“You’re going to help us find that out.”
I took up the microphone. “Dad, this is Mike. You need to take the telephone, OK?” The major motioned to me: Slow it down. “It’s just a cell phone. Will you let them bring it to you?”
The trooper inched his way up the path, looking as unthreatening as a man in full-body armor can look.
OK, I thought. Throw the phone.
But the trooper kept going. I heard one of the hounds whining behind me, then a whispered hush from the dog’s handler.
The window was totally dark. If someone inside was looking out, I couldn’t see him.
Just throw the damned phone.
The trooper was now no more than ten yards from the porch. Slowly he lowered the hand with the phone in it, getting ready to pitch it underhand in front of the door. The placement had to be perfect. If my dad was inside, he’d probably make Bickford reach for the phone, but he couldn’t risk having his hostage escape.
Three things happened next. The trooper lofted the phone and it landed, too high, with a smack against the bottom of the door. At the same time the dog that had been whining before let out a sharp yelp. And just as suddenly a gunshot exploded the cabin’s window.
The trooper dived to the ground and rolled for cover behind the tail bed of the pickup truck.
The first shot had come from inside the cabin, but the next one came from the woods to my left.
Through the loudspeaker the major shouted: “Hold your fire! Hold your fire!”
I wasn’t even aware of rising, but suddenly I was sprinting forward up the dirt road. I heard the lieutenant shout my name, but I kept going until I stood at the foot of the porch, holding my arms up for all to see. Another shotgun blast splintered the boards near my head. “Stop firing!”
“Hold your goddamned fire!” Carter shouted.
I waved my arms. “Stop shooting!”
But there were no more shots. The smell of gunpowder drifted in the night air.
A weak voice came from inside the cabin. “Help.”
“Dad?”
The door creaked open. I took a step toward it-and was tackled by the trooper who’d been crouching behind the pickup truck. He pinned me to the ground with the weight of his armored body. Around me I was aware of a rush of feet moving past-tac officers storming the cabin, weapons pointed.
Dust was in my eyes, and I couldn’t see a damned thing. Inside the cabin I heard the SWAT officers shouting commands: “Get down! Don’t move!”
I tried to push with my arms and knees. The trooper shoved my head into the dirt. “Stay down.”
Inside the cabin I heard shouts that the building was secure.
The trooper on top of me repositioned his weight, and I used a wrestling move to roll him off. In an instant I was on my feet, leaping up the porch steps and through the door.
On the floor writhed a little old man, dressed in canvas coveralls, with a kind of white man’s Afro. A trooper, in battle gear, knelt on his back. The man’s face, pressed to the floor, was smeared with blood as if he’d run nose-first into a plate-glass window. More blood was spattered on the cigarette-burned carpet. I saw a rifle lying across the room. The cluttered, bottle-strewn room smelled of something noxious-a sour, musky odor like stale urine, only stronger.
“I’m dying,” said the old man again. “I’m dying.”
Two troopers threw me against a paneled wall and held me there with the weight of their bodies as I tried to surge forward. “Where is he?”
“There’s no one else in here,” I heard a trooper report into his throat mic.
“Where’s Bowditch?”
“Where is he?” I shouted. “Where’s my father?”
Wallace Bickford raised his bloody head and gave out a wail. “Gone,” he said. “He’s gone.”
11
It turned out Bickford wasn’t seriously wounded at all. He’d just suffered a lot of small facial cuts when he shot out the window. The little man was now perched on an ambulance bumper while a paramedic daubed his face with antiseptic. His hair was really something else-a frizzled gray brush that looked like he’d plugged his finger into an electrical socket.
The sheriff folded his arms. “You’re saying the gun went off by accident-twice?”
“Yeah! I never meant no harm.” He spoke as if his tongue were swollen, but I got the sense it was a permanent speech impediment.
“Oh, I bet you didn’t,” the sheriff said. “So where did Bowditch go?”
“Otter Brook Bog, like I said. He said he needed my ATV.”
“And you gave it to him. Because you’re such a generous and giving individual.”
Bickford looked at the sheriff like he’d just asked him something in Swahili. “No, because of the moose.”
Then, for the second time in ten minutes, he laid out his story. Jack Bowditch, he said, had arrived at his cabin an hour before nightfall saying he’d shot a moose at Otter Brook Bog and needed an ATV to haul it out before the wardens caught him. “He said he’d give me half the meat if I let him borrow it,” the old man said. “He said if I didn’t let him take it, he’d tell the wardens the deer meat in my freezer was from poaching-which is a lie.”
“So Bowditch took the ATV.” Major Carter removed his helmet and tucked it under his arm; sweat shined along his high forehead. “But I still don’t understand how he got through the perimeter. The dogs scented no exit trail leaving the cabin. Even if he was riding an ATV, the dogs should have winded him.”
“The smell,” I said. “That bad smell inside the house. Didn’t you notice it?”
“I thought that was just Mr. Bickford’s natural aroma,” said the sheriff.
“It’s deer lure,” I said. “Hunters make it out of the urine and tarsal glands of bucks. It’s used to cover human odors and bring deer into a tree stand.”
“He doused himself with it,” said Lieutenant Malcomb.
“You smelled how strong that stuff can be,” I said. “He knew it would cover his scent and throw off the dogs. He must have known Bickford had some of the stuff. That’s why he headed this way.”
“So we’ll just key the dogs in to the deer lure,” said the sheriff. “And they’ll follow the new scent. All it does is delay us a little.”
“Do you know how many deer are in these woods?”
“Is there any way we can track the ATV tonight?” asked the FBI agent.
“Unless one of our planes spotted him from above, I don’t see how,” said the lieutenant. “There’s almost as many ATVs on these logging roads out there as deer. He might be ten miles away by now, and with a full tank he might get thirty more miles before he runs out of gas. We’ll take tire prints to match if we can, but unless someone spotted him, I don’t see how we follow him tonight.”
“So why the hell did you start shooting when the troopers arrived?” the sheriff demanded of Bickford. “Do you have a death wish?”
“I was scared,” said the old man. “I looked out my window and all I see are soldiers. You didn’t give me no chance to explain myself. I figured you was going to burn me out-like Waco. This is my property, and the Constitution says I have the Second Amendment.”
“This isn’t your property,” said the sheriff. “This property belongs to Wendigo Timber. You’re squatting here illegally.”
His eyes blazed. “It’s my home! They can’t take it. I won’t let them.”
“So you agree with what Bowditch did-killing that man from Wendigo Timber? Maybe you helped him do it.”
Bickford paused, mouth open. Then he wiped his runny nose and looked away. “I didn’t do nothing. It was an accident. Just like I said.”
“What’s going to happen to him?” I asked Lieutenant Malcomb. The adrenaline had left me and I was crashing fast-I felt like the blood in my arms and legs was transmuting to lead.
