“What’s that for?”
“I need it,” he said. “For my back.” He winced with every step, making slow progress over the rough ground. There were lights on inside the vehicle, and one good exterior spotlight that lighted up the entire clearing. I walked behind Whitley, told him to knock on the door. He did.
No answer.
“Where is he?” I said.
“It takes him a while,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“He’s coming. Just give him a minute.”
I started imagining the worst. Harwood had spotted me through the window, or else they had some kind of secret code. Two knocks means everything is okay, three means trouble. I pictured him inside, loading his gun. Probably another shotgun, the way my life had been going.
“Whitley, what the hell is going on?”
Finally, the door opened. The sudden light from the interior blinded me. Then I saw a metal grate. There was a sound like the bolt of a rifle. It made my heart race for a moment, until I realized what was happening. The sound was a gear being engaged. Then a platform slowly extended itself from the doorway.
The man who must have been Harwood rolled his wheelchair out onto the platform. This was the demon Maria had been running from for so long.
There was a console mounted on one of the arms of the wheelchair. He pressed a button and the platform lowered itself with an electric hum. When it hit the ground, he rolled off. Then he turned the wheelchair to face me. He appeared to be about sixty years old, with eyes the color of ashes. His body had the top-heavy look of man who had spent many years rolling himself around. His forearms could have belonged to a lumberjack.
“Who’s your friend?” he said. He was looking at me, but he could only be talking to Whitley.
“This would be Mr. McKnight,” Whitley said. “He’s another private investigator. Sort of, anyway. He works for Ms. Zambelli.”
“Is that right,” Harwood said. “And this gun in his hand?”
“Would be mine,” Whitley said. “Fully loaded, I’m afraid.”
“Very unfortunate,” Harwood said.
“I just want to ask you a couple questions,” I said. “I have no desire to shoot anybody.”
“That’s very reassuring.”
“First of all, do you know a man named Randy Wilkins?”
He thought about it, or at least made a show of thinking about it. “Randy Wilkins. Not offhand. Randy Wilkins. It might be ringing a very faint bell, but I can’t remember where I’ve heard the name.”
“Any chance that bell can get a little louder? He was running some real estate scams out in California. All of a sudden, he decided to come back to Michigan to look for Maria. The fact that you’re in real estate, more or less, and also looking for Maria, it seems like too much of a coincidence.”
“I’m sorry. I still can’t place him.”
“All right,” I said. “Now do you feel like telling me why you’re doing all this?”
“Doing what, exactly?”
“Don’t play games with me, Harwood. You killed her husband, and you tried to kill her. You’ve been hounding her for what, eighteen years?”
Harwood just sat there. Whitley stood behind him, looking useless. The wind kicked up and rocked the trees above us, but it was just background noise. We couldn’t even feel it in the shelter of the clearing. It was April, so there weren’t any mosquitoes out yet. In July, it would be hell.
“Are you going to say anything?” I said.
“No,” he said. “I don’t think I will. Go ahead and shoot me if you want. Shoot Whitley, too. He deserves it.”
“That’s not funny,” Whitley said.
“What would it take to get you to stop?” I said. “To leave her alone. And her whole family.”
“That’s an interesting question,” he said. “You have no idea how interesting.”
“What if she signed an agreement to give you complete control of the property, and the eighty percent cut you seem to want so badly?”
“Did she tell you to say that?”
“We talked about it,” I said.
“You came all the way out here to try to cut a deal?”
“She wants this to be over. This is a way to end it. What’s wrong with that?”
“Mr. McKnight,” he said, “can I ask you something? Do you have any idea how ridiculous you look right now?”
I didn’t say anything. None of this was going as planned, because Harwood held the ultimate trump card. There was no way I could intimidate him physically. What was I going to do? Hit him in the face? Tip his wheelchair over? Let the air out of his tires?
“Men are amazing,” Harwood said. “Don’t you agree, Whitley?”
“Sure,” Whitley said. “Whatever you say. Men are amazing.”
“A man will commit crimes. He’ll kidnap somebody, which is what you did. Mr. McKnight. And then threaten somebody else with a gun, which is called menacing, I believe. Also a felony. For what? Just to impress a woman. Maybe get her to go to bed with him. Absolutely amazing. Am I right, Whitley?”
“Incredible,” Whitley said. “Although I gotta admit, after seeing this woman…”
I should have shot them both right then just to shut them up. “All right,” I said. “Can we cut to the chase here? I’m not leaving here until I know you’re gonna stop harassing her.”
Harwood looked up at the sky for a moment, then back at me. “What do you think of this property, Mr. McKnight?”
I let out a breath. “It’s dark, Harwood. All I see are trees.”
“You must have seen the resort,” he said. “On the other side of the hill.”
“I saw it.”
“Do you have any idea how much seven hundred acres of forestland are worth right now? Up here on the Gold Coast?”
“She mentioned something about twenty million.”
“I bought this land in 1976,” he said. “Arthur and I bought it together, I mean. Even then, I knew it would be a jewel someday.”
“This would be the partner you killed,” I said.
He stared at me. The light was coming from behind him, so I couldn’t see his face very well.
“Whitley, can you get me a piece of paper?”
Whitley stuck his hand in his pocket. Without even thinking about it, I leveled the gun at him.
“I’m just getting the man a piece of paper,” Whitley said, pulling out a pad. “Private eyes always gotta have some paper, am I right? Tell me you at least carry a pad of paper with you.”
“Here,” Harwood said, taking the pad from him. “Show this to Mr. McKnight. I think this may help solve our problem.”
When Harwood was done writing, Whitley took the pad and hobbled over to me. One man in a wheelchair, another man holding himself up with a cane. Me with a gun in my hand, deep in the forest on a cold April night. Life couldn’t get any stranger.
But then it did. Just as I was wondering what this piece of paper would say-some kind of dollar figure maybe, some kind of deal he wanted to make for the land-I saw Harwood’s right hand move. There was a little console attached to the armrest on his wheelchair. There were buttons on it. He pushed one of them.
Whitley’s cane was already whistling through the air when the lights turned off. The pain was instantaneous as he caught me on my right wrist, just above the thumb. My hand went numb. The gun dropped to the ground. As I went down for it, a gunshot ripped through the night. The bullet must have gone right over me. The flash from Harwood’s gun was a single frame of light, enough for me to make out Whitley’s foot coming my way fast. I got a forearm up just in time to block it. I rolled before the next shot could find me.
You let your guard down, Alex. Harwood wrote it out for him, right there on his little private eye’s notepad. When I turn out the lights, hit him! Or something else just as brilliant And you fell for it.
The cane caught me again, this time on my right shoulder blade. I went to the ground facefirst and tasted pine n
eedles.
This is it, Alex. They’re gonna kill you right here. They’ll dig a grave in the woods and bury you.
“Don’t shoot!” Whitley said. “He’s right here!”
“Well, get out of the way!” Harwood said.
“Turn the lights on!”
“Damn this thing!” Harwood said. “I can’t see what I’m doing!”
I got up on my hands and knees and crawled. Something stopped me. It was Whitley’s leg. Before he could kick me with it, I grabbed and pulled. I was already on my feet and running when I heard him screaming something about his back. I didn’t stop to help him.
The lights came on just as I was about to run into a tree. A thoughtful gesture on the part of my host. Then a bullet hit the tree and sprayed bark in my face. So much for thoughtful gestures.
I ran for the car. The hell with zigzagging, or whatever you’re supposed to do when somebody’s shooting at you. I just ran as fast as I could make myself go, a forty-nine-year-old ex-catcher who never had any speed anyway. Not even in his twenties.
I went down behind the car. Harwood fired a couple more shots at me. That’s right, use up those bullets. How many does he have left? Did he shoot five times? Six? Clint Eastwood asking the punk if he feels lucky. Hell of a thing to think of at a time like this, but it rang true. It was time to see how lucky I was.
I opened the door and got in. Piss or no piss, I was taking Whitley’s Cadillac for a ride. I turned the key and listened to the engine grind.
And grind, and grind. Then it caught. I flipped the lights on, gunned it forward. I had no choice. There was no way I could back it up all the way down that trail. As I swung the car around, I saw Whitley in the glare of the headlights. He was still on the ground, flat on his back.
Then Harwood in his chair. The gun pointed right at me.
I swung hard to the left. The window on the passenger’s side exploded. The wheels spun, kicked up dirt, and then I was finally moving in the right direction. I took that big white boat right down the alley through the trees, making myself breathe. In, out. You’re in the clear now. Relax and drive.
When I got back to the main road, I took it west and then south, back toward Orcus Beach. And Maria. The cold air rushed in and made my eyes water.
The same damned thing had happened to my truck. Somebody had shot at me and blown out the window on the passenger’s side. What are the odds against that happening twice in a lifetime? What a strange and terrifying world this is, I thought, and how glad am I to live to see another night of it?
If I had only known. The night wasn’t through with me yet. Not by a long shot.
CHAPTER 20
My right hand was useless. Just a little pressure with the right thumb on the steering wheel, goddamn it all to hell, that hurt. I knew it was swelling and would be every color in the rainbow come morning. I knew this because it had happened before, at least half a dozen times. As a catcher, you try to keep your right hand protected, either behind your back like I used to do or tucked under your right leg. But sooner or later, you’re going to get hit in the hand with a foul tip. Or with the bat itself. If you’re lucky, you can still pick up a baseball the next day.
I kept driving. I needed ice, a tight bandage, and a drink. And I needed to get out of this filthy, stinking homeless shelter of a car, take a shower, and maybe burn my clothes. Then, with my hand wrapped up, a shot and a beer, four Advil, I’d be a new man.
Come to think of it, my back didn’t feel so hot, either. Whitley’s second swing had put a nice little knot in my muscles. A back rub would be the only other thing I would need out of life. I imagined Maria doing just that. This time, I didn’t tell myself to stop thinking about her that way. I let the movie run in my head, imagining what would happen next. And then after that.
When I got back to Orcus Beach, I dropped the Cadillac off at the boat ramp. I grabbed his UHF receiver and his cell phone. Then I threw the keys out into the sand as far as I could, and instantly regretted it. There was nothing wrong with the idea, but I should have thrown the keys with my other hand.
I fired up my truck and drove up the road to Maria’s house. The clock read 11:15. It was hard to believe so much had happened that night, and it wasn’t even midnight yet.
I went to the door and knocked. This is where Randy was standing when she accidentally shot him, I thought. “Maria, it’s Alex!” I said. I didn’t want her to make the same mistake. “Let me in! Everything’s okay!”
I heard the scrape of the dead bolt and then the door opened slowly. She looked out at me. She didn’t say anything.
“Are you okay?” I said.
“Yes.”
“They tried to kill me.”
“I’m sorry, Alex.”
“Don’t be sorry,” I said. I went past her into the house, into the kitchen. I emptied out a tray of ice cubes into a dish towel and then wrapped it around my hand. Then I started looking around the place, first by the phone, then on the kitchen counter, looking for a pen, or an outlet converter, or whatever the hell else there was in the house that was actually a bug. I didn’t need to find it. Not at that moment. But I wanted to be doing something. I wanted to be moving. For some reason, I was suddenly a little nervous about what might happen if I stopped.
“Say something,” I said, putting the earphones on. I kept one ear free. “I can run this on battery power, find out where the bug is.”
“What happened?” she said.
“He’s up by Traverse City,” I said. “On the land.”
“There’s nothing there.”
“He has an RV,” I said. “He sort of camping out up there.” There was a jarful of pens on a little table in the hallway. I started going through them. “Do any of these pens look strange to you? Or is this all the chief’s stuff? If it is, you’re not going to know if something’s out of place, are you?”
“What did he look like?” she said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, I have nothing to compare him to. Except, well, you know he’s in a wheelchair.”
“Yes.”
“How long has he been in that?”
“Ever since Leopold threw him down the stairs.”
I stopped going through the pens. “Leopold has a thing about stairs, doesn’t he.”
She came closer to me.
“He wasn’t what I expected,” I said. “I’ve seen killers before, believe me.”
“But then he tried to kill you,” she said. “You said so yourself.”
“You have a point there.”
“Where is he now?” she asked. “Is he on his way here? He knows where to find me.”
“I don’t know if he will,” I said. “Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere. We’ll get you out of here tomorrow.”
“Can you find the place again? Where he’s staying?”
“I’m sure he’s moved the RV by now,” I said. “I didn’t think to get the plate number.”
She closed her eyes. “This will never end.”
“Hold on,” I said. “I have Whitley’s cell phone.”
“What good will that do?”
I pulled out the phone and turned it on. “It’s gotta have a call history on it.” I turned the dial on the side. A number came up. It was Maria’s. “No, wait,” I said. “That was me. When I called you from his car.” I turned the dial again. Another number came up. I recognized it. “This is his office number,” I said. “He must have called to get his messages.”
One more turn. Another number, with a 313 area code. Detroit. “This could be it,” I said. “One way to find out.”
I pushed the send button. The signal went out into the air, to a tower somewhere, miles away. Then down the regular phone lines to Detroit, where it was received by the cellular service, sent back out on different lines, to a different tower, searching for the matching signal from one particular cell phone. Somewhere to the north of us, in an RV either sitting in the woods or already out on the road, that phone rang five tim
es. Then somebody picked it up.
Silence. Then finally, “Who is this?”
“It’s him,” I said.
Maria’s face went white, as if I had summoned the man himself into her kitchen.
“Who is this?” the voice said.
“I just wanted to say good night,” I said. “You know, it doesn’t seem right to beat the hell out of a man in a wheelchair. It’s just not fair, you know? But next time, I’ll get over it.”
He hung up.
“Maybe we should get you out of here now,” I said. “Not even wait until morning.”
“No,” she said. “I told you, I’m not running anymore.”
I didn’t feel like fighting over it. “I’m dripping all over Rudiger’s carpet here,” I said, wrapping the ice tighter around my wrist.
“What did you do to your hand?”
“It’s just a bruise.”
“Like hell it is. Let me see.”
I put the ice down on the table and showed her my hand. “This must hurt,” she said.
“A little bit.”
She took my other hand and looked at it. Then back to my right hand.
“Your mother did that, too,” I said.
“She tried to teach me,” she said. She was close to me. There was a delicate scent of something in her hair, something exotic and wise and Gypsy-like. All she had to do was look up at me and I’d be a goner.
She looked up at me. “Did my mother do this?” she said. She kissed my hand.
“No,” I said. “I don’t recall her doing that.”
She kissed my hand again, right where it hurt the most. Then she took my hand in her own and led me up the stairs to her bedroom. She sat me down on her bed and undressed in front of me. The slightest moonlight came through her window, but it was enough to see her. She took my shirt off and laid me on my back. She unbuttoned my pants. When she pulled them off, I twisted my sore back in just the wrong way and let out a little yell.
“You’re just a wreck, aren’t you,” she said. “You’re a great big wounded bear.”
I watched her climb on top of me. She kissed me and then she put her hand on my chest. “You have something inside here,” she said.
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