Harder 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 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

  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

  Also by Joseph Heywood

  Fiction

  Taxi Dancer

  The Berkut

  The Domino Conspiracy

  The Snowfly

  Grady Service (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

  Killing A Cold One

  Lute Bapcat Mysteries

  Red Jacket

  Mountains of the Misbegotten

  Non-Fiction

  Covered Waters: Tempests of a Nomadic Trouter

  Cartoons

  The ABCs of Snowmobiling

  HARDER GROUND

  MORE WOODS COP STORIES

  JOSEPH HEYWOOD

  An imprint of Rowman & Littlefield

  Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

  Copyright © 2015 by Joseph Heywood

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Heywood, Joseph.

  [Short stories. Selections]

  Harder ground : more woods cop stories / Joseph Heywood.

  pages ; cm

  ISBN 978-1-4930-0902-2 (softcover : acid-free paper)

  1. Game wardens—Michigan—Fiction. 2. Women—Michigan—Fiction. 3. Upper Peninsula (Mich.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3558.E92A6 2015

  813'.54—dc23

  2014043232

  ISBN 978-1-4930-1682-2 (ebook)

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  For those women who choose to live the harder life in order to make the rest of our lives easier and richer.

  Contents

  Copyright

  First Day of the Last Day of the World

  Gravy and Bear Breath

  Working the Problem

  The Roadrunner Should Make You Laugh

  Bambigumbo Yumyum

  Leprechauns

  Reality

  FTO

  Midsummer Day’s Night

  The Real Twelve Mike

  Basket Case

  Fishing for Glory

  Gulf of Goths

  Heads, Tails, and Other Vague Body Parts

  Dancing Hula in Felony Forest

  Trailer Fly

  Three Hours in the Chair of Wisdom

  One and One Is a Future Crowd

  Mile-High Humble Pie

  Facing Perfection

  Flier’s Club

  Hard As Nails

  Just One More Second

  Omaha! Blue!

  Dogskin, the Olympian

  Game for Names

  Two-riffic

  Facings

  My Perfect Italian

  First Day of the Last Day of the World

  Candola “Pokey” Clare had an unexpected day on the day the world ended. She was twenty-nine, and happy to remain below the th
reshold of thirty which would mark an entire new phase of life. Her best friend Curry Boland took her to dinner, toasted her with Cold Duck and a saucer-size birthday cake with two candles, a waxy two, and a nine. Curry said, “Isn’t that the most romantic thing you ever seen, and what if our candles are the last lights left on earth?”

  That’s the moment the restaurant and everywhere outside went dark. Six years as a conservation officer had taught Pokey Clare that when shit hit the fan, people like her were expected to willingly dive into the spinning blades, which was clearly an unnatural act except for the most abnormal of folk. Clare fished a flashlight out of her purse. Other diners were doing the same and small light blades were swishing around the room like Star Wars light sabers.

  “Laurie?” Clare called out. Laurie Pell was the restaurant’s owner, a forty-year-old widow with two kids, her husband killed by a sniper in Afghanistan in 2003, the same year her youngest daughter was born. The girls were now fourteen and ten.

  “Hey! Laurie!” the conservation officer repeated.

  “For Pete’s sake,” Curry Boland said impatiently. “Laur’s got this. This is exactly what generators are made for.”

  “Generators are wired to kick on automatically when the power goes down. It’s still dark,” Pokey Clare said. “Laurie!”

  When Clare started to stand up her friend said, “Nuh-uh, you’re not leaving me here alone.”

  “It’s just a wee bit dark,” the game warden teased.

  “Just is a person-specific frame of reference and this person loathes the dark. I’m going with you. Most of us normal world folks don’t get paid to crawl around in the night groping for trouble.”

  “Which means you miss most of the fun. Use your lighter on those candles.”

  “They’re too damn small,” her friend said.

  Boland fumbled in her own purse and brought out a small light and clicked it on.

  “Okay,” Clare said. “Let’s move.” There had been six people in the small restaurant when the lights blew. Pokey Clare said, “Relax folks, there’s a generator.”

  Light beams continued to dance as they made their way into the kitchen and found the back door standing open. They stepped outside and looked around. The whole area was black. The shed behind the restaurant had an open door and a flashlight beam jumping around.

  Pokey Clare found Laurie Pell and her older daughter, Sudie. They had a battery-operated lantern beside a Honda generator.

  The CO said, “What’s the problem, Laur. Can we help?”

  “I’m not sure, Pokey. This damn thing is supposed to kick on immediately with any power surge. We’ve got it rigged to a computer program that makes it start with even a hint of power loss or surge and it’s not supposed to shut off or switch regular power back on till we tell it to do so. Now it seems dead.”

  “The computer fart-glitched,” fourteen-year-old Sudie said. “Techno-hiccup. No biggie.”

  The girl’s ten-year-old sister Gainey stood nearby, rolled her eyes, and mouthed “what . . . ever.” The girl wore garish pink-frame glasses with lenses the size of Slurpee cups, and had her hair dyed a fiery pink.

  The younger girl looked directly up at the conservation officer and said, “We should talk.”

  “I know,” Pokey said. “And we will.” What an odd damn night. First the power goes kerflooey, and then apparently the power then switches on in the girl child who never willingly talks to adults and only sparingly to other children. As personalities went, Gainey had all the animation of a beepless heart monitor, never smiled, rarely gave any indication of any awareness that she was on a planet with seven billion people, much less her own family. Kids. Gainey was typical of young folks and their blind acceptance of and allegiance to computer and sundry electronic devices. Pokey Clare felt no affinity for computers and in her experience they tended to fail at the moment you most needed them—like most of the computer-run equipment in her state-owned patrol truck. “Is there gas?” she asked Laurie.

  “Tank’s full. It should run seven or eight hours on what’s in it. The computer alerts us to refill time.”

  “This ever happen before?”

  “No,” Laurie Pell said. “It’s less than three months old and guaranteed three years. So much for goddamn sale prices and deals, but how do you pass up nine hundred instead of fourteen hundred?”

  “So much for capitalist guarantees,” daughter Sudie quipped.

  “Businesses make computers too,” Sudie’s mother snapped at her.

  “That’s different.”

  “Really?” Mom said sarcastically.

  Laurie stood up. She was a tall woman, five-ten, lean, long dark hair. “There’s a backup starter and that won’t work either. It’s designed to bypass the computer in situations like this.”

  “It’s not comforting that the manufacturer plans for moments like this,” Curry Boland offered.

  The restaurant owner stood with her hands on her hips. “Well, I guess we get a night off. Not the way I like to plan such things, but there it is. Sudie, get your sister. We’re gonna move all our perishables into the freezers and throw all the ice from the ice machines in there too.”

  “What if the power doesn’t come back?” Sudie asked.

  “Don’t be foolish. The power always comes back. This is the twenty-first century. The only question is when and how much we’re gonna lose and how much I’ll have to fight the dang insurance company, which no doubt will rush to declare this an act of God and wash their hands of responsibility.”

  “Insurance company giving you trouble?” Pokey asked.

  “The company should re-name itself Not-Our-Fault Inc.”

  Pokey Clare walked out to her personal truck, dug out her transistor radio, which ran on batteries, and turned to emergency frequencies, expecting to hear nothing and instead heard, “This is a pre-recorded emergency message transmitted automatically in the event of any major power outage. Because you are hearing this message, you can assume there has been a major power outage, cause unknown, extent unknown. Do not call to report your outage. The outage is clearly known and you can be assured that the authorities and your power and local service providers are working on the problem and hope to have it resolved as soon as possible. People should remain calm, stay where they are, and await help.”

  The words gave Pokey Clare a chill. Wait for the government to help? “Yeah, how’d that work out for the Katrina folks?” she said out loud. The conservation officer turned off the radio to conserve the batteries. Stay here, or go get my work truck, find out what other cops are doing, and pitch in? Her friends would be fine. This was the moment when it hit her: “You’re the government, stupid.”

  Clare told her friends she was going.

  “I don’t think you should leave,” Curry Boland said.

  “It’s my job. Who I am, what I do, hello?”

  “Well, what if it’s not anymore?” her friend countered. “What if nothing’s ever going to be the same ever again?”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “I don’t know,” Curry said. “Just a feeling I have.”

  Pokey touched her friend’s arm. “How about we keep our deepest feelings private for a while. There’s no sense panicking anyone.”

  “You’re feeling it too?”

  “I felt something, maybe. I don’t know. I don’t have words for it yet.” Mostly it felt like a shitty night for cops and other first responders.

  “Think Armageddon,” her friend whispered.

  “Don’t start down that road,” the game warden told Curry Boland. She had known her friend all her life, knew Boland had always been churchy, easily led, severely whipsawed by various public declarations and predictions of various cataclysms predicting world’s end. “Just hush and pray to yourself.”

  “Ain’t me needs to be hearing prayers,” Boland
said.

  Pokey Clare said, “Assume He’s listening to what’s in your head.”

  “If He’s in there, He’s looking at a real mess,” her friend confided. “I’ve had that pesky Gibb Pawlowski on my mind all night long. Wine,” she concluded, as if that explained everything.

  Gibb Pawlowski had been a county deputy sheriff married to their friend Paula. Curry and Gibb had been known to fool around from time to time, which her friend rationalized as okay and not immoral because their friend Paula openly declared how much she hated sex, calling it the “disgusting deed,” and openly told them, “I wish I could be done with all that stuff.”

  Wanderings aside, Gibb was a good cop and a good guy. And Curry, despite her sense of oneandonlydom wasn’t his only side dish.

  Pokey Clare knew that unlike Paula, her friend Curry was far from done with “all that stuff,” and every time she met with Gibb, Pokey was burdened with hearing a play-by-play after-report, and more than once she had told her friend that listening to her sex reports was like listening to a golfer playing every damn shot on some meaningless backwoods course.

  “Hey,” her friend would say. “Scoring is what the game’s all about.”

  Curry was not talking about golf. Her friend’s libido was in max overdrive, so severe she swore the woman could ignite charcoal by walking past a grill. Men hit on her continuously and relentlessly, and she loved the attention, and once in a while, when the mood or chemistry struck her right, she opted for more than flirting and words.

  “I have to get my uniform and work truck,” Pokey Clare told her friend. “Drop you at home?”

  “Like hell. I’m staying with Laurie and the girls. They’ll need my stability.”