The Bone Orchard: A Novel (Mike Bowditch Mysteries) (11 page)

“It must be hard.”

“Don’t patronize me, Mike. It was a rhetorical question. I just keep thinking…”

I waited. “What?”

“Dani Tate is a good kid. She’s going to make a decent warden when she grows up. I’ve never had a rookie who’s as gung ho about the job as she is.”

I felt that she was making an unflattering comparison. “What about me?”

“You thought about everything too much. It wasn’t enough for you just to enforce a fucking rule; you had to second-guess the people who wrote it. Tate does what she’s told. I think she’s memorized every regulation in the book.”

I had met Dani Tate on only a handful of occasions, and she hadn’t left me with a strong impression, other than that she seemed a lot younger than me despite there being only four years between us in age.

“How is she doing?” I asked.

“The union lawyer says we’re not supposed to communicate. They don’t want us getting our stories straight. She’s not the most talkative person in the world anyway. Being in a truck with her on patrol is like being with my dog, conversationally speaking.”

That had been my experience with Tate as well. When I’d tried to make small talk, I’d gotten a blank stare, which made me think she disapproved of me. At the time, I figured she’d heard about my misadventures and been brainwashed by the higher-ups into seeing me as unworthy to wear the red dress jacket of a Maine warden. Now I wondered if she’d just had nothing to say.

“The thing is, it should never have happened,” Kathy said.

“You can’t think that way.”

“No,” she said. “I mean it wouldn’t have gone down the way it did if you had been there. Not just because you knew Gammon. It just wouldn’t have happened at all. That’s why I’m so pissed at you right now. I needed you that night, and where the fuck were you?”

House-sitting for a multimillionaire, studying for a law school exam I’d never take, nursing a bottle of cheap whiskey—none of the answers I had to offer was worth a damn. I was trying to collect a few sentences that didn’t sound pathetic, when somewhere in the background, Pluto let loose with both lungs.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Probably a raccoon outside. Give me a minute, and I’ll call you back.”

I sat in the Bronco, listening to the engine belts whir while traffic passed in both directions along the country road. A few minutes passed without the phone ringing, and I glanced at my watch. I turned off the engine to save gas. The mosquito made its presence known again around my ears. I decided to give Kathy another two minutes.

The headlights from the passing cars would light up the inside of the cab for several seconds and then everything would fade again into darkness.

The cell phone rested in my open hand. I brought up her number from the favorites menu and tapped the button. The phone rang for half a minute and then went to voice mail.

“Kathy? It’s Mike again. Give me a ring.”

The mosquito finally landed on my neck. I didn’t feel it at first, then reflexively I brought my hand up fast, dropping the phone to the floor. When I looked at my palm, there was a black stain on my life line that I knew was blood.

I had seen lights in the orchard above Kathy’s house and had assumed it was just teenagers parking. What if it wasn’t?

“You know I’ve been getting hate mail?” Kathy had said. “I’ve gotten signed letters from guys who served in the Guard with Gammon, and from other veterans, too.”

I had to unbuckle my shoulder belt to retrieve the cell phone from where it had landed on the floor mat. I left a message: “I’m headed back your way, Kathy. I’ll be there in ten minutes or so.”

I buckled myself in and restarted the engine, then pulled an abrupt U-turn in the road in front of a speeding pickup truck. He was going fast, but I was going faster.

*   *   *

The road to Kathy’s house zigzagged up the side of the ridge through the blueberry barrens. Tumbled stone walls ran along the edges of the asphalt. I tried not to crash into them as I cornered the Bronco.

As I turned into the driveway, I leaned forward against the shoulder belt and saw the lights of the farmhouse on the hillside above me. Seeing the homey glow made me relax for a few seconds. There was something reassuring about the sight of the illuminated windows. Then I realized that one of the bright shapes I was looking at was a wide-open door.

I eased my foot off the gas pedal. The truck slowed to a crawl as I approached Kathy’s dooryard. The high beams searched ahead of me into the gathering darkness.

There was a black shape lying on the flattened grass where I had parked my vehicle a few minutes earlier. At first, I thought it was a bunched-up blanket or discarded coat. I braked hard as the headlights brought the object into view.

It was Pluto. He was lying in a pool of blood.

I shoved the shift into park with my right hand and reached for the door handle with my left. That was when the windshield exploded.

Everything happened in an instant. Broken glass filled the air. I felt the airborne shards tear at the side of my face and neck. Simultaneously, I heard the crash of the shattering windshield and the bang of a gun. Reflexively, I ducked down behind the steering wheel and dash.

My cheekbone stung. I clapped a hand to the side of my face, and it came away red with blood and glistening with powdered glass. The entire passenger side of the Bronco was coated with blue shards. The windshield was entirely gone except for a webbed section directly in front of me.

The second blast tore the rest of the windshield away.

This time I heard the distinctive pinging of shotgun pellets. Atomized glass rained down on my right arm. I had pulled the flap of my raincoat over my head to protect myself, the way a frightened child hides under a blanket during a thunderstorm.

My hair was matted and wet. Blood was pooling inside my ear and running into the corner of my eye. I hurled my body across the passenger seat, nearly impaling myself on the gearshift. I pawed at the glove compartment before realizing it was locked and that I needed to turn off the engine and remove the keys. I managed to drop the keys on the floor twice before I got the glove compartment open and saw my newly cleaned pistol inside.

My slick hand closed around the textured grip of the Walther. It was a .380. In the gravel pit where I practiced shooting, I could put all seven bullets in a tight cluster from a distance of fifteen yards. Beyond that, my aim got iffy. I pulled back the slide and chambered a round.

I stared at the heavy little pistol in my hand, trying to feel confident about it, telling myself that at least the Walther gave me a chance, while I waited for the next blast to come.

Rolling onto my side and looking up at the ceiling, I tried to make sense of the wreckage inside the vehicle. The first blast had angled toward the right side of the vehicle before the shooter had corrected his aim and taken out the rest of the windshield. The driver’s side window was also shattered. My quick guess was that the shots had been fired from that direction: up the hill and to my left.

I managed to get my entire body on the right side of the vehicle, then popped the handle on the passenger door. Even before it had fully swung open, I lunged through the crack and dropped hard to the wet grass. I landed flat on my chest and stomach, a belly flop in the mud.

I wriggled away toward the rear of the Bronco, hoping that my estimate of the sniper’s location was correct and that I wasn’t completely exposed now. When I’d crawled around to the rear of the truck, I pushed myself up onto my knees and then my heels, making myself as small a target as possible.

Blood was oozing between my skin and my shirt collar. With my free hand, I rubbed my right eye and found that I could see better. The pain in my head and face was sharp and stinging. The phrase “death by a thousand cuts” came to my mind, but if I died, it wasn’t going to be from these small wounds. It was going to be because the shooter got the drop on me for real and fired a load of heavy shot into my heart and lungs.

Where was Kathy? She had heard Pluto baying and had gone outside to see what had gotten him riled up. The front door was standing open.

I glanced around the yard, looking for better cover. There was an open stretch of unmowed grass and then a stone wall and a cluster of sugar maples. I hated to waste a bullet, but I didn’t see much of a choice.

I sprang to my feet, extended my arms across the cold, wet roof of the Bronco, and squeezed off a shot in the direction of the pine grove. I didn’t expect to hit anyone. In fact, I aimed at a tree, in the unlikely event that Kathy herself was up there, playing cat and mouse with our assailant. If I was lucky, the shot would catch the sniper off guard and the unexpected muzzle flash would cause him to duck behind whatever he was using for cover.

A second after I’d pulled the trigger, I took off across the yard. The sniper wasn’t intimidated by my return fire, because he let loose with another blast from the shotgun. I must have been correct about his position—somewhere between the house and the pines—because he didn’t have a clear line on me. I heard the blast and thought I felt the pellets ruffling the air behind my head, but the sensation might have been something I imagined.

I hurdled over the stone wall without breaking my neck and dived down behind the roots of the nearest maple. I had good cover here, and the sniper knew it. He also knew that I was armed. The question was, What would he choose to do with this knowledge? Would he try to reposition himself to take me down from a different angle—he obviously had some sort of night-vision scope—or would he cut and run, figuring that one of Kathy’s neighbors would have already called the cops?

The nearest house was probably half a mile away, but the sound of gunshots travels a long distance, and the people at the bottom of the hill would’ve heard them. A single shot after dark would have been cause for concern, but this was a full-on firefight.

I couldn’t wait for help, not knowing where Kathy was. I looked to my left for the next place where I could take cover and spotted Kathy’s bronze Nissan, which was parked in front of the old hay barn. Filling my lungs with air again, I jumped to my feet and sprinted as fast as I could toward the humpbacked SUV. As I ran, I wondered if I would feel the shot that would kill me or if everything would go suddenly black and that would be the end of the picture.

When I found myself crouched against the damp metal of the Nissan, I experienced a feeling of surprise; I hadn’t expected to make it. The gunman hadn’t fired another shot. That meant he was probably on the move—but was he coming toward me or running away?

I decided to risk a peek at the dooryard. Light was spilling out onto the long grass from the front windows and open door. It reached as far as Pluto’s unmoving body. The dog had never had any particular affection for me, despite the hours we’d spent together, but he had rescued lost children and located the bodies of frozen Alzheimer’s sufferers so their relatives would have something to bury. The heroic animal had deserved a better end than this.

It was hard to see past the illuminated patch. I began, calculating if I could make it through the door without getting winged. That was when I noticed the dark liquid on the front steps. It didn’t look red. The tricky light made it appear more like spilled motor oil. But I knew that it was blood, and I knew that it belonged to Kathy.

Without another thought, I leaped out from behind the SUV, firing a random shot back toward the pine grove and the orchard beyond. I might even have yelled something. I went leaping up the front steps, taking them two at a time, leaving my boot prints in the streaked blood.

I found her lying facedown in the hallway in a spreading pool of blood. One of her arms was outstretched; the other was at her side. Her right knee was drawn up. The position of her body was that of a swimmer doing the crawl.

“Kathy?”

The sniper must have caught her as she stepped out the door and onto the front steps. She had let Pluto outside to chase his raccoon. Then came the shot that ended the dog’s life. I could only imagine the horror she’d experienced in that moment, watching her life’s companion slaughtered before her eyes.

The second shot must have come soon after. As shocked as she was, Kathy’s muscle memory would have kicked in and sent her diving for cover. She had too much training and experience to have remained frozen and upright when a gun was going off nearby.

The shotgun blast had struck her in the torso as she was turning back toward the house. Her fleece vest was shredded in the back and bloodstained along the side.

“Kathy?”

I dropped to my knees beside her and turned her over as gently as I could. I was more terrified than I’d ever been in my life. Her face was an unnatural color: a gray that was almost the color of bone. Her eyes were closed and sunken deep into their sockets. Her lips were a bruised shade of blue.

The front of her vest and turtleneck, from her left lung down across the abdomen, had been ripped by the pellets, but it was hard for me to tell how bad the damage was because her entire torso was painted with blood. I pressed two slick fingers beneath her jawline but felt no pulse. I tried again with a wrist. I thought I could detect a faint flutter.

“Kathy?”

I pulled up her shirt and saw the horrible patterned wounds below her bra and rib cage. The pellets had driven threads from her clothing into the ragged holes. Blood was still pumping from them. Her heart was laboring to beat.

As I tore off my own shirt, the buttons went popping everywhere. I wadded the flannel into a ball and pressed it hard against the multiple wounds. My eyes lost focus as they flooded with tears. I felt the warmth of my friend’s blood soaking through the knees of my jeans.

To this day, I can’t remember hearing the siren. The wail of the approaching ambulance was drowned out by my strangled cries for help.

14

What I didn’t see in my rush down the hall was the cell phone lying a few feet from Kathy’s outstretched hand. What I didn’t hear was the voice of the 911 dispatcher, who was still on the line, repeating with practiced calmness that help was on the way.