The Poacher's Son (Mike Bowditch 1)

and aim it carefully at the cockpit of the plane. The shots were sharp, percussive, and evenly spaced—one after the other after the other—and the plane gave a sudden jerk, like a flying bird wounded on the wing, and rolled to one side. I saw the exposed white belly of the plane and thought it might spin completely over, but instead it righted itself briefly and turned away again, steadying.
    But already my father was taking aim again. More shots rang out. The plane began to wobble as it retreated farther and farther down the lake. Charley couldn’t hold the wings level.
    The plane hit the water first with its pontoons but it bounced up again and when it hit the second time, it came down at an angle. One wing knifed the surface and broke apart. Far down the lake, half a mile or more, too far for me to see anything clearly, I watched the wing fly off and the aircraft go sharply down. With a tremendous, soundless splash it came to rest, floating, no longer a plane, just a white and red wreck. It was gone in less than a minute. I stumbled backward, knocking against a table.
    My father loomed in the door. He had the face of a stone statue.
    I couldn’t answer, couldn’t speak.
    My heart was as big as the room.

 
     
    32
     
    F or the longest time I couldn’t will myself to move. Then rage began welling up inside of me, and the numbness went away. I struggled against the straitjacket of knots.
    “You son of a bitch!”
    “You should have told me he was coming back.” He lifted the whiskey bottle from the table and drank as if to quench a desperate thirst.
    “You don’t know what you’ve done,” I said.
    He wiped his mouth and shook his head as if he felt sorry for me. He knew exactly what he had done.
    “You’re a goddamned coward,” I said.
    “Shut up, Mike.”
    “Fucking coward!”
    The punch he gave me across the chin felt like a glancing blow from a sledgehammer. It snapped my head around, and I lost my balance and fell backward across a table. I tried to get up, but he grabbed me around the throat with one hand, thumb and forefinger digging into the nerve bundles beneath the jawbone, and he held me down with his weight until fireworks exploded across my ret i nas.
    “I told him to call the police,” I gasped. “They’re coming right now.”
    He brought his face close to mine. He stank of whiskey and sweat-drenched clothes and long hours spent wading through rotting peat bogs. For a moment he stared into my eyes—so similar to his own in color and shape—and I knew he was trying to gauge my truthfulness by looking for the telltale signs of deceit in himself. What he saw, I don’t know, but he let go of me, making a noise almost like a growl, and I slumped back onto the table.
    From across the room Brenda said, “Maybe we could use him as a hostage.”
    My father stood above me, one hand gripping the butt of the .44 in his belt. Dusk was hours away, but a dark haze had come in through the windows. I saw a greasy smear of raindrops on the pane. A storm front was rolling out of Quebec.
    “Jack?” she said.
    “Let me think!”
    Wind hissed through the chinks between the log walls of the cabin.
    He removed the Ruger from his belt and waved it at me. “Get up.”
    I slid off the table, stumbled sideways a few steps, and straightened up. My jaw ached, my arms were numb.
    Brenda put her hand on his forearm, but he shook it off as if he didn’t like the feel of her flesh.
    “What do we do?” she asked.
    “Pack some food. We’re getting out of here.”
     
    Rain clattered on the metal roof, the first rain I’d heard since the night at Bud Thompson’s farm when the bear had killed his pig. Had it only been a week? That night seemed a lifetime ago.
    “Why did you call me?” I asked hoarsely.
    “What?” He stood staring out the window, but the glass was so fogged with humidity he couldn’t have seen a thing, not even his own reflection.
    “The night you killed those men, you left a message on my answering machine.”
    “I thought you could help me with the cops.”
    So that was it. Even in the first hours following the murders he’d been looking for a way to cover his tracks. Among the alibis, excuses, and lies he might use to cover himself he had remembered his son, the game warden. Why was I so shocked to realize that his only thought of me was as a means of hiding his guilt?
    “They’ll find you,” I said to him. “You can’t escape.”
    “You’re coming with us.”
    “I