Die a Stranger: An Alex McKnight Novel

by Steve Hamilton

  “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 w
asn’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.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Their official name is the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe, and their reservation is just north of Mount Pleasant. It’s by far the largest reservation in Michigan, more than two hundred square miles. It’s technically called the Isabella Indian Reservation, maybe because it’s in Isabella County. I don’t even know. What I do know is that the Saginaws live there and most people up north just call it the Saginaw rez, and when they say it you can often hear a little bit of animosity. Or maybe animosity mixed with a little bit of envy, especially if the speaker’s a member of either Bay Mills or the Sault Tribe. The reason is simple. Even though the Indian casinos started in the UP, it’s the Saginaws who seem to be making the most of the idea.

  They’ve got two casinos now. The Soaring Eagles, right in Mount Pleasant, and the Saganing Eagles Landing over by I-75, on a separate parcel of land overlooking the Saginaw Bay. Between the two properties the tribe makes enough money to pay each member something like seventy thousand dollars every year. It starts to get ugly when they start having to decide who’s an official member and who’s going to be left out in the cold, and it gets just as ugly when other members up north start to wonder why they’re not getting the same kind of deal from their tribes.

  But whatever. It wasn’t my concern and I’d hear people talking about it at Vinnie’s mother’s house if I happened to be there. They were all Ojibwa at heart, whether Bay Mills or Sault or Saginaw or anywhere else. Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Canada, it didn’t matter. When you got right down to it, they were all one people, and that was my original idea, thinking that if Vinnie and Buck were going to go hide somewhere, it would be on another reservation. Now, at last, we had one small clue to help point us in that direction.

  It was only an hour from Cadillac to the Saginaw rez, through more open flatland until we hit the Au Sable State Forest and then finally the highway running south from Clare. A few more miles through the heart of the rez and we hit Mount Pleasant. We were in the middle of the mitten now. If you held up your right hand as a map of the Lower Peninsula and pointed to the center, that’s exactly where’d we be. Pickard Street runs east and west through the center of town, and you can find just about any chain restaurant you want. We kept going a few blocks until we saw the Five Guys. We parked and went inside.

  “We should eat something,” Lou said, looking at his watch. It was past lunchtime by now. “It’ll make us think better.”

  I didn’t argue with him. We ordered a couple of hamburgers, and as we were waiting I looked around the place, as if Vinnie and Buck would be sitting right there at one of the tables. They called our number a few minutes later, and that’s how we saw the way they ran their operation there. They’d tape your receipt with your magic number on it, right there on the outside of the brown paper bag.

  I didn’t feel like burning an hour sitting down for lunch. I would rather have taken the food in the car while we drove around the rez. But Lou insisted.

  “Let’s sit here and let it sink in for a while,” he said. “Vinnie and Buck may have sat right here at this table. Just yesterday.”

  “Something tells me they didn’t do that,” I said. “If that bag was in his truck…”

  “They ate on the run, okay. But just the same, let’s watch out the window for a while, get the rhythm of this place. I bet you something will come to us.”

  So that’s what we did. I don’t know if we ever got into any kind of rhythm, or what the hell that even means, but we did get to sit there for a few minutes and plan out our next move.

  And yes, we were both starving. Taking a few minutes to eat a couple of big hamburgers was the right idea.

  “So imagine you’re Vinnie,” Lou said, wiping his mouth after a big bite. “You’ve got your crazy cousin with you, and you’re trying to take care of him. He’s bleeding—”

  “So you take him to the hospital.”

  “But you’re worried about him getting in trouble.”

  “You take him to the hospital anyway.”

  He waved that away. “If you go to the ER with a gunshot wound, they have to call the police, am I right? Isn’t that the rule?”

  “Gun, knife, anything deadly,” I said. “Actually
, any kind of violence at all. If you’ve been assaulted in any way, bad enough to go to the hospital for treatment, then they’re supposed to call it in.”

  “Seriously? Anything?”

  “That’s the Michigan law. It might be different in other states.”

  “Damn,” he said. “But okay. That makes my point even stronger. As soon as Buck walks in with a gunshot wound, the police are on their way.”

  “So where else would they go? And why all the way down here?”

  “Because they know somebody. Buck, Vinnie, one of them. They come down here because they’ve got a friend on the rez who can help them without calling the cops.”

  “It’s the biggest reservation in the state,” I said. “Where would we even start?”

  “We already have. We’re retracing their steps. Backwards, maybe, but we know they drove to that farmhouse and left Vinnie’s truck there. Before that, they were here.”

  He gestured to the counter.

  “There’s no drive-through here,” he said. “Did you notice that? That means they were standing right there at that counter. Or maybe just Vinnie, I don’t know. But he was right there like twenty-four hours ago.”

  “So what are we going to do, ask the cashier if she remembers seeing an Indian man with long black hair? She probably sees a hundred of them every day.”

  “I don’t see a lot of long hair here,” Lou said, looking around the place. “But no matter. It wouldn’t do us any good even if she was here yesterday and even if she did remember him. I don’t imagine they talked about much more than what he wanted on his hamburgers.”

  “Okay, so we’ve gotta take one more step backward. To wherever they were before they came here.”

  “That’s the idea,” he said, wadding up his wrapper and throwing it into the bag. “Let’s go find it.”

  A simple enough plan, even if I had no idea where we’d begin.

  *

  There was a walk-in clinic just down the street from the Five Guys. It seemed way too much to ask for this to be the place where Vinnie and Buck had come for help, but we walked inside and right there on the wall was a board with all of the doctors’ names. They were Indian names, all right. But we were just off the rez now and these were not the kind of Indians we were looking for.