Dearly Departed Read online

  “Have you tried The Harbor?”

  seventeen

  The Harbor was all blond wood and glass, surrounded by a gravel parking lot on one side and Lake Peterson on the other; wooden platforms where patrons could dock their boats extended into the water. At the far end of the parking lot were several slots for RVs, each with a bank of water faucets and electrical outlets protruding from the ground. A worn asphalt driveway led past the slots down to the lake, where a sign asked drivers not to block the boat landing with their vehicles. A half dozen pickups and 4X4s were bunched together in the lot.

  “Is this it, Alison?” I heard myself ask as I parked my car. “Is this why you faked your death? So you could build a drive-by resort on a mud lake in rural Wisconsin? Is this your dream?”

  A moment later I had to duck beneath a plank suspended between two ladders just inside the door. Three men stood on the makeshift scaffold, all of them examining a clump of multicolored wires hanging down from a false ceiling. Another pair was studying a floor duct on the other side of the room. A sixth man was crouched behind the bar, working on a sink, softly humming a country-western tune from the Hank Williams catalog as he fixed a heavy pipe wrench against a fitting.

  “Excuse me,” I said.

  He turned his head but did not stop working.

  “Is Michael Bettich here?”

  He shook his head.

  “Expect her anytime soon?”

  “Couldn’t say.”

  “Know where I can find her?”

  He shook his head again. “Not my turn to watch her,” he told me, trying to turn the fitting, meeting stubborn resistance.

  “It’s important that I find her.”

  “Not to me,” he replied, grunting loudly as the fitting slowly turned.

  The other workers were equally helpful.

  I returned to my car and sat with the door open while listening to the public radio station out of the University of Minnesota-Duluth—the only station I could dial up that played jazz. After two songs I shut the door and fired up the Colt, deciding against waiting for Michael’s return.

  “It shouldn’t be this hard, it really shouldn’t,” I muttered.

  It wasn’t.

  Just as I was about to put my car into gear, a Chevy Blazer cruised into the lot sporting all the paraphernalia of a police vehicle; KREEL COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT and a six-pointed star were stenciled on both doors. It was driven by Deputy Gretchen Rovick. Alison Donnerbauer Emerton was her passenger. She had changed the color of her hair from brown to a deep auburn—women have always found it easier to change their appearance than men—but even through the windshield, her blue-green eyes were undisguisable.

  I stepped out of my car as the vehicle stopped. Gretchen took a hard look at me. She clearly didn’t like what she saw.

  “What?” Alison asked. I couldn’t hear her, but it was easy enough to read her lips through the glass.

  “Taylor,” Gretchen answered.

  Alison seemed genuinely surprised that I had found her.

  I waited until they exited the vehicle.

  “Good morning, Deputy,” I said to Gretchen. She didn’t reply. I turned to the other woman. Ginger had been right. She was much prettier in person. “Alison Donnerbauer Emerton, I presume. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”

  Alison smiled slightly. “I must have screwed up.”

  I told her where. She tapped her forehead with the fingers of her right hand as if to punish herself for her carelessness. “I’d forgotten I told Marie about the name Rosalind Colletti,” she confessed.

  “We all make mistakes.”

  “And this one is going to cost me, isn’t it? How much?”

  A bribe? I thought it was beneath her and told her so. “Besides, I’m already being well paid.”

  “What then? What will make you go away?”

  “Tell me why, that’s all. Tell me why you went to all the trouble.” I was desperate to hear her explanation, and it probably showed.

  She smiled at me; it was a superior smile. “It’s a long story, and quite frankly I see no reason to share it with you.”

  Gretchen chuckled. She was leaning on the front fender of her Blazer, watching us.

  “I could make your life difficult,” I told Alison.

  She smiled some more. A threat? She thought it was beneath me and told me so.

  I was contemplating a reply—and getting nowhere—when a desperate squeal of tires captured my attention. A white Buick Regal was cutting across the parking lot at high speed, spitting chunks of gravel and an impressive dust cloud behind it. Two men I couldn’t identify sat in the front seat. Suddenly the car skidded to a stop thirty yards in front of us. The passenger was holding something at arm’s length and pointing it out of the window.

  “Down!” I screamed and tried to pull Alison to the ground.

  Alison pushed me away and stood up, watching me and not the car, asking angrily, “What are you doing?!”

  Bullets were already flying. Gretchen took a slug in the leg. The force of the blow spun her against the side of the Blazer and knocked her down. I rolled away from the Buick, more or less toward the Blazer; and rolled over a Smith and Wesson .38—Gretchen’s gun. I grabbed it with both hands and continued rolling until I was on my feet in a Weaver stance, a shooting stance with good balance. The Buick was moving now, heading out of the parking lot. I squeezed off four rounds just as it hit the highway. The rear window shattered, littering the asphalt with tiny fragments of safety glass. The car fishtailed but didn’t stop.

  Her skin was a ghastly, ashen color, and her breathing was so shallow that for a moment I thought she might be dead. But she was warm to my touch, and I could detect a rapid, thready pulse. I gently rolled her onto her back, and she opened her eyes. They were filled with terror and confusion. I said something to her. I don’t remember what. “You’ll be all right, Alison.” Something like that.

  I tore open her blouse. The hole was slightly above and to the left of her right breast. I sprinted to Gretchen’s patrol car and found her first-aid kit. I packed the wound with gauze, trying to prevent air from entering the chest cavity. I was fumbling with a compress when I heard Gretchen’s voice.

  “Officer down! Officer down!” she repeated. She wasn’t quite screaming. I glanced up at her. She was in the Blazer, laying on her side across the front seat, favoring her right leg as she worked the radio. I could see a hole midway up her thigh. Blood was seeping out of it.

  “Deputy Rovick, you’ve been shot,” I told her.

  “Don’t you think I know that?!” This time she was screaming.

  When we had talked over dinner three weeks earlier, Gretchen had accused her fellow deputies in the Kreel County Sheriff’s Department of sexism, insisting that they were slower to respond when she called for backup than when male deputies called. Maybe so. But you couldn’t prove it by me because an officer—a male— arrived within two minutes, and within five more it seemed the entire day watch had converged on The Harbor. The workers inside the resort studied us through the large windows. Some of them were eating their lunches.

  The first officer to arrive went directly to Gretchen. His name tag read: G. LOUSHINE.

  “I need a tourniquet!” he barked over his shoulder.

  I tossed him one from the first-aid kit while continuing to maintain pressure on Alison’s sucking chest wound with the palm of my hand. Her eyes were still open, but she didn’t speak.

  “Two suspects, white males I think, driving a white four-door sedan,” Gretchen recited as the deputy applied the tourniquet. “They hit us with a MAC 10.”

  “A Buick Regal, Wisconsin plates W-ZERO-F-F-W,” I added. “And it was an UZI.”

  “You’re crazy! How do you know that?” Gretchen yelled at me.

  “How come you don’t?” I yelled back. Gretchen didn’t relay even her incomplete information to dispatch when she called for assistance, giving the suspects a good five-minute head start, an
d it troubled me.

  “W-ZERO-F-F-W?” Loushine repeated.

  “Call letters for a ham radio operator,” I told him. “Wisconsin allows hams to use their call letters in place of regular license plate numbers.”

  “That’s right,” Loushine agreed under his breath and sprinted to his own car to broadcast the information I supplied instead of using Gretchen’s radio. Perhaps he didn’t want to embarrass her.

  While Loushine was making his call, the sheriff arrived. His name tag read: R. ORMAN. He didn’t rush to his deputy’s side, which is what I would have done. Instead, he moved directly to where Alison lay on the gravel in an expanding pool of her own blood.

  “My God!” he said, sucking in his breath. “Mike!” He knelt next to her and took her hand in both of his. “Mike,” he repeated. The woman looked up at him but otherwise didn’t respond.

  The sheriff’s eyes glazed over until they resembled Alison’s. They were both in shock. Loushine placed a hand on the sheriff’s shoulder and said, “The bus is on its way.” Orman didn’t reply, and Loushine had to shake him. “Sheriff? Sheriff, the bus is on its way.”

  Orman turned to stare at his deputy, but it was a few moments before his eyes focused.

  “Saginau to Deer Lake, thirty-seven minutes,” he said shaking his head, regaining his senses. “The Harbor is midway—make it eighteen minutes. Another eighteen going back. Too long. Can’t wait for the ambulance. We’ll take her to the hospital in my car. Get a blanket.” A few seconds later four of us gently lifted Alison from the gravel and slid the blanket underneath her. I insisted that we roll her over on her chest. “Transport the victim with her injured side down,” the first-aid manual says. Using the blanket as a stretcher, we gently placed the woman on the back seat of the sheriff’s car. I rode with her. No one questioned this.

  Sheriff Orman didn’t speak, instead concentrating all his energy on driving the cruiser at high speed over the winding Wisconsin back roads, his siren blasting the woodland quiet to shreds, although we didn’t overtake a single vehicle. He took one curve too fast, and Alison moaned. It was the first sound she had made since being shot. The sheriff tried to check on her through the rearview mirror, but she was too low on the seat.

  “We’re almost there, Alison,” I told her.

  We drove another mile before the sheriff said, “Did you call her Alison?”

  I didn’t reply. It wasn’t a good time.

  We were Code Ten when we rolled to the emergency entrance of the three-story Saginau Medical Center. Code Ten means sirens and flashing lights. It was a good thing we had them, too, because without them the hospital staff would not have known we were coming. No one had bothered to warn them—not the sheriff, not his deputies. Some people just don’t react well to catastrophe.

  Two doctors, male and female, and two nurses met us at the door and helped us transfer Alison from the back seat to a gurney. I discovered later that the doctors were husband and wife. Both had agreed to work in a rural community for three years in exchange for medical school scholarship money. The National Health Service Corps sent them to Saginau, population 3,267, the seat of power in Kreel County. Here they met, married, and decided to stay after satisfying their obligations. He was from New Jersey, she was from New Mexico. She gave the orders.

  “Goddammit Bobby, you should have told us you were coming,” she scolded the sheriff as she examined Alison. Her husband was taking blood pressure and pulse.

  “Can you hear me?” the wife asked Alison. “What’s your name, honey? Do you know who you are?”

  Alison’s answer was just above a whisper: “Don’t call me honey.”

  “Pulse is one twenty-two, blood pressure ninety-six over fifty-eight,” said the husband.

  “Okay, here we go,” the wife warned her husband and the nurses. “Gunshot wound, right side, midlobe, no exit. She has blood in her mouth, she’s vomiting blood. Hang a liter of D-5 and lactated ringers. Run it wide open. Wake up pharmacy. She needs to be dosed. I want an antibiotic that really cuts the pus. Call X ray. Tell ’em to bring the portable. I want a full set of chest films and a flat plate of the abdomen. She doesn’t sound good. I want respiratory therapy down here right away. Put her on 0-2. CBC type and cross-match for six units. Get an NG tube into her.”

  “Should we put in a catheter?” the husband asked.

  “First things first. We’ll take her directly to OR. Let’s roll, people. Stat!”

  I understood “stat.” It’s an abbreviation of the Latin word “statim,” meaning “right fucking now!” The rest was all Greek to me.

  They wheeled Alison down a dimly lit corridor and into a room designated simply Room One, where we were not allowed to follow.

  “She’s in good hands,” a nurse informed us. The sheriff apparently wasn’t so sure and tried to stay with the gurney. The nurse stopped him, using both hands and all her weight to keep him from crossing the line of yellow tape on the floor that separated the receiving room from the rest of the emergency facilities. Reluctantly, he spun away and went to look out the door.

  The nurse took a deep breath. “You can clean up in there,” she told me and gestured toward a rest room with her head. That’s when I noticed for the first time the blood that stained my hands, my jacket, my shirt, my jeans, my Nikes. I nodded and headed toward the rest room, stopping first at a water fountain. While I was drinking, the sheriff slapped a handcuff over my left wrist. I protested, but he wasn’t listening. He pulled me to a set of metal chairs that were anchored to the floor and wound the other cuff around an arm. Well, at least I could sit down.

  He abandoned me without comment and stood vigil just behind the yellow tape, the tips of his black boots toeing the line, his eyes fixed on the closed operating room door. He stood there, not moving, for nearly twenty minutes, until the ambulance arrived with Deputy Rovick.

  The receiving nurse poked her head inside the operating room, and soon the woman doctor emerged and went over to Gretchen. She loosened the tourniquet and examined the deputy’s wound.

  “I know you’re hurting, but there’s someone else who needs me more right now,” the doctor said “Do you understand?”

  Gretchen nodded.

  The doctor gave quiet instructions to the nurse and then told Gretchen, “We’ll give you something for the pain, and I’ll be with you as soon as I can. Don’t worry. You’re going to be fine. I wouldn’t leave you otherwise.”

  The deputy nodded again, and the doctor directed the ambulance drivers to wheel Gretchen into Room Two. Orman clutched the doctor’s elbow. She pulled away. “I need to scrub,” was all she said. She returned to Room One.

  A moment later Deputy Loushine burst through the door like he’d had a running start.

  “The scene has been secured for CID; we have bulletins on the car,” he announced.

  “What about the plates?” I asked.

  “They belong to a ham operator in the next county,” he answered as if he worked for me. “The sheriff over there is moving on it for us.”

  “What about witnesses, Gary?” the sheriff asked his deputy.

  “Just Gretchen, Mike, and him,” the deputy answered, indicating me. “The workers inside The Harbor claim they didn’t see anything.” He said to me: “Gretchen said you got off four rounds at the vehicle.”

  “Hit it, too,” I replied.

  “You’re under arrest,” the sheriff told me.

  Loushine caged me inside a large tiled holding cell that resembled a locker-room shower. It was empty of all furniture except a lidless toilet that was hidden from outside view behind a low wall in the corner. The floor sloped gradually to a drain in the center of the room. Overhead, fluorescent lights were protected by a metal grating. The sole window looked out across the corridor to the fingerprint station. A blind was on the outside of the window. I sat on the floor in the corner directly across from the door. My hands were cuffed behind my back. I sat a long time. And as the hours flowed away, I found myself doing somet
hing I hadn’t done for years, not since my wife and daughter were killed by a drunk driver. I prayed. I prayed for Alison, beseeching God to intervene on her behalf. But just as hard, I prayed for myself—prayed that I wasn’t responsible for bringing the shooters down on her.

  The sheriff arrived several hours later—at least I was guessing it was several hours. I had lost all track of time. Using the wall for support, I managed to shimmy to my feet. My legs were stiff from sitting, and I tried to stretch them as best I could without the use of my hands.

  “How is she?” I asked.

  The sheriff closed the door to the holding cell, thought better of it, and opened it again. He stepped out into the corridor and drew the blinds across the cell’s window. When he reentered the cell, I noticed that he was no longer wearing his jacket, Sam Browne belt, holster, gun, or badge.

  “So it’s going to be like that,” I said.

  “You’re going to answer my questions,” he told me.

  “Gladly,” I said.

  Only the sheriff didn’t ask any. Instead, he paced relentlessly in front of me, his hands clenched, then pointing, then resting on his hips. His face was red and twitching; his lips were pushed forward bearing his teeth; his breathing was fast and shallow. He was displaying all the classic signals of the first stage of aggression and ritualized combat—assault is possible—that I’d been taught to recognize while training to become a police officer. If I had been in uniform, with my hands free, I would have given him a good whiff of pepper spray.

  “You brought them here,” he said at last.

  “Brought who?” I asked.

  “‘Brought who, brought who,’” he mimicked. “You know who. You brought them.”

  “No, no,” I protested. I had thought about it a long time, and my brain—and my conscience—refused to accept responsibility. “It has to be a coincidence.”

  “No coincidence,” The sheriff insisted. “They came with you.”

  And suddenly it occurred to me that he knew all there was about Alison—where she had come from and why. I told him so.