Let It Burn

by Steve Hamilton

  I lay there for a while, until I started to shiver. When I finally rolled myself back up to my knees, I felt my hands shift. I gave them one great twist and felt them come free. When I pulled the thing around to look at it, I saw that it was a set of jumper cables. I threw them on the ground and looked at the raw skin on my wrists. Then I tried to get up.

  Whoa, that’s not going to work, I thought. Standing is one thing I’m not ready for. That’s when I remembered my cell phone. I reached into my pocket and grabbed it. I turned it on. Nothing. Goddamned cell phone can’t survive one lousy dunk in the water. Without another thought, I tossed it into the river.

  I started to shiver again, so I put one hand on the ground and tried to stand. One more time, I thought. You can do this.

  I got one foot under me, then the other. I took a step and almost went down, caught myself, took another step. I had no idea where I was. I had no idea where I could go for help. I just knew I had to move.

  I reached around and felt the back of my head. There was a big lump there. The skin was broken and I felt blood. A cold rational voice in the back of my head made the general announcement that I surely had a concussion and could use some medical attention as soon as possible. I took another few steps and felt everything spinning around me.

  When things came back into focus, I saw something just down the shoreline. A large facility of some sort. A building and a pair of great round tanks set into the ground. The water treatment plant. He said something about that. Something about the view from this house, and the man being in Scotland. A useless detail, and yet I remember that part.

  “Where are you, Paige?” I asked out loud, my own voice sounding strange and faraway. “Where did you go?”

  He drove the minivan all the way out here, after all. He said we were in Western Michigan, right? Didn’t he say that? That’s a long way back to Southfield. How’s he going to get there?

  I kept putting one foot in front of the other. The ground was more even here. It didn’t feel like I’d fall with every step. I was walking through the facility now. I found the sidewalk that ran between the building and the tanks. I didn’t see anybody there. I kept walking.

  I need to get out of these wet clothes. I need to get warm. I need to get my head looked at. I need to get the police on Paige’s tail. The checklist was right there in my head, yet I kept walking and walking. Out of the facility, down a street lined with houses. I could have stopped at the first house. Banged on the door, collapsed in a heap. Asked them to call 911. Yet I kept walking. Because I saw something ahead of me.

  A railroad bridge. Yet one more goddamned railroad bridge, this one crossing over the river. It was pulling me toward it. One more bridge that meant something. I didn’t even realize what yet. Until I got closer and I saw the tracks.

  I could hear the train. It wasn’t moving yet. It was sitting at the station, just a quarter mile from the bridge. Not a freight train. A sleek Amtrak train, sitting there at the station, hissing and humming, ready to go.

  This is how he’s getting back home, I thought. This is part of the plan right here.

  I started walking down the tracks. I could see people getting on. A porter helped an elderly man with his suitcase. What a lovely day for a train trip. What a beautiful lovely perfect day.

  I must have been a sight. I was soaking wet and half covered with black slime from the river. There was blood running down the back of my neck. Yet nobody turned to look at this monstrosity, until I was finally right there on the platform.

  It was a quaint little station made of bricks. A quiet little out-of-the-way stop on the Amtrak line, from Chicago to Detroit. There was a sign there, but I wasn’t sure if I could even read it. Then the letters came together. NILES, MICHIGAN. I was three hours west of Detroit, close to the Indiana border.

  “Excuse me, sir!” A voice coming from somewhere. “Excuse me, do you need help?”

  No, I thought. I’m just practicing to be the Swamp Thing, for an upcoming movie. I grabbed on to the metal handle, almost missing it. Then I hauled myself into the train.

  “Sir! You need to stop right now!”

  I was in the rear car. Everyone was settling in for the ride, arranging themselves in the seats. Heads started turning toward me. A woman gave out a little scream.

  I could hear the porter outside, yelling at someone to call the police. Yes, please do, I thought. That’s right here on my list. Call the police.

  I went up the aisle, looking for Paige. He’s on this train somewhere. I remembered doing something like this a million years before, looking for someone on a train. Then a new wave of pain washed over my head and my knees buckled. I had to grab onto the seats to keep myself up—but I kept going.

  He wasn’t in that car. I went to the next. He wasn’t in that car. Everyone was looking at me now. Mothers were holding their children. Nobody tried to stop me. Not yet.

  When I got to the last car, the conductor was standing in the aisle, blocking my way. I couldn’t really hold him in my vision at that point. He was too fuzzy around the edges, and he wouldn’t stand straight up and down.

  “Sir, you need to get off this train right now,” he said. “I really think you need some help, too.”

  I looked past him. I saw a man sitting at the far end of the car. I pointed in that direction.

  The conductor turned to look. I grabbed him by the shoulders and threw him into the seat.

  I went up the aisle. One step at a time. In the distance I could hear the police siren.

  I came up beside him. Finally. I looked down at him. He was wearing sunglasses. His head was tipped back against his seat. Even without seeing his eyes, I knew he was dozing. Exhausted from his labors.

  I stood there for a moment, waiting for him to realize that I had come back from the dead. At that moment, I was every single one of his victims, rolled into one person.

  “Mr. Paige,” I said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “I’m here to punch your ticket.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  You ask the right questions at the right time. It’s basic police work. Detective Arnie Bateman didn’t ask the right questions when he had the chance. A man went to prison for a crime he didn’t commit. The man who did commit the crime lived to kill again. I can’t blame Detective Bateman for this, of course. I didn’t ask the right questions, either.

  Elana’s brother, Ryan, finally did ask the right questions, but at the wrong time. He paid for that mistake with his life. I almost joined him, but in the end I survived and, after an eventful few hours at the Niles, Michigan, train station, I was there to see Tanner Paige taken away in handcuffs, thanks to a few phone calls to the FBI, and especially to an agent named Janet Long.

  My concussion was officially listed as Grade 4. I had lost consciousness twice, once for a few minutes, after Paige first hit me, then later for a good couple of hours in the minivan. It takes a while to get over something like that. If you came into the Glasgow Inn anytime in the month of September, you’d see me sitting by the fireplace, wearing sunglasses. Sudden flashes of bright light really got to me. Just destroyed me. Not to mention sudden loud noises. Jackie had to take it easy on me that month. I think it almost killed him.

  When I got over the post-concussion symptoms, I still had a nice new scar on the back of my head. At least this one I couldn’t see when I looked at my own face in the mirror.

  I took Leon to dinner and told him everything that had happened. I thanked him for all of his help. He said he was sorry he wasn’t there to help me in person. Even if his wife would have killed both of us when we got back home.

  Janet called me a couple of weeks after the arrest, to give me the general rundown on the legwork she and her fellow agents were doing on the other murders. It was an exhausting process, but they were definitely connecting Tanner Paige to each date and location. She also mentioned the possibility of coming up to see me sometime. She said it was her turn to make the long drive.

  She hasn’t made the
trip yet. I honestly don’t know if she ever will. Maybe we both lied to each other one time too many, even if it was always for the right reasons.

  I kept in touch with Sergeant Grimaldi. I got back to work on the cabins. Vinnie and I replaced another woodstove. On the first day of October, it snowed. Later that month, I received a visit from the King family.

  They rode up in Mrs. King’s sister’s powder blue Pontiac Bonneville. It still had the big dent in the front right quarter panel. I put them up in one of the empty cabins. I took them down to the Glasgow Inn to meet Jackie and Vinnie. On the second day, I took them to Sault Ste. Marie.

  We all had a quick beer at the Soo Brewing Company with Leon. Mrs. King looked tired but happy. Darryl looked like he wasn’t quite sure what he was doing in the Upper Peninsula. Or what he was doing with me, but we did shake hands and have a beer together. After all we’d been through, that had to mean something.

  Tremont was the real enigma those couple of days. He didn’t say much at all. After all those years living alone, out on the rails, he was like a feral animal who suddenly finds himself inside a house with a nice bed and regular meals. Add to that the guilt that he had to be feeling. Whether it was truly justified or not, you could look at him and wonder why he didn’t do something about Tanner Paige back then. He was a scared fourteen-year-old kid in Detroit and Paige had every advantage over him, including the threat of lethal violence. So maybe you can’t really blame him for running away and letting his brother take the fall for him, but there’s a big difference between looking at something on paper and waking up in the middle of the night and thinking about what you could have done, if only you’d found a way. I could tell Tremont would be living with that for the rest of his life.

  When we all bundled up and went up to the observation deck overlooking the Soo Locks, there was a big freighter coming through. The flag was Australian. Mrs. King and Darryl were both shivering and already looking at the stairs, obviously ready to go back to Paradise and sit by the fireplace, but Tremont looked out at the big boat that had come all these thousands of miles to be here, and I could tell what he was thinking. I knew he probably wasn’t done riding on freight trains. I just hoped he’d always come back, now that he had a place to come back to.

  On the day they went back to Detroit, Mrs. King gave me one of the biggest hugs of my life. I promised I’d call her. I promised I’d come down to see her again soon.

  “Maybe you’ll move back to the city someday,” she said. “Detroit needs more good people. Otherwise, I don’t know if she’ll survive.”

  I promised I’d think about it, but I knew it would never happen. Paradise was my home now.

  On the night before Halloween, we got more snow. I lay in my bed that night, listening to it fall. I thought about Detroit. The Motor City. Motown. A great city that could still be great again.

  Then I remembered what night it was. Devil’s Night. The night they burned down the empty houses, all over the city. It would have been a hard night to be there, watching the sky glow red above every corner of the city.

  Watching the city I love burning to the ground.

  Also by Steve Hamilton

  Die a Stranger

  Misery Bay

  The Lock Artist

  Night Work

  A Stolen Season

  Ice Run

  Blood Is the Sky

  North of Nowhere

  The Hunting Wind

  Winter of the Wolf Moon

  A Cold Day in Paradise

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  STEVE HAMILTON’s first novel, A Cold Day in Paradise, won the Private Eye Writers of America/St. Martin’s Press Best First Private Eye Novel Contest before becoming a USA Today bestseller and winning both an Edgar and a Shamus Award for Best First Novel. His stand-alone novel The Lock Artist was named a New York Times Notable Crime Book, received an Alex Award by the American Library Association, and then went on to win the Edgar Award for Best Novel, making him only the second author (after Ross Thomas) to win Edgars for both Best First Novel and Best Novel. He attended the University of Michigan, where he won the prestigious Hopwood Award for writing, and now lives in Cottekill, New York, with his wife and their two children.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A THOMAS DUNNE BOOK FOR MINOTAUR BOOKS.

  An imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

  LET IT BURN. Copyright © 2013 by Steve Hamilton. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.thomasdunnebooks.com

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  Cover design by James Iocabelli; cover photograph © Mark Owen/Arcangel Images

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Hamilton, Steve, 1961–

  Let it burn: an Alex McKnight novel / Steve Hamilton.—First edition.

  pages cm.

  ISBN 978-0-312-64022-4 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-25003452-6 (e-book)

  1. McKnight, Alex (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Private investigators—Michigan—Upper Peninsula—Fiction. 3. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3558.A44363L48 2913

  813’.54—dc23

  2013009810

  e-ISBN 9781250034526

  First Edition: July 2013