North of Nowhere

by Steve Hamilton

  “Excuse me?” Vargas said. He looked like he very much wanted to throw Kenny out there with the telescope.

  “I’m just saying,” Kenny said. “I mean, never mind.”

  “They didn’t touch the jewelry,” Vargas said. “All those diamonds I buy my wife every fucking Christmas. They went right to my room, right to my secret safe, and then they did this to me. Anybody have any ideas?”

  Nobody said anything, but I had a feeling this was all tied to what he was getting at before the robbers broke in—this whole business with Swanson and his wife.

  And good God in heaven, the private eye he had apparently hired to follow them. In all the excitement, I had almost forgotten about that little piece of news.

  “Anybody?” Vargas said. “Don’t be shy.”

  We heard the sirens then. It sounded like three cars, maybe four, all hitting his street at once.

  “You know something?” Vargas said. “The man who took me upstairs, I got a real good look at his eyes. If I ever see those eyes again, I’ll know ’em in a second.” He snapped his fingers to emphasize his point.

  We heard a voice from inside. “Hello! Who’s here?”

  “Remember,” he said, coming up the steps, “I’ll do the talking about the safe.”

  We ended up with four Soo police officers in the house, plus the on-duty detective. I kept expecting the police chief himself to arrive on the scene. He and I had a bit of a history, after all, and everything else that could have gone wrong that evening had already happened. So I figured a visit from Chief Roy Maven was inevitable.

  “Where’s the chief?” I asked the detective. “I kinda figured he’d be here by now.”

  “He was downstate today,” the man said. “I don’t think he’ll be back until tomorrow.”

  “There is a God,” I said. “That’s the first good thing that happened all night.”

  He didn’t argue the point. He worked for Maven, after all, so he knew what I was talking about. I told them everything I knew—the partial descriptions of the two men who had stayed downstairs, the heavier man in the athletic shoes with blue stripes, the fair-haired man who sounded Canadian. The Glocks. It wasn’t much, but he wrote it down and thanked me.

  It was well after midnight when they finally finished with us. I knew they’d be back the next day to do a good daylight search of the place. The investigation would be the center of Vargas’s life for the next few days, but the rest of us were through with it, or so I hoped. I had had quite enough of this house. I wanted very much to never see it again. Or its owner.

  “Let’s go, Jackie,” I said, as soon as the police left. “We’ve gotta get you home. You must be exhausted.”

  We left Vargas sitting there at his bartop, next to the poker table. All of the chips and cards were still lying there. Nobody bothered to settle up.

  Jackie let me drive his car. He sat in the passenger’s seat, looking out the window. I went back the same way we came, across town to Six Mile Road, all the way out to Brimley, past the two Indian casinos with their signs glaring in the night and their parking lots full, the golf course with the heavy equipment sitting all together under a single security light mounted high on a wooden pole, and then out to Lakeshore Drive. There was a half moon, reflected in the lake. There were no clouds.

  The old railroad car was there on the corner, in shadows so dark you wouldn’t notice it if you didn’t know it was there. For some reason, that railroad car felt like the perfect thing just then. It felt like I could stop the car right there and go open the door and climb inside. For me, the door would open. I’d go to sleep on the bare floor next to the rats and raccoons and God knows what else, in an abandoned, useless old railroad car that would never go anywhere ever again.

  I don’t know what made me think this way. I don’t know what made me imagine going to sleep in that old railroad car and never waking up. It was a hell of a thing to think about on your way back from an armed robbery.

  “Well,” Jackie said, finally breaking the silence. “At least I got you out of your cabin tonight.”

  “You did,” I said. “I can’t wait to see what you’ve got planned for tomorrow night.”

  “What were you thinking?” he said. “When we were lying on the floor?”

  “With the guns pointed at our heads?”

  “I seem to recall them pointed a little more at your head than at mine, but yeah, what were you thinking then?”

  “You know the old expression about your life flashing before your eyes?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Turns out it’s true,” I said. “That’s exactly what I was thinking about. My whole life.”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “What did it all add up to?” he said. “Your whole life, I mean.”

  “You really want to know?”

  “I really want to know.”

  “Not a hell of a lot,” I said. “What about you? What were you thinking?”

  “Same thing, more or less. But mine had a happier ending.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I was thinking,” he said, “that if this was my last night on earth, then at least I don’t have to see this place get destroyed.”

  “You really think it’s gonna happen?” I said. “We’re in the middle of fucking nowhere up here.”

  “We’re beyond nowhere,” he said. “We’re way north of nowhere. But it doesn’t matter. They’ll come eventually. You can’t keep this place a secret forever.”

  “I hope you’re wrong,” I said. “But I guess I wouldn’t bet against it.”

  I kept driving. Jackie leaned his head back and closed his eyes.

  “Speaking of betting,” I said. “You’re not going to make me play cards with that jackass again, are you?”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t imagine he’ll be inviting us back.”

  We were past everything by then. There were only the trees, the shoreline, waves gently breaking, the dark water going out forever.

  Chapter Five

  I went to the Glasgow Inn for lunch the next day. I wanted to see how Jackie was doing. I wanted to show him, too, that I wasn’t going to go right back into my hermit routine.

  When I opened the door, he wasn’t there. I couldn’t remember the last time that had happened. When you go into the Glasgow, Jackie is there. That’s just the way it is. Instead his son was behind the bar. Jonathan Junior, usually just Jonathan, or when he’s in trouble, just Junior—he was a little squirt like his father, with the same salt-and-pepper color hair, just a little more of it. Behind his glasses, Jonathan’s eyes were as blue as his mother’s, a woman who I had seen exactly once in my life, the day her son graduated from Michigan Tech over in Houghton. He went down to work for a computer company in North Carolina, meaning to leave the Upper Peninsula winters long behind him. He was back in two years.

  “Where’s your father?” I said, sitting on a stool.

  “He’s upstairs in bed now. Finally. He was up all night.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “I dropped him off here a little after one.”

  “I know, I heard him come in,” he said. “When I came down here this morning, though, he was sitting over there. He had a fire going in the fireplace all night, and I guess he was just sitting there looking at it.”

  “Did he tell you what happened over at Vargas’s house?”

  “He gave me the quick version,” he said. “It sure put him in a weird mood, which I can understand, I guess. Still…”

  “What is it?”

  “He actually hugged me this morning, and told me he loved me and he was proud of me.”

  I couldn’t help smiling. “If I had a son,” I said, “after last night I would have done the same damned thing.”

  “All right,” he said. “Whatever you say. If you think him sleeping at noon is okay, then I won’t worry about it.”

  “He’ll be himself by tomorrow,” I said. “God help us.”

 
I had my lunch, and caught up with Jackie’s son. The man himself never came downstairs. When I got back to my cabin, the message light was blinking on my answering machine. I pressed the play button.

  “Alex McKnight,” the voice said, as warm and soothing as a belt sander. “This is Roy Maven. I’d appreciate it if you could stop by today.”

  That was it. I wasn’t surprised. I knew he’d find me eventually. With a full stomach and not a hell of a lot to do that day, I figured why not, might as well get it over with. I fired up the truck and headed to the Soo.

  I didn’t feel like taking Lakeshore Drive again, didn’t feel like seeing the machines working on the golf course, or the old railroad car that had put such strange thoughts in my head. I took the main roads, M-123 to M-28, a straight line east through Raco and Strongs and then north on I-75 to the Soo. The City-County building is on the east side of town, just past the locks and not that far from Vargas’s house on the river. I didn’t feel like seeing that house again, certainly not the very next day.

  I parked behind the City-County building, back by the entrance to the jail and the little twelve-foot-square cage that serves as the outdoor grounds. There’s one picnic table in there, and on this day two men were sitting on top of it, one lighting a cigarette off the end of the other’s.

  I told the receptionist at the desk that I was there to see Chief Maven. She led me to the little waiting area outside his office. It’s a place I knew well enough, having spent some time there on a couple of memorable occasions. Chief Maven and I had taken an instant chemical dislike to each other, and it had gone downhill ever since. I remembered reading about Prometheus, and how the gods punished him for giving fire to mortals by chaining him to a rock where a raven would come every day for eternity to pluck out his liver. For me, this would be my ultimate punishment, to sit outside Chief Roy Maven’s office every day, waiting to go inside to see the man himself.

  Today, he didn’t keep me waiting. No sooner had I sat down when the door opened and he stuck his head out. “Alex,” he said. “Come in.”

  I followed him into the office and sat down in front of his desk, trying to remember if he had ever called me by my first name before. His office hadn’t changed. It was still four walls of concrete. Maven hadn’t changed, either. He had the drill sergeant haircut, the weather-beaten face. He was yet another tough old bird, like Jackie, like Bennett O’Dell. It was a sort of natural selection at work. Men in their sixties who lived up here year-round had to be as hard as granite. If they weren’t, they either died of heart attacks shoveling snow, or just gave up and moved to Florida.

  “I appreciate you stopping by,” he said. He looked down at the police report in his lap. “I understand from my men that it was a pretty tense situation you were in last night. I’m glad nobody was harmed.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Me too.”

  “The owner of the residence, Winston Vargas, he invited you to play poker? Are you a friend of his?”

  “I had never even met him before. He really didn’t invite me, but Jackie is one of the regular players, and they needed a sixth.”

  “Three men broke in around eleven o’clock, it says here. All with handguns. Glocks, according to you. One of them took Mr. Vargas upstairs, the other two stayed downstairs with the other five players. It looks like you got as much of a description of those two as would be possible under the circumstances. It’s fortunate you were there, Alex. Your training as a police officer came in pretty handy.”

  “Anything to help, Chief. You know me.”

  He let that one go without even blinking. “Breaking and entering, armed robbery, vandalism. It sounds like they were pretty cool about it. Like it was all business.”

  “I’d say so. You have any suspects in mind?”

  “Not at this point. We sent a copy of this over the bridge today, based on your judgment that one of the perps sounded Canadian.”

  “What was the grand total, anyway?”

  “Grand total?”

  “You know,” I said. “What they stole, what they destroyed.”

  “Mr. Vargas says he had just under five thousand dollars in the safe. Says he likes to pick up hundred-dollar bills at work. I guess he’s got an appliance store down in Petoskey. Custom kitchens, that sort of thing. When he sees a hundred in the drawer, he says he puts a hundred of his own money in, takes the bill, puts it in the safe. He’s got a five-year anniversary with his wife coming up, his second marriage, I presume. Says he was going to give her five thousand dollars in hundreds, tell her to go buy whatever she wanted.”

  “Five thousand dollars,” I said. “That’s not big a score, for all the effort they put into it.”

  “Good point,” he said. “The vandalism hurt him a lot more. All that stuff he was collecting. And the telescope. Just about all of it they threw into the river. It doesn’t make any sense. What do you make of it, Alex? Do you have any theories?”

  “Do I have any theories? Chief, if you’re setting me up for something, I’d appreciate it if you could cut to the chase.”

  “I’m not setting you up for anything. Why would I be setting you up?”

  “It’s either that or you’ve been taken over by aliens,” I said. “If I go to your house, I’ll find pods in your basement, right?”

  “Alex…”

  “In fact, that’s why you weren’t there last night. Your detective said you were out of town. Little did he know.”

  “You want to know where I was last night, Alex? I’ll tell you. I was on my way back from a retreat down on Mackinac Island. My wife and I went together. You want to know why?”

  “This is even scarier than the alien thing,” I said. “It’s starting to sound like you’re talking to me like one human being to another. But go ahead.”

  “It’s really a couple of different things that all happened at the same time,” he said. “First thing was, my doctor told me I was killing myself. I mean, literally killing myself. High cholesterol, high stress, no exercise. I was a coronary waiting to happen. Second thing was my wife tells me one day, she says, Roy, we’ve been married almost forty years now, and I’ve never had the nerve to tell you this until now. You’re bringing your job home with you every night, and I’m sick of it. You either quit the job, or you talk to somebody about how to handle it better, or you find yourself a new wife. I’m not going to watch you kill yourself.”

  He stopped. I just sat there. I couldn’t think of a single thing to say to him.

  “The third thing,” he said, “was my oldest daughter told me I was going to be a grandfather. She’s due in…” He looked behind him at a calendar sitting on a credenza. “Ten weeks, Alex. I’m gonna be a grampa.”

  “Congratulations,” I said, finally finding a word.

  “So this retreat, it was just something my wife and I did. There was a lot of New Age mumbo-jumbo they were talking about. I didn’t have much use for most of it. But one thing they said made sense. You want to hear it?”

  “Why not?”

  “They said that in life there are all sorts of things you have no control over. The only thing you can control is your reaction to those things. It’s a pretty simple idea, but I don’t know, it just hit me. All this stuff I get upset about every day, I can’t stop it from happening, no matter how hard I try. But I can choose how to react to it.”

  “Okay…”

  “This is a perfect example,” he said. “In fact, maybe it’s a little test. You know, somebody upstairs seeing how I’d do. Here I come back from vacation and I’ve got three men breaking into one of the most expensive houses in town. They’re holding six men at gunpoint, breaking into a safe, destroying the man’s valuables. I look at the list of people who were in the house, and who do I see? Alex McKnight! What do you think my reaction’s gonna be?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But it wouldn’t be pretty.”

  “That’s how it would have been,” he said. “That’s how the old Chief Maven would have reacted. But n
ot now, Alex. Not now. In fact, it’s a good thing you were there. Look at this report! You’re the only one who gave us any kind of physical description. For all I know, you were the only guy there who kept his cool and showed everyone else how to get through it. If you weren’t there, it might have all turned out pretty badly. I’m glad you were there, Alex. I really am.”

  “If all this is true,” I said. “And I’m still not sure I can believe it. But if it’s true…”

  “Yes?”

  “Then I guess I’m surprised, Chief. Surprised and even a little impressed.”

  He raised his hands, sat back in his chair. If he had wished me a good day right then and sent me on my way, I might have left the place fully convinced he was a new man.

  But he didn’t do that.

  “Besides…” he said. He picked up a pen and twirled it in his right hand, looking down at the report again. “Even though you seem to show up every time there’s a major crime in my town, look at how well it turned out this time.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Nobody was killed,” he said. “Nobody was abducted. I’m not out looking for anybody. I’m not dragging the lake for bodies. And the best part of all…”

  He looked up at me. He was smiling.

  “The best part of all,” he said, “is that you won’t even be involved this time. I won’t be seeing you every time I turn around. I won’t be hearing your name every time I pick up the phone. Because you…”

  He put the pen between his two palms and rubbed it back and forth, like he was a Boy Scout starting a fire.

  “…are not…”

  He kept rubbing and smiling.

  “…a private investigator…”

  I couldn’t decide which was more annoying.

  “…anymore. Am I right?”

  “Yes,” I said. “You’re right.”

  “This man Vargas,” he said. “You don’t work for him.”

  “No.”

  “You never will work for him.”

  “I’m sure I won’t.”

  “You’ll never work for anybody again. Not as a private investigator, anyway. Not in my town.”