Dukes swallowed hard as he looked back and forth between us. That’s when his neighbor came bursting out his back door, holding a baseball bat.
“Put the bat down!” Lou said, pointing the gun at him. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
“Put it down, Eddie!” Dukes was making no effort to get up yet. “For God’s sake, put it down!”
Neighbor Eddie did as he was told. He stood there on the other side of the driveway, his hands in the air and the bat at his feet. I looked around and wondered if the police cars would be here in two minutes or just one. But the street looked quiet.
“Can we take this inside,” I said, “before we all get arrested?”
We led them back into Eddie’s house. The customer took one look at us and the gun in Lou’s hand and bolted out the front door. Which was fine by me. Lou told the two men to make themselves comfortable on the sofa. I stayed on my feet, pacing back and forth across the room and trying to bring my heart rate back into double digits. Lou just stood there glaring down at both men, his arms folded and the gun still in his right hand. Never mind the fact that we had just spent most of the last twenty-four hours together… The way he had disarmed the man, and now the absolute calm on that ageless weathered face, made me realize how little I really knew about him.
“Lou,” I said, “you can put the gun away.”
“I’ll keep it right here, Alex. We don’t want these gentlemen to get any funny ideas.”
“Okay, now you sound like a gangster. We all need to turn it down a notch.”
“This clown brought the gun into the equation,” Lou said, nodding toward Dukes. “It wasn’t our idea.”
“The man is scared out of his mind,” I said, and as I looked down at him I could see how true that was. His hands were shaking so badly that he could barely keep them together. Beside him, Eddie was trying to look small and inconspicuous, probably for the first time in his life. He was failing miserably.
“What are you scared of?” Lou asked Dukes.
He started fumbling around for an answer, but it was like he just couldn’t put the sounds together into words.
“Okay, stop,” I said. “We’re not here to hurt you, I swear. Just take a breath.”
He nodded his head and did his best to compose himself. As he did, I took a good look around Eddie’s house. It was the house of a man living alone, that much was obvious. The furniture was ugly and simple. There was a big-screen television across from the couch and a collection of empty beer cans on either side table. The carpet needed vacuuming. Everything needed vacuuming, including the air itself. On what passed as a dining room table, there were newspapers and magazines and a small scale. Something told me it wasn’t a Weight Watcher’s scale for measuring out food portions.
I grabbed one of the dining room chairs and positioned it in front of the two men.
“Let me start,” I said. “My name is Alex. I know your name is Andy Dukes and this man here is Eddie, right?”
They both nodded.
“We’re looking for two men. One is named Vinnie LeBlanc, the other is Buck Carrick. They’re both from Bay Mills. Do either of those names mean anything to you?”
“No,” Dukes said. “No, I swear.” He looked me in the eye for the first time since sitting down. He didn’t look away. I would have bet everything I owned that he was lying to me.
Lou obviously had the same impression, because he went right over to Dukes and put the revolver to his temple.
“You know how much I hate liars?” Lou said.
Eddie made a move to get up.
“Sit down or I’ll shoot both of you.”
Eddie sat back down and closed his eyes. He was shaking just as badly as Dukes now.
“Lou, for the last time,” I said, wondering how many felonies we’d actually end up committing that day, “put the gun away before somebody gets killed.”
This was not going the way I had planned it, to say the least. This was light-years away from any possible way I would have imagined it. But we were here and the gun was in Lou’s hand and I figured, what the hell. If there was ever a time for a little game of good cop/bad cop…
“I don’t want him to shoot you,” I said, “but I honestly think he might if you lie to us again.”
“What do you want from me?” Dukes said. “Who are you guys?”
“I told you, I’m a friend of Vinnie LeBlanc’s. This is his father. He’s going to try to cool it for a minute so you can talk.”
Lou looked over at me for a moment, then he took a step backward.
“Buck Carrick is Vinnie’s cousin,” I said. “We have reason to believe that Buck may have been at the Newberry airport the other night when those five men all had their shootout. We know that the airplane was carrying in marijuana from Canada, and we know that you’re a dealer.”
“Who told you that?”
“One of your customers. It doesn’t matter.”
“Who was it?”
“I told you, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’re obviously connected to what happened at the airport. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t be hiding in your next-door neighbor’s house.”
“I’m not connected to it. I swear I’m not.”
“Here’s a little tip,” I said, sneaking a quick look at Lou. “Every time you say, ‘I swear,’ you give yourself away.”
“I’m not,” he said. “I’m not really connected. I just…”
He let out a long breath and looked down at his hands.
“You just what?” I said.
“I didn’t think anything like that would happen. I just helped them with an idea. That’s all I did.”
“Who are we talking about?”
“Some people,” he said. “From downstate.”
“All right, we’ll come back to who those people are. Tell me about this idea you helped them with.”
“They wanted to find another airport, after what happened the last time. With those guys ripping off the delivery in Sandusky. Or wherever that was. When the plane landed, the regular pickup dudes who were going to meet the plane, they were handcuffed to the fence. These other guys took all the bags and they told the pilot to fly back to Canada and to tell the growers over there that they had new contacts in the States.”
“That part I know about,” I said. “So you’re telling me your friends decided not to stand by and let this happen?”
“They’re not my friends,” he said quickly. “Come on, this is all business. I just get my supply from them. But when I knew they were looking around for another airport, I told them they should think about up here.”
“So it was your idea, you’re saying. You weren’t just helping them with the idea.”
“Yeah, I guess it was. It was my idea.”
“It got five people killed,” I said. “You realize that, right?”
“Those guys weren’t supposed to find out. It shouldn’t have happened.”
“Whatever you say. Keep talking. What happened next?”
“These people from downstate, they came up here to check it out, and I was showing them around, you know, and at first they weren’t too sure about it, because for one thing you gotta take everything back down over the bridge. But I was like, hey, you just pull up and pay your three-fifty toll. It’s not like they’re gonna search the truck or anything. So then they were like, okay, let’s see some of the airports, and I took them around to Saint Ignace and Sanderson, and then I finally took them out to Newberry. And they were like, this would be perfect if it wasn’t so deserted.”
“Wait,” I said. “I thought that was the whole point. I thought you wanted it to be deserted so nobody would notice the plane landing.”
“You don’t want anybody to notice,” he said, “but you also need to have more than one road out of there. That way, if somebody does see you, you can still get away. With Newberry, you just got the one road going east-west, or maybe you could take the crossroad north, but then you’d just be driving all that way up to Paradise and then you’d still have to loop back around. It wouldn’t take more than two cop cars to totally nail you.”