Die a Stranger

CHAPTER TEN

I had two hours to think about things. I wasn’t even driving, so I put my head back, closed my eyes, and played it all back in slow motion. I had come way too close to getting my ass shot off, that was the first thing that hit me. I had jumped in front of a drug dealer who was obviously scared out of his mind, and I had done this completely unarmed. If Lou hadn’t stepped up behind him, I might well have been still lying on that asphalt, looking up at the sky with yet another bullet in my chest. If there really is a place you go after you die, where you need to justify your life, surviving two shootings and yet somehow dying in a third was something I would have had a hard time explaining.

I opened my eyes and looked over at Lou. He was staring dead ahead, both hands on the wheel. That scar on his jawline went all the way back, under his ear, into his hair, and it was just one more reminder that this man had led a hard life I knew very little about. Like him chopping that man right in the throat, or later, pulling out that gun and pressing it against the man’s head. I mean, I knew these were extraordinary circumstances. The man was looking for his only remaining son, after all. But some things you make yourself do because you have to, and some things you do because you’ve done them in the past and you know they work. It’s so easy and immediate, it’s practically muscle memory.

“That gun,” I said, finally making a sound after sixty or seventy miles. “I’m just thinking…”

“You didn’t expect me to give it back to him, did you?”

“No, I didn’t. But I’m not sure keeping it under the car seat is such a hot idea.”

“You may have a point,” he said. “As a convicted felon, I’m not supposed to be in possession of a firearm. That’s what you’re saying, right? I guess maybe I shouldn’t have taken it away from him? I should have just let him shoot you?”

“That’s not where I was going. I was just thinking there might be a better place for it. Like in the glove compartment. Unloaded.”

He worked that over for a mile, mile and a half. Then he reached under the seat and brought out the gun. It was a Smith & Wesson.357, now that I was finally getting a closer look at it, and it looked a lot like the service weapon I’d carried in Detroit. He passed it to me handle first without taking his eyes off the road. I swung open the cylinder and emptied the six rounds into my left hand. I opened up the glove compartment and put the works on top of his rental agreement. Then I closed it.

“I should probably thank you at some point,” I said. “If that thing really was cocked and ready, he could have shot me without even thinking of it.”

“Buy me a beer later,” he said. “You would have done the same thing.”

Another mile went by.

“Besides,” he said, “it was your idea that got us here. I was just doing my part. But now that we’ve got something to go on, I mean, what do you think we’re gonna find at this farmhouse? You think the Kaisers will be there?”

“Only one way to find out.”

“What kind of people do you think we’re talking about, anyway?” he said. “A couple of heavy hitters pretending to be hippies? Does that make any sense at all to you?”

“I don’t even care,” I said. “As long as we get some answers.”

A point he couldn’t argue with. We were into the Lower Peninsula now, still making good time down I-75. We passed by Gaylord and then Grayling, then we got off the expressway around Houghton Lake and made our way west. It was yet another flat and empty part of the state, and we passed through small towns named Merritt and Lake City. We drove right into the center of Cadillac, where the road came to a T on the shores of Lake Cadillac. There were restaurants and people walking down the sidewalks with ice cream cones. Historical markers and an old locomotive sitting right in the middle of a park, but we had no time for any of it. We were looking for a street just north of town, so we made our way up the main road. As we cut back west, we drove right past the Wexford County Airport.

“You think they ever flew in here?” Lou said.

“It’s right in their backyard,” I said. “Kinda dangerous, you’d think. But who knows? It was probably easy the first few times, no matter where they did it.”

“Yeah, funny how the wrong people always seem to notice what you’re doing, if it happens to be making you some money.”

“Even around here,” I said as we passed the little airport and saw nothing but small houses and open fields ahead, “I bet it’s hard to keep a secret.”

We kept driving west. The few houses dwindled to almost nothing. We crossed some railroad tracks and then they fell into line just off the right side of the road, even as we cut north and drove through a tiny town called Boon. The tracks left us as we cut west again. The road was so thin and empty now, it felt like we were back in the Upper Peninsula, the trees getting thicker on each side of us until I began to doubt we were being sent to the right place after all. Then finally we saw a lone, nameless mailbox with the number we were looking for and an opening in the trees just wide enough for a car to fit through.

The branches scraped against both sides of the car until we broke through into a clearing. A lone, tall house stood at the end of the gravel driveway. It was a classic farmhouse with rough wooden siding, and there were two separate outbuildings, one on either side of the house. There were no signs of life, and I didn’t see any vehicles until we got closer to the house. That’s when I saw the bright red sports car parked over by one of the sheds, and then in the next second as we came around the bend I saw the black truck parked next to it.

It was Vinnie’s.

Lou slammed on the brakes. I had the door open before we even came to a complete stop. I ran out through the cloud of dust kicked up by the tires and opened up Vinnie’s driver’s-side door. There was a thick layer of pebbled glass all over the front seat, with a long piece of metal protruding from what had once been the windshield.

“Is that his?” Lou said, coming up behind me.

“Yes.”

I pulled out the hunk of metal. It was a heavy, galvanized U-channel, the kind of thing you’d use to mount a road sign. As I let it drop to the ground, I noticed the faint odor of bleach. I went over to the other side and opened that door, and the smell was stronger. I felt the seat.

“What is it?” Lou said.

“This seat is damp.”

“Not this side,” he said, his hand on the driver’s seat.

“Vinnie’s a fanatic about keeping his truck clean. He was obviously washing something off the-”

I stopped and bent down to look at the edge of the floorboard.

“What is it?”

“It looks like a drop of blood,” I said. “This is what he was cleaning up, but he didn’t quite get it all. So now we know Buck was bleeding, probably because he got shot at the airport. But it couldn’t have been too bad.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because he was able to clean it up,” I said. “He had time to clean it up. If Buck was bleeding seriously in here, it would be a goddamned mess, and Vinnie would have had more important things to do.”

“Okay, so then who smashed his windshield? And where the hell is he? If somebody was home, you’d think they would have noticed us by now.”

“I think you’re right about that.”

“What’s this?” Lou said. He picked up a crumpled bag from the floor and opened it. “Looks like they stopped for hamburgers.”

“That’s not like Vinnie to leave garbage in his truck. Hell, if he spent all this time cleaning up the blood…”

“He cleaned up the seat and then they stopped for hamburgers later,” Lou said, slamming the door shut and sending a few more pieces of the windshield onto the seat. “Then apparently he got somebody really mad at him. Or at least at his truck.”

I closed the passenger’s-side door and looked up at the farmhouse. It was just past the middle of the day now, and the sun was out from behind the clouds and casting a blinding hot light on everything around us. There was only the hum of insects in the grass and no other sound. That’s when I noticed that the front door to the house was ajar.

“What’s going on here?” Lou said as he spotted the same thing. “Why is that door open?”

I stepped forward, a sick feeling already rising in my gut. I was afraid to look inside the house, but I knew we had to. We were set on this course the moment we left Dukes and his neighbor in Sault Ste. Marie, and here we were almost two hundred miles away, about to find some answers whether we wanted them or not.

I saw the debris on the floor as soon as I got close to the doorway. I was looking into the kitchen, where someone had apparently taken out every single drawer and upended the contents on the tile. Silverware, paper, pencils, hand tools, electrical cords, a thousand different things all scattered around the place. I stood there in the doorway and was about to knock on the frame. As if somebody would come shuffling through from another room to greet me with a smile and to apologize for the mess.

“We have to go in,” Lou said. “You know we have to.”

I didn’t say anything. I just nodded my head.

“Don’t touch anything,” he said.

Normally, this would have set me off. Like maybe I shouldn’t sign the guest book, either? But my mind was already running ahead of me and I couldn’t help imagining the worst. I took a step inside and heard a sudden pop that made my heart leap out of my chest, followed a millisecond later by the crunch of a tiny Christmas tree light bulb under my shoe.

“Let’s split up,” Lou said.

He went left, around a staircase. I went straight through the kitchen, around the butcher-block island, marveling at the thoroughness of the job done by whoever had been here. Besides every drawer, he or she or they had opened up every cupboard and swept the contents clean. There was a big pantry with the door half open and when I looked inside I saw a riot of food boxes and cans all covered with a thin coating of flour. This was more than just a ransacking of the house. It was an annihilation.

I opened the door next to the pantry. It led downstairs to a finished basement. There was a steady hum from a dehumidifier sitting in the corner, and as I looked around the rest of the room I had to wonder how that particular machine had been allowed to keep running. The large-screen television had been pulled off the wall, and it was now lying facedown on the carpet with all of the stereo equipment piled on top of it. All of the pictures and posters and whatnot had been taken from the walls, the glass frames smashed and many of the contents ripped into pieces. As I looked closer, I saw the fragments of concert posters and photographs of old rock-and-roll musicians. I even saw the scrawled signature in one corner of one picture that I couldn’t quite make out, but it was further proof that these had been some valuable pieces at one time. But no more.

I went back upstairs. I looped around the ground floor and didn’t see Lou anywhere. What I did see was more carnage. Dining room chairs smashed over the table, a china cabinet literally tipped over with the contents spilling out into a million pieces of broken glass and porcelain.

I went up the stairs, hearing the old treads creak with every step. I found Lou in the master bedroom, looking down at a great pile of clothing that had been torn out of the closet.

“Did you find anything?” he said. “Any sign of Vinnie or Buck?”

“No. Just more wreckage.”

“What do you think the point of all this was?”

“Trashing the whole house? Either they weren’t real pleased with the owners. Or else they were just looking for something.”

“Maybe both,” Lou said. “But damn, this kinda goes beyond that, doesn’t it? This looks like pure rage to me.”

“Too bad we missed them,” I said. “We could have asked.”

Lou shook his head and scanned the clothing on the floor. There was a full-length fur coat ripped out of its protective bag. I would have bet anything it wasn’t a fake.

“Look at this stuff,” he said. “Does this look like something a real hippie would wear?”

“Yeah, I couldn’t help noticing, everything in this house looks pretty expensive. Although I did see a lot of old stuff from the sixties in the basement. Concert posters, signed photographs, stuff like that.”

“Maybe that’s where they came from,” he said. “A long time ago. But they seem to have gotten over it. I bet they own a lot of land here, to go with this quaint little four-thousand-square-foot house.”

We left the master bedroom and checked out the rest of the top floor, finding three more bedrooms and three bathrooms, each with mirror shards in the sinks. At the end of the hall there was an office, and here, finally, the intruder’s efforts seemed a little more focused. Every drawer in the desk and file cabinets was thrown open, but the papers weren’t scattered to the winds. Instead, someone had apparently sat himself down and gone through everything page by page, stacking them on the floor when he was done with each handful.

“Now all of a sudden they’re looking for something,” Lou said. “What do you think it was?”

“Who knows?” I said, carefully moving some of the papers aside as I looked through them. It was all the usual stuff you’d find in any home office. Tax receipts, insurance policies, all the mundane details of modern life.

“Maybe bank records,” Lou said, bending down to look through the papers on the other side of the room. “Or phone records. Or hell, it could be anything. Whatever it was, we don’t even know if they found it.”

I looked out the window. I saw the metal roof on one of the outbuildings. Lou looked out the same window and seemed to have the same thought.

“Why is Vinnie’s truck still here, anyway?” he said. If he was trying to keep the dread out of his voice, he was doing a lousy job of it. “If he’s gone, why wouldn’t he-”

He didn’t even finish. He didn’t have to. We both went back down the stairs and out the door. Without saying a word, he went to one of the buildings, and I went to the other. Mine was either a small barn or a large shed or who the hell knows what. There was a door on the side with a bare light bulb mounted over it. When I opened it, I had a small heart attack when a chicken screamed at me and then came strutting outside. I went in and saw a few more chickens walking around the place. There were bales of hay and a work table piled high with rusted old farm tools. Sunlight streamed through the windows and there was no sound except for the chickens’ clucking. On any other day the scene would have seemed downright peaceful.

I left the building and went to the other. As I walked through the lone door on the side facing me, I saw four bay doors that opened up in the other direction. It was a large garage, with two older cars taking up the spaces on the far end. I didn’t see Lou anywhere, until he finally appeared on the wooden ladder mounted against the wall. He was coming down from a small loft, and he looked thoughtful, not horrified. A good sign.

“Did you find anything in the other building?” he said.

“Just some chickens.”

“Were they alive?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Because whoever was here, they took it out on these cars, too. It wasn’t just Vinnie’s. Which makes me wonder why he didn’t do anything to the animals.”

As I looked a little closer at the old vehicles, I saw what he was talking about. One was an old white Cadillac from the 1960s, the other an even older car, a mint-green Hudson from the 1950s. The windshields of both cars had been bashed in, spraying the front seats with a thousand pebbles of glass. That’s when I noticed the metal signposts stacked in the corner of the garage. Whoever had been here had obviously grabbed one and gotten busy with it.

“There’s room for four vehicles here,” Lou said. “Counting that red sports car we saw outside.”

“There’s one unaccounted for,” I said, looking down at the faint tire marks on both empty spots. “Wherever the fourth vehicle is, that’s probably where the Kaisers are.”

“And maybe Vinnie and Buck?”

I nodded, looking out the open door. All I could see was the gravel driveway and the woods in the distance.

“So how do we find out where they went?” Lou said.

“Hell if I know.”

I went out the door and looked at the sports car. It was a bright red Chevy Camaro from the 1970s, just one more indication that these weren’t exactly genuine hippies we were looking for. Not unless they were hippies with a lot of money and great taste in home furnishings and classic American automobiles. This one looked brand new, except of course for the missing windshield.

“They got this one, too,” Lou said. “We didn’t even notice it before.”

“Yeah, Vinnie’s truck just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Do you think he was here when all of this was happening?”

I looked over at his truck, then back at the house. It gave me a little shiver, the way those dark empty windows stood out against the brilliant sunny day.

“I don’t know,” I said. “If Vinnie and Buck went somewhere with these people…”

“They were probably long gone, you’re saying.”

“He’s gonna be pissed when he sees this truck, is all I know. I’ve seen him spend half a day buffing out a scratch in the finish.”

“Maybe he’s got bigger things to worry about right now.” There was a sudden edge in his voice. Yet another shift in mood for a man who already seemed as unpredictable as the weather on Lake Superior. “Maybe we do, too.”

I wasn’t sure how to answer that, so I didn’t even try. He shook his head and walked away from me. As he stood there looking into Vinnie’s truck, it occurred to me that this was just another secondhand impression of a son he hadn’t seen in almost thirty years. Vinnie’s house, now Vinnie’s truck. Everything but the man himself.

“We’re not doing anybody any good standing here,” I said. “Not that I have any idea where we should go next.”

He didn’t answer me. He kept staring into the truck.

“We should move this,” he finally said.

“What are you talking about?”

“His truck. We shouldn’t leave it here.”

“Are you serious? You want to call a tow truck or something?”

“No,” he said, giving me a sharp look. “I’m saying we should take it back into town, drop it off at an auto-glass place. By the time we find him, it’ll be fixed. Plus, it’s probably not a good idea to have this here, you know, just in case…”

“Just in case what?”

“I don’t know, maybe these Kaiser people are dead somewhere. The police come by here, check out the house… It’ll look bad if his truck’s sitting here, right?”

Maybe these Kaiser people are dead, he says. Not taking that one further step. Who else might be dead. But yeah, come to think of it, the man has a point.

“I watched a man hot-wire a truck once,” he said. “Once he got the ignition cover off, it didn’t take him more than two minutes.”

“Or we could just use the key,” I said, taking out my key ring. “You take the car and I’ll follow behind you.”

“You have the key to Vinnie’s truck?”

“We both have each other’s keys, yeah. It’s a good idea in the winter, in case one of us gets stuck, or a battery dies, or you name it.”

He gave me a little knock on the shoulder as he went to the car. I brushed off some of the glass, got into the truck, started it, and headed down the driveway. It’s amazing how much wind you feel when you drive without a windshield, not to mention the pollen and the bugs and whatever the hell else was hitting me right in the face. But it was a short trip back to Cadillac and we pulled into the first auto-glass shop we found. I went inside, dealt with the paperwork, gave the man my credit card. He said he’d have it done in a couple of hours, but it would take a few more hours after that for the glue to dry. I told him I didn’t know for sure when I’d be back, and he said he didn’t want me to get there too soon and have to wait.

I’d take that problem any day, I thought to myself. Vinnie safe and sound, sitting in the lobby of this little auto-glass store in Cadillac, Michigan, waiting for the glue on his new windshield to dry.

Lou was waiting for me in the parking lot. “So what the hell do we do now?” he said. “We have to figure out where they went.”

“How about where they were?” I said, holding up a crumpled paper bag. “This was probably the one day in Vinnie’s life when he left garbage in his truck.”

“Yeah? So?”

“Five Guys Burgers and Fries. One with lettuce, tomatoes, grilled onions, and mustard. The other with grilled mushrooms, bacon, mustard, and jalapeño peppers. Plus an order of fries.”

“So they had hamburgers for lunch. I don’t see how that helps us.”

“They bought this at exactly 12:08 P.M. yesterday,” I said, pulling off the receipt that was taped to the outside of the brown paper bag. “On East Pickard Street in Mount Pleasant.”

“Mount Pleasant…”

“That’s by the Saginaw Reservation, isn’t it?”

“Right next door,” he said. “Think it’s a coincidence?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Then what are we waiting for?”

We got into the car and took off.