We started out with breakfast at the Glasgow. We might have been telling ourselves that we were being smart and fueling up before starting a tough day, but the truth was that we had no idea what to do or where to go. We had hit a brick wall.
When we were done eating, I gave Janet Long a call. It was something I should have done the night before, I realized, and besides, I probably needed at least one person to give me a hard time before I could call it a good day. But she didn’t pick up her cell phone, so I just left a message.
“That’s my friend at the FBI,” I said to Lou as I hung up. “I was just hoping she might have some new information.”
“Would she actually tell you?”
“No, actually she probably wouldn’t. She’d probably just read me the riot act and tell me to stay the hell away from everything. But I honestly don’t know what else to do at this point.”
“Maybe we should go back down to the Kaisers’ house,” Lou said, “see if we missed something.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Anything that might point us in the right direction, to wherever they went. Just some little thing we might have missed.”
“You sound like Leon now.”
“Who’s Leon?”
“He’s a local private-eye wannabe,” Jackie said, wiping down the bar, “but he’s twice as smart as Alex.”
“Not today, Jackie.”
“No, wait, I’m twice as smart. Leon is three times as smart. I get that mixed up sometimes.”
“I said not today,” I told him. “Leave us alone, please.”
Jackie walked away, mumbling.
“No, seriously,” Lou said. “The Leon guy. Do you think he can help us?”
“He’s on vacation,” I said. “Camping with his family.”
“Damn.”
“But we can think like him,” I said. “Hold on. What would he say if he was here right now? He’d say we should go over everything we did, step by step, and figure out the one small thing we’re missing.”
“What we did? Or what we think Vinnie and Buck did?”
I looked at him.
“I’m just wondering,” he said, “if we try to follow their footsteps instead of ours, it might get us closer to what we’re looking for.”
“Okay, so I’m Buck,” I said. “These people from downstate come up here. I know these people, a little bit. Or if I don’t, at least my dealer in the Soo does. He can vouch for them. Anyway, they want me to help them do this thing over at the airport. Maybe I know the whole story, maybe I don’t. But they come pick me up.”
“Your truck is still at your house,” he said. “So yeah, they had to come pick you up.”
“Well, plus I’m the driver.”
“Or at least the navigator.”
“Or the navigator. Either way, they need me in the vehicle if we’re going to take the back roads. So that’s the plan. We go to the airport, we’re expecting the plane to land. Then unexpected company arrives, and all of a sudden I’m in a bad situation I didn’t ask for. Things get out of hand fast, somebody takes out a gun, and now everybody’s shooting.”
“You take one in the armpit.”
“I do. I’m bleeding, probably in mild shock, even if the wound isn’t that bad. Just the whole situation has me freaked out of my head. I have to get out of there.”
“Why not take their vehicle?”
“Because it’s theirs. Because this is a multiple-murder crime scene and I don’t want to drive away with their vehicle, their keys, their license plate…”
“Either that,” he said, “or you just ran away. Then you called later.”
“That could be,” I said. “I’m bleeding and I’m walking down the side of the road. I don’t want to hitchhike and have somebody ask me what happened. Somebody who will read the paper and make the connection later.”
“Okay, so your good friend and second cousin or whatever the hell he is comes and picks you up. I’m Vinnie now. That’s something I’d actually do, right? Phone call in the middle of the night? I’d come pick you up?”
“That’s something you’d do, yes. You might give me hell about it, but you’d do it in a second.”
He nodded at that, thinking about his son. Thinking about what kind of man he was, this man he hadn’t seen in thirty years.
“So I’m still Buck and I’ve got this cousin down by the Saginaw rez,” I said. “He’s a vet, but I know he can patch me up. It’s three hours away, too. Just far enough for us to lie low for a couple of days.”
“I drive you all the way down there.”
“Three hours, like I said. That’s nothing. You drive me down there and the good doctor fixes me. By then I’m already starting to wonder what we should do next.”
“I’m telling you we should go to the cops, tell them everything that happened.”
“That’s probably what you’re saying, right. I’m a little more worried about it. I saw those men trying to hijack the operation. I saw the shootout. I was the only man to walk away from it. I’m thinking I’m in a world of trouble if the wrong people find out about that.”
“But how would they? Everybody who was there is dead.”
“They’d find out. It might take a while, but they would. Especially if I go talking to the cops about it. If I tell them I was there, put it down on the record, hell, I might as well go rent out a billboard.”
“Okay,” he said, “so I leave a message with the Bay Mills police, just to let everybody know we’re okay. How come I don’t call anybody else?”
“Because you don’t want to deal with the questions,” I said, starting to get worked up about it again. The man was helping Buck deal with a serious situation and he didn’t call me, I thought. I’m going to kick his ass all up and down this bar when I get him back here.
“Then you make a call yourself,” he said. “To your friends the Kaisers. The people who got you in this mess in the first place. They’re the people who sent the two men to the airport. It was their idea for you to be there, too.”
“Right. It’s all on them. I call them, and I tell them they have to help me. They say, don’t worry, everything’s gonna be cool. We’re gonna take care of everything.”
“So that’s two days ago,” he said. “We spend one more night down there and then you make one more call to the Kaisers. That’s yesterday morning. Then we’re off.”
“We’re off in a hurry.”
He thought about that one. “We’re in a hurry because…”
“Because the Kaisers aren’t stupid. They know they’re in as much danger as we are. Maybe even more.”
“Okay, so we drive to their house, right?”
“Yes.”
We both stopped there.
“Vinnie and Buck left in a hurry,” I said, abandoning the role-playing game, “and they drove to the Kaisers’ farmhouse in Cadillac.”
“Meaning that the Kaisers must have been waiting there.”
“So they could all leave together.”
“Right.”
“They’re convinced that they’ve got cold-blooded killers bearing down on them,” I said, “and yet they wait for Vinnie and Buck to get there before leaving?”
“It doesn’t make sense,” he said. “They would have gotten the hell out of there in two seconds. Told them to meet them somewhere. Or something.”
“It makes no sense at all.”
“And yet they were in a hurry to leave,” he said. “Vinnie and Buck were, I mean. I don’t imagine it’s because they wanted to make teatime at the Kaisers’ house.”
“Jackie, where’s the phone?” I said.
He looked up from the other end of the bar, where he was cleaning some glasses.
“I thought you told me to go away.”
“Just give me the phone.”
He came down the bar, grabbed the phone from underneath, and put it on the bar top.
“You know where the phone is,” he said. “You could have gotten it yourself.”