A Hard Ticket Home (Twin Cities P.I. Mac McKenzie Novels)

by David Housewright

“Happy now, McKenzie?”

  “You want a sno-cone?”

  “You really have a sno-cone machine?”

  “Sure.”

  “Where did you get a sno-cone machine?”

  “Remember Tommy Baumgartner from high school?”

  “Kid who broke his collarbone playing basketball?”

  “He owns a bunch of sno-cone concessions at the Minnesota State Fair now. He helped me get one.”

  And so we had sno-cones. The machine was probably too big—it was designed for amusement parks and will shave over five hundred pounds of ice in an hour, but I liked its antique charm. Bobby watched intently as I loaded the machine with about two and a half pounds of ice cubes and shaved enough of it for two large cones. I flavored mine with cherry syrup. He took grape.

  “This is pretty good,” he told me. “But about that music …”

  I replaced the monks with The Very Best of Aretha Franklin, Vol. 1.

  Bobby liked the first sno-cone so much he had a second. While he was eating it he said, “You’re the best friend I’ll ever have.”

  “You don’t get out much at all, do you?” I told him, keeping it light.

  “Where in hell is Bruder?”

  The Sunday newspapers speculated that Good Deal Dave was no longer in the state. I know I wouldn’t be. ’Course, there are plenty of places in the Twin Cities where a man could hide. Places that deal in cash only, where they don’t want to know who you are or see a credit card or a personal check or any form of ID, where they don’t want to know what kind of car you drive or what your license plate number is. The question was, how would a yuppie from Highland Park know where to find those places?

  And another question.

  “How did Cook get my business card?”

  “It’s a mystery to me,” Bobby said.

  When he left a short time later, we shook hands.

  10

  Molly Carlson called early Monday morning and requested that I meet her at a funeral home on Snelling near where it intersected with Randolph, about a mile from where Jamie was killed. I could see a bar at the intersection from where I stood speaking with her in the parking lot and wished I was in it.

  “My father died when I was eleven years old,” Molly told me. “That was what? Forty years ago? I thought I was over it but I’m not. Sometimes I’ll hear a laugh that is the same or a song he used to sing or see a man who resembles him and suddenly I’m a child again, holding my mother’s hand, asking her if Daddy’s gone to heaven. That’s what happened just now. The funeral director, he looked like my father, the same height, the same color hair, and when he came close I could smell his aftershave. It was Old Spice just like Daddy used to wear and I started crying and I couldn’t stop. He thought it was because of Jamie.” Molly dabbed her eyes with a wadded-up tissue, not concerned at all that so many strangers could see her tears. “I’m sorry I called you.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “I wish Daddy were here now.”

  “What about your husband?”

  The ME hadn’t yet released Jamie’s remains but he promised that he would soon. Molly Carlson had driven the two hundred miles from Grand Rapids to arrange to have them sent home when he did. She didn’t want to use the telephone for this. She had come alone.

  “Richard doesn’t understand,” Molly said. “It’s only been a few days since—since the policeman called, and he thinks I should be over it by now. We haven’t seen Jamie for seven years so he says I should be over it by now. Maybe he needs me to be over it so he can get over it, but I can’t get over losing a child in less than a week. And Stacy. Oh, Stacy, Stacy—what about Stacy? We’re going to lose her, too. How can Richard get over that in less than a week? How is that possible?”

  “People heal in their own time, you can’t hurry it,” I said, repeating a line that someone once told me. I was trying to be a comfort to her and not doing a very good job of it. That’s why she called. She needed comfort. She had been crying uncontrollably in the funeral director’s office. He asked her if there was anyone he could call. Only she didn’t have family or friends in the Cities. All she had was my business card.

  “I’ve been having this dream every night, a recurring dream,” Molly said. “In the dream everything is back to normal and Jamie is seven years old. She’s sitting in the backyard, feeding tea and cookies to her dolls. She’s happy and she’s smiling. Then there’s the sound of heavy footsteps and the footsteps grow louder and louder until Jamie looks up, only it isn’t Jamie, it’s Stacy, and a shadow covers her face and she screams and I wake up and start crying. The first time Richard held me in his arms and told me it was just a bad dream. Now he pretends to be asleep.”

  “Maybe the two of you need to see a counselor.”

  “Maybe. After Stacy—you will find Jamie’s son, won’t you? Richard said you would.”

  “I’m trying.”

  Molly unlocked her car door, but she didn’t get in.

  “Do you want to hear something funny? The funeral director told me that when you ship a body home by plane or train, you have to purchase a ticket for it just like it was a living person. Can you imagine that?” She started to laugh. The laughter soon turned to more tears, torrents of them.

  I took her in my arms and held her tight.

  “I wonder if Jamie has ever been on a plane before,” she said, weeping into my shirt collar.

  I rocked her gently back and forth and thought about Richard Carlson, that big, proud man. I doubted he could appreciate the dark irony of buying an airline ticket for a dead woman. If the flight was overbooked, could she be bumped? Did she get frequent flyer mileage?

  We stood like that for a long time, crying over the ticket that would take Jamie home, the one-way ticket that waits for all of us, like the one that took my mother and father to Turtle Bay, the bay on the lake where I built my lake home. My father had had my mother cremated. He stored her ashes in an urn that he kept in a box on the top shelf of his closet. He never opened the box as far as I knew. When he died, I had him cremated, too, and mixed their ashes together and scattered them on the bay and sat drifting in a canoe until the moon was high and the water was black.

  If we’re lucky, our ticket isn’t collected until we’re old and gray and dying is as easy as closing our eyes and whispering good-bye. If we aren’t—but what does it matter? When it’s time for our tickets to get punched, it’s time. Neither when nor where nor why nor how many people mourn our passing nor the quality of their tears will make a bit of difference. The conductor simply punches our ticket and sends us home.

  I broke my rule against drinking in the morning, stopping at Plum’s just down the street. I had a CB and water, but it didn’t do me any good so I had another. After the third drink I decided I had had enough.

  A half hour later I was home. I wrote a detailed report on my PC that explained what I knew, what I thought I knew, and what I was going to do about it. I printed four copies and sealed each in an envelope along with disks containing copies of my notes. I addressed the envelopes to Bobby Dunston, Clayton Rask, Chief Casey, and Richard Carlson and left them in the center of my desk. Just in case.

  Embedded in the floor of my basement is a safe. It’s where I keep my guns. I opened the safe and withdrew an extra magazine for the Beretta .380. I also pulled out a hand grenade, circa 1945, with ridges cut deep into the heavy metal to make fragmentation easier. It had been given to me a year earlier by a World War II vet I once did a favor for, a guy who was at the Battle of the Bulge and Remagen Bridge and who now lives in Hibbing. After all this time, neither of us knew if the grenade would still work.

  “Let’s hope we don’t find out,” I told myself as I slipped it into the pocket of my Minnesota Timberwolves sport jacket. The .380 was on my hip.

  I drove past the apartment building in Richfield, turned around, and drove past it again. A sleek Jaguar XJ6 was parked in the lot next to the two black Chevy vans—who says crime doesn’t pay? I tur
ned south on the next street and followed it to the hole in the chain-link fence behind the apartment building. The empty field between the hole and the rear of the building made me nervous. I would be so exposed. Then there was the thick glass in the back door—easy to see through, easy to shoot through. That made me nervous, too. I couldn’t see a sentry with my binoculars but that didn’t mean he wasn’t there. I’d certainly station one at the back entrance, wouldn’t you? I hesitated for a few minutes, told myself, A guy in a T’wolves jacket cutting across a vacant lot, why would anyone get excited about that? I took a deep breath.

  “Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” I muttered to myself, which was something my father probably would have said if he had been around. Either that or “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” He had a cliché for every occasion. For a long time I thought he made them up as he went along.

  I left the car, squeezed through the hole in the fence, and quickly followed the path to the rear of the apartment building. I watched the door as I went. Saw no one. I paused outside the door. Through the glass I could see the corridor that ran the length of the building. Two black men holding automatic rifles were clearly visible just inside the front entrance. They were talking, their backs to me. Several large packing crates were stacked along the corridor walls between me and them. They looked like the boxes refrigerators came in. I took several more deep breaths, slipped the Beretta from its holster and activated it. Quitters never win and winners never quit. I went inside. In retrospect, it was one of the dumbest things I have ever done. Also the most amazing. I have no idea who I was pretending to be.

  “What are you doing?” a voice called out.

  “Oh oh.” I flattened against a refrigerator box, hiding.

  “You’re supposed to be at the back door,” the voice screamed.

  “Chill, man, I’m watchin’. I’s just talkin’ to my bro.”

  “Don’t give me that shit, man. You suppose to be guardin’ the back door.”

  “Ain’t no thing.”

  “Tell that to Stalin. Now git your black ass back where you belong ’fore he see you. Move now.”

  I listened as two sets of footsteps approached my hiding place. They were hard to hear on the carpet over the loud and imaginative curses the screamer was laying on the guard who’d neglected his post. The cursing continued as they passed me.

  “Don’t move,” I said. I was trying to sound forceful but I doubt my words came out that way.

  The two black men were startled. They swiveled their heads to look behind them. I made sure they saw the gun I held with two hands at eye level.

  “Don’t talk. Don’t think. Just get against the wall. Do it now.”

  They did what I told them.

  “Set the rifle on the floor. Do it now.”

  The guard thought about it. “I’ve already killed two of you,” I hissed. That convinced him. He dropped the rifle and the two men assumed the position without my telling them to.

  “You dead, man,” the screamer told me.

  I ignored the remark. “Call your friend.”

  “Fuck you.”

  I poked the muzzle of the gun into his eye. He cried out in pain.

  A voice from down the hall. “What is it?”

  “Call him,” I hissed.

  “Get down here,” the screamer yelled.

  “What for?”

  “Get your ass down here.”

  The other sentry came running.

  “Drop the gun. Up against the wall.”

  He looked at me, looked at his friends.

  “Do it now.”

  “Stalin ain’t gonna like this.”

  “No lie,” the second guard replied.

  The sentry dropped his rifle, assumed the position next to his friends.

  I slipped the grenade from my pocket with my left hand, pressing the lever hard against the body. It felt like it weighed fifty pounds. I thrust it to the screamer.

  “Whoa!”

  “Pull the pin.”

  “No fuckin’ way.”

  I shoved the muzzle of the Beretta close to his eye and repeated my instructions. His finger trembled as he hooked it through the ring. He pulled. The pin slipped out far too easily for my peace of mind. I pressed the lever hard against the grenade body.

  “Are we having fun yet?” I asked.

  The three brothers didn’t think so. Truth be told, neither did I. I told the screamer to slip the pin into my left jacket pocket. He did it without taking his eyes off the grenade.

  “Now,” I said. “Let’s go see Stalin.”

  Stalin’s apartment was on the third floor. His corridor, like the others, was littered with crates that apparently contained major appliances. The word BELLOTI was stenciled on the larger crates and WORLDWARE, MELLGREN’S, and CK COMPUTERS were stamped on the smaller boxes. The four of us juked and jived around them, me in the rear, my heart pounding like I was running the Twin Cities marathon.

  Through the door I could hear a man shouting. “I don’t believe it!” He repeated the phrase three times.

  “What now?” a second voice responded without rancor.

  “Stems and seeds. I’m standing here with a baggie full of fucking stems and seeds.”

  “You the one insists we cut back on distribution, git outta the trade.”

  “And you the one insists we keep our hand in. So how come I’m standin’ here with a bag of stems and seeds?”

  I gestured for the screamer to open the door. He did and the four of us poured into the room. Two men turned to look at us. One was sitting in a brown vinyl lounge chair, a ledger book balanced on his knee. The other was standing in front of him, gripping what remained of a nickel bag of grass. The man with the bag was tall and thin, his eyes glistened with fury and his mouth was frozen in a vicious snarl.

  “How many times I gotta tell you all to knock!”

  “Stalin,” the screamer said quietly.

  That’s when Stalin noticed me standing behind the three brothers.

  “Who’re you?” he asked.

  I pointed the Beretta at his face.

  “McKenzie.”

  Stalin didn’t seem too impressed. He glanced down at the man in the faux leather chair and said, “Who in charge of security ’round here?”

  “You are.”

  “I gotta do everything … .” Then to me, “How come you still alive, McKenzie?”

  “Clean living.”

  “Man, you drive an SUV.”

  “So now you know I have nothing to lose.”

  Stalin grinned brightly.

  “Last mother point a gun at me, know what I did to ’im? I wired his johnson to a car battery. That got ’im up.” He chuckled at his own joke. The screamer and two guards chuckled, too, but you could tell their hearts weren’t in it.

  “Was it a Die Hard?” I asked.

  “A Die Hard?” Stalin laughed harder. “A Die Hard battery, that’s funny. You’re a funny guy, McKenzie.”

  “You’re a real humorist yourself.” I was trying to sound confident. I doubt I looked it. Especially after I heard the voice to my right.

  “Shhhheeeeeeettt,” it said, drawing the word out. I took my eyes off Stalin only long enough for a glance. Two men were standing in the doorway of what looked to be a bedroom. One was sporting a mustache. The other was clean-shaven. The same guys the cops rousted outside my house Saturday. The one with the mustache was hefting a Soviet-made RPK light machine gun with forty-round magazine—our equivalent to the BAR. He was pointing it at me.

  Where were they getting this stuff ?

  The man without the mustache said, “This is McKenzie, man.”

  “No shit. You just tune in?” Stalin asked calmly. “Git with the program.”

  “You’re dead, McKenzie,” said the one with the mustache as he sighted down the barrel of the machine gun. My three companions became anxious and started to slip away.

  “Nobody moves,” I told them and they froze in place a
round me, my bodyguard.

  Stalin seemed almost amused. “What’s the matter with you three? Get outta the way.”

  I kept pointing the Beretta at Stalin. He didn’t seem to mind.

  “Well?” he asked.

  I brought my left hand up from behind the screamer’s back and let Stalin get a good look at what I was holding.

  “Fuckin’ A!” He said it like an actor trying to reach the upper balcony. “What up with that shit?” He looked at Mr. Mustache with the light machine gun then back at my companions at the door. He was staring directly into the screamer’s eyes when he said, “I am really, really, really unhappy ’bout this.”

  “It weren’t me,” the screamer told him. “Damon here left his post.”

  Stalin looked at Damon. The guard shifted his weight from one foot to the other, looked at me, looked at the closed door behind us, wishing he was out the door and down the street.

  The room fell silent. Somewhere a TV played loudly—a game show host was telling a disappointed contestant that there were parting gifts waiting backstage.

  From his chair the man with the ledger told Stalin calmly, “Ax him what he want.”

  “So why the fuck you here, white meat?”

  “I thought we’d get together and chat, seeing how we have so many friends in common.”

  “What friends?”

  “Bradley Young and Cleave Benjamn for two.”

  “Let me smoke ’im!” shouted the man with the machine gun. “Let ’em put ’im down. You say the word, he gone.”

  The shout jolted me and for a moment I thought I saw a train conductor coming my way with a paper punch in his hand. Only Stalin was on top of it.

  “Chill!” he shouted, then added in a calmer voice, “Slack off but don’t back off.”

  Mr. Mustache allowed the muzzle of the light machine gun to dip slightly—instead of my head he was now aiming at my chest, not much of an improvement.

  Stalin crossed his arms like he didn’t have a care in the world.

  “Why you comin’ like this, McKenzie? You erase two a my family then you come to my house playin’ fuckin’ GI Joe. What up with that?”