The Poacher's Son (Mike Bowditch 1)

in the hot open air. Charley pointed ahead to where the road reentered the forest.
    “They drove into the clearing,” he said, “and he was waiting for them on the other side in the dark. His truck was blocking the road, facing back this way across the clearing, and I figured he hit them with a spotlight to blind them. His first shot went through the windshield on the driver’s side and straight on through Deputy Brodeur’s throat.” He tapped the hollow beneath his Adam’s apple. “The second one took the top of his head off as he was slumping forward over the wheel.”
    “What about Shipman?”
    “The third shot got him in the shoulder as he was trying to get out. He managed to get his door open and stagger back this way.” He led me to the edge of the clearing. “But he didn’t get but a few steps. Probably the killer shouted at him to stand still and he did, poor son of a bitch. The bullet that finished him was fired pointblank through the back of his head.”
    He knelt down and touched three fingers to the ground. Nearly a week had passed, and I knew crime scene technicians had been over every inch of this clearing, taking samples, but I still thought the dirt looked darker there, as if Jonathan Shipman’s blood had left a permanent stain on the earth.
    “The one thing I can tell you for sure,” said Charley, straightening up, “is that the man who did this is a poacher. He jacklighted those men just like deer.”
    When he looked at me, there was a steeliness in his eyes I hadn’t seen before.
    No, that wasn’t true. I
had
seen it before—eight years earlier, the night he stood on the dark stairs leading up to my father’s camp. Behind the affable exterior was a knife-sharp intelligence. I wondered how many poachers had underestimated Charley Stevens and found themselves worse off for it.
    “Why did you bring me to this place?”
    His gaze was direct and piercing. “Because you wanted me to.”
    Suddenly the sun lost all its warmth, as if an invisible cloud had passed across its face. “All right,” I said. “I’ve seen it. Now can we go talk to Truman?”
    He spat the toothpick on the ground. “What ever you say. I’m just the chauffeur here.”

 
     
    23
     
    W e didn’t talk for a while, just sat side by side, driving. The hot pine-needle smell of the forest floated in through the open windows. After a mile or so we emerged from the tree-clotted darkness into sunlight again. Between the logging road and Route 144 stood a rusted metal gate. Charley turned the numbers on a combination lock until he got it open.
    “How about closing that gate for me?” he asked after we’d idled through.
    I walked back behind the Plymouth and pushed the heavy gate shut and snapped the combination lock closed, giving the dials a spin for no good reason, as if I cared whether anyone got through here that wasn’t supposed to.
    Charley turned south in the direction of Dead River Plantation. Even in broad daylight, this was a desolate stretch of road. How much creepier it must’ve seemed to Jonathan Shipman. I could easily imagine his emotional state, sitting in the police cruiser, having faced down a crazed pack of Maine rednecks, the eagerness he must have felt to escape these dark woods and see the bright lights of the Sugarloaf Mountain Hotel—civilization and safety in the form of luxury condominiums and an eighteen-hole golf course.
    But he never made it out. Neither did Bill Brodeur.
    I thought of my sergeant, Kathy Frost, speeding up here, propelled by anger. She was going to arrive at the Flagstaff town office and find Charley and me missing. Why was she so intent upon rescuing my doomed career? Didn’t she understand it was too late?
    We crested a hill where the roadside pines and maples fell away and you could see the verdant farms along the Dead River. At the very top of the rise was a wood-frame structure—like a false-fronted saloon out of the Wild West, complete with a porch gallery and a watering trough in which were planted a few struggling geraniums. A big sign fastened on the roof proclaimed: natanis trading post. What caught my eye, though, was the wooden Indian about twelve feet tall, rough-carved and cartoonishly painted, that loomed at the edge of the parking lot.
    “There’s the FBI,” said Charley.
    “FBI?”
    “Fucking Big Indian.”
    Natanis, I remembered, was the legendary Wabanaki Indian—the last of the massacred St. Francis tribe—who guided Benedict Arnold