“Alex, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I got you involved in this.”
“Don’t be sorry.”
“How bad did they hurt you? Are you gonna be okay?”
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “I’ve been beat up worse before, believe me.”
“I’m gonna pay you,” he said. He pulled out his roll. “I’m gonna give you… let’s see…”
“No, you’re not,” I said. “You’re not giving me anything.”
“Come on, for everything you did.”
“If you want to send Leon more money, send it to him. Me, I was just helping out my old pitcher.”
“Gas money,” he said. “Let me give you gas money. And meal money.”
“One hundred bucks,” I said. “That’s it.”
He flipped off five twenties. ‘Terry’s got a ball game today,” he said, the spark finally coming back to him. “They’re playing UCLA. Did I mention he’s a catcher?”
“You mentioned it.”
“He’s gonna be a good one.”
“Tell him hello for me,” I said. “Tell him to watch out for left-handers.”
“You think Maria’s family will really tell her I was there?”
“I think so,” I said.
“Nothing’s gonna come of it, I don’t think.”
“Probably not,” I said. “It sounds like she’s got a lot of other things to worry about. You never know. Maybe someday. Hell, you know where her family lives now. Maybe you’ll come back.”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “I think this was my one shot at it. Just like my one shot at the big leagues. Another spectacular failure.”
I left him on that note. I said good-bye and watched him walk into the terminal. And then I started for home.
I settled in for the six-hour drive. I knew it would be well after dark by the time I got there, but I wanted to be in my own bed when I woke up the next morning. That would be the worst day, I knew. My knee would be swollen, my wrist would burn where the handcuff had been, every muscle in my neck would feel as tight as piano wire, and my head would hurt more than the rest of my body put together. But at least I’d be home with my aspirin and my hot-water bottle and my Canadian beer.
I stopped outside of Saginaw for dinner, my body already stiff after two hours of driving. It got colder and colder as I drove north, as if I were driving backward in time, from spring back to winter. When I hit the Mackinac Bridge, the temperature was below freezing. Another hour of driving in the Upper Peninsula, the snow still on the ground, and then finally I was home. I went inside my cabin, lighted the wood-stove, and fell into my bed.
After one bad day, just as bad as I thought it would be, although nothing I hadn’t lived through before, and then another night, I started to feel like myself again. I went to see Leon, still confined to his bed. I told him everything that had happened, the situation we had stumbled into. He wanted to jump right onto that one, call up Maria’s family and find out more about this man named Harwood. “Private eyes solve problems, Alex! Let’s help these people!”
I told him I wished we could. But I knew they wouldn’t accept our help.
Then I dropped in at the Glasgow, answered all Jackie’s questions. No, we didn’t find her. Yes, I did get beat up. Yes, you were right. You told me something like this would happen again. And so on into the afternoon and evening. Another April day in Paradise, sitting in front of the fire. And yet it felt different somehow, without Randy’s running commentary in my ears. A couple days with him and then everything was suddenly too quiet.
Then the phone call. In the middle of the night. A cold, raw night, with me stumbling for the phone and standing on the rough wooden floor, listening to a voice from far away.
“Alex McKnight?”
“Yes. Who is this?”
“I called your partner first. He told me to call you.”
“Who is this?”
“You know a Randall Wilkins?”
“Yes, I do. Who is this?”
“My name is Howard Rudiger. I’m the chief of police in Orcus Beach.”
“I don’t know where that is.”
“Well, right now, I’m at the Butterworth Hospital in Grand Rapids. You know where Grand Rapids is?”
“Yes. Wait. You’re at a hospital?”
“Butterworth Hospital,” he said. “Or that’s the old name, I guess. It’s called Spectrum Health or some damned thing now. It’s right on Michigan Street downtown. Your friend Mr. Wilkins is here.”
“In Michigan? Randy’s in Michigan? I don’t understand.”
“I’ll explain it when you get here, sir. It’ll take you what-about four, five hours to get here? I’ll see you here at ten.”
“Just tell me what happened,” I said. “How bad is it?”
“It’s bad,” he said. “Mr. Wilkins was found about six hours ago. He was shot, and he’s lost a lot of blood. We brought him here because it’s the main trauma center for western Michigan. The doctor says he’s in some kind of hemorrhage shock right now.”
“He was shot,” I said. “Randy was… Who did this? What happened?”
“We don’t know at this point,” he said. “We have no witnesses, and of course Mr. Wilkins can’t tell us anything. I should probably tell you there’s a good chance he’s not going to live.”
“My God. I can’t believe it.”
“I’ll see you at ten, Mr. McKnight. I’ll have some questions.”
“What are you talking about? What kind of questions?”
“Just be here,” he said. And then he hung up.
CHAPTER 11
It was still dark when I left. It was dark and it was cold, and instead of being in my bed, I was awake somehow, unshaven and unshowered, my stomach burning as I drove south down 1-75 to the Mackinac Bridge. I kept catching myself driving too fast, pushing the truck until it went into its death rattle at eighty miles an hour. Then I’d let out my breath and tell myself to slow down and watch where the hell I was going, stop thinking about it, stop asking myself why he was lying half-dead in a Michigan hospital instead of being on a beach in California.
I stopped for gas just south of Mackinac. I stood there shivering as a wind came in hard off Lake Michigan. The sun was just coming up.
Before I left the station, I grabbed a coffee and unfolded my map across the steering wheel. Taking 1-75 down to Grayling, then a little jog over to U.S.-131, and I’d be in Grand Rapids by ten o’clock.
Orcus Beach, he’d said. I tried to find it on the map. It wasn’t there. I turned the map over and went through the index. No Orcus Beach.
I hit the road again as the sky started to lighten. When I got off 1-75, the little jog I thought I had to make turned into a slow parade through the woods behind a flatbed truck carrying a mobile home. A couple cars tried to pass it, but the truck was swinging all over the place whenever the wind picked up. By the time we got to U.S.-131, I had lost a good half hour.
It was ten o’clock when I hit the Grand Rapids city limits. It took another twenty minutes to get to the hospital on Michigan Street. Whoever this Chief Rudiger was, if he was like most other police chiefs I’d known, he didn’t like people being late. So I was already off to a great start with the man.
From a couple miles away, I saw the big sign in green neon letters, SPECTRUM HEALTH. When I finally got there, I followed the signs and drove up the ramp, parked on the top level, walked down the stairs and then through a long tunnel enclosed in tinted glass until I came to a lobby. There were a couple people sitting on the blue plastic chairs, watching a television mounted high on the wall. There was a little reception desk, with a guard sitting in front of a clipboard. He might have been twenty-one years old, maybe not. I would have carded him if he were buying liquor.
“I’m looking for Chief Rudiger,” I said to the kid.
“He went to get some coffee,” he said. “He told me to have you wait in room one nineteen. Just down the hall to the left.”
“Can you tell me what room Randy Wilkins is in?”
“The chief said you need to wait for him, sir. Room one nineteen, down the hall on the left.” He tried to put a hard edge in his voice, like he had on a real badge instead of a tin security guard’s shield.