Read Blue Wolf In Green Fire Online

Authors: Joseph Heywood

Blue Wolf In Green Fire (5 page)

BOOK: Blue Wolf In Green Fire
7.37Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Another little shot at him through her. Pull her out of the DNR academy and let her live so she could watch Troop recruits experience what she was being denied.

“Captain Grant talked to Chief O'Driscoll. Your slot is being held for you in Tustin.”

“Yeah, but when will I get back to it? I don't want to fall behind, Grady. You can't believe the load there.”

“The captain said you are at the head of your class, Maridly.”

“I am?”

“Number one.”

“How the hell can I stay number one if I'm down there and my class is racing along ahead of me? I hate this, Grady!”

He did too. The whole thing had one goal: to drive her to resign, and to get back at him.

“You want to be a CO, baby?”

“Yes.”

“Then let's just ride this thing out. The captain and the chief are in your corner.” He didn't tell her she'd have a slot in the next class if she were away from the academy too long to finish with this one. She had suffered enough blows for one day. “Bozian will get his,” he said, as much for him as for her.

“Maybe I should just call him up and talk to him.”

“Don't do that.”

She waited to answer and said gently, “You're right. I'd blast out his eardrums. But he wasn't
always
an asshole, Grady.”

Service had a different view of the governor. “What's the hotel and your room number?” He wrote them down as she spoke and added, “I moved my office to Marquette today.”

“Why?”

“The captain's idea. So he and I could be closer—or so he can keep an eye on me.”

“Our whole world is turning upside down,” she said.

“We'll get it righted,” he said, hoping he wasn't whistling in the dark.

“I miss you, Grady.”

“Hang in there, honey.”

“I'll try,” she said skeptically. She sounded really down and trying to be brave.

“Seen Kate yet?” she asked, her tone lightening.

“No.”

“You will.”

At 11 p.m. Gutpile Moody and Kate Nordquist pulled up the driveway and came to the door.

“What're you two doing here?” Service asked.

Nordquist handed him two boxes and said, “Happy birthday.” Then she kissed him firmly on the mouth, prying it open with her tongue. “
That's
from Maridly. But it was pretty good for me too,” she added with a giggle.

The larger box felt like a cake. “Are you two working tonight?”

“We had to interview a loser in Kipling,” Gutpile said. “We're on our way back to Manistique now.”

“Have some cake with me.”

“We can't,” Nordquist said.

“I can,” Gutpile said.

Nordquist took Moody by the arm and started leading him back to the truck. “We're going now.” She glanced over her shoulder and winked at Service. “Enjoy your cake, birthday boy.”

He sat down at the kitchen table and opened the box. The cake was covered with purple frosting, and in the middle was a photograph of Nantz totally nude, posing suggestively. In the second box was a Marble knife with a carved curly maple handle. The Marble Arms Company in Gladstone made some of the finest edged weapons in the world.

He laughed until he cried and then slid the cake into the freezer. He would save it until they could enjoy it together. He called the hotel and asked for her room.

“I can't believe you had Kate deliver
that
!” he said.

“I wish we were together tonight, Grady, so I could give you a real birthday present.”

5

The day was off to a fast and rocky start. E-mails were pouring in from COs and Lansing, and Grady Service's telephone wouldn't stop ringing.

Fern LeBlanc, the captain's secretary, stepped into his cubicle with a couple of call-back slips and put them on his desk. “It used to be quiet around here,” she said.

The necropsy results of Griff Stinson's bear had come back from the state wildlife laboratory at Rose Lake, the bullet fragments recovered from the dead animal confirming it probably had been killed by a fifty-caliber weapon.

The state's Report All Poaching (RAP) line in Lansing had gotten a tip from a man in Menominee who claimed knowledge of an illegal commercial minnow operation. The RAP people had passed the tip to him, expecting him to investigate.

CO Vilnus Balcers called from Carlshend. A farmer had found a black bear sow and two yearling cubs dead in one of his pastures. The animals had four arrows in them. The arrows were marked and belonged to a retired air force master sergeant who lived at Little Lake. The sergeant had been arrested for illegal bears twice in the past three years. He was claiming the arrows had been stolen, but he had not reported the theft to the local police. Did Service want to take a look?

Virgil Haluska, a forester in the Baraga office, called about the suspected theft of timber from state land near Channing and thought maybe it was a crew who had been working the area for nearly two years. He could use some help in developing a case.

CO Bob Putnam called from Stephenson. He had busted an unlicensed taxidermist in Wallace and found ten boxes of live massasaugas. The Michigan rattlesnakes were endangered and protected by the state's Endangered Species Law. Did Service want in on the case? The taxidermist told Putnam he was selling them to collectors and was willing to deal.

Minnows, dead bears, stolen trees, illegal snakes? Grady Service had his mind on the commercial poaching case. He was thinking it might make sense to drive down to Grand Rapids to interview Kaylin Joquist, and—being so close to Lansing—maybe he could pop over to see Nantz. He definitely wasn't going to chase after other shit right now. He didn't need new cases to work. He was worried about Nantz, who called him every night and sometimes during the day, her own mood growing fouler.

Simon del Olmo called while Service studied the necropsy report.

“When did you transfer? I called Newberry and McKower said you'd moved to Marquette,” del Olmo said. Simon had been an officer going on five years. He had been born near Traverse City to migrant workers who worked Michigan in summer and spent their winters in Texas. Despite a peripatetic life Simon had gotten all the way through the University of Michigan and had served as an officer in the Air Cav during the Gulf War, where he had been involved in a fight with the Republican Guard inside Iraq.

“Not long. The dust is still settling,” Service said.

“Cool. I got a call from a woman who claims her ex-boyfriend is poaching.”

“And?”

“You called me back in September and asked me to be on the lookout for big-buck specialists.”

Service had called several COs as he took over the case, hoping one of them would kick loose something useful. To get leads you sometimes had to put out a wide net.

“She claims he's looking for trophy racks. I thought you might want to come on over and we'll take a look,” del Olmo said. “The woman told me where this guy hunts. She said he's staked out a couple of animals and is doing his work in broad daylight.”

“You believe her?”

The young officer chuckled. “Well, there's a jealousy factor. She says he dumped her for another woman, so she wants to get even. It wouldn't be the first time we got righteous info from an outraged woman.”

“When?”

“She says he'll be out there this afternoon. He's working the hardwoods near Lower Hemlock Rapids on the Paint River.”

“Okay. Two hours?” Anything to get out of the office.


Si, jeffe.
” The aggressive young officer gave Service the coordinates of their rendezvous and added, “Wear your mouthguard. The roads out there will rattle your choppers. I'll bring lunch. Sommers subs. Got a favorite?” Sommers was a sausage shop in Crystal Falls, its meats and sub sandwiches renowned across the western Upper Peninsula.

“Italian meatball on a rye bun, lots of onions and jalapeños. See you in two hours,” Service said.

Downstate cops liked their doughnuts, but Yoop COs preferred cinnamon rolls and sub sandwiches, when they remembered to eat, which some days took on a low priority. Service wondered why a retired CO had never opened a sub shop.

“The area's on the west side of the river,” del Olmo said. “Take US Forty-One to CR Six Forty-Three, then south. As soon as you cross the bridge over the Paint by the gravel pits, take the first dirt back to the north. Keep working your way north until you get up into the hardwood country. We'll meet about five miles north of the gravel pits.”

“In two hours?”

“Think throttle,
jeffe,
” del Olmo said with a laugh as he hung up.

Service told Fern LeBlanc he was heading toward Crystal Falls. She seemed relieved. He radioed the office in Newberry from the truck to let them know he was in his vehicle and moving. They could look at the Automatic Vehicle Locator computer to see where he would end up.

It was only 9 a.m., but the temperature was aleady in the high forties, at least twenty degrees higher than normal. The sun felt good coming through the windshield as he headed west on US 41 past Negaunee and Ishpeming.

He was glad Simon called, but he didn't like relying on others to send him work. He'd spent his career taking care of his own business, and he reminded himself with some bitterness that it was not as if he had chosen this job. He had been placed into the position, more a bureaucratic thumb at the governor than an earned promotion. Ironically, if he hated the job or flubbed it, the governor would get the last laugh. At heart he was a field officer, happiest when he was in the bush. Despite his misgivings, he had to admit that so far the captain had proven to be a boss he could work with, but Fern LeBlanc was a potential problem. She was used to quiet and having the captain to herself.

In two weeks the firearm deer season would kick off. If there was a commercial poaching operation, it would be in full-blood mode from now through early December. He reminded himself that if you kept your focus on a case sooner or later something came your way, either because of the path you followed or through serendipity, which to his way of thinking amounted to the same thing.

Simon's warning about the roads turned out to be not so much a joke as an understatement.

Several days of steady rain had left the logging roads deep in mud and ruts. Grady could imagine four-G loads as his truck lurched and banged slowly along, scraping bottom, first pressing him upward against his seat belt, then dropping him down into the seat heavily, a compressed roller coaster that threatened to rip the steering wheel out of his hands. At least the sun was shining today, which helped his mood. In the old days officers could choose a vehicle that suited their individual needs, but now department policy offered no choice. All officers drove new Dodge Laramies with double cabs and loose transmissions. The old single-cab trucks had been better in the dirt; the Dodges were better on the highway, which was not where working wardens did their real business. The rough road turned the Dodge transmission into a kangaroo, making it pop out of gear into neutral and forcing him to drive with one hand on the steering wheel and the other hand on the gear shift. Focusing on the driving helped keep his mind off Maridly's emotional state, and his own. The metal pedestal that sat between the front seats to hold his laptop computer rattled and clattered like the wagon of a Gypsy tinker. He had stuffed a heavy winter glove in the handle of the computer's carrying case to mute some of the cacophony. It helped, but not much.

Service reached the rendezvous in Section 14 before del Olmo and parked on a spot of dry ground. He buzzed down the electric windows and sat listening to the chucking and chattering of the dry autumn leaves and felt the breeze. This was more like early summer than late fall. Any day now they would get an infusion of arctic air and the snow would come and remain in the swamps into May. There had been four or five inches of snow on the ground before Halloween, but it was gone now, the ground still too warm to hold it. Nature did things in its own time and its own way. When you lived in the Upper Peninsula, you accepted this or found somewhere else to live.

The report of a rifle broke his reverie. Not the big bark of a high-caliber weapon, but the sharp, toylike crack of a .22 mag or .223, a poacher's tool. He grinned at the thought. It was possible that a squirrel hunter was in the hardwoods, but squirrel hunters nowadays tended to be kids or old men, and neither was likely to be out in an area like this. Instinct and experience suggested a violet—his own term for a violator.

Service got out of the truck, carefully leaving the door slightly ajar, took his binoculars, and walked slowly through an area of blowdown toward the sound. He was in a relatively open stand of oak and beech, with a cedar swamp at his back. Deer were still in the hardwoods, pigging out on the mast crops, but soon they would head for heavy cover and stay there until overcome by the rut and the need to copulate, which put animals and humans on an even footing. Where sex was involved, dumb decisions could get made with disastrous results for either species. When you had your mind on sex, you didn't have it on other things, a factor that led to human miscalculations and a lot of dead bucks. He made a mental note to remind Nantz of this, but she was so pissed off these days he doubted her libido was engaged.

After a cautious ten-minute stalk through still-green ferns, Service spotted a figure at the base of some beech trees about a hundred yards ahead. He guessed by the way the figure was hunched over that he probably had a deer down.

He circled the kneeling figure and got into a position that would put the sun in the man's face.

The man was gutting a gray-black buck with a handsome set of antlers, as thick as fists at their base.

There had been a single rifle shot, but the orange-and-green fletching of an arrow protruded from the animal's neck. Coincidence maybe, but Service doubted it. They were in an extremely isolated area, and it wasn't likely that two hunters would be out here at the same time. Hunting deer with a firearm before November 15 was against the law. Killing a deer with an arrow was still legal. Poachers seeking heads liked neck shots. Bowhunters preferred lung shots.

Service approached the man cautiously and silently. He looked to be midtwenties, with long scraggly hair, decked out in full camo.

“Nice buck,” Service said.

The hunter lurched at the sound of the voice and squinted to find the source of the voice.

“DNR,” Service said. “Good shot.”

“Yah, I been watchin' dis galoot coupla weeks, eh. Seen him a half dozen times.” The hunter was nervous, his face twitching.

“Get him from a tree stand?” Service asked.

“Nah, brush blind.” The man's eyes betrayed panic.

“Where's the blind?”

“Back over dere.” The man nodded in a direction that could take in half the compass.

“You hear a rifle shot?”

“Shot?” The man said, shaking his head.

“Could've been the wind,” Service said, knowing full well what he had heard. When you dealt with violets, it helped to put them at ease before you pounced. The best approach was to get them talking, then trap them with their own words, a contest he enjoyed. “The wind plays tricks on old ears. Can I see your license?”

“See my license?”

“Yah, your license.” When somebody started repeating your questions you could be reasonably sure they were trying to buy time to think.

“She's back in da blind, eh.”

“Ought to have it on you so you can tag the buck.”

“Dude, I was gonna to tag 'er.”

Dude? “Let's walk back to your blind and get that license. Your bow there?”

“Yah.” The man got up and Service fell in a step or two behind him, letting him lead the way.

“Where's your vehicle?”

“You mean da truck?”

“Right, da truck,” Service said.

“She'd be oot to da road. I walked in. Figured if I got lucky I could drive 'er in, pick 'er up.”

It was not at all likely that a hunter who was after a specific buck, especially one with a handsome ten-point rack, would risk leaving it in the woods to be stolen by somebody else. Service had seen no trucks on the way in. The area had been logged over and was crisscrossed with a varicosity of tote roads. It would be easy enough to stash a truck somewhere close by.

“How far did he come after he was hit?” Service asked.

“A ways.” Service would check for a blood trail later.

BOOK: Blue Wolf In Green Fire
7.37Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Courting the Phoenix by Viola Grace
Charlotte and the Alien Ambassador by Jessica Coulter Smith
Black Sea by Neal Ascherson
El Sol brilla luminoso by Isaac Asimov