I was still two houses back when flashes, bright and blue, lit the front windows, one, two, three. Gunshots, muffled by thick old plaster and old glass.
I ran up the steps. The old door, stripped of its knob and latch, was ajar. I slammed through it and stopped.
A man stood in the center of the room, indistinct in the haze of gunpowder lit faintly from the streetlamp outside the window. His body was rounded by the coats he wore, probably two. A long-barreled revolver dangled heavy in his right hand.
He turned slowly to look at me, seemingly unsurprised by the new intrusion.
Behind him a man lay with his back against the wall facing the dining room, where a small sofa or a piano topped with graduation pictures might have once stood. Three spots made black by the gauzy gray light showed on the blank wall, higher up. Bullet holes, surrounded by splatters made large by the heavy gun.
Relief touched at my chest. I took a breath, then another.
I said his name. “Leo.”
“You’re here for your friend?” he asked, in a slow, soft monotone I’d never heard. He was in shock.
“What?”
“You’re here for your friend?” he repeated, in that same chilling, slow voice.
“Leo!”
“Leo?” He did not know the name.
“Damn it, I’m Dek. Dek Elstrom.”
He might have made a smile. By then, I wasn’t watching his face. He’d raised the heavy, long-barreled revolver. His knuckles got larger as he began to squeeze the trigger.
I dropped and charged; the gun fired. I hit him low at the knees, not knowing whether I’d been shot. There’d never been weight to him, and he crumpled like rags. Something thudded a few feet away. The gun, coming loose from his hand.
I flipped him over, waiting for pain, but he’d missed me. I got him in an easy chokehold. He didn’t fight; he didn’t yell. None of his senses were working fast enough for those.
I got up to my knees and leveraged us both up to stand. He was dead weight and barely breathing.
“What the hell have you been doing here?” I managed, loosening my arm a little around his neck.
He shook his head, heavy with shock.
“Walk with me,” I said.
He offered no resistance. I removed my elbow from his neck, and we walked slowly toward the back of the house. The layout was identical to Ma’s, built in the same fast binge in the late 1920s when America, and Rivertown, were solid in their hope for the future.
We walked through the kitchen. The cabinets, counters, and doors had been ripped away.
As I thought, his clothes were piled in the back bedroom, the bedroom that was his in another bungalow, just a few houses down. He was a man of habit. I’d have to come back for them.
I put an arm across his shoulders and turned back toward the front room. His revolver glinted dully on the floor. I picked it up and jammed it in my peacoat.
We walked outside, my arm ready to grab him if he tried to bolt. But he went passively down the steps and down the blocks to the Jeep, and got in as solemnly as a scolded child.
He sat erect, unseeing, as we drove away. His eyes didn’t flicker as we passed the neon carnival that was Thompson Avenue, nor did anything within them flash in recognition when I got to the turret. This Leo had never been there before. We climbed the wrought-iron stairs to the second floor.
I sat him in the La-Z-Boy. His head fell to his shoulders. He was asleep.
He wore two coats. I inspected the thick wool outer one for signs of blood splatter. There seemed to be none. A thin insulated windbreaker was underneath. There appeared to be no blood evidence there, either, but that didn’t mean a crime lab examiner wouldn’t find some. I unbuttoned his topcoat but left it on. Later, I’d get him to change clothes and ditch what he was wearing.
I had rope that I used to secure my ladder when I climbed more than two stories. As he softly snored, I tied him loosely to the La-Z-Boy, around the chest, around the legs. He didn’t stir even when I duct-taped his wrists together.
I knew that if I paused to think, I’d realize I was acting like a crazy man. Leo needed medical help. I had to go out again, though, and I couldn’t risk leaving him loose, perhaps to wander over to Thompson Avenue and announce he’d just killed somebody.
I tugged at the rope. It was taut.
Now I had to clean things up.
Twenty
The sky was dark, and clouds obscured the moon. Nothing moved in Leo’s neighborhood, yet I was sure I felt a hundred pairs of knowing eyes watching as I parked around the block from the empty bungalow where the dead man lay.
I dropped the shovel I’d brought next to the excavation and hurried up the steps of the vacant bungalow. Now hidden in the shadows of the front porch, I chanced a look at the dig next door. The wall forms still lay piled outside the hole, but the cement footings had been poured, and gravel had been roughly spread between them. All that remained was to pour the basement walls, and then the basement floor. With luck, it would all be done within a week.
All I had to do was make sure the dead man was a part of all that.
I went inside. The air still stank of the gunpowder from Leo’s revolver.
The dead man facing the wall was huge. He wore a leather jacket, dark jeans, and black sneakers.
I bent down. His was the face I’d seen by the ticket shack in Mackinaw City, the last face Arnie Pine had seen before he crashed his boat onto the rocks on Eustace Island.
I patted his pockets and found a penlight clipped on a key ring containing an electronic remote and a single car key. He carried no cell phone and no wallet. That was no surprise. The man was a professional killer.
I patted him down again, to be sure. He had no gun. I swept the beam of his penlight low across the floor, thinking it must have fallen out of his hand when Leo shot him. I saw nothing. There was no gun.
There was no more time, either. I jammed the key ring into my pocket, grabbed the man under his arms so I wouldn’t smear blood from his chest or his back on the floor, and began dragging him toward the front door. He was every bit as heavy as he looked, two hundred and fifty pounds at least.
I tugged him over the threshold and paused to look up and down the block. No lights were on, but here and there a glint came off a car parked along the street. The sky had lightened. A sliver of bright moon was peeking out from the clouds.
I went backward, pulling him behind me, and dropped him.
I was exposed now, out in the faint moonlight, and had to get him out of there fast. I grabbed his ankles, turned him around, and tugged. Air banged out of him as his back and head hit each step, gasps from a dead man.
At the bottom, someone started humming the heavy bass line of an old Bob Seger tune, Night Moves. I wanted to giggle. It was me.
I dragged him to the edge of the excavation, switched ends, and pushed at his shoulders until he tipped over the edge. He hit bottom with a horrible grunt. I grabbed the shovel, rolled onto my belly, and dropped into the hole.
Something moved on the gravel. I froze, unable to breathe until I realized it was my shadow. A bigger piece of the moon had slipped out of the clouds and was lighting the whole excavation with milky blue light. The good darkness was gone.
I bumped him over the low concrete footings to the center of the excavation and ran back for the shovel. After scooping away the surface gravel, I began digging like a crazy man. I had to go down four or five feet.
At two feet I hit hard clay, rock solid and frozen. Furious, panicked, I stabbed the shovel harder at the frozen ground. It was no use. Only tiny bits broke free.
The gravel around my shadow was getting whiter. The moon was now half free.
I dropped to my knees. Raising the shovel high over my head, I brought it down with all the force I could muster. Over and over, I attacked the frozen ground. Again and again, the shovel fell from my bloody hands, unable to cut in at all.