Widowmaker (8 page)

“The one with all the cops being killed? I think about the video every time I look at my kid.”

“I think about it every day, too,” I said. “A lot of good it did me.”

“You're alive, aren't you?”

*   *   *

I had imagined that all the commotion would have frightened off Shadow, so I was surprised to see him at the edge of the trees, close enough to the action to observe everything, close enough to cover to hide. No one else seemed to notice him there, but he could tell that I was watching him, and so he was watching me back with that intense gaze common to predators.

A group of armored officers was stacked up, preparing to enter the house. Protocol required that they go in as if there might be a gang of heavily armed criminals behind the door. But everyone seemed to recognize that this afternoon was not going to be as action-packed as they had thought when they responded to the “officer down” call.

I began searching for the animal control officer. Instead, I ran into one of the EMTs who had patched me up. He tried to persuade me to ride with them to the hospital in Bridgton, but I told him I would drive myself.

“That's probably not the best idea,” he said.

“Really, I'm fine.”

“Do you know how often we hear that from people who are anything but fine?”

I spotted a little pickup truck with the Cumberland County logo painted on the door and a woman standing beside it with a catch pole, looking vaguely lost. I thanked the EMT for his concern and went over to introduce myself to the animal control officer. She was a pear-shaped woman with kind eyes and tinted brown hair that was thinning at the top. When she introduced herself, I had to ask her to repeat her name.

She smiled, as if this request was a regular one. “Joanie Swette.” She spelled it for me.

“I'm Mike Bowditch,” I said. “I'm the one who found the wolf dog.”

She turned her whole body to look, instead of just turning her head. “Where is he now? Has he run off on us?”

“He's still around. Did you bring a carrier?”

“It's in the back of my truck.”

It was one of those plastic crates with holes punched in the side for air and a steel gate at one end. I manhandled it out of the back of her pickup and then used my good arm to carry it down the road toward the tree line beyond the house.

Joanie followed with her catch pole. It had a four-foot-long aluminum shaft with a spring-loaded noose that could be slipped over the head of an uncooperative animal and tightened without getting anywhere near the animal's jaws. It was the same model I had back home in my garage.

Shadow was exactly where I had last seen him. “There he is.”

“He's magnificent! But I have no idea how we're going to get near him.”

I had no idea, either. Secretly, I was hoping that he would just turn tail and run, thus relieving me of the responsibility of capturing him, at least for now.

“Hey, handsome,” Swette called in that singsong voice certain people use with animals. “Aren't you handsome?”

Shadow remained motionless, his dark ears up, wisps of steam rising from his nostrils into the cold air.

She reached into her pocket and brought out a handful of kibble. “Do you want a treat?”

The wolf dog didn't so much as flick his tail.

“Shadow!” I shouted.

To our mutual surprise, the wolf dog took a step forward.

“I thought that was a name those two losers just gave him,” I said. “Give me that kibble.”

I extended my open hand as I called his name again, and the animal came closer. Halfway across the yard, he sat down in the snow and looked at us.

“Come here, boy!” Swette called.

I squatted down to his level. “Come here, Shadow!”

He came right over.

He was even larger up close than I had imagined. I remained absolutely still, with my arm out as he hopped over the snowbank. I had a momentary bout of anxiety as the enormous animal opened his mouth and began to gobble dog food from my palm. He could have taken off my hand at the wrist with a single bite of those jaws.

Swette stepped back to loop the snare around the wolf dog's head.

“Wait,” I said. “Maybe we don't need that. Put some kibble inside the carrier.”

She opened the gate and scattered pellets inside. The wolf dog looked at me, as if seeking my assurance.

“It's all right, boy,” I said.

And he trotted right in.

Swette was quick closing the gate behind his tail. Through the holes in the side, I saw his muscles flinch beneath his coat of black fur, but he didn't snarl or bite. He simply acquiesced to being caged.

Swette backed off and rubbed her chin.

“What?” I asked.

“I've never seen a dog like this. He's a little too calm. It's weirding me out.”

I knew what she meant. I could understand a trusting family dog—one that had never had cause to live by its wits—being lured inside a cage with dog food, but Shadow was obviously intelligent. As a rule, I do not believe in mythologizing animals, especially charismatic species like bears and wolves, but there was something about this one that unsettled me.

I helped Swette lift the carrier with Shadow inside into the back of her truck. He easily weighed more than a hundred pounds. And when he shifted from the front to the back, we both staggered to keep our balance.

“How old do you think he is?” I asked her before she closed the tailgate.

“He's not a puppy,” she said, out of breath. “But he doesn't look old, either. The teeth will give Dr. Carbone some idea.”

“Is there a chance that he's a hundred percent wolf?”

“You can't judge by looking at them,” she said. “A lab test is the only way to be sure.”

“Can you give me a call when you get the results back?”

“Absolutely.” She peered through the grille of the carrier. “It's sad, though, isn't it?”

At first, I had no idea what she meant. Then I had this panicked realization that we were sending this healthy, intelligent, obedient creature to his inevitable death. Kathy was right that no one would adopt a wolf dog that had killed a deer. I had been so taken with him that I had lost sight of the endgame. If he tested positive as a wolf, as was bound to happen, he would be given a shot of barbiturates and put down.

One of my duties as a warden was to kill injured, sick, and nuisance animals. In the course of my career I had shot moose, bear, deer, raccoons, opossums, foxes, woodchucks, geese, ducks, and even, once, a rabid dog that the residents of a trailer park had managed to corner in a waterless swimming pool. None of them had affected me as deeply as this.

Maybe it was because I had almost been killed myself and the thought of mortality was hanging over me like a half-fallen tree.

Maybe I was punch-drunk from the loss of blood.

Or maybe it was my upbringing. I was raised Catholic. Guilt is my resting state.

 

8

At the hospital in Bridgton, I was treated by a nurse practitioner. It look ten stitches to close the gash on my left forearm. She checked my back and found a bull's-eye: a small puncture in the skin surrounded by a contusion from the force of the blow. She applied a bandage to the wound and asked if I wanted the doctor to write a scrip for pain medication. I told her I had what I needed in a bottle back home.

“I'd advise against drinking any alcohol tonight,” she said.

“I'll be good,” I said.

“I don't want you to be good,” the nurse said. “I want you to get well.”

The thought of what had almost happened—how close I'd come to being killed for no good reason—had left me feeling ashamed and angry at myself. I'd gotten careless, just like the dead cops in that video. I felt a shameful urge to slink back to my house and hide behind the curtains until springtime.

But there was no hiding from my visitors. A state police detective I knew named Pomerleau arrived at the hospital to take a statement from me; she was accompanied by both an assistant attorney general and an assistant district attorney for Cumberland County. The state of Maine takes the attempted murder of a law-enforcement officer seriously even when the attack only results in ten stitches.

Then there were my fellow wardens. Volk showed up in his civilian clothes: the same hundred-dollar suit he'd worn in divorce court that morning.

Volk was a big guy, not muscular so much as heavy-boned and beefy, who had followed a well-worn path to the Warden Service: Marine Corps, jail guard, deputy sheriff, game warden. He still wore his hair shaved down to the scalp in the high-and-tight style he'd first gotten back on Parris Island. The severity of the cut made his ears seem unnaturally small, and I had noticed that they tended to turn red whenever he got angry, which was often.

“You punched her?” he asked in disbelief. “What happened? Did your gun jam?”

He seemed more disappointed that I had not shot Carrie Michaud dead than concerned for my well-being.

My redheaded sergeant, Cameron Ouelette, worried about the state of my mind.

“Do you want to talk with somebody, Mike?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Should I call Deb or Kate?” he asked earnestly. The Warden Service had two top-notch female chaplains. Their job was to counsel officers who had witnessed traumatic events or who had suffered themselves from some assault on body and soul. “Or should I call a priest? You're Catholic, aren't you?”

“I don't need last rites, Cam. I've got a cut on my arm.”

Ouelette had just returned from a training session in crisis incident stress debriefing, or CISD, and so I forgave his superabundance of caution.

The person I found most difficult to face was my newly promoted captain, John “Jock” DeFord. DeFord was a rising star in the Warden Service: a natural leader who was also a natural politician. It was a rare combination, I had found. Cameras loved his blond, all-American good looks. As Warden Service captain, his new duties included supervising the Wildlife Crimes Investigation Division (WCID)—our version of a detective unit—as well as all personnel matters. It was in the latter capacity that he had come to see me.

“The colonel wishes he could be here,” he said first off.

“I didn't expect him to fly back from Patagonia for me.”

Colonel Malcomb and his new wife were off on the fly-fishing trip of a lifetime in South America.

“Detective Pomerleau told me what happened,” DeFord said, studying my bandaged arm. “How are you doing, Mike?”

“I'm fine.”

“Those vests we wear aren't knifeproof. The Kevlar is designed to stop a bullet, not a blade.” The captain was in his forties but looked a decade younger on account of being more physically fit than anyone has a right to be. “You're lucky you were a moving target.”

“Yeah, I've definitely had a lot worse things happen to me.”

“But each one hits you different.”

“Really, I'm fine.”

“I hope you weren't this cavalier talking to the AAG.” His boyish face darkened. “That Michaud woman needs to go to jail for a long time, Mike. Her boyfriend, too. You should take a couple of sick days. I won't force you to do it, but before you start arguing with me, I want you to hear me out.”

I leaned back on the hospital table. The paper under my butt rustled.

DeFord said, “If you're back at work tomorrow, Michaud's attorney might make it look like you exaggerated what happened. How many prosecutions have you seen screwed up because DAs went into trials overconfident in their witnesses, and then they got their asses handed to them by smart defense lawyers?”

“You want me to buy a neck brace to wear when I go grocery shopping?”

“This isn't a joke.”

“I understand.” I just hated to see myself as the sort of professional who could be sidelined by ten stitches. DeFord and I hadn't talked privately in a while. But I had the sense that he liked me—a lot more than most of my colleagues, at least. Which wasn't saying much. I was eager to change the subject from my injury. “So I heard Pete Brochu got promoted to the warden investigator job in Division D.”

The position had been held for decades by a man named Wesley Pinkham. Stacey had encouraged me to apply for the post myself—warden investigator was my dream job—but I hadn't felt that I was ready. Kathy had told me that DeFord had floated my name, but Colonel Malcomb thought I needed to prove I had matured out of my youthful rule-breaking phase before I could be handed a WCID job. I had a hard time disagreeing with the colonel.

“Pete's a good man,” said DeFord.

True, but Brochu had never impressed me with his intelligence, and I had heard he was considering taking a job in his brother's lucrative home-building business.

“I wish him well,” I said.

“Me, too.” DeFord and Pinkham had been longtime colleagues, and clearly thinking about his dead friend made him uncomfortable. “I'm going to find someone to drive you home. Maybe Volk—”

“No.”

“You shouldn't get behind the wheel, Mike.”

“All they gave me was Tylenol.”

“Still.”

“I'm driving myself, Captain. I screwed up today by getting careless. Don't make it worse by making me look bad to the rest of the division, too.”

He nodded, shook his head, and smiled. “Whatever you do, Bowditch, just don't get in another accident.”

*   *   *

When I got home, I stood in the darkened driveway, looking up at the stars. The night was moonless, and the stars and planets were as clear as the carefully drawn illustrations on a constellation map. I saw the faint wash of the Milky Way flowing across the sky from horizon to horizon. Orion, the hunter, was raising his club above the trees to the southeast. Across the heavens, Draco, the dragon, was uncoiling himself around the Little Dipper.

As a boy, I had yearned for my father to teach me about the stars and planets, but he never had. It was only after I had become an adult that I received instruction from Charley Stevens, who was scandalized when I'd informed him of my ignorance. Charley believed that a woodsman who didn't know the stars was no woodsman at all.