Massacre Pond

10

By late October, the sun sets early in Maine. It takes a more southerly trajectory across the sky than it does during the summer. If you happen to find yourself standing in a shadowy north-facing place-a gravel pit, say, surrounded by high walls of pebbles and sand-you might find yourself needing a flashlight by four in the afternoon.

It was my third pit of the day, and I had already collected hundreds of shell casings and cigarette butts. Along the way, I’d discovered ripped bags of trash, plundered by raccoons that had eaten everything except the dirty diapers; a putrid gut pile that had once been the inner organs of a deer before a poacher carved them out; weather-stained paper targets in the shape of human torsos stapled to splintered pieces of wood; thousands of cigarette butts; crushed beer and soda cans; and more used condoms than I cared to count.

I found shell casings from every caliber of firearm known to man amid the litter: a lot of.30-06s, Remington.223s, the two popular Winchester loads-.270s and.308s-but also plenty of handgun shells:.45s and 9? 19 mm Parabellums, 380 ACPs like the kind I used in my off-duty Walther PPKS, 40 Smith amp; Wessons, 357s (both Magnums and SIGs), and more than a few.38s fired from snub-nosed revolvers. Not to mention all the red, yellow, blue, and green shotgun shells. The.22 casings alone were beyond belief. Gravel pits were the places many Mainers learned to shoot, and the guns that beginners used tended toward easy-kicking.22s, either rifles or handguns.

The work had been hard and hot in the direct sunlight. Then the sun dipped below the edge of the cliff, and it was as if someone had opened a refrigerator door behind me. I shivered and reached for the SureFire flashlight I carried on my belt.

I was down on my hands and knees, bagging and tagging yet another assortment of brass shells while carefully avoiding the shards of broken glass that had already sliced a hole in my knee, when I heard my call numbers come over the police radio. I’d left the windows rolled down to clear the fetid bog smell from my truck, but also so I could listen to life happening back in the real world. I’d never expected to hear myself called to a 10–32.

There is a movement across the nation in law-enforcement and emergency-response circles to dispense with the confusing jargon of ten codes in favor of what is called “plain language.” The campaign was yet another outcome of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when police and firemen rushed to the smoldering towers from far-flung locales and found themselves unable to communicate with one another because, it turned out, different communities in the tristate area used different ten codes. This commonsense movement to speak normally over the radio had not yet reached the easternmost county in the United States, where I lived. Washington County always seemed to be at the ass end of every fad.

10-32: person with a weapon.

I just about leaped into the patrol truck. “Twenty-two fifty-eight,” I said into the mic.

“Twenty-two fifty-eight,” answered the deep-voiced Washington County dispatcher. “Ten-thirty-two in progress at Twelve Jerusalem Road. Shots have been fired. What’s your twenty?”

“I’m about ten minutes away.”

“Then you’re the nearest unit, Mike. Be advised that state police and sheriff’s deputies are on the way.”

“Ten-four,” I said.

I unlocked the Mossberg 590Al from the rack behind my head and set the heavy shotgun on the floor mat. I knew the man who lived at the house on Jerusalem Road. Every law-enforcement officer in the county did, and we’d all made wagers on when this day of reckoning would finally come. If things went as badly as I feared they might, I might need every round in my service weapon and every shell in my shotgun before the night was done.

* * *

Karl Keith Khristian had been born Wilbur Williams on an island in Penobscot Bay. He came from a long line of lobstermen, many of whom spent their entire lives within a hundred miles of their home ports. Unless they served in the military, they often went decades without encountering a person of another race. In my own life, I have learned that there is a fine line between innocence and ignorance. Some of the native islanders I met were the most open and accepting people on the planet. Others were, inexplicably, the most hardened bigots you’d ever want to meet. All you need to know about Wilbur Williams is that he left the island his ancestors had settled eight generations earlier when one of his neighbors adopted two Cambodian girls.

By the time he ended up in the deep woods of Washington County, he had legally changed his name to Khristian and acquired an arsenal capable of repelling any urban refugees from the coming race war, the goose-stepping United Nations troops that were sure to follow, and the zombie apocalypse that would cap the whole thing off. When it came to doomsday prophecies, KKK was an equal-opportunity paranoid. He was a bald gnome of a man with sun-damaged skin and a permanent squint that suggested irritable bowel syndrome or an undiagnosed need for reading glasses.

According to Washington County’s longtime sheriff, Roberta Rhine, Khristian’s devolution from harmless backwoods crank to potential serial shooter was complete the day we elected our first black president. She’d told us to keep a close watch on the old buzzard. My patrols took me frequently past his personal compound. Khristian lived alone in a tiny house, along with his three rottweilers, but the actual residence was hidden behind a plank fence topped with spirals of razor wire. He used the fence as a billboard to promote various political and religious sentiments:

SOVEREIGN CITIZEN OF THE U.S.A!

WE HAVE AFRICAN LIONS IN THE ZOOS AND A LYING AFRICAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE

WARNING TO BURGLARS: THIS HOUSE IS GUARDED BY A SHOTGUN THREE DAYS A WEEK. GUESS WHICH DAYS?

The sheriff had told me that Khristian kept an underground bunker beneath his house, a combination survival shelter and shooting range. “Some day,” Rhine said, “I’m afraid he’s going to have a massive coronary on his way to Cigarette City, and we’re going to find the bodies of fifteen missing prostitutes down there.”

I didn’t think she was joking.

My own encounters with the man had been fleeting, since Khristian was one of many firearms enthusiasts who had no interest whatsoever in hunting. I had seen him behind the wheel of his camouflage-painted Dodge Ram, his small head barely visible behind the wheel, and he had scowled at me a few times in the supermarket. But I had read his venomous letters in the Machias Valley News Observer, and I seemed to recall that he had spewed considerable bile over Elizabeth Morse and her proposed national park. Coincidence that this 10–32 call would come tonight? It didn’t seem likely.

The forest flashed by my windows in a green blur. My heart was pumped so full of blood, it made my ribs ache. I tried to control my breathing and prepare myself mentally for a range of possible scenarios, from an armed standoff (likely) to a peaceful surrender (fat chance).

What I found on Jerusalem Road was the last thing I would have expected. In the failing light, I saw Billy Cronk’s truck parked before Karl Khristian’s gate. My friend stood beside it, his hands loose at his side, as still as a statue. Above the wall loomed a man with a rifle. Khristian must have constructed elevated walkways so that he could patrol his fenced property from a great height: the better to assassinate the blue-helmeted storm troopers.

Before I could even report to dispatch that I had arrived on the scene, I heard a gunshot and saw a spray of sand at my friend’s feet. Billy didn’t even flinch. He seemed utterly unafraid. Inside the walls, ferocious-sounding dogs were barking. I grabbed the Mossberg and threw open the door, using it as a body shield as I drew a bead on Khristian’s vulture head.

“Get down on the ground!” KKK was screaming in a shrill, scratchy voice.

“Police!” I said. “Drop the weapon, Khristian!”

Billy remained motionless: a six-foot-five-inch target.

“Get down on the motherfucking ground,” the little man screeched, “or I’ll blow your nut sack off!”

I had the shotgun sling wrapped around my left hand to steady it and was using the edge of the door to hold the barrel still. “I said, ‘Drop the weapon!’”

Khristian’s rifle wavered. “He’s a trespasser!”

“If you shoot him, Khristian, I swear to God I am going to shoot you next! Put the rifle down.”

“Castle doctrine! Castle doctrine!”

The castle doctrine, or the defense of habitation law, holds that a home owner has the right to use deadly force against an intruder without becoming liable to prosecution.

“He’s the one who did it, Mike,” said Billy in a calm voice. He hadn’t turned his head since I had arrived, so I didn’t know how the hell he knew it was me, unless he’d recognized my voice. “He shot the moose.”

“Goddamned liar!”

“I’m not going to say this again,” I said. “Put the rifle down, Khristian!”

Suddenly, the bald head disappeared. One second, he was there; the next, he was gone.

Oh shit. I could only imagine the secret holes in Khristian’s walls where he could aim a gun at an intruder. My spinning blue lights made me feel as if I were watching these surreal events unfold from inside a kaleidoscope.

“Billy, I want you to get down on the ground.”

“He’s not going to shoot me, Mike.”

“Yeah, well, I might shoot you if you don’t listen to me.” I scanned the fence, looking for any sign of movement behind it, anything to indicate KKK’s intentions.

“He’s the one who killed those moose,” said Billy.

“At the moment, that’s not my concern. Just get down on the ground so we can both get the hell out of here. I don’t want to tell Aimee I watched you get shot.”

His wife’s name seemed to touch a nerve. His head dipped, and he dropped to his knees in the sand. His braid swung back and forth along his shoulders.

“All the way down,” I said.

“Sorry, Mike. This is as far as I go.”

My truck belt wouldn’t stop shrieking. Inside the fence, the dogs continued their hoarse and horrible barking. I could easily imagine KKK opening his gate and unleashing his hellhounds on my friend and me.

“Goddamn it, Billy.”

“I’m not afraid of that kook.”

“Khristian!” I shouted. “I need you to step out here!”

From somewhere on the opposite side of the fence came a shout: “I claim castle doctrine!”

“That law doesn’t apply after a police officer is on the scene,” I said. “Just get your ass outside and tell me what happened.”

The next noise was that of a man yelling at a dog, followed by a canine squeal, as if it had been kicked. Then the fence gate slid open wide enough for a man to slip through the gap. KKK stepped out with a black AR-15 carbine on a sling over his shoulder. He seemed even shorter than I remembered, a beardless Rumpelstiltskin.

I trained my ghost-ring sights on his torso in case he did something stupid. “Put the rifle down, Karl,” I said.

“I am a sovereign citizen with the right to bear arms guaranteed by the Second Amendment.”

“You’re a gutless coward who shot six defenseless animals,” said Billy.

Khristian’s whole body seemed to quiver like a metronome that had been struck. “Liar!”

“Billy,” I said, “I would appreciate you shutting the fuck up now.”

Behind me, I heard the faint sound of approaching sirens. KKK squinted and cocked his head like a suspicious bird. Billy took the arrival of another police officer on the scene as a sign that he could now rise to his feet.

Khristian disagreed. “Get back on the ground!”

Two things happened next that seemed simultaneous: The old man swung the assault weapon off his shoulder as if to bring the barrel up again, and Billy Cronk sprang forward like a jungle cat. He must have covered twenty feet in a single second, because by the time I had stepped out from behind my truck door, he had thrown KKK to the ground. I came running up, aiming the shotgun at both of them, shouting for Billy to stop. Dust drifted around their struggling bodies in the headlights of my vehicle. I feared that Khristian might manage to get a shot off from the AR or produce a hidden pistol to blast a hole through my friend’s mighty heart.

I needn’t have worried. By the time I cleared the distance, Billy Cronk had the sovereign citizen pinned to the ground, flattened beneath the weight of his long body and with both of the man’s spindly arms splayed out to the sides.

“You piece of shit,” Billy snarled. “I ought to break both your arms.”

“Get off me! Get off me!” The old man could barely wheeze out the words under Cronk’s crushing weight.

The approaching siren had grown shrill, and I heard the roar of a V-8 engine and pebbles scattering beneath skidding wheels. I kept my Mossberg trained on both bodies.

“Let him go, Billy,” I said.

“Not until he says he did it.”

“Didn’t do a goddamn thing,” KKK hissed.

I heard a car door open and someone come running up. When I finally turned my head, I found myself blinded by my own headlights.

“What the hell is going on here?” said a woman with a deep, gruff voice.

I didn’t need to see her long, handsome face or black ponytail to know who she was.

“He attacked me,” wheezed KKK.

“I wasn’t talking to you, Wilbur,” said Roberta Rhine. “I was addressing Warden Bowditch.”

By blinking repeatedly, I had managed to clear my vision, and I now saw Washington County’s chief law-enforcement officer standing at my shoulder, holding a pistol at her side. She was wearing shorts and flip-flops and a chambray shirt thrown on over a white tee. Her hair was wet and loose, as if she’d just stepped from the shower.

“I’ve got it under control, Sheriff,” I said.

“It sure looks that way.”

She kicked Billy’s leg with her painted toes. “Get off him, Cronk.”

“I think you should check him for concealed weapons first,” said Billy. “I feel something underneath me, and it ain’t his boner.”

The sheriff looked at me. “Warden?”

I slung the Mossberg over my shoulder and crouched down beside the two men. Billy released Khristian’s limbs one at a time in order for me to remove first the Bushmaster AR-15, which was trapped under the old man’s bony shoulder, then a Colt 1911 holstered inside his pants and a pocket Glock secured to his left ankle. I placed all three firearms on the hood of my shuddering pickup. Then I watched Billy Cronk rise from the ground, lifting his adversary along with him. He held Khristian aloft by both arms, as if the other man was one of his children and this was a game, but there was no smile on my friend’s handsome face, just naked contempt.

“Let him go, Billy,” I said.

KKK dropped to earth and fell hard on his bony ass.

Rhine inhaled deeply and blew out a breath. “Bowditch, can you tell me what I just witnessed?”

“Sheriff,” I said, “I have no idea.”