Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 09/01/12 (4 page)

Max looked away, chewing on the corner of his lip.

“I can’t do
this, Dylan,” he said, glancing around, making sure he wouldn’t be overheard. “If
Milano finds out about it, he’ll have my ass.”

“Got it. No problem,” I said,
rising again. “It was good to see you, Max. I’m sorry about your
trouble.”

“It’s a sorry situation all around,” he said. Jotting a quick note
on his napkin, he slid it across the table to me. I palmed it without reading
it.

“No comment means no comment,” he called after me, making sure the other
staffers in the snack bar heard him. “Next time bring a damn warrant.
Officer.”

I didn’t read the napkin until I was in my car.

Two names were
on it. Pudge Macavoy and Emmaline Gauthier.

I knew both names. All too
well.

Macavoy was a local bad boy, late twenties now, in trouble since he
could walk. I remembered seeing him on TV when Sherry did a piece on domestic
abusers. Shirtless, he was standing in the door of his doublewide screaming
obscenities at her.

Was Macavoy crazy enough to go after Sherry?
Absolutely.

But he hadn’t.

A quick check of the Enforcement Net turned
up Pudge’s name. He was already in custody. He’d been busted in Petoskey for his
third DUI. Too broke to make bail, he’d been cooling in a cell for the past ten
days. He was probably guilty of at least fifty felonies. But not this one.

The
Gauthiers were another matter. There was a small army of them, a dozen families
related by blood or marriage. They’re wood-smoke folks, a catchall term for
blue-collar types who live in isolated cabins and double-wides in the northern
interior. Their homes are heated with free wood gleaned from the state forest, and
the scent of smoke lingers on their clothes like musk. I’m a wood-smoke boy myself,
and not ashamed of it, but it’s not a term you toss around casually. Some newcomers
consider it a synonym for white trash. If you call somebody wood-smoke, you’d best
smile.

The Gauthier clan has a dozen branches, but one has been top dog since
I was a boy. Miss Emmaline, mama to seven boys, grandmother to a roughneck militia.
She could give the Mafia lessons in organized crime, backwoods style.

I could
have hauled in half of the Gauthier clan on one beef or another, but it would have
been a waste of time. Wood-smoke people never talk to the law. Ever. If one of them
had a problem with Sherry Sinclair, there was only one person I could ask.

The
drive into the back country is a bit like time travel, back to my childhood. The
October hills were already dressed in gold and autumn orange, the forest floor
carpeted in leaves in a thousand colors, dusted with white snow doilies here and
there.

The Gauthier clan owns small holdings scattered around the edge of the
state forest, some adjoining, some not. Subsistence farms, for the most part, twenty
acres here, forty there. None larger. But total them up and they cover a lot of
territory.

A generation ago, they ran truck gardens, poached venison and small
game year round, lived off the land as they had for a hundred years.

But times
change. The DNR is tougher on out-of-season hunting now, and you can make a lot more
money growing reefer than raising vegetables.

Emmaline’s farm rests atop a
long rise, with a magnificent view of the rolling, forested hills with a silvery
sliver of the big lake glinting on the horizon. From her front porch, she can watch
the morning sun rise, and then see it set again at the end of the day. She can also
see anyone approaching a good half-hour before they pull into her yard.

She
watched me come, sitting on her porch in a white-pine rocker hand carved by one of
her sons. Or perhaps her great-grandfather. Time is measured differently in the back
country.

As I pulled up in front of the house, she was knitting, waiting for
me. If she was concerned, she gave no sign. She appeared to be alone, but across the
clearing I noticed the hayloft door of her barn was slightly ajar. Someone was
watching me from the shadows. Probably had me in the crosshairs. Welcome to
wood-smoke country.

I kept my hands in plain sight as I walked up the steps to
the broad front porch of her ranch house. The October air was brisk, but the sun was
warm on the weathered wood.

It wasn’t a suburban ranch-style home; the
rambling clapboard cabin could have been teleported from the Great Plains, along
with its owner.

Emmaline Gauthier had one of those old-timey faces you see in
tintypes: weathered, hawkish, carved from oak. Ice-blue eyes that looked right
through you. Her clothes probably came from Goodwill: faded flowered dress, a
threadbare sweater over an apron.

“Good afternoon, Miz Gauthier.” I nodded as
I reached the top step, “I’m—”

“Claudette LaCrosse’s boy,” she finished,
glancing up from her knitting. “You’d be Dylan, right? How’s your
mother?”

“She’s fine, ma’am.”

“Yes, she is. Most folks in town aren’t
kind. Store clerks pretend they don’t see me, snotty brats snicker at my clothes.
But when I visit your mother’s antiques shop, she offers me coffee. Shows me some of
her nice pieces. We chat about the old days. Once in a while I’ll buy some trinket,
but not often. We both grew up in the back country, your ma and me. She ain’t
wood-smoke no more, but she ain’t forgot her roots. Have you?”

“I’m not here
to talk about my ma, Miss Emmaline.”

“Then maybe I should call my lawyer.
Sergeant.”

“That’s your right, if you think you need one.”

“Oh, I expect
I can handle any trouble you got, sonny. I’d offer you cider, but I doubt you’ll be
here that long. What’s this about?”

“Sherry Sinclair,” I said, watching her
face.

“That girl from TV?” She frowned. “I heard about what happened to her.
As I recall, you two were keeping company awhile back. So are you here on police
business? Or on your own hook?”

“Both,” I said.

She glanced up at me,
her gray eyes as sharp as lasers. “No, I don’t think so. It’s mostly personal, ain’t
it.” It wasn’t a question.

“It doesn’t matter what it is,” I said. “I
understand you had some kind of dust-up with Sherry. I need to know about
that.”

“We had us a few problems,” she admitted. “The girl ambushed me. I’m
comin’ out of WalMart with a cartload of groceries. Sherry runs over and shoves a
microphone in my face with a cameraman filmin’ the whole thing like I was on COPS
TV. Girl had sand, I’ll give her that.”

“What did she want?”

“Same thing
you people always want. She’d heard a lot of ugly rumors and gossip—”

“And
checked your clan’s police records,” I put in.

“That too, maybe,” Emmaline
conceded with a wry smile. “She said she was planning a story on the wood-smoke
outlaws.”

“Starring your family?”

“That was the plan.” She shrugged.
“You know my boys, LaCrosse. There’s so many Gauthiers in this county, somebody’s
always jammed up over some beef or other. Nephews, cousins, shirttail kin. If you go
by the numbers, we can look a little shady. That girl had it in her head that
wood-smoke country is the Wild West, and I’m Jesse James.”

“More like Calamity
Jane,” I said. “What happened?”

“We made a trade, like in the old days.”
Emmaline shook her head, smiling at the memory. “I invited her out here to the house
for a visit. No cameras, no mikes, just us. She came, too. Girl wasn’t afraid of
nothin’. We had us a talk, nose to nose, worked things out.”

“Worked them out
how, exactly?”

“The way it usually works. I bought her off.”

“I don’t
believe that.”

“Everybody’s got a price, young LaCrosse, even you, I expect.
The key to a good trade is to figure what that price is. Sherry didn’t care much
about money. Robbie Gilchrist was keepin’ her and if I had his money, I’d burn
mine.”

“Then what was her price?”

“I offered to swap her a better
story.”

“What story?”

She hesitated, reading my eyes. “I wonder how far
I can trust you, young LaCrosse?”

I wasn’t sure how to answer that, so I
didn’t.

“I knew your daddy,” she said, resuming her rocking. “He was a
handsome man, but a little thick, I always thought. You favor your mother, I
believe. There may be hope for you.” Reaching into the pocket of her print apron,
she came out with a cellophaned brick of white powder and tossed it to me.

I
caught it and hefted it. It felt like a pound. “Sweet Jesus, lady,
what—?”

“That’s half a key of crystal meth,” she said calmly. “Pure glass.
Ounce for ounce, it’s worth about the same as gold.”

“It’s also worth twenty
years for possession.”

“Then it’s a lucky thing I just handed it over to the
law, ain’t it?”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m making you the same offer I
gave your girlfriend, LaCrosse. The state forest is bigger than a lot of countries.
Reefer grows wild in the woods, always has. Now and again my boys harvest a few
plants, sell a pound or two downstate, like we have for a hundred years.

“But
lately we’ve been finding a lot more than reefer out there. They’ve been coming
across campers and motor homes stashed in the big timber. They ain’t there on no
vacation.”

“Meth labs,” I said.

She nodded. “Crank crews from downstate
are moving into our territory. We’ve already had some trouble. The fellas that
cooked up that packet you got in your hand took a shot at one of my
boys.”

“What happened?”

“I just told you,” she said coolly, “they shot
at my boy. What do you think happened? Lucky they were city boys who couldn’t shoot
for squat. A bad mistake.”

“How bad?” I asked.

She met my eyes for a
moment. Her face showed nothing at all. She didn’t expand. Didn’t have to.

“We
found that crystal in their rig after they . . . departed. But that was just one
lab. There’s a half-dozen setups out there, and more on the way unless we do
somethin’ about it. It could turn into a shootin’ war. Folks could get
killed.”

I suspected they already had, but let it pass.

“You told Sherry
about this?” I asked.

“We made a trade. She drops the story about a few
wood-smoke boys growin’ weed, goes after the big-city gangs that are cookin’ up
poison on state land. She shines a light on ’em, they’ll scatter like the
cockroaches they are.”

“Or maybe they break her neck and roll her car down a
ravine.”

“I’ve been thinkin’ on that since I heard.” She sighed. “I liked that
girl. She was pretty, she had grit. If I thought one of them cookers . . . But I
doubt it was them, Dylan. We hadn’t closed no deal yet. I had the boys make up a map
that shows where the labs are now. They move the rigs after every second batch,
never stay more than a week or two in one spot. We’ve been keeping tabs on ’em, and
they’re all still in place. If they thought they’d been burned—?”

“They’d be
in the wind,” I agreed. “I want that map, Emmaline.”

“And I’d dearly love to
wake some mornin’ in Brad Pitt’s bunk. We’ll both have to settle for what we can
get. I’m offering you the same deal I gave Sherry. The map will aim you straight at
them crank labs, but in return, you leave me and mine be for a while. If your people
come across a reefer patch in the woods, you blink your eyes and keep right on
walkin’. Deal?”

I didn’t say anything.

“It’s the right thing, Dylan. The
weed grows wild in the woods. It can soothe your spirit, ease your pain. Meth’s an
abomination that rots out your mouth and steals your damned soul. I won’t tolerate
it, you understand? You move that scum off my ground, or by God we’ll put ’em under
it.”

“Deal,” I said grudgingly. “You give me the map, we’ll cut you some
slack. But tell your people to stand down. No more shootouts in the woods. You leave
them to the law.”

She spat in her hand, we shook, and that was it. Done deal.
No contracts, no lawyers. In wood-smoke country, your word is all that matters. And
it damned well better.

“I’m real sorry about that girl, Dylan. Tell her
family—”

“She had no family, Miss Emmaline. She was a foster child. Grew up in
the system.”

“No family?” she echoed. “Not even . . . ? No people at
all?”

Emmaline Gauthier frowned off into the distance, as if searching the
hills for answers. Her extended clan was her whole life. I doubt she could even
conceive of a world without blood ties.

“My God, Dylan, that’s . . . godawful
sad, ain’t it.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “It is.”

 
Driving out of the
hills, I sorted through what Miss Emmaline had told me. And what she
hadn’t.

She’d lied about one thing. Not all of her clan were Robin Hood
back-to-nature types, growing weed, living off the land like their forefathers. Two
of her punk nephews had been caught on video downstate, buying up pseudoephedrine, a
key element in cooking crank. Some of the Gauthiers were involved in the meth trade,
and if they were, she knew about it.

Which made the rest of what she said more
likely to be true. She’d given me a map of the sites of the meth labs in the state
forest, partly because they were operating on land she considered her personal
turf.

Partly because they were her competition.

Still, the pound of
crank in my pocket proved some of her story was true. Downstate gangs were operating
on our ground and with deer season only weeks away, half a million hunters would
soon be invading the north. If they stumbled across the crank labs, it could turn
into World War Three. A disaster.

Especially for the Gauthiers. The last thing
Emmaline wanted was an army of cops in the state forest. The enemy of my enemy is my
friend. That made us allies. For now, anyway.

Had she offered the same deal to
Sherry? Probably. Emmaline wouldn’t have wanted her family name in the news. Trading
up to a bigger story worked for both sides. It’s a deal Sherry would have jumped at.
Her ticket to the big time.