the Poacher's Son (2010) (35 page)

I had to brace myself against the truck bed to keep from collapsing, trying to swallow down the taste of vomit. How had this happened?

Truman's hunting rifle lay in the dirt near the front tire of the truck. I stared at it dumbly. Why didn't he just shoot me as I came up on him? Why had he played dead? None of this made sense.

His shirt had rolled up and I could see the clean stab wound through his soft gut. With a gash like that, he'd been bleeding to death even before I shot him. As if that absolved me.

I knelt down beside the man I'd killed.

I'm not sure how long it took me to notice the bruises. Five minutes might have passed before the wounds around Truman's wrists caught my eye. Then it came to me what the raw-looking marks were, and the recognition had the force of someone stomping on my chest.

I grabbed Truman's rifle and ejected the magazine.

The rifle was a bolt-action Remington 30-06--the same caliber that Soctomah claimed had been used to kill Shipman and Brodeur. I was almost certain this rifle had also been used to kill Pelletier less than half an hour ago. From the smell alone I knew it had just been fired.

But there were no bullets in it now. Pelletier had been killed by a single gunshot to the chest. It didn't make any sense that Truman's rifle should be unloaded. And why were there rope burns on his wrists?

The sun was playing hide-and-seek behind dark clouds as I sprinted back to Pelletier's cabin. The air had become heavier, and a breeze now stirred the leaves along the road.

Outside and inside the cabin I searched frantically for clues I might have missed the first time. The story told itself in blood: Truman
Dellis and Russell Pelletier had an altercation in the cabin. Pelletier stabbed Truman with a hunting knife, and Truman, somehow, improbably shot Pelletier through the chest, using the same rifle with which he'd killed Jonathan Shipman and Bill Brodeur. The coconspirators had eliminated each other. There was no apparent explanation for their quarrel, but it offered a tidy resolution to the murder investigation with only one question left unanswered: Where was my father?

I needed to call the police.

When I came around the corner of Pelletier's cabin, I found Brenda standing in the lodge doorway, holding a long-barreled Ruger revolver in one hand. I stopped in my tracks.

"What happened?" she asked, gaping at the blood on my skin and clothes. "I heard a shot."

"It was Truman," I said.

"Is he dead?"

I nodded. "I'm sorry."

"I'm not." Her mouth tightened into a sneering smile that scared the hell out of me--even more than the Ruger.

I was out in the open with nothing to hide behind and no shells left in my shotgun. "Where did you get that pistol?"

"Pelletier's safe. I know the combination."

I took a step toward the door. "I need to call the police."

"They're on their way," she said quickly.

"You called them?" I tried to hide the disbelief in my voice.

"Yeah."

"I should talk to Detective Soctomah myself."

She refused to move aside. "What are you going to tell him?"

I kept my eyes on the revolver. If it was the gun Russell had showed me once, it was chambered with a .44 Magnum round for bear hunting. "Pelletier and Truman killed Shipman and Brodeur. I don't know why. Maybe they thought they could scare off Wendigo,
make them change their plans for Rum Pond. They framed my father. Then they killed each other."

"I told you they did it! I told you Jack was innocent!"

"Yes, you did."

She narrowed her eyes. "You don't sound convinced."

"It's what happened."

"Did Truman say that?"

"We didn't have a conversation. He grabbed the shotgun and it went off."

She didn't smile exactly, but there was a look of glee in her eyes that shocked me. I had no idea how much she'd hated him.

"What the hell did he do to you?" I asked.

She bared her teeth. "He killed my mom."

"What?"

"They were walking home from a bar one night, shit-faced. She fell down into a ditch. He let her freeze to death, he was so drunk. He just came home and crawled into bed, and he never remembered a thing. They found her the next morning lying in a snow bank. I was seven years old. We came to Rum Pond after that. So, yeah, I'm glad he's dead."

I looked at her, stunned into silence for the longest time. Then I took another step forward. "I need to call Soctomah."

The Ruger came up, pointed at my chest. "Something's wrong with you."

"I just killed a man." I lifted the barrel of the shotgun slightly. "Now I need to call the police. So why don't you put the gun down and get the fuck out of the way."

It was the wrong thing to say.

The first shot from the Ruger tore through the air centimeters from my head. I heard the .44 slug smack into the cabin wall behind me as I hit the ground.

"Don't move!" she said.

She fired the second and third shots into the air.

When I raised my head, she shouted again, "Don't fucking move!"

I pressed my forehead to the dirt. "Take it easy."

She advanced on me until I could glimpse her dusty bare feet, the barbed-wire tattoo around one slender ankle. I had a jackknife in my pocket, but that was all by way of a weapon.

"Shut up! Just shut up. Lie there and don't do anything stupid."

So we waited, me with my hands folded behind my head, my heart drumming against the ground. Overhead, I heard the wind rising in the pine boughs and felt the shadow of clouds creep across the sky. Rain was coming.

"What did Truman tell you?" she asked.

"Nothing."

"He told you something."

"He didn't have to."

"What do you mean?"

But before I could answer, I heard another voice, a baritone: "What happened? Why did you signal me?"

I raised my head a little and saw a tall man materialize, as if from nowhere, out of the bushes across the road. He was dressed completely in breakup camouflage, the brown-and-gray pattern used by turkey hunters. His pants were mud-spattered and tucked into rubber boots, and he carried a deer rifle on a sling over his shoulder. He wore gloves and a camouflage hat with a thin mask that hung over the face like a brown veil.

"He knows!" Brenda said. "Truman must have told him."

The man pulled the mask loose, and for the first time in two years I saw my father's face.

Y
ou cannot describe betrayal. To someone who has never suffered it, there is no adequate way to communicate the sudden loss of balance that comes when you discover you've been played for a fool. Especially when the person who has betrayed you is someone you love. In a single heartbeat, betrayal throws everything else in your life into doubt. If this was false, what else is? Shame and second-guessing set in immediately. The signs were there all along, so how did you miss them? Sometimes the humiliation of being betrayed is so powerful you retreat back into disbelief. Denial, after all, is a pretty strong narcotic.

But for me there was no escape back into self-delusion. When I discovered the marks around Truman's wrists and found his rifle to be unloaded, it sent a surge of panic through me. Instinctually, I knew what these things meant, but I didn't allow myself to acknowledge the full implications of what I was seeing. Now there was no looking away from the terrible truth.

My father's eyes seared me with the consequences of my folly.

His face was deeply tanned with blue hollows beneath the eyes and more gray in the beard than I remembered--my face in twenty-five years, maybe, if I lived that long. He looked big, barrel-chested, and broad-shouldered in his camouflage shirt, but not as big as he had once seemed to me.

"Truman must have told him," Brenda said.

"No," said my father. "Mike shot him before he could say anything."

She looked confused, frantic. "How did he know then?"

"The ropes," I said from the ground.

He swung the rifle off his shoulder and tucked the stock under one arm casually so that he could fire it with one hand if he needed to. "Get up, Mike. Slowly. This situation has already gotten too far out of hand. And I know you're prone to stupid heroics."

I pushed myself up on my knees. I felt as though I'd had the wind knocked out of me.

"That's far enough."

"You wouldn't shoot me," I said with all the confidence I could muster.

"I would!" Brenda, her face flushed with anger and alcohol, waved the .44 in my face. "What's he talking about? What ropes?"

"You wanted to frame them," I said. "Pelletier and Truman--you wanted to frame them for those murders. That's why you came back here."

He scratched his beard as if waiting for me to continue.

"You kidnapped Truman back in town and drove him out here in his truck. Then you shot Pelletier. You stabbed Truman with Russell's knife, and cut him loose so he would run. You wanted him to bleed to death. You wanted to make it look like they killed each other, but you messed up. The ropes you tied him with left cuts and burns around his wrists."

"What else?" Like any failed trapper, he wanted to know how he'd given himself away.

"Truman's rifle," I said. "It didn't make sense it was unloaded. You planted that rifle there to incriminate him."

"How'd you figure it all out?"

"I remembered something you told me when I was a kid. You said the secret to trapping is covering your own tracks."

He smiled a rueful smile. "I taught you a good lesson."

"You didn't teach me a damned thing."

The smile went away. "You got your mother's smart mouth, that's for sure."

I thought of my mom. We had both believed in him, both argued on his behalf against Neil. Now my father was bad-mouthing her. "How'd you know I'd come out here?" I asked. "You couldn't have planned that. There's no way."

"We didn't," he said.

Brenda jumped in. "We just wanted the cops to go to Truman's place again so they would start looking for him. Then, after Jack took care of things, I was going to call in them two killing each other. We never figured that old fart would fly you out here."

The mention of Charley gave me a fleeting sensation of hope. He should be here soon, I thought. But was he bringing the police with him? Either way, I needed to stall them.

I looked my father hard in the eye. "So what did you plant at Truman's apartment to make the cops think he was the killer? It couldn't have been the murder weapon since you brought that here."

"My boots, the ones I wore that night. I left them on the porch for the cops to find."

"Not too subtle."

"Yeah, well, Truman was an idiot. He'd do something that dumb."

In my mind's eye I saw the headless body again. "Everyone thinks you're in Canada."

"I know."

"That's why you called Mom from across the border," I said.

"What's he talking about?" said Brenda, slurring her words.

"I called Marie," he said.

The muscles in her shoulders tightened. "You didn't tell me that."

"I wanted them to keep looking for me in Canada."

Her eyes blazed. "Now what are we supposed to do?"

My father reached into the pack on his belt. I saw Brenda flinch as if she half-expected him to produce a handgun to shoot her. But he only drew out a tangle of bloody rope.

"I'm sorry about this, Mike," he said. "But until we can talk this out, it's the only way."

He tied my arms behind me with the same red-stained cord he'd used to bind Truman. I thought of resisting, but then decided not to. I'd seen what he'd done to Pelletier and Truman and Shipman and Brodeur--four men dead at his hands. But even now, I couldn't believe he was really capable of killing me. Brenda, however, was another story. Adrenaline and alcohol had given her eyes a bigpupiled glassiness that worried the hell out of me.

Gently, my father directed me inside the lodge. He guided me back to the dining room, with its long tables and its view of the lake through plate-glass windows. Clouds darkened the sky above Holeb Mountain. "Sit down," he said.

The smell of burnt coffee hung in the air.

Brenda perched across from me, sitting on a tabletop with her dirty feet on the bench and her denim-covered crotch level with my eyes, resting the heavy handgun on her knees.

My father found a bottle of whiskey in a cabinet and brought it out. He took a slug.

"I want some of that," she said.

He splashed a little whiskey in a coffee mug and handed it to her. "You want a drink, Mike?"

"No."

Brenda wiped her mouth. "So what do we do now?"

"That's up to Mike." He softened his voice. "I know this is hard for you, son. Hell, it's hard for me. I never wanted any of this to happen, but it did, and now my neck's on the chopping block. You think I could actually surrender without some pissed-off cop popping me first?"