The Hunting Wind: An Alex McKnight Mystery

by Steve Hamilton

  “Why even bother? After what she did to you?”

  “I remember it so well,” he said. “How it felt. Back in 1971, when I realized she was just setting me up. All those things she said to me. All those lies. It was so easy to believe, because I wanted it to be true. I wanted it too much. When I was finally done playing out the string in baseball, when I finally went home, I knew I had to start acting like a real grown-up. My father’s business was doing well. Everybody was expecting me to take it over someday. I tried to do it the right way, Alex. I tried to work hard, the same way my father did. But then when the real estate market crashed out there . . . I was afraid I was going to lose everything. Again. The same feeling, everything going down the drain again. There was this woman, one of our clients. She was very rich. She liked me. I could talk her into anything. It was so easy, Alex. It was so easy.”

  “Okay,” I said. “A con man is born. I can fill in the rest. But you still haven’t told me why you came back in the first place. Before you knew anything about Harwood, when it was just you deciding to come back here after all these years. You could have made things right with your family. You could have tried at least. Why did you come back here?”

  “Think about it,” he said. He managed a weak smile. “When was the last time everything was good, Alex? When was the last time I was on top of the world?”

  “When, Randy?”

  “When I was pitching for Toledo, and Alex McKnight was behind the plate, that was the last time I had it right. That was the last time I felt like I could do anything I wanted to. After that, it was all downhill, Alex. On roller skates. Before I went down for good, I had to come back one more time. Just to see if I could be that person again.”

  I just shook my head.

  “And Maria. This is kind of crazy, but I may be the only person in the world who can understand her now. After everything I’ve done, you know what? You can love somebody, Alex. You can really love somebody, even though you know you’re using them.”

  “Randy, that’s the most depraved thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “It’s true,” he said. “I’ve been there. My family will never forgive me, Alex. And I don’t blame them. The people I’ve hurt, the people I’ve taken money from. They’ll never forgive me.”

  “She barely remembered you,” I said.

  “She remembers me.”

  “No.”

  “That’s what she said to you. I know she remembers me.”

  “Yeah? You know that?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Because we’re the same,” he said. “That’s how I know. We’ll always have a connection.”

  “A connection,” I said. “That’s good. That’s real good. How about this instead? You know her so well, you gotta figure she’s got a lot of money stored up after all these years. Am I right?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “You’ve worn out your welcome everywhere else. You know you’re about to take your last fall, so you figure, Why not? You’ll come back, see if you can tap into her again. After all these years.”

  “No.”

  “It was a long time ago. You don’t have much leverage. But you know she’s running something now. You get in on it. Or you threaten her, tell her you’ll scare away the mark, or God knows what. You’d think of something. Am I getting warm here?”

  “No.”

  “This was your last chance. Take her down, whatever you had to do. Take the money and run. Where else were you going to go, anyway?”

  “You got it wrong.”

  “Give me one reason why I should believe you.”

  “Because I can’t lie to you.”

  “You could lie to anybody,” I said. “You could look God himself in the eye and tell him the sky is green.”

  “Not you,” he said. “I could never lie to you.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Because you’re my catcher.”

  “Come on, Randy. Enough with that. It was thirty fucking years ago.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’m telling you the truth, and you know it. I’ve got no reason to he to you now. In your bones, you know it. You just have to trust me.”

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it.

  “You believe me, right?”

  “I don’t know what to believe anymore.”

  “Tell me you believe me. I gotta hear you say it.”

  “Randy . . .”

  “Say it, Alex. Tell me you believe me.”

  “Let me think about it,” I said. “I get nervous when people tell me I have to say things.”

  “Is there really a cop outside?” he said. “Right now?”

  “I’m surprised he hasn’t come in yet. He must have heard us talking.”

  “Maybe he’s asleep. Do you think we’d wake him if we sneaked out of here?”

  “I think he’d wake up, yes.”

  “We could tie these sheets together,” he said. “And go out the window.”

  “I hope you’re not serious.”

  “I’m never serious,” he said. He rubbed the bandages around his neck for a moment. “Is she safe?” he finally said. “Tell me that much.”

  “She’s safe,” I said. “Harwood’s dead.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  “No.”

  He thought about it. He didn’t ask me anything more.

  “You want me to get the doctor now?” I said.

  “Yes. I need some water.”

  “You should call your family.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “You know. You talked to them.”

  “Call your son,” I said. “Terry, the catcher. He’ll want to know.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll do that.”

  There wasn’t much else to say. When I finally said good-bye to him, I wasn’t sure how much I should hate him. In a way, he was exactly the same person I had known back in 1971. Now, almost thirty years later, after all the trouble he had caused me, I still couldn’t make myself hate Randy Wilkins. No matter how hard I tried.

  And I still didn’t know if I believed him.

  I drove home, four and a half hours straight north in the middle of the night. The sun was just coming up as I crossed over the Mackinac Bridge. There was still snow on the ground in the Upper Peninsula. As always, it felt like a different world. Maybe that’s why I came up here in the first place. And why I’ve stayed so long.

  I went to my cabin and slept a few hours. When I got up, I found my old catcher’s mitt and wrapped it up in a cardboard box. I addressed it to Terry Wilkins, care of the UC-Santa Barbara Athletic Department. I got myself cleaned up and took the box to the post office.

  And then, of course, I went to the Glasgow Inn for lunch. Where else was I going to go? Jackie was there waiting for me with a cold Canadian. He asked me about everything that had happened. I spent the rest of the afternoon telling him about it.

  Around dinnertime, a wheelchair came through the front door. For one sickening second, I thought it was Harwood’s ghost come to get me. It was Leon, both of his ankles still in casts, his wife pushing the wheelchair.

  We all had dinner together, and I got to tell the whole story again, this time for Leon. After dinner, I told Jackie to mix me up a vodka and root beer. “One slinky, coming up,” he said. It was truly awful.

  We drank to the past. To money and to lies. To youth. To crazy left-handed pitchers.

  We drank until the sun went down again on another day, keeping the fireplace fed and staying close to its warmth. Even when it’s springtime in the rest of the world, the nights are still cold in Paradise.

  Turn the page for an excerpt from Steve

  Hamilton’s next mystery

  NORTH OF NOWHERE

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  St. Martin’s/Minotaur Paperbacks!

  That summer, it was all about secrets.

  It was the summer I turned forty-nine years old, which made me
start thinking about fifty, and what that would feel like. Fifty years with not a lot to show for them. One marriage that was so far in the past, it was like something you’d dig up out of the ground. My baseball career—four years of minor league ball and not a single day in the majors. And my career as a Detroit police officer, which ended one night with me on my back, watching my partner die next to me. That’s what I saw when I looked back on my life.

  On the plus side, I was getting a lot of reading done that summer. And, though I didn’t know it yet, I was about to meet some interesting new people. I wouldn’t get to see any fireworks on the Fourth of July, because I’d spend most of that evening lying facedown on a stranger’s floor, a gun held to the side of my head. I would wait for one final blast, maybe one final blur of color. And then nothing.

  I already had one bullet inside me. I knew I didn’t have room for another one.

  More than anything else, it was the summer in which I had to make a big decision. Was I going to rejoin the human race or was I going to keep drifting until I was too far away to ever come back? That’s what the summer was really all about. That and the secrets.

  Jonathan Connery, AKA Jackie, owner of the Glasgow Inn in Paradise, Michigan, raised in Scotland, alleged second-cousin to Sean Connery, and in his opinion anyway, just as good-looking—this is the man who took me to that house on that Fourth of July evening. The Glasgow Inn is just down the road from my cabins. I live in the first cabin, the one I helped my old man build back in the sixties and seventies. The other five I rent out. My customers are mostly hunters in the fall, snowmobilers in the winter. In the summer, they’re families who want to do something a little different. They come up here from the Lower Peninsula to Paradise because it’s the most out-of-the-way place you can go to without leaving the state—hell, without leaving the country. After driving forever on 1-75, they think they’re almost there when they cross the Mackinac Bridge. But it’s another hour through the emptiest land they’ve ever seen until they finally get close to Lake Superior. Even then they still have to circle around Whitefish Bay, driving deep into the heart of the Hiawatha National Forest. By then, they’re wondering to themselves how anyone could actually live up here, so far away from everything else in the world. When they finally hit the town, the sign says, “Welcome to Paradise! We’re glad you made it!” They go through the one blinking light in the middle of town, keep going north along the shore a couple of miles, past Jackie’s Glasgow Inn, until they get to my cabins. When I see their faces as they get out of the car, I know how it’s going to be. If they look around like they just landed on the moon, they’re in for a long week. There’s not much to do up here, after you go to the Shipwreck Museum one day and then to the Taquemmenon Falls State Park the next. If they get out of the car, close their eyes, take a deep breath, and smile, I know they’ll like it here. They’ll probably come the year after, too. And the year after that.

  Which is why I have mostly repeat customers now—people with standing reservations who come up here the same week, every year. In the summertime I don’t have to do much for them. They don’t use much firewood, maybe just a little when the winds off of the lake cool things down at night. They sure as hell dbn’t need me to tell them what to do or where to go. They’re just as happy to never see me.

  I was spending a lot of time alone that summer. It’s what I had to do. There was a time when a certain lawyer had talked me into becoming a private investigator. I tried it and got my ass kicked. Then I met a young Ojibwa woman and tried to help her out of a jam, and got my ass kicked even worse. I got my ass kicked in ways that nobody’s ass has ever been kicked before. Then an old friend from my baseball days came back, thirty years after I had last seen him, and asked me to help him find somebody. I agreed to help him. You’d think I would have known what was about to happen. Although this time I got my head kicked along with my ass.

  Enough of this, I said to myself. This I do not need. Ever again.

  When the summer began, I was finding excuses not to go to Jackie’s for lunch. Or for my afternoon beer, even though I knew he’d have a Canadian on ice for me. Or dinner. When I did stop in, he’d ask me where I’d been. I’d tell him I’d been busy, cleaning out the cabins, fixing things. He’d give his famous look, like he could see right through me.

  By the end of June, I was spending most evenings in my cabin, reading the paper, and as many books as I could get my hands on. I had never read so many books in my life. Whatever the tiny Paradise library had, or the couple of gift shops that sold paperbacks—thrillers, mysteries, some of the classics even—that’s what I read. The books I craved the most were true crime. You’d think that would’ve been the last thing I wanted to read, with eight years as a cop and a year or so of trying very hard not to be a private investigator, and with everything that had happened to me. But for some reason, true crime books were comforting to me. Maybe because I was reading about all these people getting their asses kicked and for once it wasn’t me.

  By the time the Fourth of July rolled around, I don’t think I had even seen Jackie’s face for a solid week. He knocked on the door. I opened it and saw him standing there. It would have been a surprise no matter what the circumstances, because he never came to my place. The Glasgow Inn had the television and the food and the Canadian beer. So there wasn’t much reason for him to come my way.

  “Jackie,” I said. “What’s going on?”

  “Alex,” he said. He stepped past me and looked around the place. I think Jackie was sixty-five that summer. Over the years, his face had felt a lot of cold wind off the lake. He had a certain sparkle in his eyes, though, that told you he could take whatever the lake gave him. When the snow melted, he’d be there smiling.

  “Is everything okay?” I said.

  “Everything’s fine,” he said. “Just dandy.” He picked up the book on my kitchen table and turned it over to read the back.

  I stood there watching him. I wasn’t sure what to say.

  “Okay,” he said, putting the book down. “Here’s the deal. I brought a tent with me. It’s practically brand new, one of those space-age nylon things. Doesn’t weigh more than thirty pounds, but it’s plenty big and it keeps the wind and the rain out. It’s beautiful. Along with that, I’ve got a good portable propane stove. A sleeping bag that’ll keep you warm to forty below. A backpack. You know, the kind with the frame that keeps the weight on your hips instead of your shoulders. A lot of other little stuff. Water purification kit, first aid kit, some mosquito netting. Oh, and I almost forgot, a couple of great fishing rods. I mean the best.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” I said. “Where are you going?”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “You are.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You’ll need a good rifle,” he said, “You’ll have to get that yourself.”

  “Jackie . . .”

  “I’ll draw you a map of this place. It’s up in the Yukon Territory. If you drive, it’ll take you a hell of a long time to get up there. I hope your truck is up for it.”

  “Jackie . . .”

  “If I were you, I’d sell the truck and fly up there. Tell you what, since I’m giving you all this equipment, just leave the truck with me. It’s what, about twelve years old?”

  “Jackie, will you kindly tell me what the hell you’re talking about? Since when am I going to the Yukon Territory?”

  “I’m just trying to help you out, Alex. I thought you’d appreciate it.”

  “By sending me to the Yukon? That’s helping me?”

  “Think of it, Alex. The guy who told me about this place, he says you could set up camp there. Fish the rivers for food, maybe shoot some small game once in a while. There’s a little town a few miles away if you really need it, but aside from that, no human contact at all, Alex. You could go a whole year and never see another person’s face.”

  “You’re trying to be funny, right? This is a joke.”

 
“I’ll look after the cabins,” he said. “I promise. Now get your stuff together.”

  “Okay, I get it,” I said. “This is your cute little way of telling me I haven’t been coming around much lately.”

  “Yeah, it’s been killing me,” he said. “Nobody to tell me I’m doing everything wrong. Nobody to make dinner for whenever he snaps his fingers. It’s been a real nightmare.”

  “I was gonna stop by tonight,” I said. “Really.”

  “The hell you were,” he said. “Look at you. Look at this crap you’re reading. ‘A heart-stopping tale of murder and revenge.’ ” He picked up another book and then plunked it back down. “ ‘A true story of deception and naked greed.’ If this is what you’d rather do than come harass me all night, so be it. It doesn’t bother me one bit, believe me. Not until everybody starts asking me questions. ‘Where’s Alex, Jackie?’ ‘How come Alex doesn’t come in anymore?’ ‘What the hell’s wrong with Alex, Jackie? I said hello to him at the post office and he walked right by me like he didn’t know me.’ ”

  “Who was that?” I said. “Who said hello at the post office?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “You don’t care. You don’t need us anymore. Any of us. This the goddamned loneliest town in the whole country, and you still have to hide in your cabin. So I figured, what the hell, there’s only thing to do with him. Send him north! Let him live with the bears!”

  “Are you about done?”