The Poacher's Son (Mike Bowditch 1)

looked confused, frantic. “How did he know then?”
    “The ropes,” I said from the ground.
    He swung the rifle off his shoulder and tucked the stock under one arm casually so that he could fire it with one hand if he needed to. “Get up, Mike. Slowly. This situation has already gotten too far out of hand. And I know you’re prone to stupid heroics.”
    I pushed myself up on my knees. I felt as though I’d had the wind knocked out of me.
    “That’s far enough.”
    “You wouldn’t shoot me,” I said with all the confidence I could muster.
    “I would!” Brenda, her face flushed with anger and alcohol, waved the .44 in my face. “What’s he talking about? What ropes?” “You wanted to frame them,” I said. “Pelletier and Truman—
    you wanted to frame them for those murders. That’s why you came back here.”
    He scratched his beard as if waiting for me to continue.
    “You kidnapped Truman back in town and drove him out here in his truck. Then you shot Pelletier. You stabbed Truman with Russell’s knife, and cut him loose so he would run. You wanted him to bleed to death. You wanted to make it look like they killed each other, but you messed up. The ropes you tied him with left cuts and burns around his wrists.”
    “What else?” Like any failed trapper, he wanted to know how he’d given himself away.
    “Truman’s rifle,” I said. “It didn’t make sense it was unloaded. You planted that rifle there to incriminate him.”
    “How’d you figure it all out?”
    “I remembered something you told me when I was a kid. You said the secret to trapping is covering your own tracks.”
    He smiled a rueful smile. “I taught you a good lesson.”
    “You didn’t teach me a damned thing.”
    The smile went away. “You got your mother’s smart mouth, that’s for sure.”
    I thought of my mom. We had both believed in him, both argued on his behalf against Neil. Now my father was bad-mouthing her. “How’d you know I’d come out here?” I asked. “You couldn’t have planned that. There’s no way.”
    “We didn’t,” he said.
    Brenda jumped in. “We just wanted the cops to go to Truman’s place again so they would start looking for him. Then, after Jack took care of things, I was going to call in them two killing each other. We never figured that old fart would fly you out here.”
    The mention of Charley gave me a fleeting sensation of hope. He should be here soon, I thought. But was he bringing the police with him? Either way, I needed to stall them.
    I looked my father hard in the eye. “So what did you plant at Truman’s apartment to make the cops think he was the killer? It couldn’t have been the murder weapon since you brought that here.”
    “My boots, the ones I wore that night. I left them on the porch for the cops to find.”
    “Not too subtle.”
    “Yeah, well, Truman was an idiot. He’d do something that dumb.”
    In my mind’s eye I saw the headless body again. “Everyone thinks you’re in Canada.”
    “I know.”
    “That’s why you called Mom from across the border,” I said.
    “What’s he talking about?” said Brenda, slurring her words.
    “I called Marie,” he said.
    The muscles in her shoulders tightened. “You didn’t tell me that.”
    “I wanted them to keep looking for me in Canada.”
    Her eyes blazed. “Now what are we supposed to do?”
    My father reached into the pack on his belt. I saw Brenda flinch as if she half-expected him to produce a handgun to shoot her. But he only drew out a tangle of bloody rope.
    “I’m sorry about this, Mike,” he said. “But until we can talk this out, it’s the only way.”
    He tied my arms behind me with the same red-stained cord he’d used to bind Truman. I thought of resisting, but then decided not to. I’d seen what he’d done to Pelletier and Truman and Shipman and Brodeur—four men dead at his hands. But even now, I couldn’t believe he was really capable of killing me. Brenda, however, was another story. Adrenaline and alcohol had given her eyes a big-pupiled glassiness that worried the hell out of me.
    Gently, my father directed me inside the lodge. He guided me back to the dining room, with its long tables and its view of the lake through plate-glass windows. Clouds darkened the sky above Holeb Mountain. “Sit down,” he said.
    The smell of burnt coffee hung in the air.
    Brenda perched across from me, sitting on a tabletop with her dirty feet on the bench and her denim-covered crotch