Widowmaker (Mike Bowditch #7)(94)

I bent down and poked his chest. There was no blood. My finger touched some kind of hard plate.

Damn, if the son of a bitch wasn’t wearing a bulletproof vest.

*

I dragged Dyer to a birch at the side of the road and handcuffed him with his arms wrapped around the trunk. Shadow had retreated farther down the hill, but he continued to watch. I had a brief thought that if I left the helpless vigilante alone, the wolf might devour him. It would have been a fitting punishment in my opinion, but I was already going to have a hard time explaining the events of the past few hours.

So it had been Dyer after all. All the signs had pointed to him. He’d left a signed confession on his kitchen table. Who else had I been expecting?

I slapped his stubbled face to get his attention. “Dyer! Wake up!”

He groaned. When he opened his mouth, I saw his stunted tongue.

“Where’s Adam?” I said.

“Fuck you.”

“What did you do with Adam Langstrom?”

“Fuck you.”

“Talk to me. Tell me where he is.”

He started to giggle. I slapped him again—this time just for the hell of it.

Mink perched himself atop a snowbank and offered a running commentary that was heavy on constructive criticism on what I should be doing.

“You sure he can’t slip out of those cuffs? I knew a guy who could dislocate himself. How come your truck doesn’t have bulletproof glass? He shot it all to kingdom come. I’m lucky he didn’t hit my liver or some other organ. This has been an unusual night!”

“You lost your wig,” I said.

He clapped his hand atop his head and let out a curse. Then he slid down from his place of observation and began searching in and around the truck for his red-haired mop.

I told Mink to keep an eye on Dyer.

“Where are you going?” he asked, looking up from his hands and knees.

“I’m taking his snowmobile down the road until I can get a signal. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“What about that freaking wolf?”

Good question.

Dyer had a nice sled, a Yamaha Phazer—vintage, but he had maintained it well. When I opened the throttle, I needed to hang on for dear life.

I finally got a cell signal down past the farm where I had seen the kids chasing each other on their snow machines. I dialed the state police dispatcher and gave him the rundown. He told me there were units in the area.

The snow, which had been falling steadily all day, had finally begun to lighten up. There were a few intermittent flakes, but whereas the night sky had been a uniform gray dome before, now I could make out the backlit outlines of clouds moving southeast across the valley. A cold front was pushing down from Canada.

I removed my glove and ran my fingers up my sleeve and over the stitches on my arm. The threads had ripped, and there was some sort of fluid oozing from the wound. Yet another scar to remind me of yet another moment of carelessness.

Funny, though: That night outside Carrie Michaud’s seemed an age ago now. For reasons I could not explain, the firefight with Dyer—an even closer brush with death—had unchained me from the mortal dread I had been dragging around for the past week. I felt fully alive again in body and soul.





36

My conservative estimate was that a dozen officers responded to my call. The road up to Mink’s place looked like rush hour with all the emergency vehicles lined up one after the other. With so many people bustling around the scene, asking me questions, offering thanks, I found it hard to focus.

Dyer was unlocked from the birch and taken to the back of Clegg’s cruiser and left there until the detective could finish his work.

I walked Clegg and a couple of state police detectives around the cabin, giving them the minute-by-minute replay. Another trooper escorted Mink inside to get an independent statement from him on what had happened. Even though I was receiving congratulations from deputies and EMTs whom I had never met—the hero of the hour—I knew that our accounts would be compared and contrasted, and that I might be called upon to explain any inconsistencies in our stories.

A deputy found my shotgun buried in the snow and returned it to me.

Shadow had disappeared into the woods. I kept looking for him at the edges of the trees, but he was gone.

Maybe, in the future, he would be glimpsed by backcountry skiers up on Widowmaker or caught in the headlights of sledders racing at night along one of the trails to Quebec. I could imagine the department getting occasional calls from people who were insistent that they had seen a wolf—not a coyote or a dog, but a wolf. Wardens and wildlife biologists would politely take the statements of these eyewitnesses, and then they would write off the reports as cases of mistaken identity. Wolves were not secretly returning to Maine to reclaim their ancient hunting grounds. That was just a myth.

With all the vehicles lined up along the road, I didn’t notice the midnight-blue Ford Explorer Interceptor at first. I looked around for Russo but didn’t see him in any of the clusters of cops. Eventually, my gaze drifted to Clegg’s cruiser.

There was Russo, standing beside the open back door, talking privately with Dyer. No one else was within twenty feet of them. I glanced around, looking for Clegg, but the detective must have gone up to Mink’s cabin.

I was seized by a sudden panic. I had the image in my head of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald in the gut. As quickly as I could on my injured leg, I limped over to the cruiser.