Running Dark (2 page)

“Lose somepin'?” one of the men asked.

“You got names?” Service said.

“Stanley Ketola,” the driver said. “My brudder Leo,” he added with a nod.

Service asked in a nonthreatening voice, “Where's the twenty-two, Stanley?”

The brothers looked at each other. “We don't got no twenty-two,” Stanley said. “Right, Leo?”

“Ketolas don't hunt deer wit' no plinker,” Leo added with an affirming nod.

Service said, “I was behind you fellas last night, followed you, saw you shoot the deer, followed you back here, witnessed the whole deal, start to finish.”

Stanley Ketola grunted. “Me and Leo never liked no DNR fairy tales.”

Service examined the carcass. The .22 wound was separate from a larger hole. “You two stay right where you are,” Service said. He walked back to his watch spot, got his thermos and set it down so both men could see the inscription on it, and filled his cup. He saw them exchange glances.

Service took a swig of coffee and let out a sigh. “You boys been around and you know how this goes, right?”

“Yeah,” Stanley said. “Da easy way or da hard way. Dat's a fairy tale, too,
bub.
”

Leo grinned and nodded at his brother.

“How about we look in the pole barn?” Service said. “That okay with you fellas?”

“You got a warrant?” Leo asked.

“Do I need one?”

Leo blinked and Stanley glared at his brother. “Dat buck dere's legal. Guess you'll be movin' on, eh?” Stanley said. “You don't got reasonable suspension to be pokin' around da property.”

Service sighed: reasonable suspension? “Tell you what,” he said. “Anything I find in the barn I won't hold against you unless I can prove this buck is illegal.”

Neither man showed any emotion, but both obviously were trying to analyze the unorthodox challenge.

“What's da deal?” Stanley asked warily.

“You shot this deer just after three-thirty this morning and you both just drove in here with open containers of alcohol,” Service said, fingering the tag on the antler. “But we'll forget the open containers, just to show you fellas I'm not tryin' to be chickenshit here.”

“We got dat buck dis mornin',” Stanley said emphatically. Service felt certain that Stanley had been driving last night and that he had done the shooting, but Leo had tagged the animal. He had no idea why.

“We?” Service said.

Leo laughed. “Brudders, we always say we, eh?”

The two men were stone-faced.

“So you fellas are telling me you both shot this buck before first light, right, one of you with a twenty-two, the other with a bigger caliber? Is that your story?”

“Holy moley, we din't say dat,” Stanley said.

“You shot the deer,” he told Stanley. “This morning.”

Leo stammered, “Hey, dat's my buck. I shot 'im dis mornin', maybe seven-t'irty. Da buck's legal and no bloody way youse can prove udderwise, eh?”

Service said, “I'll take that as a yes.”

“Yes to
what?
” Stanley said, his voice rising slightly. “We din't agree to nuttin'.”

“What I hear you saying is that you got dirt in the barn and dirt out here,” Service said.

“Dis is baloney,” Stanley said, his eyes showing stress. “Youse're loony.”

“Look, guys. I know you've been at this a long time,” Service said. “You're professionals and I'm a professional. I say I've got you cold, you say I don't. How about we show our cards?”

The two men looked at each other and stared at him. “We want our lawyer,” Stanley said.

“What do you need a lawyer for? You got a legal deer, right?”

Leo said, “Get off'n da property.”

Service said, “I thought you guys were pros, but all I see is a joke.”

Stanley bristled. “We don't gotta put up wit' dis crap from no rookie woods cop.”

Service knelt and dramatically poked his finger into the second hole in the deer hide and wiggled it around, probing deeply.

The men watched his hand.

“You lookin' for change?” Leo asked, laughing out loud.

“Shut yer pasty hole, Leo,” the other Ketola snapped.

Service eased out a tiny swatch of blood-soaked red cloth and held it up. “The human mind is predictable, boys,” he said. “People always think in series of threes—in this case, marked hoof, two quarters in the hide—and you fellas were feeling pretty good about finding three markers and eliminating all the evidence.” Service waggled the red patch. “This is number four. I put it there last night—ahead of the second quarter.”

The two men studied each other. Stanley said, “Dat s'posed to prove somepin'?”

Shuck Gorley suddenly walked around the back of the pickup with the .22 rifle in hand, yelled, “Catch!” and flipped the rifle at Leo, who caught it awkwardly.

Service looked at the men. “Nice grab,” Service said. “Let's summarize where we are: I saw you shine and shoot. I followed you here, I went back and fetched the twenty-two from where I saw you ditch it, I marked your deer, and now the twenty-two has your fingerprints on it, Leo. I think Stanley shot the animal, but since you claim it, you get the brunt of the charges.”

Leo Ketola dropped the rifle on the ground.

Service used his brick radio to call the county and within ten minutes they pulled up the driveway. The sullen brothers stared off into the distance while they waited. Service poured coffee for Shuck Gorley.

“Carcass, rifle, lies—now we have a reason to go into the pole barn,” Service chanted, walking past the kneeling brothers.

There were twelve deer suspended from stainless steel hooks in a cooler in back, and parts of birds and a couple hundred pounds of lake trout and walleye fillets in a commercial freezer.

“You fellas been busy,” Service said to the brothers as the Luce County deputies put them in their patrol cars.

Stanley Ketola looked out at Gorley and grinned. “Well, you never got us, eh Shuck.”

Service wiggled the thermos in front of the older brother. “Who do you think sent me out there to wait for you two, and who do you think spread it all over town that he wouldn't be working anymore? He knew you boys would be cocky with a rookie on the job.”

The patrol cars backed down the driveway with their prisoners and headed for Newberry.

Shuck Gorley stuck out his hand and grinned. “Thanks for including me.”

“This was yours all the way,” Grady Service said. “You called in the order. I just made the pickup.”

Gorley stared at him. “I think you got a heap more brains than your old man had,” he said. “You stay safe out here.”

Service continued his patrol until nearly 10
p.m.
that night, and when he got home his wife Bathsheba was already in bed. He looked for leftovers in the fridge and found none, showered, and crawled into bed beside her.

“You decided to come home,” his wife said coolly with her back to him. When he put his hand on her hip, she pulled away.

“I had a lot to do.” He briefly explained the arrest of the brothers and how Gorley had been after them for years and always came up short.

“Like little boys,” she said. “They cheat, you try to catch them, and for what—a bunch of stupid animals? Good God, Grady, is this any way for a grown man to live?”

She could not have found more destructive words.

PART II

WAR IN THE GARDEN

3

GARDEN PATROL, NOVEMBER 20, 1975

The hunters had suddenly become the hunted.

Grady Service had no idea what was happening. Sergeant Holloman had called the trailer at 2:30
a.m
. and told him to report to Sergeant Blake Garwood at the Fishdam boat launch at noon.

Grady Service was less than eight months into his responsibility for the Mosquito Wilderness Tract, the same area his CO father had patrolled before him. His wife, Bathsheba, was gone, having abruptly departed six months ago for Nevada to file for divorce. She had lasted less than a year trying to adapt to life as a CO's spouse before throwing in the towel. Service felt that some of it was his fault, but he was still angry, and sometimes he even missed her when he crawled into bed alone at night. But since his transfer from the Newberry district to the Mosquito Wilderness he had focused all his energy on his new responsibilities, and thoughts of Bathsheba were fewer.

He protested because it was the second week of his second deer season as a CO—and first in his new territory—and he didn't want to leave the Mosquito Wilderness unprotected.

“Just meet Garwood at the launch,” was Holloman's clipped response. “And don't be late.”

“It's not my territory,” Service argued.

“As I recall, our patches say
Michigan
Department of Natural Resources,” Holloman said. “Which means we go where we're needed. Blake's partner came down with the flu; he needs help and you're it. This takes priority over deer hunters in the Mosquito.”

Service didn't try to argue about his lack of knowledge and dislike of boats. He knew from some of the other officers that the Fishdam River launch site was used for patrols down Big Bay de Noc along the Garden Peninsula. During his time in Newberry he had participated in some Lake Superior marine patrols during salmon and steelhead runs, but he had never done a patrol in northern Lake Michigan, and from what other officers had said, duty in the Garden could range from deadly boring to just plain deadly. He didn't relish either alternative.

The Garden Peninsula was a twenty-one-mile-long, shark-tooth-shaped, cove-pocked neck of land between Escanaba and Manistique. It was part of what geologists called the Niagaran Escarpment, limestone, dolomite, and shale-gypsum formations that snaked south from the Garden across a string of rocky, barren islands that eventually led like a geological arrow to Wisconsin's Door Peninsula. When the first whites arrived in the area they found Noquet and Menominee Indians using the area's rich soils for gardens, giving the area its name, which persisted to this day.

The western extremities of the peninsula were largely untillable, with limestone sometimes found within inches of the surface, and though some people still farmed the center and east of the peninsula, few except the occasional fruit grower and small dairyman could earn any semblance of a living. The primary economic focus of the peninsula had been and remained one thing: fish. Since the establishment of Fayette State Park, locals were happy to take dollars from tourists, even though tourists were a nuisance and sportfishermen not particularly welcome. Fish in the Garden were about money, not recreation.

Fayette had risen during the Civil War, when the North needed iron for its armies. The smelting operation had closed in 1891, leaving intact ruins and a ghost town that had been turned into a campground, state park, and historic site. Fayette, Service thought, was like the rest of the Garden Peninsula. When there was no more money to be made, the village had been abandoned.

Fewer than a thousand people lived on the peninsula, which had two villages, Garden and Fairport. The DNR had reason to know both of them well. Fairport had been a commercial fishing center since 1880, and nearly all of its residents still fished—a few of them legally, a lot more of them illegally. In 1969 DNR fish biologists had finished studies of Lake Michigan yellow perch, whitefish, walleyes, and lake trout, and decided that heavy pressure on fish stocks had to be reduced. Commercial licenses that lapsed would no longer be renewed. Unlike the past, if you didn't fish every year, you couldn't just jump back in and start up another year because it looked like there were big runs and money to be made. You had to keep fishing every year in order to keep your license, and if you let it lapse for a single season, you couldn't renew. And no new licenses would be issued until biologists judged the fish populations could handle it. “Order Seventeen” became an instant bone of contention.

Garden fishermen immediately donned sweatshirts that said
dnr = damn near russian,
and rebelled. Since 1969 there had been repeated confrontations between the DNR and the fishermen who were harvesting illegally. Locals had used long guns and pistols to take potshots at officers, mostly to scare them away; they also had rained rocks on them, vandalized and stolen their vehicles, assaulted and threatened them with knives and scissors and clubs, sometimes with large groups surrounding one or two uniformed game wardens. So far there had been no serious injuries, but everyone knew that the clock was ticking as long as the dispute continued.

After a confrontation a few months back, the Delta County prosecutor had declared to the state that he would no longer allow county deputies to assist conservation officers until such time that the state beefed up its force, its equipment, and its training. The U.P.'s law boss had simultaneously reduced the frequency of CO patrols down the peninsula for nearly two months, a decision that had many officers angry and ashamed, and had Gardenites crowing with delight.

Service had never been called in to assist in the Garden, but the decision to cut back the DNR presence there had rankled him because he saw it as just the sort of gutless decision imposed by some spineless bureaucrat in Lansing. It never occurred to him that Lansing might not have had anything to do with the curtailment.

Blake Garwood was a tall, stooped man with black hair and a full mustache that drooped over the corners of his mouth. The marine safety sergeant's duties involved regular lake patrols, and Service had met him only once, and then just to be introduced.

The sergeant arrived fifteen minutes after Service, but earlier than their meeting time.

“Lend a hand,” Garwood said, tossing an orange life jacket to Service. The two men moved boxes of gear from the trunk of the patrol car to the dark green eighteen-foot Glastron on the trailer. Some of the boxes held various lengths of nylon rope and some homemade welded grapples. Empty green plastic fish bins were already lashed securely into the boat. Loading done, Garwood backed the trailer down the ramp until its wheels were in the water. The two men unlashed the craft, pushed it off the trailer, and Service held a line to the boat while the sergeant parked the vehicle and trailer against the trees at the landing. They both pushed the boat away from shore and hopped aboard. Service looked at his watch. It was noon, straight up.

The sky was gunmetal gray, but there was no snow and visibility was good.

“Your partner's sick?” Service asked.

Garwood was fiddling with a battery cable. “Garden flu,” the sergeant said glumly. “It can hit anyone at any time.”

The outboard motor gurgled and rumbled as they worked their way out of the sinewy river mouth, curving left, passing jutting boulders as they moved toward the open water of Big Bay de Noc.

“Your first time out here?” the sergeant asked, yelling over the straining motor as he tightened his life preserver.

Service nodded. The boat was bouncing and bucking against three-foot swells.

“You got green gills?” Garwood asked.

Service shook his head. He had never been seasick, but he also knew that motion sickness, like flu, could strike at any moment. Garwood patted the bench seat behind the console where he sat, indicating that Service should join him.

“We got shit for power. Putting the weight back here will help us get onto a plane,” he yelled as he pushed up the throttle. The boat's nose rose up and the motor howled and groaned as the boat drove through the surface resistance and began to skip over the water, dislodging a fine spray that soaked both of them. Service used his hand to brace himself on the console as the boat raced along, slapping the waves beneath them.

“We're running south toward Round Island,” the sergeant shouted. “We got a tip last night from a tourist that some rat fishermen out of Fairport and Garden are working whitefish spawners. No way to tell if this will amount to anything, but we have to check it out. Keep your eyes open and do what I tell you.”

Service nodded, uncased his binoculars, and began scanning ahead.

Twenty-five minutes later Round Island appeared over the bow, and Garwood was pointing with his binoculars. Service saw a white boat with a horizontal red stripe and a huge outboard motor. Two men seemed to be scrambling to pull in nets.

The sergeant shoved the throttle forward and Service glanced at the instruments, which showed 32 mph, the tachometer at 5,000 rpm, and near its red line. “This is all we have!” Garwood yelped.

Service saw the striped white boat's motor come to life, its nose lift, and bubbles erupt from the stern. One of the two crewmen was dumping something out of white boxes over the back.

“How many boxes?” Garwood asked.

“Four,” Service called out. “So far.”

Despite having speed and the angle coming in, the white boat began to steadily pull away from them. As they passed the area where the boxes had been dumped, Service caught a glimpse of fish floating in the water. “Whitefish, I think,” he yelled as they raced past them, knowing they could have been anything.

The sergeant nodded, picked up the ship-to-shore radio microphone, and requested ground units be dispatched to Fairport. Service had no idea why Garwood thought the boat was headed to Fairport instead of Garden, but he kept his mouth shut and let the sergeant do his job.

“ETA, thirty minutes,” Garwood said, concluding his transmission. “Marine Patrol One clear.”

At 12:40
p.m
. Service saw the two-hundred-foot-high multicolored limestone cliffs of Burn't Bluff looming ahead. The white boat continued to steadily pull away.

“This bloody equipment—” the sergeant griped, not finishing his thought. Service saw him pushing the throttle so hard that it looked like he'd risk breaking it off if it would have produced more power.

Service saw another boat appear in front of them and run parallel to the white boat, keeping up with it. Both boats were two hundred and fifty yards ahead, but he could see that the second craft's motor was a huge red Evinrude.

As the two boats rounded Burn't Bluff heading southeast, the two craft separated, the new arrival veering northeast toward Sac Bay and the white boat cutting due west toward open water. After four or five minutes the white boat angled sharply back to the southeast and accelerated, raising a gaudy roostertail.

“Fairport for sure,” the marine safety sergeant called out.

Just before 1
p.m.
Service saw through his binoculars what looked to be a pier on the west end of the village. Beyond it were at least two more, one of which led to a commercial fish house, the other cluttered with moored commercial fishing tugs. The piers looked crude, made of nothing more than large black boulders held together by aged gray railroad ties, laid horizontally. As they passed three hundred yards offshore, Service saw four vehicles pull up to the westernmost pier and discharge eight people. Two men from a lime-green pickup with a white camper cap brandished rifles.

“Guns,” he reported to Garwood, who didn't alter course.

Service heard the report of a rifle followed almost immediately by a splash not five feet from their port side. A second shot was not as close, but in the same general midship area, and Service hunched slightly as the bullet ricocheted off the water and zipped over their heads.

Garwood didn't flinch.

The white boat stopped at the pier cluttered with larger cigar-shaped commercial fish tugs, but nobody got off, and as the Glastron closed the gap, the back of the white boat erupted in froth and bubbles as it took off racing west. Garwood cut his wheel to get in behind the white boat and shorten the distance between them, playing the angle. As they zoomed back past the western pier in pursuit, the white boat cut sharply to starboard and reversed direction back to the east.

“They're trying to suck us in!” the sergeant yelled as they headed back for the tug dock. Garwood didn't alter course.

Service heard another shot and saw a water spout twenty feet directly in front of them. A second shot stitched the water twenty feet to their port side, and Service shouted, “More shots fired!”

Garwood was immediately on the radio, profanely wanting to know where their “goddamn land units” were, but the radio was silent.

They were beginning to close on the tug dock when the white boat turned sharply, its bow coming up out of the water, pivoted, steadied, and came roaring directly back at them. Service immediately saw somebody on the bow with a rifle. Four shots sounded in close order, but Service didn't see where the rounds hit because the Glastron swerved sharply as Garwood began to zigzag in evasive maneuvers. The hunters had suddenly become the hunted.