“I’m a friend of Buck’s,” I said. I gave them my number, told them to call me back.
“How long to get there?” Lou said. “Two and a half hours?”
I turned the page over and read it again. Dukes hadn’t had an exact address to give me, but he had written out the directions. It could all have been fake, but something told me he was just as bad a liar on paper as he was in person.
“Maybe closer to two hours,” I said, “if you gun it.”
He gunned it. We crossed the bridge and kept going straight south. Next stop, a farmhouse just outside Cadillac. We were going for some answers, but hell, maybe Vinnie and Buck would be there. Maybe we’d pull up and they’d all be sitting there in the shade, Harry and Josephine Kaiser and their two guests from the UP.
Maybe, just this once, we’d catch a break and this whole thing would be over.
I wasn’t betting on it.
CHAPTER TEN
I had two hours to think about things. I wasn’t even driving, so I put my head back, closed my eyes, and played it all back in slow motion. I had come way too close to getting my ass shot off, that was the first thing that hit me. I had jumped in front of a drug dealer who was obviously scared out of his mind, and I had done this completely unarmed. If Lou hadn’t stepped up behind him, I might well have been still lying on that asphalt, looking up at the sky with yet another bullet in my chest. If there really is a place you go after you die, where you need to justify your life, surviving two shootings and yet somehow dying in a third was something I would have had a hard time explaining.
I opened my eyes and looked over at Lou. He was staring dead ahead, both hands on the wheel. That scar on his jawline went all the way back, under his ear, into his hair, and it was just one more reminder that this man had led a hard life I knew very little about. Like him chopping that man right in the throat, or later, pulling out that gun and pressing it against the man’s head. I mean, I knew these were extraordinary circumstances. The man was looking for his only remaining son, after all. But some things you make yourself do because you have to, and some things you do because you’ve done them in the past and you know they work. It’s so easy and immediate, it’s practically muscle memory.
“That gun,” I said, finally making a sound after sixty or seventy miles. “I’m just thinking…”
“You didn’t expect me to give it back to him, did you?”
“No, I didn’t. But I’m not sure keeping it under the car seat is such a hot idea.”
“You may have a point,” he said. “As a convicted felon, I’m not supposed to be in possession of a firearm. That’s what you’re saying, right? I guess maybe I shouldn’t have taken it away from him? I should have just let him shoot you?”
“That’s not where I was going. I was just thinking there might be a better place for it. Like in the glove compartment. Unloaded.”
He worked that over for a mile, mile and a half. Then he reached under the seat and brought out the gun. It was a Smith & Wesson.357, now that I was finally getting a closer look at it, and it looked a lot like the service weapon I’d carried in Detroit. He passed it to me handle first without taking his eyes off the road. I swung open the cylinder and emptied the six rounds into my left hand. I opened up the glove compartment and put the works on top of his rental agreement. Then I closed it.
“I should probably thank you at some point,” I said. “If that thing really was cocked and ready, he could have shot me without even thinking of it.”
“Buy me a beer later,” he said. “You would have done the same thing.”
Another mile went by.
“Besides,” he said, “it was your idea that got us here. I was just doing my part. But now that we’ve got something to go on, I mean, what do you think we’re gonna find at this farmhouse? You think the Kaisers will be there?”
“Only one way to find out.”
“What kind of people do you think we’re talking about, anyway?” he said. “A couple of heavy hitters pretending to be hippies? Does that make any sense at all to you?”
“I don’t even care,” I said. “As long as we get some answers.”
A point he couldn’t argue with. We were into the Lower Peninsula now, still making good time down I-75. We passed by Gaylord and then Grayling, then we got off the expressway around Houghton Lake and made our way west. It was yet another flat and empty part of the state, and we passed through small towns named Merritt and Lake City. We drove right into the center of Cadillac, where the road came to a T on the shores of Lake Cadillac. There were restaurants and people walking down the sidewalks with ice cream cones. Historical markers and an old locomotive sitting right in the middle of a park, but we had no time for any of it. We were looking for a street just north of town, so we made our way up the main road. As we cut back west, we drove right past the Wexford County Airport.
“You think they ever flew in here?” Lou said.
“It’s right in their backyard,” I said. “Kinda dangerous, you’d think. But who knows? It was probably easy the first few times, no matter where they did it.”
“Yeah, funny how the wrong people always seem to notice what you’re doing, if it happens to be making you some money.”
“Even around here,” I said as we passed the little airport and saw nothing but small houses and open fields ahead, “I bet it’s hard to keep a secret.”
We kept driving west. The few houses dwindled to almost nothing. We crossed some railroad tracks and then they fell into line just off the right side of the road, even as we cut north and drove through a tiny town called Boon. The tracks left us as we cut west again. The road was so thin and empty now, it felt like we were back in the Upper Peninsula, the trees getting thicker on each side of us until I began to doubt we were being sent to the right place after all. Then finally we saw a lone, nameless mailbox with the number we were looking for and an opening in the trees just wide enough for a car to fit through.
The branches scraped against both sides of the car until we broke through into a clearing. A lone, tall house stood at the end of the gravel driveway. It was a classic farmhouse with rough wooden siding, and there were two separate outbuildings, one on either side of the house. There were no signs of life, and I didn’t see any vehicles until we got closer to the house. That’s when I saw the bright red sports car parked over by one of the sheds, and then in the next second as we came around the bend I saw the black truck parked next to it.
It was Vinnie’s.
Lou slammed on the brakes. I had the door open before we even came to a complete stop. I ran out through the cloud of dust kicked up by the tires and opened up Vinnie’s driver’s-side door. There was a thick layer of pebbled glass all over the front seat, with a long piece of metal protruding from what had once been the windshield.
“Is that his?” Lou said, coming up behind me.
“Yes.”
I pulled out the hunk of metal. It was a heavy, galvanized U-channel, the kind of thing you’d use to mount a road sign. As I let it drop to the ground, I noticed the faint odor of bleach. I went over to the other side and opened that door, and the smell was stronger. I felt the seat.
“What is it?” Lou said.
“This seat is damp.”
“Not this side,” he said, his hand on the driver’s seat.
“Vinnie’s a fanatic about keeping his truck clean. He was obviously washing something off the-”
I stopped and bent down to look at the edge of the floorboard.
“What is it?”
“It looks like a drop of blood,” I said. “This is what he was cleaning up, but he didn’t quite get it all. So now we know Buck was bleeding, probably because he got shot at the airport. But it couldn’t have been too bad.”