Hard Ground (7 page)

“Sure you do. Everybody does.”

“Even you?”

“Hell, I'm
already
famous. Listen, as we get close to the camp, I'm gonna turn off our engine and glide down in stealth mode.”

Glide? Stealth mode? No engine! Jesus!
“Turn off the engine, you mean . . . like turn
off
the fucking motor?”

“Roger. It ain't no big deal.”

“You can do this, turn it off and restart it while we're flying?”

“Almost always.”

The next thing Elliot Rose knew, they were angled steeply nose down, then suddenly pulling out of the dive, and the engine stopped, leaving them only with the sound of air coming through the open windows. He even heard frogs in the swamp below them, and Haliday was hanging precariously out his window as the aircraft floated along, sinking like a stringless kite.

Rose never saw the pilot light a string of M-80s, but he caught a glimpse of the sputtering fuse as Haliday dropped it. The aircraft continued to float and descend, and Haliday lit and tossed a second string, then turned on the engine, which sputtered momentarily before catching. Haliday took them steeply upward, with Rose looking behind him, watching multiple flashes on the ground where they had passed overhead.

Haliday called on the interphone, “Shacked that shit, eh, Rosey? Now, let's go see if we pissed those suckers off.”

“Air One, Two One Twenty-one, those bangs our signal?”

“Negative, wait for the volley.”

Rose thought,
Volley? What volley?

Haliday descended to the treetops, jerking the aircraft muscularly and confidently. “Okay, nav, I think we're lined up pretty good. Two hundred feet off the ground, those assholes won't be able to help themselves.”

Rose had no idea what was happening.
At least the crazy bastard has the engine on this time.
Which is when he saw dim orange lights in a building and several blinking white stars and an occasional red or green tracer round. His mind screamed,
Fuck! Kalashnikovs on automatic!

Haliday said, “Know what them are?”

Before Rose could answer, Davey radioed, “We hear AK-47s on full auto, and we're rolling, Air One.”

Haliday laughed. “Ain't you the smart one, Boss. They opened up on us as we flew over. Three weapons, I'd say, could be four.”

“Two One Twenty-one and One Thirty-five are going in fast and black.”

“Air One copies.” Switching to the intercom, Haliday said, “I'm gonna bank hard, come down at them from another angle, switch their attention to us as our colleagues charge.”

The pilot immediately descended, the fuselage brushing against treetops, shaking the small aircraft.

“Right in their britches this time,” Haliday said, laughing.

Bullets came through the fuselage with sharp pings that made Rose flinch and hold his hands over his nuts as the metallic clicks continued. The plane slid left sharply, and Haliday said calmly, “No sweat now, nav, I got this baby. C'mon, baby, c'mon, baby.”

The pilot continued to chant as the nose came up, and they got above the treetops. Haliday said over the radio, “Two One Twenty-one, Air One has sustained battle damage, and we have a smidge of a control problem. We're gonna make an emergency let-down on some high-ground humps about a mile northwest of your position.”

“Are we
crashing?
” Rose yelled up to the pilot.

“Ain't you been listening?” Haliday yelled back. “Buck Rogers don't crash. What we got us is some teensy control issues, but I got us a dandy alternate picked out. Always remember that, Rosey. In the air or on the ground, with your girlfriend or your squeeze, always have you an alternate, every time, every moment, every situation. Pay attention, nav. This here's one you'll be telling your grandkiddies.”

“Air One, Two One Thirty-five, say your problem.”

“Nav, handle our commo. I'm getting kinda busy up here. C'mon, baby, c'mon, baby, you can do this one last dealie.”

One last dealie.
Rose felt sick. “Two One Thirty-five, Air One, we've got a situation up here, no details, copy?”

“Good job, Rosey; never let them hear you shit your pants,” Haliday said over the intercom.

“Air One, Two One Twenty-one, we have four very, very angry, very surprised, and extremely drunk individuals in custody. County is en route to transport. Say your status and location.”

“Uh, still flying,” Rose radioed. “I think.”

Haliday laughed out loud. “Tell 'em we're on high final and sign off with over.”

“Two One Twenty-one, Air One is on high final, over.” Rose felt the gear drop down and lock.

Haliday said, “Okay, nav, the moment of truth approaches. See them big-ass trees up ahead?” Haliday wrestled the nose slightly starboard and illuminated the trees with a hand spot as Rose craned to see. “We're gonna set her down right on top. I'm gonna pull the nose up real high and slide through the air bleeding off our airspeed aerodynamically until we lose our lift. Then I'll gently ease the stick forward, and we should plop gently on the treetops like a big yellow bird. You scared?”

Rose tried to say something but only gagged.

Haliday laughed. “Me too, Rosey. Anybody ain't scared in deals like this is psychotic or lives in their mama's basement. Okay, nose coming up, power coming back. Wish us luck, son.”

Rose held his breath, tried to remember his Hail Mary, and failed. It felt like his back was pointed at the ground, his face at the stars, and the airframe was creaking and moaning and making all sorts of what he thought were stressful sounds, yet they floated on.

And floated and floated.

Until Haliday said, “Moment of frickin' truth, Rosey. Let's hope I got this right.”

The nose dumped forward.

The engine stopped, and the air filled with sounds of metal tearing.

And then it was still, and a whisper breeze was wafting through the windows.

“Keep your headset on, Rosey. You okay?”

Rose opened his eyes. “I think so.”

“We're good and secure,” Haliday said, making the plane shake to test it. “Let's just sit here a few minutes and let our heart rates normalize. Then I'll climb out and see where we can get down with our tree penetrators. You ever use one?”

“Never even heard of one,” Rose said.

“Piece of cake. Attaches to clips on your harness, two-point connection with one line attached to a pulley secured to a good branch. Release the brake and down you go. Harder you pull, the slower you go. Designed it myself. You get on the ground, release the two connections, and I'll come down behind you.”

Rose felt anger welling. “You planned this, you fucking maniac. You
planned
to crash!”

“Don't be a crybaby, Rosey. There ain't been no crash; we just made us an emergency let-down.”

“You're a fucking maniac, Haliday!”

“I guess I won't argue a moot point, nav. But I gotta say, you done great! Bean counters in Lansing are dumping us pilots. I got me a job dropping smokejumpers out to Coeur d'Alene. Fuck the bean counters and suit dogs. This pilot is outta here!”

“You could've killed me!”

“You got to get your head out of negative mode, Rosey. It ain't healthy, and you're alive. Look around, man.”

Thirty minutes later the two men were on the ground by a two-track, using the 800 MHz radio to bring Two One Twenty-one into position to pick them up. Davey pulled up and looked around. “Where's the crash site?”

“Landing site,” Haliday corrected him. “Put your spotlight on the treetops a hundred meters south of us.

Davey lit the top of the trees and whispered, “Holy fuck.”

“Get me away from this madman,” Elliot Rose said.

Haliday said to Davey, “Ignore the boy. They're always a little unsettled their first time. He ain't got a scratch.”

The two patrol trucks drove back to the DNR office in Escanaba, where other officers gathered to await their return. Local radio was already reporting a DNR raid that captured four major poachers with four automatic AK-47s, seventy illegal deer, hundreds of pounds of dope, and other contraband—and the raid resulted in a DNR aircraft sitting atop a grove of trees near the site of the raid. “No word from the state yet on what happened with that—or who's gonna fly the plane off the trees,” the local reporter quipped.

Elliot Rose looked at Buck Rogers and made a fist.

Haliday grinned. “Go ahead, kid, you get one free shot. But remember this: You punch me now, you lose the glory that goes with this kind of close call. It's your choice.”

Rose exhaled, unclenched his fist, and extended his hand. “Good luck out west, you maniac.”

The Dry Spell

Last Independence Day, Lurleen Turco had arrested mental midget Bobo Kokko with 20.4 ounces of skunk weed and fifty-three corncob pipes. Despite all the evidence, Kokko's slimebag lawyer from Oscoda got him released on his own recognizance, and he was free, the trial having been pushed back three times, the last rescheduling set for this fall.

Even with the trial hanging over Kokko, a good tip suggested that the dickhead would be at something called Fender Camp in southwest Alger County. Word to CO Turco was that he was gathering another load of dope, this one grown mostly by local folks, down in the Garden Peninsula.

The tip came from Rocky Tidd, who sold Indian sweet grass to tourists, many of them now stopping to ask if sweet grass was a (wink) euphemism for medical marijuana. Kokko was among the fool callers. He had shown up high and ranting he'd “buy every fucking pound of the good shit” Tidd had. Rocky had to explain to the lunkhead that “sweet grass” wasn't what Kokko wanted, and somehow the dumbass had let drop he was working on “like, a massively massive score at Fender Camp in Alger.” What a tool.

Rocky wasn't the straightest arrow in the quiver, or the smartest, but he was mostly honest, and he was clean. CO Turco called the county drug team with the tip, but they said they had something big going on and asked her to handle it. She had agreed, even though she loathed drug cases and felt they were outside what a true a game warden's purview ought to be.

On the other hand, her lack of a personal life was such that more work actually sounded good. It beat the hell out of sitting alone in her house watching fricking reality shows. Twice divorced, she had dated, but she had never been without sex so long, in this instance 388 days and counting. It had gotten so bad that she had to stop herself from trying to size up every stranger she met for his quickie potential.

The array of reasons her dates didn't make love to her begged credulity, and someday she assumed she'd laugh about it, but right now being perpetually horny nearly all the time was not what she'd call fun.

One of her “suitors” always placed two couch pillows over his crotch protectively like the Chinese Great Wall designed to keep invading barbarians out of the middle kingdom. He announced to her that he believed sex was bad for society. She'd countered with, “Syllogistically, no sex, no people; therefore, no society.”

He had countered lamely, “You know what I mean.” But she didn't, not in the least.

The next would-be paramour had been a room-stopping handsome Mormon, who told her sex with her before marriage would consign his soul to the outer ring of darkness, which she guessed by his tone was a nasty place to be. “Men who make love with me tell me it's heavenly,” she tried to reason with him.

“They're not Mormon,” he shot back.

No argument there.

One of the strangest ones was a recovering sex addict, and she distinctly remembered upon hearing his confession, “Thank God, finally!” But he'd been three years without sex and didn't want to “fall off his bed of nails. Otherwise I'd have to go back to scratch one,” he told her, explaining, “You have to understand, I was a total satire.”

Obviously, Mr. Scratch One/Total Satire was a literate recovering sex addict. Even so, missing out on that one probably hurt the most, as much from pure curiosity as sexual need.

More work would be just fine, even if she donated time to the state, which had no budget for overtime. Boyfriends came and went. Only the job persevered.

She telephoned CO Jock Gillian in Munising. “You know the Fender Camp?”

“Ya, it's the one owned by family claims they're related to the guitar people, but that may or may not be bull-pucky. You know how camp owners love to bullshit. Something up?”

“Could be. People who own it are named Fender?”

“Nope, Gavrilaitis, Greeks or Turks, I tend ta get those two mixed up. The story I heard was that old man Gavrilaitis worked for Dow Chemical and sold car lacquers to Fender for their gitfiddles. The old man got rich and retired. One that owns the camp now is a grandson, I think, lives out to Rancho Somethingorother in California, spends May through October at the camp. Word is he has a full electronic recording studio out there.”

“You been out there on business?”

“Nah, all I know is local gab. Not sure the Fender Camp bunch fishes, hunts, or even walks in the woods. Why?”

“Musicians in and out of there, West Coastals and drug suckers and the like?”

“I'd guess, but that's all it would be is conjecture and bar talk,” Gillian said. “I once heard old man Gavrilaitis owned the world's largest collection of Gibson Les Paul guitars with Seth Lover humbuckers.”

“Can that be parsed into English?” she asked.

“You don't pick?”

“Only my nose and the occasional nag,” she said.

“I played some. Humbucker's a sweet gizmo takes the hum and white noise shit out, you know, pulls the buzz and interference out of the background. Fenders and Gibsons are real cool.”

Gillian had a Dubya/Alfred E. Newman look to him, with massive elephant ears, not the sort of person whose countenance sang out musician, never mind guitarist. “Bump you later, Jack.”

Rocky Tidd said he heard from Kokko there was to be some sort of big get-together at Fender Camp over the Fourth and that the gathering was “primo for dumping his shit.”

The night of July 3, Turco located Fender Camp and walked the perimeter as a steady flow of vehicles drove down the ungated two-track. No wire fencing, only a few no trespassing signs, and the absence of a gate suggested the owner wasn't over-amped with security concerns. Not that getting into the camp would be a piece of cake. It wouldn't. She couldn't charge in on the say-so of a single informant, and she had no evidence as probable cause other than Kokko's track record and Tidd's tip. She had pretty much concluded about the best she could do was show up tomorrow with a smile, say howdy, and look around. It was lame, but it was all she could come up with.

Shooting erupted suddenly, so many rounds that she lost count, but she could plainly hear bullets coming down through the trees and leaves as their upward trajectories lost momentum, and gravity pulled them home.
Good grief!
Every day some segment of the American public becomes more and more like the damn PLO, whipping out their AKs and cranking rounds straight up in celebration or sadness, and never mind the unlucky schnooks who happened to be standing under a plummeting spent round.

Shooting provided reasonable cause. Turco went back to her truck and drove out to the camp road, where she got wedged between pickup trucks, PT Cruisers, four-wheelers, and motorcycles, all of them raising a humongous cloud of fine reddish gray dust. When they finally entered an open area, she could see even through the dust a field filled with haphazardly parked vehicles of every imaginable description and make.

As she parked and got out, more rounds went off, and one thunked down on the roof of a new VW bug beside her. Turco got down on her hands and knees and felt around until she found the spent round, which she stashed in her pants pocket.

Standing up, she blinked wildly as she found herself trapped in a surging crowd of Elvis Presleys, all in checkered leather suits and shiny boots, all streaming toward a huge circus tent, which suddenly illuminated with floodlights and a sign that proclaimed,
Upper Great Lakes Region Top 100 Competition: Loyal, Prayerful Order of God's Lifting Up Professional Female, Male, and Transgender Elvis Impersonators.

“Oh my,” she said out loud. She couldn't decide whether to laugh or scream, but one thing was clear, that among so many oddly garbed folk, she stood out. If she walked into the big top, Kokko would surely see her and split. Better to scour the parking lot, find the asshole's cherry red Chevy pickup, and surveil it until he showed. For the ideal pinch she needed to see him deal drugs, but this was a detail that would sort out or not. Such were the vagaries of law enforcement.

Multiple bands were warming up in the humid night. She could hear squeals and screeching amps, drum thumps rattling like distant heartbeats, chords being strummed. She always kept several changes of clothes in her truck for emergencies and was in the process of deciding how to dress (favoring a short white sundress with spaghetti sandals to show off her legs) when someone grabbed her neck with a sleeper hold, and she felt herself tumbling into lalaland, no decisions to be made there, but with all these men there had to be a few straight ones, and maybe going braless would make good bait, yeah, that would work good—if she could get past this asshole who was in the process of assaulting her. Her final thought before sleep was:
This frickin' jerk knows his stuff.

She awoke in the dark, propped against a tree, her butt on the ground, a pine needle stuck in her buttock. She could hear music thumping somewhere off in the distance, and she had a low-grade headache. A dark figure sat near her. She immediately tried to gain control and mumbled, “Who are you, and where am I, and why am I here, and all that shit?”

“What are you doing in this damn Elvis mob?” a vaguely familiar voice asked.

“Bite me,” she said, adding, “Did we have sex?”

The figured laughed. “Charley Vincent,” he said, “you hard case
you.
Hell no we didn't have sex. Are you suggesting that's an option, Turco?”

“C.V.?”

Vincent was a detective in the Wildlife Resource Protection Unit, the Department of Natural Resource's undercover investigative branch. “Sex is never an option with you, asshole. The drug team asked me to handle a case.”

“Which case?”

“Bobo Kokko, drugs.”

“No shit. We're on his case, too. The group here is having a venison roast in honor of Elvis. Guess who's providing the fare?”

“What an idiot,” she said and saw by the silhouette that her colleague was in neither civvies nor uniform. “Good God , C.V., is that asshole getup you've got on really necessary?”

“You are obviously unfamiliar with the principles of undercover blending in, ma'am.”

“Is that like passing?”

“Pretty much. Listen, Lurleen, anybody not in costume here gets the heave-ho. No costume, no can stay. They're real hard-asses about it.”

“Who, Elvis trannies?”

“Don't levy value judgments, Officer Turco. Away from here these are some normal productive folk.”

“If you say so,” Turco said, her words dripping sarcasm.

“We have to get you made up,” the detective said.

“We?”

“Our people, Fish and Wildlife, FBI, Homeland Security, Immigration, BATF—hell, the whole law enforcement mob is here. The feds have information leading them to believe Arab terrorists have infiltrated the Elvisian community.”

“Why would they think that?” she asked, and it occurred to her that mob was a good term for the gaggle of law enforcement personnel. What this was going to be, she knew, was a memorable goat rodeo.

“Elvis swap meets. These folks sell guns to each other,
lots
of guns.”

She thought for a moment. “Okay, I'm in, but you got to get me into an outfit.”

“Other agents may not like this,” Vincent said.

“Fuck them, C.V. I'll find Kokko's truck and stay with that.”

“He'll be dressed as Elvis,” Vincent said.

“No duh. Which flavor?” she said.

“Not sure, ma'am, but thank ya varra, varra much,” he said in a crude rendition of Elvis speak.

“You know Kokko's got a court date on last year's drug case?” she asked.

“We're aware.”

“Why the hell didn't you tell me about this shit?”

“Need to know,” he said. “You know how feds think.”

Actually, she didn't. Nor did she want to. What she said was, “Uh-huh, where's my damn costume, C.V.?”

“I'm on it,” he said, “ma'am.”

“I'll wait right here,” she said.

“Thank ya varra, varra much.”

As soon as Vincent was gone, she followed him, which wasn't difficult. C.V.'s white leather jumpsuit illuminated like a chemical light stick. Back in the lot, she veered off to find Kokko's truck, and as providence would have it, she bumped into a person in a checked leather jumpsuit who mumbled, “You wan' score weed, blow, speed, pixie dirt?”

What the fuck is pixie dirt?
“One-stop shopping, that your spiel?”

“You want to eat it, snort it, or fuck it, I got it for ya, ma'am.”

“How much for your best weed?”

“Garden Green's primo with supermax THC, little lady.”

“Price?”
Dillweed.

“Twenty for two lids.”

Too weird to be real. She
knew
this voice. “The good shit, right?”

“The best,” he said.

“Good, hit me,” Turco said, and when Kokko handed her two small bags, she gave him $20 and slapped a cuff on his wrist, grabbed the other, and got that one, too, all before he could even react.