He didn’t pay someone. Somewhere up the line, somebody got it in their head that this guy was taking liberties. So they took him out. I’m sure it happens. Not every day, but it happens.
Whoever it was, the killer obviously had it worked out ahead of time. He probably used a silencer, after all. So why cut his throat? You just shot him in the face. If he’s not dead already, he’s dead within two minutes. Why make a mess of the place? Somebody who kills people for a living doesn’t do that, not unless it’s a message. To other bookmakers who might make the same mistake? Maybe. Or maybe it was just personal.
I threw a few rocks in the water until my shoulder complained. The sun went behind a cloud, the wind started to pick up again. The waves started to hit the rocks with a littie more feeling. As I started to walk back I picked up a petoskey stone and put it in my pocket for good luck.
I walked a lot faster on my way back to the cabin. Having gone over it in my mind, having put some distance between myself and a random act of violence that had nothing to do with me, I felt a little better. I walked over those rocks like a man who had someplace to go again. And besides, I was starting to get too damned cold.
I watched for hunters this time as I walked through the woods. The six cabins I owned were strung out down an old logging road. My old man had bought this land back in the early sixties, came up here every weekend, clearing the trees and planning his first cabin site. He built them the old-fashioned way, the “right way.” You take some good solid pine and you scribe it all the way across with a chain saw so that each log fits perfectly on top of the other. He didn’t do any chinking at all. That wouldn’t have been the right way.
I helped him that summer. That was 1968, the year the Tigers won the World Series. I had one more year of high school, and then I was on my way to minor league ball instead of college. He wasn’t too happy about that. But he didn’t talk about it much. I caught the tip of the chainsaw on a log one afternoon and almost took my ear off. He drove me to the hospital in the Soo while I held a rag against the side of my head. “You like to learn things the hard way, don’t you,” he said. “I wish I was young and stupid again.” Then he went on to tell me how I wouldn’t last a day in the minor leagues if my throws to second base kept sailing on me. He had caught some himself when he was younger. He told me again about the four-seam drill, even though I had heard it a hundred times already. “When I was your age,” he said, “I had a baseball in my hand every waking minute. You grab it, you turn it so you have four seams across your fingers. Grab it, turn it, again and again until it becomes a part of you. Then your throws to second don’t sail.”
That was what, thirty years ago? He died a couple years after I left the force. I was still trying to deal with what had happened, collecting three-quarter pay on disability. I came up here expecting to sell off the property and the cabins. He had built five more of them by himself, each one bigger and better than the first. When I decided to stay a while, I took the first one, even though it was the smallest and there were some gaps in the logs that let in the cold. I’m sure those were the logs I had done myself, back when I was young and stupid.
Later on I spent a slow Sunday night at the Glasgow, reading the paper over a steak and a cold Canadian beer. The murder had come too late for the Sunday edition, so the good people of Chippewa County would have to wait another day to hear about it. Violent deaths weren’t uncommon up here, but it was usually the lake that did the killing. Maybe four or five men a year, caught in sudden storms. Murder was a little different. It would make everyone nervous for about two weeks and then they’d forget it ever happened.
“Good evening, Alex.”
I looked up from my paper. Edwin stood next to the chair across the table from me.
“Sit down,” I said, and he did.
“So,” he said. “Anything interesting in the news?”
I looked at him and turned a page. “Not in today’s paper,” I said. “Tomorrow’s will be a little more exciting.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “A reporter already called me today. Can you believe that?”
“A reporter called you? How did he get your name?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But you know how those reporters are.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I didn’t give them your name,” he said. “I mean, I didn’t tell them about you coming out to help me. I figured that’s the least I can do.”
“Hm.”
“I’m really sorry, Alex. I shouldn’t have bothered you with it.”
“Edwin, can I ask you something?” I put the paper down and looked him in the eyes. He was wearing a red flannel shirt that day, trying to look like one of the locals. It wasn’t working.
“Sure, go ahead. Anything.”
“What are you doing getting mixed up with that guy in the first place? Didn’t you tell me that you weren’t going to gamble anymore?”
“Yes, I did,” he said. “I did say that.”
“You were sitting right across the table from me, just like you are right now,” I said. I looked across the room. “No, it was right over there. That table right there by the window. Remember? ‘I, Edwin J. Fulton the third, hereby resolve that I will never gamble again, and that I will go home and be a good husband to Sylvia, and Alex will never have to come to the casino and drag my butt home because I’ve been gone for two days.’ Do you remember saying that?”
“Yes,” he said. “I remember that very well.”
“When was that?”
“I don’t know, it was around the end of March. Right after that last little episode.”
“Yeah, that little episode,” I said. I could feel the anger building inside me, and it wasn’t just because Edwin was gambling again. If the man throws his money away, that’s his business. But then he leaves his wife at home for days at a time, all alone in that big empty house out on the point. A woman like Sylvia, who had too much of what I was starving for. The winters up here are too long. I had too much time to think about it, knowing she was alone in that house waiting for me.
“Alex, it’s not what you think.”
“No, of course not. You were delivering five thousand dollars to his motel room in the middle of the night, but it’s not because you were gambling.”
“Alex…”
“As it turns out, the guy was selling Girl Scout cookies on the side and you bought two thousand boxes.”
“You don’t understand,” he said.
“Yes, I do. That’s the problem. I understand you completely.”
Edwin got up from the table. I thought he’d leave, but instead he went up to the bar and ordered a Manhattan. He came back with it and sat back down.
“Alex,” he said. “I have a problem. I know that. And I thought I had solved that problem. I thought I was done with it. But I was wrong. I admit it. Okay? I was wrong. I still have a problem.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I don’t know if you’ve ever had a problem like this,” he said. “You don’t strike me as the kind of guy who’d ever have a gambling problem. You probably can’t relate to that. But it’s really not that much different from any other kind of compulsion or addiction or whatever you want to call it. Whether it’s gambling or alcohol or drugs, it’s really the same thing. Have you ever had any kind of problem like that at all?”
“For the sake of argument,” I said, “let’s say I have.”
“Okay, but whatever it is, it gives you something. Whether it’s a drink or a pill or a bet. It gives you a certain kind of feeling. You know what I mean? It’s a feeling that you can’t get anywhere else. And eventually you get to the point where you know it’s starting to hurt you, but you still have to have that feeling. For me, it’s the feeling of having something at risk. That ball is spinning in the roulette wheel. Or the dealer is showing a six and I’ve got eleven. It’s like a bolt of electricity right through me, Alex. And believe me, there is nothing else that makes me feel that way. There is nothing that can take its place.”