Widowmaker (7 page)

And yet when Spike opened the passenger door of his truck, the animal leaped obediently inside, as eager as the family dog going for a ride.

“Good boy, Shadow,” I heard the Goth say.

He had pulled on a black trench coat and fingerless gloves to make his getaway. He moved with surprising speed and purpose for a man with so few functioning brain cells. He hurried around the front of the truck, pushing the remote starter button on the key fob. I heard the engine turn over.

I tumbled down the snowbank and jumped into the driveway. “Hold it, Spike!”

The Goth stopped in his tracks, his arms dropped to his sides, and his mouth fell open. For about ten seconds, he gawked at me. Then he reached for the driver's door.

“Hold it right there!”

I sprinted forward as he climbed inside the running truck, and managed to catch the door handle before he could yank it shut. We played tug-of-war for a few seconds, and then he threw the truck into reverse. The pickup lurched away, forcing me to release my grip or be pulled along with it.

I would estimate that the backward-moving Raider hit the snowbank at thirty miles per hour—enough speed to fill the bed with snow and bury the rear wheels. Spike tried to drive forward, but he was stuck now. An acrid cloud of exhaust fumes and burning rubber gathered around the truck as he tried in vain to dislodge it.

I put my hand on the grip of my sidearm. I had reached the limits of my patience. The idiot might have dislocated my shoulder. “Step out of the vehicle!”

He stared openmouthed at me through the windshield as I got myself into position parallel to his door. Just as I was about to repeat my command for him to get out, he threw himself across the seat and pushed the passenger door open, shouting, “Go, Shadow! Go!”

The wolf dog gave a yelp when he hit the snow.

But instead of running off, the beautiful animal stopped. He stood there, looking back and forth between us with his luminous yellow eyes. He seemed to have no idea what was happening. I couldn't blame him. This whole comedy had me shaking my head. Wait until I told Kathy how it had gone down.

“Step out of the vehicle,” I shouted again. “Step out of the vehicle now!”

It was then that a dark shape swooped into my peripheral vision. I was so focused on the ridiculous man behind the wheel that I missed Carrie Michaud running up behind me. I felt the knife between my shoulder blades before I saw it.

 

7

The sensation was like nothing I had experienced: somewhere between a sharp poke and a hard punch. At first, my mind couldn't connect the peculiar pain to a recognition of what had just happened.

Then, as I turned, I saw the blade glint in the winter sunlight. And the neurons fired.

She had just stabbed me in the back.

Carrie Michaud lunged at me again. I brought my left arm up to protect myself and received a slash across the forearm. This time I felt the pain fully, knowing what it was. I staggered away, trying to get my legs under me, but I stepped on a patch of ice and went down on one knee. I fumbled for my sidearm but couldn't find the grip.

She came at me again, this time from above. Her lips pulled back from her sharp little teeth.

All I could think to do was punch her. I jabbed with my left fist and hit her squarely between the eyes. Her head snapped back violently, the knife dropped from her hand, and down she went.

I spun around frantically for a few moments, trying to feel with one hand between my shoulder blades, certain it would come back wet with blood. But all I could feel was torn fabric.

The blade had sliced cleanly through my poncho and the parka underneath. My body armor had been designed to stop a bullet, not a knife. By all rights, the blade should have cut through my trapezoid muscle, severed an artery, and punctured a lung, if not my heart. Had I turned at just the right moment? I had no idea how I had been saved.

My other hand finally found the grip of my SIG and pulled it free of its holster.

Carrie Michaud lay crumpled on the ground. I had knocked her out cold, or maybe she had hit her head on the ice. Her body looked as delicate as that of a child. And yet this waif had come within inches of killing me.

Under the law, I would have been justified in shooting her dead. It didn't matter that she seemed to be unconscious. She had stabbed me, and that was all that mattered. I knew I could pull the trigger and end Carrie Michaud's miserable existence and the state of Maine would claim that I had been fully justified. The legislature had granted me an indulgence to commit homicide.

I lined up my gun sights at her narrow chest and slipped my finger inside the trigger guard. In shooting class, you are taught that is the point of no return. Out of the box, in single-action stage, the SIG Sauer P226 has a trigger-action pull rate of 4.5 pounds. The slightest squeeze and it would be done.

But I couldn't.

Instead, I swung the pistol around on her boyfriend. If anything, the Goth looked even more helpless and pathetic. He was still sitting wide-eyed and slack-jawed behind the wheel of the immobilized Raider. Smoke from the exhaust continued to melt snow and fill the yard with oily fumes.

“Don't you fucking move!” I shouted.

But his mind was afloat in some other drug-induced realm.

I flipped Carrie Michaud onto her stomach and twisted her arms behind her back. I felt a cruel urge to snap her wrists but resisted the impulse. I reached behind my belt and found my handcuffs. When I heard the clasps click, I took a breath.

The harrowing reality of the situation was slowly beginning to take hold. I had almost joined the ranks of the police dead, only there would have been no video to show the cadets at the Criminal Justice Academy. Just a cautionary tale to frighten the new recruits:
“Did you ever hear about Mike Bowditch? Poor guy got knifed because he tried to take away a drug addict's wolf.”

The knife had fallen into the snow. It was a Gerber tactical model: black, with a tanto point and a serrated edge. The blade was wet.

Blood was dripping from my arm. It spotted the smooth patch of ice at my feet. The cut wasn't deep, but it stung as if it had been rubbed with salt. I couldn't put pressure on the wound without reholstering my weapon, which meant I had to deal with Spike first.

I used so much strength pulling him from the running truck that he sprawled on the ice at my feet.

“Don't hurt me,” he whined.

“Shut up!”

I used my second set of cuffs to secure his wrists. The effort pumped more and more blood from my arm onto the snow. When I was convinced that both of them were restrained, I finally put my gun away and clutched at the wound. Only then did it occur to me to raise my eyes to the house. For all I knew, there was someone else inside the building; someone else out of their drug-crazed mind, only maybe this person was armed with a gun instead of a knife.

I retreated back to a position of cover behind an oak tree at the edge of the drive.

All the while, the wolf dog watched me with keen interest. He didn't run off, nor did he approach. He just studied me with his eerie eyes while I called for help.

“Can you describe your injuries?” the dispatcher asked.

“She struck me in the back first, but the knife barely punctured the skin. Don't ask me how. I've also got a cut across my left forearm. I'm losing blood, but I've got pressure on the wound, and it seems to be helping.”

“You're sure your back is all right?”

“Pretty sure.”

“Stay on the line until backup arrives. Nearest unit is five minutes away. Ambulance is right behind.”

“I'm not going anywhere.”

“Keep talking to me.”

“What should we talk about?”

“Is there anything else we should know about your situation?”

“You're going to need an animal control agent, too. Make sure he brings the biggest carrier he's got.”

“Is there a vicious dog on the property?”

Even from a distance, I could see his luminous eyes. They looked possessed of an intelligence I had never seen before in a domestic dog. “Not exactly.”

Above my head, the dead leaves of the oak made a sound like whispers whenever the breeze touched them.

The wolf dog kept watching me intently.

*   *   *

I lost count of the units that responded to my 10-74 call. That is what happens when a report goes out that an officer is down; every available cop—sometimes even those off-duty—rush to the scene.

The first to arrive was a Cumberland County Sheriff's deputy. He drove up with lights blazing and sirens wailing and emerged from his salt-splashed cruiser with his weapon already drawn. I think he was a little disappointed to find me alert and upright, albeit leaning against an oak tree, with only a bleeding forearm.

The deputy's name was Moody. He was about my age, black-haired, brown-eyed, with a smirky way of talking out of one side of his mouth. “You're sure you weren't stabbed in the back?”

“See for yourself.”

He examined the holes in my clothing. “Man, all I can say is you got lucky. You owe your guardian angel a big tip.”

He fetched a pressure bandage from his cruiser while we waited for EMTs to arrive. I pressed it tightly to the wound.

“This isn't my first visit to Casa Michaud,” Moody said.

“When was the last time?”

“Halloween. Carrie had a party. One of the girls who showed up had too good a time, if you know what I mean.”

“Overdose?”

“Heroin cut with fentanyl, according to the coroner.”

I'd been trying to understand why she'd stabbed me over a wolf dog. You only had to look into her eyes to see that the wires had short-circuited a long time ago. Where there are drugs, there are almost always guns. If Carrie Michaud had come at me with a pistol instead of a knife, I would have been seriously screwed.

“I shouldn't have let her sneak up on me,” I said.

He shrugged. “Looks can be deceiving.”

Carrie Michaud had been unconscious for such a long time, I had begun to fear she might be dead, the way boxers sometimes die from single punches in boxing movies. But she chose that moment to wake up. She began flopping around, trying to get to her feet, shouting obscenities the whole time.

“You're not going to bleed to death while I go get her?” Moody asked.

“I think I'll survive.”

Moody pulled Carrie Michaud, kicking and screaming, to the back of his car.

Meanwhile, Spike continued to lie compliantly on the cold ground, never making so much as an effort to move.

The ambulance arrived next. The EMTs made me sit in the back while they applied a serious bandage to my arm. I would need to go to the hospital and have a doctor look at the wound, they said. From the way the cotton was drinking up the blood, I would certainly need stitches. The doctor would also want to take a sample in case the blade had been contaminated with some pathogen.

More and more cruisers were arriving. The flashing lights—blue and red—gave the scene a disco vibe. All the attention made me uncomfortable. No one had ever thrown me a surprise party, but I imagined it would have felt slightly less embarrassing. Now that the adrenaline was wearing off, I could smell my own sour perspiration. I was going to have to file a detailed incident report about the assault, and the information I included would determine whether Carrie Michaud was charged with aggravated attempted murder.

I saw a state trooper escort Spike out to the road.

“Do I have to keep sitting here?” I asked one of the EMTs.

“It would be better if you did.”

“I feel perfectly fine.”

“But you lost some blood. If you stand up, you might faint.”

“I'm willing to take the risk,” I said with a smile that was not returned.

I climbed down out of the ambulance and went searching among the cruisers for the one with Spike in the backseat.

“Do you mind if I talk to him?” I asked the trooper standing outside the vehicle.

We'd met once before, but I didn't remember his name. He was one of the new recruits in the state police and still had the stalwart look of a rookie who had yet to see the disconnect between the job he'd applied for and the job he'd ended up doing every day. He shrugged and opened the door for me.

I leaned against the cold blue chassis, looking down at the absurd Goth. The front of his clothes were all wet from lying on the icy asphalt.

“Tell me about the wolf dog,” I said.

He kept his bleached head bowed. “His name is Shadow.”

That was certainly original. “Where did you get him?”

“We traded for him.”

“Traded drugs?”

His head bobbed in what I took to be a confirmation. “Carrie's always wanted a wolf dog. She says wolves are her totem animals. A guy we kind of know said he could get one for us.”

“What's this guy's name?”

He licked his chapped lower lip while he considered this. “Rafael.”

“What's his last name?”

“I don't know, man. He hangs in the same clubs as we do down in Portland. You show me a picture, and I can point him out. We didn't know it was illegal to own a wolf dog.”

“I never said it was.”

He bowed his head again. “Shit.”

“You've been letting him run loose?” I was surprised that the animal would have returned willingly to his new owners.

“He escaped last night. We drove around all morning looking for him, but then we saw him on Pondicherry Road. He just hopped right in with us. Carrie says she was gypped. She says he's a shepherd-husky mix or something and only looks like a wolf. She says she's going to get back at Rafael.”

I closed the door on him. I could feel the cold air on my skin through the rip in my parka.

“How's your arm doing?” the young trooper asked.

“It'll heal. Do you remember that movie they showed at the Academy?”