I taste the blood in my mouth. I pull myself up and turn. I have so far to go.
No. It’s not that far. I can see the truck. I am close.
Another tree, then another, and this time a broken branch scratches against my cheek. There is water at my feet and I feel it soaking into my shoes. It is cold and it comes up through my body like electricity. My left arm is still dead and useless and I’m swinging my right arm and hurling myself forward like something from a monster movie. Which is exactly what this has become. I know this. He is right behind me and there’s no way I can get away from him. Unless…
I see the boat launch, the concrete slab angled down into the lake. I know if I take one step on it I’ll go right in and never come out. I reach out and grab the rough wood of the dock. The platform over the water, where I first stopped to look at the edge of the lake and to wonder if he could possibly be here somewhere. My truck is just across the street here. A few yards away. It is waiting for me. If I can get in I’ll find a way to put the key in. I’ll turn it and I’ll press the gas pedal and then steer down the long empty road until I reach something. That’s my only way out of this.
I see my shadow in front of me again. The shadow grows shorter and I know he’s close. I turn and try to swing at him but I feel myself going down onto the dock. I feel the wood against my face. I can’t breathe again. I have to breathe.
“Bravo,” he whispers to me. “I’m getting every second here. This is beautiful.”
I roll away from him. I feel myself come to rest by the post at the end of the dock. I reach out for something to hold on to. Something I can grab and throw at him. Or plunge into his neck. There is nothing but the post and cold water, inches below me.
He comes closer. The light is getting brighter and brighter. He is wearing it on his head like a miner’s helmet. As he bends over me, the audio machine pulls down from his chest, straining against the strap. The camera is on its own strap, looped around his neck now. He pushes the microphone closer to me.
I wave with my right hand. Come here.
“What a great scene,” he says. “I’m so glad you showed up now.”
I wave again. Come here.
He comes in for the close-up. Time to say good night.
I push myself up. I reach out and grab one of the straps. All I have is dead weight now, but it might be enough. I fall backward, bringing him with me. He collapses across my body and rolls right over me, head first into the water. I hear an instant of hiss as the hot light hits the cold water and then his body follows with a great splash. I am lying on the edge of the dock and I’m soaked and it is icy cold but it feels good. It wakes me up and lets me take one more breath. I’m still holding on to that strap. I roll all the way over so my arm is in the icy water and I’m reaching below the dock. I feel for a cross beam and I pull the strap through and around and then I pull back as tight as I can. He is thrashing now and for one second his head comes back above the water. He is spitting water and screaming and then he says his last words, “Cut! Stop rolling! Cut!”
I pull harder and he’s back below the water. He’s half under the dock and I hold on to that strap like it’s the last good thing I’ll ever get to do on this earth. I hold on to it for as long as I can until the thrashing grows quieter, until he is still and it’s just me facedown on the dock, looking through the narrow slit between the planks and I see his dark form below me. I hear a drop of my blood falling into the water. Then another. Then another and I finally see another light moving across the water. It sweeps across my face and then it’s dark again.
Then I sleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Faces. Voices. Something covering my mouth, then the sensation of movement. More faces and voices. Lights shining in my eyes.
Then more sleep.
When I finally opened my eyes for good, I saw Chief Roy Maven of the Sault Ste. Marie Police looking down at me. So I knew I wasn’t in heaven.
“Where am I?” I said. I was leaning back at a forty-five-degree angle. My chest and left shoulder were wrapped in bandages, and there was a tube coming out of my side with blood draining through it. There was an IV drip in my left arm. I tried flexing the arm. It hurt like hell, but it moved.
“You’re in the hospital,” he said. “In Hancock.”
“Your daughter…”
“She’s fine. She’ll be just fine. Don’t worry.”
“You should be down there with her.”
“I’ll go back down today,” he said. “I just wanted to see what happened to you.”
“What did happen to me?”
“A single. 45-caliber slug through the upper lobe of the left lung. The doctors saw entry and exit wounds, but then they took an X-ray.”
“Don’t tell me.”
“For a minute, they thought a fragment might have stopped near your heart,” he said. “They didn’t know this wasn’t the first time for you. The agents gave me a call and I told them about your… previous history.”
“I’ll have to stop getting shot in the chest. It’s going to catch up with me one of these days.”
He smiled at that. Just a little bit, but it was the first smile I’d seen from him since this whole business started.
“I should be dead,” I said. “He had me lined up straight in the chest, point-blank range.”
“Good thing he’s a bad shot.”
“No, he still had his homemade suppressor on the barrel. That must have knuckleballed the shot.”
“I guess he didn’t take it off yet,” Maven said, “because he was saving it to use on me.”
I looked at him. “Yeah, that may have been the general plan.”
Maven stepped closer. “It was the exact plan, Alex. The bullet that went through your chest was the bullet he was going to use to kill me.”
I lay there and looked up at him.
“They found Sean Wiley in the cottage,” he said. “He’d been shot in the chest, too.”
I closed my eyes.
“They can increase your medicine if you want them to,” he said. “Just say the word.”
“I’m okay. Where are the agents, anyway?”
“They were here a while ago. They’ll be back.”
“How long have I been out?”
“Eight hours, give or take.”
“Feels like longer,” I said. “Hey, there’s a young woman down in Bad Axe, Sean’s girlfriend, she was waiting to hear from him.”
“I believe some state officers went out there. Don’t worry.”
“I promised her I’d find him, Chief.”
“You did, Alex. You found him.”
“Come on…”
“You did everything you could have done.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said. “But I’m glad your daughter’s okay. That’s the one thing that went right.”
“No, the other thing that went right is that the agents had everybody out looking for you. One of them spotted your truck from the road.”
“I’ll thank them when I see them.”
He nodded his head. He looked like he wanted to say something else, but couldn’t find the words.
“What is it, Chief?”
“I still don’t understand how I got put on this guy’s list,” he said. “It’s driving me crazy. Did he happen to tell you why?”
“He didn’t mention you specifically. Although he did say one thing.”
“What was it?”
I tried to replay everything in my mind. I felt dizzy right about then and had to take a moment to breathe.
“Take it easy, McKnight. You don’t have to do this right now.”
“No, I have to remember. It was strange, because it was like he was just making a movie about everything. Like I was just an actor, and none of it was real.”
“Okay… very strange, yes.”
“At one point, he asked me if I had ever played a state police officer. Then he asked me how many people I’d put in jail. How many families I ha
d torn apart.”
I kept going over it, moment by moment. The pain in my shoulder started to radiate across my chest.
“I’m getting the doctor,” Maven said. “I’ll be right back.”
“No, wait.” I reached out and grabbed him with my right hand. “He asked me if I had ever taken a kid who was trying to climb out of hell and thrown him back in.”
“A kid? Like how old?”
“He didn’t say that. But when Wiley was arrested, Bergman must have been around twelve years old.”
“A twelve-year-old kid. Thrown back into hell. What could he have been talking about? I don’t see how that could have had anything to do with me, I swear.”
“I believe you.”
“But this must be based on something.”
“I don’t know, Chief.”
The doctor came in to examine me. I was ready to hear the whole story about the X-ray and the bullet and if the doctor had a sense of humor, how I should try to get shot in another body part next time. Maven got shooed out of the room, but I could see he was still working it over in his mind.
One minute later, he came charging back into the room.
“The governor’s daughter!”
“You’re gonna have to leave, sir,” the doctor said.
“The governor’s whole family was on Mackinac Island,” Maven said, waving off the doctor. “There’s a summer residence up there for the governor, and the governor’s daughter had this horse show she was supposed to go to. The rest of the family would come down the next day, but on that day, they told me and Raz to run up there and pick her up and bring her back down to Lansing. That was the ‘Admin’ on our daily logs. But there were thunderstorms all over the area, so we knew the horse show would probably be cancelled, and we kept telling them that. This is a waste of time, you want us to drive all the way up there to bring the governor’s daughter down here for nothing. Not to mention that’s a total waste to begin with. A sergeant and a trooper driving four hundred miles round-trip so a teenager can ride a horse around some barrels.”
I was mesmerized now, and I think the doctor was, too. I sat there on the bed and he stood there with the blood pressure cuff around my good arm, and we watched Maven go.
“I think we took one of the unmarkeds. That part I don’t remember for sure, but I do remember both of us riding all the way up there while the black clouds are building up and the thunder’s starting to roll in, and we’re on the radio saying, hey, this is stupid, guys, but nobody wanted to actually go bother the governor to get the official word. So we get all the way up there and we go to Mackinaw City to catch the ferry. That’s why St. Ignace wasn’t registering, because if you come from the south you go out of Mackinaw City, right? Anyway, we get on the ferry and now we’ve gotta sit on that stupid boat like a couple of tourists and ride all the way out there, and then when we get there, there’s one of the regulars from the governor’s attachment, and he says, sorry guys, change of plans, no horse show after all. Except we can tell he’s busting a gut trying so hard not to laugh. So we get right back on the boat and go back to the lot and get back in our cars and now we’ve got to drive all the way back to Lansing for nothing. No horse show, no daughter in the car, just a couple of idiots who obviously picked the wrong career. That part I remember now, because I think that might be the exact day I decided it was time for a change.”
“But if you took the ferry from Mackinaw City, how did you ever get up to St. Ignace?”
“That’s the part that comes later. That’s the part I forgot, because I wasn’t even thinking about picking up some kid. I was trying to remember actually arresting somebody, remember?”
“So what are you saying? You were the guys who picked up Bergman?”
He let out a sigh of exasperation. “Maybe. I mean, we picked up some kid on I-75, okay? We’re driving back and we get a few miles and there’s this kid hitchhiking right on the expressway. We pull over and we pick him up.”
“Wait, he was alone?”
He squinted for a moment as he thought back on it.
“Yeah, it was really strange. He hopped in the back of the car like it was nothing, and he starts talking about nothing, I don’t know, but then he realized we were cops. So I guess we must have been in the unmarked. But anyway, he gets real quiet then and he doesn’t say one single word again. So we call in and they tell us to turn around and take him to St. Ignace.”
“That’s it? That’s all they said?”
“The kid wouldn’t give us his name or anything. We kept trying to talk to him, but he was just totally silent, so we had to call him in as a young John Doe and they said, oh yeah, we think we know who that is. Bring him up to St. Ignace. I don’t think we ever found out why they wanted us to bring him all the way up over the bridge at that point. We probably didn’t even care anymore. We just took him up and dropped him off and…”
“You used the bathroom.”
“We used the bathroom. Naturally. It’s a long trip. Got back in the car. We must not have stuck around to find out who the kid was, or how he ended up on the expressway. At that point, we had a long ride back and we were both pretty fed up with everything. We just got back in the car and went back to Lansing.”
“But that would have been logged, right? Picking up the kid? It would be in your daily records.”
“Well…” He closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. “Maybe, maybe not. A day like that, that’s the kind of day you might not even bother, you know? We didn’t really do anything. We just went on this stupid errand and then we brought the car back and then we probably just went out and had a drink and bitched about the job. I think making sure all the paperwork was squared away was probably pretty low on our list of priorities. That wasn’t the only time it ever happened, believe me.”
“Wiley was trying to help them get away,” I said. “He went up there and worked over his son-in-law, and the daughter and grandson were supposed to leave. They must have gotten separated from each other somehow.”
“Wiley was helping them escape,” Maven said. “My God. The kid made it all the way to the Lower Peninsula and we brought him right back. Just like he said, we dragged him back to hell.”
“You had no way of knowing. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Tell that to the kid going back to hell.”
“You don’t have to feel guilty, Chief. You or especially any of those other men and their families.”
“Okay,” the doctor finally said. “Can we get back to treating your bullet wound now?”
Maven stood there for one more awkward moment, maybe trying to work it out, have it make sense, say something else about it, or God knows what. But the doctor went back to taking my blood pressure and Maven left the room.
***
The agents showed up later that day. Or at least they showed up for the first time since I was conscious.
“I’m getting the regular parade,” I said. “It’s like the end of The Wizard of Oz.”
“Which one am I?” Agent Long said. “The scarecrow?”
“No, they were back to regular humans when Dorothy woke up, remember? Either way, I believe I owe you both a big thank-you.”
“Going up there by yourself was probably not a great idea,” Agent Fleury said.
“It seemed like the thing to do at the time.”
“I’m serious,” Fleury said, stepping a little closer to me. “It was reckless and stupid. But you sure as hell paid for it.”
“He knows he’s an idiot,” Agent Long said. “Give him a break.”
He kept standing over me, and I couldn’t help but wonder if he was picturing a golden opportunity to take down Bergman himself going down the tubes. But then he surprised me.
“He filmed the whole thing,” he said. “Every second.”
“I know.”
“We watched it. The film was a little wet, but we were able to get it developed.”
“Already?”
“It doesn’t take lo
ng.”
“So how was my performance?”
He looked at me and shook his head. “I’ve never seen anything like it, Alex. I don’t know many men who would have survived.”
“No, I think Agent Long summed it up best. I’m just an idiot.”
He put out his right hand. I shook it.
“Time to get some more rest,” Agent Long said. Agent Fleury left first. She stuck around for another few seconds, just long enough to touch her hand to my face. She shook her head at me. Then she was gone.
***
Vinnie came out once to see me, bearing greetings from Jackie, along with a single bottle of Molson. Leon and Eleanor drove all the way out there, too. As soon as Eleanor saw me sitting there in that hospital bed, I could tell she felt terrible for me. I could also tell she felt vindicated in her belief that only men who are both single and mentally unstable should ever consider doing PI work. I knew Leon would be hearing about it all the way back home.
The doctor told me I was doing well. The wounds were healing and there were no signs of infection. He removed the tube from my side and let me actually get out of bed to use the bathroom.
On the fourth day, Agent Long came back into my room. This time she was alone.
“Where have you been? I was starting to worry about you.”
“I’m here to take you home.”
“Thanks, but I have my truck. They brought it down here for me.”
“Yeah, and you can’t drive it yet. So my partner dropped me off here. I’ll take you to Paradise and then he can pick me up there. Then we’ll go back to Detroit.”
“You don’t have to drive me. I’m serious. I’ll be fine.”
“Too late. He’s already gone, so I’ll need to ride with you, anyway. We can talk about the case on the way.”
“Sounds like I don’t have a choice.”
“No,” she said. “As a matter of fact, you don’t.”
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