The Seven Sequels bundle

by Orca Various

  Carver perks up at the word loser.

  “You ever been in Detroit before, Rennie?”

  “No.”

  “And you say you never met Eric McLennan before?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What do you know about him?”

  “Nothing. Except he lives with his uncle and his grandfather, he’s got a major attitude problem, and he hangs with guys who look just like him—like losers.”

  Carver purses his lips. He’s inspecting me carefully. “A couple of college kids were killed last spring.”

  It’s my turn to perk up, and Carver notices.

  “You heard about that, huh?” There’s a flicker of a grin on his lips, like he thinks he’s got me now.

  “I was in a diner. It’s a few blocks from where Eric lives. The cook is a guy named Jacques, from Ivory Coast. I met him my first night here and had breakfast there the next day. There were some guys in there when I was there. They were having breakfast. They said something about two college students getting killed by some white-power guys. If you want to, you can check with Jacques. He’ll tell you.”

  Carver lets out a sigh. “A guy named Jacques is going to tell me that someone else mentioned two black kids who got murdered. What good is that going to do you, Rennie?”

  “You’ll know I’m not lying. I haven’t lied about a single thing.”

  “You’re concerned about that, are you? You’re worried I don’t believe you?”

  That is a question a person in my situation doesn’t want to have to answer. If I say I’m worried, he’s going to press on why I should worry if, as I’ve been telling him, I didn’t do anything wrong. If I say I’m not worried, he’s going to wonder why I’m so confident, why I’m going into such elaborate detail, how far ahead I worked out my story, how well I planned what happened in that alley.

  “Look,” I say. “I came to Detroit to find out some information about my grandfather. That’s how I met Eric’s grandfather. He’s a nice old guy. Eric lives with him. I don’t know anything about Eric. When he asked me to help him out, I figured it was the least I could do. I was having supper at his place. His sister made it. I didn’t know Duane. I didn’t know he was a cop. And I don’t know anything about those two college kids except what I heard in Jacques’s diner. I don’t even know why you brought them up.” I have a bad feeling about that though.

  “Two black college kids were killed in what we call a racially motivated crime.” That was what the men in the diner had said, that they were killed by a group called the Black Legion. “One was beaten to death. The other was beaten and then shot. From what we were able to find out, it was some white kids who did it. For reasons I am not going to get into with you, we’ve determined Eric McLennan to be a person of interest in the case. Are you following me?”

  “You think Eric did it?” I barely know the guy, but I wouldn’t put it past him. He’s got an attitude that I recognize only too well.

  “Eric and a couple of his associates.”

  “So, what, Duane was undercover, trying to make the case?”

  Of course, he doesn’t answer. I don’t think I expected him to. But I knew I was right. Duane had probably worked hard at getting close to Eric.

  “Eric’s pals,” I say. “Do any of them have a spider tattoo?”

  Carver rolls his eyes. “A giant one? One on his face? No, Rennie. None of Eric’s known associates has a giant tattoo spider on his face.”

  Something about the way he says it makes me sweat. Does he believe me about the tattoo or doesn’t he? Does he believe me about anything—or doesn’t he?

  “What about Eric?” I say.

  “What about him?”

  “He said he was going to turn the truck around so we could load the fridge. But he didn’t. Maybe he knew Duane was a cop. So maybe he met up with Spider Face. Maybe he was with him.”

  Carver shakes his head. “Eric was at a gas station three blocks away. We have witnesses who say he was paying for gas when gunshots were heard. He’s got an airtight alibi.”

  “And his friends? You said you think he and his friends killed those college students. Where were they when Duane got shot?”

  Again, I get no answer.

  “I didn’t do anything wrong,” I say. “I did CPR on him. Look, I could have been killed too.”

  Carver looks me straight in the eye. “But you weren’t.”

  Silence.

  “Are you going to arrest me?”

  “Let me recap the situation for you, Rennie. We’ve got a dead cop. We’ve got a murder weapon with your fingerprints on it. We’ve got you with the victim’s blood all over you. We’ve got exactly one witness to the killing—you. And you’re telling me some guy with a giant spider tattoo on his face did it. That’s what we’ve got.”

  Everything he says is factually true. But somehow the facts aren’t working in my favor.

  “I don’t know you, Rennie. I don’t know that anything you’re telling me is true. You get what I’m saying?”

  I do.

  He stands up and sweeps the file folder off the table. “You stay put,” he says.

  I do exactly that. I sit in that hard chair at that bolted-down table in that drab tiny room, my leg beating as fast as my heart, and I wait. I don’t know what I’m waiting for. To be told I can go, I guess. Definitely not to be told I’m under arrest. Definitely not that. I wait and I wish I’d never got that message from Adam. For sure I wish I’d never answered it. I wish I’d never come to Detroit.

  An hour passes. I’m hot and tired and hungry. No one has offered me anything to eat or drink, which makes me think that things aren’t going my way. Finally, the door opens and Carver comes back into the room. He has the file folder with him again, but it’s thicker now. I get a very bad feeling. I sincerely hope he isn’t about to read me my rights.

  He sits down, leans back in his chair and looks me over.

  “Rennie, you didn’t tell me you have a record,” he says. “Up there in Canada.”

  I tell him the truth, which is, “You didn’t ask me.”

  He laughs. It’s like a clap of thunder. I hear it and then it’s gone, and you’d never know by looking around that it was ever there.

  “Reads to me like you have a problem with impulse control, and maybe with keeping a lid on your temper.”

  “I guess that’s true.” Why not admit it? “I did have a problem with that.”

  “Did?”

  “I’m working on it.” Then, I suppose because I want him to see me in the best light possible, I add, “I’m back at school.”

  “Hmph.” Which I read as, “So?”

  “What do you think I should do, Rennie?” he says after a long pause. “What would you do if you were on my side of the table?”

  I want to say, Detective Carver, if I were you, I would kick me loose. Because if he did that, I’d take myself to the nearest bus station, buy a ticket for Windsor and zip across the border into good old Canada, and never look back. But trust me, the Major didn’t raise anyone that stupid. It’s not a real question. Carver isn’t asking me to make a decision for him. He’s playing with me. He’s the big old cat, and I’m the little mouse he’s flattened under his paw.

  “Some people, my lieutenant, for example—” He nods at the mirror, which is only a mirror on this side of the wall. “He thinks I should arrest you and lock you up. He thinks we have everything we need to make this case: the murder weapon, the shooter, the motive.”

  “I had no reason to kill Duane,” I tell him.

  “So you say. But, see, that’s part of the problem, Rennie. You say some guy with a spider tattoo shot Duane. You say you tried to save Duane’s life. You say the murder weapon has your prints on it because the shooter threw the gun to you.” He shakes his head again. “And then you say you had no reason to kill Duane.”

  I have to admit, if I were him I’d be a whole lot more than doubtful.

  “So here’s what I want you to do, Re
nnie.”

  I swallow hard. This is serious. Too serious.

  “I want you to take a deep breath and tell me everything you’ve done from the minute you arrived in Detroit. I don’t want you to leave anything out. Not a thing. You got that?”

  I do. I start to talk.

  TEN

  My mind is racing. I go through the whole story from start to finish. I start with Adam. I hesitate before I say what Adam and the rest of my cousins found and what they’re up to. It sounds even crazier than being shot at by a guy with a giant spider tattoo on his face. But by now it’s obvious to me that this big homicide cop is the only thing standing between me and a jail cell. If I can convince him that every word I’m saying is true, I might have a chance to get out of here and go home.

  I explain all about David McLean. Carver doesn’t interrupt me. He doesn’t get impatient and tell me to get to the point, that he doesn’t want to hear anything about anyone’s grandfather unless it’s Eric’s. The whole time I’m talking, he sits straight up in his chair, leaning forward slightly to make me think that he’s catching every word I say, and I don’t doubt he is.

  I tell him about Buenos Aires and Mirella and Heinrich Franken. I tell him about Curtis and how he crossed paths with Mirella way back when. I say I was hoping that Curtis could help me out with more information. I tell him that’s the only reason I’m in Detroit, that my being here has nothing to do with Eric McLennan. I tell him I don’t even like the guy. I tell him everything. I don’t leave anything out. At least, I don’t think I do. My main goal: to convince Detective Carver that, despite what he knows from my record and from the circumstances in which he met me, I am basically a law-abiding citizen.

  When I finish, Carver says nothing. Minutes tick by.

  “That’s it?” he asks finally. “That’s everything?”

  “That’s everything.”

  I say it not because it’s true. It’s not. Not exactly. There’s one little thing I don’t tell him. It’s not that I want to lie. What I want is for him to believe me. And it worries me that if I tell him this one thing, it’ll make him take another hard look at me and decide to charge me and lock me up. I don’t tell him about seeing Duane in Eric’s garage, and I pray in my own way that it won’t come back to bite me in the butt.

  Carver gets up and leaves the room again. He’s gone for a long time, during which I put my head down on the table and try to catch a little sleep. It’s crazy, I know. One minute I’m so jumpy I’m like a perpetual-motion machine. The next, I’m exhausted.

  Carver shakes me, hard.

  I sit up. My neck is stiff. My mouth is dry. My stomach is rumbling.

  Carver slides a can of pop in front of me. I snap it open and gulp greedily. He has a cup of coffee for himself. He sits down, again with the file folder.

  “I’ve gotta tell you, Rennie,” he says. “I’ve had a lot of people sit in that chair over the years, and a lot of them—most of them—have started by telling me cockamamie stories about how I’ve got the wrong person, how it couldn’t possibly be them. If I was inclined, and I’m not, not even remotely, I could write a book. Seriously. You wouldn’t believe the nonsense I’ve heard. Frankly, some of it is downright insulting. I didn’t get here by being the dumbest cop on the beat.”

  That bad feeling I’ve had ever since I was put in this room gets dramatically worse.

  “Your story, son…” He shakes his head. “It’s the cockamamiest one I’ve ever heard, I kid you not. A grandfather with secret identities and a bunch of passports. Hidden money. Coded notes. It wouldn’t even make a good novel. It’s too crazy.”

  “But—”

  His hand slashes through the air and makes me bite my tongue.

  “Nobody would believe it,” he says. “No cop I know. No sane jury member. Even a rookie defense attorney would advise you to come up with something better.”

  The soda in my belly starts churning like an ocean in the middle of a hurricane.

  “If it wasn’t for that thing you pulled off in Iceland,” he says. He flips open the file folder, and there are some pages printed out from the Internet. About me. In Iceland. About what happened there. “And these guys—they’re your cousins, right?” He flips the pages. There’s a small article about my cousin Bunny, who got himself into a scrape with some gang members. Thank you, Bunny. There’s a news item about Webb too, from some little newspaper way up north. “That whole idea, some guy leaving a video and sending his grandsons on these crazy missions—that’s cockamamie too. But it looks to me like it’s not the stories that are nuts. It was your grandfather. No offense.”

  “None taken,” I say.

  He leans back in his chair and studies me. “So you’re here trying to track down what your grandfather had to do with some Nazi, huh?”

  “I have a picture in my wallet.” I start to reach for it and then stop. He nods. I pull my wallet out of my pocket and show him the copy of the newspaper photo Adam sent me. He looks at it and nods.

  “Cockamamie,” he says. “The thing is, Rennie, you have a record. You’ve been associating with a person of extreme interest in an unsolved murder instigated, we believe, by racial hatred. You were at the scene of the murder of a police officer. You’re the only witness, and there are elements of the situation that put you in a very bad light. You understand that, right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And I’m sure you can understand that all of this makes my lieutenant antsy. Very antsy. He thinks that if I let you walk out of here, that even if I tell you not to leave town, that kind of thing, you’ll shoot back across the border and give us a gigantic paperwork headache when we need you back down here again when and if this case goes to trial.”

  I hold my breath. Does that mean he believes my story? Or is this some kind of trick? Is he watching for my reaction? What’s the best way for someone in my position to act? How do I make him believe I’m innocent?

  “Now, I guess I could contact your father in Pakistan.”

  “Afghanistan,” I say. “Sir.”

  “Afghanistan. I could tell him your situation and ask that he come back here.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t do that.” I wish it fervently.

  “I bet you do.” He sips his coffee. “My father was a military man too. A real disciplinarian.”

  “That’s the Major,” I say.

  “Is there someone else you can contact? Another family member?”

  “What for?”

  “To come down here and talk to us. So maybe we can work something out.”

  My heart flutters. Is he going to let me go? If he does, is it because he believes me?

  “There’s my grandmother. She lives in Toronto.”

  He takes a notebook from his jacket pocket and slides it across the table together with a pen. “Write down her name and phone number.”

  I stare at the pen. I don’t reach for it.

  “I’d rather contact her myself. She’ll freak out if a cop calls her.” Especially a Detroit homicide cop. “She has no idea I’m even down here.”

  Carver sits still for a moment. “Okay,” he says. “I’ll get you a phone. You talk to her, and then I talk to her.”

  “I have my cell phone,” I say.

  There’s a long pause.

  “Okay. You call her. You talk to her. When you’re done, you let me know and I’ll talk to her.” He stands up to leave. I can’t shake the idea that he’s setting a trap for me. But I say okay, and I pull out my cell phone and punch in my grandmother’s phone number.

  “Hello?”

  The voice that answers isn’t the one I’m expecting.

  It’s not my grandmother. It’s Ari. I think about hitting the End button—that’s how much I like the guy. But if I want to get out of this police station, I need to talk to my grandmother.

  “Hey, Ari. Is my grandma around?”

  “Rennie? I thought I recognized your number. Mel’s been expecting you.” That’s my grandmother, Melanie. �
��To be honest, she’s been worried. Is everything okay?”

  See, that’s the thing with Ari. You ask him a simple question—“Is my grandma there?”—but you don’t get a simple, “Yes, I’ll put her on.” No, you get Ari’s take on things. You get him asking you questions, like I even care what he thinks. And I don’t. I don’t care if he and Grandma have been best buddies since before I was born. I don’t care if they visit back and forth—even though Grandma tells me there’s absolutely nothing romantic going on between them. All I know is that Ari gives me the creeps. He asks too many questions. He watches people the way a fox watches a henhouse. And he’s a know-it-all.

  “I just need to talk to Grandma, Ari.” I can’t make it any plainer than that.

  “She can’t come to the phone right now.”

  “Why not? She’s okay, isn’t she?” Then I have a thought. I pray—boy, do I pray—that he’s not going to tell me she’s in the shower. I mean, it’s bad enough that he’s there at her place in the middle of the night. I glance at my watch. Correction: at six in the morning. But if I have to put it all together—Ari, early morning, Grandma in shower—I think I’ll puke.

  “She was at her friend Joyce’s last night.” Joyce and Grandma apparently raised hell back in the day. “They had a little too much wine, I think. She’s sound asleep. And it is early. Can you call back later? Or do you want her to give you a shout?”

  Before I can answer, I hear a sleepy voice. “Hello?”

  “Grandma?”

  “Rennie? Is that you?” She sounds instantly alert. “Where are you? Are you okay?”

  “Sorry to wake you, Grandma.”

  “I’ve been worried. You were supposed to be here by now.”

  “I know. Something came up.”

  “You should have called. I was about to see if I could contact your father.”

  “No! Don’t do that!”

  I can’t see my grandmother, and she doesn’t say a word, but I have no trouble picturing her sitting straight up in bed now, her granny antennae quivering.