Hard Ground Read Free

type it up? I’ll sign it.”
    â€œSir?”
    â€œThat’s a joke, son. You’re the new guy, I bet.”
    â€œYessir.”
    â€œLighten up,” the doctor said. “You the fella played basketball in Spain? Saw the article on you in the Manistique paper.”
    â€œYessir.”
    The ME grinned. “Our dearly departed here was a widely known and much-loathed shitbag.”
    â€œI sort of got that impression from his wife.”
    The ME grinned. “Her? She’s worse than him.”
    Halter got back into his truck and tried to conjure dancing hares. Twenty-five years, he told himself. This is your second day.

Last on the List
    They took the Norton−Kramden thing as a left-handed compliment more than a put-down. Not that either man remembered the Jackie Gleason show, The Honeymooners, but they knew what it was and decided it was a good thing. COs Edouard Morton (Norton) and Ralf Camden (Kramden) had patrolled Iron County for years, almost always together. The two men had spent so much time together that each felt like he knew what the other was thinking.
    By contrast, neither man had a clue what his wife was thinking, but out on patrol they rarely talked in depth about personal matters. On duty, wives and kids were superfluous. Neither man saw what they did as work or a mere job. It was a higher calling, like a doctor, a minister, a hooker, or something.
    July 5 was hot and sultry. They were patrolling the Net River country in north-central Iron County, just south of the Baragastan line and north and a bit east of the Wisconsin border in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Morton and Camden had been young Marines in Hue City, where they had been fire-hardened in combat, seen RPGs obliterate comrades, other men die from sniper fire, still others from grenades stuffed in dead dogs or explosives strapped to seven-year-old girls and detonated remotely. Because of their war (it was always their war, their personal possession), the partners had developed and sustained acute senses of situational awareness. Truth be known, Camden’s in-the-moment acuity was a bit better than Morton’s, who was by nature more trusting and garrulous.
    On patrol when their eyes weren’t focused hard outside the truck, they sometimes talked about the possibility of losing the focus and honed edge they had come to call “Big E.”
    Yesterday had been a busy, long twelve-hour marine patrol, checking boaters and fishermen on Chicagoan Lake. They had written a dozen tickets for various safety violations, short fish, and over-limits, but they mostly issued warnings for lesser violations. While laws were written black and white, enforcement happened more in the gray, where keen judgment and quick reflexes ruled.
    â€œSeems slow,” Morton said now, driving slowly. The roads in this part of the county were almost all rock, brutal on trucks and tires, and human spines.
    â€œYesterday,” Camden said. “Busy then, now this. Big yawn.”
    Both men grunted as they topped a small rise and saw a vehicle a couple of hundred yards ahead of them. Camden had the stabilizer binos in hand. “Passenger’s window is open. I count two souls. Driver window’s open, too. I can see his elbow.”
    â€œWeps?” Morton asked.
    â€œNot visible.”
    â€œI’ll hang back,” he said, “barely keep contact, let them roll along.”
    â€œWorks for me,” Camden said.
    The serpentine road was in semi-open country with multiple small rises and dips and now and then a half-mile stretch through a dense hemlock or Norway pine stand or massive popple regrowth.
    â€œStop!” Camden said to his partner, got out, fetched a shiny new beer can, still with dregs, which he emptied onto the ground, and tossed the empty into the truck bed.
    â€œRoad beer,” he said as he got back in.
    â€œI didn’t see him toss it.”
    â€œPassenger let it slip down his