Paul Doiron - Massacre Pond

Most of these officers had just assisted in the apprehension of Karl Khristian, forty-five minutes away in Machias. What this meant, I realized, was that Bard would be alone until I arrived. There was no one else to help him.

Even at top speed, it took me nearly fifteen minutes to cover the distance, bouncing along gravel roads. Bard stayed on the radio, so I knew he was still breathing. He reported that he had returned fire into the camper. No subsequent shots had been fired since the initial exchange, he said in a strained voice. That detail didn’t sound good for Chubby LeClair. The Airstream had walls about as thick as a can of tuna and just as easily pierced.

What the hell had Bard done? Almost at the very moment that Bilodeau was arresting Karl Khristian on a felony terrorizing charge-when the case seemed finally on the verge of being solved and Rivard had reason to smile for the first time in a week-Jeremy had gotten himself into a shoot-out.

The blood was pounding in my neck and my underarms were damp with perspiration as I arrived at the clearing. I stopped my truck far enough down the road so that I could survey the scene without coming under direct fire. Bard’s patrol truck was parked directly across the road from the Airstream, which reminded me of a space capsule that had crashed to earth in the Maine woods. Chubby had chain-sawed down a stand of paper birches to make room for it along the hillside, leaving foot-high stumps scattered about like crude pieces of sculpture. Among the amputated trees were other objects: a rusty bicycle, several scorched oil drums, a careless pyramid of wood scavenged from a rotting barn. I also saw a forest-green Toyota Tacoma parked at an abrupt angle to the door of the camper, as if its driver had arrived in haste or was planning a quick getaway.

I radioed the dispatcher to tell her I was on the scene and to see whether I could raise my fellow warden.

“Bard,” I said, “where are you?”

“Bowditch? Is that you? I’m inside my truck.”

“Are you OK?”

“The bullet grazed my fucking head. The blood keeps running into my eyes.”

Head wounds tend to bleed heavily, so it didn’t surprise me that Bard had panicked. I probably would have, too, if I’d been shot.

“Is Chubby still inside?” I asked, aware that if he had a police scanner-and most rural Mainers did, especially the inveterate lawbreakers-that he might be eavesdropping on our conversation.

“He hasn’t come out the door, and there’s no back way out of there.”

I unfastened my shotgun from its holder. “Hang tight,” I said. “I’m going to come up to your truck.”

“Ten-four,” he replied.

I pushed open my door and hopped out, keeping my body low to the ground, holding the heavy Mossberg with its sling around my wrist to steady my aim. Across the road from the camper, the hill fell steeply amid birches, beeches, and poplars. I figured I could circle around through the trees, using the embankment as cover.

I had to steady myself against tree trunks to keep from sliding on the fallen leaves down the hill. My torso was slick with perspiration beneath my ballistic vest, and I felt both hot and cold at the same time. Once I’d swung around below Bard’s truck, I had to climb the hill again. The forest floor was wet from where the morning frost was melting away, and the leaves came off beneath my boots in layers. The air rising from the ground carried the nutty odor of decaying vegetation.

Eventually, I managed to pull myself out of the ditch beneath the passenger side of Bard’s truck. I knocked at the door. It swung open suddenly from the pull of gravity, and I nearly toppled backward down the hillside to avoid being clipped in the shoulder. Bard thrust his bloody face at me. He was sprawled across both seats, his feet jammed beneath the steering wheel, and he had clamped a raincoat against his wounded skull. He looked like he’d spilled a can of red paint over his head.

“Took you long enough,” he said, trying to blink the blood out of his eyes.

“How are you doing?”

“It stings like a motherfucker. But I’m all right, I guess.”

“So what happened here?”

Bard rubbed at his eyes but succeeded only in rearranging the smeared pattern on his face. “He shot me is what happened. Just opened fire out the window while I was sitting here. The glass exploded and the bullet clipped me in the head. Son of a bitch!”

The concept that LeClair had spontaneously started shooting didn’t strike me as persuasive. There had to be more to the story. At the moment, I needed to focus on defusing the situation or at least stalling until backup arrived. “You said you returned fire?”

“Yeah, I emptied my magazine into the camper. He hasn’t shot at me again, so maybe I got lucky.”

So, if I understood what Bard was telling me, he had pulled his sidearm and fired blindly into the Airstream. Self-defense excuses a lot, but law-enforcement officers aren’t supposed to discharge their weapons without knowing what else their bullets might strike. The attorney general had personally interrogated me when I’d shot a sociopath who’d cracked my head open with a crowbar. I’d barely escaped that interview with my badge.

“Stay here,” I said, pulling away from the door.

“Where are you going?”

“To see if he’s OK.”

He twisted his mouth and blinked several times in quick succession. “What about me?”

I didn’t answer that I expected him to live. I didn’t say anything, in fact, because at that precise moment a shot sounded from the camper, and I dropped, face-first, to the ground.

“He’s shooting again!” Bard said, as if I had somehow missed the news. He reached for his SIG, which he must have reloaded while he was waiting for me. Then he sat up and, with his bloody eyelids stuck together, shot at the camper through what was left of the driver’s window.

“Stop it! Bard, stop it!”

He gave no indication of having heard me. He didn’t stop shooting until the receiver ejected the fifteenth.357 cartridge from the magazine. One of the red-hot cases bounced off my leg, leaving a burn in the fabric.

A blue cloud of gunpowder smoke drifted over my head. “Goddamn it,” I said. “He wasn’t shooting at us.”

Bard continued to stare up at the Airstream. “What?”

“That shot was muffled.”

I rose from my knees and peered over the hood of the truck. Even from a distance, I could see the bullet holes in the metal skin of the Airstream. In his rage and blindness, Bard had mostly managed to miss the camper, but a few of his rounds had found their marks.

Holding the shotgun across my body, ready to bring the barrel up if need be, I darted around the front of the Sierra and ran in a straight line at the front door. If Chubby had been taking aim through one of the cracked windows, he could easily have ended my life with a single shot. But I was certain that the fat man wasn’t pointing a gun at me.

“Bowditch!” I heard Bard shout. “Bowditch! What the fuck?”

I grabbed the metal handle of the door and gave it a twist. An odor spilled out in my face: a miasma of dirty dishes, stale marijuana smoke, and unwashed bed linens. I craned my neck to see inside. The interior was dim except for where the sunlight filtered in through the dusty windows.

I didn’t recognize the Indian boy, although I found myself unsurprised to see him. There had been a reason Chubby didn’t want to let Bard see what was happening inside his trailer. The boy’s small body was propped against a blood-drenched cushion. He was naked except for his tight white underwear. There was a bullet hole in his neck from where one of Bard’s stray rounds had pierced the carotid artery.

Chubby lay on his back across the fixed table that occupied the center of the camper. He was wearing a stained T-shirt and denim coveralls, a strap loose over one shoulder. He was barefoot. His eyes were wide open. The gun he’d shot himself with had fallen from his burned mouth. I wouldn’t have pegged LeClair for a suicide, didn’t think he had it in him, but he must have known the torments that await child molesters in prison. In the end, the fat man had taken the easy way out.