Very Bad Men

by Harry Dolan

  “What’s this about, Mr. Loogan?”

  I thumbed a button to put her on speaker. “Detective Waishkey’s here with me,” I said. “We’re trying to reach Nick. Is he home?”

  “He’s gone to a movie with his friends—Kevin and J.T.”

  “In Brimley?”

  “In Sault Sainte Marie.”

  “How would he get there? It’s a long way to ride a bike at night.”

  “They took the truck. Kevin has a license.”

  “What truck?” I asked her. Then I remembered the rusted pickup at the farmhouse.

  “Nick’s father’s truck,” she said. “I’ve let them take it to Sault Sainte Marie before. Kevin’s responsible. Is something wrong?”

  “I hope not. Are you sure the three of them are together? Did you see them leave?”

  A flutter of static on the line. Then: “No. Nick called to tell me they were leaving. They were gone when I got home. You’re starting to scare me, Mr. Loogan. What’s going on?”

  I turned to Elizabeth, unsure how to answer.

  She said, “We think Nick may have gotten the idea that the senator is to blame for Terry getting shot. We’re worried about what he might do.”

  Madelyn took a few seconds to absorb the news. I wondered how she would react to the mention of the senator—if she would pretend to be puzzled.

  In the end she simply said, “Where would Nick get that idea?”

  “It’s not important,” Elizabeth said. “Is the senator still at the cabin?”

  A few more seconds passed. Then: “Yes.”

  “Nick knows he’s there,” Elizabeth said. “The best thing would be to call the senator and tell him to get out. We’re on our way there now.”

  The line went silent and I realized Madelyn had hung up. Three minutes later she called back. “I couldn’t get through to John. If he’s sleeping he may have his cell turned off.”

  “There’s no landline at the cabin?” I said.

  “Not since Charlie died. Nick’s not answering his phone either. And there’s something else—Kevin and J.T. aren’t with him. I just talked to their mother.”

  I thought of Sarah—how eager she was to learn to drive. Nick would feel the same way. And up here, in the country, they would start early.

  “Could he be driving the truck himself?” I asked Madelyn.

  “He knows he’s not supposed to,” she said. “But he could be. Charlie was teaching him.”

  I glanced at Elizabeth, at her profile in the dashboard light, her easy grip on the wheel. We sped west, the straight gray line of Six Mile Road rushing to meet us.

  The fields on either side of us ran out into the empty dark. Beside me I heard Elizabeth say calmly, “Mrs. Turner, I need to know if you keep a gun in the house, or if there’s one in the cabin.”

  Madelyn answered in a hollow voice. “No. Do you really think—? No, no guns. I have to go now. I’m heading to the cabin.”

  “That’s fine,” said Elizabeth. “We’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  As I snapped the phone shut I thought about guns and felt a ripple of dread run through me. Nick had seen me fiddling with a bullet earlier in the day. Where there’s a bullet, there’s a gun. We had left the car unlocked in Tillman’s driveway, with my borrowed revolver in the glove compartment. If Nick had been there—

  I popped the latch of the glove compartment and it fell open. I unzipped the cloth pouch and saw the barrel of the revolver.

  “It’s still here,” I said, half to myself. “I was afraid he might have taken it.”

  Elizabeth lifted a hand from the wheel and brushed her fingers through her hair.

  “You’re forgetting about Tillman’s pistol,” she said.

  CHAPTER 57

  The truck had one headlight to pierce the dark under the trees. The light jittered over the unpaved lane and the tires sent pebbles bouncing into the undercarriage. Nick Dawtrey drove with the seat racked forward. Sam Tillman’s gun belt lay on the passenger seat beside him, the nine-millimeter in its holster.

  He had doubled back and discovered Tillman’s house empty. Had broken a window to get in, just like at Delacorte’s.

  In places the trees grew so close to the lane that the branches scraped along the side of the truck. Nick liked to hear the swish of the leaves. It reminded him of driving with his father.

  He doused the headlight well before he reached the cabin, lifting his foot off the gas at the same time. The truck crept to a stop. He killed the engine and let his eyes adjust to the dark before he climbed out. He left the belt and the holster on the seat. Took the pistol.

  His father had always kept a spare key under a bucket on the porch. Nick found it and let himself in, slow and easy so the hinges of the door wouldn’t squeak. Inside, a lamp was burning with a shade like parchment. It gave off enough light to show him John Casterbridge lying on the sofa, mouth open, snoring softly. The senator had fallen asleep in his clothes.

  On the floor by the sofa were playing cards laid out in columns—a game of solitaire. What Casterbridge had been doing before he fell asleep. Nick knelt and set the pistol on the carpet and gathered the cards. He didn’t like to see them there, because they belonged to his father. And because he used to play cards with Terry.

  He had met his brother for the first time when he was five years old, in the visitation room at Kinross Prison. He had been afraid that day; at least that’s what his father told him later. He might have been afraid of all the people and the noise, but not of Terry, who had a wide smile and a gentle laugh, who wanted to hear about his friends and about school.

  He remembered other visits. Terry telling jokes. Silly ones. Why do cows wear bells? Because their horns don’t work. Sometimes they played checkers. Sometimes Terry would have a deck of cards. The three of them would sit at a table with a white plastic top—Nick and his father on one side, Terry on the other—and they would play fish.

  It took a while for Nick to realize that Terry was a prisoner—and what it meant. At the end of those early visits, his father would take his hand and tell him to say good-bye. “Can Terry come with us?” he would say. “Not this time, kiddo,” Terry would tell him. Once, on the drive home, he asked his father about it—why Terry never came home with them. “He can’t,” his father said. “They won’t let him out.” “Why not?” Nick asked. “He did something wrong,” his father told him, “and now he has to stay there.” “Couldn’t he say he’s sorry?” “Sometimes sorry’s not enough.”

  His father sounded very sad, and Nick didn’t ask him any more about it. But from then on he was more aware of the gray walls of the visitation room, of the guards who wouldn’t let his brother leave. The next time he said good-bye to Terry, he leaned close to him and whispered, “Someday I get you outta here.”

  Terry smiled, but he didn’t laugh, and Nick was glad of that. When the next visit rolled around, he said it again, and Terry only nodded. “I bet you will, kiddo.”

  The visits continued. Nick got older and the card games he played with Terry evolved, from fish to hearts to crazy eights to poker. By the time he turned fifteen he had long ago stopped saying, “Someday I get you outta here.” He had stopped because he didn’t want the guards to overhear. Because it was a promise he intended to keep.

  NICK SQUARED OFF the cards and tucked them in his pocket. He retrieved the pistol from the carpet and flicked the little lever on the side. That would be the safety. He worked the slide the way he had seen it done in movies. Now there would be a bullet in the chamber.

  He stood over the sofa and listened to John Casterbridge snoring. The man’s hands, wrinkled and spotted, lay folded over his stomach. There were deep creases in the loose flesh of his neck. A patch of white stubble showed along his jaw where he had missed shaving.

  Nick aimed the pistol at the center of the old man’s chest. He felt a tightness in his own chest, a fluttering like a current running through him. He held his arm straight, but the gun trembled. He looked up an
d closed his eyes, willing his arm to hold still.

  When he opened his eyes he saw his father’s sparrow calendar on the wall behind the sofa. He saw his own portrait in a frame beside it.

  Not here, he thought.

  John Casterbridge shifted in his sleep. Nick stepped closer and jabbed the muzzle of the gun into the old man’s shoulder.

  “Wake up,” he said.

  I BROUGHT THE REVOLVER with me into the woods, when we went looking for Nick and the senator. It wasn’t a conscious decision. I had the thing in front of me in the open glove compartment when Elizabeth swung onto the lane that led to Charlie Dawtrey’s cabin. It was there when we passed the rusted pickup, when Elizabeth pulled over onto the grass. And when we got out of the car I took it from the cloth pouch and tucked it under my waistband at the small of my back. Sometimes I wish I’d left it behind.

  The roadside near the cabin was thick with cars: the senator’s under the canvas tarp, Madelyn Turner’s, a cruiser from the Michigan State Police. The last was Hannagan’s doing, the best he could muster by phone on short notice. Brimley didn’t have its own police department.

  Hannagan drove in just behind us. We joined him near the porch of the cabin, where a sergeant from the state police was waiting—a young guy with ginger hair. His name was Cooper. He had arrived only five minutes before us.

  “I found the door open and the Turner woman inside,” he said. “There was no one else here.”

  “Where is she now?” Hannagan asked him.

  He pointed vaguely eastward. “She went to talk to some neighbors. See what she could find out. There’s no sign of a struggle,” he added, glancing into the cabin. “You’d hardly know anyone was living here at all. Is it true—John Casterbridge has been staying here?”

  Hannagan looked to Elizabeth. “It’s true,” she said.

  “And the truck down the road,” Sergeant Cooper said. “That’s the one the Turner woman’s son was driving?”

  Elizabeth nodded.

  “I think you were right to be worried, then,” said Cooper. “I found this in the truck.” He stepped into the house to retrieve something just inside the doorway. I recognized it as Sam Tillman’s gun belt. The holster was empty.

  We heard footsteps on the lane—Madelyn Turner coming back from the neighbors’. She hurried up the stone walk to the cabin and told us that the couple she’d talked to hadn’t seen or heard anything unusual. “It’s been a quiet night,” she said. “No shouting, no loud noises—they would have heard.”

  She was breathless and talking fast. Her eyes were a little too wide.

  “They would have heard,” she said again. “No loud noises. That has to be good.”

  Loud noises. She couldn’t bring herself to say “gunshots.”

  Hannagan took charge, speaking to her in a reassuring voice. “That’s fine. Now, do you have any idea where your son might be? Is there someplace nearby where he likes to go?”

  “I’m not sure. He’s been wandering around these woods almost since he could walk. He knows all the paths.”

  “Can you give me a direction, anything at all?”

  She looked around as if there might be a trail of footsteps to follow. The only light came from inside the cabin and from the full moon high above. The ground was a carpet of pine needles and low grass. It was dry. It didn’t give up any secrets.

  She looked up and faced south, her back to the cabin’s door. “You go that way, you’ll hit the main road before long.” She made a slow turn to the north. “The woods are deeper in back of the cabin. That’s where most of the paths are. Go far enough north and you come to the lake.”

  “You think he might have gone to the lake?”

  “I don’t know.” Madelyn’s head moved side to side. “I can’t—I need to look for him.”

  Hannagan touched her shoulder. “Ma’am, you should stay here, in case he comes back. We’re going to search for him. I’ll make some calls, get more people out here. We’ll find him.”

  Madelyn answered him, but I didn’t wait to hear. I slipped back to the car and found the flashlight I’d used at Delacorte’s. Rooting around in the trunk, I found another.

  Elizabeth joined me and I passed her the second flashlight. I nodded toward Hannagan. “We’re not going to wait around until he organizes his search, are we?”

  “No,” she said.

  Madelyn didn’t wait either. She vanished into the woods, shouting Nick’s name. The sergeant went to look after her. Hannagan stayed behind to make his phone calls.

  Elizabeth and I walked around to the back of the cabin and picked our way north through the trees. Soon we stumbled onto a path that bent northeast—a narrow track of hard-packed earth.

  We followed it down into a gully, and when it rose again it sent off a spur to the left—roughly northwest. We followed the spur through a small clearing rich with wild fern. Climbed over the rotting trunk of a fallen birch. Soon after, the path divided once more.

  We halted there. Madelyn’s calls to Nick had faded into the distance.

  “There’s too much ground to cover,” Elizabeth said.

  “I know.”

  She aimed her flashlight down the right-hand path. “I don’t like the idea of splitting up.”

  “I don’t like it either.”

  The trees stood quiet around us, waiting.

  She kissed me once, and fast. “Don’t get shot again.”

  “What are the odds?” I said.

  I took the left-hand way, which ran west for a while before angling north. It crossed an unpaved road and ran past a dark cabin, bigger than Charlie Dawtrey’s. I aimed my flashlight at the windows and doors and found nothing broken.

  After the cabin, the path widened out and the woods began to thin. The land sloped down, the exposed roots of trees forming a series of natural steps. When I got onto level ground again I pulled my phone from my pocket and dialed Nick’s number, listened to his careless fifteen-year-old’s voice telling me to leave a message and maybe he’d call.

  Farther on, the air got cooler. Somewhere a wood fire burned. The path bent a little to the east and the packed earth gave way to sand. Lake Superior came into view, green-black beneath a blue-black sky. Moonlight glinted on the foam near the shore.

  I found him huddled on the sand, his arms wrapped around his knees, his head bowed. Strands of his black hair obscured his face.

  I knelt in front of him. “Nick, are you all right?”

  He lifted his head and wiped his face with the heels of his hands. “What do you want?”

  “I’ve been looking for you.”

  “Why don’t you leave me alone.”

  “Your mother’s worried. We thought we’d find you at the cabin.”

  He stared out at the darkness of the lake. “I couldn’t do it at the cabin.”

  I felt a twist in the pit of my stomach. “Do what?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Nick, where’s the senator?”

  He waved his right hand over his shoulder. “Look for him down the beach. That’s where I left him.”

  I saw a black sheen on his fingers. The beam of the flashlight turned the black to red.

  “Are you hurt?” I said.

  He shook his head and wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  “You’re bleeding.”

  He held his hand up to study it. “Not mine, sport.”

  I tried to make sense of the blood. There’d been no shot. I would have heard it.

  “Where’s the gun, Nick?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What happened?”

  He clutched his knees again and bent his head over them. He didn’t answer me.

  “I want to help you,” I said gently, “but I need to know what happened.”

  “I don’t want your help.”

  “What am I going to find down the beach, Nick?”

  “See for yourself. Nobody’s stopping you.”

  I reached to brush his hair out of his f
ace. “Tell me what happened to the gun.”

  He slapped my hand away. “Get away from me.”

  “Tell me.”

  I saw him shudder, and then the words struggled out of him. “What do you want me to say? I made him kneel in the sand and I put that gun against his head. And he admitted it—he told me he had Terry killed.”

  Nick buried his face in his arms and I reached again to touch his hair. This time he let me. He rocked himself forward and back, and his voice was raw as a wound. “He admitted it, and I still couldn’t do it. I couldn’t pull the trigger. Why couldn’t I do it?”

  I sat beside him on the ground, got an arm around his shoulders. I watched the waves come in to the shore as the pace of his rocking gradually slowed to nothing. I helped him up when he was ready and took him down to the water, where he rinsed his hands and washed his face.

  “I want you to wait here for me,” I said. “We’ll go back to the cabin together.”

  He answered with a distracted nod.

  “I won’t be long,” I said, and leaving him the flashlight I set off down the beach.

  The shore curved to the south and before long I came to a grassy hill that ran down from the woods almost to the water’s edge. Once I navigated around that, the moonlight showed me a seated form on the sand. The senator’s legs stretched out before him and as I drew closer I could see that his feet were bare, the cuffs of his pants turned up. His shoes and socks were nearby. He leaned back on his arms, taking in the sky full of stars.

  He didn’t see me until I was almost on top of him, and then he only sat up slowly and folded his legs. His soft laugh was barely audible. “You get around, don’t you?”

  I dropped down onto the sand, facing him. “I could say the same about you.”

  “What do you think of Brimley?”

  “It’s a nice little town, what I’ve seen of it.”

  He nodded, gazing past my shoulder at the lake. “I always liked it. I spent some time here when I was younger. Camping. Hiking. Before they opened the casino. If you wanted excitement you drove to Sault Sainte Marie. You crossed the bridge to Canada.” He shook sand from his pant leg. “Back then you could cross without a passport. That was a more innocent time. Do you have one?”