The Bone Orchard: A Novel (Mike Bowditch Mysteries) by Paul Doiron Read Free Book Online Page B

too fired up with alcohol to back down.
    “If someone had called me last year to report this,” I said, “I would have taken a boat out there ASAP.”
    “That’s why you’re a civilian now.”
    “Go to hell.”
    “What’s got you so wound up tonight?” he asked. “Is it that thing with Frost?”
    I sat up straight on my barstool. “What thing with Frost?”
    “She was the one who shot that guy last night. I thought you’d heard.”
    In my self-absorbed outrage, I’d forgotten about the shooting Mason had mentioned earlier. The whiskey I’d been swigging all night surged back up into my throat.
    “Frost and Tate shot a guy who just got back from Afghanistan,” Bard said. “Everyone’s saying it was a suicide-by-cop scenario. I guess the kid was wounded pretty bad over there. I can’t believe you didn’t hear about it.”
    “I was guiding,” I said.
    “The guy was a decorated vet, and his old man is well connected, from what I heard.”
    My palm had grown sweaty from holding the phone to my ear. My tongue stuck to the bottom of my mouth.
    “So, is that it?” Bard asked.
    “Are you going out to Bump Island tomorrow?”
    “You really are a piece of work, Bowditch,” he said, and hung up.
    I sat at the counter, looking down at my newly cleaned pistol resting on its bed of newspaper. In my short career as a law-enforcement officer, I had killed two men. On each occasion, I had been subjected to a government inquisition that stopped just short of tooth pliers and red-hot pokers.
    I sat down at the desk where Elizabeth Morse had arranged for a computer to be installed for the use of her guests. She wanted them to be able to check their stock portfolios every day.
    The shooting was the top story on all the Maine news sites. The headline on the Portland Press Herald page confirmed my worst fears: POLICE KILL ARMED VETERAN .
    Beneath the words was a photograph of the dead man in his dress uniform. With his low-slung beret and stern expression, I had a hard time recognizing Jimmy Gammon.

 
    7
    Law dictionaries define the term suicide by cop as an incident where an individual engages in consciously life-threatening behavior to such a degree that a police officer has no choice but to respond with deadly force. Other terms for this phenomenon are police-assisted suicide and victim-precipitated homicide.
    The Jimmy Gammon I had known was a young man who loved life. He took pleasure in expensive scotch, in wing shooting alongside his dog, in the private half marathons he ran on summer mornings before the heat began to rise off the cracked roadways. What had the war done to make him want to snuff out his own candle?
    The news reports were vague on this point. They said that he had been wounded in Afghanistan, but they didn’t say how severely. They mentioned that he had been receiving treatment at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Togus, but they didn’t explain what he was being treated for. They reported that there had been a previous call by his family to 911, but they didn’t detail what precipitated the prior emergency or how it had been resolved.
    Christ, I hadn’t even heard Jimmy was home from Afghanistan. I felt sick to my stomach just thinking about what had happened to him.
    I stared into the digitized eyes of the photograph. The picture had been taken after he completed his live-fire training at Fort Bliss, in Texas, but before he shipped out for the Afghan war. At first, I was inclined to see his grim expression as an affectation: the mask of a tough guy headed into battle. But the more I studied it, the more I realized that he hadn’t been acting. Even before he’d been deployed to a war zone, he had already changed from the goofy kid I’d known. His own death had ceased to be an abstraction for him. In the lens of the camera, he was seeing a reflection of his own mortality.
    Experience had made me an expert on the subject of police shootings. In Maine, the Office of the Attorney General