Die a Stranger: An Alex McKnight Novel

by Steve Hamilton

  “Who were these guys who hijacked the cargo?”

  “They weren’t exactly wearing name tags. But they said they were working for a man named Corvo.”

  “Corvo,” I said, looking over at Lou. He shook his head. The name was just as new to him.

  “I think they were from Chicago,” Perry said, “if I know my American accents. But whatever. I didn’t care. As far as I was concerned, that was my last flight. I tried to convince Pete of that, too. But, well, he wasn’t there with me when the men with guns showed up, first of all. And second of all, he always was a little more crazy than me.”

  “Was he doing the flights all along?”

  “We both were, yeah. Mostly me, because I had a lot more hours in the air and visual flying by night can be a little tricky. But once he got his license, I started bringing him along once in a while. I figured he could start spelling me if I didn’t want to make a run, and hell, he could start making some money, too. He’d already done like three or four solo flights by the time this happened. I told him, hey, that’s it for us, we’re done. No sense getting killed over it. But then when Harry and Jo kept calling.…”

  “Those are the Kaisers you’re talking about,” I said. “Harry and Josephine Kaiser.”

  “To tell you the truth, I never did hear their last name. They weren’t calling us directly, they were calling the growers and then they’d put the product together and they’d say like, ‘Harry and Jo will have a couple men waiting for you. Go to this airport at such-and-such a time.’ That kind of thing. I never met Harry and Jo, because they’d always have their guys there doing the unloading.”

  “Would they give you the money, too?”

  “No, that was all done separately, between Harry and Jo and the growers. Then the growers would pay us. But anyway, when this thing happened with Corvo and his men, like I said, I was all done. But then Harry and Jo got this idea that they could move the drops way the hell up north, in the Upper Peninsula. I said no way, because we’d have to fly over Lake Superior instead of Lake Huron, which means taking off from a different airport, like maybe Batchawana. You need something small but not too small. But even if you got that worked out, it would only be a matter of time until the wrong people found out about it again. And this time they wouldn’t be so ‘friendly.’”

  “So he did the flight to Newberry,” I said. “You tried to stop him.”

  “I didn’t get the chance. I didn’t even know about it until he was gone. The growers came right to him, told him they had this new route worked out. Harry and Jo were gonna pay more, and it was a longer flight so Pete would be paid more, and everybody would be happy. It’s four days later and I still don’t even know which airport he took off from. None of the growers will talk to me. They’ve all disappeared. Their phones are disconnected. Finally, I remembered I had this one number for Harry and Jo, an emergency number in case their men ever didn’t show up. I called and I talked to them. To Jo, actually. She sounds like a real charmer. She was all like, oh my God, we’re so sorry, we had no idea. We lost two of our own men here, they were like family to us. And I was like, I just need to know what happened. Why did they have to kill Pete? He was just the pilot. What on earth were they thinking of that they had to kill the guy flying the plane?”

  He stopped talking for a while. He sat there in the kitchen holding a half-empty glass of whiskey with both hands. He stared down at the floor.

  “Please keep going,” I said. “Did they mention Vinnie and Buck?”

  “They mentioned Buck,” he said, looking up at me. “Buck and his getaway driver. I assume that’s Vinnie you’re talking about.”

  “His getaway driver?” Lou said. He’d been leaning back in his chair, listening intently to Perry’s story. Now he was halfway to his feet.

  “Jo said it was all Buck’s idea,” Perry said. “This whole new plan. Buck was working with this other dealer up here, some guy named Dukes.”

  “Andy Dukes,” I said.

  “Yeah, she said it was Buck and this guy Dukes who were really running the show now. Harry and Jo didn’t even want to be in the business anymore, not after what happened. That’s what she said. But then these guys went behind their backs and made the new arrangement to keep things going.”

  Lou sat back down, but he was leaning forward in his chair now. I could see him flexing his forearm muscles as he made two fists.

  “I know it was a lie,” Perry said. “Okay? I’m not that stupid. I know she was trying to cover her ass. I know this was all Harry and Jo and that these other guys were just the hired help. Like always.”

  “So why are you here?” I said. “If you know they weren’t behind this…”

  “They told me Buck was there,” Perry said. “At the airport. They told me he was the only guy who walked away. Whether this other guy, this Vinnie, whoever he is, if he was the man who drove him away, I don’t care. Whether any of this other stuff they’re saying is true, I don’t care. I just want to know if that one part of the story is true. If this one man named Buck Carrick was there that night, and if he really lived to talk about it. That’s why I’m here. I just wanted to look him in the face and ask him what happened. Why my brother got killed. Or if he was, I don’t know, if he was even alive when Buck just walked away from it. If he left him there dying on the ground.”

  He stopped again. I watched him stare at the floor for another half a minute.

  “Even if this guy Buck is a walking dead man,” he finally went on, “I had to hear it from him, face-to-face.”

  “Why did you say that?” I asked. “Why is he a walking dead man?”

  “That’s what Jo said. Him and Vinnie both.”

  I looked at Lou, waiting for him to react. But he just sat there like someone had slapped him across the face.

  “She said Corvo would carve them all up like Thanksgiving turkeys,” Perry said. “Her exact words. She told me I should stay out of the way, in fact, or I might get caught in the middle of it. She said I should just lay low for a while, wait for Corvo to get it out of his system. That’s what Harry and Jo were going to do.”

  “Do you know where they are?” I said. “Do you know where Harry and Jo are right now?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Please think,” I said. “This is very important.”

  “I promise you. I don’t. I just had the one phone number. Here, I’ll find it.”

  He took out his cell phone and did a quick scroll through the memory. He read me off a number and I recognized the 231 area code. It was almost certainly the number at their farmhouse in Cadillac. Either that or a cell phone. He tried calling the number, right then and there, but there was no answer. There wasn’t even voice mail. Another dead end. Lou kept sitting there, watching both of us but not really seeing anything. I could tell his mind was somewhere far away.

  In the end, when all the words had been said and his story was done, we took him and his unloaded shotgun back outside to his car. He had been parked down the street, where he could watch Buck’s house. I told him that if we found Buck, I would have him call him. I told him Buck would tell Perry everything he knew about that night. About his brother Pete and the way he’d died. I figured that was the least I could promise him.

  “I was thinking maybe I should go talk to this guy Dukes,” he said, just before he got into his car. “Maybe he can tell me something.”

  “Don’t bother,” I said, and then I put up my hand before he could even pursue it. “Please, just go back home. You look exhausted.”

  “So do you,” he said. “Both of you.”

  He was right, of course. But we were far from done. We watched him drive away.

  “Come on,” I said to Lou. “We still have to call the police.”

  *

  I drove back down off the rez to the gas station next to the Cozy. I figured that was the closest pay phone. Lou sat in silence while I drove, then he got out and went to the phone. He had a quick one-sided conversation with the
911 operator. Then he got back into the car.

  “What did you tell them?”

  “I gave the woman the house number on Hursley Street,” he said, “told her to send a car over.”

  “That’s all?”

  “I told her to send someone with a strong stomach.”

  We drove back to Paradise, once again passing the two houses on the rez that held his two daughters, along with his grandchildren, all sound asleep at this hour. Lou looked out the window as we drove by, and I couldn’t even imagine what he was thinking.

  The moon was waning but still bright. The lake was there just beyond the trees and when the trees broke we could see far out onto the water’s cold surface. I was tired, but I was even more hungry, so when we came to Paradise I pulled into the Glasgow Inn. Lou still hadn’t said a word.

  Jackie took one look at us and knew better than to ask how the day had gone. We ate some of Jackie’s famous beef stew and we each had a cold Molson. When we were done we got back into the car and drove up my road. My road and Vinnie’s road. We stopped in front of Vinnie’s cabin and gave it a quick once-over. Nobody had been there.

  We were standing outside under the stars and I don’t think either of us knew what to do next. We both needed to sleep, but to give in to that would have been to admit failure. We had looked for Vinnie and Buck all day long and had ended up right here where we had started.

  The only difference was, now we had much more to worry about. Including a man named Corvo, who apparently liked to carve up each of his victims like a Christmas goose.

  “You had a good idea last night,” Lou finally said.

  “Did I? I don’t even remember.”

  “It was your idea to go find Dukes. You thought he was probably still close to his home and you were right.”

  “Not good thinking on his part,” I said. “But yeah, that’s how we started the day, huh? Seems like a long time ago.”

  “I’m trusting that you’ll have another good idea tonight. So go and get some sleep. We both need our strength for tomorrow.”

  “Okay. You’re right.”

  “We’ll find them tomorrow,” he said. “I know we will.”

  I drove him to my second cabin and dropped him off there. Then I went back to my own cabin. Get some sleep, the man says. Like it’s that easy.

  As I lay down, the thought came to me. A whole train of thought, running through my mind as unavoidably as a real train roaring down a set of real tracks. This man Corvo came to Sault Ste. Marie to butcher Dukes and he happened to find his neighbor in the house, too. But he didn’t come out here to Buck’s house. And he didn’t come to Vinnie’s house.

  He knows they wouldn’t be here. Either one of them. If he knows where they’re not, he probably knows where they are. Which can mean only one thing. The one unavoidable thing I must stop myself from thinking, no matter how hard that may be.

  Vinnie and Buck, wherever they are …

  They’re probably already dead.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I slept more than I’d thought I would. But it was a thin troubled sleep born of sheer exhaustion, and I awoke the next morning feeling like it had done me no good at all. I got up and looked at the sunlight streaming through the window. It was another goddamned beautiful useless day in Paradise.

  When I was cleaned up and ready to go, I drove down to the second cabin. Lou was gone, just like the morning before. Only this time he didn’t come walking up the road. So I got back into the car and drove down past the other cabins, past the cabin with the four women from downstate, up here on their quest to help protect the nesting plovers. Right about then I would have paid big money to have that as my biggest problem, to be going out on the beach and looking for nests instead of whatever the hell the day had in store for me.

  I drove past the next cabin, with the family here to visit Tahquamenon Falls and the Shipwreck Museum. Past the next three cabins, all empty that week. I finally found Lou sitting on a rock, just past the last cabin, on the edge of the woods. There was a slight wind that morning, and it was well past black-fly season. Otherwise he would have been sitting there on the rock being slowly eaten alive.

  His eyes were closed. He opened them when he heard me coming closer.

  “Good morning,” he said. “You’ve come to tell me your great idea for the day.”

  “I wish I was. I’ve got nothing.”

  He just nodded at that. “It’s been so long since I lived here, I swear, it’s like I almost forgot I’m an Ojibwa. But being here, I don’t know, it makes me remember that I’ve got roots here, going back a thousand years. Like I’m just a little twig on this one big tree.”

  “Okay…”

  “So I guess I’ve just been sitting here trying to feel where my son is. Or if he’s still even on this earth and part of the same tree.”

  “Are you having any luck?”

  “I’m pretty sure he’s alive. That’s all I can say.”

  “That’s good to hear.”

  “You don’t totally believe me,” he said, getting up slowly, “but that’s all right.”

  “Maybe I do. I’ve lived around Vinnie and his people for a while now. I’ve even done a few sweats.”

  “In that sweat lodge at Buck’s place? Did you have any visions?”

  I wasn’t sure what to say to that. There had been a time, shortly after Natalie …

  “It’s a personal thing,” he said, before I could even start answering. “I’m glad you did the sweats. It makes you a better man.”

  He took a minute to shake out the kinks. I had no idea how long he’d been here, but the rock didn’t look too comfortable.

  “Come on,” he said. “Now that we know he’s alive, let’s go find him.”

  *

  We started out with breakfast at the Glasgow. We might have been telling ourselves that we were being smart and fueling up before starting a tough day, but the truth was that we had no idea what to do or where to go. We had hit a brick wall.

  When we were done eating, I gave Janet Long a call. It was something I should have done the night before, I realized, and besides, I probably needed at least one person to give me a hard time before I could call it a good day. But she didn’t pick up her cell phone, so I just left a message.

  “That’s my friend at the FBI,” I said to Lou as I hung up. “I was just hoping she might have some new information.”

  “Would she actually tell you?”

  “No, actually she probably wouldn’t. She’d probably just read me the riot act and tell me to stay the hell away from everything. But I honestly don’t know what else to do at this point.”

  “Maybe we should go back down to the Kaisers’ house,” Lou said, “see if we missed something.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Anything that might point us in the right direction, to wherever they went. Just some little thing we might have missed.”

  “You sound like Leon now.”

  “Who’s Leon?”

  “He’s a local private-eye wannabe,” Jackie said, wiping down the bar, “but he’s twice as smart as Alex.”

  “Not today, Jackie.”

  “No, wait, I’m twice as smart. Leon is three times as smart. I get that mixed up sometimes.”

  “I said not today,” I told him. “Leave us alone, please.”

  Jackie walked away, mumbling.

  “No, seriously,” Lou said. “The Leon guy. Do you think he can help us?”

  “He’s on vacation,” I said. “Camping with his family.”

  “Damn.”

  “But we can think like him,” I said. “Hold on. What would he say if he was here right now? He’d say we should go over everything we did, step by step, and figure out the one small thing we’re missing.”

  “What we did? Or what we think Vinnie and Buck did?”

  I looked at him.

  “I’m just wondering,” he said, “if we try to follow their footsteps instead of ours, it might
get us closer to what we’re looking for.”

  “Okay, so I’m Buck,” I said. “These people from downstate come up here. I know these people, a little bit. Or if I don’t, at least my dealer in the Soo does. He can vouch for them. Anyway, they want me to help them do this thing over at the airport. Maybe I know the whole story, maybe I don’t. But they come pick me up.”

  “Your truck is still at your house,” he said. “So yeah, they had to come pick you up.”

  “Well, plus I’m the driver.”

  “Or at least the navigator.”

  “Or the navigator. Either way, they need me in the vehicle if we’re going to take the back roads. So that’s the plan. We go to the airport, we’re expecting the plane to land. Then unexpected company arrives, and all of a sudden I’m in a bad situation I didn’t ask for. Things get out of hand fast, somebody takes out a gun, and now everybody’s shooting.”

  “You take one in the armpit.”

  “I do. I’m bleeding, probably in mild shock, even if the wound isn’t that bad. Just the whole situation has me freaked out of my head. I have to get out of there.”

  “Why not take their vehicle?”

  “Because it’s theirs. Because this is a multiple-murder crime scene and I don’t want to drive away with their vehicle, their keys, their license plate…”

  “Either that,” he said, “or you just ran away. Then you called later.”

  “That could be,” I said. “I’m bleeding and I’m walking down the side of the road. I don’t want to hitchhike and have somebody ask me what happened. Somebody who will read the paper and make the connection later.”

  “Okay, so your good friend and second cousin or whatever the hell he is comes and picks you up. I’m Vinnie now. That’s something I’d actually do, right? Phone call in the middle of the night? I’d come pick you up?”

  “That’s something you’d do, yes. You might give me hell about it, but you’d do it in a second.”