Hard Ground (11 page)

“Service?” a female voice called. “You okay?”

“Down here,” he said listlessly, his body dumping adrenaline now that it was no longer needed.

Beany Moiles walked past him directly to the animal. “She charge youse?”

He shook his head. “Clacked her jaws once.”

“One more and she'da come rightachyouse,” Moiles said. The tiny woman knelt beside the bear and bent close to inspect her. “You see white star on her chest?”

“No.” He'd seen only the eyes, the head. White star flash on the bear and white stars all over the sheriff's gaudy station wagon. The two images merged in his mind, made his stomach sour, made him reach deep to remain focused.

“I know this animal,” Moiles said quietly. “Ten years back she had three cubs, went four hundred pounds easy. Lived her whole life down there in the Bread Creek wilds. Shoulda died down there too, eh.” She paused. “Back in her prime dis star bear prolly push at least six hundred, eh. Now look at her: starving to death, teeth rotted and falling out, ribs showing; poor old gal. Nature's way: Eat or die. Her and us. Doc Venable's up to da house. Youse want him down here now?” She added, “Damn builders anyways.”

Moiles moved over to the child, didn't touch the body and didn't linger. “Animal on the kill when you come upon her?”

Grady Service nodded.

“Got a smoke?”

He handed her his pack and ancient Zippo, asked her, “Imago with you?”

“Kicked his ass out a month ago, filed divorce papers. He ain't told nobody, been sittin' over there on a stool at the Frozen Dog since den, like ever't'ing hunky-dory. Piece of shit, he is.”

The Frozen Dog. Service knew what that was all about. A local watering hole favored by the hopelessly addicted, including Service's late father, a drunk, and also a career conservation officer.

Moiles finished her smoke, GI'd it, stuck the butt in a pocket. “I'll fetch Doc Venable.”

“Vince, too, but not Swick. Tell that toad we're not yet sure what we have down here, and tell him you didn't see anything, that I want the area preserved for the doctors.”

“I'll bring 'em. Youse sit tight and try to relax.” She handed the lighter and pack back to him and rubbed his upper back. “Youse done good, Grady.”

“Hard,” he said.

“I know,” she said and walked away, angling up the hill in the direction of the child's home.

Rudi Venable was white-haired, in his sixties, a hard-working, no-bullshit veterinarian who didn't milk his clients with pet-owner complex built on ownership guilt. His hair was white-walled into a buzz cut that needed a trim. Venable knelt beside the bear, and Vilardo went to the child and stood there, slowly shaking his head, absentmindedly chewing his bottom lip, blinking hard.

Service got off the windfall and joined the vet.

“
Old
girl,” Venable remarked, his hand under the sow's jaw, elevating it so he could look. “Find her on the kill?”

“Yah,” Service said.

“Her teeth are a mess. Can't figure how'd she even chew. Probably pinched stuff off with the crushing power of her jaws.” The doctor opened a large plastic tool box, put on a rubber apron, got out a wood-handled fillet knife, honed it with a few whacks on a leather strop, and pulled on elbow-length rubber choppers. It took the combined strength of all three men to roll over all the dead weight and get the animal's upper body slightly elevated so gravity could assist the evisceration process.

The veterinarian delicately punctured the abdomen, just below where ribs came together, and using two fingers, one on either side of the sharp blade, slid his hand downward, opening the cavity, moving smoothly from top to bottom. Steam spewed from the body, the stench overwhelming Service, who pretended not to notice. Game wardens were supposed to have cast-iron stomachs. His was. Mostly.

“Not much fat,” the vet reported, pointing. “Pretty sure she wunta made it through this winter.”

Service watched the vet remove organs and place them in black rubber bags. Venable stopped and used the back of his forearm to wipe sweat away. “Brain's in bits. Heart, too. Whereju hit 'er first?” he asked the CO.

“Top of the head.”

“And she ran?”

“Tried.”

“Brain surge, speck she wunta gone too far. Got enough brain tissue I can run some tests, but her heart's a lost cause,” Venable told the men. He used the knife to sever the stomach at the top and tilted it down and out, flopping it in grass in front of his knees like a bulging laundry bag, used the sharp knife to deftly slice open the sac, releasing more cloying smells, and reached inside with his gloved hand.

“Not much in her,” he said, leaning over and fishing deep in a pool of liquids and slime. Venable looked up at his colleagues. “Check the right hand on our vic, Vince.”

“Isn't one,” Vilardo said quietly.

“Okay, good. Got it here in her gut. We'll do blood tests, but this is our killer,” Venable said.

The three men were silent. A breeze ruffled leaves over them. Service lit a cigarette, his hand shaking slightly. Vilardo chewed on his pipe. Venable rubbed his forearm against his head again, rested his buttocks on his boot heels as he knelt.

“I don't think I have words for this, fellas,” the veterinarian said. He looked up at Service. “Good thing you found her, otherwise damn yahoos would be out here shootin' every darn bear they come across.”

“Still may,” Service said.

When an animal killed a human, Yoopers tended to go overboard, ostensibly to find the killer and put it out of the way of harming others, but as much out of pure revenge as any other reason. As often as not with bears, the vigilantes killed a whole lot of animals and never did confirm the guilty one. Rudi was right about his finding the animal with the child, good luck for the bear population tacked on the ass end of tragedy. He also knew some hardheads would still not believe he had the right killer, suspecting the DNR was holding back from the public. He could never understand why people felt this way, but it wasn't uncommon here.

“Only the sheriff hears about the hand,” Vilardo told them. “I want to spare the mother whatever horror we can.”

“Swick needs to tell reporters this is the right animal,” Service said.

“
I'll
handle that,” the vet said.

Vilardo took out his 35 mm Leica and began snapping photos, first of the child, then of the animal.

“You want the hand for the mortician?” Venable asked the medical examiner, “You know, so they can bury all of her together?”

It was the sort of bizarre conversation cops and other emergency personnel often had, and it left Service feeling more grouchy than anything else. Vilardo handed a rubber bag to the vet, who placed the hand in it and said, “Let me fish around, see if there's anything else in there to salvage.”

A minute or so later, the vet said, “Looks like we've got all of her.”

Vilardo sealed the black rubber container and placed it in his medical bag so no one would see it.

“Reporters will want to photograph the animal,” the vet said.

“Not this time,” Service said. “Will you need more off the bear?”

“No, I should be good,” Venable said.

“I'll call other officers. They can winch the remains out of here, take it somewhere, and dispose of it. That okay?”

“That's not okay,” Vilardo said, intervening. “We need to store the animal's carcass until the inquest is done.

“There's an evidence cooler in our Gladstone office. There
has
to be an inquest?”

“You know that's the law,” the ME said, turning to Service.

“Doesn't seem right,” Service replied.

Both doctors shrugged. Vilardo radioed his people back at the house and asked them to come down, using a code word for recovering a body.

Service and Venable left Vilardo with a technician and a state cop and went up to the house, where they met Swick.

“You find her?” the sheriff asked the veterinarian.

“I examined her. Service found her.”

“The bear?” the sheriff huffed at the CO.

“Dead,” Service said.

“How far from him were you?”

“She, not him, a sow; she was on the body, and I was less than thirty feet from her,” he reported. “She went two or three steps, I shot again and dumped her.”

“You'll swear to that under oath at the inquest?”

Service nodded, felt like backhanding the man.

“Being on the kill don't necessarily means youse has got the right one,” the sheriff asserted.

“This the right one, Hugh,” the vet said. “Absolutely no doubt.”

Swick looked to Vince Vilardo, who had come up to get more muscle to help move the animal. “You'll talk to the mother, Vince?”

“That's your job,” Vilardo said.

Swick frowned. “I ain't never been too good at that next-of-kin notification bullshit.”

Grady Service turned to the sheriff and smiled. “I'll take care of it for you, Sheriff.”

Swick brightened. “Thanks, man. Between us girls, I don't got a heap of boohoos for a mother lets her tot play alone outside in bear country.”

Service looked at the man. “You don't hunt. How the fuck do you know this is bear country?”

“Found that out when I bought the land for these houses,” the sheriff said. “Helped me leverage a better price, eh.”

Service said, “I'll talk to the mother,” and walked toward the house. He turned off the new tape recorder in his pocket as he stepped onto the back porch. Next of kin
bullshit?

He knew an old
Evening News
reporter who might find the recording very, very interesting, but now it was time to compose himself and give the sad news to an already grieving mother.

Cuffed to a Truck, Left to Die

After twelve years in southwest Michigan, Conservation Officer Shana Lafave finally got her transfer to Watersmeet in Gogebic County. She'd even found a decent little house to rent her first trip up and moved in after trout season had kicked off. It would be weeks before she was actually settled into the place.

Locals had so far treated Lafave with distant respect—the one-step-back politeness Yoopers reserved for all outsiders, newcomers, and people perceived to have some power, not to mention the enemy, which meant any game warden or cop.

It was Friday night, humid and sultry, the best sort of night for brook trout fishing. Long ago her grandma Franck had taken her to Ten Mile Creek every summer, where they loaded fresh brook trout into canvas creels and shared a beer afterward, from the time Lafave was eight. In those days she and Grandma Franck paid no attention to DNR rules and considered the creek's fish to be their personal eating stock, an attitude shared by many denizens of the Upper Peninsula.

The spot she used to fish with Grandma was a half-mile walk along an eroded razorback ridge. If others were fishing the area, Grandma would park at a little cul-de-sac, currently empty, and walk a couple hundred yards down to the stream. The old gal had told her a lot of locals liked to hike in from County Line Road, which put them upstream of where Lafave intended to stash her truck tonight after a quick look at the stream.

Lafave hiked south, and fifteen minutes later she heard vehicle doors slam at the parking area. She wished she'd brushed away her in-and-out tracks, but it was too late for that, and all but the most serious violators didn't pay that much attention to anything except what was smack in front of them. She backtracked over a hill, heard voices, and stepped into some trees as the group passed, six men, beer cans in hand, the usual male verbal jabbing and bullshit. She heard them reach the creek and separate upstream and down.

The conservation officer moved toward them and watched one of them drifting worms under the skeleton of a cedar blowdown. Very quickly he had a fish on, removed it from the hook, and dropped it into a clear plastic bag tied to his hipper belt.

The size limit here was eight inches. This trout was maybe half that. The man moved downstream, catching one tiny trout after another, keeping them all. One of his upstream compadres yelled down to say he was “slaying these bitches!” and the man closest to her yelled back, “Same here, dude!”

Dillweeds, one and all, traveled in packs.

The closest man finished a beer and tossed it on the bank, sat down on a log, and rolled a cigarette, which he lit, inhaled deeply, and held. She smelled the skunk weed, real cheap dope. She guessed the men would rendezvous at the parking area after dark and decided to wait there to make contact. She was certain they'd all be over the keep limit and have short fish.

It was nearly eleven when they stumbled back up to the truck, still drinking beers. She waited until they were right at the trucks before stepping out on them.

“Conservation officer; you guys have any luck?”

Silence was
not
the reaction she hoped for. Yoopers in the face of authority generally defaulted to denial or fudged an answer, no matter the question, anything short of a bald-faced lie out of the gate. But all she had was an ominous quiet, and she immediately guessed what would come next.
I wanted to avoid this crap.

“Yo, honey, we heard about youse,” one of the men said in a ten-year-old boy's singsong bully voice.

“Put your fish bags on the ground in front of you,” Lafave said.

“Or what?” one of the men asked. “Way we heard it, you ain't so tough.”

“You can't believe everything you hear,” Lafave said. “Put your fish bags on the ground, boys.” “

“Bitch,” a man said. “No wonder you got yours.”

“Fish. Ground. Now.”

When they didn't move, she unsnapped her holster and waited.

Time for a little game. She had not yet checked licenses with Lansing, but she made a hobby of memorizing most popular baby names by year, and she guessed these toads at about twenty or a hair older. “Fish down. Which one of you birds is Lucas or Jason?”

One by one they put the fish on the ground. The man to her right was tall and big with a thick bullneck and mullet, decked out in a black wife beater and a nose ring. He held up his hand. “Lucas.”

Lafave said, “Line up your fish, longest on your right, shortest on the left, in order of size.”

“Do it yourself,” Lucas said and looked down at the Taser in her hand. “That the lightning?”

“Yeah; you wanna ride it?”

“No, ma'am,” he said, kneeling and arranging his fish.

The other five followed the first man's example.

She said. “Operator and fishing licenses.”

“Left my fish license to home,” one of the men said quickly.

“Convenient,” she said, “but it doesn't matter. Just guessing here, but when I run you through RSS, I'll find none of you has a license this year, and I'm guessing you haven't bothered to buy a license for several years. Anybody want to disagree?”

“Bought mine this morning,” the man countered. “There's a lag before it'll show up in your computer.”

“The law says you have to have it with you. If you bought it this morning, where is it?”

“Just told you I left it to home in my wallet in my other pants.”

“You have two wallets?”

One of the men sniggered.

“You've got a wallet in the pants you have on, right?” she said.

“Why you doing this shit to us?” the man complained.

She turned to the other man she had named. “
Your
story?”

“Never got around to buying a license. I meant to, but I didn't, and that's the plain truth. That'll make it easier on me, telling the truth, right?”

“It won't make it worse. Count off your fish, out loud.” She held out her digital recorder, repeated the called out counts: ten, ten, twelve, sixteen, seven, eleven. “Limit's five, boys,” she said.

“Didn't use to be,” one of the men complained.

“Measure the fish,” she said.

“With what? We ain't got no ruler.”

“Hey, Foley,” one of the men chirruped, “whip out youse's four-inch hog and tell her it's eight inches, like you tell all the bar bunnies.”

The insulted man took a roundhouse swing at his comrade but missed and cartwheeled harmlessly to the ground.

Lafave tossed a tape measure to the man on the ground. “So you don't have to embarrass yourself. Call out each length. The rest of you get out your operator licenses.”

“We ain't driving; why we need them?” one of the men asked.

“Because the law says you do.” She wrote down fish lengths as the man called them out. “The lot of you are getting tickets for littering, being over the daily limit and possessing short fish, and fishing without licenses. I'm ignoring the dope.”

“That's a buncha chickenshit!” Lucas howled, puffing with rage.

“One more word from you, sir, and it's jail tonight for interfering with a police officer in the performance of duties.”

“No way that will stick,” he said.

“Won't matter,” she countered. “There'll be a trial, it'll be in the news, on the radio and TV, and Facebook; you'll have to take time off work, and you'll lose the case. How will it look for everybody in town to know you got busted by the split-tail fish cop? Think about it.”

The others laughed.

“I ought to . . . ,” Lucas said.

“
What?
” she asked sharply, stepping toward him. “How about you ought to keep your trap shut. I start inspecting trucks here tonight, there'll be no end to the possibilities, and your pals will suffer all because of you.”

“C'mon, Lucas, listen to her, eh?” one of his friends said.

She looked at them. “You guys heard how some assholes gang-raped me and used my own handcuffs to attach me to my own patrol truck and left me there to be found, and because of that the DNR transferred me up here because they feared I'd lost my ability to be effective there, or I might get hurt. That or something like it is what you heard: Now, here's the truth—I caught a guy spiking my tires, beat him half to death, and told him when he got out I'd finish the other half of the job. I cuffed him to the truck while I whaled on him. Questions?”

None. An hour later she had all the tickets written, had them collect their empties, and reduced the littering charge to a warning. By then they were all joking and laughing and carrying on with each other. Tickets handed out, she said, “Git,” and they jumped in three trucks and were gone.

Lafave got a cigarette out of her truck, put down the tailgate, sat down, and lit up. Every female officer in the state who transferred or came into a county as a new officer had the same myth attached to her arrival. This round of horseshit would pass. In time, some of tonight's fools would become her snitches, and she would slowly strangle the illegal activities of the county's wingnuts with their help. She'd asked for this transfer because this is where she spent summers with her grandmother.

She could imagine Grandma Franck smiling from heaven.