Hard Ground Read online

  Praise for Joseph Heywood and the Woods Cop Mystery series:

  “Heywood has crafted an entertaining bunch of characters. An absorbing narrative twists and turns in a setting ripe for corruption.”

  —Dallas Morning News

  “Crisp writing, great scenery, quirky characters and an absorbing plot add to the appeal. . . .”

  —Wall Street Journal

  “Heywood is a master of his form.”

  —Detroit Free Press

  “Top-notch action scenes, engaging characters both major and minor, masterful dialogue, and a passionate sense of place make this a fine series.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Joseph Heywood writes with a voice as unique and rugged as Michigan’s Upper Peninsula itself.”

  —Steve Hamilton, Edgar® Award-winning author of The Lock Artist

  “Well written, suspenseful, and bleakly humorous while moving as quickly as a wolf cutting through the winter woods. In addition to strong characters and . . . compelling romance, Heywood provides vivid, detailed descriptions of the wilderness and the various procedures and techniques of conservation officers and poachers. . . . Highly recommended.”

  —Booklist

  “Taut and assured writing that hooked me from the start. Every word builds toward the ending, and along the way some of the writing took my breath away.”

  —Kirk Russell, author of Dead Game and Redback

  “[A] tightly written mystery/crime novel . . . that offers a nice balance between belly laughs, head-scratching plot lines, and the real grit of modern police work.”

  —Petersen’s Hunting

  Praise for The Snowfly

  “A truly wonderful, wild, funny and slightly crazy novel about fly fishing. The Snowfly ranks with the best this modern era has produced.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “A magical whirlwind of a novel, squarely in the tradition of Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato and Jim Harrison’s Legends of the Fall.”

  —Howard Frank Mosher, author of The Fall of the Year and others

  “The Snowfly is as much about fishing as Moby Dick is about whaling.”

  —Library Journal

  “Fly-fishing legend meets global adventure in Heywood’s sparkling, ambitious novel . . . an engrossing bildungsroman . . . part Tom Robbins, part David Copperfield.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “If The Snowfly becomes a movie, it will blast A River Runs Through It out of the water.”

  —Fly Angler’s Online Book Review

  “. . . a finely tuned plot and masterful, literary craftsmanship. It will stand with The River Why as the finest of its kind.”

  —Riverwatch

  Praise for Red Jacket (A Lute Bapcat Mystery)

  “Joseph Heywood has long been a red-blooded American original and an author worth reading. With Red Jacket—a colorful and sprawling new novel with a terrific new protagonist named Lute Bapcat—he raises the bar to soaring new heights.”

  —C. J. Box, New York Times bestselling author of Force of Nature

  “In 1913, Theodore Roosevelt recruits former Rough Rider Lute Bapcat to become a game warden on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in Heywood’s absorbing first in a new series. Outsized characters, both real (athlete George Gipp before his Notre Dame fame, union organizer Mother Jones) and fictional (randy businesswoman Jaquelle Frei; Lute’s Russian companion, Pinkhus Sergeyevich Zakov), pepper the narrative.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Joseph Heywood tells a great story, weaving real and fictional characters throughout his narrative…. [C]risp writing with a sense of humor….”

  —Woods ’N Water magazine

  “Heywood mixes history—the [miners’] strike and the violence it engenders, culminating with the Christmas Eve Italian Hall Disaster in Calumet, Michigan, in which 73 died—with vivid characterizations in a . . . promising series opener.”

  —Booklist

  HARD GROUND

  ALSO BY JOSEPH HEYWOOD

  Woods Cop Mysteries

  Ice Hunter

  Blue Wolf in Green Fire

  Chasing a Blond Moon

  Running Dark

  Strike Dog

  Death Roe

  Shadow of the Wolf Tree

  Force of Blood

  Lute Bapcat Mysteries

  Red Jacket

  Other Fiction

  Taxi Dancer

  The Berkut

  The Domino Conspiracy

  The Snowfly

  Non-Fiction

  Covered Waters: Tempests of a Nomadic Trouter

  HARD GROUND

  WOODS COP STORIES

  JOSEPH HEYWOOD

  Copyright © 2013 by Joseph Heywood

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be addressed to Globe Pequot Press, Attn: Rights and Permissions Department, P.O. Box 480, Guilford, CT 06437.

  Lyons Press is an imprint of Globe Pequot Press.

  Text design: Sheryl Kober

  Layout artist: Melissa Evarts

  Project editor: Ellen Urban

  Map by Jay Emerson, Licensed Michigan Fisherman Emeritus

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  E-ISBN 978-0-7627-9421-8

  Printed in the United States of America

  For the men and women who wear the green and gray, and those special people who love them.

  CONTENTS

  Author’s Note

  Map of Michigan and Upper Peninsula

  The Second Day

  Last on the List

  Double-Jointed Trouble

  Symbiosis

  Going Viral

  Laws of Physics

  Informant

  Checkmate

  Song in the Woods

  Airzilla

  The Dry Spell

  Henry VIII

  Funnest Man Ever

  The Third Partner (A Lute Bapcat Story)

  Black Beyond Black (A Grady Service Story)

  Cuffed to a Truck, Left to Die

  Guts Young

  Man in the Woods; Man on the Road

  Fences

  Special Powers

  Humane Disposal

  Life in Grays

  Damn Near Russian

  Last Night as a Secret Squirrel

  Sisyphus Redux

  A Good Little Lie

  Rampike

  The Fifth Ace

  Dancing for the Dead

  About the Author

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  The stories and characters herein are “fancies,” that is, fictional creatures plucked from my internal cedar swamp. If there are unifying themes beyond the wearing of the same uniform, it seems to me they are the quest for justice and search for self-validation and all the strange forms these concerns can take. As the Woods Cop mystery series plugged along and new series began, it occurred to me one day while we were in Deer Park (thirty miles north of Newberry), that in twelve years of patrols with conservation officers I had experienced and learned a heap of things that would never fit into a G
rady Service or a Lute Bapcat story. This collection is the result. As always, thanks to Michigan’s officers and their supervision for allowing me such access and candid looks at the work they do and the fascinating world in which they live. Theirs is often, by necessity, a secretive existence. Special thanks here to my agent, Phyllis Greenberg, at Harold Ober for her guidance, and to my wife, Lonnie, for her unflagging support; she has to watch the stew brew, which is akin to watching sausage being made, never a pleasant thing. I also want to thank Editor (New-Daddy) Keith Wallman and the team at Lyons Press. This is my twelfth book with the house, and it has been a pleasure all the way. I would like to name all the officers who’ve endured my presence, but the list is too extensive, and you know who you are. Remember, what follows is fiction. Mostly. Sort of.

  Joseph Heywood

  Deer Park, Michigan

  May 2013

  The Second Day

  Newly minted Conservation Officer Kirby Halter had been mesmerized as he watched snowshoe hares dancing under a full moon. Only two days on duty on his own, and every moment felt magical, even nature’s unexpected presentation of romance last night. Is this real? he kept asking himself. They pay me to do this?

  Four years of professional basketball in Spain had been fun, it but wouldn’t begin compare to this, he was sure. Not even close. Best of all, you could keep this job until you retired twenty-five years downstream, because this was a real job, not a bunch of pituitarily gifted adults playing a kid’s game, dependent on the whims of rich team owners.

  Everybody he knew had been bewildered when he passed on the NBA draft to attend the MCOLES police academy and for taking the Michigan state civil service examination, but he already had an offer from Spain and a large signing bonus. When he hung up his Adidas sneakers, he called the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and six months later found himself in a class of nine DNR recruits. A year later, here he was, a probationary conservation officer assigned to Schoolcraft County in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

  For the moment he was living in an apartment over a marina in Manistique, but he had bought a lot on Indian Lake and had a builder working on plans. European basketball had left him with nearly a half-million euros, with more to come over time in deferred payments.

  Today, Halter was cruising County Road 436 when Station Twenty in Lansing alerted him to a missing hunter report north of Blaney Park. The hunter had gone out early this morning and not yet come home, the call to 911 coming from the man’s wife. The hunter’s name was Ben Koski, who lived on the perimeter of the Bear Creek Swamp. Halter immediately headed in that direction.

  The house was made of half-logs, a ten-year-old brown minivan parked on a scabrous colorless lawn. A doorless barn held a rusted John Deere tractor. Halter pulled in, parked, and a young woman came out of the old farmhouse with one kid straddling her hip and another trailing close behind like a gosling.

  “My name’s Asia,” she said. “Just like the country. Benny went out to the northwest forty this morning. He owns two-forty total. If you follow the grass two-track, it will take you right to where he parks.”

  It was April with crusted snow clots still in the woods and no meaningful hunting seasons yet under way. “What’s he hunting?”

  The woman stood mute, looking confused. She was barely five feet tall and had long, stringy, tinted red-orange hair and big brown eyes, both swollen, the left one nearly shut and discolored. There was a small contusion under her nose, and it looked like she’d tried to hide it with makeup.

  “That man hunts everything,” she said. “Mind you, he won’t eat none of it, just likes to kill. I guess you being a man and all, you probably know about such things,” she added, tears in her eyes. Both kids had dry snot trails under their noses.

  “What’s he driving?” Halter asked.

  “Ford pickup, yellow and rusty,” she said. “My name’s Asia, like the country? Did I already tell you that?”

  Halter nodded. “Yes ma’am, you did. It’s a nice name.” He watched her go back inside, didn’t point out Asia was a continent, not a country.

  The game warden saw the yellow truck about two hundred yards off, angled nose down on a slight incline, ass in the air like it had been beached, the driver’s door open like a small wing. He found a man he assumed to be Ben Koski in the driver’s seat, a .410 shotgun stock down in matted trap weed, barrel pointed up, Koski’s jaw and right eye gone. The man had somehow gotten his left arm stuck in the steering wheel, pinned in place like a piece of sculpture. Halter checked the man’s wrist and neck, got no pulse, pulled out his notebook, wrote down the time, stepped away from the truck, and retched violently into the grass.

  Steadying his breathing, the new CO tried to imagine what had happened, guessed the shotgun had been loaded and Koski had dropped it butt first, hurrying to get out. Halter studied the body. Koski looked at least twenty years older than his wife. Had the man beaten her this morning, last night?

  Kirby Halter called the Schoolcraft county dispatcher. “DNR Two One Thirty-five has a GSW.” He gave the house address.

  “Bus or wagon?” The dispatcher asked.

  “Wagon,” he answered.

  Halter debated letting county personnel notify the woman but reminded himself he had been the one to find her husband. It was his responsibility to close the loop.

  By the time he got back to the house, the woman called Asia limped out to greet him, a different kid on her hip this time. “Where’s he at?” she asked directly.

  “I’m very sorry,” he said, “There’s been a terrible accident.”

  “Jesus God,” the woman whispered in a barely audible voice. “He’s dead?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I’m so sorry.”

  “That selfish, worthless son of a bitch!” she shouted.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Know what his last words to me were?”

  Halter guessed this might be rhetorical, or she was venting, or something. He decided to let silence stand.

  The woman shook her small fist at him: “He said, ‘Your poppy will be home soon.’ He was talking to his goddamn dog, not to his wife or to his four kids, but to his stinks-like-shit, hates-the-whole-damn-world dog. And then that dumb bastard stomps outen our house, and he ain’t never comin’ back. You married?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Make it stay so,” she said with a growl. “Marriage is like hunting; after you pull the trigger, the fun’s done, and it ain’t nothin’ but work from that point on.” The woman patted the diapered bottom of the child on her hip and made a face. “How’d it happen?”

  “There will be an investigation,” Halter said.

  “Bullshit. You saw him; tell me what the hell you saw. How hard can that be? You didn’t even know him.”

  “Loaded gun in his truck. Looks like he might’ve dropped it, and it went off.”

  “He suffer?” she asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Halter said, having no idea.

  “Too damn bad,” the woman said. “He was a mean, worthless bastard, bills not paid in four months. I had to take a job over to the casino, and every time that asshole drank, he accused me of fucking out-of-town customers and beat the living shit out of me! I ain’t fucked nobody, least of all him. What sort of man says goodbye to his dog and ignores his family, eh?”

  Halter was sure no answer was expected.

  “Hello, are you, like, deaf and dumb?” she spat at him. “What kind of asshole picks his dog over his wife and kids? Am I ugly?”

  “No, ma’am, not in my opinion.” Actually, she was damn good looking, bruises and all.

  “I got a good body?” She twirled like a pole dancer to show him.

  “I’d say so, yes, ma’am.”

  “Then tell me why in hell did he talk to the damn dog?”

  “I can’t
say, ma’am.”

  She stared angrily at him. “You mean you know, but something is keeping you from saying, or you don’t have a clue?”

  “No clue, ma’am; sorry.” This was worse than the headshot corpse.

  “Great, here I’ve got this awful mess, and who shows up but a clueless clown in a make-believe cop suit.”

  “Ma’am, is there someone I can call for you?”

  “Asia, my name is Asia. Why I want somebody called? You think I’m some weak, quaking little twat? Look at my face! That man beat the shit out of me. Now he’s dead. Why would I call someone? My troubles are over, hally-fucking-lujah!”

  A Schoolcraft county deputy arrived and joined them.

  “Sorry for your loss, ma’am.”

  The woman said, “What sort of man says goodbye to his dog and ignores his family?”

  “I don’t know, ma’am,” the deputy said.

  She laughed. “An honest man! Your partner in the pickle suit said he couldn’t say.”

  Halter left the deputy to deal with her, went to his truck, and began typing a report into the computer. Dancing hares last night, this lunacy today. They didn’t talk much about this sort of thing in training. Before he could ponder more deeply, the medical examiner arrived, and Halter led him to the body.

  “Touch anything?” the doctor asked.

  “Wrist and neck for a pulse.”

  “Good job,” the ME said. “What happened out here?”

  “Had a loaded .410 in his truck, and it looks like he must’ve dropped it getting out.”