A Stolen Season: An Alex McKnight Novel (An Alex Mcknight Novel Series)

by Steve Hamilton

  Still no Vinnie. I should have been relieved that I wouldn’t have to fight my way past him, but all I could do was wonder what the hell he was up to.

  I found out as soon as I got into my truck and tried to start it.

  I didn’t even have to look under the hood. I knew what he had done.

  “Son of a bitch,” I said as I got out. “You have got to be kidding me.”

  I walked the quarter mile down to his cabin. His truck was parked out front. I went to his front door and opened it without knocking.

  He was standing at his sink, filling up another plastic bag with ice. He didn’t say a word when I walked into the kitchen. He didn’t move.

  “Why did you cut my battery cables?” I said.

  “Same reason you cut mine.”

  “I don’t have time for this. I need your truck.”

  “You’re not getting it.”

  “Vinnie, God damn it. Don’t even start this. I’m serious. Give me your keys.”

  “You’re not driving my truck, Alex. If you have someplace to go, I’m taking you there.”

  “You’re not coming with me. Give me your keys.”

  “I’m coming with you,” he said. “Period.”

  “Vinnie…” I closed my eyes for a moment, rubbed them, tried to think of the right words to say. Meanwhile, the time was slipping away from me. All day to wait and now I was suddenly racing the clock.

  “You have to trust me,” I said. “I need to go somewhere, and I need to go there now. Alone. You have to give me your keys.”

  “You think this has been easy? You think I like you fighting me every step of the way?”

  “Vinnie…”

  “No, let me finish. I’m trying to understand what you’re going through the last few days. I know it’s not exactly the same as what I had to deal with, but I think I’ve got the general idea. I’ve been trying to be your friend, Alex. Your blood brother. I’ve been trying to be there for you, just like you were for me. But instead of letting me help you, you’ve been sneaking away whenever I turn my back. You’ve been driving around, all over the place, looking for a way to get yourself killed. And now tonight…God knows what you’ve got planned. God knows. You really think I’m going to let you just drive off and do this by yourself?”

  “You have to.”

  “It’s not happening. I’m going with you, no matter what. You’d do exactly the same thing if the situation was reversed. You know that. Hell, you’ve done it.”

  “This is different,” I said, sneaking a look at my watch.

  “It’s not. It’s exactly the same.”

  “Give me the keys.”

  “No.”

  “Where are they?”

  I looked around the place, spotted his keychain on the counter.

  “Don’t even try,” he said. “You’ll have to kill me to get them.”

  He stood there, his hands at his sides. I knew I couldn’t take the keys from him. There was no way I could overpower him. And there was no way I could let him come with me. I’d want him on any other trip, but not this one.

  Not if I honestly didn’t think I’d be coming back.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “You don’t leave me any choice.”

  I reached into my jacket pocket and took out the Taser. Before he knew what was happening, I did the unthinkable. I pulled the trigger. The front cap exploded with a dull pop as the two wires shot toward him. I didn’t have to do anything else. It was all automatic. The voltage was already moving as the wires hit his chest. Even after I dropped the Taser, the charge kept running through him for several seconds, doubling him up, putting him right on the floor like a tied-up calf in a rodeo.

  I went to the counter and grabbed the keys. Then I bent down and put my hand on his head. He was trying to speak, trying to move.

  “You’ll be okay in a couple of minutes,” I said. “It’s totally harmless. I promise.”

  Cheap words from a man who’d do this to his best friend. I couldn’t quite believe I had just done this.

  This is what you’ve come to, Alex. This is what losing Natalie has done to you.

  I touched his head one more time. He stayed there on his kitchen floor as I walked past him. The Taser had released a spray of confetti all over the place. I knew each little piece of paper had a unique serial number printed on it. It was all part of the weapon’s design—incapacitate your man, but leave a trail of markers on the ground for full disclosure. In this case, I didn’t think it would be an issue.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to him as I opened the door. My hands were shaking. “But it’s not your day to die.”

  The sun was just starting to go down as I drove Vinnie’s truck out of Paradise, the lights from the Glasgow Inn in the rearview mirror. I took the same roads south, the same fifty miles, crossing the entire Upper Peninsula to Hessel, from the shores of one lake to another. I left the highway, drove down the peninsula to the summerhouse. My fourth time there now, and the road looked just as deserted.

  I parked Vinnie’s truck at Gray’s house. I didn’t see any reason to hide it. I got out of the truck and walked up the driveway. The gun felt heavy in my jacket pocket. The small pistol strapped to my ankle brought back a sensory memory from long ago, the way the shin guards felt when I was working behind home plate.

  It was almost eight o’clock now. I walked across the road and down the neighbor’s driveway. When I got to the house, I saw that everything was exactly as I had left it. The back-door window was still broken, the rock I had used to break it still there on the ground. The boathouse door in the same state. I looked through and saw the boat still sitting there, nose in. It was riding a lot higher in the water now that its cargo was resting on the bottom of Lake Huron.

  I wonder how long I’ll have to wait, I thought. Hell, maybe Laraque is already here. Maybe he’s watching me right now.

  I looked all around me. Behind me the empty canal. The backyard, two rows of trees on either side of me, the darkness under the branches growing with each passing minute. Ahead of me the house. The driveway. The whole place seemingly abandoned to the ghosts of summer.

  He’ll be here, I said to myself. He has to be.

  I stood there for a while. A half hour snuck by in the absolute silence. The sky got darker. Finally, I heard a vehicle up on the road. Two headlights appeared, turned onto the driveway, came closer, pointing right at me. I had to look away.

  The vehicle stopped. The headlights turned off. My eyes took a moment to adjust, then I saw two figures, one on either side of the car. It was a red Jaguar, one of the new, smaller models with the round front grill. I heard the two doors shutting, almost at the same time. The two figures started walking down toward me. I stood my ground next to the boathouse.

  I looked from one to the other as they got closer. The woman was on my left, the man on my right. He had been driving. They walked slowly, the woman stepping carefully on the uneven ground.

  They were both dressed in black. The woman in a black raincoat, knee-high black boots, black stockings. A black bag hanging from her shoulder. The man in a long black trench coat, black leather shoes. He was wearing dark glasses, even now with the sun long gone.

  They came closer.

  “Alex,” the woman said. Her voice giving nothing away. No emotion at all.

  “You’re Rhapsody,” I said. She was a lovely woman, no question about it. She had the killer eyes. The dark eyebrows. A model’s face, and yet something wasn’t quite right. There was a sharpness in her features that would have put me on edge, even under innocent circumstances.

  Like Natalie had said about her, she looked like a younger, sexier Cruella De Vill.

  And Laraque…What I could see of his face behind the dark glasses…Natalie had told me he wasn’t a tall man. He wasn’t muscular. He wasn’t physically imposing in any way. Yet the unspoken power that emanated from him…

  This was him. I clenched my fists. This was him.

  “You have no idea w
hat we went through to get here,” Rhapsody said. “I hope you’re ready to make it worth our trouble.”

  The bag around her shoulder was unzipped, in perfect position for her right hand to reach into it. I had no doubt about what was inside.

  “Remember one thing,” I said. “If you shoot me now, you don’t get your guns back.”

  “Who said anything about shooting you, Alex? We came here to talk.”

  I looked at Laraque. He hadn’t said a word yet.

  “So talk,” I said. “I’m going to ask you something. I want the truth.”

  He didn’t say anything. He didn’t move.

  “Please take the sunglasses off,” I said.

  Nothing. He was a statue.

  “He doesn’t wish to take them off,” Rhapsody said.

  “I’m not talking to you,” I said, without looking at her. “I want to ask you one question, and I want to see your eyes when you answer me.”

  Another long moment. Something flew over our heads. Either a bird out late or a bat out early.

  “Take them off,” I said.

  A movement, finally. He lowered his head a fraction of an inch. Then he reached up with his right hand and took off his glasses. He put them in his coat pocket.

  As I stepped closer to him, I could sense Rhapsody shifting the bag around her shoulder. I was one second away from dying.

  I didn’t care.

  “Natalie Reynaud was one of the police officers who met with you in the hotel room,” I said.

  He looked me in the eyes. There was just enough light left to see his face clearly.

  “She and her partner were both shot dead. I want to know if you were responsible for that.”

  His eyes, a greenish shade of brown. Hazel, they call it. Although in the dying light it looked more like a dull shade of gold.

  “Did you have them killed, Laraque? Tell me.”

  He blinked once. Twice. Slowly, he shook his head.

  You clear your mind. You ask the question. You listen, you watch. Your gut tells you if it’s the truth.

  “Tell me,” I said. “Say it. Did you have them killed?”

  “No,” he said. “No, I didn’t.”

  I watched him. I remembered what Natalie had said about him, about the fear she felt just being in the same room with him.

  Something happened then. His eyes moved. He started to look over at Rhapsody. Then he stopped.

  It happened that quickly. But it was all wrong.

  Forget if he was lying or telling the truth. In that instant, I knew something even more important. Natalie Reynaud would never be afraid of this man.

  “You’re not Laraque,” I said.

  If there was any doubt, his reaction was all I needed. The eyes went wide before he tried to regain control. “What are you talking about?”

  “You’re not Laraque. What’s going on here?”

  The gun came out of Rhapsody’s bag. It was just like some of the guns I had seen on the boat, an automatic with a suppressor fixed to the barrel. The damned thing was so long, it was a wonder she could get it out of the bag so fast.

  “Okay, enough of this,” she said. “Just tell us where the merchandise is.”

  “Where’s Laraque?”

  “Never mind him. You need to deal with me now.”

  “I told you I wouldn’t talk to anybody else.”

  “You don’t understand what I’m trying to tell you. Laraque is out of the game. You can’t talk to him.”

  “First thing you can do, you can take Mr. Dress-Up here back to Canada. Was this Laraque’s idea, by the way? Send a stooge over here to take his place? Is that the kind of man he is?”

  “Alex, listen to me…”

  “Second thing, you tell the real Laraque he has twenty-four more hours to get his ass over here.”

  “You see, that’ll be hard to do, on account of his being very dead right now. Unless you’d care to join him. Maybe you can talk to him on the other side. I don’t know.”

  “What are you talking about? Who killed him?”

  “Who do you think, genius?”

  “You did? Why would you do that?”

  She shook her head. “I know you’re a man, so I’ll try to talk slow here. I killed the boss so I could take over the operation. You understand me?”

  “That’s not a good enough reason,” I said. “Not compared to mine.”

  “Whatever you say, Alex. Just get over it, because we’re not joking around here. Why don’t you wise up and tell us where the stuff is right now, before we really hurt you?”

  “Who’s we? You and your caddy here?”

  “No, not him. Jacques is my driver. He’s quite harmless.”

  “Then who are you talking about?”

  “And just for the record, this whole fake Laraque thing, it wasn’t my idea. I thought it was a little over the top myself.”

  “Whose idea was it? Who are you talking about?”

  “I think that’s your cue, Babe,” she said. She raised her chin, said it loud enough for anyone else to hear, anyone who might be waiting in the trees.

  I heard the footsteps. I turned and saw the man. I recognized him in a second.

  It was Cap.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  He had a gun just like Rhapsody’s, with the same long suppressor screwed onto the end of the barrel. He walked over to me with a smile, like he was renewing his acquaintance with a long-lost friend.

  “Alex and I have come to an agreement,” Rhapsody said. “Your idea was ridiculous.”

  “Is that right?” He moved closer to me, never taking his eyes from mine. He put his gun in his back pocket for a moment, just long enough to pat me down and to take Leon’s gun out of my jacket pocket. I waited for him to go down each of my legs, to find the ankle holster.

  But he didn’t.

  “Alex saw right through it,” she said. “Jacques never had a chance.”

  “The man wanted Laraque,” Cap said. He transferred Leon’s gun to his right hand and threw it in a high arc. It splashed in the middle of the channel. Then he started to walk around me in a slow circle. “So we gave him Laraque. I thought it would be easier this way.”

  The fake Laraque put his hands up. “Hey,” he said, “you didn’t tell me this guy would be here.”

  “Shut up, Jacques,” she said.

  “No, this guy’s crazy. I didn’t sign up for this.”

  “Just shut the fuck up.”

  “Seriously. I’ll let you guys work this out. I’ll be right over here.”

  “You’re not going anywhere.”

  “The hell I’m not. I just quit.”

  Cap turned from me and shot him twice in the throat. Shoomp shoomp, two muffled shots like the sound a nail gun would make. Me on the roof of my cabin, nailing down a shingle. That was the exact sound.

  At first, the man showed nothing but surprise. He tried to speak, but couldn’t make a sound, his vocal cords obliterated with everything else as the blood rushed down the front of his coat. He went to his knees, looking at the ground like he still couldn’t quite fathom what had happened to him. He tried to speak again. Then he pitched sideways and spent the next few seconds staring up at both of us.

  “Was that necessary?” she said.

  “You told me he wasn’t even a good driver.”

  I watched the man die on the ground. It occurred to me, maybe this was one of his reasons for shooting him in front of me, so I’d know exactly what he was capable of.

  “I thought you were long gone,” I said to him. “After you tried to trick me into going after Mr. Gray.”

  “What’s this?” she said. “This sounds interesting.”

  “Never mind,” he said. He kept circling me. “It was just an idea, a spur of the moment thing.”

  “I thought you weren’t afraid of Gray,” she said.

  “I just put a bullet in his head two days ago. Does that sound like somebody who’s afraid of anybody?”

  “You kill
ed Gray?” I said.

  He stopped in front of me. “Yes, I did. Now tell me where the guns are, or you’ll get the same deal. I promise you.”

  “I think he was afraid of you, too,” she said to me. “I think that’s why he came up with this idea.”

  “Rhapsody…”

  “‘Get Jacques to pretend,’” she said, imitating him, exaggerating the swagger in his voice. “‘McKnight won’t know any better. If he ends up killing him, so what?’”

  “What do you think?” he said to me. “Do you think I’m afraid of you?”

  “I think you talk pretty big,” I said, “when your woman has your back.”

  He made like he was going to turn away, then surprised me with a punch right in my gut. It folded me in two. I went with it, going all the way to the ground, feeling for the mini automatic under my pant leg. Lift and fire, if I do it fast enough…

  No. Not yet. Either one of them would mow me down in a second.

  “Okay, enough chit-chat,” Cap said. “Where are the guns?”

  Play this out, I thought. Buy some time, figure out what the hell is going on.

  “They’re out there,” I said, pointing to the water. I was struggling to get my wind back. Laraque was dead. Gray was dead. I couldn’t believe it was all coming down to these two.

  “What are you talking about, McKnight? Out there where?”

  “I have to take you to them.”

  “What did you do, hide them on some island like a pirate?”

  “That’s exactly what I did, yes.”

  He leaned down closer to me. “Do you have any idea how much you’ve fucked up my life already? Do you?”

  “The man says he’s going to take us to the merchandise,” Rhapsody said. “So let him do it.”

  “You actually believe him?”

  “He looks like a smart man. He knows if he gives everything back, we’ll let him walk away.”

  He grabbed me by the back of the collar. “Where are they, McKnight?”

  “He said he’d take us to them,” she said. “Are you deaf?”

  “I’m not falling for it,” he said. “I swear to God…”