Read Online Hard Ground by Joseph Heywood - Free Book Online

You’ve arrested him more than anyone.”
    â€œI’ll try to take a look tomorrow. You want me to bring him in?”
    â€œI’d prefer that you shoot that giant drain on my life so I could be done with him once and for all, but use your own judgment,” the PO said, ending the conversation. Translation: The man is in violation of his parole, and the rest of you have to figure out what to do and leave me alone.
    Wintermute had spent ten years as a game warden, the whole time in Mackinac County, living in Gould City. The man in question, Jacques Cramp, was a lifelong fish and game violator, and over the years he had been frequently accused of incest and various sex crimes, none of which he’d ever actually been charged with, much less been found guilty of.
    It seemed to Edwy Wintermute that in this state, once you were down, there were unseen forces that worked together to keep you there and made it impossible for you to climb back to any level of normalcy, never mind respectability. It was an aspect of the state that Wintermute loathed and lamented. In her experience, a lot of the complaints about Cramp came from his competitors, most notably the wing nuts and jamoke violators over in the Garden Peninsula.
    Sure enough, Cramp’s house looked empty. Wintermute called the county sheriff in St. Ignace to find out if new charges had been filed against the old man. Answer: verbal hand thumps to the bureaucratic forehead, followed by lugubrious silence. Translation: Charges had never been made out or had slipped into the proverbial red tape crack. Or it was all bullshit, which was her guess.
    Jacques Cramp had bounced around the county for decades (not to mention parts of Chippewa, Schoolcraft, Luce, and Alger), but the one place he seemed to gravitate toward was a remote camp in Hulbert Township in Chippewa County, reachable only on unmarked, vague two-tracks that wound through monster cedar swamps, north toward the Tahquamenon River flood plain, roads that were impassable much of the year because of flooding and snowdrifts, or whatever.
    Once she’d seen the roads covered with five inches of pure ice, and she had gotten a hundred yards in before sliding into a ditch. Not a big deal. By midday the ice melted, and she backed out. There were also deep sugar sand sections to contend with. Years ago Wintermute had hiked in on snowshoes from the East West Road, four miles up the railroad grade and southwest through the swamps to intersect a long finger of hard ground, where the old man’s camp sat, built into the side of the ridge, isolated and largely hidden, like a small wilderness keep. Today Wintermute decided to chance the drive and got to the cable gate with minimal trouble (only two blowdowns and one boulder to be evaded).
    She left her truck at the cable and walked a quarter mile back to the camp and three hundred yards in found the old man turtling along the two-track, both of his pant legs folded behind what remained of his legs and pinned in place. He was headed the same direction she was.
    Wintermute said, “That looks like mighty slow going, Cramp.”
    The old man stopped but didn’t look up. “Good joke. Never woulda thunka that one, Edwy,” he said with a series of grunts and gasps.
    â€œPenny misses your weekly tête-à-têtes .”
    â€œWhy God make miserable coose like dat?”
    â€œVariety maybe. You seem to be short some appendages since last we met, Jacques.”
    â€œDa sweet blood finally got to ’em. VA over Iron Mountain took ’em off. I told dat PO bitch I had surgery comin’ up, and VA even sent letter. She said, yada-yada, yada-yada, sucks to be you.”
    â€œYou’ve been in Iron Mountain five months? ”
    â€œDere t’ree and some, rest of time seein’ old chums. Ya know, like R&R, eh?”
    â€œLike a snowbird to Florida,” Wintermute said. “Lositch says there’re charges pending, sex