Widowmaker (34 page)

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Authors: Paul Doiron

BOOK: Widowmaker
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The dogs were baying even more loudly and aggressively. Their supersensory hearing had picked up the sound of approaching vehicles and voices. Back up the hill, in the bed of my truck, Shadow responded with occasional howls, which had officers looking at one another with startled expressions.

A fresh-faced deputy, whom I'd never met, took a look at my gloves and catch pole and said, “You on dog duty?”

“I will be if needed.”

The young guy had his shotgun already in his hands and wasn't practicing particularly good muzzle control. His name tag said Cauoette. “Man, I am pumped. It's like an adrenaline high.”

I had a hunch about him. “When did you graduate from the Academy?”

“I'm scheduled to go this spring. Is it as tough as they say? I'm hoping it is. What's that term?
Crucible of fire?

If Cauoette didn't wash out after the first week, I would be surprised. I stepped clear of the rookie and made a vow to myself that as we entered the building I would stay behind him, where he couldn't mistakenly blow a hole in my back.

Clegg turned to face the assembled officers. I counted seven besides myself: two state troopers, four officers from the sheriff's department, and a state police forensics technician who would not be part of the assault.

Then it hit me: Russo was missing. Where had he gone? I hadn't noticed his SUV leaving, but I had been distracted with Shadow and thinking about Stacey. I would have thought a competitive shooter, currently employed as a glorified security guard, would have been eager to get in on a no-knock raid.

“Gather round, people!” said Clegg. “So here's how we're going to do this. We're going in two teams.”

“Aren't there three doors?” asked a trooper behind me.

“We'll have a team posted outside the third one. But we have dogs to deal with inside and only two officers with bite sleeves.”

“Why can't we just shoot them?” someone behind me whispered to himself.

Clegg must have had good hearing. “Those dogs are not to be killed unless an officer is at risk of dire injury. We've got television reporters lined up along Moose Alley in both directions. I don't want to be the one who goes in front of the cameras and explains why we had to shoot two of this guy's pets.”

The detective spent five minutes laying out his plan. One officer would breach the door with a sledgehammer and then step back, allowing two others to enter: one armed with an AR-15 carbine and one assigned to subdue the canines. I had never wrestled a dangerous dog before, but I had seen it done on occasion, in person and in videos, and hoped I could manage the jujitsu involved. We would move quickly to clear the house. Once it was secured, the forensics guy would assume responsibility for searching the premises.

“Everybody good?” Clegg asked after he had finished separating us into teams. “You understand your assignments?”

“Hoo ya,” said the overeager rookie, Caouette.

I followed a deputy holding a sledgehammer to the front door and took my place beside a trooper armed with a carbine. Given the tight quarters, I decided to leave my catch pole propped against the house.

I didn't expect Clegg to give the signal as fast as he did, but the next thing I knew, the deputy was swinging the hammer and the door went flying inward off its hinges. A trooper with an AR-15 stepped quickly into the breach, and I followed just in time to see both hounds lunging for him. I threw myself between the man and the attacking dogs. I shoved my padded glove into the open mouth of one of the animals and kicked at the other, catching it in the haunch.

The dog began shaking its head viciously, and I felt tendons and ligaments straining to move in ways they were not supposed to move. The other hound went for my calf, but the trooper beside me knocked it on the head with the butt of his gun. It howled in pain and retreated out of my line of sight.

I was totally focused on my own attacker.

The Plott was incredibly strong for its size and weight. I tried manhandling it away from the door to give myself more room to maneuver, and nearly tripped over a coffee table. Flashlight beams crisscrossed the room in a geometrical pattern as I wrestled with the hound. I heard shouts and then an explosion.

Someone had fired a gun.

I lurched upright, pulling the dog free of the floor, and then thrust my arm forward, twisting my wrist. It landed on its back, its ribs and soft belly exposed, its four legs clawing at the air. I dropped my knee on its stomach and felt its fangs loosen as its lungs emptied of air. Immediately, I spun the hound back over and grabbed its collar, pulling and twisting. I straddled its back and pressed my knees tightly against its haunches. The dog shook its head and snapped, but I didn't stop squeezing.

The overhead lights came on. I glanced around and saw a bathroom to my right. Using all my strength, I hurled the gasping dog through the open door and pulled it shut before it could catch its breath.

“Where's the other one?” I shouted.

“It got out!” a female voice cried from the kitchen.

Another gunshot sounded. This one came from the backyard.

All around me cops were darting into rooms. I heard heavy footsteps racing upstairs, boards creaking on the second floor, then voices shouting.

“Clear!”

“Clear!”

“Clear!”

I turned to Clegg and pointed at the bathroom. “Don't let anyone through that door!”

The snarls coming from inside as the angry animal tried to break free made the point for me.

I made my way through the living room, noticing heavy blankets covering the windows and the pervasive smell of mildew. I passed through a formal dining room that hadn't been used in decades and entered the kitchen, where I found a female deputy sitting on the linoleum with her hands clutched to her thigh and blood oozing between her fingers. She had cast aside the bite sleeve she had been wearing to put pressure on the wound.

“Are you all right?” I asked, crouching beside her.

“I don't know.”

The back door was open to the night. I heard yet another gunshot in the clearing behind the house.

“I'll be right back,” I said.

I smelled gunpowder the second I stepped onto the back porch. An officer stood in the falling snow. It was Caouette, of course. He was staring down the barrel of his shotgun at the second-growth timber behind the farmhouse.

“Son of a bitch!” I heard him say.

The hound had vanished.

“Didn't you hear the sergeant?” I said. “No shooting.”

“That fucker bit Carly.”

“Route Sixteen is only a quarter mile from here,” I said. “The reporters are going to have heard those shots. Will you stop pointing that gun at me and start practicing some goddamned muzzle control?”

Caouette dropped the barrel toward the snow. “Where's the other one?”

“Safe and secure,” I said.

The dog's prints led in a straight line from the back door toward the trees. I followed them through the calf-deep snow. The light was lousy, but I found the splatter of dark spots melting the snow. The impact had knocked the dog off its feet, but it had regained its footing and loped down the private snowmobile trail Logan Dyer had cleared from his property to the network of interconnecting paths that Pulsifer had showed us on his map.

I knew from hard experience that nothing is more dangerous than a wounded animal. I also knew what I had to do.

I removed the talonproof glove and crossed the yard to the porch, where the hotheaded deputy stood watching me.

“Did you find it?” Caouette asked.

“No, but I will.”

“Why? What for?”

“Because you don't leave a wounded animal to die in the woods!”

Inside the kitchen, a trooper was applying a pressure bandage to the leg of the injured deputy. Her face had good color, which was a positive sign. I continued through the house and out the front door. I was going to need my snowshoes if I was going to track down that poor dog and put it out of its misery.

 

34

I returned to the house with my snowshoes under my arm, bracing the single-point shotgun sling against my other side. Cops who had been part of the raid were trickling out through the busted door. The evidence tech didn't want any inexperienced patrol officers messing up potential evidence.

I found Clegg inside the living room, conferring with a state trooper with corporal chevrons on his sleeve. Both of them had put on latex gloves. The detective waved me over when I stepped across the threshold.

“Any ideas how we're going to get that dog out of the bathroom?” he asked me.

“Call a real animal control agent. I can recommend a good one in Pondicherry if you're willing to pay her mileage.” I kept my hands in my pockets to avoid touching anything. “If you don't need me, I've got to go track down a wounded dog.”

Clegg looked none too pleased. “I heard the shots.”

I moved my gaze around the ratty room. It was less of a man cave than a man cesspool. “Find anything interesting?”

“Logan sure likes video games,” said Clegg, pointing to the big-screen television. “First-person shooters primarily. He's got one hell of a collection. And he drinks a lot of Mountain Dews.”

The trooper chimed in: “Also, his snowmobile is gone.”

“What about Adam Langstrom?” I asked.

“What about him?” said Clegg.

“Is there any sign he was here?”

“It's a big house, and we've just started to search.”

In the winter, before they begin to hibernate, certain snakes will gather together and roll themselves into a writhing ball. That was how my stomach felt.

“I need to go find that dog before the snow covers its tracks,” I said.

A phone rang in Clegg's pocket. He glanced at the number on the screen and winced but answered anyway. “Yes, this is Clegg.” He made various affirmative noises to signal he was listening and then he covered the receiver with his hand. “A bloody dog just ran out onto Route Sixteen from the woods. Some of the reporters tried to approach it, but it ran off toward Redington.”

I turned toward the broken-down door. “I'm going to get my truck. Maybe I can catch up with it before it gets hit by a plow.”

From another room came a voice: “Lieutenant!”

A deputy beckoned through the doorway. He pointed a gloved finger at the table.

A stack of white computer paper lay in a perfectly neat pile. In a house littered with filthy socks, dirty dishes, and dog-chewed hambones, the pages were noteworthy for having been so carefully arranged.

Standing behind the white-haired detective, looking down over his shoulder, I could read only the first paragraph:

From: Logan Scott Dyer

To: America

Subject: Last resort

As I do not expect to survive the coming days or have my appointed hour in court, I hereby leave this statement of purpose to explain why I have had no choice but to take drastic and shocking actions to protect the children of this community. I know I will be villified by the media as my father was, a great man dragged down by lesser beings. When the evil are allowed to prosper and go free while the pure of spirit are condemned to suffering and death, we must admit that this once-great country is sick with a moral cancer that must be cut out tumor by tumor.

“Christ,” said the trooper. “It's a goddamned manifesto.”

“That's why he left his dogs here,” I said. “He doesn't plan on being taken alive.”

Clegg covered his face with one of his big hands. When he let go, there were red marks in the skin from the pressure of his fingers. “This day just gets worse and worse. I've got to call Major Carter.”

The detective stepped aside to place his call. The trooper and the deputy both remained fixated on the manifesto. I could tell they were itching to turn the page and read more but were reluctant to touch it, even wearing gloves.

“It doesn't sound like him,” I said.

Both men looked at me.

“Dyer has a speech impediment, which makes people think he's dumb. I don't think he is, exactly. But these words don't sound anything like him. The man shovels snow for a living.”

“Maybe he took courses online,” said the deputy. He hadn't meant the comment to sound as stupid as it did.

It wasn't my job to deconstruct Dyer's prose style, in any case. I needed to find his wounded dog and either save its life or end its suffering. I repositioned the snowshoes under my arm and stepped back outside into the picture-perfect winter evening.

*   *   *

The two frostbitten deputies were still standing at the intersection, directing traffic, but they had been joined by half a dozen vans and SUVs painted with the logos of television stations from across Maine.

I didn't want to roll down my window to ask which way the dog had gone. I knew one of the reporters would use the opportunity to stick a camera and microphone in my face. Fortunately, one of the deputies guessed what I was doing and pointed me in the right direction after he moved his cruiser aside for me to get out.

As soon as I was past the last parked vehicle, I hit the gas until I began to fishtail. In the bed of the truck, the dog carrier shifted and Shadow yelped; I hadn't secured it as well as I should have. I let up on the pedal. That would be the last straw: careening off the road on live television and sending a caged wolf tumbling into space.

I shouldn't drive too fast anyway, I thought. I didn't want to miss a sign. The cold was probably crusting the blood on the dog's pelt. But every once in a while, I caught sight of a print in my high beams. The wounded animal seemed not to want to leave the flat openness of the road for the deep snow. Only if it felt cornered would it seek cover in the trees. Or so I hoped.

After a mile, I happened to glance in my rearview and saw headlights approaching quickly from behind. They seemed low to the ground. The car behind me accelerated when it was twenty feet from my rear bumper. I tapped the brakes to put a scare into the driver. But he just swung out into the passing lane and gunned his engine.

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