“I should have tried harder to stop them,” the doctor said in an even voice. “I realize this now.”
“No, I’m sorry,” Lou said, rubbing his forehead. “It’s been a hard day.”
“Please go on,” I said. “Is there anything else you remember from yesterday? If you can add one more little piece to the puzzle, it might be helpful.”
We waited around for a few more minutes while he thought about it, but he came up empty. I gave him my phone number and asked him to call me if he remembered anything else. He told us to make sure we took care of Buck and Vinnie, assuming we ever found them. Then we thanked him and left.
“We need to find out more about the Kaisers,” I said as we got into the car. “Find out where they might have taken Vinnie and Buck, once they were all together.”
“Someplace safe, right? I mean, if they were nervous enough to be in such a big hurry yesterday…”
“So where is that? What’s the safest place they’d go?”
“No way to know. We’ve never even met these people.”
“I can only think of three people who have met them,” he said. “Buck, Vinnie, and-”
“And the person who sent us down to that house in the first place,” I said. “He’s our only lead right now.”
He nodded and looked out the window. “Sounds like it’s time for one more visit.”
That’s how we ended up back on that same street in Sault Ste. Marie. It was almost dark by the time we got there. It was late and we were both hungry, and we had spent six good hours in the car running all over the state. The last thing we wanted to do was talk to Andy Dukes again. I don’t imagine he felt much like talking to us, either. With or without his next-door neighbor, Eddie. But Dukes was the one man who might have more information about Harry and Josephine Kaiser. If we were finally due for that one lucky break, he would think about it for two seconds and then say, “Oh yeah, they must all be at their summer place. Here, let me write down that address for you.”
But that lucky break was apparently still lost in the mail.
We made our way back to Hursley Street, taking that same turn just before the power canal. We pulled up in front of his house. It looked dark and empty, but that wasn’t a surprise. We knew the drill. He was officially long gone, already in Texas by now. Just ask his neighbor.
The lights were on next door, and once again we saw the blue flickering glow from the television. We rang the bell and waited. I heard faint voices but figured they could be coming from the television. We rang the bell again.
“It’s almost like they’re not happy to see us again,” Lou said. “Go figure.”
“At least he won’t be armed this time.” I thought of the revolver we had taken from him, currently locked up, unloaded, in the rental car’s glove compartment. Then I thought how foolish it would be to assume that was the only firearm Dukes owned.
Lou opened up the outside patio door before I could tell him what a bad idea that was. He went to the interior door and started pounding on it. I was already picturing the wooden door breaking apart, a thousand scraps of wood flying in the air as the gun blast turned everything inside out.
He stood there pounding on the door until finally he peeked inside through the front window.
He froze.
“What is it?” I said.
He didn’t answer.
I went up the steps and moved him out of the way. I looked through the window and saw exactly what he saw.
I saw the two bodies on the floor. I saw the blood. I saw the damage that somebody had inflicted on both of these men.
Everything we had done that day, everywhere we had gone, it had all led up to this single moment.
“I knew it,” Lou said. “I knew it. I knew it.”
“Knew what?” I said, barely able to speak.
“This is what these people do,” he said. “You screw around with these people, and this is what they do to you.”
I came down off the steps. I tried to breathe. The sun was finally going down.
“We have to find them,” he said. “We have to find Vinnie and Buck. Don’t you see, Alex? We have to find them. Or they’ll be next.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
He pulled me to the street. I tried to push him away, not for any coherent reason, just a reflexive reaction to what I’d seen through the window.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said through clenched teeth. “Right now.”
“We have to stay here,” I said. “We have to call somebody.”
“Like hell we do.”
I took him by the arm and was halfway into a wristlock, pure muscle memory from all of those years on the force. A suspect resists and you twist that arm right around and turn that wrist. All of a sudden he’s a lot more cooperative.
“I’m calling the police,” I said. “Then we’re going to wait until they get here.”
“Don’t be an idiot. If we call the police, they’ll lock us both up.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Because that’s what they do.”
I knew that was the reality for him, at least. That was his own personal experience.
“No, Lou. Come on.”
“We came here earlier today,” he said, “and now we’re back and those two guys are lying in there in a lake of blood. What do you think they’re gonna do?”
“They’re gonna talk to us, and we’re gonna tell them everything we know.”
“So you want them to take us down to the station, is that what you’re saying? Best case, they put us in a room for the next twenty-four hours. Ask us the same questions over and over, which won’t do anybody any good. Meanwhile, whoever it was who did this is getting closer and closer to Vinnie.”
“He wasn’t there, you realize that.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Vinnie’s not involved in this. He’s never had anything to do with Dukes or these people from downstate, and he wasn’t even at the airport that night. He just picked up Buck and-”
“And helped Buck get away,” Lou said. “He’s been with Buck ever since. Go ask Dukes’ neighbor in there, what’s his name? Eddie? Go ask Eddie how that one works. You think Eddie was a big player in this whole thing?”
I took a quick look up and down the street, expecting somebody to be watching us. Two men standing in the yard, having an argument. But the street was empty.
“You make a fair point,” I said, “but we still can’t just leave. We can’t let somebody else find these guys like this.”
“Then we call the cops when we’re on the road. Give them an anonymous tip, tell them to come check out this house. It’ll do just as much good, without jamming us up. We have to keep moving, Alex, don’t you understand?”
“But we have no idea where we’re going. You know that.”
“We have to think. We have to figure it out.”
I let go of him. I wasn’t ready to leave with him, but what he was saying, it was starting to sink in.
“Whoever did this,” Lou said, “if they get to Vinnie and Buck first…”
In which case it would be hopeless, I thought. In which case they’re as good as dead. But I didn’t dare say it.
Then it hit me. If Buck was really the next target…
“You win,” I said. “Let’s go.”
I was back behind the wheel, driving hard from Sault Ste. Marie to Bay Mills. I had to remind myself that I wasn’t driving my truck now. If I roared by a Michigan State Trooper going eighty, he wouldn’t know it was me and he’d pull me over in a second. In the state I was in, I had no desire to explain why I was driving so fast.
I kept seeing it in my head, those two men on the floor. The blood, the unnatural positioning of the bodies. The way the television cast the whole scene in an otherworldly glow. And something else. One more detail.