“But you live in Canada.”
“If you say so. Forget superfluous and irrelevant shit, man. You don’t need to know where I live. It don’t matter, see? They don’t got no category yet for world citizen. One more thing. You need to talk again, don’t look for me here. You call Ralph, capisce?”
“Va bene,” Service said.
The man spit his vodka out laughing.
6
On the drive from the Soo to McMillan, Service kept thinking about Ralph Scaffidi, who had never been a mobster but seemed to know a helluva lot of people who knew a helluva lot about shit mobsters knew about. He tried to call Joe and Kathy Ketchum, but couldn’t run them down. Then he called Treebone and asked him if he had somebody in Grand Rapids who could do some research for him. Tree said he would get back to him with a name. Service knew he could always call in another detective from the Wildlife Resources Protection Unit, but the lead was so thin right now, he didn’t want to get a lot of DNR people involved.
Griff Stinson’s camp was a few miles north of the village, on the south bank of the Tahquamenon River. Unlike most Yoopers, who lived in towns and kept remote camps (usually for R&R from their wives and kids), Griff’s camp was his year-round home. The small log cabin had been built around the turn of the twentieth century with the trademark small doors of that era. Small doors kept heat inside. Griff’s wife was sprawled beside the driveway on a chaise lounge. She wore a red two-piece bathing suit.
“Hey, Vernelia,” Service said, sliding out of the Yukon.
“He’s out back in his shop, hey,” Vernelia said. She was a generation younger than her husband, a woman in her late forties who still turned heads in town and had a colorful history of hell-raising before inexplicably and suddenly settling down with Stinson. Her hair was piled on top of her head in a topknot, and the couple’s brown miniature dachshund, Cootie, was lying at her feet. Cootie looked at Service and began wagging her tail.
Stinson’s shop was a metal outbuilding with a concrete slab floor and oil heat. The outfitter used it to store equipment and to tinker with new bait recipes.
The bear guide was a veteran of Korea. He wore a faded Red Wings cap and had a pipe clamped between his teeth. The wiry Stinson was in his mid-seventies and clean-shaven. He was in the center of his work area with a large barrel that gave off a sweet scent.
“New formula?” Service asked. “Vernelia said you were back here.”
Stinson grinned. “She sittin’ out there in her underwear?”
“Looked like a bathing suit to me.”
“Underwear, same thing,” Griff said. “She likes to sit out there in that chair givin’ the pulpy drivers hard-ons.” He didn’t seem particularly bothered by what she was doing.
“Seems like you gotta try something new every year,” the guide said, using the cut-off handle of a canoe paddle to stir the slurry in a stainless steel drum. “Take a whiff.” Service stepped close to the barrel, sniffed tentatively, and backed away.
Griff said, “Mashed Brazilian waffle cones, red gummy bears, bulk black maple syrup, day-old stop-and-rob freeze-burgers, and mini-PayDays.”
“They’ll smell that for sure,” Service said.
“Mr. Bear always sees the world through his nose,” Stinson shot back. “It’s gettin’ ’im to stop and eat interests me.”
A horn roared from a passing truck. “That’s three,” Stinson said.
“Three?”
“Vernelia gets them truckers all worked up and then they get her all worked up. Six honks and she’ll be back here beggin’ me to give her some sweets.”
“Maybe one of those drivers will slam on his brakes and step over to talk to her.”
“Her choice, what she does,” Stinson said. “Here ’cause she wants to be. Someday, she don’t want, she’ll be gone.”
“You’re okay with that?”
“Fully growed woman got the right to choose. What can I do for you?”
Service was not so sure he could be so nonchalant about Maridly having a dalliance, though he had to agree with Griff that people had the right to decide what they did and who they did it with.
“You borrow a trap from Joe and Kathy and have a bear get loose?”
Stinson sat down, took a foil pouch of tobacco out of his shirt pocket, and loaded the bowl of his pipe. “You hear that from?”
“Bearclaw.”
“How’s Betty doing?” Stinson asked. Griff and Bearclaw had been an item many years back.
“Still doin’ her job,” Service said. He had no idea how serious it had been or why it had ended.