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  Praise for Gerry Boyle

  Straw Man

  Winner, Crime Fiction, 2017 Maine Literary Award

  “Deftly drawn characters and a strong sense of place add texture and depth to this gritty tale of rural crime and vigilante justice.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Gerry Boyle is a rare author—a true grandmaster of suspense. It’s no wonder his latest, Straw Man, is unforgettable . . . This hypnotically suspenseful, beautifully written novel is impossible to put down.”

  —Gayle Lynds, New York Times bestselling author of The Assassins

  Once Burned

  “Plot, characterization, atmosphere—everything works in Boyle’s excellent 10th Jack McMorrow mystery.”

  —Publisher’s Weekly

  “A truly riveting read from first page to last, Once Burned continues to document novelist Gerry Boyle as a master of the mystery/suspense genre.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “The details are crisp, the writing is concise, and Boyle’s keen observational skills come across in the character and dialogue.”

  —Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine

  Other books by Gerry Boyle

  Jack McMorrow Mystery Series

  Deadline

  Bloodline

  Lifeline

  Potshot

  Borderline

  Cover Story

  Home Body

  Pretty Dead

  Damaged Goods

  Once Burned

  Straw Man

  Brandon Blake Mysteries

  Port City Black and White

  Port City Shakedown

  Port City Crossfire

  Random Act

  A Jack McMorrow Mystery

  Gerry Boyle

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Random Act

  A Jack McMorrow Mystery

  First Islandport Edition / June 2019

  All Rights Reserved.

  Copyright © 2019 by Gerry Boyle

  ISBN: 978-1-944762-69-8 (ebook)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019931592

  Islandport Press

  P.O. Box 10

  Yarmouth, Maine 04096

  www.islandportpress.com

  [email protected]

  Publisher: Dean Lunt

  Book Design: Teresa Lagrange, Islandport Press

  Cover image courtesy of iStock.com/sanjeri

  Printed in the USA

  For Vic. Onward.

  If you cry about a nickel, you’ll die ’bout a dime.

  —Robert Johnson, “Last Fair Deal Gone Down”

  1

  k

  It was December 5, a Wednesday. The snow had come in wet at midday, fat, sticky flakes giving way to rain. And then the temperature had plummeted and the rain had frozen into a shell of hard crust.

  That was the last day we’d seen Louis.

  We were all supposed to work in the woods the next morning, cutting for our old friend Mrs. Hodding. The usual plan: Meet at Clair’s barn at 6:15, have coffee, load the saws and tools, ride up to Hyde in his truck. The skidder and trailer were parked in the woodyard.

  Louis didn’t show up. He didn’t answer his phone or our texts, sent when Clair and I were leaving in the morning, when we broke for lunch, when we loaded up the gear to drive home.

  Friday afternoon we packed up early, got in my truck, and headed south for Sanctuary.

  “It’s not like he’s never gone silent,” I said, as we turned off Route 3, headed for Liberty.

  Clair didn’t reply at first, just looked out at the woods, the black-trunked leafless trees looking like a fire had swept through. I waited. More woods, a right at 220, the light falling fast as the sun slid lower behind us.

  “I know,” Clair said finally, knowing I’d hold my last thought. “But when he starts to sink, he holes up. Just want to make sure he isn’t sinking too deep.”

  For Louis, deep was a very dark place. Ramadi, 3/5 Marines. House to house. Insurgents firing from around every corner. Screaming women and children. A sniper killing Louis’s best friend, Paco, his brains spattered on Louis’s face. Kicking in doors and killing the armed men inside. Killing all of them, no prisoners. Just killing, killing, killing. Not a fight to the death. A fight immersed in death, as Louis once put it, in a whiskey-driven talk in Clair’s barn, “blood as thick as mud.”

  We knew this about Louis, Clair more than me. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. Different wars, same story. They’d been there, had both fought hard, with great skill and a dose of luck. And survived. And then they’d retreated to their refuges in the Maine woods—in Clair’s case, to marry and raise a family. In Louis’s case, to be alone.

  Clair took a long breath, added, “Just want to know he’s okay, that’s all.”

  We rattled along, the Toyota pickup jouncing over bumps and potholes. The sun had lapsed behind the ridges to our west, leaving the road in a side-shadowed darkness. I flicked the lights on, concentrated. Saw red glowing eyes on the roadside to my right.

  “Deer,” I said.

  I gripped the wheel.

  “He’s probably fine,” I said. “Lost his phone. Got absorbed in a good book. Decided to go backpacking someplace, sleep out.”

  “He only does that when things aren’t good,” Clair said.

  “And he always comes back,” I said.

  We were quiet as we swung east on two-lane 105, zigzagged our way through the six-house settlement of Washington, crested rises over streams, twisted down steep grades, then hurtled back up. And then we were in the town of Sanctuary, where there was more woods, more darkness. For Louis it lived up to its name.

  I slowed and waited for the turnoff, then drove north for three miles, eased up on the gas as the entrance to Louis’s long driveway drew closer. And then I spotted the single red reflector nailed to a tree. The same tree held one end of a steel cable that Louis sometimes slung across the drive, padlocking it in place. He did that when he wanted to make sure he was going to be alone.

  The cable was down.

  “Interesting,” Clair said. “Stop here.”

  I did, just short of the turnoff. With the lights on and the engine running, Clair got out and I followed. He stopped and stared at the gravel driveway, where tracks showed a car had turned off and driven down the driveway.

  “Not his Jeep,” I said.

  “No,” Clair said. “And they were here for a minute. Can see where the exhaust melted the snow.”

  He squatted.

  “That was Thursday,” he said, “the way the tracks are frozen in. And they don’t come back out.”

  We climbed back into the truck and I started down the driveway, the tire tracks leading the way. The single lane continued for about a mile, the trees close on both sides. We crossed a black-running stream on a wooden bridge, hemlock timbers that Louis had cut and milled. We swung to the left and climbed a short rise. Another jog to the right and we could see the vague shadow of the cabin.

  No lights.

  Drawing closer, we could see Louis’s jacked-up Cherokee parked in the dooryard by the pole barn. Beside it was an SUV. The truck lights swept past it. A new Audi. Vermont plates. A numbered sticker on the back window, lower right.

  “Rental,” I said.

  “Huh,” Clair said.
>
  “Tourists and criminals,” I said.

  He reached under his Carhartt, made an adjustment. His gun.

  “These little Glock forty-threes,” Clair said. “Hardly know it’s there. Nine millimeter’s a sign of my advancing age, I suppose, not wanting to lug the forty or forty-five.” A little patter to cover up his concern for Louis.

  We got out and looked toward the house. There was smoke coming from the chimney, thick and puffy like the fire was damped down.

  Clair slipped a flashlight from his jacket pocket and turned it on. The blue-white beam swept the Audi, the Jeep, the yard behind them. We turned and crossed the dooryard side by side, stepped up onto the porch, and stood.

  Footsteps. Inside.

  The flashlight beam swiveled and swept the floorboards of the porch. There was a fine dusting of snow. No footprints.

  “Might have gone out the back,” Clair said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Dog must be with him.”

  “Clearly,” Clair said.

  Louis’s dog was named Friend—130 pounds of shepherd and hound—and he protected the perimeter here. If he pegged you as a bad guy, only a bullet would slow him. A big one.

  Clair stepped to the big plank door and leaned close. Listened. He motioned to me to come closer, and I leaned in. A woman’s voice from the right said, “Who is it? Is somebody there?”

  An accent. Faintly Eastern European.

  “Friends of Louis,” I said.

  “He’s not here,” the woman said, still to the right of the door.

  “Is he out back?” I said.

  There was no reply.

  Instead there were two footsteps, from the direction of her voice. I reached out and knocked again. Then said, “Hello,” lifted the latch, gave the plank door a push. It swung open, no creak.

  I stepped in. Clair followed, swept the light across the floor. There were two L.L.Bean boots off to the right, nobody in them. I was starting to turn to the left when the woman spoke.

  “Freeze,” she said. “Or I’ll blow your fucking head off.”

  A white light blazed on, wavering in the darkness.

  “Arms above your head,” she barked. The same accent. Agitated.

  We raised them, half turned toward the light.

  “We’re Louis’s friends,” I said.

  “I don’t know that,” she said.

  “Where’s Louis?” Clair said. An ominous tone.

  “Keep your hands up.” A tremor in the voice. Fear? Anger?

  Clair looked at the light. My eyes were adjusting. I could see a woman’s shape behind the glare. Not old. Athletic.

  “Lie down on the floor,” she said. More accent. “Hands straight out above your head.”

  “Where’s Louis?” I said.

  “Get down,” she shouted, and the light moved to her right, behind us, in front of the open door. The cold air rushed in.

  “You a cop?” I said. “Or do you just watch a lot of television?”

  “I won’t say it again. And I mean that. Last chance.”

  We eased to our knees, then to our bellies. The floor was cold. The light on the gun illuminated the room in rapid flicks. I saw a woman’s handbag on the island that separated the big open room from the kitchen. It was brown. On the next sweep I saw a small leather duffel. Matching.

  I turned my head and saw her, peripherally. A shadow. Dark hair, jeans and a cream-colored jersey. The gun in the ready position. Tan grips and a flashlight under the barrel. Louis’s new Sig. Had he given it to her, or had she used it on him?

  “Arms out,” the woman said. “Stay flat.”

  I saw red socks. Another gust of cold wind blew through the door, snow scattering like fairy dust.

  The woman moved closer, training the gun on Clair’s back, then swinging it toward me. A beep and the woman said, “Where are you?”

  “Right here,” Louis said.

  He was behind us, had come through the door.

  “Hey, Louis,” I said.

  “Hey,” Louis said, like this was all normal. And then to the woman, “It’s okay.”

  “Okay. Sure. But how was I supposed to know that?” the woman said. “They just walked right in.”

  The light dimmed, the gun trained on the floor behind us. And then there was the clicking of dog claws on wood as Friend trotted inside, sniffed Clair, then me. He wagged his tail and we stood. The woman slipped her finger out of the trigger guard, her nails the color of pink pearls. She smiled, but not apologetically.

  “This is Marta,” Louis said. “Friend of mine. We go back to high school.”

  “I had no way of knowing,” Marta said. “Who you were.”

  “Marta has been through some stuff,” Louis said. “Bad guys came to her house.”

  “Too bad for them,” I said.

  “Not really,” Louis said. “They caught her asleep.”

  A momentary vision of that, its implications. It all made more sense.

  We nodded. She passed the gun to her left hand and stepped over, shook Clair’s hand, then mine. Looked us in the eye. Hers were big and dark, with a hyperalertness, like an animal that navigates in the dark.

  “Louis’s friends. Wonderful to meet you,” Marta said.

  “Likewise,” I said. “Sort of.”

  “I’m sorry. But you understand?”

  “They killed her boyfriend,” Louis said.

  A pause as that sunk in, too.

  “I’m sorry,” Clair said.

  Marta nodded. Smiled. She was very attractive. High cheekbones. Full lips. Hair pulled back in a short stub at the nape of her neck.

  “So you can understand why I may have overreacted,” she said.

  “Didn’t overreact at all,” Clair said. “But what was next, if Louis hadn’t come in?”

  She looked to him, like suddenly it had turned into a competition. Twenty questions on home defense.

  “Search you,” she said. “My boyfriend, Nigel, he used to tell me what to do.”

  “Search both of us?” Clair said. “How?”

  “Start with you. Put my left hand on your back, keep the gun in my right.”

  “And then you do him?”

  “Yes. Switch hands.”

  “We were too close together. As soon as you shift your attention to Jack, I kick a leg out from under you. You start to fall, I roll over and fire with the weapon still in my shoulder holster. It swivels.”

  “But I still can shoot you, right?” Marta said.

  “Low percentage, because you’re falling, gun pointing up. You’re dead before you get off a second shot.”

  He opened his jacket and pivoted the holster and the little Glock. “Word to the wise. For a friend of Louis.”

  Marta seemed to be running the sequence through her mind, then she said, “That’s good to know,” like he’d told her how to change a tire. “Louis told me you were very—how did he say it?—resourceful.”

  The dog flopped on the floor and sighed, bored with all the talk.

  Louis moved closer to Marta, put a hand on her shoulder and leaned close, mouthed the words, “Good job.” Gave her a quick kiss on the cheek.

  Two things from that: His instructions. If somebody comes in . . . And she wasn’t his long-lost sister.

  “Did all this happen recently?” I said.

  “Three months,” Louis said.

  “In some ways it seems like yesterday,” Marta said. “Other ways, like from a different life.”

  “You survived,” I said.

  “Yes, I ran, hid in the wine cellar,” Marta said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “It was hard, in many ways,” she said, but in a flat tone that said she’d moved on.

  “So what brings you here?” Clair said.

/>   They looked at each other, held the glance.

  “We were friends,” Louis said. “In high school.”

  “He makes it sound like the two of us, we were in the chess club,” Marta said, smiling at me.

  “You weren’t?” I said.

  “No, we—”

  She looked back at Louis.

  “Dated,” she said.

  She leaned into him with her hip and pressed. He gave her a squeeze and smiled back. It was as surprising as the gun. Almost.

  2

  k

  We stood there for a moment, adjusting to this new world order. Louis with a woman. The woman with a gun pointed at our heads.

  Then we moved to the kitchen part of the big room, and Louis threw a log into the woodstove.

  “Sorry to barge in,” I began. “But you didn’t answer your phone, and—”

  “We got worried,” Clair said.

  “I think my phone went dead,” Louis said.

  He went to the refrigerator, took out a growler of his home-brewed ale, and put it on the counter. Then he took down four canning jars and filled them one by one, handed them around. “English-style black,” he said. “Got a little bored, all this IPA.”

  It was Marta who first raised a glass. “To old friends,” she said. “And making new ones.”

  Off to such a good start.

  We clinked jars and drank. Marta lowered hers and said, “Very nice. If I’d known Louis had all these talents, I would have tracked him down sooner.”

  The accent was fainter, like it came out in stress.

  “Been a long time?” Clair said.

  “Since before Iraq,” Louis said.

  “Our last night was in a motel outside Camp Pendleton. The Best Western in Oceanside, eleven years ago now. It’s hard to believe. But we took up right where we left off.”

  She smiled at Louis. There was a lot of that going on.

  “Like we started up the same conversation,” she said. “Right, babe?”

  Babe.

  Marta moved to him, put her arm around his waist, in case we didn’t get it.

  “Heard a lot about you guys,” she said. “Wish Louis had shown me pictures.”