The warden said he had proof that there was a cache of illegal deer meat inside Payne’s freezer and commanded him to take a seat. The next thing Alvin knew, his hands were being bound behind him with duct tape.
Even more puzzling: the officer didn’t bother looking inside the freezer at all. Instead he ransacked the closets and kitchen cupboards. The first thing he confiscated was Alvin’s supply of prescription cannabis.
It was dawning on Payne that the situation might not be what it seemed.
“What’s your name and badge number!” he demanded.
“My name is Mike Bowditch,” the warden answered in a tough-guy voice. “And my badge number is zero-zero-fuck-you.”
He then applied a strip of tape across Alvin’s mouth to curtail further conversation.
Payne claimed he had nearly suffocated watching his trailer be turned inside out and upside down. It was obvious this Warden Bowditch was growing agitated that he couldn’t find whatever he’d been looking for. Finally he returned to his prisoner and ripped the tape from his lips.
“Where’s the pills?”
“What pills?”
“The pills your cousin gave you.” Then he pressed the barrel of his gun to Payne’s temple.
Alvin just about wet himself. “All he gave me was a honey bucket because my toilet don’t work.”
I held up my hand to interrupt Rhine. “What’s a honey bucket?”
It was a primitive commode, she explained, made from a prefab toilet seat that attached to a five-gallon plastic pail. The generic name was bucket latrine.
While I had never heard of a honey bucket, the name had meant something significant to the guy pretending to be me. As soon as he heard it, he disappeared out the door leaving Alvin Payne bound to the chair.
I followed the sheriff behind a flowering shadbush that functioned, more or less, as a privacy screen. A roll of tissue still hung from a nearby branch, but there was no sign of the portable shitter itself.
“Wasn’t it risky hiding pills in the bottom of a toilet?” I said, trying not to inhale. “What if Payne dumped them out?”
“Maybe they were attached to the bottom somehow. Or buried in the ground underneath. It was actually a clever place to hide pharmaceuticals from any drug-sniffing dogs that might have searched the property.”
“I assume the pills were oxycodone.”
“Probably, but it could’ve been a mix of prescription painkillers. Codeine, hydrocodone, etcetera.”
“Who is Payne’s cousin?”
“A Canadian smuggler by the name of Dylan LeBlanc. The DEA and ICE have no clue how he’s been getting his drugs across the border from New Brunswick.”
“So LeBlanc gives cousin Alvin a honey bucket as some kind of secret drug stash. But if he’s such a wily smuggler, how did our warden impersonator know he was caching his drugs out here?”
“That’s another good question. Alvin claims to be ignorant of his cousin’s profession, and I believe him.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because after he gnawed himself free, he called 911 to report the home invasion.”
The sheriff’s phone rang. It was the Drug Enforcement Agency.
I stood alone in the darkness, listening to the earsplitting frogs, and feeling myself growing angrier and angrier at the thought of a two-bit robber using my name to commit his crimes.
Maybe pulling over those girls had just been a trial run to see if he could fool people into believing he was a warden. Maybe this heist had been his master plan all along. The pretender simply hadn’t reckoned with the extent of Alvin Payne’s potheaded stupidity.
I made my way through the trees to Rivard who was still holding court to a slightly smaller audience of cops. “So what did you do with the honey bucket, Mike?” he said. “Come on, tell the truth.”
“I don’t find this situation particularly amusing.”
“A stoner gets duct-taped to a chair by a fake warden who then runs off with a portable toilet full of narcotics. Yeah, you’re right. There’s nothing funny about this at all.”
Blood warmed my cheeks. “It’s a crime to impersonate a law enforcement officer.”
“You take yourself too seriously, Bowditch.”
Several nights later, an unidentified vehicle dumped Alvin Payne in the parking lot outside the hospital in Calais, a five-minute drive from the international bridge that crosses the river into New Brunswick. Multiple bones in his arms and legs had been broken, most likely with a two-by-four. When he emerged from hours of surgery and finally awoke from anesthesia, the luckless stoner told Sheriff Rhine he’d injured himself falling from the roof of his trailer.
The next time I saw Marc Rivard, he refused to meet my eyes.
Now it was summer and a man was dead.
The driver’s license was fake, of course. I stood on the wet planks with my doppelgänger at my feet while the sheriff circulated the plastic card among her officers first and then, when no one recognized him, among the good people of Roque Harbor.
Who was he?
Not a single person could say.
The man who’d discovered the submerged truck decided he could remain the center of attention by turning to comedy. “How does it feel to be dead, Warden?” Twelve-gauge Gaynor asked in a loud voice. “Did you see a white light before you swallowed the sea?”
The sun was growing unbearably hot, as if its rays were being focused through a giant magnifying glass. I could almost feel it burning a hole through my black ball cap.
The divers meanwhile continued their underwater investigation.
Their first significant find was an empty fifth of Fireball Cinnamon Whisky the slogan for which is “Tastes Like Heaven, Burns Like Hell.” There was a good chance that my namesake had consumed the bottle prior to his daredevil jump into the harbor. As a rule, most vehicles that end up going off wharves are driven by individuals with blood alcohol levels in the double digits.
The divers were unable to locate any papers in the vehicle, not even an automobile registration. Even the license plate, it turned out, had been stolen a month earlier off a security van parked outside the Bangor Mall.
“The Law of the Sea
