Paul Doiron - Massacre Pond

I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. It was just a brief impression of something blue. And then a shot echoed.

I ducked my head-as if I could actually have dodged a bullet-and brought the pistol around.

Pelkey was creeping along the edge of the gravel pit. He had scrambled up the other side and was moving from boulder to boulder. I fired and heard the round careen off stone. Pelkey showed his face for an instant, and there was a smile on it. He leveled his pistol, and I flattened myself to the ground. He didn’t bother firing this time, not wanting to waste a round.

He was getting closer and closer. I felt a bubble of fear rise in my stomach. At least one of my ribs was broken. My breath was ragged, and my hands were shaking. This man was an expert shooter. I wasn’t sure I could stop him before he drew a bead on my head. If I rose to my feet to run to the nearest trees, he would easily knock me over again, even if he failed to hit my brain. After that, it would just be a matter of delivering the coup de grace.

I peered around the boulder, but I didn’t see him. Maybe he was circling into the pines, planning to come up behind me. No, there he was. Behind that stump. I let off a shot and saw splinters fly up where the round dug into the pulpy wood.

Pelkey took the opportunity to rise to his feet and lunge across the open space between the stump and a nearby boulder. He was almost across, almost safe again from my bullets, when there was a single sharp crack. I saw Pelkey straighten up. He had the oddest look on his face; his eyes were wide and his mouth was open. I think he was already dead when his body fell off the cliff. He tumbled down the steep gravel wall as if his bones were all loose inside the skin and not connected. His lifeless corpse came to rest in a cloud of dust beside the man-shaped target they’d been using to test the AR-15.

Billy lowered the black rifle and looked at me. One of his eye sockets was swollen and bleeding. His forehead looked like it had a red dent in the middle of it. His long hair had been torn loose of the braid. And his entire body was coated with gray dust.

He threw his head back and let out a scream like nothing I’d ever heard. I didn’t know if he was back in Fallujah or Waziristan, but wherever it was, it was somewhere very far away from the warm home he shared with Aimee and his children. He spit a gout of blood on the ground and advanced on the broken man trying to crawl away from him through the weeds.

I had the impression that both of Beam’s arms were broken. It was something about the way he was using his knees to lurch along. He would get himself into a kneeling position, like a man facing Mecca, and then he would flop forward with a whine. He used his shoulders to throw his arms ahead of him, but his wrists were curled in on themselves, and his hands were boneless things unable to assist his movement.

“No, Billy,” I said. The words came out like a parrot squawk. “Billy, don’t do it.”

I watched helplessly as my friend unloaded a magazine into the back of Lewis Beam’s head, reducing it to an unrecognizable mass of red jelly.

I gingerly removed my jacket and shirt, then loosened the Velcro straps holding my ballistic vest in place. There was a bruise the size of a paper plate on my chest. I traced the map of broken blood vessels with the tip of my finger. In a few days, when the skin turned green and yellow, I was going to look like a card-carrying member of the walking dead.

Billy had told me that his people came from the marshes of Holland, not the fiords of Scandinavia, but after having witnessed what I just had, I had a hard time believing the blood of berserkers didn’t flow through his veins. After I’d gotten my voice back, I called 911. I told the dispatcher that there had been a shooting and that two men were dead and a third man was in custody, and then I went down into the pit to arrest my friend.

He sat motionless on a rock, his head bowed. His hair hung like a hood around his face, and the rifle rested on his knees.

“Billy?” My voice sounded wheezy from the injury to my ribs.

“Yeah?” he mumbled.

“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you for saving my life.”

He kept his blood-soaked head down. “I thought you were going to say something else.”

I stood over the headless body of Lewis Beam. My mouth went as dry as if I’d stuffed it full of cotton. “You came here for the reward,” I said. “You thought they might sell you one of the twenty-twos they used to kill those moose. Or maybe you figured you could trick them into admitting what they’d done. That was your plan, wasn’t it?”

He didn’t answer.

Every word made my ribs hurt. “But you didn’t know they’d already gotten rid of their guns. Last night, after they heard about Chubby LeClair, they dumped the rifles in a bag behind his camper. As long as the twenty-twos couldn’t be traced back to them, they knew they were in the clear.”

Billy raised his head and showed me his one good eye. The other was swollen and scratched, and he kept it clenched shut. I wondered how much lasting damage Beam had managed to do to it in that fight. “I guess I can forget about that reward,” he said.

I wasn’t sure if he’d meant it as a joke. “Why, Billy?”

“Why what?”

“From the moment we found those moose, you’ve acted like another person. I don’t know who the hell you are anymore.”

He brought his hand up to stroke his beard, as he often did, and found the hair matted. He stared at his bloodred fingers with his good eye. “I left the gate open.”

“What?”

“The night of the shootings, I left it open. It wasn’t the first time I forgot to lock it. I was thinking about the toy fishing rod I was going to buy Logan, how I needed to use the ATM in Machias to get cash first. I was worried about being late for his party. So this is all my fault for being stupid.”

I wanted to tell him that he shouldn’t blame himself, but I was in no position to offer him absolution. However this mess had begun-whatever Billy Cronk did or didn’t do on the night those animals were slaughtered-no longer mattered. What mattered were the corpses. Briar Morse, Chubby LeClair, Marky Parker, and now Todd Pelkey and Lewis Beam. The state would demand a reckoning for them all.

My gaze drifted to the body lying against the wall of the pit. Billy had taken out Pelkey with a well-placed shot to the head. Half-blind, clawed to pieces, with a chunk bitten out of his arm, he hadn’t hesitated to save my life. The recognition made what I had to do next that much harder.

“You didn’t have to kill Beam,” I said. “He wasn’t going anywhere after all the bones you’d broken.”

“I know,” he said.

“The state police are going to be here soon. They’re going to see what happened to his head. There’s no way you’re going to be able to claim self-defense.”

Lots of men would have played upon my emotions and asked me to lie. They would have pleaded with me to concoct some crazy story that explained how a man’s head had been reduced to raspberry Jell-O. But not Billy Cronk. My friend just nodded and rose to his feet with a sigh. He handed me the AR, and I slung it over my good shoulder. He removed the KA-BAR from its sheath and set it on the rock behind him. Then he held out his wrists. “You’d better cuff me,” he said.

“I’m not going to do that.”

“Yes, you are,” he said. “You know why? Because you’re a good cop.”

Wincing, I reached for the handcuffs I wore on my belt. The locks made a ratcheting sound as I adjusted them around his thick wrists.

“I’m going to testify on your behalf,” I said.

He kept his arms outstretched. “Take care of Aimee for me while I’m away,” he said.