jail, unidentified, and facing charges of attempted murder and felonious assault.

“Here's da kicker,” Homes said. “Da broad from dat night hired Odd Hegstrom. Can you believe
dat?
”

“
Ode,
like in poem?”

“No, man. It's spelled O-d-d and pronounced
Ode.
He's an Icelander, Greenlander—somepin' like dat.”

Service shrugged; the name meant nothing.

Homes said, “He's a lawyer out of Ironwood. When Order Seventeen come down, da Garden fish house boys hired him ta fight da DNR. He's a very tough operator.”

“And he took the woman's case?”

“Everybody's shaking dere heads, but at least she'll have ta identify herself now.”

Service immediately wondered if she was a Garden woman, but shoved the thought aside. The potential for other connections was too large to dwell on. Still . . .

Eddie Moody was the next to arrive, then Budge Kangas, a veteran CO from Menominee County, and, finally, acting lieutenant Lennox Stone.

The four men stood in the morning air drinking coffee and smoking as snow continued to fall. Stone handed them dark green ski masks. “We're gonna take a little ride this morning,” he explained. “I'll lead, followed by Kangas, Moody, Homes, and Service. Keep a close interval, say, three car lengths.”

“What're these for?” Moody asked, holding up a mask.

“Psychological warfare,” Stone said with a grin.

“Garden Road?” Homes asked.

“Yep, right down da gut, all da way ta Fairport.”

“Why?” Kangas asked.

“We need to test da crow line.”

“What's to test? We know it's there.”

“We'll talk about it after we're done,” Stone said.

They pulled out and headed east precisely at zero-nine hundred. It was five or six miles east to Garden Road. Light snow continued to fall. Garden Road began at a spot called Garden Corners, the main landmark a nondescript gas station called Foxy's Den; the road stretched the length of the peninsula. The patrol drove the speed limit, lined up like spring goslings, and passed through the village without incident. It struck Service as odd (if not ominous) that they had not seen a single northbound or southbound vehicle during the run down to the village, and there had been nobody on the streets when they passed through.

The convoy continued south for eight miles, past Fayette State Park.

The park was the former site of a pig-iron and smelting operation that grew out of the need for iron spawned during the Civil War. In its heyday it had been a stinking hellhole someone had once compared to Cleveland's worst slums. Service had never been into the park and had little interest in seeing the ghostly remains of a town; the U.P. was filled with them, most of them the detritus of companies scarfing up the state's natural resources and moving on.

Their destination was Fairport, a village seven miles below the park, and the terminus of the twenty-one-mile-long peninsula. The snow had stopped as they left Garden, and they were bathed in morning sunshine as a few illuminated flakes swirled off the trees.

They were approaching a sharp turn with a cedar forest on both sides of the road, when Service was startled by something striking his hood and skipping off his windshield, quickly followed by more impacts. Ahead he saw things raining out of the cedars toward the other vehicles, and wondered how Stone would play it.

They went less than a hundred yards when Stone radioed, “Dat ain't no confetti! Hang a one-eighty, boys!”

Service cut sharply to the left, stopped, backed up, jerked his wheels to the right, stopped and shifted to drive, steered sharply left, and headed back to the north. Missiles continued to bounce off the Plymouth, but as soon as he got up the road away from the cedars, the assault stopped. He watched in his rearview mirror as the others turned and began to follow.

Coming into Garden he saw a crowd of twenty or more men on the porch of Roadie's Bar on the east side of the road, and as he got closer, he saw they were wearing black ski masks. They began to heave softball-size rocks and bottles at him. A brick or something as heavy smacked his passenger window with a popping sound and spidered it, but did not break it out.

“Service, you're too far out front,” Homes yelped on the radio, and Service executed a quick U-turn in front of the bar. The rock throwers immediately fled, some of them through the front door, others down the sides of the building.

When the other vehicles got closer, he did another U-turn into the lead and they drove out of the village and off the peninsula without seeing another vehicle.

Out on US 2, Stone accelerated and passed Service, settling into the lead position, and led them to the Ogontz boat launch, which was five miles south of US 2 and located on the west shore of Ogontz Bay.

Four other DNR vehicles were already parked in the lot, officers milling around outside.

Dean Attalienti nodded at him as he got out of his squad with his thermos and joined the group.

The acting captain said, “While you men went down Garden Road we went down Harbor Road on the east side. We got eight miles in and got cut off by trees dropped across the road, so we turned around, and a mile back they had dropped more trees. It took us thirty minutes with a chain saw to clear the barricade.”

“Dey rain rocks on youse?” Stone asked.

“Just the tree barriers, but now we know that they have enough people for the crow line to cover both sides, and we have to assume some of the middle roads and trails, too. They obviously don't want us down there without knowing about it, and they've put enough resources on it to get what they want. All this business today was to let us know it's their turf.”

Service considered telling them that the rock throwers at Roadie's had fled when he'd made his sudden U-turn in front of the bar, but he kept his mouth shut. Mobs acted like mobs as long as they felt in control. The slightest threat to such a group usually shifted psychology to every man for himself.

“We got stoned north of Fairport,” Stone said.

“I got hit in Garden when I was in front of you,” Service added. By the time the patrol caught up to him, his attackers had disappeared.

“I seen da rocks and stuff on da street,” Stone said.

“We need unmarked vehicles,” Homes offered.

“Not just unmarked,” Attalienti corrected him, “but blenders—vehicles that look like they belong down there—trucks, vans, that sort of thing.”

“So what was the point of today?” Moody asked.

“A probe in force,” Attalienti said.

“But we turned tail an' ran!” Homes said angrily. “Now dey tink dey've won another round.”

“Winning a round isn't winning the fight,” the acting captain said. “You men did fine today.”

“I'm sick of being a target,” Homes groused.

Ninety minutes later, Service was back in the Mosquito looking for snowmobile tracks; the machines were banned from operating in the wilderness tract, but this didn't keep a few idiots from trying it. While he drove around he thought about the excursion onto the Garden, and decided it had not been a total waste of time. Now they knew the crow line covered the entire peninsula, and whoever organized it had enough manpower not only to put together simple assaults, but to drop trees behind the eastern patrol—a clear message that they could cut off and isolate officers whenever they chose.

It was also interesting how the crowd at the tavern had split so quickly. This suggested they didn't want one-on-one confrontations, which meant they were in total group-think down there. Marines were taught to fight alone and in groups, but in all circumstances to keep fighting until ordered otherwise. Attalienti was right: The Garden crowd seemed to have considerable manpower at their disposal, and some sense of tactics. But it was still not much more than a mob, probably held together by beer as much as fidelity to a real cause.

The sniping tactics around the peninsula suggested recklessness and a desire to harass rather than homicidal intent. If they had wanted to kill officers, today would have been the day—but there had been no gunshots, just rocks and projectiles. The Garden people weren't looking so much to kill their rivals as to simply keep them at bay while they took fish illegally and made their money. This wasn't about philosophy or politics—it was about money. And if Cecilia Lasurm could point them to the leaders, there was a chance the DNR could focus pressure and gain some control.

Attalienti was on the phone with him around 8
p.m.
“I'm having second thoughts about your recon. It seems to me that the only way to beat the crow line is to go in on foot at night and hope there's no snow to give you away. Have you got a plan in mind?”

“I thought we agreed that whatever I work out will remain with me.”

“Yup, you're right; I guess I'm just a little edgy. You'll let me know when you get the timing worked out?”

“That's what we decided.”

He liked Attalienti, but he'd begun to wonder if he was one of those managers who had to have his hand in everything, delegating nothing. On the plus side, the acting captain was showing a distinct interest in the welfare of his men.