the Poacher's Son (2010) (10 page)

My father had traveled far since morning, more miles than seemed
possible for an injured man on foot, and not in the direction anyone expected, either. Instead of making for the major roads, he'd gone north, turning away from the village of Dead River and moving deeper into the industrial forest now owned by Wendigo Timber.

The state police tactical team had thrown up a perimeter at the end of a dirt road, beyond rifle range of the cabin. This was their show now, and if the troopers couldn't induce my dad to give up his hostage and surrender, they would go in with tear gas and automatic weapons.

The sheriff and the others were waiting behind an improvised barricade of police cruisers.

"What's the situation?" asked the lieutenant.

"One shot fired."

"Anybody hurt?"

"No."

"Is he contained?"

"Completely."

The cabin was a sorry-looking structure fashioned of red-painted boards and plywood, with silver Typar holding it all together like so much duct tape. There was only one crooked window in front, a cockeyed angle on the world. A rusty Nissan pickup was parked beneath some pines. A rutted ATV track ran up the hill into the woods.

"How do you know my father's in there?" I asked.

"The dogs were indicating all over the place when they got here," said Major Carter. "There's no exiting scent trail, as far as we can tell."

An FBI agent I hadn't met stepped forward. He was African-American, which immediately set him apart from all the white faces around us. "What do we know about the hostage?"

"He's a local hermit named Wallace Bickford," said the sheriff. "I'm told he's retarded."

"He's brain injured," said Lieutenant Malcomb. "A tree fell on him ten years ago, and he lives off Social Security and worker's comp."

The FBI man was jotting notes onto a pad. "He's disabled?"

"Yeah, but it doesn't stop him from poaching deer. He baits them in close to his cabin and then potshots them through an open window. Charley Stevens and I pinched him a few times over the years."

"Are we sure it's just the one hostage?" I asked.

"We can't get close enough to the window to see."

Word came that the tactical team had moved into position around the cabin. Snipers with nightscopes had all the doors and the window in their sites and were prepared to breach the building on command. Major Carter announced that he would act as tactical negotiator.

"Do we have a phone line in there?"

"No."

"I hate these goddamned bullhorns," said the major. He grabbed the microphone from the cruiser and snapped on the loudspeaker switch. There was an electronic crackle, and then his voice boomed out into the dusk: "John Bowditch. This is Major Jeffrey Carter. I'm with the Maine State Police. I'd like to talk to you. We are not planning an assault. You are in no danger. I repeat: We are not planning an assault."

We waited, but there was no reply. The only sound was the static and pop of police radios from the dozen parked cruisers. A line came back to me from a video we watched at the academy: "A hostage situation is a homicide in progress." "Call him Jack," I said.

"What?"

"Jack, not John. He hates the name John."

He switched on the mic again. "Jack, this is Jeff Carter again. It's imperative that we have a conversation right now."

I whispered to the lieutenant, "Why isn't he asking about the hostage? Shouldn't we find out if he's OK in there?"

"He doesn't want the H.T. to think the hostage has any bargaining value."

"H.T.?"

"Hostage taker."

The major's voice came back over the speaker: "What I'd like to do, Jack, is give you a cell phone. That way, we won't have to shout at each other." He made a hand gesture to a trooper in full-combat armor to start forward. "I have a man bringing you a cell phone. This is not an assault. He's just bringing you a phone so we can talk."

The trooper began creeping forward, using the cover of the pines to draw close to the building.

Then came a muffled shout: "Don't come up here!"

The trooper froze in place.

There was something about the voice that raised the hairs along my neck.

"OK, Jack," answered the major. "Whatever you say."

Slowly the trooper backed away from the cabin.

I grabbed the major's shoulder. "It's not him."

He swung around on me. "What?"

"That's not my father," I said. "I don't know who it is, but it's not him."

"Are you sure?"

"Positive."

"Could it be Bickford?" asked the FBI agent.

For the first time in hours I felt something like real hopefulness. "What if he's not in there?"

"Somebody shot at my men," snapped the sheriff.

"What if it's just Bickford?"

"The dogs tracked him here, for Christ's sake."

Suddenly the strange voice shouted again: "I hear them outside the walls! Don't come in here!"

Major Carter switched on the loudspeaker again: "Nobody's
coming in, Jack. You have my word on that. Jack, we've got your son, Mike, here."

I knew I was there to help negotiate, but the thought of actually talking my dad into surrendering left me wondering if the major knew what he was doing.

The FBI agent wondered, too. "You can't put a family member on the horn."

"Under normal circumstances, I'd agree," said the major. "But Bowditch called his son last night. We have reason to believe he trusts Mike to get him out of the situation."

"I think it's a big mistake," the FBI agent said.

The major started to hand me the mic but held it back a moment. "Talk slowly and normally. You're going to tell him that you're here, and he's in no danger. You can vouch for that."

"I can?"

"Yes, you can. You're going to say that he should let us give him a phone. That's all. Don't mention the hostage, don't make any promises. Our only goal right now is to convince him to take the phone. Staying on the loudspeaker like this, forcing him to shout, just ratchets up everybody's adrenaline. We need to take this situation down a notch."

"What if he's not in there? What if this is just some sort of mistake?"

"You're going to help us find that out."

I took up the microphone. "Dad, this is Mike. You need to take the telephone, OK?" The major motioned to me: Slow it down. "It's just a cell phone. Will you let them bring it to you?"

The trooper inched his way up the path, looking as unthreatening as a man in full-body armor can look.

OK, I thought. Throw the phone.

But the trooper kept going. I heard one of the hounds whining behind me, then a whispered hush from the dog's handler.

The window was totally dark. If someone inside was looking out, I couldn't see him.

Just throw the damned phone.

The trooper was now no more than ten yards from the porch. Slowly he lowered the hand with the phone in it, getting ready to pitch it underhand in front of the door. The placement had to be perfect. If my dad was inside, he'd probably make Bickford reach for the phone, but he couldn't risk having his hostage escape.

Three things happened next. The trooper lofted the phone and it landed, too high, with a smack against the bottom of the door. At the same time the dog that had been whining before let out a sharp yelp. And just as suddenly a gunshot exploded the cabin's window.

The trooper dived to the ground and rolled for cover behind the tail bed of the pickup truck.

The first shot had come from inside the cabin, but the next one came from the woods to my left.

Through the loudspeaker the major shouted: "Hold your fire! Hold your fire!"

I wasn't even aware of rising, but suddenly I was sprinting forward up the dirt road. I heard the lieutenant shout my name, but I kept going until I stood at the foot of the porch, holding my arms up for all to see. Another shotgun blast splintered the boards near my head. "Stop firing!"

"Hold your goddamned fire!" Carter shouted.

I waved my arms. "Stop shooting!"

But there were no more shots. The smell of gunpowder drifted in the night air.

A weak voice came from inside the cabin. "Help."

"Dad?"

The door creaked open. I took a step toward it--and was tackled by the trooper who'd been crouching behind the pickup truck. He pinned me to the ground with the weight of his armored body.
Around me I was aware of a rush of feet moving past--tac officers storming the cabin, weapons pointed.

Dust was in my eyes, and I couldn't see a damned thing. Inside the cabin I heard the SWAT officers shouting commands: "Get down! Don't move!"

I tried to push with my arms and knees. The trooper shoved my head into the dirt. "Stay down."

Inside the cabin I heard shouts that the building was secure.

The trooper on top of me repositioned his weight, and I used a wrestling move to roll him off. In an instant I was on my feet, leaping up the porch steps and through the door.

On the floor writhed a little old man, dressed in canvas coveralls, with a kind of white man's Afro. A trooper, in battle gear, knelt on his back. The man's face, pressed to the floor, was smeared with blood as if he'd run nose-first into a plate-glass window. More blood was spattered on the cigarette-burned carpet. I saw a rifle lying across the room. The cluttered, bottle-strewn room smelled of something noxious--a sour, musky odor like stale urine, only stronger.

"I'm dying," said the old man again. "I'm dying."

Two troopers threw me against a paneled wall and held me there with the weight of their bodies as I tried to surge forward. "Where is he?"

"There's no one else in here," I heard a trooper report into his throat mic.

"Where's Bowditch?"

"Where is he?" I shouted. "Where's my father?"

Wallace Bickford raised his bloody head and gave out a wail. "Gone," he said. "He's gone."

I
t turned out Bickford wasn't seriously wounded at all. He'd just suffered a lot of small facial cuts when he shot out the window. The little man was now perched on an ambulance bumper while a paramedic daubed his face with antiseptic. His hair was really something else--a frizzled gray brush that looked like he'd plugged his finger into an electrical socket.

The sheriff folded his arms. "You're saying the gun went off by accident--twice?"

"Yeah! I never meant no harm." He spoke as if his tongue were swollen, but I got the sense it was a permanent speech impediment.

"Oh, I bet you didn't," the sheriff said. "So where did Bowditch go?"

"Otter Brook Bog, like I said. He said he needed my ATV."

"And you gave it to him. Because you're such a generous and giving individual."

Bickford looked at the sheriff like he'd just asked him something in Swahili. "No, because of the moose."

Then, for the second time in ten minutes, he laid out his story. Jack Bowditch, he said, had arrived at his cabin an hour before nightfall saying he'd shot a moose at Otter Brook Bog and needed an ATV to haul it out before the wardens caught him. "He said he'd give me half the meat if I let him borrow it," the old man said.
"He said if I didn't let him take it, he'd tell the wardens the deer meat in my freezer was from poaching--which is a lie."

"So Bowditch took the ATV." Major Carter removed his helmet and tucked it under his arm; sweat shined along his high forehead. "But I still don't understand how he got through the perimeter. The dogs scented no exit trail leaving the cabin. Even if he was riding an ATV, the dogs should have winded him."

"The smell," I said. "That bad smell inside the house. Didn't you notice it?"

"I thought that was just Mr. Bickford's natural aroma," said the sheriff.

"It's deer lure," I said. "Hunters make it out of the urine and tarsal glands of bucks. It's used to cover human odors and bring deer into a tree stand."

"He doused himself with it," said Lieutenant Malcomb.

"You smelled how strong that stuff can be," I said. "He knew it would cover his scent and throw off the dogs. He must have known Bickford had some of the stuff. That's why he headed this way."

"So we'll just key the dogs in to the deer lure," said the sheriff. "And they'll follow the new scent. All it does is delay us a little."

"Do you know how many deer are in these woods?"

"Is there any way we can track the ATV tonight?" asked the FBI agent.

"Unless one of our planes spotted him from above, I don't see how," said the lieutenant. "There's almost as many ATVs on these logging roads out there as deer. He might be ten miles away by now, and with a full tank he might get thirty more miles before he runs out of gas. We'll take tire prints to match if we can, but unless someone spotted him, I don't see how we follow him tonight."

"So why the hell did you start shooting when the troopers arrived?" the sheriff demanded of Bickford. "Do you have a death wish?"