The Poacher's Son

30

I lurched backward, but his grip was too strong to break. Wild eyed, panting hard, with blood smeared across his teeth, he yanked with his free hand at the barrel of the shotgun. I tried to bring the butt up against his jawbone, but he threw his weight, and we both fell over onto the bloody ground.

My breath exploded out of me with the impact, and it was all I could do to keep hold of the gun. He had the barrel by both hands now, trying to wrench it away. I brought a knee up between us, wedging us apart, pushing against his wounded gut.

He let out a howl and punched me hard in the nose. Lights flashed in my eyes. He was fighting for his life, struggling for control of the gun. I drew my knees up again, but he just kept coming.

Hands slick with blood, I felt myself losing my grip.

I don’t know which one of us pulled the trigger.

It all happened in a millisecond. The recoil drove the shotgun hard into my stomach. Through a blue haze that burned my eyes I saw him jerk back, as if in super-fast motion, and in that same instant I was splattered with blood.

The smell of cordite hung in the air. My eardrums ached.

Oh, God, I thought.

Somehow I was on my feet, breathing hard, pointing the empty, shaking shotgun at his motionless body. Half of his head was gone. Above the jaw there was nothing I recognized as a human face, just blood and tissue and scraps of skull.

I had to brace myself against the truck bed to keep from collapsing, trying to swallow down the taste of vomit. How had this happened?

Truman’s hunting rifle lay in the dirt near the front tire of the truck. I stared at it dumbly. Why didn’t he just shoot me as I came up on him? Why had he played dead? None of this made sense.

His shirt had rolled up and I could see the clean stab wound through his soft gut. With a gash like that, he’d been bleeding to death even before I shot him. As if that absolved me.

I knelt down beside the man I’d killed.

I’m not sure how long it took me to notice the bruises. Five minutes might have passed before the wounds around Truman’s wrists caught my eye. Then it came to me what the raw-looking marks were, and the recognition had the force of someone stomping on my chest.

I grabbed Truman’s rifle and ejected the magazine.

The rifle was a bolt-action Remington 30-06-the same caliber that Soctomah claimed had been used to kill Shipman and Brodeur. I was almost certain this rifle had also been used to kill Pelletier less than half an hour ago. From the smell alone I knew it had just been fired.

But there were no bullets in it now. Pelletier had been killed by a single gunshot to the chest. It didn’t make any sense that Truman’s rifle should be unloaded. And why were there rope burns on his wrists?

The sun was playing hide-and-seek behind dark clouds as I sprinted back to Pelletier’s cabin. The air had become heavier, and a breeze now stirred the leaves along the road.

Outside and inside the cabin I searched frantically for clues I might have missed the first time. The story told itself in blood: Truman Dellis and Russell Pelletier had an altercation in the cabin. Pelletier stabbed Truman with a hunting knife, and Truman, somehow, improbably shot Pelletier through the chest, using the same rifle with which he’d killed Jonathan Shipman and Bill Brodeur. The coconspirators had eliminated each other. There was no apparent explanation for their quarrel, but it offered a tidy resolution to the murder investigation with only one question left unanswered: Where was my father?

I needed to call the police.

When I came around the corner of Pelletier’s cabin, I found Brenda standing in the lodge doorway, holding a long-barreled Ruger revolver in one hand. I stopped in my tracks.

“What happened?” she asked, gaping at the blood on my skin and clothes. “I heard a shot.”

“It was Truman,” I said.

“Is he dead?”

I nodded. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m not.” Her mouth tightened into a sneering smile that scared the hell out of me-even more than the Ruger.

I was out in the open with nothing to hide behind and no shells left in my shotgun. “Where did you get that pistol?”

“Pelletier’s safe. I know the combination.”

I took a step toward the door. “I need to call the police.”

“They’re on their way,” she said quickly.

“You called them?” I tried to hide the disbelief in my voice.

“Yeah.”

“I should talk to Detective Soctomah myself.”

She refused to move aside. “What are you going to tell him?”

I kept my eyes on the revolver. If it was the gun Russell had showed me once, it was chambered with a.44 Magnum round for bear hunting. “Pelletier and Truman killed Shipman and Brodeur. I don’t know why. Maybe they thought they could scare off Wendigo, make them change their plans for Rum Pond. They framed my father. Then they killed each other.”

“I told you they did it! I told you Jack was innocent!”

“Yes, you did.”

She narrowed her eyes. “You don’t sound convinced.”

“It’s what happened.”

“Did Truman say that?”

“We didn’t have a conversation. He grabbed the shotgun and it went off.”

She didn’t smile exactly, but there was a look of glee in her eyes that shocked me. I had no idea how much she’d hated him.

“What the hell did he do to you?” I asked.

She bared her teeth. “He killed my mom.”

“What?”

“They were walking home from a bar one night, shit-faced. She fell down into a ditch. He let her freeze to death, he was so drunk. He just came home and crawled into bed, and he never remembered a thing. They found her the next morning lying in a snow bank. I was seven years old. We came to Rum Pond after that. So, yeah, I’m glad he’s dead.”

I looked at her, stunned into silence for the longest time. Then I took another step forward. “I need to call Soctomah.”

The Ruger came up, pointed at my chest. “Something’s wrong with you.”

“I just killed a man.” I lifted the barrel of the shotgun slightly. “Now I need to call the police. So why don’t you put the gun down and get the fuck out of the way.”

It was the wrong thing to say.

The first shot from the Ruger tore through the air centimeters from my head. I heard the.44 slug smack into the cabin wall behind me as I hit the ground.

“Don’t move!” she said.

She fired the second and third shots into the air.

When I raised my head, she shouted again, “Don’t fucking move!”

I pressed my forehead to the dirt. “Take it easy.”

She advanced on me until I could glimpse her dusty bare feet, the barbed-wire tattoo around one slender ankle. I had a jackknife in my pocket, but that was all by way of a weapon.

“Shut up! Just shut up. Lie there and don’t do anything stupid.”

So we waited, me with my hands folded behind my head, my heart drumming against the ground. Overhead, I heard the wind rising in the pine boughs and felt the shadow of clouds creep across the sky. Rain was coming.

“What did Truman tell you?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“He told you something.”

“He didn’t have to.”

“What do you mean?”

But before I could answer, I heard another voice, a baritone: “What happened? Why did you signal me?”

I raised my head a little and saw a tall man materialize, as if from nowhere, out of the bushes across the road. He was dressed completely in breakup camouflage, the brown-and-gray pattern used by turkey hunters. His pants were mud-spattered and tucked into rubber boots, and he carried a deer rifle on a sling over his shoulder. He wore gloves and a camouflage hat with a thin mask that hung over the face like a brown veil.

“He knows!” Brenda said. “Truman must have told him.”

The man pulled the mask loose, and for the first time in two years I saw my father’s face.