Die a Stranger

CHAPTER TWENTY

Nobody said anything for a while. I made myself stick to the speed limit. Buck was holding on to his knees, leaning forward like he was about to throw up.

“That would have been us,” Vinnie said from the backseat. It was the first time he had spoken since we’d left Charlevoix. “Both of us.”

“There’s no such thing as ‘would have,’” I said. “It didn’t happen. That’s all that matters. You’re safe now. We’re all safe.”

Not quite true, I thought. But I still wasn’t ready to drop that on him.

When we hit Cadillac, I found the same auto-glass shop again. Vinnie’s truck was out in the parking lot, its windshield fully restored. Lou went in to talk to the man while I stayed outside with my cell phone. I called Janet Long and she answered on the first ring.

“Alex, I was trying to call you back yesterday. What happened?”

There was a joke there about being tied up, but I wasn’t about to say it.

“I’ve got something to tell you,” I said. “You have to listen very carefully. I’m going to give you an address just outside of Cadillac. There are two dead bodies in the barn. A man and a woman.”

“Alex, stop right there. You need to go to the local police immediately.”

“We’re on our way back to the UP right now, and that’s the first place we’ll go, I promise. You just need to send somebody over there now.”

“What the hell is going on up there? There were two dead men found in Sault Ste. Marie just a couple of days ago. Are we talking about the same perpetrator?”

“The same perp,” I said, smiling grimly at the cop talk. “It’s a man out of Chicago named Corvo, if you want to know the truth. Although I don’t imagine you could tie it to him just yet.”

“What was that name?”

“Corvo. You know who I’m talking about?”

There was a silence on the line.

“Alex, you have to go to the police right this second,” she said. “The nearest station you can find. You may be in some serious danger.”

You don’t know the half of it, I thought, and then that’s when I had to make my choice. I flashed back on what Mr. White had said to me. If you try to set up Corvo, he’ll smell it from a mile away. Then every family member of every man involved, every single one of them, dies in a river of blood.

“You’re the only person I can trust with this,” I said. “So let me ask you a question. If you’re putting together a case on Corvo-”

“I didn’t say that. I just said you-”

“Needed to go to a station right away because I might be in big danger. I got that part, okay? I heard you. Obviously you wouldn’t be saying that if you didn’t know about this guy. And you wouldn’t know about this guy unless he was on your radar. Look, I’m not asking you to tell me any secrets. Just give me a general idea here. Are you close to moving on him?”

Another silence.

“Janet, are you there?”

“I’m here.”

“There’s a good chance I’ll be seeing him again. Soon. I need to know if there’s any chance of you putting him away. Like maybe even with my help.”

“This is insane,” she said. “You cannot be involved in this.”

“Too late. I’m already involved.”

I heard her let out a long breath. “I need to go talk to somebody, Alex. I’ll call you back as soon as I can, all right?”

“Okay. I’ll be here. Thank you.”

I ended the call, just in time to see Lou coming out of the glass shop. I figured that meant we were ready to go, but he stopped me and waved over Vinnie and Buck.

“I have something to ask,” he said, “from all three of you. When we get back up north, I know the police are going to be asking a lot of questions. I know Alex said we should tell the truth. But in my case, I’m afraid that even the truth might get me into a lot of trouble.”

“It was all justified,” I said. “It was self-defense.”

“Let me finish, Alex. If the police start asking me questions and they find out who I really am, I’m going to have a big problem. I’m a convicted felon, remember? I’m technically still on parole?”

“There’s no ‘technically’ about it,” I said. “You’re either on parole or you’re not.”

“Okay, I’m on parole. If they find out back in Nevada that I’m mixed up in this? Never mind if anything I did was justified or not, it’s gonna hang me up for a long time just trying to explain what happened. As you can imagine, I’m not accustomed to getting any breaks when it comes to the police.”

Vinnie shook his head and for a second I thought he was going to turn and walk away. But he stayed put and kept staring at the ground.

“I hope Alex will agree I’ve been good to have around this week. If I get sent back to Nevada today, I lose any ability to keep helping you.”

“I’m getting a headache again,” Vinnie said. “Can we get going now?”

“I’ll drive the rental car,” Lou said. “You guys go with Alex in Vinnie’s truck. All I’m asking is that you guys leave me out of the story. Okay? That’s all I’m asking.”

“Fine,” Vinnie said. “You weren’t here. I can live with that.”

“He helped save our lives today,” Buck said. “Come on, give the man a break.”

“It’s okay,” Lou said to Buck. “We still need some time to sort things out.”

Vinnie and Buck got into the truck. It was a tight fit sitting three across, but we’d been through a lot worse. I gave Lou a nod and told him I’d see him back in Paradise.

Vinnie sat in the middle. I could see him trying to focus, until he finally gave up and closed his eyes. I didn’t want to disturb him. Let the man rest, I thought.

I looked at my watch. About twenty-four hours had passed since I’d been given my little assignment. We were halfway to the deadline and I still hadn’t told them that Corvo considered them both walking dead men.

Buck didn’t seem too happy about it, but I drove right to the Bay Mills Tribal Police Station. I figured we might as well get right into the fun part of the day. Chief Benally made us all wait in the lobby while he called in a detective from the Michigan State Police post in the Soo. Some of this reached beyond Chippewa County, after all. I recognized the man who showed up. I knew him well enough to nod hello to, anyway. Chief Benally and the detective took Buck into the interview room first. Then Vinnie. Then it was my turn.

I told them everything I knew from direct experience. I didn’t speculate about anything else. Like how willingly or unwillingly Buck became involved in the first place. I gave short, direct answers and told them what had happened. Except for the parts involving Lou. I didn’t say one word about being taken to the swamp, or what happened when we got there. My story was that the Kaisers left me alone in the house, taking their two lackeys with them, and then I went to find Vinnie and Buck in the boat.

I also left out my entire conversation with Corvo. I was still waiting to hear back from Janet. I knew she was my one last hope to get any real help.

Then it was Vinnie’s turn again. Then Buck’s again.

It wasn’t clear for a while whether Buck or possibly even Vinnie would be taken into immediate custody. In the end, Vinnie was allowed to leave. The chief said we shouldn’t bother waiting for Buck. Even if he was released that day, he lived just down the road, so he could walk home.

So I drove Vinnie back to Paradise. He put his head back, yet again, and closed his eyes.

“Your father saved my life yesterday,” I said to him. “So really, he saved all of our lives.”

“I know that.”

“I’m not trying to tell you how you should feel about him. But you should try to talk to him.”

He didn’t answer.

“Let me ask you one thing,” I said. “That night Buck called you, why did you go out to get him?”

“I had to. He’s my cousin.”

“The first night you ever got drunk, in your entire life, is the night you drove to Newberry. That’s what you’re telling me?”

He looked over at me.

“I’m just saying, if you had hit somebody, you would have gone away. Just like your father.”

“So I’m no better? Is that your point?”

“No. My point is that you had a good reason, so yeah, maybe there was more to the story than just another drunk Indian. If you had a chance to explain yourself, maybe somebody else could understand it.”

I let that one hang for a while. Finally, he opened the door, but then stopped before he got out.

“Tell me the truth,” he said. “We’re not done with this guy yet, are we?”

“Who, Corvo?”

He waited for me to keep talking. He wasn’t going anywhere until I did.

“No, we’re not done with him,” I said. “You get some rest and I’ll meet you down at the Glasgow for dinner, okay? We can talk about it then.”

He didn’t move.

“I promise. Get some rest and I’ll see you down there.”

He got out of the truck. Before I could back out, he came over to the driver’s side. I rolled down my window.

“Thanks for everything,” he said. “I’m not sure I even said that yet.”

“It’s okay. I figure we’re about even now.”

He put a hand on my arm for a second. Then he let me go.

It was a couple of hours later, after a shower, a change of clothes, some new bandages, and four aspirin. My landline-phone rang. It was Janet.

“Alex, are you there? I tried your cell earlier…”

“I live on the edge of the world, remember? Cell phones are always a crapshoot up here.”

“You need to come down here and talk to us,” she said. “Right away. Even if you get here late.”

“What, in Detroit?”

“Yes. Do not initiate any further contact with Corvo. Just get down here and-”

“Janet, are you guys close to moving on Corvo, or not?”

“We’ll talk about that down here.”

“Tell me now. Do you have a case or do you not have a case?”

“We have pieces,” she said. “Okay? We don’t have enough to move on yet. In fact, if you really want to know the truth, we’re not even close. If you have something to give us, it might help…”

“Yeah, it’ll help all right. Look, I know how it works. It takes months to put together a RICO case. Sometimes years.”

“Alex, what do you have for us? You have to tell me.”

“I have talk,” I said. I closed my eyes and rubbed my forehead, feeling suddenly very alone. “I have a bunch of words between three men sitting in a boat, in the middle of Lake Michigan. That’s what I have.”

“Okay, then. I can’t wait to hear about it. You’re coming down, right?”

There was a knock on the door.

“Yes,” I said. “It’ll be good to see you again. I should have come down by now, taken you to dinner like I promised.”

“Alex-”

“I have to go. Somebody’s at the door.”

“Do not hang up, God damn it.”

“I’ll come down, Janet. Not tonight. But soon, okay? It’s good talking to you.”

I hung up the phone and unplugged it from the wall. Then I answered the door. It was Lou. He had obviously gone back to the other cabin for a shower and some clean clothes himself. Between the two of us, we looked almost like regular humans.

“Is Vinnie in his cabin?” he said.

“He is. He said he’d meet us down at the Glasgow a little later.”

I could tell he was about to say something about how we were supposed to be watching him closely for any signs of PCS, but he let it go. If I knew Vinnie at all, I knew he’d want a few hours to himself.

“Alex, what’s going on? Who were you talking to?”

“My friend in Detroit,” I said. “I thought maybe she could help us.”

“I thought you weren’t supposed to contact anybody. Wasn’t that one of the things they made very clear to you?”

“Look, I’m an ex-cop,” I said. “I had it drilled into my head, all those years. Call for backup. Do things by the book. But you know what? I’m just realizing tonight… even if I still had a badge and a gun, I don’t know if I’d even believe in the book anymore.”

Lou stood there in my cabin, his wet hair slicked back, looking tough and old at the same time, like he’d seen everything there is to see in life, most of it bad. He listened carefully to every word.

“The rules are all gone now,” I said. “They’ve been torn up. People do things that would have seemed unimaginable just a few years ago. I mean, when those guys told me that they’d kill everybody… not just us but every family member they could find… Meaning your family, Lou. All of them. When they said that, I believed them. I know they weren’t just talking. I know it. I saw their eyes when they told me what would happen. You understand what I’m saying?”

He nodded slowly.

“But still, I figured I had to try, you know? Just take one chance to get somebody else on our side. ”

“There’s nobody,” he said. “Not for something like this. I could have told you.”

“We can’t run, either. Not forever. So yeah, that leaves one choice. We go down there and we take it to ’em.”

“I’m with you,” he said. “But it’s just you and me, right? We leave Vinnie out of this?”

“I think he has the right to know what’s going on.”

“No, Alex. We can tell him afterwards. I’d like to keep Buck out of it, too. Maybe for different reasons. I mean, we’ve already seen how he functions under pressure.”

“I hear what you’re saying, but come on, we don’t have much time left. Tomorrow’s the deadline.”

“We’ll have time. How ’bout we all have a meeting over breakfast? See who’s really up for it?”

“I’m just thinking, if Vinnie’s feeling better tonight…”

“You gotta promise me,” Lou said. “He gets one more night to recover. No talking about this until tomorrow morning.”

“Okay, I promise.”

“Thank you,” he said, grabbing my shoulder. “We’ve got a deal. But right now, I think I need a drink.”

The sun had gone down on another tough day. At least I knew that Vinnie was in his cabin as I drove by. That was one thing that was right in the world. Lou and I drove down to the Glasgow in his rental car and sat at the bar. Jackie broke out the cold Molsons for both of us from my personal fridge. A Tigers game was on the television over the bar, the sound turned low. It was cold outside tonight. Legitimately cold. Logs burned and crackled in the fireplace.

“I can see why you like this place,” Lou said to me. “I think I’d be here every night myself.”

“For the love of God,” Jackie said, bringing the beers over and looking at the bandages on my face, “what the hell happened to you?”

I didn’t want to get into it. I just asked the man for a plate of his beef stew and hoped he’d let me be for the rest of the night.

Vinnie came in a little while later. He could have chosen to sit next to Lou or next to me. He chose the stool next to me.

“At least you did come down,” Lou said. He was staring at the label on his beer bottle and he didn’t so much as glance in Vinnie’s direction. “Even if you’re not going to talk to me.”

Vinnie didn’t respond. Jackie fixed him a plate of beef stew and slid over a 7UP. I was pretty sure I’d never see him drink another drop of alcohol.

“I did what you asked me to do,” Vinnie finally said. “I covered for you at the station. I also realize that we all owe you some gratitude for what you did today. So you have that from me.”

“Okay, then,” Lou said. “I’m glad I was able to help.”

“I’m afraid I can’t give you much else. But that’s the choice you made thirty years ago.”

“Just tell me this much,” Lou said, his eyes still fixed on the bottle. “I brought some things with me from Vegas to give to your sisters and their kids. How many are we talking about?”

Vinnie stopped eating.

“I just want to know how many grandchildren I have,” Lou said. “Is that so much to ask?”

“My sisters have two kids each,” Vinnie said. “But I wouldn’t call them your grandchildren. Not if you don’t even know how many there are.”

“There we go,” Lou said. “Now we’re getting somewhere. You got anything else to say to me?”

“Yes. You shouldn’t have come here.”

“You just got done thanking me.”

“I changed my mind,” Vinnie said. “On second thought, I’d rather be back on that island than owe you anything.”

“You’re saying you’d rather be getting sliced up like those people at the farmhouse? Is that what you’re saying? He’d probably be doing that to you right now, as we speak.”

“Gentlemen,” Jackie said, “I’m not sure this is appropriate dinner conversation.”

I looked at him and shook my head. Jackie let out a huff and walked away.

“I’m your father,” Lou said. “I made enough mistakes for ten men, and I paid for them, believe me. But I’m still your father.”

“Fathers don’t leave,” Vinnie said. He was holding on to the rail of the bar and I could practically hear the fizzing sound as his extralong fuse burned away.

“Sometimes fathers have to leave. Sometimes they have no choice.”

“You beat your wife,” Vinnie said. “My mother. That makes you the lowest kind of man on earth.”

Lou took a long breath, nodding his head. “I laid my hands on Nika in anger exactly one time. One time in my life and I had a reason.”

“Don’t say her name. I don’t want to hear her name pass your lips.”

“They made me leave, don’t you understand? Everyone on the rez turned against me. I was driven out. They told me to never come back.”

“A solid idea,” Vinnie said. “I wholeheartedly agree with them. I should go find every person on the rez past a certain age and thank them.”

“Which is it, Vinnie? You can’t have it both ways. Am I supposed to stay away or am I supposed to try to come back? Tell me what I should have done.”

“You should have come back for your son’s funeral,” Vinnie said. “That’s what you should have done. Oh no, wait, you couldn’t do that because you were in prison for murder.”

Lou stood up from his bar stool. Vinnie stood up to face him.

“Vinnie, you’re supposed to be taking it easy,” I said to him, figuring it was finally time to step in. “I don’t think this qualifies.”

“Stay out of this, Alex.”

“You’re right,” Lou said. “I couldn’t come to Tom’s funeral because I was in prison. Not that it would have mattered. I wouldn’t have been welcome, anyway.”

They stood there looking at each other. A log shifted in the fireplace and let out a loud pop.

“He wasn’t my son,” Lou said. “Nika was sleeping with Henry Carrick.”

There’s that moment. The fuse burns out. You don’t hear the fizzing anymore. There’s one second of silence, maybe two. You think the bomb might not go off.

“I know it’s hard to keep a secret on the rez,” Lou said, “so it’s kind of ironic. The biggest secret of all, and only me, Nika, and Henry know about it.”

“No,” Vinnie said. “No.”

“I shouldn’t have hit her. I admit that. They made me leave and I accepted it. I kept the secret all of these years. But now you know the truth. It was your mother who destroyed our marriage.”

Then it happens. The bomb goes off.

He was on him before I could get off my stool. Vinnie hit him once in the face and then drove him to the floor with his shoulder. He got a few more shots in and it looked like Lou wasn’t even trying to defend himself. I tried to pull Vinnie off of him and we both went crashing against the bar rail. I got the worst of it, taking the rail right in the ribs, the same spot where I’d been jabbed twice with a gun barrel when I was being driven to the swamp. I had to hold on and wait for my breath to come back. Instead of launching at his father again, Vinnie walked out the door.

Lou took a while getting off the floor. Jackie stood there watching us and for once in his life he had the good sense not to say anything.

“It’s okay,” Lou said as he slid back onto the bar stool. “He needed that.”

“What in God’s name are you talking about?” I said. “What happened to taking care of him? Letting him recover from his goddamned concussion?”

“It was eating him up, Alex. I wanted him to get mad at me. He needed to get that out of his system.”

“Oh, well then excuse me. I guess you played that just right.”

“You don’t understand,” he said. “I had to do that while I had the chance. Who knows where we’ll all be after tomorrow…”

He picked up his bottle and drained it.

“Was all of that stuff true?” I said. “About his brother?”

“Ask Henry Carrick. Next time you see him.”

“You’re gonna have a hell of a black eye tomorrow,” I said, looking at him. “He really caught you.”

“Good. Like I said. It was a long time coming.”

“You are absolutely insane,” I said, picking up my beer. The muscles in my side were finally beginning to relax.

“I’m going to go. I’ll see you in the morning.”

He stood up before I could say another word. Then he was out the door, even quicker than Vinnie. I heard him start the motor of the rental car. I finished my beef stew, watching a little of the ball game and listening to Jackie complain about things. It almost felt like a normal night for a change. I should have known it wouldn’t last.

I left around ten o’clock. An early night, but probably just what I needed. Until I realized that I had no way to drive home. So I started walking up the road. Good thing it was late summer, so it was only cold and not brutally cold.

As I walked up my road, I saw Vinnie’s truck parked by his place. I considered stopping in and then thought better of it. Instead, I went up to the second cabin, figuring I’d see what Lou was doing. Smoking a joint, no doubt. But when I got there, I didn’t see the car.

He might be on the rez, I thought. He might have dropped in on his daughters. Which would be quite a sight, especially with the newly added bruises on his face, courtesy of Vinnie.

I went back to my cabin, wishing that I could sleep for the next week straight. That brought me back to Corvo’s deadline and guaranteed I’d be lying awake for at least a few hours, staring at the ceiling.

Around ten thirty, my cell phone rang. It took me a moment to find it in the filthy pants I had taken off and thrown on the floor of the bathroom. I finally wrestled it free and answered it.

“Janet, is that you?”

“No, it’s Lou. I need some help.”

“What are you talking about? Where are you?”

“I’m in Sault Ste. Marie. In the jail. You gotta come get me out.”