What he saw were cops. A whole convention of them in his driveway, more going in and out of the house. He saw patrol units with a couple of different sets of markings. He saw people standing around on the sidewalks, watching the show. He saw more or less the scene he’d imagined based on Tanya’s description, clearly still in full swing.
He was trying to pick out Tanya from the crowd of onlookers when someone tapped a horn behind him. Mike checked the rearview and saw headlights stacked up back there. It was the first time he noticed that he’d slowed all the way to a stop.
How about now? the reasonable voice said. Now can we go?
Or was the reasonable voice the one telling him to stay?
It was a minute past nine, according to the clock in the dash. If Hal could have seen what Mike was seeing now, he’d never have loaned out the truck.
But then, Mike wouldn’t be looking at anything at all if not for Darryl. Both were equal realities, leaving him with a choice he didn’t know how to make: turn right, down his own street, or keep on rolling. All the way up to Rockhaven.
The horn sounded again behind him, not so polite this time.
Screw it.
The Dodge grumbled and heaved as Mike punched the gas. With fifty-seven bucks in his wallet, the mouthy throb in his leg, and the clothes on his back, he set out for the lake country.
SOLDIERS OF MISFORTUNE
9
“Jesus, buddy,” Deon said. “Sometime today.”
Maya checked her watch. Even with Deon driving, they’d been hung up in traffic for nearly an hour, stuck behind a jackknifed semi-trailer on I-94, and now here they sat: a hundred feet from their final turn.
“Hey,” she said into the windshield, calling to the guy in the pickup hogging the street in front of them. “Looky Lou. Get with the program.”
Off to her right, she could see squad cars crowding a small house on the east side of the cross street, several houses up from their corner, which remained just beyond reach. She could see Barnhill’s unmarked unit in the driveway. Even as they sat there, she saw something else: a van from Channel 9, approaching the scene from the opposite end of the street.
At the sight of the competition, all Maya’s reflexes kicked in: the jump in her pulse rate, the urgent pull in her gut, the stubborn clench in her jaw. She shifted impatiently in the passenger seat and said, “What the hell is this guy’s deal?”
Through the back window of the pickup she could see the driver sitting there, half turned. He sat with an elbow on the steering wheel, one hand on his chin, pondering the action half a block up as if the whole street was his personal property. He wore a ball cap and sunglasses, even though it was dark outside, and something about his posture struck Maya oddly. He knew they were behind him—he’d looked in his mirror when Deon honked—and yet he just sat there, like a sculpture. Rodin’s The Thinker in a cap and sunglasses, manning a thirty-year-old Dodge Power Wagon.
She looked back up the street and saw their doppelgangers from Channel 9 already parked and setting up shop. Another photographer, another reporter sniffing the ground.
“Oh, you’re killing me,” she said, reaching across Deon to lean on the horn with the heel of her hand. “Dude! Move your ass!”
The guy straightened in his seat as though she’d woken him from a nap.
“There we go,” Deon said, moving at last, as the truck lurched forward ahead of them and sped away down the street.
Something about the whole thing gave her a tingle. Maya watched the truck’s taillights bank and disappear around the first corner going left as Deon turned the corner going right. By the time Deon rolled up to the news already in progress, she saw that she’d scribbled down the truck’s license number in her notebook without being fully aware she was doing it. It was stupid, but Maya didn’t care. After this morning? No more overlooking suspicious vehicles. No more overlooking anything.
Their arrival was in no way overlooked by Channel 9. As Maya piled out, she saw the reporter—some kid she didn’t recognize—making urgent hand gestures to his photographer, pointing to a spot up the curb. The reporter looked as though he were trying to box out an opponent for a clutch rebound.
The photographer looked bored. When he saw them coming, he nodded and said, “Hey, D.”
“Randy,” Deon said, popping a new toothpick. “What’d we miss?”
While the other reporter tried to decide whether or not to be friendly, Maya saw Roger Barnhill emerge from the side door of the house. The detective spoke briefly with a uniformed deputy and then headed for his car. She left 9 and 7 standing together at the curb and hustled over.
A St. Paul cop stopped her at the mouth of the driveway, palm out. “Nope,” he said. “Sorry.”
She stood on tiptoe, looking past him. “Detective!”
Barnhill saw her. He checked his watch, gave instructions to another deputy, then came down the driveway, walking quickly.
“It’s okay,” he told the St. Paul cop. “Thanks.”
The St. Paul cop shrugged and stepped aside.
“Listen,” Maya said, on impulse tearing out the page from her notebook with the tag number of the goofy-acting gawker in the pickup truck. “I’m sure I’m being paranoid, but …”
“Tell me on the way,” Barnhill said. “You’ve still got my mobile number?”
Standing within paper-handing reach, she could feel a grim tension radiating off the detective in waves. “I’ve got it,” she said. “On the way where?”
“I can’t speak to you now,” Barnhill said. He folded the paper once and shoved it inside his sport coat. “You can follow my car if you keep up.”
His demeanor gave Maya another tingle. A deep and unpleasant one. Something about the set in his jaw, the drawn look in his eyes, the tone in his voice. All at once, she felt tight in her chest.
“You found her,” she said. The way the uniforms within earshot perked up, the way Barnhill reacted, she knew her intuition was correct. “Didn’t you?”
Barnhill was already halfway up the driveway. “Let’s hope not,” he said, though it didn’t sound to Maya like he had much hope left in supply.
She glanced for a reaction toward the St. Paul cop who had stopped her. He was nowhere to be found.
So she stopped standing there. Deon caught her signal and met her back at the truck. Inside, strapped into his seat belt once more, Deon fired up the engine, glanced over, and said, “What’d he say?”
Maya sat in her seat and felt her heart wilting and somehow couldn’t bring herself to answer the question. Please not like this, she thought. Not her, too. She pointed ahead at Barnhill’s car, now zipping away, flashers pulsing in the windows, already leaving them behind.
10
They watched a news rig from Channel 9 cruise by them, turn at the corner, and scoot down the street toward the action. Pretty soon they watched another rig, from News7, turn in at the other end of the block. The whole time Bryce sat there with the binoculars like he was watching his favorite show on TV, and when he finally spilled the beans about the call from Uncle Buck, Toby didn’t believe him.
“Suit yourself,” Bryce said. “Just telling you what the boss told me.”
“Yeah, but that’s crazy.”
Never once did Bryce lower the binoculars. “Your point?”
“I’m just saying.”
“Look it up on your space phone,” Bryce suggested.
Toby looked at his mobile, on standby in its dash cradle, and sighed.
It was only a phone. Obviously he needed something that could get the sports feeds, and the lines from Vegas, and, besides, if you wanted to stay competitive, it was smart business to keep up with the top gear available. Seemed like something a respectable modern bounty hunter might like to consider, in fact. So earlier, to pass the time, Toby had made the mistake of showing Bryce the GPS app that could track their position on a satellite map of the Cities—in real time, while they were driving, like in the movies—and Bryce had done nothi
ng but give him shit about it ever since.
That, Toby had learned, was the thing about Bryce. Even when the guy didn’t say anything or look at you, he had this way about him that made you feel like every single thing you did or said was weak and silly.
On the other hand, he had a point.
While Bryce went on surveilling through his window, Toby grabbed the mobile and fired it up. He went out to the online sites for Channels 9 and 7. Sure enough, it was the top story in both places: the rich girl from Lake Calhoun who’d gone missing this afternoon. Not long after Toby and Bryce had been here talking to Barlowe, if the Web feeds had it right.
“Damn,” Toby said.
Bryce didn’t look over, but he did seem interested. “What does it say?”
“Nothing about Potter,” Bryce said, still scanning. “But you’re right about the girl.”
“Name again?”
“Huh?”
“The girl,” Bryce said. “What’s her name?”
“Benson,” Toby said. “Juliet Benson. You see the thing on the news last night? About that architect?”
“Nope.”
“Anyway, he’s her dad.”
“That’s what your uncle said.”
“Huh,” Toby said. “There’s a reward, sounds like.”
“Yeah?” Bryce lowered the binoculars an inch. “What kind of reward?”
“For info on the girl.”
“I figured that,” Bryce said. “I mean how much?”
For a moment, Toby thought about ignoring him. Let the guy get his own space phone. Then he folded and said, “Twenty-five K.”
“No shit?”
“That’s what it says.”
Bryce gave a low whistle. He raised the binoculars again.
Toby tried the online site for the Star Tribune, but he didn’t find anything more there than he’d found already. He tried to imagine what this girl from upmarket Minneapolis could have to do with a low-rent bully like Darryl Potter, and while he couldn’t come up with anything, Toby had a sinking feeling that his odds of seeing any of his eleven grand come back into his pocket had stretched considerably.
Pretty soon he’d found everything it looked like he was going to find on the missing girl. Toby took a minute, set up an auto-alert with the keywords Juliet Benson, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Minnesota, police, and authorities. He thought about it and added the name Darryl Potter. He thought about it some more. Added the name Barlowe.
Then he put the mobile back in its cradle and said, “So what now?”
Bryce adjusted the focus knob on the binocs. “What now what?”
“I mean what do we do?”
“We’re doing it.”
Toby sighed and settled back in his seat. He was tired, and he couldn’t get comfortable. He wanted to go home, make a bowl of cereal, pop in a DVD, and pretend he didn’t know about any of this. But he felt trapped. In his own ride, no less.
How had it happened? One minute, Bryce was just some guy working for him, on loan from Uncle Buck, and the next thing Toby knew, it felt the other way around.
It didn’t seem fair. This was supposed to be his show. It was his money they were after. It was even his car. He was the one sitting in the driver’s seat. But Toby was starting to get the message loud and clear: Sitting in the driver’s seat only made him the driver.
They sat without talking for a while. Bryce kept watching through the binoculars until an unmarked car backed out of the driveway of Potter’s house and drove off down the street, lights flashing in the rear window. They watched as the news crews piled back into their rigs and drove off the same way.
After a while, things seemed to be winding down. The neighbors had more or less dispersed. The uniforms had thinned out on the ground. Lights went dark in the house. Pretty soon, one by one, the squad units began peeling away. Before long the whole street looked quiet again. If you hadn’t been sitting there watching, Toby thought, you wouldn’t have known anyone had been there at all.
His mobile went off. Toby grabbed it, saw the screen, and said, “Hey, Uncle Buck.”
“Howdy, sport,” Uncle Buck said. “Listen, put Bryce …”
Toby was already handing the phone over.
Bryce took it and said, “I’m here.”
Toby didn’t even bother trying to listen this time. It was no use. He sat there behind the wheel, looking out the window at nothing in particular, until Bryce said, “I’ll let you know,” and handed the phone back.
Toby took it. Waited.
Silence.
Then Bryce said, “Barlowe’s in the wind.”
In the wind. It sounded mystical. “He’s where?”
“Exactly,” Bryce said.
Whatever. More silence.
Toby waited.
“So here’s what I’m thinking,” Bryce finally said. Talking like they were partners again all of a sudden. “You and me, we split that eleven grand of yours. What’s left of it, anyway. Then we take that twenty-five-K reward money, and we split that too.” Bryce winked. “You’re the numbers guy, you tell me. What’s that come to each?”
“Eighteen grand,” Toby said.
“Yeah, that’s what I got.”
“Depending,” Toby said.
“On?”
“On how much of my eleven grand there is left.”
“Right,” Bryce said. “Good point.” He turned in his seat toward Toby, got comfortable. “So, figure we get no luck. There’s nothing left of the dough Potter took from your restaurant guy. That leaves us with, what? Only twelve? Each?”
“Twelve and a half,” Toby said.
“Hey. You really are a numbers guy.”
Toby felt like he was having a perfectly logical conversation that made absolutely no sense. He sat a minute, wanting to avoid saying something dumb, which would only give Bryce something new to crack on him about, then said, “Tell me again how we get the reward money?”
“Same way we get your eleven grand back,” Bryce said. “We find this Potter genius.”
Who’s the genius? Toby thought, but held his tongue. He took another moment, chose his words carefully, and said, “Isn’t that sort of the whole problem?”
Bryce smiled. It looked like the bones in his face shifted position. “You be the numbers guy,” he said. “Let me be the ideas guy.”
11
Mike Barlowe had joined the Marine Corps straight out of high school because he couldn’t think of anything better to do. He’d grown up in foster homes and had no blood siblings. His girlfriend—who he’d always known was out of his league anyway—had gone out east for college and met a new guy by Halloween. His buddies were good for laughs and trouble, but they were all going nowhere fast, and even though he’d never had much evidence to support it, Mike always had the idea that maybe he’d amount to something more.
He’d been a sophomore at Sibley when the towers came down in New York City. Though he’d never said so to anybody, inside he’d always admired the seniors he knew that year who signed up to go off and do something about it. Three years later, he signed up himself, one otherwise pointless Saturday afternoon, at a recruiting depot set up for the weekend at the Mall of America in Bloomington.
Three years after that, Mike came home from the Marine Corps with a plastic knee, 63 percent hearing loss in his left ear, and a bunch of grisly sludge where his nighttime dreams used to be. And if not for Darryl Potter, he most likely would not have come home at all.
They’d been getting ready to turn over Ramadi to the next bunch of Marines after six months in the combat zone. September in Anbar Province was nothing like early autumn in Minnesota, and Mike had been daydreaming about fishing for lunker northerns and watching the leaves change back home.
Two weeks before shipping back to the States, his team found an ambush on patrol and ended up in a hell of a jam. They’d been outpositioned, pinned down in a side street for a quarter of an hour by the time support arrived. From his cover in a doorway, Mike laid down ri
fle fire while his men piled into the Humvee, then he broke out after them.
He’d made it about three steps when an RPG round screamed over on a rope of exhaust from a ground-floor window across the street, detonating high on the wall above the doorway behind him. The next thing Mike knew, he was deaf, half blind, concussed out of his gourd. He found himself bound up in a pile of rubble with no feeling in his leg, AK-47 rounds kicking up silent puffs of sidewalk all around him.
Potter, they told him later, hadn’t even waited for the big truck-mounted .50-cal to swing around and start hammering. They said he just jumped out of the Humvee and bolted straight into the hail. Pulled Mike out of there. Dragged him all the way back by his flak vest with one hand, firing his regulated M4 across the street with the other. Burst after burst, they said, straight out of the movies. They said all he needed was a chewed-up cigar clamped in his snarl.
But Mike couldn’t remember any of that. The next thing he remembered was bouncing around in the back of the Humvee, hauling ass out of the hot zone, looking up into Darryl’s grime-caked face. He remembered how white Darryl’s teeth had looked against the battle dirt. He remembered saying thanks, though he couldn’t hear his own voice.
He couldn’t hear Darryl’s either, but he’d been able to read his grinning lips: Don’t worry about it. Next time you can save mine.
The lane to Rockhaven was so grown up with brome-grass and sumac that Mike might not have seen it in the dark if he hadn’t known where he was going. The Power Wagon’s headlights found the break in the overgrowth, then fell across the familiar sign, the old barn door Hal’s grandfather had nailed across a pair of gnarly hedge posts sometime during the Truman administration. Its last paint job was nearly scoured away by the elements, and Mike wondered how that could be. He was the one who’d last repainted it—a thank-you to Hal for letting him use the place—and it didn’t seem like it had been all that long ago.
Lake Country Page 8