Envy the Night

26

__________

Traffic in Chicago was always a bitch, but Grady was helped by it being a Sunday morning, and made his way out of the city and into Wisconsin by eight, doing eighty-five up I-90. If anyone stopped him, he’d flash the badge and go on his way. He had a map on the seat beside him, and the Willow Flowage was way up there, just south of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Looked like a five-hour drive at best, and that was counting on forgiving traffic and no delays.

He should have left last night. As soon as Frank had hung up the phone, Grady should have been in the car. Hopefully it wouldn’t matter. Hopefully Atkins was already out there. He’d be giving Frank hell, of course, but that didn’t matter so long as he was getting Frank off the lake and out of Devin Matteson’s path. With any luck they’d have Matteson’s wife and her boyfriend, the prison guard, in custody by noon, and by the time Matteson did arrive it would be over, nothing left but the shouting.

His phone rang just before nine, and he answered expecting Atkins and hoping for good news.

It was someone from the Bureau, but not Atkins.

“Good news,” Jim Saul said, “you won’t have to worry about picking up any speeding tickets in Miami. Police down here love you dearly. Hell, get drunk and drive naked down the strip. They won’t care. Of course, that wouldn’t be far out of the ordinary for this town, either.”

“Why do they love me?”

“Vaughn Duncan.”

“You turn something up?”

“Turned a murder warrant up. The Miami police guys had one complete fingerprint and one partial on a casing they found in the parking lot where Matteson was shot. Shooter got two of the casings but left one behind, lost it in the gravel. Either he panicked and didn’t want to take the time to find it, or it was too dark and he couldn’t. Anyhow, Miami PD ran the print through IAFIS and didn’t get a match. Surprising, right, because they were betting whoever took Matteson out had a record.”

“Right.”

“Well, no match on IAFIS, which means no record, at least not one of substance. And the cops down here were confused, because the print on the shell indicates whoever popped Matteson wasn’t a pro, and that seems wrong. Then you throw this guy Duncan at me, and I call around and find out he decided to quit his job up at Coleman without giving any notice, and I think, hmm, the good folks at Coleman probably have his prints on file.”

“They matched?”

“Bet your ass they did. Nothing on IAFIS because he didn’t have a record, but once we got the prints from Coleman and compared them, they matched up. I had some unhappy people down here, bitching about turning this around on a weekend, but I assured them I had a first-rate tip.”

“Duncan shot Matteson, then left with the wife?”

“That’s the flavor of the month, yes. The print is enough for the warrant. Now, you care to tell me where you’re getting this information?”

“Wisconsin,” Grady said, “and now I’ve got to make a call up there. I’ll talk to you soon, Jimmy—”

“Hang on, hang on. I also had the flights checked. Miami to Wisconsin. Guy matching Devin’s description got a private charter to some place called Rhinelander, flew out late yesterday, real late.”

“Rhinelander.” Grady felt numb, even though this was what he’d been expecting. The map beside him showed Rhinelander clear enough. It was about thirty miles from the Willow Flowage.

“Yeah. Like I said, private charter, and it landed in Rhinelander just after midnight—”

“I gotta go, Jimmy.”

Grady hung up and found Atkins’s number, dialed it as a car behind him blew the horn, Grady letting his own car drift into the next lane. He veered back to the right and slowed, held the phone to his ear. It was answered immediately.

“He’s not here, Morgan. He’s not at his cabin, and I’m getting pretty damn pissed off because I think when he talked to you he heard something that made him bolt.”

“No,” Grady said. “He’s not gone. Trust me.”

“Trust you. Sure.”

“Listen, Atkins, I’m on my way north—”

“I told you to stay the hell away from here.”

“I know that, but I thought maybe you’d want some help serving the murder warrant.”

“Warrant?”

“That’s right. You got a pen handy, Atkins? I think you’re going to want to write some of this down.”

The conversation might have gone on all morning and into the afternoon if nothing had interrupted them. Ezra and Frank were prying for more information, sorting through the mess of memories Vaughn and Renee offered, when Nora’s cell phone began to ring. She’d slipped it into her pocket before leaving Frank’s cabin, and the first two times it rang she simply put her hand inside her pocket and silenced the phone. On the third call, though, she took it out and checked the display and saw the call was from the receptionist desk at her father’s nursing home.

“Give me a minute,” she said and started to walk off the porch. Renee’s eyes went wary, though, and Nora realized she was probably afraid that the call was from the police. Might as well stay on the porch, then. Relax the woman.

She answered and said hello and Barbara, a receptionist whom Nora had seen several times a week at the nursing home since arriving in Tomahawk, burst into a tirade of worry and concern.

“I don’t know how he got the newspaper or who brought it to him, Nora, I really don’t, but your father saw this article and he is beside himself because he doesn’t understand it but he knows it’s bad. He’s so worried, and we are, too. We were worried even before, but now that he’s seen it, I really think you need to come down and show him you’re okay. They’ve got a photograph of all the police cars outside your shop, and he keeps looking at that, and he won’t let us take it away.”

Nora squeezed her eyes shut. Wonderful. Of course he would have seen or heard about it by now, and of course he’d be panicked. How could she have forgotten that, or ignored it till now?

“Barb, can you put him on the phone? Let me say a few things to him, and then I’ll come in and visit. Please?”

“Nora, I don’t think you understand—he’s not able to talk on the phone right now. He was extremely agitated. We had to give him some tranquilizers to get him calmed down. If there’s any way at all you can get in here to see him, that’s what I’d suggest. He’s not going to be calm until he sees you.”

What could she do? She hesitated, felt annoyance and disbelief in Barb’s silence at the other end of the line, then promised to be in as soon as possible. When she hung up, everyone on the porch was staring at her.

“It’s my father,” she said. “He’s in a nursing home, and somehow he got his hands on a newspaper. He doesn’t understand what happened, but he’s worried about me.” She looked at Frank. “I need to go see him.”

He looked irritated, but said, “All right. We’ll take you. Ezra?”

Ezra worked his tongue around his mouth, looking at the lake. “There are two boats. Why don’t you take her back in mine, and I’ll stay here.”

“Don’t trust us enough to leave?” Renee said.

“You want to be left alone if your buddies show up?”

“No,” she said.

“I was thinking an extra body wouldn’t hurt anything,” Ezra agreed, “and we still got some talking to do. So, Frank, you take Nora in and get her to her father. You stay with her, okay, and keep your eyes sharp. You know why.”

“Yeah, I do.”

Ezra nodded, looked at Nora. “That work? Time you get this settled with your dad, maybe we’ll have a better idea of what the hell needs to happen out here. Y’all can come back out, and we’ll see what we’ve got.”

“All right.”

“You got a phone?” Frank said to Ezra. “A way we can get you if we need to?”

“Most times it doesn’t work on the water, but I’ll give you the number. It’ll ring, if nothing else.”

He ran Ezra’s boat hard all the way back across the lake, a stupid thing to do considering his lack of recent knowledge of the sandbars and stumps, but one that had an advantage. When the motor was roaring and the boat was sluicing through the wind and water, conversation was impossible, and right now Frank didn’t want to talk. His mind was at turns back on that island, and the house of his boyhood, and in a Florida prison he’d never seen.

Everything he’d hoped for last night when he’d stood on the dark beach with Ezra was gone, obliterated. The situation wasn’t what he’d desired, and it appeared a good deal worse. It was also, he knew, his fault. That any of them were involved in this now was his fault. He’d come up here after Devin, come up with blood in his eyes, eager for a confrontation, and because of that he’d caused the accident with Vaughn and set all of this in motion. You couldn’t run from this, the legacy of bullets and bodies. Seven years he’d dodged it, bouncing around the country and avoiding anything to do with his father. Then one phone call from Ezra had pulled him north, and the result was this: They were right in the crosshairs of a bloody feud that should never have involved any of them. Particularly Nora.

It was time to get out. Time to hand the whole mess over to the people who should have had it from the beginning, to let Atkins and the FBI take it and hope he and Nora and Ezra could get the hell away from here before the fallout.

The good thing about running Ezra’s boat almost wide open was that it gave him a moment of peace; the bad thing was that he made the trip in too short a time. They were back at the cabin with the motor cut and the boat’s hull nestling into the shallows before he’d worked anything out. Not that extra time would have helped, though. He already knew what he had to do, which was get out of here, and stay gone.

He wanted to drive, but it was Nora’s truck and she had the keys. She got in the driver’s seat, and he opened the passenger door and sat down. The motor was started but she hadn’t put the truck in gear before she spoke.

“Do you think we can help them?”

This was the reason he’d run the boat at full throttle, the exact question he’d wanted to drown under the whine of the wind. He’d hoped Nora would not want to help them. Trying to help Vaughn and Renee would be nothing but an exercise in futility. Either DeCaster would get them or the police would. The fact that Devin was alive and missing was only an added problem, one that would make pursuit of Renee all the more imperative. If they had Renee, they could force Devin back to the surface. Maybe. Knowing what Frank knew about Devin, it seemed just as likely he’d leave his own wife to pay the price for his greed.

“Well?” Nora said when he didn’t answer. Her face was beautiful in the half-light of the shade in which she’d parked, those earnest eyes speckled by shifting shadows.

“Her husband isn’t dead,” Frank said.

“What?”

“He’s alive. Somebody shot him, that was true, but he didn’t die. He was in the hospital until yesterday, and then he took off.”

She turned and stared out of the windshield, then back at him. “What are you talking about? How do you know this?”

He inhaled, looked away. “I talked to a guy last night.”

“Last night?”

“Around two in the morning. You were asleep. He’s with the FBI, was part of the group that investigated my dad. He told me that Devin had been shot, told me that he’d left the hospital and no one knew where he was.”

Her face was incredulous at first, uncomprehending, and then the anger began to show as she reviewed the timeline.

“You knew this last night, and didn’t tell me?”

“I wanted to see what the situation was first. The way it was told to me, Renee and Vaughn were responsible for shooting Devin. Tried to kill him and run off together, or something.”

She frowned. “How do you know that’s not true?”

“The way she slapped me. That was sincere. She wouldn’t have had that sort of reaction if she wanted her husband dead.”

Nora started to nod, then stopped. “Wait a second. You knew that her husband is still alive, and you didn’t tell her? She thinks he’s dead! Why didn’t you tell her?”

“Let the FBI tell her,” he said. Then, after a pause, “You know, it was a damn nice opportunity. I got to keep him from existing for a little while. Next best thing to actually killing him.”

“What?”

“I told you what happened to my father,” he said. “Devin’s the piece of shit who turned him in to the police. Devin, the same guy who recruited him and then made sure he stayed on board, he turned him in.”

When she didn’t respond, he plunged forward. “Listen, don’t think for a moment I’m defending what my dad did. I’m not. He earned his fate, Nora, and I understand that better than anyone. But Devin? Devin earned his, too, and he walked away from it. Still is, somehow. Three bullets in the back and he’s still walking away.”

She was shaking her head now, not wanting to hear any more.

“What are you really doing here?” she said. “Why did you come here? It’s not an accident. None of this could possibly be an accident.”

His fingers had curled into his palms, and now he flattened them on the seat, breathed, looked at her.

“I came here to kill Devin.”

“Devin? He’s not even here.”

“I thought he would be. Ezra thought he would be. Ezra called, told me Devin was coming back . . .”

“And you came to kill him,” she finished.

“I’d like to pretend that’s not the truth,” he said. “I’d like to think, to hope, that if it had happened as I’d expected and he’d been out on that island, I would have been able to stop myself. To walk right to the brink and then turn around and leave. But I doubt I could have.”

It was quiet. The windows in the truck were up and the air-conditioning was off, making the inside of the cab muggy. Sweat was starting to run down his spine. He was having trouble looking at her now.

“Think what you want of me,” he said, “but I’ve told you the truth. And I’m sorry you’re involved. You have no idea how sorry I am about that.”

The silence went on for a while, but then something changed in the engine noise, an increase in pitch as it acclimated to the long idle without ever being put into gear, and the sound seemed to jar something loose in Nora.

“What do we do?” she said, voice soft.

“I think you ought to call your FBI guy, Atkins. Tell him where they can be found. It won’t cause Ezra any trouble. It’s got nothing to do with him.”

He felt guilty about that, leaving Ezra on the island with no warning that they were turning the whole mess over to the police, but ultimately it was the thing to do.

Nora’s eyes narrowed, lines showing on her forehead. “What? Now you do want me to talk to the police?”

“I think you should.”

“You want to go to the police?” She repeated it again, as if it were incomprehensible.

“No, I want you to. I’d actually love it if you could drop me off someplace where I could rent a car. That would be a big favor.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I need a car, Nora. I’ve got nothing to drive.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’ll work that out. If the cops, or anybody else, want to find me, they can track me down. I’ve committed no crimes, and there’s no reason I have to stay here.”

“You’re leaving? You’re leaving?” She leaned toward him, spat the repeated the question in his face, eyes aflame.

“I’m not going to die for Devin’s wife, Nora. I’m not going to kill for her, either. I stay and try to help, it’s going down one way or the other. Grady, the FBI agent I talked to, this was his advice, to just get in a car and get the hell away from here and keep on going. He was right, too. I just should have listened to it earlier.”

“You’re going to leave the rest of us behind?” She looked at Frank as if she’d lost all hope of communicating and shook her head. “And I’m supposed to go the police alone?”

Before he could respond she lifted her hand. “You know what, I can’t think about this right now. Before I deal with any of this, I’ve got to go see my dad, show him that I’m not dead, and then I can take you to get a rental car so you can run away, and then I will decide what in the world I tell the police.”

She put the truck into gear, backed up, and started down the gravel drive.