“Oh, horseshit,” I said. “They’re gonna take one look at us and… God damn it.”
I picked up the cell phone and called information, got through to the OPP station in Hearst, and asked if Constable Reynaud was still around. A minute later, I heard her voice.
“Constable,” I said. “You’re still there. This is Alex.”
“What is it, McKnight?”
“We’re coming up to the bridge. Any chance you could call ahead and clear the way for us?”
“You’re all the way down there already? You shouldn’t have driven so far in your condition. It’s not safe.”
“I would have thought you’d be happy to get us out of the country.”
“Don’t get cute with me, McKnight. All right? It’s bad enough.”
“I’m sorry. We just want to get home.”
“I’ll call right now,” she said. “I’ll tell them to expect two men who look like shit.”
“That sounds about right,” I said. “Vinnie tells me you called his mother personally. I’m glad I got the chance to thank you for that.”
There was a silence on the line. “Mrs. LeBlanc sounded like a good woman,” she said. “Now if you’ll excuse me.”
“Good night,” I said. “I’m sorry about your partner.”
She hung up.
I rolled through town and onto the International Bridge. Vinnie woke up and looked out at the water. “The bridge,” he said.
“Don’t worry, they know we’re coming.”
When we pulled into the American customs booth, the man had obviously gotten the message. He looked us both over and whistled. “They said you’d look bad, but good Lord.”
The sun was going down when we hit Michigan soil. We had forty-five minutes to go. Forty-five minutes to my own bed.
I drove the roads I knew so well, from Soo Michigan to Paradise, through the Hiawatha National Forest, along the southern rim of Whitefish Bay. It was too dark to see the water now. The sign on the edge of town said WELCOME TO PARADISE! WE’RE GLAD YOU MADE IT! I drove by the sign, stopped at the blinking red light, went past Jackie’s place to our access road.
Drop Vinnie off at his house, I thought. Get him inside, make sure he’s comfortable. Then go home and go to bed. And sleep for at least three days.
As I pulled onto my road, I was blinded by a pair of headlights.
“Who the hell?” I couldn’t imagine who was on their way out. Then I remembered all the hunters who were due to check out of my cabins. I would have been back in plenty of time to see them off, if everything hadn’t gone to hell.
I stopped the truck and opened my door. It was a long, black sedan. I didn’t recognize it. Two men got out.
They weren’t hunters. That was obvious. Then it came to me. The two FBI guys said they’d be in touch. They didn’t waste any time.
But I was wrong again. It wasn’t the FBI. I realized that as soon as I saw their faces, and the guns in their hands.
They had my cell phone number. With a little work, you could find out my address. And here they were.
They were on top of us before I could do a thing. No time to back up, no time to get out and run-not that we would have been able to run, anyway.
“Out of the truck,” the one man said. He said it in a matter-of-fact way, the way you’d tell a mover where to put the furniture. The guy on Vinnie’s side, he looked a little more serious about it. He had a big nose, but with all the advance publicity, I was expecting something even bigger.
I looked at my man closely as I got out. He was thick in the neck and shoulders, the way an old football player would look, years after he’s stopped playing. My guess was linebacker turned nightclub bouncer. He had a nice leather jacket on, a high forehead with thinning hair on top. I understand steroids are murder on the hair. There was a diamond earring in his right ear.
“Nice and easy,” he said. He gave me a quick pat-down and turned me around to face the other man across the bed of my truck. The whole scene was side-lit by the glare of the headlights.
“Which one of you is McKnight?” the man with the nose said. Red’s brother. He was smaller, built more like a baseball player. He had a leather jacket on, too-probably a size L to my man’s XXL. He was using a gun a lot more, holding it right to Vinnie’s temple, just above the tape.
“I am,” I said. I looked at Vinnie. He was doing just fine, all things considered.
“And you’re the Indian?” He pulled his head back by the hair.
Vinnie didn’t flinch. “Yes.”
“Start talking.”
“About?”
“Why did you call Red?”
“We were looking for my brother,” Vinnie said. “Red hired him as a guide.”
“Yeah, I know that.”
“Then what do you want from us?”
Easy, Vinnie. I tried to catch his eye.
“What I want from you, you stupid fucking Indian, is the whole story.” He got a tighter hold on Vinnie’s hair, came closer to him, put his face right next to Vinnie’s. “What the fuck happened up there?”
“Did the police call you?”
“They called his wife. They said he was buried in the ground up there.”
“They all were. My brother, your brother. All of them.”
The man shook his head. “Who did this?”
“We don’t know,” Vinnie said. “We know a man named Gannon was involved. That’s all.”
“No. No, that’s not good enough. You hear me? That’s not fucking good enough. My brother is dead. And I want to know why.”
“So do I,” Vinnie said. His voice was even, his eyes clear. There was a supernatural calm all over him, and it was scaring the hell out of me.
“So talk,” the man said. “Tell me what you know about this. You gotta know something. You were up there, weren’t you? Were you involved in this? Was this something you and your Indian brother did?”
“No,” Vinnie said. “We didn’t. And you can stop talking like that. If you want to kill us, go ahead. After what we’ve been through, I don’t even care anymore. Go ahead and put a bullet in my head if you want, but stop talking about my brother that way.”
That threw him a little bit. His eyes got wider, and I was sure he was about to do something stupid. It was a good time to speak up.
“We found him,” I said. “We found your brother.”
He looked over the truck bed at me. “Where?”
“Out in the woods. Where Gannon had buried him, along with the others.”
He took a few hard breaths. Everything else was still, all around us. “You found Red?”
“That man you’re holding on to, you see the bandages on his face?”
“Yeah?”
“Gannon shot him. He blew part of his ear right off.”
He looked closer. “Okay. Then what?”
If I was gonna do this, I had to sell it all the way. It seemed like our only way out. “You wanna know what this man did to Gannon? You wanna hear what this man did to the man who killed your brother?”
“Yes, I wanna hear it.”
“He took a long, heavy stick,” I said, “and he sharpened it. I distracted Gannon, so Vinnie could sneak up behind him. We didn’t have any other weapons. You understand what I’m saying? All we had were sticks.”
“Go on.”
“While Gannon was shooting at me, Vinnie came up behind him and ran that stick right through his back. If he had gotten him in the heart, he would have died almost immediately, but that’s not the way it happened.”
“How did it go?” he said. “Tell me.”
“The stick must have gone through his lung. The blood was such a bright color. He was pumping that blood right out of his lungs, all over the ground.”
“How long did it take him to die?”
“A long time,” I said. “He was bleeding on that ground for a long, long time.”
“Were his eyes open? Did he say anything to you?”
“His eyes were open. He tried to say something, but he couldn’t. He was drowning in his own blood. He was choking on it.”
There were tears in the man’s eyes. “You’re telling me this man killed the man who killed my brother.”
“Yes,” I said. “He ran a stick through his chest and he died a horrible, painful death. That’s what this man did.”