The Poacher's Son (Mike Bowditch 1)

father shoved the biker away and dropped the knife. The man fell to his knees beside me, gasping for breath, one hand clamped to his bleeding throat.
    “They attacked my kid, Sally,” said my father.
    “Tell it to the cops.”
    Five minutes later a sheriff’s deputy arrived with his gun drawn. The deputy, a soft-looking guy with a face that made him look like an evil baby, made my father kneel on the broken glass. He twisted his arms behind him while he put on the handcuffs. But my father just grinned. He was having the time of his life.
    More police arrived—a state trooper and an old game warden pi lot I knew named Charley Stevens. They arrested my father and the three bikers on assault charges. Everyone wanted me to go in an ambulance to the hospital in Farmington, but I refused. The result was a scar on my forehead, right at the hairline, that I’d almost forgotten about until the Warden Ser vice gave me a crew cut.
    “He was just trying to help me,” I told Charley Stevens.
    “That may be,” said the old game warden. “But he could have killed that man.”
    “I’ll bail you out,” I told my father.
    He shook his head. “I’ll be out before morning. It’s a bullshit charge and they know it.”
    They led him away in handcuffs, and the next day when we went to the county jail in Skowhegan, we learned the charges had indeed been dropped against him, just as he’d predicted. I tried to phone him afterward at Rum Pond to say thanks, but he never did return my calls.
     
    Until now. I didn’t know why my father had called me, but if he was coming back into my life after two silent years, trouble was sure to be close behind.

 
     
    3
     
    A few hours later I awoke to the cackling of crows. At dawn, a gang of them took over the pines around my house, and their harsh quarreling voices roused me from sleep.
    The house I was renting bordered a tidal creek that flowed through a field of green spartina grass down to the Segocket River. As the tide went out, the creek would shrink to a bed of soursmelling mud, and great clouds of mosquitoes would rise off the salt pannes. But at high tide I could slide my canoe down into the stream and follow the water all the way to the sea.
    The house was a single-story ranch that Sarah and I managed to rent cheap on account of its ramshackle condition. A lobsterman had built the place without a blueprint, making improvements and repairs as necessity dictated and his bank account allowed. When he gave us the keys, he also gave us a hammer and a roll of duct tape, saying, “Expect you’ll need these from time to time.”
    He was right. Each rainstorm seemed to reveal a new leak in the roof. Sarah had hated the place from the start, but she refused to stoop to renting a mobile home, and on my piss-poor salary and her school stipend, it was the best we could do. Still, I always liked the old place. From the window above the kitchen sink I could watch herons and egrets hunting in the tidal creek, and at first light there was always the good smell of the sea, miles downstream.
    This morning, though, I didn’t hang around to enjoy the quiet. I took a quick shower, put on a clean uniform, and made a call to my supervisor, Sergeant Kathy Frost, at her home.
    Kathy was an eighteen-year veteran of the Maine Warden Service and one of the first women in the agency’s history, back before affirmative action opened things up. She’d had to pass the same physical fitness test as a man to get in—bench press, sit-ups, push-ups, running, and swimming. Now, in addition to being one of three sergeants supervising wardens in Division B, she oversaw the K-9 unit and was odds-on favorite to replace Lieutenant Malcomb when he retired.
    This morning she sounded like she was coming down with a cold, her husky voice even huskier than usual. “I don’t know if you’ve seen the news, but a cop got killed last night.”
    I felt as if I’d been punched in the gut. “Who?”
    “A Somerset County deputy named Bill Brodeur.”
    “Oh, shit.”
    “You knew him?”
    “We were at the academy together. What happened?”
    “It was a double homicide—Brodeur and a guy from Wendigo Timber. They were shot up in Dead River Plantation.”
    “Dead River?” I closed my eyes and saw my father’s bearded face, like the afterimage of a bright light, flash across the inside of my eyelids. When I opened them, the room seemed out of focus. “Did they get the shooter?”
    “Not yet.”
    “So does CID