Dark Specter

21

Joe Quinlan was driving a truckload of hay back to the barn when his pager sounded. The low beams of early evening light which showed up every detail of the meadows to his right had turned the woods on the other side to a jagged sheet of black. Quinlan swung into the Cooks’ drive, backed out facing the way he’d come and jammed the pedal to the metal, swooping around the curves and over the belly-wrenching undulations of the two-lane blacktop that meandered the length of the island.

The grass in the fields was burned to a deep ochre, the driest Quinlan could remember for years. Lying in the rain shadow of the Olympic mountains, the San Juans had a microclimate totally unlike the prevailing conditions along the rest of the coast. Tourists, off-island immigrants and elderly convalescents loved this “banana belt” effect, but for the islanders themselves it was a mixed blessing. After a month in which the sun had blazed down almost every day, water supplies were now dangerously low. The whole county was like a primed barbecue waiting for a flame.

It took him twelve minutes to reach the outskirts of Friday Harbor, and another five to get through the convoy of cars, trucks and RVs which had just disembarked from the ferry. When he finally pulled up outside the Fire House, the doors were closed and both engines still inside. In the office, he found Jim McTafferty and Ed Boyle sipping coffee. McTafferty was wearing jeans and a Hawaiian shirt, Boyle a pair of combat pants and a T-shirt inscribed “Accordions Don’t Play Lady of Spain-People Do.”

“What’s the idea?” he demanded.

McTafferty looked up with a pesky smile.

“Hi, Joe. We got a reported blaze at the old camp on Sleight. Thought we might take the boat over, have ourselves a look at the situation.”

Joe Quinlan stared at him incredulously.

“You drug me all the way down here for that? Sleight’s private, you know that. Those hippies don’t pay taxes. Fuck ’em if they’ve got a fire. Let it burn itself out.”

“What day’s it today, Joe?” asked Ed Boyle.

Quinlan frowned.

“Hell’s that got to do with it?”

Boyle looked at McTafferty.

“He don’t get it,” he said sadly.

Jim McTafferty shook his head.

“I guess he don’t.”

“OK, Joe,” said Boyle, “you better run along now. Wouldn’t want you to be late for charm school.”

Joe Quinlan felt a sinking sensation in his gut. He’d forgotten all about the function that evening. At seven o’clock, they were all supposed to assemble at the high school to attend a “Communication Skills and Stress Management Seminar.” Some salesman had gotten to the Chief and convinced him that the “emergency response capability” of San Juan County would be “enhanced” if all personnel participated in an “interactional growth experience providing a neutral space in which to ventilate feelings and promote team cohesion through the development of problem-solving strategies and coping mechanisms.”

“This facilitator they brought in from the mainland sounds like she really knows her stuff,” McTafferty said. “That seven-page questionnaire they sent around sure made me realize my communication skills need to be upgraded. I couldn’t understand a goddamn word.”

“I hear they’re going to have role-playing too,” Ed Boyle chimed in. “I sure hate not to get a chance to express my true feelings. I remember going to those Lamaze classes when Jean was pregnant. That was so much fun. I really miss all that touchy-feely stuff.”

He wiggled his fingers in the air.

“Hell, yes,” said McTafferty. “We’ll be thinking of you, Joe.”

“Let us know how it goes,” added Boyle.

Joe Quinlan looked at them.

“The Chief said it was mandatory.”

“Mandatory this!” said Boyle, stabbing a finger in the direction of his crotch.

“Thing is,” McTafferty explained, “we’ve had this report of a fire on Sleight, like I said, and in my capacity as deputy I consider it incumbent on me to investigate personally and if need be inform the state authorities pertaining to the risk of environmental damage.”

“Way to communicate,” murmured Ed Boyle.

“I’m taking Ed here along ’cause it’s getting dark and he knows the waters around here better than anyone, and I was also hoping to draw on your considerable experience, Joe, to assist me in any decision I might feel called upon to make. Plus I know you just love watching things burn. But it would mean missing out on this seminar, and I can see you don’t want to do that.”

Joe Quinlan broke into a broad smile.

“Hell, Jim, since you put it like that …”

They drove the two blocks to the waterfront in one of the motor pool trucks which the Fire Department shared with other county officials, then strolled down the wooden walkway past the sheriff’s spanking-new speedboat to a battered red vessel marked FIRE-RESCUE. It was almost thirty years old and could make eight knots, flat out.

“So who reported this?” Quinlan asked as they chugged out of the harbor into the San Juan channel.

Ed Boyle gave the wheel a wrench to starboard.

“You know Bert Rigby over at Eastsound on Orcas?”

McTafferty laughed.

“He and Kathy Monroe still a number, or did she wear him all out? Now there’s one spunky babe. She’s been through half the men on Orcas since she got her divorce squared away”

“Probably looking for a meal ticket,” said Quinlan. “Knowing Gregg Monroe, she’ll never see dime one.”

“Perry Fletcher told me Bert’s already got a couple by-blow kids somewheres on the mainland. Someone should buy him a pack of Trojans.”

Ed Boyle pushed the throttle up to full revs.

“Anyway, Bert was up on the Turtleback with his gun and spotted smoke on Sleight,” Boyle continued. “Called in when he got back home. ‘Thought you should know,’ he says. ‘But to be honest, them hippies burn themselves out, it’ll be the best news since we won the Pig War.’”

Quinlan smiled sardonically. Off-islanders were never more than tolerated by the locals, although most of them were pleasant enough folks: boat-butts, retired military personnel, convalescent oldsters, a reclusive millionaire or two. The only real pains were the tree-huggers, granolas in Birkenstocks who’d moved out there from the cities to have a meaningful relationship with nature. They were constantly banging on about stuff the islanders had been doing since Christ was a corporal, like burning off the stubble and dumping their sewage in the ocean. Joe couldn’t see it made a damn bit of difference, the tonnage of raw shit the Canadians pumped into their side of the straits every day.

But at least the eco-nuts lived in regular houses, paid their taxes, sent their kids to school and supported local businesses. A few of them even had jobs. The people out on Sleight were different. Always had been. There was something about that island seemed to attract weirdos. When the first-growth was logged, back in the last century, one of the crew had gone crazy and killed two others with an axe while they slept. Then some kind of religious cranks had set up there, Quinlan could never remember the name, Theo and Sophy came into it. They were there for years, and when that brand of voodoo finally went out of style a bunch of goddamn hippies moved in. It was enough to make you believe the story someone had told him, that the Indians used to avoid the island because it was inhabited by bad spirits.

The boat shoved its ungainly way through the water shimmering in the last faint rays of the vanished sun. Ed Boyle consulted his watch.

“Well, the seminar should be under way by now Wonder if they’re in the hot tub yet.”

At last they cleared the cluster of islets at the southwestern tip of Orcas, and Sleight Island finally came into view, a dark mass hunkered down on the shifting waters. There was no sign of any fire.

“Shee-it!” breathed McTafferty.

“Looks like we might have to start something ourselves,” said Ed Boyle.

Joe Quinlan sighed.

“I knew I shouldn’t have let you boys talk me into this. It looks like we ditched out on purpose, the Chief’ll go ballistic.”

“Bert wouldn’t kid us about something like this,” said Boyle. “Maybe she just burned herself out.”

He switched on the searchlight mounted on the cabin roof, illuminating the coastline and the wooden pier.

“No sign of their boat,” McTafferty remarked.

Ed Boyle throttled back to bring the launch alongside, while Quinlan and McTafferty went out on deck to get the mooring ropes ready. Then there was a jarring crunch, and the launch stopped dead, hurling Quinlan painfully against a winch.

“What the fuck?”

McTafferty got up from the deck, rubbing his thigh. He looked overboard.

“Something down there.”

They backed off and angled the searchlight down into the water. All three men gathered at the bow.

“Jesus!” said Quinlan.

In the depths alongside the pier lay a submerged boat. Taut mooring ropes secured it to the pier, which was leaning over at an angle under the weight. On the blue hull of the wreck, white lettering spelled the word POLICE.

“Where the hell’s that from?” asked McTafferty.

Ed Boyle brought the launch in on the other side of the pier, and they all went ashore. The bulk of the island rose massive and black behind them. There was no sound, no light, no trace of human presence.

“Guess we should go see what’s cooking,” said McTafferty.

“Guess so,” said Boyle.

Neither man moved.

“You guys get on the radio,” said Joe Quinlan. “Find out if the cops have been here. I’ll go check it out.”

McTafferty walked a ways along the pier with him.

“If you’re not back here in ten minutes, Joe, we’ll …”

He broke off, catching sight of the body. It was lying on its back in the dirt at the landward end of the pier, the arms and legs stretched wide.

“Christ almighty.”

“Give us some light here!” Quinlan yelled to Boyle.

The searchlight moved jerkily up and across. Quinlan approached the body, processing information as he drew nearer. A man. In his thirties. Blond hair. Beard. Work boots. Jeans. Blue flannel shirt with a large red stain. No pulse. Skin cold. Been dead some time.

He glanced up instinctively at the screen of trees all around, the tips barely etched in against the night sky.

“Kill the light!” he shouted.

The searchlight went out, leaving him blind for a moment. He groped his way back to McTafferty.

“Well, we don’t have to worry about skipping that seminar,” he said.

“Is he …?”

“Yeah. Get the sheriff out here.”

Darrell Griffiths was a massive man with flinty eyes, a bushy mustache, an impressive gut and a permanently morose expression. He had owned the islands’ only drugstore for years, but when his oldest daughter graduated from pharmacy school at the university he turned it over to her and ran for sheriff. Since then, Darrell had supervised whatever law enforcement the county needed-not a whole heck of a lot, to be honest-as well as raising the four younger children his wife had dumped on him when she ran off to Spokane with some guy from the mainland. It had been the talk of the town for months, but Darrell had never said one solitary word about the whole business, and he wasn’t the kind of guy you could ask.

The fire launch was lying at anchor about half a mile off Sleight. It was the first time they’d had the hook down as long as anyone could remember, but the damn thing worked perfectly, showed the maintenance program must be OK. The sheriff’s boat came alongside, and Griffiths and his two deputies went aboard the launch to confer with the firemen. After a brief conference, the two vessels continued to the pier, where they tied up side by side.

The six men walked down the pier and surrounded the body.

“Anyone recognize him?” asked Griffiths.

Pete Green, one of the deputies, spat mellifluously into the undergrowth.

“One of the guys that lives out here,” he said. “Time I came over last year he met me right here, we talked. Not that bad a guy …”

“…for a hippy,” the others all concluded silently.

Griffiths recalled the occasion. The police had been called by a group of rich yuppies from Boston who were spending a couple of weeks in the islands, cruising around in a fancy yacht they’d chartered. They’d dropped anchor off Sleight and gone ashore in a dinghy to have a picnic. Next thing they know, these guys are standing around them with guns, telling them the island’s private property and they got sixty seconds to get their butts off it. The hippies were within their rights, of course, and the sheriff didn’t have a whole hell of a lot of sympathy for easterners anyway, but he’d sent Pete over to have a word with them, suggest maybe next time they could tone down the attitude some.

Joe Quinlan knelt down and inspected the massive entry wound in the chest.

“Looks like a high-velocity rifle,” he announced to no one in particular.

Quinlan had been in the war, and was the only one of them to have much experience with gunshot wounds. Lorne Fowler, the other deputy, voiced the question that was on all their minds.

“Think whoever done it is still up there someplace?”

The sheriff sniffed loudly.

“Bring me the bullhorn, Pete.”

Pete Green brought the megaphone from the boat. Griffiths switched it on.

“This is the sheriff speaking. If any of you are armed, lay down your weapons and come out with your hands on your heads. I’ve got five men with me and we’re coming in now.”

He drew his revolver and started up the trail. The others followed. The dusk was gathering rapidly now. The woods on either side were already in darkness. The six men walked quietly, at an even pace, without speaking. A startled bird flew off into the woods with a rapid squawking. Something scuttled away in the shrubbery. The moon had risen, a perfect white crescent cut as though with a razor out of the blackboard of the sky.

As they turned the final bend of the trail and came in view of the clearing, they all stopped. The camphouse, the only building of any size on the island, had completely disappeared. In its place lay a heap of charred timber and ashes from which a flaccid plume of smoke rose into the evening air. Some of the undergrowth on the far side of the clearing was smoldering quietly, but a more serious conflagration had been avoided, thanks to the absence of wind. There was no one in sight, and no sound other than a creaking and settling from the burned-out timbers.

“Jesus,” said Griffiths quietly.

He led the way across the open ground between the trail and the ruins of the hall. The silvery veil of moonlight made everything look unreal. Then they all heard the noise, and stopped again. It seemed to be coming from the piled ashes and debris, a kind of moaning sound. It had a human edge, like the wail of a baby you can’t ignore. The men looked at each other, none of them wanting to be the first to admit what they were all thinking.

At first they were almost relieved when the other noise cut loose, loud and insistent, mechanical, masculine. Its clamor chopped up the silence into orderly segments, and proved its reality by chipping timber off the trees with vicious slashes. By the time they realized what it was and had thrown themselves to the ground, it was over. They lay panting, retrospectively terrified.

For a long while, no one spoke. They all knew that if the gunman had aimed a little lower, they would now be dead. They also knew that unless he had aimed high on purpose, they would soon be dead anyway. The guy had some kind of rapid-fire weapon, a machine-gun or assault rifle. Returning fire would only draw attention to their position, and in any case they had no idea where the shots had come from.

“Pete?” said Griffiths eventually.

“Yeah?”

“You have your radio?”

“Nope.”

“Lorne?”

“Didn’t think we’d need it.”

There was another silence.

“OK, I’m going to try and make it back to the boat,” Griffiths said. “You guys cover me.”

He crawled backward through the scrub and rocks, high enough to make progress difficult but too low to give a man any serious cover. Hearing a sound behind him, he whirled over on his back, revolver pointed.

“It’s me,” said Joe Quinlan.

“Jesus, almost blew you away!”

“Two of us should go. That way one of us might make it.”

“I don’t believe this,” muttered the sheriff.

“It don’t need you to believe it,” Quinlan replied.

They had almost reached the woods when Griffiths stumbled on something. Another body, a guy in his forties this time, short but solidly built. He had a blond mustache and a ponytail and that was about all you could tell, because the whole back of his head wasn’t there.

“Ah, fuck it,” said Quinlan.

He stood up.

“Get down!” yelled Griffiths.

Joe Quinlan kept on walking. The sheriff wasn’t his boss. When he reached the trees, he started to run, dodging and weaving, feeling a thrill he hadn’t experienced for years, not since he was a boy playing war games up at English Camp with the Whitney kids and Lorne Fowler. It was fun! He tore through the woods, emerging on the trail about twenty yards from the pier. Only then did it occur to him that this wasn’t a game.

He backed into the trees again and worked his way down beside the path. He could see the pier now, the two boats riding at their moorings and the dead man. If this had been a trap, these were the jaws. He stayed there for a full five minutes by his watch. There had been no further firing back in the clearing. Then he stepped out on to the trail and strolled down to the pier. There was no point in hurrying. If there was anyone up there in the trees, they’d get him anyway.

He climbed over the police boat into the fire launch moored alongside. Sheriff had some kind of smart radio he wouldn’t know how to operate. Quinlan switched on the set and sent out an “Officer Down” call, adding that they’d found two bodies and were under fire. No one had actually been hit, but he wanted armed backup, and he wanted it now. If these guys were going to play hardball, let them play the pros.

Thirty minutes later, Sleight Island was thick with cops. State troopers, a SWAT team from Seattle, units from Skagit County and Bellingham, even a squad of MPs from the Navy airbase at Oak Harbor. A helicopter hovered overhead, pouring a cone of brilliant light down on to the clearing.

In the meantime, Pete and Lorne, the two deputies, had split up and circled around the remains of the hall to see what they could find. Joe Quinlan was about to offer to join them when he realized that would be uncool. He’d already upstaged the cops by volunteering to go to the boat and call HQ. He hadn’t even been thinking, but they had. He was in Vietnam, they thought. He figures he’s the hot-shit jungle warrior and we’re just a couple of farm boys.

Actually, nothing had been further from Quinlan’s mind. He hadn’t been trying to make anyone look bad, he’d just done what felt good. But he could see it from their point of view, and sat tight while they loped off through the bush with their.38s drawn, wagging their tails around like they were playing flag football. Quinlan prayed to God some guy out there wouldn’t blow their well-meaning asses over Orcas before they even figured out what they were doing wrong.

Ten minutes later, Pete Green was back, white-faced as a kid whose Halloween has turned bad on him.

“Another guy dead up there!” he exclaimed, pointing to the hillside. “Stripped down to his underwear. Jesus, made me sick to look at him!”

The five men crouched down, scanning the darkness for signs of movement, alert to every rustle in the surrounding undergrowth, trying to shut out the sporadic unnerving moans which emerged from the burned-out structure of the hall.

“I better go take a look,” said Darrell Griffiths.

Pete Green went with him. Joe Quinlan kind of tagged along. They found the corpse right behind one of the outbuildings. He was a big guy, over six feet tall, with a long beard divided into miniature pigtails looped together with some kind of silver threads. A ring in one nostril dangled suggestively over the bloody ruin of his skull, which had been dismantled with a brute force that even Quinlan found sickening. Mostly because it reminded him of other times, other deaths.

“Looks like someone shot him from behind,” Griffiths remarked, as though this wasn’t obvious.

“From about a foot away,” Quinlan added.

Then they heard the siren of the first backup team to arrive, and returned to the others. Lorne Fowler was back. He’d found a body too, on the far side of the clearing. This one had been shot in the chest, just like the guy down by the pier.

An hour later, with overwhelming force on their side and all the equipment and backup they needed, they still hadn’t found the shooter. The cleared area around the burned-out hall had been searched meticulously, as well as all the smaller buildings that had survived the blaze. They had located the source of the unnerving moans, a girl in her teens with a broken leg and severe burns lying in the dirt to one side of the charred hall. She was airlifted to the hospital in Bellingham by medevac helicopter along with another woman and a man, both of them suffering from third-degree burns.

Other than that, the search yielded only corpses. Some had been hauled from the wreckage of the hall, burned beyond recognition. Others were scattered outside the doorway, apparently shot down as they had tried to flee.

None of the survivors was in a condition to fire a gun, and no weapons were found anywhere near them. The conclusion was obvious. The person who had loosed off those shots after Griffiths’s warning had slipped away into the woods and was still at large. It was impossible to search the whole island until daybreak, but the sheriff wasn’t worried about the delay. Members of the SWAT team had secured the perimeter of the clearing, preventing any further threat to the safety of the law enforcement personnel on the ground, and there was no place the guy could go. Let him shiver alone in the dark. They’d pick him up the next day at their leisure.

There might well be more bodies in the burned wreckage of the hall, but that too could wait. Helicopters cost money, and the taxpayers of the county were going to get a stiff enough bill for the night’s operation as it was. Griffiths had the site sealed off with tape, and arranged for the loan of a set of mounted floodlights and a generator from the state. The Coast Guard agreed to provide a vessel with sleeping accommodation and communications facilities. Everyone was pulling together, the way they always did when things got tough. Griffiths was just beginning to think he might get to bed that night after all when one of the SWAT personnel called in to report intruders.

“Is he armed?” asked Griffiths.

“One of them is.”

“How many are there?”

“Two. No, wait…”

Joe Quinlan stood beside the sheriff, staring starkly up at the helicopter spraying light like some deadly defoliant.

“Use your discretion,” Griffiths told the SWAT man curtly.

Quinlan was peering toward the edge of the clearing, beyond the water tank on its metal trestle, his eyes narrowed. The helicopter blades whopped monotonously overhead. Then he started to run.

“Hold your fire!” shouted Griffiths into the radio. “One of our guys is …”

He broke off. What the fuck was Quinlan doing? Sprinting up the trail as if his life depended on it, toward the figures who had emerged from the woods. He reached them, turned and walked with them down the trail.

“Joe’s with them,” Griffiths told the men scattered around the clearing. “Hold your fire.”

The policemen waited, looking toward the three figures moving toward them. No, four. A child had detached itself from the grasp of one of the adults and was walking between them, holding their hands. Joe Quinlan walked to the right of the group, a little apart. They came steadily forward down the trail into the scorching circle of light, staring at the semicircle of armed men, who stared back.