Widowmaker (Mike Bowditch #7)(14)

“Which house is Carrie Michaud’s?” I asked.

“Blue one at the corner. Got lots of yard art out front. You can’t miss it. Don’t tell her it was me who told you, though. Carrie’s a little thing, but she can get worked up pretty good.”

“I won’t.”

Before I could thank him for his help, he restarted the blower. I watched him shuffle along behind the noisy machine, smelling the heady gasoline exhaust on the cold air and wondering what this old Green Beret’s story was. You never know who you’ll meet holed up in some backwoods shack. I suspected that it might take a long time to pry this man’s tale out of him, and then I would be disappointed to learn he had bought the T-shirt for two bucks down at the Goodwill store.

*

Some breeds of dogs bark; others bay. I had heard dogs moan or wail when they were hurt or unhappy. They were capable of all sorts of unexpected vocalizations. But the old man had perfectly imitated a wolf’s howl, and unless he was having fun with me, which was a distinct possibility, it meant that I might owe Gail Evans an apology.

I had no trouble finding Carrie Michaud’s house. The front yard was littered with snow-covered appliances and rusting scrap metal. By “yard art,” the old geezer hadn’t meant sculptures like those outside Gail Evans’s house. He had meant junk.

The house itself wasn’t much better. Someone had once painted its cedar shingles bright blue, but the color had faded and had now turned a color I associated with the lips of people who’d frozen to death. The blinds were all drawn, as if whoever lived behind them was allergic to sunlight. A yellow plastic sign posted to a pine warned against trespassing. Another said BEWARE OF DOG.

In the driveway were parked two trucks: a Suzuki Equator and a Mitsubishi Raider, both painted black.

As I climbed out of my own truck, I removed my gloves and felt without looking for the canister of pepper spray on my belt. There were no dogs visible, but I did see prints in the snow, big ones like those I’d found in the woods behind Gail Evans’s house, and, the pièce de résistance, an enormous pile of shit.

They hadn’t bothered to shovel the walkway, but had worn a path from the drive that required me to place one foot in front of the other. I heard music pounding through the front door. Screeching guitars and machine-gun drums. I pushed the glowing doorbell and waited. I gave it a minute, then banged with my fist.

Eventually, the door was opened by a skinny guy who looked like he’d just walked off the set of a postapocalyptic horror movie. He had bleached hair, disk earrings that had stretched holes in the lobes wide enough to stick your finger through, and a bone-white complexion. He wore a sleeveless purple T-shirt, cargo pants, and leather boots with a surplus of nonfunctional buckles.

When Goth fashion had finally come to Maine—everything came to my rural state long after it was passé elsewhere—it had lost something in the translation.

“You wouldn’t happen to own a dog, would you?” I said.

He turned and yelled over his shoulder into the darkened, thumping interior of the house. “Carrie!”

“What?” came a shrill voice.

“Do we own a dog?”

“What?”

“There’s a game warden at the door.”

The music stopped, as if a plug had been pulled. I heard staccato footsteps on a staircase.

“What’s your name?” I asked the Goth.

“Spike.”

“You don’t know if you have a dog, Spike?”

“It ain’t my house, man.”

A moment later, a woman elbowed her male friend aside to face me. She stood no more than five feet tall and weighed, I was guessing, no more than ninety pounds. She had a pixie haircut (dyed black), a painful-looking sore on her lip, and bile-green eye shadow. Like her beau, she was outfitted for the end-time in a leather vest, with no shirt underneath, and black jeans rolled above her bare ankles. She also happened to have a new tattoo on her forearm. It was poorly drawn and still scabbed, but it was unmistakably the silhouette of a howling wolf.

“Didn’t you see the sign!” she said in the overloud voice people use who are hard of hearing. Her eardrums must have still been stunned from all that metal. “No trespassing!”

“That doesn’t apply to law enforcement,” I said. “I also saw the ‘Beware of Dog’ sign. What kind of dog is it?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“A dog killed a deer down the road from here.”

One side of her mouth—the side with the sore—twitched. “I don’t have a dog no more. That sign is old. Who told you I have a dog?”

“You’re Carrie Michaud, aren’t you?”

“So what?” Everything about this hostile, manic, hollow-eyed person shouted narcotics.

“Look, Carrie, I know you own a dog. There are dog tracks and urine stains all over your yard. There’s a big pile of dog shit next to that snowbank. You need to stop lying to me. Now, why don’t you go get your dog?”

“So you can give me a ticket? Ha! No way!”

I was tired of playing coy about my suspicions. “It’s a wolf dog, isn’t it?”

Before I could say another word, she slammed the door in my face.

Wolf dogs are the hybrid offspring of wolves and domestic dogs, bred, mostly, for people who want the thrill of saying that they own the baddest animal on the block. They rank above pit bulls in that regard. They also happen to be illegal to possess in the state of Maine.