The Poacher's Son (Mike Bowditch 1)

hear him, but his shoulders were shaking.
    He had come back for her. He could have stayed in Canada and might even have eluded the police there, traveling north and west, becoming in time one of those nameless men you see pumping gas in small towns or working behind the counter of roadside con venience stores, anonymous men living always one step ahead of their past. But instead he had risked capture and death to come back for her—this unbalanced, alcoholic girl who had already betrayed him at least once.
    “Dad?”
    He gave no indication of hearing me. Motionless as he was, he could have been another of the glacial boulders scattered along the lakeshore. When he finally arose, he never gave me a glance, just staggered off into the forest, clutching the Ruger to his chest. He crashed through the undergrowth like a wild animal and was gone, leaving me with nothing but questions.
    Would the police run him to ground before he reached the Canadian border? Or, like the escaped German POW he’d told me about, would he disappear without a trace into the Maine woods, never to be seen again?
    My answer arrived in the form of a single gunshot that came booming through the trees. I’d always thought of my father as the ultimate survivor. But in that, too, I was mistaken.
     
    I cut myself loose with my jackknife.
    I had a hard time pulling it from my pants pocket, but eventually I was able to get my numb fingers to grip the handle and slide it out. I dropped the knife a few times before I was finally able to saw through the cords that bound my wrist. As the circulation returned to my forearms and hands I felt first a tingling and then a dull throbbing ache.
    Leaving the bodies for the police, I picked up the paddle that had washed onto the shore and then waded out to where the canoe had come to rest amid the branches of a half-sunk birch tree. I pulled the canoe onto the gravel and flipped it over to get the water out of the bottom. Then I dragged it back into the shallows and climbed in.
    The wind had subsided and the rain seemed to be lightening—at least the sky was no longer so dark.
    I paddled out to the Super Cub.
    The pontoons of the wrecked plane jutted above the surface of the lake. Even with the breeze blowing, a diesel smell hung in the air, and floating streamers of iridescent oil showed the currents that usually moved unseen through the lake.
    Up close I could see that the plane was balanced on several submerged boulders. I counted three bullet holes just in the fuselage. Peering into the water I could make out the pi lot’s door hanging open, but I couldn’t see into the cockpit.
    I set the paddle down in the canoe and prepared myself to dive over the side. But dread of what I would find in the cockpit froze me in place. Rain fell into my eyes, blurring my vision. I tried to wipe them clear, but it was no use. I took a deep breath and watched a seat cushion float past the bow.
    That was when I noticed the little island. It was just a clump of boulders, really, that rose up from a sandbar maybe fifty yards away—between the wreckage and the opposite shore. I hadn’t noticed it before.
    Something green seemed to be wedged between two of the rocks.
    I lifted the paddle again and began to chop at the water. In less than a minute I had drawn close enough to the boulders to see that the shape was a man wearing a green shirt. He didn’t appear to be moving.
    “Charley?”
    The canoe glided closer as if pulled by a magnet. I saw the back of his head, one suntanned arm thrown over a boulder, hanging on.
    “Charley?”
    The wet head turned. A swollen eye opened.
    “There you are,” he said, as if he had been expecting me.

 
     
    33
     
    H e looked like hell. He had been shot in the left arm and leg. The wound to his arm was just a bloody groove where the bullet had grazed the triceps. The leg wound was something worse. The bullet had burrowed like a worm into the meat of his thigh. It had missed the femoral artery, but even so, he was losing blood at an alarming rate. The skin of his face, beneath the red-and-violet bruises, was drained of color. His pulse was weak, his breath fluttery.
    “I thought you were dead.”
    I’d pulled him up onto the rocks and was now trying to stanch the flow from his leg by applying pressure with both hands. Dark-looking blood leaked between my fingers.
    He winced. “Don’t speak too soon.”
    “I’m going to get you out of here, Charley.”
    He smiled, but his eyes were