A Stolen Season am-7

by Steve Hamilton

  “I don’t suppose he tried to help you fight them off.”

  “I don’t actually recall him doing that, no.”

  I thought about it for a minute. I could have done what he said, just wait until that night, hope to find them somewhere in town. Or else…

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Wouldn’t Caroline know where they are?”

  He looked at me as well as he could with one good eye. “You’re not going after them alone.”

  “Look who’s talking.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “I’m not going after them,” I said. “Not really.”

  Not in the way you’re thinking of, anyway…It was close enough to the truth, I could say it with a straight face.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’ll tell you after I do it. I promise.”

  “I’m coming with you,” he said. He took the ice away from his face. His beaten-up wreck of a face.

  “You stupid idiot…What the hell were you thinking?”

  “I’ve never wanted to kill a man before,” he said. “I think I could do it now, Alex. I honestly think I could do it.”

  “I believe you. That’s why you’re staying here.”

  A few minutes later, I was out the door. He had fresh ice. He had water. He had soup. He had the bottle of ibuprofen.

  I had the keys to his truck.

  Before I left, I stole them. I didn’t want him to follow me down there. Then it occurred to me that he might have a spare key, so I opened the hood on his truck and disconnected the battery terminals.

  Then I figured, yeah, that’ll slow him down for two minutes. I went back to my truck, got the big wire cutters and snipped off both connectors.

  Now you’re grounded, I thought.

  I headed out to the main road as the sun cleared the trees. Hell, maybe the temperature would break sixty today. There was always hope. I headed east yet again, tearing up the same old road to the Soo. An empty road, as straight as if drawn with a ruler. I drove even faster than usual, which is saying something. I’m not just an ex-cop, but an ex-cop who took three bullets on the job, so there isn’t a state trooper, county deputy, or local police officer in the state of Michigan who would give me a speeding ticket.

  Okay, maybe there was one particular chief of police who would gladly ring me up, but as far I knew he never sat out here with a radar gun.

  It was just after ten when I hit Sault Ste. Marie. I drove to Caroline’s house on Seymour Street. This time I saw Eddie’s beat-up old truck in the driveway. I pulled in behind it.

  Nobody answered when I knocked on the door. I knocked again, louder. Finally, I heard movement somewhere inside. When the interior door opened, there was Eddie, looking like he’d just spent the last few hours laid out on a morgue table.

  “The hell you want, man.” He had sweat pants on and no shirt. Which was the last thing I needed to see at this hour. Or any hour.

  “Remember me?”

  “You’re Vinnie’s friend.” His voice was slightly muffled through the glass storm door.

  “Very good. Where’s Caroline?”

  “She’s sleeping.”

  “Wake her up.”

  “No way.”

  I grabbed the storm door handle a split second before Eddie. We had a brief tug-of-war until I got it open and stepped inside the place. I was ready to nail him if I had to, but he was already moving backward.

  “The fuck you doing,” he said. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “What happened here last night?”

  “It was Vinnie’s fault, man. He shouldn’t have been here.”

  “He was trying to look out for your wife. Because obviously you’re not going to.”

  “You can’t come in here and talk to me like that.”

  “And yet somehow I’m doing just that. Go wake up your wife.”

  “I’m gonna call the police.”

  “You go ahead. We’ll all have a lot to talk about.”

  “What’s going on out here?” Caroline said. She came into the room wearing an old blue bathrobe. Her eyes were still swollen with sleep, her dark hair all over the place.

  “It’s what’s-his-face,” Eddie said. “Vinnie’s buddy. I told him you were asleep.”

  “My name is Alex,” I said. “I think we met briefly at the bar.”

  “Yeah,” she said, “right before you guys took the place apart.”

  “That wasn’t exactly my idea. But speaking of Vinnie-”

  “I’m putting some clothes on,” Eddie said. “If you don’t mind.”

  “Go right ahead,” I said. “There’s a couple of things I need to ask your wife about.”

  When Eddie left the room, Caroline kept standing there. She didn’t invite me into the kitchen for coffee. She didn’t ask me to sit down. She looked down at the carpet and rubbed the back of her neck.

  “Where are they?” I said.

  “Who?”

  “You know who I’m talking about.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I think you do.”

  “Please go,” she said.

  From another room I could hear Eddie banging drawers. It sounded like he was getting dressed in a hurry.

  “I’ll go when you tell me where to find them.”

  “Why do you want to know that?”

  “You know why. They beat the hell out of Vinnie.”

  “You want them to do the same to you?”

  “That’s not my plan.”

  I heard a door slam. Then footsteps outside.

  “You should stay away from those guys,” she said.

  “So should you.”

  She shook her head. She still hadn’t looked me in the eye.

  “I know what you’re doing,” I said. “With the prescription medicine.” I didn’t want to rat out Theresa, the woman from the clinic, but I would if I had to.

  “You don’t know anything.”

  “How much money are you making?”

  “It’s none of your business.”

  “I can’t imagine it’s worth it.”

  “Like I have a choice.”

  I thought about that one for a minute. Then I heard Eddie starting his truck. What the hell, I thought. I’m parked right behind him.

  I went to the front window and looked out, just in time to see him backing up a few inches, clipping my bumper, and then gunning the truck forward in a sharp turn across his own front yard. When he hit the street he was gone in two seconds.

  “Where’s he going?” I said.

  “I think you make him nervous.”

  I turned and looked at her. This time, I really saw her for the first time. It wasn’t the sleep that had made her eyes so swollen. As I moved closer to her, I could see the purple bruises. I had officially never seen so many bruises on so many people in one week before.

  “Did Eddie do that to you?”

  “Please go now.”

  “He’s making you do this,” I said. If he were still here, I’d very much want to bounce him off every wall in the room. “He’s making you get the pills and sell them. Am I right?”

  “I’m not talking about it. I don’t even know you.”

  “You don’t have to do this. Any of it. You can leave here right now.”

  “Get out.”

  “I’m serious. Vinnie will help you. I’ll help you.”

  “I said get out.”

  “Okay,” I said. “If you don’t want us to help you…Fine. Just tell me where they are and I’ll go.”

  “I’m not telling you anything.”

  “I know Vinnie won’t talk to the police about what you’re doing, Caroline, but I will. Do you understand me? I’ll call Chief Maven right now.”

  “Why are you doing this to me?”

  “I have no choice. The next time Vinnie runs into those guys, either they’ll kill him or he’ll kill one of them. Either way, his life is over. Don’t you care about that?”

  She didn’t
answer. She was starting to rock back and forth now.

  “So tell me where they are,” I said, “and I’ll leave you alone.”

  “You’re an asshole.”

  “Yeah, sometimes. When I have to be. Tell me where they are.”

  “They’re in Hessel.”

  “Hessel? Are you serious?”

  “The kid, Harry, his father’s got a summerhouse down there.”

  “Where is it?”

  “It’s a maze down there. All those little islands.”

  “I know that. Is the house on one of the islands?”

  “No, there’s a road that goes down from the center of town. It branches a couple of times.”

  “Draw me a map.”

  She gave out a long sigh like she was the most tired and beaten-down person who ever lived. “You want a map,” she said. “Why don’t I just chauffeur you down there myself?”

  “No, thanks. The map will do.”

  She went into the kitchen and drew it on the back of a pizza menu. She handed it to me without looking at me, then sat down at the kitchen table.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’ll come back sometime, if you want me to.”

  “Why would I want that?”

  “I told you. I can help you.”

  “You can’t help me.” Her voice was flat, like she was reciting a simple fact that anyone with any sense could see.

  “I can try. I’ll start by smacking your husband a few times.”

  That almost got her to smile.

  “Just say the word,” I said. “Just let me go do this other thing first.”

  She nodded her head. That was all I was going to get from her. I left her sitting there at the table, went out the front door to my truck. Eddie had left a set of tire tracks across the thin grass, and as I stood in front of the truck I could see where he had dented my bumper.

  “Oh yeah,” I said out loud. “I’ll definitely be watching out for you, Eddie.”

  Before heading down to Hessel, I had one more stop to make. I drove over to the Custom Motor Shop, but Leon wasn’t there. His boss Harlow told me that business was so slow, they had to cut him loose for a while. With the lousy weather, who was going to buy a boat? I almost told him I knew a few guys who were looking for a new boat, but I didn’t feel like explaining the joke. So I just thanked him and left.

  Exactly what I was afraid of, I thought. I have to go to the house again.

  Eleanor answered the door. That same cloud came over her face as soon as she saw me. I wondered how many perfectly innocent visits I’d have to make for that cloud to go away. Whatever the number, today wouldn’t be the start of them. I was there to borrow a gun.

  I asked Leon to be discreet about it, not to parade through the house with the gun in his hand. He brought it out to me in a shoe box, but I don’t think Ellie was fooled. It’s not like I make a habit of borrowing shoes from the man.

  I hate guns, that’s the thing. I hate everything about them, even though I carried one every day for eight years. When I threw my last gun into the lake, I was in no rush to replace it. So now here I was, using a loaner from my ex-partner. I had my driver’s-side window open, hoping he’d just give me the box so I could be on my way. Instead, he opened up the passenger door and got in the truck with me.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “I’m not giving you this until we talk.”

  “Leon, come on.”

  “Tell me the situation.”

  “Leon…”

  “It’s the men from the boat,” he said. “That much I can guess. Last I saw of them, they were going around looking for that stupid lockbox. What’s happened since then to make you need a gun?”

  I gave him the short version. How the men were getting the pills from Caroline. How close to her Vinnie had been, way back when. Then how he’d gotten himself beat up the night before.

  “How bad is it?”

  “They got him pretty bad. But he’ll live.”

  Leon shook his head. “So you’re going to go make the same mistake.”

  “I was hoping a gun in my hand would make a slight difference.”

  “Think it all the way through, Alex. You’re upping the ante here.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You stick a gun in their faces, tell them to stay away from Vinnie, to stay away from this woman on the reservation…What do you think happens?”

  “Well…”

  “I’ve seen those guys. Lord knows you have. You don’t think it’ll be like poking a stick in a bee’s nest?”

  “Okay, Leon. So what do you suggest?”

  He thought about it for a minute. “First way I can think of…”

  “What is it?”

  “If you hurt them, Alex. I mean if you hurt them so bad you get right into their souls…”

  “That does have its appeal right now. If you could have seen Vinnie…”

  “No, I mean you’d really have to beat them within an inch of their lives,” he said. “To these guys, you’d have become the devil himself. So bad they’d shiver every time they thought of you.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “You can’t do it, Alex. You can’t go that far. I know I couldn’t.”

  “So what does that leave me?”

  “Well, there’s one other way I can think of. You remember my little principle for maximizing a perceived threat?”

  “Oh no,” I said. “Please don’t tell me. Not that thing…What was it?”

  “The illusion of overwhelming force.”

  “Every time we try that one, it blows up in our faces. Remember?”

  “We’ve had bad luck with it, I admit. Something always breaks the spell. But the idea itself is solid.”

  “I can’t believe I’m even going to ask,” I said, “but how would it work this time?”

  “It’s simple. You have to make these guys believe that it would be in their best interest to stay as far away as possible. That messing with you, or Vinnie, or anybody else you care to name would be the biggest mistake of their lives.”

  “I thought that’s what I was gonna do.”

  “As what? A guy who rents out cabins?”

  “More than that. An ex-cop, for one thing.”

  “That won’t do it, Alex. These are bad guys. You gotta go in a lot harder than that, know what I mean? You gotta go in like this is something you do every day and twice on Sundays.”

  A classic Leonism, I thought. Somebody should write this stuff down.

  “It would help if I went with you,” he said. “We could double the effect.”

  “You’re not coming with me.”

  “I really think I should.”

  “Leon, I appreciate it. Really, I do. You’ve saved my ass more times than I can count. But I can’t keep dragging you into things, okay? I can’t keep putting your wife through this.”

  “I’ll tell her we’re going fishing.”

  “She can see right through you, Leon. Through me, too. I’m doing this alone.”

  He looked out the window at his house. He was about to say something, but he stopped himself before he made a sound.

  “Thank you for the gun,” I said. “I’ll bring it back when I’m done.”

  “Okay,” he said. He put the shoe box down on the seat. “Be careful, all right?”

  “You know I will.”

  He opened the door. As he was about to step out, he turned back to me.

  “You know what was in that lockbox, right?”

  “If I had to guess…Money.”

  “To buy what?”

  “More drugs. Big-time drugs.”

  “From where?”

  “Not the reservation…”

  “Of course not. This thing with the woman…It can’t be more than a bottle or two at a time, right? I bet they’re just taking those pills themselves.”

  “You’re probably right,” I said. “Anything more than that, it would never get past the doctors on the reservation. So he
ll, how much money could even be involved here?”

  “Small time stuff,” Leon said. “But if you had some real money and you were in the market for a big score, where would you go?”

  I shook my head.

  “Assuming it was that same kind of stuff…prescription painkillers…Vicodin…Hell, just about anything these days.”

  “Canada,” I said.

  “Exactly. They’ve got a ton of it over there. And American dollars will buy a lot more of it.”

  It was starting to make more sense to me. It was an open border, with a thousand different places to slip through unnoticed. Natalie was dealing with her own version of the story, but in a completely different way. Different merchandise, going in the opposite direction, but the same basic idea. Hell, even her own grandfather had been part of it, back when the liquor was coming across from Ontario during Prohibition.

  “That’s why they were in the boat,” I said. The irony of it, that those old wooden Chris-Crafts were once the rumrunner’s choice, all those years ago when they were the fastest thing on the water.

  “On a foggy night. Maybe they couldn’t get across the water yet, so they were waiting…Killing time at the casino, rounding up a few pills, just for themselves.”

  “But now if their box of money is at the bottom of the lake…”

  “They’re in a tough spot. They probably don’t know what to do. They might be afraid to go back empty-handed.”

  “So maybe I can give them a little nudge.”

  “Exactly,” Leon said. He got out of the truck. “Make them feel a little homesick.”

  “Thank you again.”

  “One more thing…I probably shouldn’t even have to say this, but make sure you load the gun.”

  “They won’t know if it’s not loaded.”

  “Yeah, but you’ll know. It’ll make a big difference, believe me.”

  He was right again. He almost always was. I took the gun and I left him standing there in his driveway. As I looked back in the rearview mirror, I could see him watching me until I was out of sight.

  Chapter Nine

  I left the gun in the box all the way down there. Hessel is about fifty miles due south, so it didn’t take long. Once I got there, though, I had to pull out Caroline’s map to find the house. The Les Cheneaux Islands are scattered all along the Lake Huron shoreline-I’d once heard somebody say there are thirty-six main islands, with almost as many little peninsulas jutting out from the mainland. Overall, there were hundreds of channels running through the whole area, some of them wide and inviting, some rocky and shallow. It was a beautiful part of the state, but easy to get hopelessly lost in.