Chasing a Blond Moon (12 page)

“Ten o'clock,” Service said. “Looks like a straight line. Something's back there.”

McCants said, “Let's leave the truck behind the barn, go in on foot.”

Service pulled behind the barn and locked the vehicle.

The two of them headed across the field, circling so as not to telegraph their intended destination.

At two hundred yards they could see a beat-up green trailer and a 2002 double-cab blue Ford 150 truck. “Let's move closer, get a plate number,” McCants said.

They moved cautiously, staying low and using natural barriers to block their approach. When they were close enough, McCants used her binoculars, got the vehicle license number, and called it in to Lansing.

The answer came back, “2002 Ford 150, dark blue, reported stolen.”

“When?” McCants asked.

“Twelve days ago.”

“Stolen,” McCants said to Service. “Two days after Verse got out of Kinross, and from Pickford, which is pretty much right out the back gate. This is starting to get interesting.”

They could hear music blasting from the trailer.

“Hip-hop,” Service said.

McCants shook her head. “Rap.”

“Same same,” he said.

“You are
so
white. Let's get up close and personal.”

“Want to pay a call now?”

“No, let's let the sun get low. He comes to the door, he'll have to look due west. That'll put the sun in his eyes. Let's use what God gives us.”

Service checked his watch. “Ninety minutes, give or take.”

“Wifey expecting you?”

“Knock it off, Candi. Why're we going slow on this?”

“Not sure,” she said. “A feeling, and not one of the nice ones, ya know?”

He did, though he felt nothing at the moment.

The two backed off a hundred yards and set up near some tamaracks. Service used his cell phone to call home.

“Nantz.”

“It's me.”

“Thank God,” she said excitedly. “Kate Nordquist is in the hospital in Escanaba. She and Gutpile stopped to get a snack this morning in Rapid River. She stayed in the truck while he went inside to get sandwiches and coffee. When he came out he found her on the ground. One of her legs is broken in two places, Grady. She has to have surgery. It looks like somebody nailed her with an iron bar, then drove over her. Gutpile can't understand what got her out of the truck. I called Vince. We're gonna meet at the hospital and talk to Kate's doctor.” Vince was Vince Vilardo, an internist, Delta County's medical examiner, and Service's longtime friend.

Kate Nordquist was a young officer who had trained with Moody and been recently assigned to Schoolcraft County with him. She was Nantz's friend.

“Witnesses?” he asked.

“None. Gutpile called 911 and the city, county, and Troops are investigating. He followed Kate to the hospital. Where are you?”

“With Candi. We're waiting for the sun to go down to pay a call on a parolee.”

“Be careful.”

“Count on it. See you later tonight. Tell Gutpile I'll give him a call, and say hi to Vince for me.”

“I almost forgot,” she said. “You also had a call from Sheena Grinda.”

“What's with her?”

“Said she found a bear with cable wrapped around its neck. She wants to talk to you.”

“Dead?”

“No, alive, but she sounds uptight. Tell Candi no poaching my man.”

Elza “Sheena” Grinda was an extremely self-contained officer. It was unusual for her to call anyone and he had not gotten around to contacting her. A bear with cable around its neck?

“How's Nantz?” McCants asked as he eased back beside her.

“She says no poaching her man,” Service said.

“I rest my case,” the younger officer said. “Married in her mind. Got her claim all staked out.”

Service waited calmly. If Bryce Verse came out of the trailer, they would be ready for him. Experience had taught him to respect fear and wear it like an outer skin attuned to threats and acting like an early warning system. Just about everything he'd done in his life entailed various degrees of ­physical risk—hockey, the USMC, state police, DNR—but physical risk alone rarely activated his early warning system. Physical risk was more a matter of applying a skill to the challenge. If any fear persisted for him, it was the fear of not acting, rather than trepidation over results. In this way, it was like regret—which for him grew only out of things not done.

McCants slid over to him. “We've already got the stolen veek,” she said. “If we want to get Verse with weapons in possession, we need to take him inside. He could claim he didn't know they were there. I wish I could look in his truck.”

“Still too light,” Service said.

McCants got to her knees. “I'm going to look around, see if there are other two-tracks out this way. If there's only the one road and he's not spooked, he'll come out the way he came in.”

It didn't matter how many roads there were, Service told himself. They were not going to let Verse get to the blue truck. Service watched her move away in a low crawl. The first time he'd worked with her they had stopped three snaggers. One of them had swung his rod at her and buried a one-ounce lead silver spider deep in her cheek. She had not hesitated or backed off, but tackled the man and took him down with blood running down her face. She still had a small scar.

While McCants scouted, he sat so he could keep an eye on the trailer and thought about recent events, starting with Walter. Why had Bathsheba not told him about their son? He told himself if he had made an attempt to maintain even a superficial relationship with his ex-wife, he might have found out about him sooner. Something not done: regret.

He cautioned himself to keep his mind on the trailer and what might be inside, but his mind kept wandering back to other things.

Ralph Scaffidi was perplexing: wholly harmless on a superficial level, but there was always something deeper and more sinister just below the surface. Still, he felt attracted to the man. Was Magic Wan part of something real, a lead worth following? This whole bear thing was a lot of nothing so far. Hairs in a car, galls mixed with poisoned figs, some game-playing among guides, a couple of empty traps, old Trapper Jet up to something . . . None of it amounted to anything he could really work with, which was not unusual, but lack of hard evidence and direction always irritated him. And now there was possibly a bear-napper with access to drugs, meaning a link to a vet? And Grinda had a bear with a steel cable around its neck. Were any of these things connected? Was the peculiar informer right—were these symptoms of an international bear parts ring moving in?

McCants returned right at last light. “We've got a good one,” she said, her voice tight, words clipped. “Windows blacked out, crawled under the trailer, coffee filters stained red, dozens of empty boxes of Nyquil, evidence of dry ice, a cylinder of liquid ammonia, and a box of empty twenty-pound propane tanks. Behind the trailer, empty case of lithium batteries,” she said, finally stopping to catch her breath. “You know what this means?” she asked him.

“Drugs,” he said.

“Meth lab,” she said, “Your basic Beavis and Butthead operation. The lithium batteries tell me they're making Nazi meth.”

“How do you know?”

“In-service last summer while you were on suspension. Didn't you read the lit? It was put in your mailbox. We pretty much shut down Cat up here; now crank is moving in.” Cat was methcathinone, a homebrewed amphetamine-like drug made from battery acid, Drano, and nonprescription asthma meds. It had emerged in the U.P. in 1990 and five years later had spread to ten states, as far west as Colorado.

Service had been so caught up in life with Maridly Nantz that he had barely glanced at the information that had accumulated during his suspension.

“We need backup,” McCants said.

“Shouldn't we look inside first?” he asked.

“That would be nice, but Grady, the shit laying around here can add up to only one conclusion.”

“Okay,” he said. “Call help.” He immediately regretted saying anything because it sounded like he was her superior, approving her actions and giving orders, which was not the way it was.

“I'm going to bring them in quiet and dark,” McCants said. “A lot of these meth cooks are also users. What we don't need is a tweaker. After a while users go paranoid and don't react well to anything they might misinterpret.”

While McCants withdrew to use radio, Service decided to take a closer look at the trailer.

Slithering on his belly, the first thing he noticed was the stench—like there were a thousand pissing cats living in the trailer. The debris was as Candi had described it, but there was also a pile of deer viscera and a rancid skin crumpled against the side of the trailer skirt.

He got carefully to his feet and checked the windows of the camper. Blackened, as she said, but the paint was on the outside of the glass, not the interior. Why? He used his fingernail to peel a tiny hole in the paint and look inside. The paint had not been on the glass long. A naked man was standing beside a table filled with clear mason jars. A naked teenage girl stood beside him, wearing a small revolver in a holster. A jam box was blasting. The man had long hair down to middle of his back. Blurred tattoos covered his right shoulder and upper arm. Another blurred tat was on his right buttock. It looked like a name, but he couldn't make it out. When the girl turned to stare at the window, he dropped to the ground and crawled away from the trailer.

McCants was there when he slid back into their hidey hole. “Help's rolling,” she said. “ETA, twenty minutes. They're bringing the drug and hazmat teams—and Grady, they want us to wait.”

“Not a problem,” Service said, the words bringing a grin to his face.

“What's so funny?” McCants asked.

“Nothing,” he said, shaking his head. “Should one of us go greet the posse?”

“No. The Troops will give us a bump on the eight hundred.”

“Looked to me like they're making something in there right now,” Service told her. “You smell cat piss?”

“That's the ammonia,” she said. “I hope they're not using while they're cooking,” she added somberly.

“Is there a plate on the trailer?” he asked.

McCants scowled. “I didn't notice.”

Service was adding charges in his head. The more they had, the better to stick Verse with and hold him against bail. Failure to report to his PO within forty-eight hours, stolen vehicle, paroled felon in possession of firearms, adult with and giving intoxicants to minor girls, maybe a drug lab, an illegal deer—the charges were stacking up. By the looks of Verse, he'd not surrender easily. Too much to lose.

Time passed slowly. The trailer continued to shake under the barrage of music, the bass thumping like the heart of a giant beast.

“Five minutes,” Service said, checking his watch.

“The sooner the better,” McCants whispered.

There was a sharp crack and the tinkling of glass. Both COs tensed. “Shot,” McCants said. “Move!”

Service was on his feet and advancing before he could think through the situation. McCants had been a good officer since he'd first met her, always charging into trouble, never pausing to cogitate.

“Only one door,” she said as they jogged forward. “Both of us on the front side, one to an end,” she said.

When they reached the trailer she took one end and he took the other. Two more shots cracked and the music stopped. Silence overwhelmed the scene.

The front door flew open, slapping sharply against the side of the trailer.

“You crazy fucking
bitch!
” a male voice keened angrily. “What is your fucking
problem,
man!”

“You said you'd do
me
first,” a female voice answered. “
Me.
But you did her first!”

“Dude, you were cooking,” the man said, his voice part defiance, part pleading.

“You promised,” the girl said resolutely. “You do me,
then
you do her. That was the deal,
man!
”

“You
shot
the bitch,” the man said.

Another gunshot sounded and the man toppled out the door and hit the ground hard on his back. The girl appeared in the opening, a revolver in both hands. The man tried to crawl away, but collapsed face down and stopped moving.

The girl raised the pistol over her head. “I shot the fucking monster, the monster is
fucking
dead!” she screamed.

The girl was naked, and no more than a kid. Lethal force was called for, but Service hesitated at drawing his weapon. He looked toward McCants but it was dark and he couldn't see her. He tried to listen in the direction of the farmhouse and barn, but heard nothing. Still no posse, goddamn them.

“I'm gonna cut the fucking monster's head off!” the girl said. Service recognized the tone: pure fear, driven by adrenaline and anger. He had heard this too many times in Vietnam to forget it.

“Oh shit!” another female voice said. Then, “Oh, just
fuck
!”

The girl in the door turned back to the inside.

“You supposed to be dead,” the shooter said, her tone almost one of curiosity.

“You shot my
tit,
man!” the other girl said loudly.

“You did my man,” the shooter said calmly.

“You watched,” the other one said in her own defense. “What's the deal, man? We
both
been doing him, ya know?”

“Me first,” the shooter said. “You went out of turn. We had a
deal,
” she argued.

Service didn't dare move. Too far to go with the light shining out of the trailer. He hoped Candi was closer.

Another shot cracked and there was a scream, but the shooter suddenly came windmilling and flailing out of the trailer. McCants had the girl by a leg and was wrestling with her. Service jumped on the pile.