Die a Stranger: An Alex McKnight Novel

by Steve Hamilton

  Lou was pacing back and forth in front of the lab sink now. He pounded on the counter a few times before finally speaking again.

  “If you were convinced they were in such big trouble,” he said, “why did you let them go?”

  “Take it easy,” I said to him. “What did you expect him to do, tackle both of them?”

  Lou put his hands up. “I’m just saying.”

  “I should have tried harder to stop them,” the doctor said in an even voice. “I realize this now.”

  “No, I’m sorry,” Lou said, rubbing his forehead. “It’s been a hard day.”

  “Please go on,” I said. “Is there anything else you remember from yesterday? If you can add one more little piece to the puzzle, it might be helpful.”

  We waited around for a few more minutes while he thought about it, but he came up empty. I gave him my phone number and asked him to call me if he remembered anything else. He told us to make sure we took care of Buck and Vinnie, assuming we ever found them. Then we thanked him and left.

  “We need to find out more about the Kaisers,” I said as we got into the car. “Find out where they might have taken Vinnie and Buck, once they were all together.”

  “Someplace safe, right? I mean, if they were nervous enough to be in such a big hurry yesterday…”

  “So where is that? What’s the safest place they’d go?”

  “No way to know. We’ve never even met these people.”

  “I can only think of three people who have met them,” he said. “Buck, Vinnie, and—”

  “And the person who sent us down to that house in the first place,” I said. “He’s our only lead right now.”

  He nodded and looked out the window. “Sounds like it’s time for one more visit.”

  *

  That’s how we ended up back on that same street in Sault Ste. Marie. It was almost dark by the time we got there. It was late and we were both hungry, and we had spent six good hours in the car running all over the state. The last thing we wanted to do was talk to Andy Dukes again. I don’t imagine he felt much like talking to us, either. With or without his next-door neighbor, Eddie. But Dukes was the one man who might have more information about Harry and Josephine Kaiser. If we were finally due for that one lucky break, he would think about it for two seconds and then say, “Oh yeah, they must all be at their summer place. Here, let me write down that address for you.”

  But that lucky break was apparently still lost in the mail.

  We made our way back to Hursley Street, taking that same turn just before the power canal. We pulled up in front of his house. It looked dark and empty, but that wasn’t a surprise. We knew the drill. He was officially long gone, already in Texas by now. Just ask his neighbor.

  The lights were on next door, and once again we saw the blue flickering glow from the television. We rang the bell and waited. I heard faint voices but figured they could be coming from the television. We rang the bell again.

  “It’s almost like they’re not happy to see us again,” Lou said. “Go figure.”

  “At least he won’t be armed this time.” I thought of the revolver we had taken from him, currently locked up, unloaded, in the rental car’s glove compartment. Then I thought how foolish it would be to assume that was the only firearm Dukes owned.

  Lou opened up the outside patio door before I could tell him what a bad idea that was. He went to the interior door and started pounding on it. I was already picturing the wooden door breaking apart, a thousand scraps of wood flying in the air as the gun blast turned everything inside out.

  He stood there pounding on the door until finally he peeked inside through the front window.

  He froze.

  “What is it?” I said.

  He didn’t answer.

  I went up the steps and moved him out of the way. I looked through the window and saw exactly what he saw.

  I saw the two bodies on the floor. I saw the blood. I saw the damage that somebody had inflicted on both of these men.

  Everything we had done that day, everywhere we had gone, it had all led up to this single moment.

  “I knew it,” Lou said. “I knew it. I knew it.”

  “Knew what?” I said, barely able to speak.

  “This is what these people do,” he said. “You screw around with these people, and this is what they do to you.”

  I came down off the steps. I tried to breathe. The sun was finally going down.

  “We have to find them,” he said. “We have to find Vinnie and Buck. Don’t you see, Alex? We have to find them. Or they’ll be next.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  He pulled me to the street. I tried to push him away, not for any coherent reason, just a reflexive reaction to what I’d seen through the window.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said through clenched teeth. “Right now.”

  “We have to stay here,” I said. “We have to call somebody.”

  “Like hell we do.”

  I took him by the arm and was halfway into a wristlock, pure muscle memory from all of those years on the force. A suspect resists and you twist that arm right around and turn that wrist. All of a sudden he’s a lot more cooperative.

  “I’m calling the police,” I said. “Then we’re going to wait until they get here.”

  “Don’t be an idiot. If we call the police, they’ll lock us both up.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “Because that’s what they do.”

  I knew that was the reality for him, at least. That was his own personal experience.

  “No, Lou. Come on.”

  “We came here earlier today,” he said, “and now we’re back and those two guys are lying in there in a lake of blood. What do you think they’re gonna do?”

  “They’re gonna talk to us, and we’re gonna tell them everything we know.”

  “So you want them to take us down to the station, is that what you’re saying? Best case, they put us in a room for the next twenty-four hours. Ask us the same questions over and over, which won’t do anybody any good. Meanwhile, whoever it was who did this is getting closer and closer to Vinnie.”

  “He wasn’t there, you realize that.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Vinnie’s not involved in this. He’s never had anything to do with Dukes or these people from downstate, and he wasn’t even at the airport that night. He just picked up Buck and—”

  “And helped Buck get away,” Lou said. “He’s been with Buck ever since. Go ask Dukes’ neighbor in there, what’s his name? Eddie? Go ask Eddie how that one works. You think Eddie was a big player in this whole thing?”

  I took a quick look up and down the street, expecting somebody to be watching us. Two men standing in the yard, having an argument. But the street was empty.

  “You make a fair point,” I said, “but we still can’t just leave. We can’t let somebody else find these guys like this.”

  “Then we call the cops when we’re on the road. Give them an anonymous tip, tell them to come check out this house. It’ll do just as much good, without jamming us up. We have to keep moving, Alex, don’t you understand?”

  “But we have no idea where we’re going. You know that.”

  “We have to think. We have to figure it out.”

  I let go of him. I wasn’t ready to leave with him, but what he was saying, it was starting to sink in.

  “Whoever did this,” Lou said, “if they get to Vinnie and Buck first…”

  In which case it would be hopeless, I thought. In which case they’re as good as dead. But I didn’t dare say it.

  Then it hit me. If Buck was really the next target …

  “You win,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  *

  I was back behind the wheel, driving hard from Sault Ste. Marie to Bay Mills. I had to remind myself that I wasn’t driving my truck now. If I roared by a Michigan State Trooper going eighty, he wouldn’t know it was me and he�
��d pull me over in a second. In the state I was in, I had no desire to explain why I was driving so fast.

  I kept seeing it in my head, those two men on the floor. The blood, the unnatural positioning of the bodies. The way the television cast the whole scene in an otherworldly glow. And something else. One more detail.

  “Those two men,” I said, not using the names. They didn’t have names anymore. They were just dead meat on the floor. “They weren’t shot.”

  He thought about it. He brought up the same image in his mind and, assuming he had the same power of recall, went over the two bodies from head to toe.

  “No, they weren’t,” he said. “There was a lot of cutting.”

  “But not the throat. Did you notice that?”

  “They bled to death,” he said, nodding. “It probably took a while.”

  “So whoever did this, there was probably more than one of them. With a gun you can kill them both single-handed. But not this way.”

  “Yes,” he said, nodding again. “There’s at least two of them.”

  I kept the car on the road. Going straight. Between the lines.

  “So pull over at this gas station,” he said. “Let me call it in. If I do it, they won’t have your voice on the tape.”

  “We’ll do that in a minute. We’ve got something else to do first.”

  “Wait, aren’t you the one who insisted we call somebody? Where are we going?”

  “To Buck’s house.”

  “We both know Buck’s not there.”

  “You’re right. We know that. But we have no idea if they know that.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “Whoever these people are,” I said. “If you happened to be sitting in Buck’s house and they rang the bell, do you think you’d be safe opening the door?”

  He looked at me while he thought about that one.

  “Are you saying there might be somebody at Buck’s house today? Even though he’s gone?”

  “I’m saying there’s almost definitely somebody there. It’s the local party house, whether he’s around or not.”

  He didn’t say anything to that. He didn’t have to. I kept driving as the sky got darker and the moon rose above the trees. When I got to the intersection in Brimley, we could see all of the cars in the Cozy’s parking lot. We barreled down that road, around the curve of Waishkey Bay, until we finally got to Buck’s house. There were no cars in Buck’s driveway besides his old beat-up clunker, but that meant nothing. Not in a neighborhood where most of your extended family and every close friend is within walking distance.

  We got out and went to the door. I knocked but nobody answered. I tried the door. It was unlocked. I pushed it open. Then I turned on the first light switch I could find. The living room was empty. There were beer cans by the dozen, lined up in rows on every flat surface.

  “Good thing you’re not a cop anymore,” Lou said. “This would not be kosher, just walking in.”

  “It’s not kosher for anybody. But I figure we can make an exception.”

  I went down the hallway to the bedroom. I turned on a light and saw an unmade bed and several loads of laundry all over the floor. There was a faint odor of marijuana in the air.

  When I am done with this and Vinnie is home safe, I said to myself, I will make sure I never have to smell this stuff again. I don’t care if it really is nonaddictive and the plant itself is the answer to every problem in the world, I swear to God I hate the sickly sweet smell of it so much right now.

  I backed out of the bedroom and stuck my head into the next room. A guest room, I suppose you would call it, on account of the folded-out futon, but really it was just another place to throw piles of clothes and a huge old tube television that probably weighed a ton and a half. The most important thing was that there were no dead bodies anywhere.

  I poked my head into the bathroom and even pulled open the shower curtain. The tub needed cleaning, but at least it wasn’t full of blood.

  I met back up with Lou in the kitchen.

  “Nobody here,” he said. “I guess that’s good news for once.”

  I was about to agree with him. Then we both heard it behind us and we froze. It was the unmistakable sound of a pump-action shotgun being racked, a sound that would turn even the hardest man’s knees to jelly.

  “Don’t move,” a voice said. “Either one of you. Now turn around slowly.”

  I wasn’t about to point out that we’d have to move to turn around. I figured just keeping my mouth shut and following his last instruction was probably the way to go. As we both turned at the same time, I saw the man standing there. I was expecting a police officer. Hell, maybe even Chief Benally himself. In which case we could immediately begin explaining ourselves. But no, the man was not wearing a uniform. He was wearing a light windbreaker and a baseball cap. I had never seen him before.

  “I suppose you’re Buck,” he said, pointing the gun barrel at Lou.

  “No,” Lou said. “You’ve got the wrong guy.”

  The man looked a little confused. Then the gun barrel came over to me.

  “He’s not Buck, either,” Lou said. “Buck’s not here.”

  “How do I know you’re not just lying to me?”

  Canadian, I thought. That accent. In a land of Yoopers, many of whom sound almost but not quite Canadian, this guy was the real thing.

  “This man’s name is Alex,” Lou said. “Does he look like an Indian to you? And hell, I’m probably twice Buck’s age.”

  “How would I know how old he is?” the man said. “I just know he lives in this house. That’s all. So I figure that has to make you him.”

  “Well then, you don’t know a thing about Indians,” Lou said. “We walk into other people’s houses all the time.”

  The man closed his eyes for a moment. He let out a long breath.

  “Where is he, then?” he said. “Where is Buck Carrick?”

  “We’re going to tell you the truth,” I said. “And then I hope you’ll put the gun down. Buck Carrick has been missing for four days. Lou and I have been trying to find him. That’s why we’re here right now.”

  Another long breath from the man. A few seconds ticked by. It seemed to me like he had no idea what to do next. Not a good idea when you’re holding a shotgun. It looked like a Benelli to me. One of the sleek black models. But I was pretty sure even a cheap gun would have blown us both apart just fine.

  “I need to know where he is,” the man said. “That’s the only reason I’m here. Tell me where he is and I’ll leave.”

  “I swear we don’t know,” I said. “Please put the gun down.”

  He hesitated for a few more seconds. Then he lowered the gun barrel. Lou took a step toward him, but I grabbed his arm.

  “It’s not even loaded,” the man said. “I apologize if I scared you.”

  Lou still seemed to want to get a lot closer to the man, whether to take the gun away or to smack him right in the face, I didn’t know.

  “Just put it down, please,” I said. “You’ll make us both feel a lot better.”

  He bent down and laid the gun down on the kitchen floor. He did it slowly and carefully. Then he just stood there rubbing his forehead, his eyes closed.

  I went over and picked up the shotgun. It was indeed a high-end Benelli and it was unloaded.

  “It’s my brother’s gun,” he said. “I’ve never shot it before. I’ve never shot any gun. I hate guns.”

  “Who’s your brother?”

  “His name is Pete. I mean, his name was Pete. He’s dead now.”

  “What happened to him?”

  The man opened his eyes and looked at me.

  “He was killed four days ago. At the Newberry airport. I assume you men know about what happened there?”

  I let that fact sink in. I was about to ask the obvious follow-up question, but he beat me to it.

  “He was the pilot,” the man said. “He’s the guy who flew the plane and never came back.”

  *<
br />
  We sat down with the man, right there in the kitchen. He apologized a few more times. His first name was Perry. We never even got his last name. We found a bottle of cheap whiskey in the kitchen cupboard and poured him a drink. He sat there and nursed it for a while. Then he finally told us his story.

  “My brother Pete and I,” he said, “we’ve been making these flights over to the States, from Port Elgin. We were flying at night.”

  “We know that part of it,” I said. “You find an empty airstrip in Michigan, turn on the ground lights from your cockpit.”

  “The PCL, yeah. Pilot-controlled lighting.”

  “That’s how you deliver a whole planeload of marijuana across the border, without anybody catching you.”

  He just looked at me.

  “We’re not the police,” I said. “We don’t care at this point. Please, continue what you were saying.”

  “Yes, it’s pot,” he said. “Not hard drugs. Not even an addictive drug at all, if you want to get technical. Way less dangerous than tobacco or alcohol.”

  He raised his glass to emphasize that last point. I didn’t feel like hearing the whole extended argument again, so I just waved him on.

  “We were doing it for the money, I’ll give you that much. These growers in Canada, they can make a lot of money moving it over to the States, and we get a good cut of that. Even though it’s a pretty easy flight. Just fly low, right over the water. Light up and land. They’re waiting right there, unload, boom, you’re done. Back in the air in ten minutes. Fly back home. It was actually kind of an adrenaline rush. I really enjoyed it, I admit. Until the one night I landed and the wrong people were there waiting for me.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “That was you? Earlier this summer?”

  “That was me, yes. I landed and there were these two guys there, with guns. I told you, I hate guns. But they pointed them at me and they told me I would be working for a new organization now. Same schedule, same pay. Everything nice and friendly, they said. Which would have sounded a little better if they didn’t have guns pointed in my face. Then they made me help unload the cargo. When I was going to their truck, I could see my regular contacts handcuffed to the fence. They were alive, at least. I mean, nobody got killed that time, right? That should have been enough of a warning.”