Mountains of the Misbegotten Read online

  Praise for Red Jacket, the first 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 Joseph Heywood’s Grady Service 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 short story collection Hard Ground

  “Heywood (Red Jacket) displays uncommon storytelling versatility in this brilliant collection of 27 tales about the game wardens who patrol Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. . . . This volume should be read for pleasure, but would do equally well as an instruction manual for aspiring writers.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Joseph Heywood knows his poachers, deer-baiters, and road-beer-drinking yahoos, as well as his cross-dressing informants and Elvis impersonators, but his most compelling characters are the hardworking and embattled conservation officers, the quietly heroic men and women who enforce the law evenhandedly against a well-armed slice of citizenry. Heywood is at his finest and funniest in these short stories from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where cold kills and night can be as ‘black as the inside of a cow.’ These detective stories are a great contribution to the rural American literary tradition, with nods to Mark Twain, Robert Travers, Jim Harrison, Cully Gage, and Dashiell Hammett.”

  —Bonnie Jo Campbell, author of Once Upon a River and American Salvage, a National Book Award finalist

  “Joseph Heywood has a great ear for the vernacular of some of America’s more colorful backwoods ‘citizens,’ the cast for this wild set of tales. Even more incredible is his ability to see into the wild hearts of a wide range of wonderfully flawed human beings and the cops and conservation officers who try to keep them under control. This is full throttle writing, the kind of stuff you can’t put down to pick up the remote. Heywood is a compelling writer who has obviously done his time in the woods and lived to come back to tell us what it’s really like out there.”

  —Michael Delp, author of As If We Were Prey and The Last Good Water

  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

  Mountains of the Misbegotten

  Also by Joseph Heywood

  Fiction

  Taxi Dancer

  The Berkut

  The Domino Conspiracy

  The Snowfly

  Grady Service 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

  Stories

  Hard Ground: Woods Cop Stories

  Non-Fiction

  Covered Waters: Tempests of a Nomadic Trouter

  Mountains of the Misbegotten

  A Lute bapcat Mystery

  Joseph Heywood

  Copyright © 2014 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, 246 Goose Lane, Suite 200, Guilford, CT 06437.

  Lyons Press is an imprint of Globe Pequot Press.

  Text design: Sheryl Kober

  Layout artist: Melissa Evarts

  Project manager: Ellen Urban

  Map: Alena Joy Pearce © Morris Book Publishing, LLC

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Heywood, Joseph.

  Mountains of the misbegotten : a Lute Bapcat mystery / Joseph Heywood.


  pages cm

  Sequel to: Red jacket

  Summary: “Former Rough Rider turned Michigan game warden Lute Bapcat learns that the deputy warden from Ontonagon County has gone missing and must navigate one of the Michigan Upper Peninsula’s most lawless places on his search”— Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-1-4930-0608-3 (hardback)

  eISBN 978-1-4930-1422-4 (eBook)

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

  PS3558.E92M68 2014

  813'.54—dc23

  2014024055

  For Madelonnie Louise, Heart and Sand

  PART I: Betwixt and Between

  One cannot help fancying that he has gone to the ends of the earth, and beyond the boundaries appointed for the residence of man. Every object tells us that it is a region alike unfavorable to the productions of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, and we shudder in casting our eyes over the frightful wreck of trees, and the confused groups of falling-in banks and shattered stones, yet we have only to ascend these bluffs to behold hills more rugged and elevated, and dark hemlock forests, and yawning gulfs more dreary and foreboding to the eye. Such is this frightful region.

  —Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, reflecting on his 1819 visit to Ontonagon

  CHAPTER 1

  Red Jacket

  Monday, June 1, 1914

  “What say you to the charges, Deputy Warden Bapcat?”

  “Why are we even here, Your Honor?” Deputy State Game, Fish and Forestry Warden Lute Bapcat said, although he knew exactly why he was in court: He had made an enemy.

  Two months ago, Bapcat had been visiting his friend Dominick Vairo in the barkeeper’s Red Jacket saloon. When he’d left and swung up into the saddle of his flaming red mule, Joe, he had seen Cruse frantically waving an arm at him. “Get yourself down offen that animal when you talk to a fellow peace officer, boy. Don’t you know no better?”

  Bapcat had dismounted and stood beside the hulking figure of the Houghton County sheriff.

  “It ain’t the least dignified nor professional, you riding that four-legged beast into the confines of Michigan’s most modern city,” the sheriff said. “You oughten to know better, this being the twentieth century. But I s’pose you being a cop way out there in the woods, all this reality has done escaped your notice and undeveloped sensibility for modern life. So, let me help you: This here, Deputy, is a town with inside shitters, not ground holes out in the bush, and people take offense at the leavings of an equine nature. Be better for all concerned, you leave that hulking beast outside town and avail yourself of public transport, of which we got plenty. Better yet, drive that Ford you and your Russian partner got out there in Allouez, and at least make yourselves look like you belong in this glorious century.”

  Bapcat had more respect for a drooling rat than the county’s sheriff, who was a lawman in title only, having shown his stripes in the recent strike by copper miners. Cruse was bought and paid for by mine owners and operators, and made no bones about it. Bapcat and his partner, Zakov, had sided with the strikers, made the sheriff and his crowd look bad, and Cruse had been stalking them ever since.

  “This your idea of April Fish?” Bapcat had asked the man.

  “The hell you talking, fish?”

  “What most of the world calls April Fool’s Day, which is today. Kids go ’round trying to stick paper fishes on each other’s backs.”

  “April Fool? You oughten keep your focus on serious law business, not no damn kid foolishness,” Cruse had said disgustedly, and stalked away with a paper fish on the back of his jacket.

  Cruse. Bad blood. Need to watch him. Be wary. Ergo, this episode in court.

  Yesterday Bapcat had come to town and been arrested, and Cruse had lodged him in the Houghton jail overnight.

  The judge read from a paper in his hand. “It says here the county of Houghton wishes to charge you with violation of the recent ordinance against horses inside the limits of Red Jacket, Hancock, and Houghton. We are here to determine if said charges are justified, and if so, should they be pressed. You see, the two counties in question, out here in the great nowhere south of Canada, are self-anointed technological marvels before the entire world, and it wouldn’t do for our collective and carefully nurtured civic image to be sullied by hooved creatures dropping their large, smelly, and unseemly plops on our newly paved and electrically illuminated streets.”

  The courtroom reeked of chloride of lime, and pinched at Bapcat’s nostrils. “I understand that, Your Honor, but I ain’t violated nothing. I’ve been ordered by Lansing to look into the disappearance of a state official that happened west of here, and not knowing how long this business might take us, all I done was that me and my mules, Joe and Kukla, stopped over to Dominick Vairo’s saloon to visit our friends on our way south to catch a train out of Houghton. Next thing I know, I am arrested and spent last night in the hoosegow, and today, here I am in court.”

  Judge O’Brien had a naturally florid complexion and was positively glowing now. “Where are said mules, Joe and—what was that . . . Koala?—now?” the judge asked James A. “Big Jim” Cruse, Houghton County’s obese, blatantly political sheriff.

  “Kukla, your honor,” Bapcat said.

  “Shouldn’t Your Honor be swearing me in?” Cruse inquired carefully.

  The judge’s face darkened to crimson. “I decide how things run in my court, Sheriff. You wouldn’t dare to be telling me I don’t know my own business, would you, sir?”

  “No, Your Honor, that certainly was not my intent,” the fat man said obsequiously.

  “Then kindly and promptly reply to my interrogatory. Where are said mules now?”

  Cruse pointed. “Out yonder, Your Honor, outside the courthouse, in protective custody.”

  The judge came out from behind his bench, his gown swirling like a storm-pushed wave of black water as he made his way to the window and peered down. “Remarkably handsome animals,” Judge O’Brien announced. “Don’t believe I’ve ever seen a fire-engine-red mule before. Must be Irish, eh, Bapcat?”

  To Cruse: “These animals have adequate food and water?”

  “They certainly will when you rule for the plaintiff,” Cruse said, puffing.

  Judge O’Brien picked up a sheaf of paper and rattled it for effect. “This the ordinance in question?” he asked the county’s new assistant prosecutor, one Frederick Alward Rockford.

  “Indeed it is, Your Honor,” the young lawyer answered sharply.

  The judge nodded solemnly. “Case dismissed. Mr. Assistant Prosecutor, please make a side note that said animals in the sheriff’s custody are mules, not horses, meaning they were sired by a donkey out of a mare, and thus are a hybrid of noble lineage heavily favored in the illustrious Roman Empire, and most great cultures since then. It is a separate species, Mr. Rockford. I assume you studied Linnaeus at some point in your shiny education?”

  “Not in relation to the law, Your Honor.”

  “Too bad. Law takes in everything, and as the future unfolds I expect that more and more science will be part and parcel of legal jurisprudence,” Judge O’Brien said. “Now, if said ordinance was to require donkeys, mules, and horses to be kept out of the city’s confines, it should have been specifically written so. Alas, it specifies horses alone, and therefore this case is dismissed.

  “Now, if I were Deputy Bapcat, I would no doubt seriously consider engaging an attorney to countersue for what is patently no more than a half-baked attempt to interfere in the state deputy’s official duties. Pushing through an ordinance in anticipation of a man coming to town to share a farewell libation with his friends suggests heinous and personal intent. We’ve got four liveries in this so-called city, and I see nobody from any of them, which makes me think this whole thing is a target on Deputy Bapcat’s back. Perhaps even the state
attorney general might send one of his legal coupe-coupe men north to take the case forward against this poorly conceived, and undoubtedly political, ordinance.

  “In any event, Mr. Rockford, you’re the shiny new fella around here, and I am surmising that our county sheriff inveigled you into this petty silliness and your bosses don’t know about it, so here’s what I’ll do, lawyer to lawyer, and man to man. This hearing never happened. Therefore, no record is needed, and none shall exist, meaning you can start off without an official loss on your pristine prosecuting record. Further, I hope you’ll learn what a political skunk looks and smells like. Mark my words, you follow a skunk around, your own scent will be indistinguishable from the skunk’s, and that might just be a toxic thing for a budding legal political career, sir.”

  “Thank you, Your Honor,” Rockford said, sweat glistening on his forehead.

  Judge O’Brien banged his gavel once. “Everyone clear out of my courtroom. Deputy Warden Bapcat, see me in my private chambers.”

  The judge shed his robe, opened a rolltop desk, took out a bottle of whiskey, and tipped a touch into two glasses, offering one to the deputy.

  “I’m on duty,” Bapcat said, shaking his head.

  “We both are. I order you to drink it down,” the judge said. “I know you well enough to see your little mule stunt was somehow intended to get Cruse’s goat, which you’ve done, so don’t deny it. You’ve got that fancy Ford truck up on Bumbletown Hill, and no need for mule transportation.”

  Bapcat handed a telegram to O’Brien: