“Excuse me,” I said.
He turned his head but did not stop working.
“Is Michael Bettich here?”
He shook his head.
“Expect her anytime soon?”
“Couldn’t say.”
“Know where I can find her?”
He shook his head again. “Not my turn to watch her,” he told me, trying to turn the fitting, meeting stubborn resistance.
“It’s important that I find her.”
“Not to me,” he replied, grunting loudly as the fitting slowly turned.
The other workers were equally helpful.
I returned to my car and sat with the door open while listening to the public radio station out of the University of Minnesota-Duluth—the only station I could dial up that played jazz. After two songs I shut the door and fired up the Colt, deciding against waiting for Michael’s return.
“It shouldn’t be this hard, it really shouldn’t,” I muttered.
It wasn’t.
Just as I was about to put my car into gear, a Chevy Blazer cruised into the lot sporting all the paraphernalia of a police vehicle; KREEL COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT and a six-pointed star were stenciled on both doors. It was driven by Deputy Gretchen Rovick. Alison Donnerbauer Emerton was her passenger. She had changed the color of her hair from brown to a deep auburn—women have always found it easier to change their appearance than men—but even through the windshield, her blue-green eyes were undisguisable.
I stepped out of my car as the vehicle stopped. Gretchen took a hard look at me. She clearly didn’t like what she saw.
“What?” Alison asked. I couldn’t hear her, but it was easy enough to read her lips through the glass.
“Taylor,” Gretchen answered.
Alison seemed genuinely surprised that I had found her.
I waited until they exited the vehicle.
“Good morning, Deputy,” I said to Gretchen. She didn’t reply. I turned to the other woman. Ginger had been right. She was much prettier in person. “Alison Donnerbauer Emerton, I presume. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”
Alison smiled slightly. “I must have screwed up.”
I told her where. She tapped her forehead with the fingers of her right hand as if to punish herself for her carelessness. “I’d forgotten I told Marie about the name Rosalind Colletti,” she confessed.
“We all make mistakes.”
“And this one is going to cost me, isn’t it? How much?”
A bribe? I thought it was beneath her and told her so. “Besides, I’m already being well paid.”
“What then? What will make you go away?”
“Tell me why, that’s all. Tell me why you went to all the trouble.” I was desperate to hear her explanation, and it probably showed.
She smiled at me; it was a superior smile. “It’s a long story, and quite frankly I see no reason to share it with you.”
Gretchen chuckled. She was leaning on the front fender of her Blazer, watching us.
“I could make your life difficult,” I told Alison.
She smiled some more. A threat? She thought it was beneath me and told me so.
I was contemplating a reply—and getting nowhere—when a desperate squeal of tires captured my attention. A white Buick Regal was cutting across the parking lot at high speed, spitting chunks of gravel and an impressive dust cloud behind it. Two men I couldn’t identify sat in the front seat. Suddenly the car skidded to a stop thirty yards in front of us. The passenger was holding something at arm’s length and pointing it out of the window.
“Down!” I screamed and tried to pull Alison to the ground.
Alison pushed me away and stood up, watching me and not the car, asking angrily, “What are you doing?!”
Bullets were already flying. Gretchen took a slug in the leg. The force of the blow spun her against the side of the Blazer and knocked her down. I rolled away from the Buick, more or less toward the Blazer; and rolled over a Smith and Wesson .38—Gretchen’s gun. I grabbed it with both hands and continued rolling until I was on my feet in a Weaver stance, a shooting stance with good balance. The Buick was moving now, heading out of the parking lot. I squeezed off four rounds just as it hit the highway. The rear window shattered, littering the asphalt with tiny fragments of safety glass. The car fishtailed but didn’t stop.
Her skin was a ghastly, ashen color, and her breathing was so shallow that for a moment I thought she might be dead. But she was warm to my touch, and I could detect a rapid, thready pulse. I gently rolled her onto her back, and she opened her eyes. They were filled with terror and confusion. I said something to her. I don’t remember what. “You’ll be all right, Alison.” Something like that.
I tore open her blouse. The hole was slightly above and to the left of her right breast. I sprinted to Gretchen’s patrol car and found her first-aid kit. I packed the wound with gauze, trying to prevent air from entering the chest cavity. I was fumbling with a compress when I heard Gretchen’s voice.
“Officer down! Officer down!” she repeated. She wasn’t quite screaming. I glanced up at her. She was in the Blazer, laying on her side across the front seat, favoring her right leg as she worked the radio. I could see a hole midway up her thigh. Blood was seeping out of it.
“Deputy Rovick, you’ve been shot,” I told her.
“Don’t you think I know that?!” This time she was screaming.
When we had talked over dinner three weeks earlier, Gretchen had accused her fellow deputies in the Kreel County Sheriff’s Department of sexism, insisting that they were slower to respond when she called for backup than when male deputies called. Maybe so. But you couldn’t prove it by me because an officer—a male— arrived within two minutes, and within five more it seemed the entire day watch had converged on The Harbor. The workers inside the resort studied us through the large windows. Some of them were eating their lunches.
The first officer to arrive went directly to Gretchen. His name tag read: G. LOUSHINE.
“I need a tourniquet!” he barked over his shoulder.
I tossed him one from the first-aid kit while continuing to maintain pressure on Alison’s sucking chest wound with the palm of my hand. Her eyes were still open, but she didn’t speak.
“Two suspects, white males I think, driving a white four-door sedan,” Gretchen recited as the deputy applied the tourniquet. “They hit us with a MAC 10.”
“A Buick Regal, Wisconsin plates W-ZERO-F-F-W,” I added. “And it was an UZI.”
“You’re crazy! How do you know that?” Gretchen yelled at me.
“How come you don’t?” I yelled back. Gretchen didn’t relay even her incomplete information to dispatch when she called for assistance, giving the suspects a good five-minute head start, and it troubled me.
“W-ZERO-F-F-W?” Loushine repeated.
“Call letters for a ham radio operator,” I told him. “Wisconsin allows hams to use their call letters in place of regular license plate numbers.”
“That’s right,” Loushine agreed under his breath and sprinted to his own car to broadcast the information I supplied instead of using Gretchen’s radio. Perhaps he didn’t want to embarrass her.
While Loushine was making his call, the sheriff arrived. His name tag read: R. ORMAN. He didn’t rush to his deputy’s side, which is what I would have done. Instead, he moved directly to where Alison lay on the gravel in an expanding pool of her own blood.
“My God!” he said, sucking in his breath. “Mike!” He knelt next to her and took her hand in both of his. “Mike,” he repeated. The woman looked up at him but otherwise didn’t respond.
The sheriff’s eyes glazed over until they resembled Alison’s. They were both in shock. Loushine placed a hand on the sheriff’s shoulder and said, “The bus is on its way.” Orman didn’t reply, and Loushine had to shake him. “Sheriff? Sheriff, the bus is on its way.”
Orman turned to stare at his deputy, but it was a few moments before his eyes focused.
“Saginau to Deer Lake, thirty-seven minutes,” he said shaking his head, regaining his senses. “The Harbor is midway—make it eighteen minutes. Another eighteen going back. Too long. Can’t wait for the ambulance. We’ll take her to the hospital in my car. Get a blanket.” A few seconds later four of us gently lifted Alison from the gravel and slid the blanket underneath her. I insisted that we roll her over on her chest. “Transport the victim with her injured side down,” the first-aid manual says. Using the blanket as a stretcher, we gently placed the woman on the back seat of the sheriff’s car. I rode with her. No one questioned this.