The D.A. put an I’m-the-expert expression on his face and nodded solemnly. “Got to wrap things up tight for the jury.”
Strickland and Cutty plainly felt this wasn’t true but elected not to say anything.
“Just don’t take any unnecessary risks,” Alan urged, as if he were part of the briefing team.
He became particularly agitated when it was apparent I couldn’t wear a bulletproof vest under my coat. The thing was just too tight.
“The coat sort of shrunk over the years,” I explained lamely.
The laughter that followed cut a lot of the tension, except for Alan’s. “We really need that vest,” he protested as one of the cops put it back into the van.
“I really think the risk is pretty low. You shout no good and hit the floor, he’s going to have no idea what the hell is going on. By the time he stands up to see what you’re doing, my officers will have their weapons drawn and in his face,” Cutty said. “But it’s your choice. We can hold off until we find a coat that fits over the vest.” She didn’t want to wait, I could tell. The hunt was on, and her vivacious eyes were alive with it.
“Let’s do it,” I said.
* * *
The wooden arm at the bank parking lot was broken off, and Zoppi’s Jeep was gone from where I’d parked it with the other repos in the back. It would be fun to take it from him again. The two women cops were already inside when I arrived, filling out deposit slips or something at two counters. To my right were the tellers and a manager, all behind bulletproof glass. Straight ahead was an empty conference room, and to the right, in a glassed-in office, was Blanchard, talking on the phone. His eyes bulged when he saw me.
“He seems surprised we’re here,” Alan said.
I knocked on his open door. “Got a minute?” I asked as he ended his phone call.
“The hell are you doing here?” he demanded, looking afraid.
Unasked, I slid into a chair in front of his desk. “I did what you asked me to do last night, so I’m here for my money.”
“I never said to come here. This is where I work.”
“You never said not to,” I countered, sounding like the tough hit man I was supposed to be. “I came here after the Yancy job, remember?”
“That was completely different, you idiot! Close the door. Jesus.”
I was supposed to leave it open but didn’t see how I could refuse. I eased it shut, momentarily meeting the eyes of one of the two female cops in the lobby. “I printed up some pictures for you,” I told Blanchard, not having to fake a chill demeanor after the idiot crack.
He was so jumpy, I expected him to all but faint when he saw the fake murder scenes. Instead his face changed completely. His eyes widened, like a little boy unwrapping a birthday gift. He picked up the photo, then the next one, a gloating smile on his face.
There was something so ugly and reptilian about the way he was receiving this information, I felt a cold anger building in me. This was his wife.
“It’s almost sexual for him,” Alan observed.
“I had to kill the kid, too,” I blurted, not even realizing I was going to say it until the words came out. Blanchard stared at me. “She saw me. Sorry.”
“I said not to touch her!” he snarled at me, his face turning crimson. Finally some emotion. So he did care about the child, at least.
“I had no choice.” I shrugged.
“Well, goddammit, you fucking moron. I don’t have any insurance on the kid. Won’t get a dime for her, and now I’ll have to deal with all the funeral expenses,” he fumed.
“My God,” Alan said.
Enough. “I did what you asked. I shot your wife. I want my fee.”
“Your fee.” He shook his head wonderingly. “Just how stupid are you? Come in here the morning after my wife is murdered, before anyone has even found her body. Everyone in the bank has seen you now. And what do you think, I’m just going to hand you a bag of cash now? Place of business?”
“You handed me a bag last time. And it’s a bank: Are you saying you don’t have any money here?”
“I’m saying, I don’t have any money for you here. Not that kind of money.”
I stared at him, unsure what I should do next. We were hardly at bingo. Almost unconsciously, I turned to look at the two police officers, but they were both studiously ignoring me. One of them was laboriously counting out a small stack of one-dollar bills; the other was punching buttons on a calculator. I glanced back at Blanchard, and he was nodding furiously.
“That’s right; even some customers have seen you. Now, here’s the deal. Story is that you came in to discuss a repo, all right? See the damage to my gate? Tony Zoppi stole his Jeep back, the moron. You go get the thing, let him know he’s messing with the wrong guy. Got it?”
“What about my money?”
He seemed impatient with me, as if the job itself should have been its own reward. “Need to think about where we can meet.”
“Why not where we were the other morning?”
His eyes narrowed. “You don’t decide this. I’ll think of something and call you later today, all right?”
“He hasn’t even thought that far ahead,” Alan marveled. “He doesn’t have a plan.”
Well, that was just how Blanchard rolled.
“Okay,” I agreed. “My cell phone’s almost out of juice. If I don’t answer, just leave a message.”
“Not leaving a message,” he replied in a mocking voice. “You don’t answer, you are shit out of luck.”
“All right. Then call me at the Black Bear.” I handed over another one of my professional bar bouncer cards, and now I was down to ten. I stood up. I didn’t know if I had messed this up or not, but I hadn’t gotten to bingo and felt like I needed to say something to salvage the situation. “Don’t forget to call me. You won’t like what will happen if you forget to call me.”
He gave me a cold smile. “Don’t worry. You’ll get your money. Going to do lots of business together, you and me.”
“Lots of business?” Alan repeated incredulously. “More murders? How does someone like this get into banking?”
I left the building, one of the two women cops coincidentally departing at the same time. The other one went to the teller window.
I smiled at the woman cop, who gave me a completely noncommittal expression in return as I held the door for her. I guessed she was waiting to find out from her bosses whether we were all happy with Ruddy McCann.
I noticed the panel van parked across the street as I got into my repo truck, and followed it when it pulled out into traffic.
* * *
We went back to the same parking lot in Acme. The van side door slid open and Strickland, Cutty, and D.A. Hughes all got out, stretching their limbs.
“I think we got enough,” Cutty told me. “But he really wants some cash to change hands.” She jerked her thumb at D.A. Darrell.
“What was the whole thing with the cell phone?” The D.A. asked me.
“My cell phone is running low on battery, and I don’t have a car charger,” I explained.
“Great,” he muttered.
“What is your problem?” I asked.
“My problem is that you keep making changes to the plan without authorization.”
“Look…,” I said, the blood flowing to my face.
“Let’s all relax,” Strickland suggested.
We all stood around, relaxing. “So, what do we do now?” I finally asked.
“Now,” Cutty replied, “we wait for Blanchard to call you.” She eyed me. “This isn’t going to go down behind bulletproof glass. He might think it’s best not to pay you anything. We better get you a vest.”
28
Not Good
Standing there in the parking lot, I learned what cops do when they have too much time on their hands and there’s no Weather Channel—they make contingency plans, and then they make contingency plans for contingency plans. They endlessly speculated on whether they should put people
in the Black Bear to guard me, just in case Blanchard showed up unannounced and pulled a gun. In that case, I told them, I would take the gun away from him. This impressed no one. But an armed presence might make Blanchard suspicious. Do we even want the Bear to be open? But to close it would incite unruly apprehension in the town. (That’s exactly how D.A. Darrell phrased it. He and Kermit would love talking to each other.)
All of this, Alan reminded me impatiently, predicated on the possibility that Blanchard might decide to deliver the money to me at the Bear instead of phoning me at the number I’d given him. Why would he do that? Alan believed, and I agreed, that Blanchard would probably want to meet me in some isolated place so no one would see us together.
I tried to imagine where that might be and grew defeated by the possibilities—this whole part of the country was an isolated place.
Eventually it was decided that I should go to the Black Bear and that Cutty would put a single man inside and watch the front and back entrances from outside.
“For a phone call,” Alan maintained stubbornly.
I was glad to be back in my truck and away from the debate team. My cell phone warned me it was a good day to die, so I phoned Katie and told her briefly that I wouldn’t be able to make our date, that it was business. Mindful of the wise words of Jimmy Growe, I apologized at least a dozen times, until finally she was laughing at me. “It’s okay. Tomorrow night,” she told me.
“Tomorrow,” I promised.
“This will be fun. Ruddy…”
“Yes?”
“Thanks for doing this. I’m feeling a lot better about things. Like I finally know who I am.”
“If you love someone, let her go,” I quoted somebody. “And if she comes back to you, she probably forgot something.”
She chuckled delightedly. “Exactly. I know this has been hard on you, but I’m figuring things out.”
“We’re dating,” I replied firmly. “Also, my socks are either mated or in the hamper. No exceptions.”
“Oh my.”
I told her about the Wolfingers loving their hotel room, but at some point in the conversation my phone’s battery shut down the connection.
On the way to the Bear I stopped at my home, earning me a questioning look from Strickland and Cutty, who were following me in Strickland’s SUV. I trotted over to their window.
“I just need to run inside for a minute; give me a sec?” I requested. I didn’t bother to look at Darrell Hughes in his car directly behind Strickland, but I assumed he was appropriately offended with my deviation from the agreed-upon plan.
I went inside and plugged my phone into its charger. As soon as some life came back into it, I texted an apology to Katie, along with an emoticon of a bottle of wine, a heart, and a basset hound. No one can accuse me of not being romantic. Then I called the Ferry Bar and asked to speak to Wade Rogan.
“Hey there, Ruddy,” he greeted enthusiastically when I identified myself.
We compared notes on how the bar business was doing and chatted about how much longer before the ice left and the people returned. Then I got to it.
“Hey, I was out to Shantytown.”
“Oh?” he responded. “Excellent! Did you talk to Phil?”
“No. He wasn’t there.”
“Really.”
“You seen him?”
“I don’t think so. Hang on.” I heard him ask if anyone had seen the mayor of Shantytown, and pictured Guy at Bar numbers 1 and 2 coming out of their stupor.
“Ask him about his ice shanty, why he lied,” Alan suggested while we waited.
Rogan came back. “Nobody’s heard anything from him. I hope he’s okay.”
“I’m just wondering why you didn’t tell me you have your own shanty out there on the ice.”
“Now, what?” he responded slowly.
“Out in Shantytown. You have your own place on the ice.”
Rogan was silent long enough for me to want to ask him if he was still there. “He’s thinking,” Alan advised me. “Trying to figure out what he should say to that.”
“What are you asking?” he said, a lot less friendly sounding.
“Just curious why you said ice fishing didn’t interest you. You said you didn’t know anything about Shantytown.”
“Ice fishing doesn’t interest me. That’s where I keep my iceboat.”
Now it was my turn to be silent.
“Hello?” he asked.
“Iceboat,” I repeated, just to have something to say.
“Yeah, you ever do that? It’s a blast. The wind catches your sails, and you can hit forty miles an hour, easy. Where they plowed all the snow and it’s like an ice rink out there? Come out sometime; you’ll love it.”
“Yeah. I mean, no, I’ve never tried it.”
“You busy Monday? I usually take Mondays off.”
“I’ll have to check my schedule,” I said. I don’t even have a schedule; it’s just something people say. I tried to picture lying on a fragile frame, skimming on the ice at forty miles an hour, Alan screaming in my head like a frightened child.
“Cool. Anyway, my boat cost me twelve grand, so yeah, I keep it locked up.”
“Makes sense,” I replied.
“Ask him about Rachel Rodriguez,” Alan prodded.
I sighed. If I didn’t ask, Alan would bug me about it until next summer. “Hey, Wade, another thing. Remember there were those pictures of those missing women I showed you?”
“Yeah?” He sounded wary again.
“Remember what you said about Rachel Rodriguez?”
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
“She was the one, you said, ‘Who is that?’ The rest of them, you obviously knew who they were. But when you got to Rachel, you didn’t recognize her. Which maybe makes sense, because I was wrong. She isn’t presumed dead. The rest of them are, but she’s still alive. The cops tracked her down.”
Rogan was breathing into the phone.
“Just think it’s odd,” I continued. “You knew all the dead ones but didn’t recognize the living one. Why would that be?”
I waited for what I knew would be his logical explanation, mentally preparing myself for Alan’s protests. After a long silence Rogan hung up on me. I pulled the phone away from my ear and stared at it in disbelief. “He just hangs up?” I demanded.
“You panicked him. He didn’t know what else to do. He wasn’t expecting that question.”
“Yeah. Maybe.” I thought about it. “On the other hand, maybe I just pissed him off. I did pretty much imply he killed the other women.”
“Right, about that. Why did you do that?”
“Because you told me to!” I snapped.
“No, I said to ask about Rachel. I didn’t say to accuse him.”
“I didn’t accuse him, and if you want me to not say anything, then you should not say anything,” I retorted, my anger flaring.
I left my phone charging, the repo truck in front of my house, setting off to Becky’s bar on foot. I heard Strickland start up his truck and follow me, and the white van was already parked half a block down the street from the Bear.
I went inside and decided the police officer must be the tall guy in the corner booth because, besides Jimmy, he was the only person in the place. I snagged a seat at the bar and asked Jimmy if I could have a burger.
“A burger? After you had the cholesterol special for breakfast?” Alan huffed.
“Hey, somebody just called for you,” Jimmy told me.
I went very still. “Yeah?” I replied cautiously.
Jimmy sorted through a short stack of papers next to the phone. “Yeah, it was sort of weird. I got a call and nobody was there, just dead air, but I could hear him breathing, you know? Then he hangs up. Then maybe two minutes later the same number comes up on caller ID, and this time the guy wants to speak to you. So I say you’re not here and he asks me to leave a message.” Jimmy squinted at his handwriting. “So it says, tonight, ten p.m., south tip o
f Holy Island.” He looked at me. “Got any idea what that means? What’s Holy Island?”
“There’s a little island in the south arm of Lake Charlevoix. Maybe a dozen homes on it. You get to it by this short bridge,” I told him. “Can I have the message? And you can skip the burger; I’ve got to run.”
* * *
Holy Island is maybe fifteen hundred feet long and a hundred feet wide. It has a one-track road running down the length of its spine from the bridge to the southern tip. I imagined its residents, mostly summer people, spent a lot of their time pulling into driveways to allow their neighbors to pass. In the winter it appeared only a single home at the north end was occupied, though a plow had run all the way down to the turnaround at the other end of the island. The houses were buried in snow, three feet of it stacked on the roofs. Dark trees rose out of the untracked white, fading from view as the sun set.
I’d gone around the turnaround and was parked about twenty feet back up the road from it, facing north and blocking further progress for anyone else coming onto the island. Strickland had dropped his vehicle into low four-wheel drive and churned into position behind the southernmost cottage, which was locked up tight for winter behind me. No one on the road would see it.
Officers wearing white hooded snow cover were hiding just off the road and would close in behind Blanchard when he approached. A communications station was set up in the house at the north end, which luckily belonged to an ex-cop who was more than happy to take his wife out to dinner on the state’s dime while his home was used to trap a snake.
I was pretty impressed with the setup. They even used brooms to hide their tracks in the snow, and with their white hoods on, they simply vanished from sight.
There wasn’t a lot for me to do but wait. My cell phone, naturally, was still at home in its cradle, so I couldn’t call anyone—a mistake I would never make again. I had my magic hat on, the listening gum in my pocket. The unfamiliar bulletproof vest was like a heavy blanket—I was wearing a borrowed coat over it, which I had unzipped because it was so warm with all the layers. Alan was thankfully not trying to talk to me—he understood it wouldn’t help the prosecution much if the star witness spent the moments before the arrest arguing with himself.