The first thing I noticed as I got closer was that neither one of the men was Bruckman. The second thing I noticed was that they both had hunting caps on. I didn’t recognize the man pushing the car, or the man driving, as much as I could see of him. But I didn’t take much notice of the other hockey players that night, so I couldn’t be sure.
I pulled up next to them and stopped. I rolled down the window.
The man kept pushing and swearing softly to himself. The driver kept working the wheel. They weren’t going anywhere. Neither of them even looked at me.
I just sat there, watching them. The road was nothing but snow and pine trees. No houses to be seen in either direction. A few lazy snowflakes started to fall. If this was the big snowstorm everybody was talking about, it had a lot of work to do.
Finally, the man outside the car gave me a furtive little look and then a little wave. His face was red from all the pushing. “S’all right,” he finally said to me. “We’re okay here. Thanks anyway.” A totally natural response when you’re stuck in the snow and a man in a truck pulls up.
I didn’t move. I kept watching them.
“We’ve got to get it rocking, for God’s sake,” the man said to the driver. “Forward and back, forward and back. Come on!” But the two men couldn’t settle into the same rhythm. The man gave me a wave again. “We’re fine,” he said. “Go on.” He still wouldn’t look me in the eye.
“Looks like you boys could use some help,” I said.
“No, no, really,” he said. “Thank you.”
“You’ll never get unstuck that way,” I said. “You’ll be here until spring.”
“We’ve got it,” the man said. “I feel it coming now. Look out, please! You’re in the way there!”
“Nah, you’re stuck all right,” I said. “I’m gonna have to pull you out.” I opened the door and stepped out of the truck.
“No, really!” the man said. “Please! You don’t have to do that!” The driver was shaking his head now and pounding on the steering wheel.
I went around to the bed of the truck and pulled out a long length of heavy chain. I held most of the chain in my left hand, and kept just enough free in my right hand to knock somebody’s teeth out if I had to. My gun was in my right coat pocket. “We’ll have you out in a second,” I said. “You boys are lucky I came along.”
“Yes,” the man said. “Yes, we certainly are.”
“Here, give me a hand with this,” I said. “I’m gonna see if I can tie this on to your back end here.”
The man hesitated for a moment. I saw him give the driver a quick look. “Sure,” he finally said. He climbed out of the snow and came around to the back of the car where I could get a good look at him. I gave the chain a little swing with my right hand. If he tried anything, I was ready.
When he was close enough, I looked him in the eye. He might have looked a little soft from a distance, but those eyes gave him away. Even with that ridiculous bright red hunting cap with the flaps hanging down on either side of his head, I could see he was a rock.
“See if you can hook this up under there,” I said. “I can’t bend down real well today. I’m still sore from playing hockey.”
I gave him the chain and stepped back a little bit. I put my right hand in my coat pocket. The man looked at the chain like he had never seen one before, and then he got down onto the snow and looked up at the back end of the car. “Down here?” he said.
No, genius, I want you to stick the chain up your ass. “Yeah, right there,” I said. “See if you can hook it onto the frame there. You ever play hockey?”
“No, never did,” he said from under the car. While he rattled around with the chain, I looked at the Michigan license plate and recited the number in my head a few times. It’s a Ford Taurus, I told myself. Dark green. I looked up at the driver. He was as motionless as a wax dummy now, facing forward. I still hadn’t gotten a good look at his face. “Come on out of the car,” I called to him. “You don’t want to be in there when I start pulling.” Actually, he would want to stay in there and steer while I was pulling the car, but I figured it was worth a shot. The driver opened the door and got out.
“Hi, I’m Alex,” I said. I kept my hands in my pockets, my right hand wrapped tightly around my gun. I didn’t want to shake hands with the man, so I shivered a little bit for him and said, “God, it sure is cold out here.”
“Sure is,” he said. Even with the glasses and the little mustache, he looked as tough as his partner. His hunting cap was blue and his flaps were snapped up. Now that I had seen both of them, I still didn’t recognize either one of them. I didn’t think they were hockey players, or anybody who would hang around a guy like Bruckman, for that matter. But if they weren’t with him, what the hell were they doing following me around?
I looked up and down the road. I could pull the gun on them right now, I thought. Tell the man on the ground to stay put, point the gun right at the other man’s head, and then politely ask them to start talking.
I decided against it. I had the plate number. I could describe both men. I could pick them out again if I had to. And I had the advantage of knowing that they were following me now. And the further advantage of them not knowing that I knew.
“Haven’t seen you boys around here before,” I said. “You up here visiting?”
The driver just looked at me and then down at the man on the ground. “You got that hooked up yet?”
“I think so,” he said.
“Yeah, we’re just visiting,” the driver said. “See if that’ll work now.”
I took the other end of the chain and looped it around my trailer hitch. I got back into the truck and gave it a little gas. The chain pulled taut and then the car started to ease its way backward out of the snowbank. For a split second, I was tempted to punch it and drag the car behind me for a few miles. See if they’d chase me on foot. In a race, my money would have been on the guy with the snapped-up blue cap.
“That wasn’t so bad,” I said as I got back out of the truck.
The car had barely stopped moving before red cap was back on the ground unhooking the chain. He handed it to me and said, “We gotta get going.”
“Appreciate it,” blue cap said. They swung the doors open on either side, hopped in, and then sprayed me with snow as they left.
I stood there watching the car. It went into another death slide and almost ran off the road again. That man does not know how to drive in the snow, I thought. And the way they just took off like that with barely a word of thanks. If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear those boys didn’t appreciate my help at all.
CHAPTER TEN
I kept driving to the Soo, wondering when I’d see my new friends in my rearview mirror again. The snow was coming down harder now, in big wet flakes that stuck to my windshield and made it hard to see where the hell I was going.
I called the sheriff’s department again. Bill still wasn’t in, and they still wouldn’t give me his home number. I left another message for him to call me as soon as he could. I didn’t want to try to explain to a deputy over the phone that two men were following me all over Chippewa County. I wanted Bill on the other side of a desk, or better yet a table in a bar, listening to me and writing it all down.
I made my way to the east side of town, over by the ice rink where this whole mess started. The address was in a neighborhood just off of Spruce Street, near the old Union Carbide site. The map calls it a “spoiled area” now. In the summer it’s a big field of weeds and sumac trees that nobody ever touches. In the winter it’s covered by a couple feet of snow like everything else so you don’t think about it. The houses are small, with windows sealed in plastic to protect them from the wind off the St. Marys River.
I found Leon Prudell’s little red car parked in the driveway of the house. The snowbanks on either side of the driveway were as tall as the car itself, so I almost missed it. I had just enough room to park my truck behind him and then squeeze my way between the car an
d the snowbank to get to the front door. When I rang the bell, it was answered by an elderly woman with thick glasses and the first real smile I had seen in days. How she could smile like that in the middle of winter was a mystery to me, but I instantly loved her for it. She was wearing a thick white sweater and holding a coffee cup in one hand while opening the door for me with the other hand. I could see Leon on the couch, holding a cup from the same set. “You must be Mr. McKnight,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “And you must be Mrs. Hudson.”
“May I offer you some coffee? Mr. Prudell and I have been having quite a party here waiting for you.”
“I apologize for being late,” I said. “As a matter of fact, some hot coffee would do me a lot of good right now.”
“Mr. Prudell and I just finished some apple pie,” she said. “Can I cut you a slice while I’m in the kitchen?”
“You gotta try this pie,” Leon said. Now that she mentioned it, I could see the crumbs all over Leon’s shirt.
“That sounds wonderful,” I said. “If it’s not too much trouble.”
“You have a seat,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”
When she left, I took a quick look around the place. There were a lot of old black and white pictures of children and color pictures of what must have been grandchildren. The room was small, but it looked comfortable and well-kept. There was a plastic slipcover on the couch Leon was sitting on. “What took you so long?” he said.
“I had to help out a couple guys who got stuck in the snow,” I said. I sat down on the other end of the couch. The plastic made a sound like popcorn popping.
“So I’ll brief you, Alex,” he said.
“Brief me?”
“Yes, bring you up to date on the information I’ve developed today.”
“Or you could just talk to me and tell me what’s going on,” I said. “Where was Bruckman staying, anyway? Upstairs?”
“No, there’s a big apartment out back, over the garage,” he said. “He’d been renting the place for about six weeks.”
“How did you find this place?”
Prudell leaned forward and sneaked a look around the corner at Mrs. Hudson in the kitchen. “I had to throw a few Franklins around, Alex, but it was worth it.”
“Franklins? You mean, what, fifty-dollar bills?”
“No, hundreds. Grant is on the fifty.”
“Leon, what are you talking about? Who did you pay to find out where Bruckman was living?”
“Hockey players, Alex. At the Big Bear Arena. You said you played against him on Thursday night, right? So that’s where I started. First I tried the office. I told them I wanted to find Bruckman and I knew he was on one of the teams that played there in the Thursday night league. I got nowhere with that, so I figured I’d just hang around with the players, see if I could get a lead on him that way.”
“You hung around with the hockey players?”
“Yeah, I just walked around in the locker rooms. Said hello, how’s it going, tried to act like I was playing in the next game or something.”
“Leon, no offense, but you don’t exactly look like a hockey player.”
“I told ’em I was a goalie,” he said. “That’s where they put the guy who can’t skate, right? Just like in baseball when they put the worst player at catcher.”
I counted to three in my head. “Okay, right,” I finally said. “So eventually you found somebody who knew Bruckman?”
“Eventually,” he said. He peeked into the kitchen again. “Alex, I believed you mentioned that this Bruckman fellow may have been involved in drugs?”
“Yes,” I said. “Very involved.”
“Well, it was certainly no secret to these players I talked to. It didn’t take me very long to see what angle to play. I pretended I was looking for him so I could buy some drugs.”
I tried to picture Leon Prudell in a locker room, pretending to be a hockey goalie looking to score some coke. The image didn’t quite work. “How long did it take you?” I said.
“I had to work several games,” he said. “Maybe seven or eight. There was a lot of … reluctance to tell me where he lived. I guess they figured that if I had really bought drugs from him before, then I should know where he lived. That’s where the Franklins came in. They can be very persuasive.”
“Leon,” I said, “just how many Franklins did you have to spend?”
“Four or five,” he said. “A couple of guys gave me bogus information. I had to go out and check the addresses and then come back again. But one guy finally came through for me. A real dopehead who was playing in the midnight game.”
“Here we are,” Mrs. Hudson said as she came back into the room. She set a slice of apple pie in front of me, along with a cup of coffee. “The cream and sugar are right there next to Mr. Prudell.”
“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this, ma’am,” I said. “I understand you had a man named Lonnie Bruckman staying in your apartment out back.”
“Oh yes,” she said, looking down at her hands which were folded in her lap. “As I was saying to Mr. Prudell, I’m afraid it hasn’t been a very pleasant experience, especially the past couple days. He seemed like a nice enough man when he first took the place, but then there were all these people that started showing up. There was always loud music going on, and those snowmobiles that he and his friends would ride. I’ve always hated those things.”
A woman after my own heart. “Mrs. Hudson, I just have to say that this is the best apple pie I’ve ever tasted.” It was a perfect creation of apples and cinnamon and a flaky crust. It made me feel human again, if only for a moment.
“Oh, why thank you,” she said. “You have to know how to save the right kind of apples over the winter.”
“But go on,” I said. “He had all these people over. Was there one woman in particular who was staying with him?”
“Yes,” she said. “There was. I never found out what her name was. I didn’t see her much, but when I did … I don’t know. There was something about her. She always looked very sad and alone to me. Even when all those people were around.”
“The police were here on Friday night,” Leon said. “And then again on Saturday morning.”
“Friday night?” I said. “What time?”
“I called the police around two o’clock in the morning,” she said. “I heard all these noises back there. Woke up the whole neighborhood. Things crashing into the walls, glass breaking, like somebody was destroying the place.”
“Two o’clock,” I said. “The same night he … Okay, go on. Did you see who it was? Was it Bruckman?”
“I didn’t see anybody,” she said. “I was afraid to look out the window.”
“What happened when the police came?”
“Whoever was in the apartment was gone by the time the police got here. They just went up and looked around. The place was completely ruined. When I think about all the time Joe spent finishing that apartment—”
“Your husband?”
“Yes,” she said. “He’s been gone, my heavens, has it been seven years already?”
“You said the police were here again on Saturday morning?”
“Yes, they came back,” she said. “They were asking more questions, about the young woman who was with him.”
It made sense. He trashed the place Friday night, probably when he saw that she was gone. The next day, the police came back when they found out Dorothy had been kidnapped.
“Can I see the apartment, Mrs. Hudson?”
“I don’t see why not,” she said. “Let me just put my coat on here. Is it snowing yet?”
“It’s snowing,” I said.
“All my friends think I’m crazy,” she said as she wrapped herself up. “They’re all down in Florida now.”
“Ah, what’s in Florida?” Leon said as he put his coat on. “Besides sunshine and orange trees.”
“And old people waiting to the,” she said. “I’d rather live somewhere wh
ere you have to keep moving.”
She led us out through her back door, down a walkway with enough new snow to cover our ankles. The garage was bigger than the house, with enough room for three cars. There was an exterior stairway on the side, leading up to the apartment. “Careful on these stairs,” she said. “I didn’t get a chance to clean them off.” I wanted to hold on to her, help her up the stairs, but she went right up the snowbound treads before I could touch her. When we got to the top, she pushed open the door. The molding was splintered, like mine.
“Did this happen Friday night?” I asked her.
“Yes,” she said. “It looks like somebody kicked the door right in.”
“But if it was Bruckman—”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe he didn’t have his key that night. Maybe the young woman had it.”
“I suppose so.” I took a look inside. “This looks familiar,” I said. The place was destroyed. All of the contents of the kitchen drawers and cabinets on the floor, all of the furniture slashed. But there was one difference: I counted three broken hockey sticks here.
“The police asked me not to clean it up yet,” she said. “They also asked me not to let anybody inside.”
“I understand,” I said. “I just wanted to take a look.” Leon stood next to me in the doorway, looking the place over like he was memorizing it.
“It’s killing me, not being able to clean this mess up,” she said. “If Joe had ever seen the place like this …”
“Looks like it was a nice place,” I said.
“You know the funny thing?” she said. “With all the trouble these people caused, you think this place was ever a mess before this? I came up here a couple times when I knew they were gone, you know, just to make sure everything was okay …”
“Yes?”
“I swear to God, Mr. McKnight, this place was spotless. Every single inch of this apartment. The kitchen, the bathroom. It was immaculate. All the noise back here, all the carrying on they did, all those people tromping through here. Say what you want about them, they kept this place clean. And now this. Isn’t that strange?”
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