A Stolen Season

Chapter Thirteen

A sheriff’s deputy, first on the scene. An ambulance. Natalie taken from me, pried out of my arms. Then three state police cars. Red lights spinning in the fog.

Questions. Voices. Did you hear anything?

No.

Did you see anything?

Lights.

What kind of lights?

A car. A truck.

You can’t be more specific?

No.

Did anybody follow you home?

No.

We know this isn’t easy, Alex.

No.

No, you don’t know.

The sun comes up. The earth keeps spinning, for whatever reason. Time is obliterated. An hour passes or a minute or a day. There’s no reference point anymore, because nothing ever changes. Everything is pain. Pain is all there is or ever will be. Pain so real it makes its own fog. I can’t see anything else.

More questions.

I’m in the next cabin up the road. I can’t be in my own place. A crime scene now. As if I could ever go back there anyway. I’m in the second cabin, the one my father built by himself, the summer after the first. The summer of the second cabin, the summer before the third cabin. Before the fourth then the fifth then the sixth and then he died. He’s dead.

Name other dead people, Alex. Strange, strange thoughts coming to me now. I can’t stop them. Go ahead, name some more dead people. My mother. My old partner. Who else?

No, don’t say it. Don’t you dare.

It’s light out now. The sun rising on the world. It’s still cold. Jackie comes to sit with me. He doesn’t have much to say. He folds his hands together and presses them between his knees. He asks me what he can do for me.

Nothing.

He stays a long time. Vinnie comes to relieve him. I am apparently not to be left alone. Jackie on the way out, telling me he’ll be back. Vinnie taking the chair, his face still a swollen mess.

Minutes pass, or hours, or days. He’s not looking at me.

“Alex…,” he finally says.

“Yes.”

“Alex, how did this happen?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who did this?”

I say nothing.

“Alex, who did this?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“You have an idea. You think it was them.”

“Them who?”

“You know who I’m talking about.”

I shake my head. The rage still on the upcurve, not all the way there yet. Not by a long shot.

“Alex, what are we going to do?”

“We can’t bring her back,” I say. I haven’t lost it yet. I can still say things like this. “We can’t bring her back, so it doesn’t matter what we do.”

His hand on my shoulder, squeezing hard. “Don’t worry about it right now. We’ll figure it out.”

“Yeah. We will. We, uh…”

Then I can’t talk anymore. From one moment to the next, I lose the ability to make words. I’m rocking in my chair. Back and forth, back and forth.

If I had never gone up there on that New Year’s Eve, this thing wouldn’t have happened.

If she hadn’t come out here from Toronto, this thing wouldn’t have happened.

If I hadn’t left her alone in the cabin, this thing wouldn’t have happened.

Or at the very least, we’d both be dead now. That would have worked just fine. Much better than living in this black hole.

Then something happens. Time snaps back into place. The clock starts ticking again. I realize that twelve hours have passed since the thing happened.

That’s the other important change. It’s the thing now. For the rest of this day, it will be the thing. I’ll feel the pain of it, but I’ll know that the thing itself can be kept at bay, as long as I start moving, and stay moving. For a few hours, at least, I can keep the thing just far enough away to function.

Leon showed up. He stayed outside the cabin for a minute, talking to Vinnie, their voices a low rumble in the wind.

“Guys,” I said. I could speak again.

They didn’t hear me.

“Guys!”

They both came in at once.

“Give me a little time here, okay?”

“What do you mean?” Leon said.

“Give me an hour. Go down to Jackie’s, get some breakfast.”

They didn’t want to leave. They kept standing there.

“Come on. Please. I need to be by myself for one hour. Go get some breakfast. Vinnie, you must be starving.”

“The police will be coming back soon,” Leon said. “They’ll have some more questions.”

Meaning what, I wanted to say. Like that will do any good for anybody. “I know,” I said. “I know. I just need an hour to myself. Then I’ll be ready.”

“We’re not leaving you,” Vinnie said.

“Please. One hour.”

“You shouldn’t be alone.”

“I need some food. You can bring me back something.”

“I’ll stay. Leon can get you some breakfast.”

“That’s a good idea,” Leon said. “I’ll do that. I’ll be back soon.”

“Guys, please.”

But Leon was gone before I could say another word.

“Just go down there,” I told Vinnie. “You don’t have to stay here.”

“I don’t have any choice, remember? You cut my battery cables.”

So take my truck…The next logical thing to say, right? I didn’t say it.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

We sat there. I felt the thing coming closer. I had to move.

“Do me a favor,” I said. “I need some aspirin. There’s some in the bathroom.”

Vinnie got up. He went for the aspirin. As soon as he was out of sight, I stood up and went to the door. I tried to be quiet about it.

“I don’t see it,” I heard him say. Whatever came next, I didn’t catch it. I was out the door and in my truck.

And then I was flying.

I passed Jackie’s place. Leon might have heard me roaring by, might have stuck his head out the door and caught my taillights vanishing down the road, but there was no way he was going to catch me. He didn’t even know where I was going.

I went south, leaving Lake Superior, heading straight for the other lake. The sun was out today. I had to flip the visor down. If the sun was actually warming things up, I didn’t notice. Leon’s gun was still in the box under my seat.

It couldn’t have been Laraque, I thought, or anyone else from Canada. They had no idea that Natalie was here.

No, I had another person in mind.

If he had found out that Brucie couldn’t do the job, whether Brucie admitted it to him, or whether he just knew somehow…Either way, if Cap knew I was still alive, he would come for me. If I wasn’t there, who the hell knows…Instead of waiting, instead of coming back…

God damn, why couldn’t I have been there?

Or maybe he really did want to take her. Maybe that was his plan. Do that to me first, break me into little pieces, then come back later to finish up. From what Brucie had said about him…

I tightened up on the steering wheel, nearly lost my wheels for one sick moment, fought my way back. The road was empty.

I got off I-75, took the two-lane road east, along the shore of Lake Huron. I drove into Hessel, took the secondary road that ran down the peninsula, took the smaller residential road off of that, turned the corner.

I saw the black Escalade on the road, saw the face behind the wheel. On pure impulse I swung hard, veering across the road. I felt the impact on the corner of my bumper, the Escalade sideswiping me and then running headlong into the ditch. I left the road on the opposite side, obliterated a mailbox, then a small tree. I was out the door before the truck had settled.

Cap came out of the Escalade, lost his footing, and had to put one hand on the ground to keep from falling on his face. He staggered back too far the other way, trying to find his feet, looking like a man who’d been spun in a blender. I was on him before he even saw me.

I planted my right fist in his gut, felt all the wind leave his body. He tried to grab me. I hit him with my left hand, caught too much of the crown of his head, and felt my whole arm go numb. He went down.

I kicked him in the ribs, had the urge to keep doing that about twenty more times. Then I remembered the gun. It was still in the truck. I went back for it, looking up and down the road. My truck was off the road, but his back end was blocking half of it. If anyone came by, they’d have to slow down.

So they’d get a good view of me putting a bullet in his head, I thought. I grabbed the gun, went back to Cap. He was on his hands and knees trying to draw a breath. I kicked him again, flipping him over. There was a bloody scrape on his forehead.

I bent down over him. His eyes focused on me.

“McKnight,” he said. “Fuck. You’re alive?”

“Yes, I am. Surprised to see me?”

He was. It was unmistakable. Under the circumstances, I didn’t see how he could be faking it. He was genuinely shocked to see me.

“Brucie killed you.”

“Obviously he didn’t.”

“That pussy.”

I put the gun to his temple. I remembered the last time I had pointed this gun at him, the way he had taunted me for sounding like some kind of yooper hick. “I’m going to kill you,” I said in a dead even voice. “How’s that sound? Am I doing better this time? I’m going to blow your brains out, all over this road. They’ll be picking parts of your head out of the bushes for a week.”

His eyes went wide. He tried to slide away from me.

“How am I doing?” I said. “Do I sound convincing now?”

“What do you want?”

“Where’s your partner?”

“I don’t know.”

I hit him in the face with the butt of the gun.

“Where is he?” I said.

“I told you, I don’t know.” He kept his face away from me while he spit out blood. “Brucie disappeared. If you’re alive, that might explain it.”

“What do you mean?”

“He knows what’ll happen to him if Mr. Gray finds out.”

I thought about it. I could feel the flame inside me starting to burn out. I knew Brucie hadn’t done it. He had already proven to me he wasn’t a killer. And if Cap was truly this surprised to see me alive, then obviously it couldn’t have been him, either.

What the hell was I doing here?

“Wait a minute,” I said. “What would happen to me?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You said Brucie knows what would happen to him if Mr. Gray finds out I’m alive. What would happen to me?”

“Forget it. You’d be done.”

“Would he send somebody up here to do it?”

“Of course he would.”

“He wouldn’t give you a call? Tell you to take care of me?”

Cap swallowed hard, like he was thinking about what life would be like if Mr. Gray decided he couldn’t be trusted. “I have a feeling I don’t exactly work for him anymore,” he said. “But he has other people.”

“What if I wasn’t home? What if there was somebody else in my cabin?”

I felt dizzy, just saying the words. Cap didn’t answer me. He spat out some more blood.

I grabbed him by the face, made him look up at me.

“If there was a woman in my cabin, God damn you…If Gray sent somebody up here to kill me…what would happen to her?”

He shook his head. “If you knew him, you wouldn’t even have to ask.”

I wanted to hit him again. I wanted to use the gun like a hammer and smash his face in until there was nothing left. Then I wanted to put the barrel of the gun in my own mouth and pull the trigger.

I didn’t do it. Instead, I grabbed his shirt and pulled his face close to mine. “Did he do it? God damn you, you stupid piece of shit. Did he do this thing? Tell me the truth.”

“If Brucie left you alive, there’s no way he could keep it from Gray. There is no fucking way. Trust me, the next time he talked to him, it would all come out. Which can only mean one thing.”

I kept holding on to his shirt. My arms were shaking.

“Where does he live?” I said.

“Mr. Gray?”

“Yes, Mr. Gray. Where can I find him?”

“It’s not a big secret, McKnight. You know where St. Clair Shores is?”

“Yes.” It was an affluent suburb, next to Detroit.

“The house is on Trombley Street, right on the water. But the place is a fortress, man. And he’s got a bodyguard who could take you apart with one hand.”

“You’ve been to the house?”

“Yeah, a few times.”

“How do I get in?”

“Are you serious?”

“Tell me how I get in the house.”

“Don’t go in the front door. Go around to the back. He has a study on that end of the house. There’s a door by the pool.”

“Do you think he’s home today?”

“What, you’re gonna drive all the way down there right now?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Then I’ll give you one more piece of advice.”

“What’s that?”

“As soon as you see him, shoot him in the head. Don’t wait one fucking second. Shoot him in the head and keep shooting until you run out of bullets.”

I wasn’t sure what to say to that. After everything that had happened, he was being almost helpful.

“You never did pick up the drugs from Canada,” I said.

He looked up at me. “Who are you, anyway? How the fuck do you know this stuff?”

“Is that why you were buying those Vicodin from Caroline? You needed a little fix until the big shipment came in?”

“Talk to Brucie. If you ever see him again. He’s the one with the pill problem.”

“I meant what I said about staying away from her.”

“I told you, it was Brucie. You think I wanted to hang around with that skank?”

I took the gun out of my right hand and hit him with my fist. He didn’t try to cover up. He shook his head and spit out some more blood.

“You’d better grow a set of balls before you get to Gray’s house,” he said, “and learn how to kill somebody. You try this little tough-guy act on him and he’ll rip your heart out of your chest.”

“If I learned how to kill somebody, I’d be just like you.”

“In your dreams, McKnight. But maybe you can manage it for one day.”

“You’re alive on this earth,” I said as I got up. My right hand was throbbing. “And she’s gone. How fucked up is that?”

He stayed on the ground. He didn’t say another word.

I got in my truck, backed it out onto the road, and turned it around. To the main road, to the highway, to the bridge to the Lower Peninsula.

To St. Clair Shores and the man they call Mr. Gray.