Loading the magazines with hollow-points, I gazed out my window at the leafless oaks. The nests of the invasive moths looked like spun sugar in their bare branches. In a few years, some of these trees would be dead from the defoliating infestation.
The phone rang.
It was Tom Wheelwright. I didn’t want to answer but feared he would keep calling—perhaps even call Major Shorey—if I didn’t pick up.
“Captain Wheelwright.”
“Tom, please.” Even his voice projected manly self-confidence.
“It’s better that we don’t communicate except through established channels.”
“Totally understand. Listen, I just got a call from an air force buddy of mine, Joe Fixico. He said he spoke with you yesterday. I have to give you an A+ for thoroughness, Mike. I didn’t even realize he was living in Miami-Dade.”
“Captain, we can’t be having this conversation.”
“No, I understand. But you need to know that Fixico has mental problems. Don’t get me wrong. He was a hell of an electronic warfare officer. But he was in an automobile accident a while back. It did severe damage to his brain.”
He still thinks he’s getting the job, the cocky SOB.
“Captain, I spoke with the women.”
He didn’t miss a beat. “Which women are you referring to?”
“Captain Wheelwright, I am going to hang up now. Please don’t call back or attempt to contact anyone else on the search panel. We will be in touch.”
Five seconds after I hung up, I had my supervisor on the phone.
“I just got your email about heading out of town,” said Jock DeFord. “Is there something you forgot to add?”
“It’s Wheelwright.”
“I read your report,” he said. “Those are serious allegations. I don’t like it, but the major thinks we owe him a chance to defend his name.”
“Jock, he just called me.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I just hung up on him. He’s gotten wind of the conversation I had with Fixico and is trying to control the damage. Aside from the call being completely inappropriate, there is no way in hell we can hire this guy. His application needs to be shitcanned immediately.”
“He shouldn’t have reached out to you. Agreed.”
“Even allowing this to proceed risks blowback from the press.”
“I think you’re exaggerating, Mike.”
“Because I understand the danger Wheelwright poses to our credibility. You need to make sure Shorey doesn’t sway the hiring panel.”
“I think you’re selling the rest of us short. We’re all on the same page about Wheelwright.”
“Not Shorey.”
“Pat is going to be Pat, but he doesn’t have the purview to hire whoever he wants. There’s nothing for you to worry about.”
That was easier said than done.
When I was a teenager, the Warden Service had weathered one shit storm after another. First, an instructor at the Advanced Warden Academy had been fired for hazing cadets with his own urine. Then an undercover warden busted a well-liked fishing guide on some rinky-dink charges. The guide claimed entrapment, and the story somehow found its way into The Wall Street Journal. Afterward, all charges were dropped against the guide.
The bad press had reached its peak fifteen years earlier in a raid on a town along the New Brunswick border. An undercover warden investigator had disappeared somewhere around the village of St. Ignace and was presumed to have been murdered by the poaching gang he’d infiltrated. In the first hours of the house-to-house search, three residences had burned to the ground. The fire had almost certainly been set by the man who’d killed the investigator, but the media—goaded on by opportunistic politicians—had accused the Warden Service of engaging in storm trooper tactics.
Those scandals had occurred before the advent of social media and the #MeToo movement. I could guess what Twitter might do with a serial predator like Tom Wheelwright.
Before I left home, I wrote an email to Dani. I knew she wouldn’t see it until she finished qualifying at the range. She would have it in her head that I would be driving over to western Maine to stay at her house. I wanted to prepare her for disappointment. And the situation with Charley was too complicated to explain via a chain of text messages.
We had been dating long-distance for more than a year now. Door to door was a two-hour drive, but the excitement of visiting her made it seem shorter. Dani was, in a word, fun. She was go-go-go. She liked racing snowmobiles across frozen lakes and speed-hiking to the tops of four-thousand-foot mountains. She had given me private lessons in Brazilian jiu-jitsu that always seemed to end in our having sex.
Less successfully, she had tried to interest me in video games we could play against each other while physically apart (Mario Kart was her current favorite), but I couldn’t get into them. I had always been an old soul. Alone, at night, I preferred a good book. Dani’s personal library consisted of her old textbooks and motivational guides by Stephen Covey and Anthony Robbins.
In my email, I laid out the meager information I had about my mentor’s sudden disappearance.
“I know you’ll understand,” I wrote. “Charley has been the closest thing I’ve ever had to a real father. I owe it to Ora to track him down.”
The old pilot had his faults. He could be reckless, scheming, secretive. He was a born actor who exaggerated his folksy Maine accent when it benefited him for a suspect to underestimate his intelligence. He had the corniest sense of humor. Nor had he handled Stacey’s and my breakup with the grace for which I had hoped. And yet he remained my hero.
“I wish he talked more about his past,” I continued. “It seems like everything I know about his history—from his childhood in the logging camps to his service in Vietnam—I had to pry out of him
