Running Dark (8 page)

Now what?
Service thought.

He could hear something thrashing frantically inside the barrel, but the sounds had faded from screams to moans and hisses. He snapped on his four-cell flashlight.

“Conservation officer!” he announced. “What's going on here?”

“Got Bandit!” a voice said excitedly.

“Shut up, Eugene!”

“
Gumby!
” the other voice said. “Not Eugene. Gumby—not Eugene!” The tone was something between frustrated and pissed.

Service said, “What's in the barrel, guys?”

“Not your business,” one of the voices said.

“Bandit,” the first voice said. “Got 'im good!”

“Can I see?” Service asked.

“You got a warrant?” one of them challenged.

“Yeah, got weren't?” the other voice chimed in.

“Shut up, Eugene.”

“Gumby!” the other voice insisted.

Service looked them over. Two males, one of them six-five with a cherubic face and an extra wide body of muscle and baby fat. The other was shorter, lean and feral in appearance, furtive in movement, with long hair hanging loose and wild.

“Stay right there, boys,” Service said. He stepped forward and used the end of his flashlight to slide the lid off the barrel. Sparks exploded into the night and showered him as something leaped out of the barrel and began to run circles in the clearing, falling, getting up, and plunging on through the snow, its fur singed, the snow causing a hiss that blended with the animal's keening.

“Got
Bandit!
” the larger of the two men said. “Got 'im good!”

“Step over here by the barrel,” Service said.

“We don't got to,” the long-haired one said.

“Got badge?” the bigger one asked.

Service had his radio on a strap. He kept the light on the two men and toggled his radio. “Two-one-thirty, move up, no lights no music.” Should he call for county backup? His mind was torn between keeping an eye on the two men and knowing he had to put the animal out of its misery. He glanced in the barrel and saw charred and stinking remains of other animals. The stench pinched his nostrils.
Sickos
, he told himself.

“Okay guys, we're gonna walk around the cabin to the road. Stay in front of me.” The larger man walked backward looking back at Service. “Gumby see badge?”

The larger man was Gumby. “Ivan Rhino?” Service asked the other man.

“Gumby,” the big man insisted. He looked to be late teens at the oldest.

“Shut up, Eugene,” the other man said, ignoring Service.

They had just reached the east side of the cabin when Gumby smacked the other man so hard he went down on his face and immediately scissored Gumby's legs out from under him, dumping him in the snow and pummeling his face.

Service saw vehicle lights coming up the tote road. He stepped over to the two men on the ground and jabbed the smaller one away with his boot.

Gumby immediately clamped onto his leg and started clawing at his holster, shouting, “
Get gun! Get gun
!”

Service bopped him once on the head with the butt of his flashlight and the man collapsed on his side in the snow.

“Fucking retard,” the other man grumbled.

Mehegen pulled up in the squad. Service had the smaller man help his partner to his feet and guided them roughly toward the vehicle. “Call the county,” he said. “Two prisoners to transport.”

“What for?” she asked.

“Make the call,” he said with a growl. “There're extra cuffs on the parking brake. Toss them to me.” Mehegen did as ordered, stared at him.

“Sit,” he told the skinny one. He cuffed the small man's leg to the big man's wrist, took the second set, attached it to the larger man's wrist and the smaller man's wrist. He could hear Mehegen on the radio, knew the county wanted a ten-code beyond a request for transport in order to assign a priority, but he still didn't know exactly what he had. He stepped over to the patrol car and whispered, “Just say yessir to whatever I say, okay?”

“Yessir,” she said.

“Okay, Officer Mehegen. You've got the shotgun, right?”

“Yessir.”

“If these two don't behave, if they try to get up or cause any trouble, shoot them.”

“You can't do that!” the smaller man said.

“Yessir,” Mehegen said.

Service went out into the clearing and found the animal. It had collapsed next to a fallen log on the edge. Heat rose into the night air, blended with the stench of burned hair. Service put the light on the animal. The raccoon was still breathing shallowly. He took his backup piece, a .38 snub, out of his pocket and put one round in the animal's head. He used a stick to knock the top off the glowing barrel and wedged two more coon carcasses out of the hot coals and went back to the patrol car.

“County in twenty minutes,” Mehegen said.

“Good.”

Service undid the cuff from the little man's leg and told both men to get up. He snapped the cuff on the little man's other arm and led them around the patrol car. “In here,” he told the smaller man. He opened the passenger seat door, put his hand on the top of the man's head, and pushed down, helping him to get in. The big man remained docile.

“Shoot him if he even sneezes,” Service said.

He heard Mehegen say, “Yessir.”

He led the larger man to the steps that led onto the porch of the small cabin.

“You're Gumby, right?”

“Yeah, Gumby.”

“Your partner's Ivan Rhino, right?”

“Yeah, Ivan.”

“Gumby, how about we go inside and look around your place.”

“Got weren't?”

“Why would I need a warrant?”

“Ivan said.”

“I don't need a warrant if you invite me in. You want me to see your place, right?”

The man thought for a moment. “Okay, yeah.”

Service reached for the door, but the boy balked. “What?”

“Him-her inside?”

“Somebody's inside?”

“Him-her?” Gumby said, his head nodding rapidly.

“Did you guys shoot some deer, Gumby?”

“So's him-her can eat 'em,” he said, smacking his lips.

“It's good to eat deer,” Service said. “You like to eat deer?”

“Him-her does,” he said with a nod at the door.

“Your mother?”

“
Her
.”

“Got a name?”

“Cunt.”

“The woman's name is Cunt?”

“Ivan says,” Eugene said.

“You want to tell her we're coming inside?”

Gumby opened the door a crack. “Comin' in, Cunt!”

“Turn on the lights,” Service told the boy.

“Turnin' on light!” Gumby shouted before reaching gingerly inside the door.

“
Retard!
” a muted female voice bellowed from somewhere in the cabin.

Gumby tried to go in, but Service restrained him and eased through the door first, into a messy living area.

“Ma'am, this is the DNR. Please step out here so we can see you.”

No answer. “Where are the deer, Gumby?” Service asked the boy.

They walked into a dining area off a small kitchen. There were four deer heads on the floor, several severed legs on a table covered with newspaper, ragged haunches, blood and deer hair all over the floor, piles of guts overflowing buckets, the place an abattoir.

“Deer,” the boy announced.

“You use a gun to kill them?”

“Robin Hood,” the boy said.

Robin Hood? “A bow and arrow?”

“Yeah, Robin Hood.”

“Can we talk to the woman you live with?”

“Her-him? Got weren't?”

“I'm inside now; I don't need one, remember? You invited me in.”

“Oh yeah.”

“I've been nice, haven't I?”

“Hit Gumby's head.”

“Because you tried to grab my gun.”

“Yeah,” the boy said.

Service toggled his brick radio. “Two-one-thirty, let me know when you see lights from the county boys.”

“Ten-four.”

“Ma'am?” Service called out.

“She's not here,” a female voice called back.

“How are the Agostis?” Service asked the boy.

He shrugged.

“They own this place.”

“We found,” the boy said, shaking his head.

“What the hell are you doing out there, Eugene?” the woman yelled from a darkened room at the end of the cabin.

“Gumby!” Eugene shouted. “
Not
Eugene!”

He stepped toward the room with Service behind him.

“Turn on the light, ma'am,” Service said.

“Him got badge!” Gumby shouted.

“Dummy,” the woman shot back with disgust.

“Show Robin Hood,” Eugene said, stepping gingerly into the darkness before Service could stop him.

“Get the light on, Gumby.”

Service heard movement and what sounded like a scuffle. The boy stepped out of the room, looked back, said, “Her-him
hurt
me!”

He took one step forward and fell on his face. Service saw a knife handle sticking out of the lower right side of the boy's back.

“County's coming,” Mehegen announced over the radio.

“Call an ambulance,” Service told her.

“Are you okay in there?” she asked.

“Get an ambulance!”

Where was the woman? He looked at the boy, knew the wound was serious, but he couldn't do anything to help him until he knew where the woman was. The boy looked like he had gone right, so Service crawled on his knees to the door, reached inside with his left hand, groped for the light switch, flipped on the light, and stayed outside the door to the room.

Two deputies came through the living room, guns drawn. One of them reached for the knife in the boy's back. “Don't touch him,” Service said.

“He'll bleed out.”

“Let the medics handle it!” Service said forcefully. He had seen knife wounds in Vietnam.

Service peeked in the door. A woman sat on the bed holding a sheet up to her chin. There was an unassembled double-barrel shotgun on the foot of the bed and a crossbow and brass lamp on a side table. “Where are the bolts, ma'am?”

The woman had long stringy blond hair, didn't answer.

“Ma'am, if you're armed and you try something, you are going to be shot dead—do you understand what I am telling you?”

She looked at Service and smiled fecklessly. One of the deputies stood on the other side of the door opening, his revolver drawn.

“Ma'am, please lower the covers.”

The woman leered. “You wanna see my titties!”

“No, ma'am.”

“Why not? I got
real
nice titties,” she said, crestfallen.

“Cunt got
big
ole titties,” Gumby mumbled from the floor.

The woman lowered the sheet to reveal pendulous breasts hanging off an emaciated frame.

The deputy pointed his pistol at her. Service stepped gingerly inside and snapped the covers off the bed. There were two crossbow bolts by the woman's left leg.

The deputy handed Service a pair of cuffs. Service handcuffed the woman, got her up, and draped a blanket around her shoulders.

The other deputy was still staring at the knife lodged in Eugene's back.

“You okay, Gumby?” Service asked, trying to soothe the boy.

“Her-him punch,” he said.

Service knew what a stabbing felt like initially. “Just once?”

“Two, three times. Her-him don't punch hard. How come hurts?”

Service knelt beside the boy, asked the deputy to help him. They tilted the boy slightly, got his shirt untucked. In addition to the knife stuck in him, there was a stab wound and a slash. The slash wasn't bleeding much. The stab wound was bleeding steadily, but not spurting. Artery intact, he told himself, and steady but not heavy flow from the protruding knife, which looked to be in deep. Was there organ damage? No way to tell. Most vital organs were buried deep inside the body and not easily reached by anything other than cataclysmic force. In Vietnam a chaplain once proclaimed this was by God's design. If so, Service told the man, God must have planned on people wreaking violence on each other, which made humanity's flaw either a screw-up on the part of humankind's creator, or a matter of malevolence, neither of which he thought much about. The chaplain called him a blasphemer. So be it, Service thought: To live you had to deal with life as it came to you, which meant bumping heads with assholes and understanding you were mortal.

Mehegen was suddenly kneeling beside Service, her hand on Eugene Chomsky's face. “Don't move. It's gonna be okay.”

The boy stared up at her with wide eyes as she continued to talk softly to him. Mehegen glanced at Service and gave him a look that chilled his blood.

“Where's the fucking medevac!” Service screamed.

Mehegen took his arm and led him out to his Plymouth. The ambulance was coming up the road, bumping and sliding, lights flashing. Service leaned against the grille while Mehegen poked in his pockets until she found his cigarettes. She lit one for each of them.

The ambulance attendants moved quickly, and Service half-listened to them barking orders at each other and the deputies as they brought Eugene out of the cabin, loaded him, and raced away.

“Medevac?” Mehegen asked. “Did Scotty beam us elsewhere?” Service had no idea what she was talking about. “Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock,
Star Trek
. . . on TV?” she prompted.

He shrugged. He didn't own a television. He walked over to the sheriff's cruiser where Ivan Rhino sat glowering in the backseat, and then moved on to the next vehicle where the woman was in custody, the blanket still draped over her.

A deputy interrupted him. “You'd better step back inside,” he said.

A second bedroom in the cabin was littered with firearms, fishing rods, a couple of salmon nets, boxes of ammo stacked up, two chain saws, and piles of tools. Service studied the mess, said, “There's a boat on a trailer, a couple of snowmobiles, and an Indian motorcycle under tarps in the wood line behind the next camp.”