The Poacher's Son by Paul Doiron Page B

all I knew, he had both the State Police Criminal Investigation Division and the Somerset County Sheriff’s Department believing he was a cop killer. Jack Bowditch: the State of Maine’s Public Enemy Number One.
    The stupid prick.
    I drove fast along a newly paved stretch of forest road. It was a miracle I didn’t run my truck headfirst into a telephone pole. On the dashboard, the speedometer was back up to seventy.

7
    T he last time I’d visited the Somerset County Jail had been the morning after the bar fight in Dead River. Now, here I was rushing to his rescue again. It hardly felt as if two years had passed.
    The jail was a brick fortress, next door to the old court house in downtown Skowhegan. It was a spooky building that always brought to mind a story my dad told me as a kid. Years ago, a prisoner wrapped his hands in towels and scaled the razor-wire fence that surrounded the exercise yard. He thought he could escape by swimming across the flood-swollen Kennebec River. Big mistake. A week later searchers found his broken body stuck in the dam downstream.
    Now my father was a prisoner in the same jail.
    I opened the glass door leading to an office. Seated behind a high counter, a lone dispatcher was taking a call, jotting down a note on a pink message slip. A police radio chattered beside him.
    â€œMa’am, you did the right thing,” the dispatcher said without glancing up at me. He was a harried-looking guy with wire-frame glasses and auburn hair combed and sprayed over a bald spot. Behind him was a wall of wood-partitioned cubbyholes stuffed with more pink slips. “We’ll be glad to check it out for you. I’ll send someone down as soon as I can.”
    On the counter was a clipboard holding the week’s pink incident reports, left out for reporters who covered the crime beat. I leafed through them, looking for the name Bowditch. I saw nothing, but I knew how paperwork lagged in these offices. Chances were that my father was still being booked downstairs in the jail, having his mugshot and fingerprints taken.
    â€œNo, I can’t say when exactly,” the dispatcher continued into the receiver. “A deputy will be there as soon as possible. No, I really can’t say when.” He put down the phone and gave me a blank, shell-shocked expression. “What an effing morning,” he said.
    Effing?
“I’d like to see Sheriff Hatch, please.”
    Before the dispatcher could respond, a busty woman in uniform—the redness in her eyes showed how much crying she’d done that day—appeared in the door behind me.
    â€œHeard anything from Pete?” she said.
    â€œI still can’t raise him,” said the dispatcher.
    The woman seemed to notice me for the first time. “Can I help you?”
    Her wrinkled lips were painted a metallic pink, the color of a Mary Kay Cadillac. Like the dispatcher, she was wearing a black ribbon pinned to her uniform shirt, a reminder of their murdered deputy.
    â€œOne of your deputies just brought in a prisoner,” I said.
    The phone started ringing again, but the dispatcher didn’t answer it right away. The woman’s eyes directed themselves to the little name plate on my uniform.
    â€œI believe it’s my father,” I said.
    â€œStay right here,” she said, and darted through the door. Through the glass wall I watched her enter the sheriff’s office.
    The dispatcher answered the phone. “Sheriff’s office,” he said, keeping his eyes on me as if I might suddenly break and run
    The raccoon-eyed woman returned. “It turns out the sheriff wants to see you, too,” she said to me.
    Sheriff Joe Hatch sat across from me behind a dark-stained oak desk, his big-knuckled hands folded on the blotter. He had mustard brown hair going white about the temples, a brush mustache, and the shoulders of a retired defensive tackle. Pinned to his lapel was that same black ribbon everyone