Widowmaker (Mike Bowditch #7)(18)

I saw a state trooper escort Spike out to the road.

“Do I have to keep sitting here?” I asked one of the EMTs.

“It would be better if you did.”

“I feel perfectly fine.”

“But you lost some blood. If you stand up, you might faint.”

“I’m willing to take the risk,” I said with a smile that was not returned.

I climbed down out of the ambulance and went searching among the cruisers for the one with Spike in the backseat.

“Do you mind if I talk to him?” I asked the trooper standing outside the vehicle.

We’d met once before, but I didn’t remember his name. He was one of the new recruits in the state police and still had the stalwart look of a rookie who had yet to see the disconnect between the job he’d applied for and the job he’d ended up doing every day. He shrugged and opened the door for me.

I leaned against the cold blue chassis, looking down at the absurd Goth. The front of his clothes were all wet from lying on the icy asphalt.

“Tell me about the wolf dog,” I said.

He kept his bleached head bowed. “His name is Shadow.”

That was certainly original. “Where did you get him?”

“We traded for him.”

“Traded drugs?”

His head bobbed in what I took to be a confirmation. “Carrie’s always wanted a wolf dog. She says wolves are her totem animals. A guy we kind of know said he could get one for us.”

“What’s this guy’s name?”

He licked his chapped lower lip while he considered this. “Rafael.”

“What’s his last name?”

“I don’t know, man. He hangs in the same clubs as we do down in Portland. You show me a picture, and I can point him out. We didn’t know it was illegal to own a wolf dog.”

“I never said it was.”

He bowed his head again. “Shit.”

“You’ve been letting him run loose?” I was surprised that the animal would have returned willingly to his new owners.

“He escaped last night. We drove around all morning looking for him, but then we saw him on Pondicherry Road. He just hopped right in with us. Carrie says she was gypped. She says he’s a shepherd-husky mix or something and only looks like a wolf. She says she’s going to get back at Rafael.”

I closed the door on him. I could feel the cold air on my skin through the rip in my parka.

“How’s your arm doing?” the young trooper asked.

“It’ll heal. Do you remember that movie they showed at the Academy?”

“The one with all the cops being killed? I think about the video every time I look at my kid.”

“I think about it every day, too,” I said. “A lot of good it did me.”

“You’re alive, aren’t you?”

*

I had imagined that all the commotion would have frightened off Shadow, so I was surprised to see him at the edge of the trees, close enough to the action to observe everything, close enough to cover to hide. No one else seemed to notice him there, but he could tell that I was watching him, and so he was watching me back with that intense gaze common to predators.

A group of armored officers was stacked up, preparing to enter the house. Protocol required that they go in as if there might be a gang of heavily armed criminals behind the door. But everyone seemed to recognize that this afternoon was not going to be as action-packed as they had thought when they responded to the “officer down” call.

I began searching for the animal control officer. Instead, I ran into one of the EMTs who had patched me up. He tried to persuade me to ride with them to the hospital in Bridgton, but I told him I would drive myself.

“That’s probably not the best idea,” he said.

“Really, I’m fine.”

“Do you know how often we hear that from people who are anything but fine?”

I spotted a little pickup truck with the Cumberland County logo painted on the door and a woman standing beside it with a catch pole, looking vaguely lost. I thanked the EMT for his concern and went over to introduce myself to the animal control officer. She was a pear-shaped woman with kind eyes and tinted brown hair that was thinning at the top. When she introduced herself, I had to ask her to repeat her name.

She smiled, as if this request was a regular one. “Joanie Swette.” She spelled it for me.

“I’m Mike Bowditch,” I said. “I’m the one who found the wolf dog.”

She turned her whole body to look, instead of just turning her head. “Where is he now? Has he run off on us?”

“He’s still around. Did you bring a carrier?”

“It’s in the back of my truck.”

It was one of those plastic crates with holes punched in the side for air and a steel gate at one end. I manhandled it out of the back of her pickup and then used my good arm to carry it down the road toward the tree line beyond the house.

Joanie followed with her catch pole. It had a four-foot-long aluminum shaft with a spring-loaded noose that could be slipped over the head of an uncooperative animal and tightened without getting anywhere near the animal’s jaws. It was the same model I had back home in my garage.

Shadow was exactly where I had last seen him. “There he is.”