by Dan Ames
I hugged the girls and Anna, and they walked out of the pool area, leaving wet footprints behind them.
Ellen and I left, too. We found the dining room empty and grabbed a table with four chairs. The only people in the place were a couple of servers setting up tables. A giant black bear, stuffed of course, stood in the corner and supervised all of us. I wondered if, at night when all the guests were asleep, the stuffed bear chased the stuffed moose around the resort. Maybe they were friends and played in the pool.
“So how’s the search for Dynamite going?” Ellen asked, interrupting my musings.
I took her through everything I’d done, including the meetings with Don White and John Harrison.
“Huh,” she said. “So, you’re nowhere.”
“More or less,” I said. “No way to ID the guy driving Dynamite’s Bronco. No one’s seen him. He hasn’t reappeared.”
“This is a lot tougher gig for you when you don’t have a sibling on the local police force, isn’t it?” Ellen asked.
“Don’t flatter yourself,” I said. But she was right, of course.
“Now what are you going to do?”
“I need more information,” I said. “Something more to go on. It happens almost every time I take a case like this. I have to go back to my client and see if there’s anything else they can tell me.”
“And do they usually have something else to say?”
I winked at her.
“Here’s a little tip from an experienced private investigator regarding clients,” I said. “They always have more information.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
The next morning, I checked out of the resort, saw my family off, and got a rental car from the local Avis dealer.
It was a real piece of crap.
A tiny white Chevy with an engine that sounded like a lawn mower.
It was time to talk to my client.
Lindsey Nordegren and her absentee husband did not live in one of the mega mansions along the shore of Lake Michigan.
Instead, they lived in a newly built contemporary dwelling on a bluff overlooking a small inland lake, about a mile from Good Isle.
I turned down a road named Nordegren Way and it led to only one house.
First clue you have a lot of money? When you can name the street you live on after yourself.
I could see it now: John Rockne Road. Boy, that sounded nice.
The house was a concrete monster, all right angles, overhangs, towering windows and exposed black metal supports. A monument to modernism, new home construction, and an unlimited budget.
It was also nearly entirely devoid of landscaping save for perfectly manicured green grass that ran down to a dock that stuck out into the breathtakingly blue water of the lake.
Lindsey Nordegren was waiting for me at the front door.
“Leif is very big into security,” she explained. “I’ve been watching you for the past five minutes.”
My first reaction was to think if I’d done something gross. Luckily, I hadn’t.
Lindsey gestured for me to enter the house, so I complied. Black metal steps led up to a wide open space that served as a great room. It was like still being outside thanks to the banks of windows that made up practically every wall in the room. The floor was wood, as blonde as the lady of the house, and all of the walls were painted white.
It felt a little like an insane asylum. Or, at least, what I thought one would look like.
We crossed the room, Lindsey’s black heels making a sound that seemed deafening in the quiet space.
She gestured to a sitting area whose window provided a stunning view of the lake.
“This lake is amazing,” I said. “The water looks like the Caribbean.”
“Spring-fed,” Lindsey said. “It’s the only thing I liked about the place.”
“Really? It’s spectacular.” I had caught her use of the past tense but decided to let it go. For now.
“It’s for sale if you want to buy it,” she replied.
I thought about how to respond to that.
“It includes the lake,” she added.
At first, I thought she was joking, but then when I looked at her face, I realized she was serious. And I also realized why the lake looked so gorgeous. There weren’t any other homes on it. The whole lake to myself. How cool would that be?
“Do you go skinny dipping every night?” I asked. “I would.”
She looked out at the lake and I thought she was going to say something, but then she changed her mind.
Lindsey turned from the window and looked at me, her eyes cool and distant.
“I take it you haven’t found him,” she said.
“I’m afraid you’re right,” I admitted.
She sighed.
“It would have been nice to get this all wrapped up,” she said.
Sometimes I had to admit I could be a little slow on the uptake. Saying the house was for sale, the emptiness of the place.
“You’re leaving,” I said.
“It seems to be a trend.” There was irony in her voice, along with sadness and resignation.
“Your husband isn’t coming back, is he?” I had finally put it all together.
“No, it seems he has fallen in love with Italy. Specifically, an Italian countess with almost as much money as Leif,” she said. “Their relationship, I’m sure, is just an embarrassment of riches.”
Now the house felt really big and empty. I felt sorry for her.
“Where are you going?”
“Anywhere but Italy,” she said with a laugh. God, she was a beautiful woman. With the startling blue of the lake behind her, her face was like a perfect sculpture. And when she smiled, it only got prettier.
“Somewhere warm,” she continued. “It’s been so cold up here. I’ve always liked San Diego. Maybe I’ll get a condo in La Jolla. Stare out at the Pacific instead of Lake Nordegren.”
The laugh was more of a scoff.
“Do you want me to keep looking for Dawkins?”
She took her time answering. Was she considering how much of an investment she had made emotionally in him? I figured there would be a direct correlation between her true feelings for Dawkins and the lengths she would go to find him.
Finally, she reached her answer.
“I want you to find him,” she said. “Cost is no object. You can continue to get your checks from Beau, although now that Leif and I are officially over, there’s not much need for secrecy. But it will make things easier.”
I assumed she meant in the impending divorce.
“Okay,” I said. “Is there anything more you can tell me about Dawkins? I know we’ve been through it all once. But since then, have you thought of any other places he might have gone? Or been taken? Anybody want to hurt him that you didn’t want to discuss in front of Beau, or that maybe you realized you’d neglected to mention?”
“No, we didn’t do a whole lot of talking when we were together,” she said, raising her eyebrow slightly at me.
“He had some business issues with his former manager and the manager’s company,” I offered.
“Don White?” she asked. “It wouldn’t surprise me. That guy is a creep. One time I came home and he was here, talking to my husband. Pitching some kind of business deal or something. After he left, I told Leif I never wanted to see that man in my home again. Gave me the willies.”
“And Dynamite had no family you knew of?”
“He never mentioned anyone,” Lindsey said. “He hardly mentioned anyone or anything because he’s a man of few words. Very thoughtful, though. Just doesn’t often share what’s on his mind. I liked that about him.”
“Well, as a PI trying to track him down, I definitely don’t like that about him,” I said. “I like loud, obnoxious people. The quiet ones make my job a lot harder.”
She shrugged her shoulders and I knew what she was thinking.
What can you do?
We talked a little more but she had nothing
to add, and I got the sense she wasn’t too happy to have a visitor. Eventually, she walked me to the front door and we said our goodbyes.
When I drove away from the house, I glanced back and she was framed in the middle of the house’s main window.
It looked like a staged photograph.
A sad one.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Ever-widening circles.
That’s what the good guys in the old Westerns would do. If they were tracking a bad guy, and they lost the trail, they’d slowly ride in ever-widening circles, looking for any stray track or sign that their quarry had passed through.
Not exactly the highest tech approach to finding a missing person, but Good Isle was a small town. And as long as I believed that Dynamite Dawkins was still in the general area, I figured what the hell.
A vintage Bronco would stand out like a sore thumb, even up here.
There were old SUVs, certainly, but most of them were ridden hard and put away wet, as the saying goes. With all the snow, the roads during winter were doused heavily with salt, and if you lived long enough up here you could tell by the giant swatches of rust your vehicle soon became infected with.
So that’s what I did.
I drove into the center of town, and then slowly drove in a rough circle, widening my search area with each turn. I was mostly looking for the Bronco, even though I’d done my homework and had looked at enough pictures of Dawkins to know what he looked like.
But the Bronco was the key.
A fully restored, mint condition, vintage Ford Bronco would be easy to spot.
And once I had the vehicle, I was pretty sure I would have Dawkins.
I quickly learned that there were no real bad areas of Good Isle. If Ellen got the job here, she wouldn’t have too much crime to deal with. Not even littering.
It also became apparent that despite a general sense of sophistication, the citizens of Good Isle liked to drink. There seemed to be more than enough drinking establishments to go around. Which meant the opposite for Ellen. Probably a lot of drunk and disorderlies up here, especially during the winter when there was nothing else to do but get hammered.
As the saying went, during winter, it wasn’t just the streets that got plowed daily.
On one of the last roads on the outskirts of Good Isle I saw a Bronco and allowed my hopes to momentarily spike. But when I got closer, I saw that it was a disaster on wheels with no hubcaps, covered in rust, and mismatched body panels.
No way that was a “lovingly restored” Bronco.
Another hour took me out further and further into the country, where my circles always eventually touched back to the lake.
My gas tank indicator told me I needed to fill up and it was good timing because I was sick of driving, but then a big white SUV roared past me. It was a high-end Japanese model, maybe a Lexus or an Infiniti.
It wasn’t the make of the vehicle that caught my eye.
It was the driver.
Don White.
Forgetting the need to get gas, I set off in pursuit.
He was driving way too fast for the posted speed limit, which was 45.
White was doing at least seventy and I had to wonder where the hell he was going that demanded such a fast pace.
We were going directly east, away from Lake Michigan, out toward some of the other smaller, inland lakes, and eventually the Interstate.
About a mile from I-75, White suddenly braked and took a crazy-fast left turn onto a small dirt road.
Now my yellow warning light for low gas came on, but I had to follow. I could always hitchhike if I ran out of fuel.
The road was steep and covered in gravel. Remnants of White’s dust obscured my view as I desperately tried to keep up, but I knew I was falling further and further behind.
If only I had the minivan. Yeah, say what you want, but that vehicle had a nice V-6, very powerful. Plus, I sat up higher, which would have helped with all this dust.
Instead, I was in a glorified golf cart with an engine that sounded like an oven fan, so low to the ground I was in the thickest part of the dirt cloud.
I was about to stop and turn around when suddenly, there was Don White’s big SUV, in the middle of the road, turned sideways blocking the way.
Even with my foot jammed on the brake, I was barely able to stop, the car sliding forward until I was a foot from smashing into the bigger vehicle.
The door handle was in my grasp when it was wrenched open and my arm was grabbed.
Suddenly, I was hauled bodily from the car and as I straightened up, a fist crashed into my jaw.
My back landed on the road and I looked up to see a man now standing above me.
I’d seen him before.
In John Harrison’s shop.
What was his name?
Darnell.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The sucker punch that had knocked me on my ass, hadn’t knocked me out.
However, the sequence of events that landed me in the back of Don White’s SUV was like a bad movie, thanks in no small part to the effects of the blow.
My mind was suddenly grainy, full of poorly edited jump cuts and a bizarre soundtrack.
The punch had been a good one and my face ached. I had a horrible headache and being crammed into the back of the SUV wasn’t helping matters.
My hands were tied behind my back and my face was smashed into the floor. I rolled over as best I could, until I could at least see the ceiling of the vehicle.
Yep, definitely Don White’s SUV. I could see the back of the seat to my right, it looked like plush leather and I also got a whiff of cologne. Of course, Don White would wear a ton of cologne. The man blasted shotguns in his backyard wearing a thong.
Shit.
I thought about my rental car. What were they going to do with it? And my phone. Where was my phone? I tried to feel if it was in my pocket and I didn’t think so. I thought back and figured that I had probably set it in the car’s cupholder.
Not good.
The rental car had a GPS, though. So I figured if Ellen would wonder where I was, she might go there and see if I’d returned the car, at which point they would be able to find the vehicle.
But how long would all of that take?
Plus, that would only happen if my abductors hadn’t stolen the car, which they probably had. After assault and kidnapping, what was a little grand theft auto?
Or maybe they’d drive it into a lake somewhere after stuffing my dead body into it.
That’s real positive, John.
I started sweating and could make out voices from the front of the vehicle. They probably didn’t have the air conditioning turned on for the back of the vehicle.
“Hey, can you turn on the AC back here?” I shouted, glad they hadn’t gagged me.
“Shut the fuck up,” a voice called back. “Say anything else and we’ll put a bullet in your head and dump you in the swamp.”
He sounded sincere, but technically there weren’t any swamps around here. Marshes, for sure. But no one thought of them as swamps. I made a mental note to correct him once my imposed period of silence was over.
That had sounded like Don White’s voice, but I couldn’t be sure. My ears were ringing from being socked in the jaw.
As we drove, I occasionally heard snippets of conversation from the front.
“…bullshit…”
“…how many…”
“…ass-kicking…”
“…bitch…”
Not exactly the Algonquin Round Table going on up there, I thought.
But both the tone and the content of their words confirmed that White and Darnell, and probably others, had grabbed Dawkins, too.
Was John Harrison involved?
Darnell had been at his shop. Was this some kind of militia thing? Why would they have grabbed a retired boxer? Ransom? Demands from the government?
Maybe the plan was to blackmail Lindsay Nordegren. I would be more than happy to tell them wha
t a bad plan that was.
The whole thing didn’t make any sense to me.
Right now, I wished I was on the way back to Grosse Pointe with my family, instead of going who knows where in Don White’s gaudy vehicle.
After what felt like hours but was probably more likely forty-five minutes or so, we hit a really rough road, and I knew we were going into the middle of nowhere. Roads like these are all over northern Michigan and when you feel that washboard pattern, you know you’re well away from modern civilization.
Eventually, the vehicle came to a stop. My circulation had stopped well before that, and my fingers and hands were tingling from numbness.
The passengers in the front got out and I hoped they were coming to get me, but they weren’t.
I waited another twenty minutes before the rear door opened and Darnell hoisted me out.
My legs had turned into jelly so I stumbled and nearly fell.
In front of me was a temporary tent, with a square in the middle delineated by a single strand of rope shaped roughly into a square.
A boxing ring.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Dawkins started with a small cough.
Troy had Wheel of Fortune on the television and was shouting out guesses.
“Green beans!” he yelled.
Dawkins coughed again, this time a little louder.
“Great plans?” Troy shouted. “Shit!”
Billy had been working himself up, swallowing as much saliva and air as possible, psyching himself up for what he was about to do next.
Troy helped by shutting off the television after the contestants guessed the answer before he did.
Never a good sign of your intelligence.
“Stupid show,” Troy said. “But I’d bang the crap out of Vanna, even if she’s eighty years old. Instead of turning those letters she can twirl my balls.”
Dawkins suddenly buckled on the cot, as if wracked by a spasm.
He rolled onto his side and willed himself to vomit, sending a shower of saliva mixed with blood onto the floor of the cabin.