Paul Doiron - Bad Little Falls

“Lucas,” I sputtered. “The life jacket.”

I didn’t think he’d heard me, let alone understood what I’d meant, but the next thing I knew, I felt us surge forward. He was kicking his legs. I gave one last push and reached out with my stiff arm. I brought it down on the PFD. I squeezed the flotation device against my side and felt its buoyancy lift me from the current. I nearly dislocated Lucas’s shoulder as I pulled him up beside me.

I heard voices in the dark. People were shouting.

Suddenly we began to move. Someone was tugging on the rope. I had no idea who it was, but I saw lights and heard engines.

“Hang on, dude!” someone said.

I felt my body being reeled in like a fish. Without having to exert myself at all, Lucas and I were suddenly lying on the snow-dusted ice, shivering violently and gasping for air.

“Are you guys OK?”

Above us loomed several people in snowmobile suits. The one who’d spoken to me had taken his helmet off. He was a hulking kid with a flattop haircut and a wide oval face.

“I know you,” I sputtered.

“You came to my school,” said Barney Beal.

My heart felt like a lump of ice in my chest. I couldn’t feel my feet.

The boys helped us into the truck, where I could run the heater and call for an ambulance. I found a wool blanket to wrap Lucas in, and another one for myself. I left the blue lights spinning so the responding units would have an easier time finding our location out on the lake.

The boys giggled at my chattering teeth, proving they were as stoned and drunk as I had suspected when I first saw them speeding in front of Doc Larrabee’s house. Later, I would need to talk to them about the inadvisability of snowmobiling under the influence. But not now.

Barney Beal brought me my gun belt without my asking for it. The snaps were all open on the leather holsters, so I knew he’d been looking at the secret things inside, the spare magazines and handcuffs.

“That fucker is heavy,” he said. “How much does it weigh?”

“Forty pounds.” I was having a hard time getting the words past my spastic tongue. “Did you guys see anyone else… when you… rode up?”

“Like who?”

“Older guy… with a beard. Went into the water, too.”

“Shit, he must have drowned.”

I wasn’t so sure. My last sight of Kendrick was of him swimming confidently to the edge of the hole. Maybe he had been unable to climb out and had slipped beneath the surface while I was fighting for my life. Or maybe he had staggered away into the night. One way or another the Maine Warden Service would find him. At the moment I was having a hard time caring if it was alive or dead.

After a few minutes, the teenagers grew bored listening to my castanet teeth and wandered off to sit on their snowmobiles and smoke cigarettes. I saw the orange tips floating in the darkness like fireflies surprised from their hibernation.

Lucas closed his eyes and his head lolled. I felt his pulse beneath his chin. It was scarily slow. I pushed his wet hair back off his forehead and wrapped the blanket more tightly around him, and I put my arm around his shoulders, trying to share some of my own negligible body heat.

What would happen to him now? It would depend on his mother’s court case. If she was convicted on the drug charge, then she’d be given a mandatory sentence of not less than two years. Despite Munro’s criminal history, a softhearted judge might feel obliged to award him custody. I thought of this weird, intelligent boy in my arms growing up with a violent felon for a father, and I wondered if he would be as lucky as I had been and would somehow escape his doom.

Emergency vehicles rolled across the ice; their lights flashed red and blue.

I squeezed his shoulders. “Lucas?”

His eyes fluttered open. “Am I dead?”

“No,” I said. “You’re not.”

The first officer I talked to was a state trooper. Like most of his brethren, he stood about seven feet tall and had a jaw carved from solid marble. Trooper Belanger listened attentively as I unspooled my story, staring from beneath the shadowed brim of his Smokey the Bear hat.

“Someone needs to check in on Doc Larrabee.” I had the blanket wrapped around my shoulders, but it wasn’t doing much against the chill of the night.

“You got it.”

“I don’t know what happened to Kendrick. He might have gone under, but I think he got himself out of the hole. We’ll need a dog to track him if he went into the Heath. I’m not sure how far he can run if he’s as cold and wet as I am. But I believe he’s carrying at least one firearm, so whoever’s tracking him needs to treat him as dangerous. He already killed one man and kidnapped a child.”

“Understood.”

“We should get those dead dogs out of the water. It doesn’t seem right to leave them down there.”

“Anything else?”

“No, I can brief Rivard and the sheriff when they get here.”

“Can I make a suggestion?”

“Sure.”

“Get your ass to the hospital. You’re shivering like a half-drowned rat.”

For once, I took somebody else’s advice. I rode in the back of the ambulance with Lucas. The emergency medical technicians had him lie down atop the folding stretcher and covered him with blankets. He responded with just grunts and nods to the questions the female EMT asked him.

“Do your fingers and toes hurt?” she asked.

“No.”

“Can you wiggle them for me?”

“No.”

“No because you can’t, or no because you don’t want to?”

“Wiggle your fingers, Lucas,” I said.

He did as I asked. He had lost his glasses in the lake, so he was forced to squint constantly. I don’t think his unfocused gaze left me once during the entire trip. It was as if he feared I might vanish like a genie into a puff of smoke if he looked away.

“Did Kendrick force you onto the sled?” I asked.

“Who?”

“The man with the dogs.”

Suddenly this boy whom I had never seen cry burst into sobs. “He said he would let me drive them.”

I clutched his hand and held on tight.

After he approached the truck, Kendrick must have seen my cell phone in the cup holder and decided to use it to call Doc. Then, when he realized he needed to lure me onto the ice, he had promised the boy a ride.

I replayed the telephone conversation I’d had with Kendrick, searching for answers. There had to have been a connection between Randall Cates and the professor. If it wasn’t the dead girl, Trinity Raye, then what was it?

At the hospital, I climbed stiffly out of the ambulance and asked the EMT if I could borrow her cell phone. My energy was beginning to sag as my adrenal glands decided they had done their work for the evening and needed a two-week vacation. The EMTs carried Lucas on the stretcher. He squinted ahead into the brightly lit ambulance bay, his features contorted in alarm, as if he expected to discover a vivisectionist’s laboratory behind the secured door.

“Don’t be afraid, Lucas.”

“Will you come with me?”

“I’ll see you inside,” I promised him.

His expression said he didn’t believe me. He was right not to.

Those were the last words I would speak to Lucas Sewall, although I didn’t know it at the time.

I dialed Sheriff Rhine’s mobile phone. I caught her on the road to Bog Pond.

“I’m at Down East Community Hospital,” I said. “I didn’t want to leave the poor kid alone. I also thought it would be a good idea for a doctor to sign off on my fitness for duty after going into the water like that.”

“That’s uncharacteristically prudent of you.”

“I don’t want anyone complaining that I refused to follow protocol. My personnel file is thick enough already.” My whole body felt like it had been pummeled by a sadistic Swedish masseuse. “I think you should send one of your deputies to the Spragues’ house.”