From the Grave--A McKenzie Novel

by David Housewright

  People began filing out of the auditorium. No one asked for a refund; no one seemed disappointed that they didn’t get their money’s worth.

  Shelby remained behind. She waited until they were quite alone except for the young woman still writing feverishly on her clipboard.

  “Hannah,” she said, “why did the dead man chant McKenzie’s name?”

  “I really can’t say. Most people in our profession follow a code of ethics about the information we disclose…”

  “You don’t understand. I’m pretty sure I know McKenzie. I know him very well.”

  Hannah stared at the woman for a few beats as if trying to judge her honesty. The woman with the clipboard stopped writing.

  “What’s his profession?” Hannah asked.

  “I have no idea what to call him now, but McKenzie used to be a police officer like my husband.”

  Hannah grabbed Shelby’s wrist and squeezed hard.

  “He’s in danger,” she said. “If you are really his friend, you must tell him, he’s in danger.”

  “Why? What kind of danger?”

  “The man, the dead man, he wanted Ryan to kill McKenzie. He said that he would tell Ryan where he hid the money, but only if he killed McKenzie first.”

  TWO

  Nina took another sip of wine, then leaned forward and set the glass on the table. After she straightened up she looked at me and said, “It’s always something with you, isn’t it?”

  “Me? How is this about me?”

  “The dead man singled you out by name,” Shelby said.

  “There are plenty of people with the name McKenzie; most of them spell it differently. Bobby, remember the gypsy Ian brought to hockey a couple of weeks ago? He claimed that we were descendants from the same clan in Scotland until he found out I spelled my name M-C and he spelled his M-A-C.”

  “How many of them were police officers?” Shelby asked.

  “I’m guessing a lot.”

  I glanced at Bobby for confirmation. He gave me what I referred to as his ignorance-apathy shrug, the one that said, “I don’t know and I don’t care.” And I thought, He’s left us again. At any given moment only half of Bobby’s brain was fixed on the here and now. The other half was working a case. I was convinced he was thinking of Ruth Nowak, who was listed as a missing person, but who we all knew was dead. You don’t wander away from your comfortable Crocus Hill home into an icy Minnesota winter night without your coat, without even your purse. ’Course, Bobby couldn’t prove that she’d been murdered. Yet. Not without a body. Not without other physical evidence. But he knew. He also knew that her husband, Robert, who had proven himself to be very adept at giving teary-eyed interviews to the local TV news stations, was probably the one who killed her.

  Shelby ignored her spouse. She lowered her eyes and spoke in the voice that she used when she warned her pretty teenage daughters about men. I had met her in college, met her, in fact, just a few minutes before Bobby had, and loved her every way it was possible to love a woman without actually touching her ever since. I knew when she was serious.

  “McKenzie, last night I heard a dead man put a price on your head,” she told me.

  “A ghost,” Nina said.

  “Whatever. I would think, I would wish, that you’d be a little concerned. Do you think I’m making this up? Do you think that I’m pranking you?”

  “No,” I said.

  She glared at Bobby. “Do you?” she asked.

  “Hmm? No, but…”

  “But what?”

  “Honey, we’ve had this discussion before. I’m a law enforcement professional. I deal in facts. Facts you can see and hear and touch; facts that can be proven by science. Facts that you can take to court. What you’re telling us, these are not facts, and even if they were, what do you expect me to do about them?”

  “You, nothing.” Shelby pointed at me. “But you…”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Don’t you care that a dead man is threatening your life?”

  “Okay, a couple of things. Thing one: I don’t know that he’s threatening my life. Thing two: What’s he going to do? Hide my car keys? Drag chains across the floor of our condo?”

  “Hardwood floors,” Nina said. “He had better not leave a mark.”

  “You’re missing the point,” Shelby said. “It doesn’t matter if you believe it. What matters is if Ryan believes it, or someone else that the dead man might contact.”

  Bobby waved his beer in his wife’s direction. “There are a lot of nutjobs out there,” he said.

  “Excuse me?” Shelby said.

  “I’m agreeing with you, honey. McKenzie, you should be careful.”

  Nina laughed. “I’ve been telling him that for years,” she said. “Does he listen?”

  “You guys are making fun of me,” Shelby said. “I asked you to come over tonight so I could help you, so I could warn you, and you’re making fun of me.”

  “We are not,” I told her.

  “What was the name of the embezzler that you collared?” Bobby asked.

  “Thomas Teachwell. Last I heard he was alive and well and living in a cabin on Lower Red Lake, the same cabin where I caught him. He moved there after doing eight and two-thirds at Oak Park Heights.”

  “It needs to be someone who’s dead,” Shelby said.

  “That doesn’t mean I killed him, does it?”

  “No, I guess not. Just someone you made angry.”

  Both Bobby and Nina laughed at the same time.

  “That’s a long list,” Bobby said.

  “Are you kidding?” Nina said. “Half the time he makes me angry.”

  “I’m at, like, eighty percent,” Bobby said.

  Shelby folded her arms across her chest and glared.

  “Now you’re making me angry,” she said.

  Something about the way her green eyes sparkled took me back to that day in college, to the party that we had all attended.

  Dammit, Bobby, my inner voice said. How different would life be if I had been the one who spilled that drink on her dress instead of you?

  “I’m sorry,” I said aloud. I meant it, too. “You’ve always been my very good friend.”

  We all sat like that for a few moments, everyone staring at everyone else, until Shelby herself broke the silence.

  “My mom wanted me to thank you again for the gift you gave her on her seventieth,” she said. “She said it was the best birthday present anyone has ever given her.”

  “She’s very welcome,” I said.

  “I have to admit, that was pretty clever,” Bobby said.

  “What gift?” Nina asked.

  “My mother-in-law loves to go to the casino in Hinckley and play the nickel slots,” Bobby said. “It’s her chief form of entertainment. So, McKenzie gave her a hundred dollars’ worth of nickels.”

  “It came in rolls packed in a box,” Shelby said. “It looked like a big brick.”

  “It weighed twenty-two-point-five pounds, which doesn’t sound heavy until you carry it for her,” Bobby said.

  Nina gave me a nudge. “You’ve never given me a brick of nickels,” she said.

  “I gave you a baby grand piano.”

  She dismissed me with a wave of her hand and a noise that sounded like the word “pooh.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “All I can say—Christmas is coming. I expect you to step up.”

  * * *

  It was cold when Nina and I left the Dunston house, the house where Bobby grew up. He bought it from his parents when they retired. It’s also where I practically grew up after my mother died when I was in the sixth grade. I didn’t have a family except for my father after that, and the Dunstons had all but adopted me. Or maybe I had adopted them.

  The temperature had dipped to twenty degrees, which was about average for 10:00 P.M. in the Cities during the first week of December. There was no snow on the ground, though, and usually we’d have at least a foot by now. Some people were ac
tually concerned that we might not have a white Christmas. I wasn’t one of them. It was Minnesota, for God’s sake. Snow was coming. It was always coming.

  We climbed into my Mustang GT, which Nina had given to me on my birthday, thank you very much, and I started it up.

  “Where to?” I asked.

  “We could go back to the condo, set a fire in the fireplace, turn off the lights and get cozy on the sofa…”

  “Hmm.”

  “And wait for the Ghost of Christmas Past to appear.”

  “A viable option.”

  “Or we can go to Rickie’s and catch Davina and the Vagabonds playing their last set.”

  “They always sell out. Can we get a seat?”

  “I know the manager.”

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes later, we strolled through the front entrance of the club on Cathedral Hill in St. Paul that Nina had named after her daughter, Erica. Jenness Crawford met us at the door.

  “Hey, boss,” she said.

  Nina held up her hands as if she were surrendering. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not here to check up on you. We just dropped by to grab a drink and listen to Davina.”

  Jenness knew Nina’s penchant for managing the club every minute of every day, which she’d done since she opened its doors twenty years ago, and said, “I don’t believe you.”

  Nina hugged her manager’s shoulder and glanced around. Rickie’s was divided into two sections, a casual bar on the ground floor with a small stage for happy hour entertainment and a full restaurant and performance hall upstairs. The bar was crowded for a Wednesday evening, and the customers seemed to be in a festive mood. Perhaps the Christmas decorations had something to do with it. Our condominium had only a few, but Rickie’s was loaded with them.

  “How are things going, anyway?” she asked.

  “See?” Jenness said. “I told you.”

  “Seriously, everything good?”

  “We had another incident in the basement.”

  Nina stepped away and glared at her manager as if that were the very last thing she had wanted to hear.

  “You asked,” Jenness said.

  “Let me guess, someone turned off the lights again.”

  Jenness held up two fingers. “Twice,” she said.

  “It’s a problem with the wiring.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Rickie’s is not haunted.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  Nina spun toward me.

  “Do you have anything to say?” she asked.

  “Not a word,” I told her.

  Nina went to the bar. She returned with a Rekorderlig, a hard cider imported from Sweden that she had become addicted to during our last trip to Europe, and a Summit Extra Pale Ale for me, and led the way up the red-carpeted staircase to the performance space upstairs. We found a tall table against the wall in the back of the room with fair sight lines and good sound and settled in.

  Davina and the Vagabonds was a terrific blues band that combined Memphis soul with New Orleans charm. They channeled everyone from Fats to Louis to Aretha. Their best tunes, though, were the ones that Davina Sowers wrote herself—“Black Cloud,” “Sugar Moon,” “Bee Sting,” “Sunshine,” “Red Shoes.” And no Christmas songs; thank you, Davina! As much as I enjoyed their sound, though, I couldn’t shake Shelby’s story out of my head. My mind began to wander.

  Is there really a dead guy trying to buy a hit on you? my inner voice asked.

  Stop it, I told myself. Listen to the music.

  Bags of money—why is that familiar?

  Where would you keep your money if you were a ghost?

  A secret room inside a haunted house?

  Sure.

  How ’bout a haunted jazz joint?

  During the pause between numbers Nina said, “Are you thinking about what that psychic medium said? That’s kind of nuts, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah.”

  Still, while Davina and her band were cutting loose on “Shake that Thing,” I slipped a pen from my pocket and started doodling on a napkin. Nina noticed and said nothing. She knew it was something that I did when I couldn’t stand up and pace.

  It was while Davina sang I’ve got a feeling something ain’t right, I don’t know what to do, that I wrote out the numbers one one eight eight zero zero four one.

  The dead man was chanting these numbers, my inner voice told me. And Ryan said it was him, that he was one one eight eight zero zero four one. What did that mean? Was this his Social Security number?

  No, a Social has nine digits, I reminded myself.

  A passport?

  A U.S. passport also has nine numbers.

  A cell phone?

  That’s ten.

  I kept running the pen over the numbers one at a time, doubling their size. I was starting on the second zero when I stopped and stared. The way the numbers appeared on the napkin, 1 1 8 8 0 0 4 1, prompted me to add a dash so that it read 1 1 8 8 0—0 4 1.

  “Damn,” I said.

  Nina leaned in.

  “Shhh,” she said. “What?”

  I lowered my voice to a whisper and said, “Every inmate sentenced to a federal prison is assigned a five-digit identification number plus a three-digit suffix. A register number, they call it. Anyway, the suffix is the code number of the district where the inmate was processed into the federal correctional system. There are a hundred districts. Well, ninety-eight, to be precise. The code for the District of Minnesota is zero four one.”

  “You think this Ryan guy that Shelby told us about was a federal prisoner?”

  “Let’s find out.”

  Rickie’s had very good Wi-Fi, and it was easy for me to pull out my smartphone, access a search engine, and call up the website for the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The website included a Find an Inmate app that allowed anyone armed with the right names or codes to locate the whereabouts of any inmate incarcerated in a federal prison since 1982. It took me a minute because the screen was small, the keyboard was smaller, and I was all thumbs, yet I managed to type in the number and hit SEARCH.

  About fifteen seconds later, I was told that Ryan Hayes, a thirty-nine-year-old white male, had been transferred a dozen years ago to the Federal Correctional Institution in Sandstone, Minnesota, a low-security prison for male offenders located about a hundred miles northeast of the Twin Cities, where he served the remainder of his sentence. The “Release Date” field indicated that he had been discharged from Bureau of Prisons custody last May.

  Davina and her boys were swinging on “St. James Infirmary,” one of my favorite tunes, when I leaned back in my chair, closed my eyes, and said, “That’s an unexpected coincidence.”

  “What?” Nina asked.

  Nina must have read the screen of my smartphone to get her answer, because a few moments later she leaned in close again and whispered in my ear, “Do you know this man, this Ryan Hayes?”

  “We’ve never met,” I said. “But I had dealings with his father, Leland Hayes. I’m the one who shot him in the head.”

  THREE

  I knew it was me. Knew it the moment I squeezed the trigger. I didn’t say anything, though, until ballistics confirmed it. When it did, I said, “I’m sorry.” My colleagues wouldn’t hear of it. It was a good shoot. A righteous shoot. Everything by the book. We even had dashcam video to confirm that the suspect had fired first. “You saved lives,” I was told and put on administrative leave, which is what always happens when a police officer shoots a suspect. It was while on leave that I came thisclose to retiring from the St. Paul Police Department. Bobby and a few other officers talked me out of it. “You didn’t do anything wrong,” they said. Yet it felt wrong.

  I explained it to Nina when we returned to the high-rise condominium that we shared in downtown Minneapolis.

  * * *

  The armored truck pulled into the asphalt parking lot directly behind the old Midway National Bank located on the southeast corner of Snelling and University. I
say “old” because it was torn down years ago. You need to remember, this was long before they put in the Green Line, the high-speed train that runs down the center of University Avenue from downtown St. Paul to downtown Minneapolis; long before they built Allianz Field, where Minnesota United plays soccer. Still, even then it was probably the busiest intersection in St. Paul. There was a shopping center and a liquor store, an office building, several restaurants, fast-food joints and a couple of bars, a used-book store and the cars, buses, and pedestrians all that attracted. It was no wonder that the truck crew didn’t notice the battered red two-door Pontiac Fiero idling nearby or the two men sitting inside it.

  I never learned if the truck was delivering money to or taking money from the bank, only that somehow the back of the truck was opened and a guard grabbed two canvas sacks filled with cash. That’s when one of the men jumped out of the Fiero wearing a black ski mask and white coveralls. He had a gun in his hand that he pressed against the guard’s spine.

  Words were exchanged along the lines of “Do what I tell you or I’ll blow your brains out” and “Don’t do anything stupid” and “It’s not your money.”

  The guard dropped the sacks and his hands went up. The gunman forced him to his knees and snatched the cash bags off the ground.

  At the same time, the driver moved the Fiero out of its parking space and stopped next to the truck. The car’s trunk was opened and the gunman began tossing sacks of money inside it.

  There were plenty of witnesses, some of them actually standing inside the bank and watching through the glass doors, yet no one moved to intervene. Again, all this took place before smartphones had become indispensible, something that everyone carried everywhere they went, and years before Myspace was invented, much less YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. No one was shooting video that they hoped would go viral. I did learn later that one guy ran to a pay phone to call the police—remember pay phones? Anyway, he needn’t have bothered, because the driver, who was safely tucked inside the cab of the armored truck, knew what was happening and sent out a call for assistance.