Bad Optics Read online

  “There’s no need for all that effort,” Service said, reaching back and plucking his companion to a place directly in front of him. “Here, he’s all yours.”

  The old man slapped ineffectually at Service’s grip before surrendering and sheepishly turning his gaze to the woman. “You sure lookin’ real hot, Fellow.”

  The woman snorted. “Oh, I’m hot all right. Who gave you license to bang-bang a girl seven nights running, then disappear for going on a year?”

  She was sixtyish, short of five feet tall, attractive. Silver hair in a female bowl-cut, clear nail polish, thin face, with the lean and sinewy feral look of a predator.

  “Now youse know it weren’t not like ’at,” Allerdyce said defensively. “Been jes what, t’ree mont’, Fellow? No shit, tree, four tops. I had go work deer season wit’ Sonny ’ere. Ast ’im, ast ’im.”

  Service nodded and thought, Great, Lansing’s all over my ass about Allerdyce, and now he’s drawing some woman’s wrath down on me.

  “Deer season lasts a whole year now, does it? When did that change? I wrote down on the calendar when you were here last. Want to see?”

  “No need,” Allerdyce said. “I trust youse.”

  The woman laughed and shifted the pistol barrel to the old man’s forehead. “Tell me why I shunt’ pop one?”

  “Cause ’stead of year, den she be forever,” the old man said. “You want go forever widout no sweets?”

  The woman said, “You badly overrate yourself, and for the record, months and years already seem like forever, but you know I’m not waiting on the likes of you, no way. You’re not the only hobnail in this girl’s boot.”

  “I aint’ a’tall s’prised,” Allerdyce said. “Any chance two wood ticks mebbe get us some special breakfast?”

  “The big one there with you aint’ no common wood tick. He’s a game warden to the marrow: Grady Service. Everybody knows their game warden, you ignorant old man. You still downstate?” the woman asked Service.

  “Not exactly.”

  “That’s why I left Lansing,” the woman said. “No direction anywhere but Mama Echo.”

  Service rubbed his face. Was this another weird dream? “Mama Echo?”

  “The letters M and E equals me, or I, which is all people like that ever see. Not a person down there can spell or think another damn word.”

  He asked, “You were in Lansing?”

  “Indeed, with a damn good consulting business, policy intelligence, twenty-two and a half employees. Say you’re a legislator thinking about introducing a bill to make handguns legal for kids under three, your staff hires us to do the research and map out the ins and outs. If you like what we do, you take our report and recommendations to the Legislative Services Department to draft the actual bill. We then help LSD fine-tune and tweak the draft for you. Lucrative? Bet your ass. But Republicans, Democrats, Greenies, Socialists, they’re all just rats on the rubbish pile, leaving a trail of turds wherever they go. I got tired of slipping on that junk. I branched out into academia, and now I work strictly for folks chasing PhDs. But that’s my story. How shitty is your life that you have to hang with the likes of that?” she asked, pushing Allerdyce’s shoulder with the pistol barrel.

  “I haven’t stooped to sleeping with him,” Service said without thinking.

  The woman had deep lines carved into the flesh on the outsides of her eyes and a slightly hawked nose. She looked tired. There was a long pause.

  She laughed, finally pointed the Colt at the floor. “I like a man who can spit out what he thinks.”

  “I t’ink youse look fine,” Allerdyce said, and the gun was immediately back at his head again.

  “You are not included in that generalization, bucko.” The woman looked up at Service. “You don’t look like some silly-ass free-range locavomit foodie. You bring real appetite to a woman’s table, do you?”

  “I try.”

  The woman grinned. “I’m Fellow Marthesdottir, my family Icelandic in the way-back, bad-ass old Vikings. Funny thing, our genes kept shrinking till all that’s left is pint-size me, last of the line, and likely going to stay so for the good of the world.” The woman reached out and patted Allerdyce’s face affectionately. “You’ve been missed.”

  “Me too,” Allerdyce whimpered, and started into a room with Service right behind him. The room was a surprisingly large and astonishingly well-equipped kitchen, high-dollar cooking gear all the way.

  “Here’s your coffee,” Marthesdottir said. She poured a cup, pulled out a chair, put the cup on the table in front of the chair, tapped Service’s shoulder to let him know he should sit, took Allerdyce’s hand, and said, “You come with me, Bub, and this ain’t no request, it’s an order.” The couple walked back out the door they had all come in.

  Service was alone for close to thirty minutes, wondering all the while how long he could nurse one cup of coffee. Not that long. Antsy, he made his way back to the room cluttered with electronics. It looked like the back warehouse at Radio Shack, or the NASA space center, whatever that was called these days. The lady said she was connected. To whom and why? He recognized a bank of external security monitors. Reality or paranoia? Hard to judge up here in the Yoop; so many people were sure they would make their last stand when the world came to its end, or Martians landed, or in the face of black holes, hordes of liberal gun-snatchers, anything. Conspiracists were a pain in the ass, and aplenty. This was the last redoubt of the self-proclaimed independent-thinking man, even those that had never had an original or clear thought in their lives.

  The cameras seemed to be monitoring somewhere that didn’t appear to be anything quite like this place. It seemed vaguely familiar, a grove of yellow birch and a grassy area. Definitely not any terrain near here.

  Security cameras were not a surprise. Despite the bucolic setting and few people, the U.P. was no more crime-free than anywhere else. There was less of it in sheer numbers, yes, but less violent and less random? Not so much. In his experience up here, eight in ten households kept loaded weapons within reach and scattered all over their homes and camps. Calls for help were fine, but response times beyond towns were measured on the snail scale, worse than Detroit, not because of incompetence, but because of sheer and inconvenient geography. Places up here were scattered and peoples’ homes not that concentrated. In sheer geography, it took time to get anywhere, even with your lights and sirens going. Up here people were largely on their own for most things, health and safety included, ergo guns were everywhere. He couldn’t remember the last time a citizen had stopped a crime with a gun, but never mind that. The Second Amendment gave comfort to people.

  Allerdyce and the woman returned, and both of them wore subdued smirks. “Bet your hunger’s off the scale by now,” their hostess said to Service, smiling.

  “Mine is,” Allerdyce volunteered.

  “Shut up, you. I guess we all know about your appetites,” the woman said and took eggs from the fridge and began cracking them on the edge of a metal bowl.

  “I m-m-mean breakfast,” the old man said, stammering slightly.

  “Hard to know what the likes of you ever means,” Marthesdottir shot back. “Got eggs, peach, and blueberry pancake batter made with wild berries frozen since last summer, good for all us old folks, with antioxidants and all that good stuff.”

  The words “all us old folks,” made Service recoil, but he recovered. “Sounds good.”

  The woman smiled at him, turned to the fridge, moved the ingredients to a small counter, and began to whip up the promised breakfast for the drop-ins. Hospitality for visitors, expected or otherwise, wanted or not, was a long-established rule in the U.P. Serving food was a gesture of temporary peace, and expected even for your sworn, worst enemies.

  Service tried to suppress a smile. Obviously the door opener here was Limpy, and the price of admission was something other than morning repast. How A
llerdyce could have such an appeal to and hold on women was far beyond his ken, but it seemed real, never mind downright weird. Some things just were, and would and could never be explained in any rational terms. There was probably a picture of Limpy under the word “inexplicable” in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

  Service watched Marthesdottir attacking her food as eagerly as his partner. Such a small and thin thing. How does she keep off the pounds?

  Allerdyce was gumming his food loudly and obnoxiously. Service had never much thought about it, but the old man seemed to look the same now as the first moment he could remember him, which was decades ago. He never seemed to change and could go astonishingly long periods with no food at all, or sit down and pig out for hours on end. He was as feral and bingy as a wolf, feast or famine.

  “Impressive electronics,” Service remarked as they ate.

  “My own backup generator, too,” the woman said. “My clients expect product when they want it, not when I can get it to them.”

  “You’ve got quite the security system.”

  She nodded. “Voice and facial recognition software built in with all the latest technical marvels.”

  “You get a lot of unwanted visitors?”

  “No, but a girl can’t be too careful,” Marthesdottir offered.

  Allerdyce grunted some sort of ambiguous affirmation, his mouth full of partially chewed pancakes.

  “I looked at your screens,” Service admitted. “Looks like there’s more than one location.”

  She said, “I’ve got a camp over the west edge of the Mosquito.”

  He knew the exact land parcel. There was no cabin there, at least in his memory.

  “An actual camp?”

  “Just land,” she said. “A nice forty on the two-track, and another twenty out back.”

  “Traffic?”

  “Some hikers and berry-pickers in summer, hunters in fall. Fishermen steer clear because the bugs are real flesh-eaters and always so bad. Or maybe because the name scares them off, not sure which. The nasty bugs in summer are real enough.”

  “Couple of spring-fed feeder creeks dump into the Mosquito,” he said. “Both must cut right through your land. Loaded with brook trout, especially in late summer.”

  “Not many people left who’re willing to bust brush to get to good spec water,” she said.

  “Ever seen a 2008 silver Ford 350 near your property? Has DRAZEL SISTERS L.L.C. SATELLITE SERVICES & EARTH SURVEYS in red letters on the sides.”

  Marthesdottir laughed. “Their services do get dispatched by satellite, all right, but that’s all the truth in that label.”

  Service didn’t understand. She had drawn out the word “services,” making it almost pregnant. “I think I’m missing the joke.”

  Allerdyce nodded. “Sonnyboy dere sometimes ain’t sharp as he t’inks.”

  The woman said, “Drazel’s a very old word for a woman of easy virtue.”

  God. “Really? You know this how?”

  “Cameras showed them over by my camp property to the west, and I’ve seen them on the north side of the Mosquito, too.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Looked to me like they were taking photographs.”

  “They’re actually sisters?”

  “Saw but one female twice, and not the same one each time,” she added with a shrug.

  “How long ago?”

  “Past month, not before.”

  Winter was starting to seriously lose its hold, but lots of snow was still massed in the wilderness area, and some roads were still snowed in and mostly impassable. Most seasonal roads in the area remained unplowed, as they were all winter. A few roads had lost snow and were now moving toward the spring mud phase, which could be worse than snow. Sometimes the mud got deeper than the snow and was a lot more difficult to escape once it got hold of you. “They always with that silver truck?” he asked.

  “No, once it was a snowmobile over to the west. A Yamaha, I think, sleek and yellow but no advertising sign I could see.”

  He and Limpy had seen the silver truck and the woman along the north approach to the wilderness. Service asked incredulously, leery of the answer that might result, “Drazel—what the hell kind of business are they running?”

  “Funny business,” the woman said. “I did some searching. The company was formed late last year and some of the paperwork isn’t filed yet.”

  Ergo the new truck. “The women own the company?”

  “No, I found it impossible to nail down the business owner’s name, but I did some Googling and called some friends and there is scuttlebutt around Lansing about a high-dollar lawyer and land and business developer name of Kalleskevich. Drazel is his survey company. He lives down in an East Lansing in a Hummervillage.”

  Service said, “Never heard of it.”

  “Because that’s a description, not a name. Area of fat-cat McMansions between East Lansing and Okemos. The legal community name is Six Gates, which is how many checkpoints there are to get through.”

  “This Kalleskevich develops high-end digs?”

  “Can’t say for sure. I just scraped some surface stuff. But he seems to have his hands in all kinds of things—mines, gravel pits, wilderness travel, trucking.”

  “He owns mines in Michigan?”

  “I don’t think so. Far as I can tell, he’s a limestone guy, not hard rock or ore.”

  Service felt his gut flutter. “This Drazel outfit got an address, phone, website, any of that good stuff?”

  “They have a U.P. office down to Ford River, just south of Escanaba. It was a party store in a former life.”

  Southwest of Escanaba in Ford River? There was a retired trooper who owned a little stop-and-rob until his wife passed away. He moved to Oklahoma to be closer to his daughters and grandkids. Could this be the same place? Has to be.

  “Any idea what the women were taking photos of?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “I could dig a bit, but I’m expensive.”

  “Do what it takes,” he told her.

  “Be advised that I don’t work for civil servant rates,” she said, staring at him. “I’m talking serious money.”

  Service didn’t blink. “Like I said, whatever it takes.”

  She smiled. “You want me to have a contract drawn up?”

  He held out his hand. “Nope. This is good enough for me. Go deep and bill whatever works for you. Either of us isn’t happy, we’ll say so, settle the bill up to that point, and walk. Okay?”

  “You’re a dinosaur,” she said, grinning, and added, “I’ve seen one other person around.”

  “Who?”

  “Young fella, drives an old rusted-out green Subaru, an oh-three I think. I got plates, cameras filed them. Don’t have a name yet, but the boy’s a dead ringer for Justin Timberlake.”

  “When was this?” Who the hell was Justin Tinklelulu?

  “After the Drazel girl was out by my camp property.”

  “Same place?”

  “Same day. Didn’t look like coincidence, but then I have a suspicious streak.”

  “Can you get more on him too?”

  “Got more coffee?” Allerdyce asked the woman. He was still pounding down pancakes.

  “You’ll be peeing all day.”

  “Already do,” Allerdyce said. “Da bot’ uvus, right Sonnyboy?”

  “Thanks,” Service told the woman, and handed her his private and personal business cards, left over from his most recent detective gig with the department.

  “Nothing on this one about the DNR,” Marthesdottir observed.

  “The DNR business card’s on a leave of absence,” he told her. “Just between us.”

  “How long a leave?”

  Service shrugged. To be determined by forces beyond his control. His suspension had alrea
dy been extended all the way to July 1, an unprecedented seven months by then, and his gut said they might stretch it even longer. Actually the timing of the delay didn’t bother him so much. He loathed winter patrols and there was a lot at stake in this situation, too much to think about right now. “Focus on the Drazel women and that Subaru,” he told the woman, “and anybody else shows up on your cameras in the same areas.”

  “I can deploy more cameras,” she said. “No charge. Been meaning to extend my coverage. Eventually I intend to test a full security net and, if it works, maybe market the architecture to land-rich rural barons.”

  Marthesdottir sounded ambitious. He nodded and led Allerdyce out, the old man pocketing folded pancakes. “You hear any of that?” he asked the old violet, which was his term for a violator.

  “After what we done in ’er back bedroom, hard time t’ink much else, hey.”

  “Kalleskevich, that name ring any bells with you?”

  Allerdyce inhaled a last pancake, wiped his hands on his sleeve and shook his head. “Nawf.”

  “She said he’s a limestone guy.”

  “So?”

  “Mosquito.”

  “Ain’t no limestone out dere.”

  “I thought you were my old man’s partner.”

  “Was,” an irritated Allerdyce said. “Same as like wit’ youse.”

  Service climbed into his truck and started the motor. Allerdyce was looking out the windshield, said quietly, “Da Woof Cave.”

  So he does know. “Now you get it?”

  Wolf Cave was the most unlikely natural formation in the unique wilderness area, which was mostly hard rock all around one concentration of limestone. Coincidence, he told himself, but the old stomach keeps rolling with a different take and concern.

  “Ain’t been out dat way long long time, I t’ink. Still be da deep white dirt out der, hey.”

  “Snow is a game warden’s pal. We’ll be able to tell if anybody’s been trekking out that way.”

  They were headed for his Slippery Creek Camp, and Allerdyce was uncharacteristically quiet. “Dat sleep skull bone I given youse, dat come from outten Woofie Cave.”