Mercy Falls (2 page)

T
HEY HIT THE
skunk just outside of town, and after that, they drove with the windows down. It didn’t help much.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Deputy Marsha Dross said.

“How could you know what I’m thinking?” Cork replied.

“Because it’s what I’d be thinking if I were you.”

“And what’s that?”

“That if I’d let you drive, this wouldn’t have happened.”

“You’re not me,” Cork said. “And that’s not what I’m thinking.”

“What are you thinking?”

“Just wondering if there’s enough money in the budget for a new Land Cruiser.” He put his head out the window and let the air clear his nose.

The road they were traveling had been traveled before by generations of Ojibwe and Voyageurs. It connected the Blueberry River with Iron Lake and had been an important passage in the days of the fur trade. The French had called it Portage du Myrtille, Blueberry Portage. To the Ojibwe, whom the white men often called Chippewa but who preferred the name Anishinaabe, which meant Original People, it was known as Maanadamon—Bad Trail—because it was a long portage with stretches of marsh and deep mud. And skunks. To the engineers who, in the mid twentieth century, had widened and graded it and laid down asphalt, it was called simply County Road 23. They’d killed the beauty of the names, but they hadn’t been able to destroy the stunning grandeur of the land through which it ran, the great Northwoods of Minnesota.

The asphalt ended at the beginning of the Iron Lake Reservation. On the rez, the wide shoulders disappeared and the road became a narrow gravel track following a clear stream that threaded its way through vast stands of pine and rugged hills topped with birch trees and spruce.

As Dross slowed down, the skunk smell grew worse.

“Maybe I should take it through a creek or something,” she suggested.

“With skunk, I think you just have to let it wear off. Maybe we’ll put this unit out to pasture for a while.” He scanned the road in front of them, looking for the turn he knew was coming up.

Autumn had started out cold that year. The sugar maples and sumac had turned early, a deep crimson. At sunrise, the eastern sky was often the color of an open wound and sometimes on crisp mornings the frost that lay over everything reflected the sky, and the whole land appeared to bleed. Warm weather returned in the first week of October, and for the past few days it had felt almost like June again.

“I love Indian summer.” Marsha Dross smiled, as if hoping for a pleasant change of subject.

She was a tall woman, nearly six feet, and slender. Her hair was coarse and brown and she kept it short. She had a broad face, large nose. In her uniform and without makeup—something she never wore on the job—she was sometimes mistaken for a man. Off duty, she knew what to do with mascara and eyeliner and lip gloss. She preferred tight dresses with high hemlines, gold jewelry, and line dancing.

“Don’t you love Indian summer, Cork?”

“Know where the term
Indian summer
comes from?” he asked.

“No.”

“A white man’s phrase. They didn’t trust Indians, so when the warm days returned in late fall and it felt like summer but everyone knew it was a lie, they gave it a name they deemed appropriate.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Yes.”

“Yes, what?”

“I do love Indian summer.” He pointed to the right. “Turn here.”

“I know.”

Dross pulled onto a side road even smaller and rougher than the one they’d just followed, and they slipped into the blue shadow of a high ridge where a cool darkness had settled among the pine trees. The red-orange rays of the setting sun fell across the birches that crowned the hilltops, and the white trunks seemed consumed by a raging fire.

“I wish you had let me take the call alone,” Dross said.

“As soon as you hit that skunk, so did I.” He smiled briefly. “You know my policy.”

“I responded to a lot of calls on the rez when Wally was sheriff, and Soderberg.”

“I’m sheriff now. Domestic disturbances can turn ugly, even between people as harmless as Eli and Lucy.”

“Then send another deputy with me. You don’t always have to go on the rez calls.”

“When you’re sheriff, you can do things your way.”

Life, Cork knew, was odder than a paisley duck. Three months before he’d been a private citizen, proud proprietor of Sam’s Place, a small burger joint on a lovely spot along the shore of Iron Lake. Flipping burgers was a vocation many people probably considered only slightly less humble than, say, rounding up shopping carts in a Wal-Mart parking lot, but Cork had grown fond of his independence. When a scandal forced the duly elected sheriff, a man named Arne Soderberg, from office, the Board of County Commissioners had offered Cork the job. He had the experience; he had the trust of the people of Tamarack County; and the commissioners happened to catch him in a weak moment.

Dross slowed the Land Cruiser. “The truth is, you love going out like this.”

The truth was, he did.

“There,” Cork said.

It was a small, shabby cabin set against the base of the ridge, with a horseshoe of poplar trees around the back and sides. There was an old shed to the right, just large enough for a pickup truck, but Cork knew it was so full of junk there was no way a pickup could fit. A metal washtub sat in the yard, full of potting soil and the browning stalks of mums that had frozen days before. A big propane tank lay like a fat, white hyphen between the cabin and the shed. Behind the shed stood an old outhouse.

Dross parked off the road in the dirt of what passed for a drive. “Looks deserted,” she said.

The curtains were open and behind each window was deep black.

“Eli’s pickup’s gone,” she noted. “Maybe they patched things up and went off to celebrate.”

The call had come from Lucy Tibodeau who lived with her husband Eli in the little cabin. These two had a long history of domestic disputes that, more often than not, arose from the fact that Eli liked to drink and Lucy liked to bully. When Eli drank, he tended to forget that he weighed 140 pounds compared to Lucy’s 200-plus. In their altercations, it was generally Eli who took it on the chin. They always made up and never actually brought a formal complaint against one another. Patsy, the dispatcher, had taken the call and reported that Lucy was threatening to beat the crap out of Eli if someone didn’t get out there to stop her. Which was a little odd. Generally, it was Eli who called asking for protection.

Cork looked at the cabin a moment, and listened to the stillness in the hollow.

“Where are the dogs?” he said.

“Dogs?” Dross replied. Then she understood. “Yeah.”

Everybody on the rez had dogs. Eli and Lucy had two. They were an early-warning system of sorts, barking up a storm when visitors came. At the moment, however, everything around the Tibodeau cabin was deathly still.

“Maybe they took the dogs with them.”

“Maybe,” Cork said. “I’m going to see if Patsy’s heard anything more.”

Dross put on her cap and opened her door. She stepped out, slid her baton into her belt.

Cork reached for the radio mike. “Unit Three to Dispatch. Over.”

“This is Dispatch. Go ahead, Cork.”

“Patsy, we’re at the Tibodeau place. Looks like nobody’s home. Have you had any additional word from Lucy?”

“That’s a negative, Cork. Nothing since her initial call.”

“And you’re sure it came from her?”

“She ID’d herself as Lucy Tibodeau. Things have been quiet out there lately, so I figured we were due for a call.”

Marsha Dross circled around the front of the vehicle and took a few steps toward the cabin. In the shadow cast by the ridge, everything had taken on a somber look. She stopped, glanced at the ground near her feet, bent down, and put a finger in the dirt.

“There’s blood here,” she called out to Cork. “A lot of it.”

She stood up, turned to the cabin again, her hand moving toward her holster. Then she stumbled, as if she’d been shoved from behind, and collapsed facedown. In the same instant, Cork heard the report from a rifle.

“Shots fired!” he screamed into the microphone. “Officer down!”

The windshield popped and a small hole surrounded by a spiderweb of cracks appeared like magic in front of Cork. The bullet chunked into the padding on the door an inch from his arm. Cork scrambled from the Land Cruiser and crouched low against the vehicle.

Dross wasn’t moving. He could see a dark red patch that looked like a maple leaf spread over the khaki blouse of her uniform.

The reports had come from the other side of the road, from the hill to the east. Where Cork hunkered, the Land Cruiser acted as a shield and protected him, but Dross was still vulnerable. He sprinted to her, hooked his hands under her arms, and dug his heels into the dirt, preparing to drag her to safety. As he rocked his weight back, something stung his left ear. A fraction of a second later another report came from the hill. Cork kept moving, his hands never losing their grip as he hauled his fallen deputy to the cover of the Land Cruiser.

A shot slammed through the hood, clanged off the engine block, and thudded into the dirt next to the left front tire.

Cork drew his revolver and tried to think. The shots had hit an instant before he’d heard the sound of them being fired, so the shooter was at some distance. But was there only one? Or were others moving in, positioning themselves for the kill?

He could hear the traffic on the radio, Patsy communicating with the other units, the units responding. He tried to remember how many cruisers were out, where they were patrolling, and how long it would take them to reach that cabin in the middle of nowhere, but he couldn’t quite put it all together.

Dross lay on her back staring up with dazed eyes. The front of her blouse was soaked nearly black. Cork undid the buttons and looked at the exit wound in her abdomen. A lot of blood had leaked out, but the wound wasn’t as large as he’d feared. It was a single neat hole, which probably meant that the bullet had maintained its shape, hadn’t mushroomed as it passed through her body. A round with a full metal jacket, Cork guessed. Jacketed rounds were generally used in order to penetrate body armor, which Dross wasn’t wearing.

Cork had choices to make and he had to make them quickly. If he tended to Dross’s wounds, he ignored the threat of an advance from the shooter—or shooters—and risked both their lives. But if he spent time securing their position, the delay could mean his deputy’s life.

He weighed the possibility of more than one assailant. The shots had come one at a time, from a distance. When he considered how Dross had fallen, the trajectory of the bullet that had pierced the windshield, and where the final round had hit the engine, he calculated they’d all come from approximately the same direction: from somewhere high on the hill across the road. The shooter was above them and a little forward of their position, with a good view of the driver’s side but blind to where Cork crouched. If there’d been more than one assailant involved, a crossfire would have made the most sense, but so far that hadn’t happened.

So many elements to consider. So little time. So much at stake.

He chose.

He holstered his revolver and leaned toward the deputy. “Marsha, can you hear me?”

Her eyes drifted to his face, but she didn’t answer.

“Hang on, kiddo, I’ll be right back.”

In the back of the Land Cruiser was a medical kit that contained, among other things, rolls of gauze, sterile pads, and adhesive tape. Cork crept toward the rear of the vehicle. If he was right about the shooter’s location, he should be able to grab the medical kit without exposing himself significantly to gunfire. If he was right. It was a big gamble. Dross gave a low moan. The blood had spread across the whole of her uniform, seeped below the belt line of her trousers. Still she looked at him and shook her head, trying to warn him against anything rash. Cork drew a breath and moved.

He reached around the back end of the Land Cruiser, grasped the handle, and swung the rear door open. He stood exposed for only a moment as he snatched the medical kit and the blanket, then he spun away and fell to the ground just as another round punched a hole in the vehicle and drilled through the spare tire, which deflated with a prolonged hiss. He rolled into the cover of the Land Cruiser.

While he put a compress over Dross’s wounds, the radio crackled again.

“Dispatch to Unit Three. Over.”

Cork glanced up from the bloody work of his hands. At the moment, there was no way to reach the mike. He tore another strip of tape with his teeth.

“Unit Three, do you copy?”

He finished tending to both wounds, then turned Marsha gently and tucked the blanket underneath her along the length of her body. He crawled to the other side, pulled the blanket under her, and wrapped her in it tightly like a cocoon.

“Unit Three, backup is on the way. ETA is twenty minutes. Are you still taking fire?”

Despite the blanket, Dross was shivering. Cork knew that shock could be as deadly as the bullet itself. In addition to keeping her warm, he had to elevate her feet. He opened the front passenger door and wormed his arm along the floor until his hand touched a fat thermos full of coffee he’d brought along. He hauled the thermos out and put it under the deputy’s ankles. It elevated her feet only a few inches, but he hoped that would be enough.

Then he turned his attention to the son of a bitch on the hill.

He drew again his .38, a Smith & Wesson Police Special that had been his father’s. It was chrome-plated with a six-inch barrel and a walnut grip. The familiar heft of it, and even the history of the weapon itself, gave him a measure of confidence. He crawled under the Land Cruiser, grateful for the high clearance of the undercarriage, inching his way to the front tire on the driver’s side. From the shadow there, he peered up at the wooded hill across the road. The crown still caught the last direct rays of the sun and the birch trees dripped with a color like melting brass. After a moment, he saw a flash of reflected sunlight that could have come off the high polish of a rifle stock plate or perhaps the glass of a scope. If it was indeed from the shooter, Cork’s target was 250, maybe 300 yards away, uphill. He thought about the twelve-gauge Remington cradled on the rack inside the Land Cruiser. Should he make an attempt, risk getting himself killed in the process? No, at that distance, the shotgun would be useless, and if he were hit trying for it, there’d be nothing to prevent the goddamn bastard from coming down the hill and finishing the job he’d begun. Better to stay put and wait for backup.