The Precipice: A Novel Read online

  The snare wouldn’t have hurt me. Even if I’d gotten a leg caught, I would have been able to snip the cable with the wire cutters on my multitool. But I preferred not to disturb the trap.

  A wave of silent warblers passed through the trees overhead, individual birds flitting from branch to branch, indistinguishable except as momentary flashes of color—and then they were gone and the forest held its breath again.

  I was readying myself to leap over the snare when my muscles locked up. My body refused to obey the commands traveling from my brain. Something was wrong here.

  My father had run a trapline in the western Maine mountains when I was young, and he had taught me to always set two snares for smart predators like coyotes and foxes: one in plain sight, the other concealed. In trying to avoid the first trap, the clever animal would fall victim to the second. I lowered myself onto my haunches, but I didn’t see anything on the ground, not a foothold trap or a leaf mat that might have concealed a pit filled with poisoned spikes.

  Shafts of sunlight—alive with drifting dust motes—entered the forest from the field. I lifted my head to feel the warmth on my face. That was when I saw it. Five feet in the air, another fishing line was strung horizontal to the forest floor. My breath caught in my throat when I saw that it was a trip wire connected to a bomb.

  A Maxwell House coffee can had been nailed sideways to a tree. The monofilament line ran through a hole punched in the plastic lid and was connected, I assumed, to a switch or fuse inside. What else was inside the can? Black powder? Roofing nails? Buckshot?

  Booby-trapping your land is a felony in Maine. The danger that a jury-rigged explosive might pose to innocent people who have a good reason to be on your property—firemen, police officers, utility workers—outweighs your right to blow yourself to bits. Not that the law has ever been effective at protecting people from themselves.

  “The Dows don’t screw around,” Pinkham had said. He wasn’t kidding.

  To be on the safe side, I looked to see if there might be a third trap. But evidently there were limits to the number of precautions the Dows were willing to take to protect their pot fields.

  Getting past the snare required some gymnastics on my part. I ducked my head to avoid the trip wire and tumbled forward over the wire noose. I rubbed the leaf mold off the bottom of my jeans as I climbed to my feet. I would need to make a note of the explosive’s location so a bomb-disposal officer could remove it.

  A shadow passed at the edge of my vision.

  “Don’t move!” The voice was almost doglike in its timbre.

  I raised my hands.

  “You’re not going to shoot me in the back,” I said. “Are you, Trevor?”

  “You’re trespassing. This land is posted. Law says we can shoot trespassers.”

  “Game wardens don’t need permission,” I said, and began to turn around.

  “Stop!”

  Trevor Dow wore the same outfit he’d had on the day he’d tussled with Charley Stevens outside the Monson General Store: dirty jeans, flannel shirt, Dexter boots. His beard shone like spun copper in the brilliant light of morning. He raised a scoped AR-15 rifle—the kind used to execute coyotes—and pointed it at my heart.

  “Did I miss one of your game cameras coming up the hill?” I asked. “Is that how you found me?”

  His mouth jerked to a smile beneath his mustache. He was fifteen feet away, and he had his finger on the trigger. It was too far to make a flying tackle.

  “It’s illegal to booby-trap your land, Trevor,” I said. “And making bombs is a felony.”

  He stared down the scope at me. “Take your gun out. Slowly!”

  I didn’t like where this was headed. I could only hope that Fitzpatrick and Chamberlain were nearby, and that Trevor Dow wouldn’t decide to use me as a human shield if they drew their weapons. But I didn’t see what options I had.

  His fox-colored eyes bored into mine. “Toss it at my feet.… Not that way! By the barrel.”

  My heavy SIG landed with an audible thud on the dirt. He squatted down beside it. I hoped he would take his eyes off me while he picked up the gun. It might give me a split second to throw myself at him. But Trevor Dow was wise to my plan and began feeling around blindly with one hand. The other remained on the pistol grip of the AR-15, his index finger curled around the trigger.

  His mouth jerked again as his hand closed around my gun. He hefted the SIG in his palm, as if trying to guess its weight. “I’ve always wanted one of these.”

  The explosion took us both by surprise.

  The earth didn’t shake. There was no flash of light. Just a boom. And then a man’s scream.

  My head whipped around in the direction of the noise. Pinkham, I thought.

  In my peripheral vision, I saw Trevor Dow flinch. The hand holding my pistol fell to his side, and the SIG dropped into the weeds. He looked down to see where it had gone. The barrel of the rifle drooped.

  Without pausing to think, I hurled myself across the space between us.

  My forehead collided with his hip bone, and he let out a gasp. Before he could bring the butt of the rifle down on my skull, I wrapped my arms around his lower thighs and lifted him clear off the ground. Trevor landed hard on his shoulders—I heard the wind propelled from his lungs—but he never let go of the AR-15. A shot fired into the air when his trigger finger clenched.

  Lying on his back, Trevor shoved the stock of the rifle at my chest, trying to separate us, but I got hold of the hand guard. He was expecting me to play tug-of-war with him. Instead, I yanked the barrel to my right side while pushing the polymer stock against his temple with my left hand.

  He was a strong man, stronger than me, but the impact of the gun against his head caused his grip to slip. Now I pushed the muzzle forward and pulled the stock back. The metal sight knocked him between the eyes.

  I pulled back with all my might, knees planted firmly on the ground, and stripped the AR-15 from his grasp.

  The motion caused me to fall backward. Trevor was bleeding badly from his cut brow, but he wasn’t done fighting. He lunged at me, trying to grab the weapon.

  I had just enough time to drive the stock into his chin. There was a sharp crack as the mandible shattered. Blood sprayed from his mouth. He slumped to the ground.

  I shimmied away from him until I was far enough away to get the rifle turned around.

  “Don’t move,” I said, aiming at his chest.

  He lay on his side, red drool trailing from his lips, a deep wound plastering the hair across his forehead.

  “You’re under arrest,” I said, panting.

  I could see his rib cage expanding and contracting as he struggled to catch his breath.

  I reached into my back pocket and found my handcuffs. I threw them at his legs.

  “Put those on.”

  “Fuck you.”

  I raised the barrel. “Do it!”

  He fumbled with the cuffs while I got my feet beneath me. My ears were ringing. I watched him close the clasps.

  “Now get up.”

  He put his weight on his hands until he was on all fours. He began hop-crawling toward me as I bent to retrieve my pistol. The son of a bitch is going to try rushing me! I circled around behind him.

  Defeated, Trevor Dow staggered to a standing position.

  “You’re under arrest for assaulting a police officer,” I said.

  “Fuck you.”

  During the struggle, the world had gotten small. Now I could feel it expanding around me, returning to full size. I heard shouting. Dogs barking. The roar of engines.

  Pinkham.

  I felt a sudden pull on my heart, strong enough that it might have tugged me across the field. The impulse was to run to see what was happening. But there were other booby traps on the Dows’ land, probably lots of them.

  I told Hay Face to start walking.

  Trevor Dow spat blood into the weeds and began to march. I kept pace behind him, with the tip of the gun raised, fully pre
pared to drill a hole in his back. We followed the perimeter of the field toward a fenced group of buildings that looked, from a distance, almost like a concentration camp plopped down in the Maine woods.

  Looking to my right, I began seeing structures outside the wire: an old two-seater outhouse missing its door; a listing hay barn about to collapse on top of the vintage tractor parked inside; assorted storage sheds. I saw a washing machine with a trio of sunflowers growing up from inside the open lid; cable spools used as picnic tables; and, beside them, a rusted oil tank like a red elephant in the tall grass.

  A mustached man on an ATV came racing across the field. His unbuttoned shirt flapped behind him like denim-blue wings. I spotted a deer rifle in a scabbard mounted to the side of the four-wheeler. Troy Dow glanced at us but never slowed to help his brother. We watched him disappear into the woods.

  Some thirty or so people milled about in the road up ahead. From a distance I couldn’t tell what they were looking at, but their attention seemed riveted. They were men and women, boys and girls. Idling trucks spat out toxic fumes, and barking dogs circulated among the onlookers, excited by all the commotion.

  I glimpsed a figure in a powder blue hat through the crowd. It was Trooper Chamberlain. My pulse throbbed in my neck.

  Trevor and I weren’t far from the oil tank. A pipe jutted from one end. It looked solid enough.

  “Over there!” I told him. “Walk to the tank.”

  I raised the rifle barrel to show him that I was serious. He let out a snarl but did as ordered.

  I found the keys to my handcuffs in my pocket and made him extend his arms. I unlocked one cuff, then snapped it shut again around the pipe. A purple bruise had begun to blossom above his left eye.

  I turned and began jogging toward the crowd, holding the AR-15 in a port-arms position across my chest. To my right was a jumble of mobile homes, arranged in no obvious pattern inside a tall wire fence. In the center of the compound was a big rotting farmhouse that had once been painted red but now looked mostly gray.

  Chamberlain held his .45 pistol with both hands. He shouted at everyone to get back, but the mob kept surging forward. I spotted Toby Dow among the bystanders. The young man was red-faced and sobbing. Many of the smaller children were crying, too.

  “Stand aside!” I said.

  The crowd broke apart as if I were a grenade thrown in their midst. Suddenly, they had no idea how many cops were raiding their backwoods garrison. A couple of men hightailed it back inside the compound; a few others jumped into their waiting trucks and went shooting off down the road. A skinny boy drove away on another muddy all-terrain vehicle with an overweight girl on the back, her hands clutching his stomach. She screamed something and flipped me the bird.

  Chamberlain pointed with two fingers at the tree line behind him. “Pinkham!”

  “Do you need help here?”

  “No, but he does.”

  I sprinted along the far edge of the clearing, hoping I wouldn’t step into a bear trap. I found Fitzpatrick kneeling beside a big maple. From the rear, it looked as if he was praying to the old tree. Then I saw Pinkham lying on the ground, his skin the color of bone.

  There were finger smears of blood on Fitzpatrick’s cheek, and both of his hands were red from applying pressure to the other man’s wounds. When I got closer, I saw that the bottom half of Wes Pinkham was missing. The improvised bomb had ripped off both legs below the crotch.

  35

  I wish I could say that Pinkham had died instantly, but Fitzpatrick told me the warden investigator had lived for a few minutes, trying to sit up, not knowing where his legs were, until the light went out of his eyes.

  I’d also like to say that I didn’t gag. That, too, would be a lie.

  I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. Fitzpatrick was on the phone with Dispatch. He had covered the corpse at his feet with his blue windbreaker.

  State police troopers and sheriff’s deputies would soon converge on the hilltop. Dozens of game wardens would rush to Blanchard when word got out that one of our own had been murdered. The state police would send bomb-sniffing dogs and a disposal unit from Augusta. Only once the compound was secure would the medical examiner be allowed up to tell us what we already knew: Wes Pinkham had been cut in half by an improvised explosive device.

  Fitzpatrick called DeFord next. “Wes has been killed,” he said without prelude. “He walked into a hidden explosive on the Dow property.” He cleared his throat. “No, he didn’t. Wes said the land was booby-trapped, but he’d been in and out of here enough times, he wasn’t worried.” He paused while DeFord asked a question. “Chamberlain and your man Bowditch. Uh-huh. All right.” He held out the phone, which was tacky from the dead man’s blood. “The lieutenant wants to talk with you.”

  “Are you OK, Mike?” DeFord asked.

  My mouth tasted of regurgitated coffee. “No, sir. I’m angry.”

  “So am I.” Wes Pinkham had been a mentor to him, too. “What the hell happened?”

  “I didn’t see it,” I said. “I came up the hill a different way. I found another bomb at the edge of the woods—similar to the one that killed Pinkham—but I got past it without triggering the explosive. I must have given myself away in one of the Dows’ game cameras, though, because I found Trevor Dow waiting for me with an AR-15. I managed to disarm him and then handcuffed him to an oil tank.”

  “Good man.” The lieutenant’s voice sounded distant.

  “There’s one other thing, sir,” I said. “Troy Dow got away. I saw him ride off into the woods on an ATV.”

  “In which direction?”

  “North. Back toward Monson.”

  “Put Fitzpatrick back on.”

  I handed the phone to the detective. He pressed it to his ear and turned away from me. Whatever Fitzpatrick had to say to DeFord, he didn’t want me to hear.

  I looked over at Chamberlain and saw that the mob had dispersed except for a single barking dog, which had decided its responsibility was to continue sounding the alert. The Dows had all vanished inside their trailers or taken flight down secret trails into the woods.

  Pinkham had been a good man and a good warden. He’d had a wife, children, and grandchildren. He hadn’t deserved to be murdered by cowards like Troy and Trevor Dow.

  No one deserved that.

  I wanted Trevor to contemplate spending the rest of his life behind bars for what he and his family had done. I wanted to parade the whole goddamned clan past Wes Pinkham’s lifeless body. I started walking toward the oil tank to fetch my prisoner. A red haze obscured my vision.

  Greasy smoke began to rise from inside the compound. One of the Dows was trying to get rid of incriminating evidence.

  A siren wailed in the distance. Half a minute later, a black Ford SUV bearing the insignia of the Piscataquis County Sheriff’s Department came screaming up the hill. It slid to a stop on the gravel, and a female deputy jumped out holding a pump shotgun.

  “Deputy!” I pivoted so she could see the badge on my belt.

  The woman sprinted toward me. She had short brown hair, and she was wearing a ballistic vest over a chocolate-colored uniform.

  “I heard there’s a man down,” she said, already out of breath.

  “Wes Pinkham. He’s dead. Over there.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I need you to do something for me. Do you know Trevor Dow?”

  The muscles around her eyes began to twitch. “I know him.”

  “Well, this is his rifle. I took it away from him after he pointed it at me. He’s handcuffed to an oil tank on the other side of that barn. I need you to go get him for me. Here are my keys.”

  She stared at the keys as I dropped them into her palm. “You don’t want to do it?”

  “I don’t trust myself with him at this point.”

  More sirens sounded, coming up the road. I turned and began walking with the rifle toward the gate into the compound.

  “Where are you going?” she called after me.


  “I need to find someone.”

  “They’ve already killed one warden. You’re going to get yourself shot!”

  Wes Pinkham would have told me not to risk my life to locate Toby Dow. But then, it no longer mattered what he wanted. I tightened my grip on the AR-15 and kept marching. It was completely reckless, but I felt armored by my anger.

  As I passed through the gate, I could feel their eyes crawling over me. A wheel-rutted lane meandered between the mobile homes, garages, and sheds toward the farmhouse at the center of the compound. It was a rambling three-story structure—no doubt the ancestral Dow manse—and it dominated its surroundings like a feudal castle among grass-thatched huts.

  A barn cat trotted across the space in front of me and ducked under a boat trailer.

  My gut told me that the worst of the Dow men had fled, afraid to be found violating bench warrants or in possession of firearms as felons. But there might still be a teenaged boy around, looking to make his bones by assassinating a Maine game warden with a deer rifle. And I doubted that the Dow women were harmless.

  Smoke spiraled up from a long, flat-roofed building. The windows had been sprayed with black paint, but I could see flames glowing behind the opaque glass. The Dows had constructed their drug warehouse apart from the trailers in the event it needed to be razed in a hurry.

  I kept advancing toward the farmhouse. Someone else could worry about the fire. A porch stretched the length of the first floor and was littered with blue and yellow toys, potted tomatoes, and mismatched chairs. Pushed up against the back was a ratty sofa, and seated on it, out of the sun, was a tiny old woman. I knew who she was: the witch of the castle.

  She had pink skin the color of a dog’s belly and long frizzy hair that had once been red but was now mostly whitish yellow. She wore a biker’s leather jacket over a cotton nightdress. Her legs were so short they dangled clear of the floor, and on her feet was a pair of doll-size moccasins. She sipped from a can of Mountain Dew.