The Bone Orchard: A Novel

“It doesn’t have to be that way,” I said. “If you surrender, the prosecutor will take it into account. You still have a chance to watch your babies grow up.”

The roar of the ATV grew louder and louder. I moved my head toward the line of trees and saw the headlights—like the close-set eyes of a mechanical monster—bearing down on me. I had hoped to distract Jason’s wife long enough to grab the pistol away from her, but now I saw her stumbling away, nearly falling backward to get herself clear of what she knew was about to happen.

I turned and planted my feet as the four-wheeler barreled down on me. I held my arms out and lowered my center of gravity. The trick was to time my leap to the last-possible second.

Jason Decoster revved the engine and charged me like a bull driven to madness in the bullring. The man riding it was nothing but a huge shadow. I could see the outline of his humpbacked shoulders and his enormous head. Then the machine was upon me.

The ATV had a winch and a metal cargo rack on the front. I must have struck my foot on it as I threw myself clear of the vehicle. Pain shivered up the nerves of my leg from my ankle to my thigh. And I landed face-first in the dirt.

Decoster was an experienced rider. He pulled the handlebars around sharply, causing the rear wheels to spin out, like a hot rodder doing a doughnut on a darkened stretch of highway. In seconds, he managed to turn the machine in a complete circle, but now he was only yards away, and I was lying prone on the ground with a barking ankle.

As he accelerated, I somehow managed to roll to one side. I saw his front wheel pass, and then his motorcycle boot resting on the footrest. The back tire spit mud in my face as he missed me for the second time.

He braked hard and turned the handlebars as far as they would go. I knew this was my last chance. As the four-wheeler swung around broadside, I pushed myself up onto my arms, raised one of my knees, and used the leverage of the earth to hurl myself at him. He hadn’t expected the attack, because he barely had time to raise his elbow to protect his head. I grabbed him around both shoulders and we toppled over the ATV.

The man was enormous. If he hadn’t been standing on the footrests with his ass hanging over the seat, I doubt I could have unhorsed him. Both of us landed awkwardly: Decoster on his shoulder and bent arm, me with half of my body on top of him and my legs dragging in the dirt. My forehead knocked the side of his skull, hard enough that a phosphorous flash exploded in my eyes.

Decoster didn’t seem to have had any self-defense training; he was probably too big to have ever needed any. From a young age, he had learned that all he had to do was use his considerable size and weight to maneuver his opponent around beneath him. Just pin the poor kid’s arms down with his knees and start whaling away with both of his rocklike fists.

My body registered what he was trying to do without the recognition even traveling through the neurons of my brain. It was all muscle memory on my part, gained through hours of practice. My body still belonged to a cop, and that was how I reacted.

Decoster pushed with his free arm into my chest, trying to flip himself on top of me. Rather than get pinned under his weight, I moved my arms from his shoulders to his neck. I pushed myself up onto my knees so that we were facing each other. For a split second, I found myself staring into the eyes of a living caveman who had stepped out of a museum diorama. He had greasy hair, a heavy brow that could shatter your knuckles if you threw a punch against it, deep-set brown eyes full of rage, and a huge stubbled jaw.

I reared up on my knees, wrapped my left arm around his neck, and grabbed my left hand with my right. He drove himself into me until I was flat on my back, but that was what I’d wanted. I had my arm against his windpipe now. I brought my legs up around his fat ass, crossed my ankles together, and extended my thighs. The move is called a guillotine choke. Slowly, I was stopping the flow of air to his brain. He tried using his fat chest to crush my rib cage, but the angle was wrong. Then he began clawing at my face with his clumsy fingers. I turned my head away, craning my neck as far as it would go, and kept pushing my arm against his trachea, hoping to hear the cartilage crack.

Decoster was growing desperate. No one had taught him how to escape this chokehold. He should have been pushing my legs away from his hips, not fumbling for my face. Eventually, he began clutching at my right hand, hoping to break the grip, but by then it was too late. He could no longer breathe at all.

He thrashed and flailed his arms and tried to roll over, but the guillotine works whether the attacker is lying on his side or on his back. I never heard a crack—his windpipe was too well protected by the blubber in his neck—but his movements began to slow, as if he had lost conviction. I didn’t know if he knew was dying, but I wanted the thought to pass through his brain before it ran out of oxygen.

Eventually, he stopped moving altogether. I wanted to kill him. The desire to strangle him to death was nearly overwhelming.

But I couldn’t. It was as if some gentle hand was pulling me off the man and a soft voice was whispering “Enough” in my ear. When Decoster had finally stopped struggling and I was sure he wasn’t playing possum, I found myself releasing my grip and letting my legs fall loose.

I’d had my eyes squeezed shut through most of our wrestling match, afraid he might gore them out. When I opened them, I saw his wife standing over us with her hand over her mouth and a look of shock on her face. The pistol hung at her side.

“Did you … Did you kill him?”

As out of breath as I was, I had difficulty spitting out the word no.

I became aware of the sound of the idling ATV engine. She was standing in the glow of its headlights, so that half of her face was illuminated and half was a black mask. She raised her arm until the barrel was weaving back and forth between my exhausted body and her husband’s unconscious one.

“People deserve the bad things that happen to them,” she said, more to herself than to me. “Yeah, they do.”

I took a breath, trying frantically to think what I could say to stop her.

In the end, it didn’t matter. She dropped the gun in the mud and then turned and walked in silence back to the house, where her children were sleeping.





39



I sat on the ATV and waited for Decoster to wake up. It was a Yamaha Grizzly: the high-end 700 FI model, painted in stealth black. I had no handcuffs or plastic cable ties to secure the big man’s wrists. There was some rope stowed with my gear in the back of the car, but I didn’t like the idea of leaving him alone until the state police arrived.

Not having heard from Soctomah, I called the dispatcher in Houlton. It took a while to explain what had happened. I started in the wrong place, talking about how Kathy had been shot, when I should just have said, “There is a dead body here, and I’m holding a gun on the man who killed him.” I didn’t know for certain that Kurt’s corpse was in a hole down along the tree line, but I was willing to wager on it.

I had maneuvered the Yamaha around so that the headlights would shine in Decoster’s eyes if he lifted his head. He was lying on his back, with his arms and legs spread, as if enjoying a snooze. I leaned over the handlebars and looked at him. Destiny had been right about the unibrow and about the hair that sprouted from his unbuttoned shirt and ran all the way around his neck. He was wearing dark brown Carhartt bib coveralls over a tan chamois shirt. I estimated his weight to be about 250 pounds.

The thought occurred to me that I could simply rev the engine and crush his spine under the saw-toothed tires, but I had already called the police and committed myself to a different course of action. There would be no vigilante justice tonight, not unless he forced me to use the pistol. It was a Glock 17. The magazine was fully loaded with hollow-tipped 9mm cartridges. I had made certain of it.

Jason Decoster began coming around in a few minutes. It was a slow, strange process, which I observed with the detachment of a scientist. His chest began to rise and fall, and then his limbs went rigid, almost as if he were undergoing rigor mortis before my eyes. It took a few more minutes for him to groan and raise his mud-smeared head. He squinted into the blinding beams of his own four-wheeler.

“Huh?” he said.

“Stay down, or I’m going to put seventeen bullets in you.”

“What?”

I couldn’t tell if his synapses were having trouble flickering back to life after I’d put out his fuse box, or if he was just a moron. The possibilities weren’t mutually exclusive.

“Just don’t move.”

His head slumped back into the damp soil and he crossed his hands over his heart the way you see corpses arranged in coffins. I found myself hoping he’d try something so I would have an excuse to shoot him. I was having a hard time ridding myself of the murderous impulse.

“Why did you do it?” I asked.

“Do what?” His voice sounded peaceful. He seemed content to lie on the cold ground.

“Murder your mother, shoot Kathy Frost, kill Kurt Eklund.”

“No idea what you’re taking about.”

Every cop learns not to trust appearances. Jason Decoster might have looked like an extra who had walked off the set of Quest for Fire, but he was no idiot.

“I’m guessing that you ditched the shotgun you used on Kathy,” I said. “But they’re going to find Kurt Eklund’s body down at the end of your field. Too bad you didn’t have time to move it after I called your wife.”