“No, look. It is working!” Alan shouted hopefully. I glanced over and saw what he meant: Even in the glare of the headlight, I could see blue and yellow flames flickering on Rogan’s hood and roof, but they were tiny and useless. Little drips of flaming liquid were trailing off the Hummer as it lumbered forward. Then Rogan floored it again, speeding straight at me. I was too far away from the nearest shanty, caught in the open.
Dodge too soon, and he could follow my movements. Wait too late, and I’d be in pistol range. “Ruddy!” Alan warned. I elected to wait. Rogan’s arm came out of the window. I tensed and then darted right, a quick five steps, then jinked back left, trying to get to the mayor’s ruined shelter before Rogan could run me down.
Rogan had taken the feint and then, when he overcorrected, sent his Hummer into a slide. I’d always been good at faking out linebackers. He wrestled with his wheel, too busy to fire.
“He’s toying with us,” Alan said urgently. “It’s a game.”
This time, when the Hummer rocked to a stop, I saw something new: black clouds rising from his lower windshield, almost as if the glass were on fire. His wipers, I realized. They were burning, melting, and the rubber was smoking. His truck really was on fire, the fuel floating on the surface of melting snow and dripping onto the ice. It was just that the kerosene wasn’t volatile enough to pose any danger.
Volatile.
I made it to the mayor’s ruined shanty and jumped inside. The roof had collapsed halfway, but I ducked under it, feeling in the disorganized spill of supplies and tools.
“What are we doing? We’re sitting ducks in here,” Alan gasped in terror.
I pulled the flashlight out of my pocket and flicked it on. I found a screwdriver, and then my hand closed on one cone-shaped can, then another. “Starting fluid!” I explained. “Pure ether! Highly explosive!”
In other words, boom.
I stuffed the items into my pockets and rolled out through the hatch in the floor, squeezing myself in the small crawl space and scrabbling back onto the open ice.
When I peeked around the corner, I saw Rogan see me: His head was out the window, trying to peer past the smoke. He turned off his headlights for a moment, so that the only illumination came from the now sputtering flare, which abruptly extinguished.
“What’s he doing? Why did he turn off the lights?”
“It’s starting to get foggy. Maybe he thought he’d be able to see me better with his fog lights,” I replied, but Rogan just sat there for a minute, his fog lights off. Ghostly blue and yellow flames licked the air—it was unholy, a vehicle straight from hell.
His lone head lamp came back on. Maybe he thought that in the darkness I’d try to run for a new shanty, give him a clue where I’d hidden Katie, and that he’d catch me out in the open. I saw him grinning, still enjoying being the bull to my matador.
Would he charge, or come fast? “I need him to come fast. If he comes slowly, I won’t be able to dodge him, and he’ll be able to line up his shot. I need one more charge,” I gritted out as I pulled out a can of starting fluid and punctured it with the screwdriver. The sharp tang of the ether filled the air.
“Then run. Draw him out. Make him roll down his right window and fire out that one, across the inside of the truck.”
I did it, breaking from behind the shanty and dashing hard across the ice. Rogan was twenty yards away and easily spotted me. I ran to his right. He accelerated, lazily steering after me. I heard his rattling motor closing in, and watched my shadow on the ground get shorter and shorter, and then I threw myself farther to the right.
All I did in college was carry the ball, but in high school I was the best passer in northern Michigan. Both of his windows were open, and I aimed for the large black square and threw that can in a decent spiral, ether dribbling out as it sailed in a flat arc, a ten-yard toss as he braked. Boom.
The can went over the roof of the Hummer and vanished silently in the night. Rogan slid to a stop twenty yards away, broadside to me, staring at me through his open right window. I knelt and punctured the second can. Blue flames dribbled off his roof, smoke rose from his wipers, but I swear I could see his white teeth smiling. He raised his pistol and I raised my can. He fired and I threw.
He missed and I didn’t. The can clipped the doorframe and then fell inside. I braced myself for a second shot, but it didn’t come.
“You did it!” Alan cried.
Still no boom, but after a moment, yellow flames filled the Hummer’s interior. I saw Rogan beating on them, slapping at himself, but he’d gotten some of the fluid on him, and the fire wasn’t going out.
His dome light came on as Rogan tumbled out into the night. He staggered, his arms ablaze, and then fell into the snow.
I didn’t bother to watch the rest. He would put out the flames on his clothing or he wouldn’t. He would come after me with the pistol or he wouldn’t. Either way, he was on foot now—his car was burning more and more brightly, filling the foggy night with a brilliant orange light. He was still dangerous, still had the gun, but if it was a footrace, I knew I could beat him.
I ran. I had to get to Katie and drag her to safety while Rogan was still distracted.
The cold air sawed harshly at my throat, and my legs felt ready to give out—I’d asked a lot of them that night already. I pictured Rogan snuffing out the flames, rolling in the snow, and then retrieving his pistol and pursuing.
I lined up the lights of the shore with where I knew the cluster of three shanties would be, though the wind was whipping snow around, nearly blinding me.
“It’s the one in the middle,” Alan reminded me unnecessarily as the three dark shapes suddenly appeared in my vision, less than fifteen yards away.
I went to the shanty and opened the door.
* * *
Once inside, I turned on the flashlight. Katie hadn’t moved. I knelt by her, checking that she was still breathing. I threw the wood sled out the door, picked her up, and followed it, laying her down.
“Ruddy?” she murmured. “Where are we?”
I took off my coat and laid it on the blanket over her chest, the frigid air moving quickly to attack the sweat under my flannel shirt. “It’s okay, Katie. You’re going to be all right.” I slipped the rope around my waist and strained forward. Less than two hundred yards to my truck. When I turned off the flashlight, I could see the lights of Rogan’s house, barely discernable in the storm.
We made it maybe halfway when the howling wind simply erased the shore. One moment I could see a few lights dancing around in front of me, then next all was swallowed in fog and snow. It was a whiteout, except that at night it was a screaming, menacing blackness.
I turned on the flashlight, and it lit up the cloud that enveloped me but did nothing for my vision. I leaned into the wind.
“We need to go back to the shanty!” Alan told me urgently. “You can’t see where you are going!”
The wind was unstable, buffeting me from all directions, making it difficult to keep my bearings, to know where to go. I stopped and looked back toward where the shanties were. They had vanished.
“I can’t see anything!” I bellowed.
“If you keep moving, you could wind up lost out here on the ice,” he warned.
“If I don’t keep moving, I will die,” I snapped back.
I kept moving. When I turned off the flashlight, hoping to see some glimmer from shore, the darkness was alive, swirling and dancing in front of me like a devil, urging me on. I thought of the ghostly figure of Wade Rogan, his arms on fire, staggering forward and falling down. He’d looked like a monster.
I walked until my instincts told me we were at the shoreline, but we weren’t. The ice was flat and hard under my feet. I played my flashlight around, hoping a break in the fog would let me catch sight of something: a tree, a shanty, anything. I turned and looked at Katie. She was shivering, her eyes open but dull. I knelt by her and patted the snow off her.
“I am so cold,” she tol
d me.
“All right,” I said after a moment. I lay down next to her, wrapping my arms around her and pulling her tight against me.
“What are we doing, Ruddy?”
“She’s freezing.”
“We can’t lie here! We’ll all die!”
“That’s going to happen anyway, Alan. We’re lost.”
“Please get up, Ruddy. Please keep going.”
“Wouldn’t you rather it be this way? Holding Katie?”
“Don’t give up! You’ve never given up!”
“God, you sound just like my father right now.”
“Stop it! This is Katie’s life. You can’t lie down!”
I thought about it. “Okay,” I said. “You’re right.” I leaned over and kissed Katie on the cheek, shocked at how cold her skin was under my lips.
I stood up and put the rope around my waist. I left the flashlight on—we were stumbling around at random, hoping by sheer luck to find safety, so it didn’t matter that the glare blinded me. Maybe someone would see us, though that didn’t seem possible in this storm. I just knew it gave me comfort, to have light, to be able to turn back and see Katie on the sled.
“Thank you, Ruddy. Thank you for trying to save my little girl.”
“Alan. I have to tell you something,” I panted.
“Yes?”
“I always thought you were real. Even though I know you can’t be, I always thought of you as being a real person.”
“Thank you, Ruddy.”
“I’m glad you’re with me now. I would hate to be doing this alone.”
“I won’t leave you,” he promised.
I staggered ahead for a few minutes, then stopped. My legs were trembling and weak, and I felt ready to collapse. “I need a break,” I said, my hands on my knees.
Then something slammed into me.
* * *
I fell back as if shot, registering that something coming fast had jumped up from the ground, hitting me hard in the stomach. I didn’t even have time to move and it was on me, a wet tongue finding my face.
“Jake!” I shouted. “My God!” I wrapped my arms around him, joyously clutching his wriggling stout body. “What are you doing here?”
Kermit. He must have come to the repo rescue and, naturally, he brought my dog with him. My dog, with his silly ears and astounding nose.
I untied the rope from the wood sled and used it as a leash. When I gave Jake the loathed instructions to “go for a walk,” he pulled steadily in the direction of the nearest nap: the repo truck.
We were heartbreakingly close to shore—I had been trudging along parallel to it, but would soon have been back out on the open ice. Jake led me to solid ground precisely where I had started my trek that night. The progress onshore was harder—the couple inches of new snow slowed the sled, but now I saw the flashing light bar of the truck pulsing ahead of me, ghostly in the swirling fog.
I didn’t see Kermit until we were about ten feet away. He got out of the repo truck, gawping at me. I let go of Jake, who bounded over to him.
“It’s Katie,” I explained curtly.
“Did she fall through the ice?” he asked, coming to help.
“Where’s your truck?” I replied.
Kermit pointed up the driveway, and we dragged Katie over. “We need to get her to a hospital. Keep your heat on high,” I panted as I struggled to get her sitting upright in the passenger seat. Her head lolled like a drunk’s. “She didn’t fall into the water, but she’s been drugged. I’ll tell you all about it when we get to the emergency room.”
“Okay.”
I looked at him, put a hand on his shoulder. “Thanks for coming, Kermit.”
He straightened. “Sure.”
“I’ll follow in my truck with the light bar on. Jake will come with me. Let me have your cell phone, okay?”
He handed over his phone and got into his truck. Jake followed on my heels, but when I opened the passenger door of the repo truck for him, he stood, his nose lifted, facing the direction of the ice shanties, sniffing. Could he smell Rogan, out there somewhere, still alive? His gaze was intent and focused, though there was nothing to see. Maybe Rogan was close, staggering to shore, or maybe he had crawled into one of the huts for shelter. I watched my dog for a moment and then snapped my fingers. “Hey,” I said. “Forget it, Jake. It’s Shantytown.”
33
You Don’t Have Much Time
“We need to let someone know what happened,” Alan told me.
“Yeah, I know that, Alan.”
“We should call Cutty.”
Keeping one eye on the road, I held up Kermit’s cell phone and thumbed 911. Alan made a small grunt of protest that we weren’t calling his never-to-be girlfriend.
“911, what is your emergency?” a man asked crisply.
For a moment my brain went into the mental equivalent of a four-wheel drift, as I tried to separate what I should say from all that I could say. I cleared my throat. “There’s a man who was run over out in Shantytown. Sort of in the middle of the ice shanties, but the southern edge. The guy who did it was driving a Hummer, and it caught on fire.”
“On fire. Who is this, please?”
“The driver’s name is Wade Rogan. He was driving around smashing into the shanties, destroying them, and there was a man in one. He deliberately ran over the guy a second time. I don’t think the, uh, the victim, survived.”
“What is your name, sir?”
“You need to send the ambulance and the police. Wade Rogan has a gun.”
“I need to know who is calling, and your location.”
“Did you get it? Wade Rogan. He is armed, and he’ll shoot any cop he sees.” I hung up.
“Let’s call Cutty.”
I ignored him and phoned Barry Strickland. I expected him to sound groggy—it was three thirty in the morning—but he answered on the first ring.
“Strickland.”
“It’s Ruddy.”
“Hang on a minute.”
There was a rustling sound. I could hear a report about a big snowstorm on the East Coast, and then the volume went down and he came back.
“Did I wake you up?” I inquired.
“Can’t sleep,” he grunted. “All my years of duty, that was only the second time I’ve ever killed a man.”
“You saved my life, Barry.”
Strickland grunted again. “I should have realized Blanchard might come for you. We knew he was on a snowmobile. I put you at risk.”
“I’d say Blanchard did that.”
Strickland thought about it. “Him, too.”
“Are we going to talk about Wade Rogan?” Alan asked peevishly. I thought I knew why he was so cranky—it was his theory that all the disappearances were linked, but I was going to get the credit.
“There’s going to be a lot of activity out on the ice of Shantytown tonight. It has to do with Lisa Marie Walker.”
I could feel Strickland going still. “Yes?” he responded cautiously.
“I know who killed her. His name is Wade Rogan. He owns the Ferry Bar in Charlevoix. He feeds women alcohol and then drugs them with Rohypnol. I think Lisa Marie might have been his first—he saw her get out of my car, realized how drunk she was, and just sort of picked her up. When the news came out that she had supposedly drowned in my car, it gave him the idea to toss her in the lake after he’d … had her … for a few days.”
“And then he realized the M.E. was incompetent,” Alan urged.
I had sort of forgotten this, but it still irritated me to be reminded. “It wasn’t a perfect murder at all,” I continued. “Her body was in good shape; his semen was in her. Rogan was a dentist at one time; he had to know the forensics were against him. Except the man in charge of the county lab was our good friend Dr. Kane, who suppressed evidence and chalked up the lack of decomposition to the temperature of the water.”
“Please don’t tell me you’ve spoken to this Rogan and told him your theory,” Strickland interr
upted.
“It’s not a theory,” Alan protested.
“There’s more, though. The woman who fell off the Emerald Isle, Nina Otis, was in his bar, drinking, the day she died. She never got on the boat. He kidnapped her and did the same thing he did to Lisa Marie. And the woman who supposedly got drunk and slipped off the boat in Boyne City? The thing was anchored in front of his house. He probably saw her staggering around on deck and couldn’t resist rowing out to see if he could grab her.”
The phone in my hand beeped, and I pulled it away from my ear to glance at it—the 911 operator was calling me back.
“All right, Ruddy,” Strickland said kindly. “I understand how attractive this is—it’s an explanation that gives us a bad guy, a very bad guy, responsible for participating in a fraud that ruined your life. But cases like this just don’t string together this easily. It takes hard evidence and proof.”
Alan and I were both silent for a moment. I pondered how to convince Strickland without talking for an hour, and hit on the solution. “He tried to do the same thing to Katie tonight,” I said bluntly.
Now it was Strickland’s turn to be quiet. “Say that again,” he finally instructed sternly.
I told him about Rogan luring Katie to his home, drugging her, and holding her prisoner in his pump house. About my escape onto the ice. “Rogan drove his Humvee out after me and started crashing into the shanties. One of them had a man in it, and Rogan deliberately drove over him. He killed the guy right in front of me.”
“Where is the perpetrator now?” Strickland asked tensely.
Rogan had gone from being the subject of a wild theory to perpetrator. I felt a cold satisfaction. “He’s out on the ice still. I burned him alive.” I gave the rest of it to him, the phone beeping at me frantically. “I’ve already called 911. That’s what I meant by a lot of activity.”
“So you didn’t actually confirm he was dead. For all we know, he escaped,” Strickland speculated.
“Have you looked out your front window? No one could survive out there. But I did tell 911 that he was armed and would shoot any cop he saw.”