“Where am I?” I said. I was leaning back at a forty-five-degree angle. My chest and left shoulder were wrapped in bandages, and there was a tube coming out of my side with blood draining through it. There was an IV drip in my left arm. I tried flexing the arm. It hurt like hell, but it moved.
“You’re in the hospital,” he said. “In Hancock.”
“Your daughter…”
“She’s fine. She’ll be just fine. Don’t worry.”
“You should be down there with her.”
“I’ll go back down today,” he said. “I just wanted to see what happened to you.”
“What did happen to me?”
“A single. 45-caliber slug through the upper lobe of the left lung. The doctors saw entry and exit wounds, but then they took an X-ray.”
“Don’t tell me.”
“For a minute, they thought a fragment might have stopped near your heart,” he said. “They didn’t know this wasn’t the first time for you. The agents gave me a call and I told them about your… previous history.”
“I’ll have to stop getting shot in the chest. It’s going to catch up with me one of these days.”
He smiled at that. Just a little bit, but it was the first smile I’d seen from him since this whole business started.
“I should be dead,” I said. “He had me lined up straight in the chest, point-blank range.”
“Good thing he’s a bad shot.”
“No, he still had his homemade suppressor on the barrel. That must have knuckleballed the shot.”
“I guess he didn’t take it off yet,” Maven said, “because he was saving it to use on me.”
I looked at him. “Yeah, that may have been the general plan.”
Maven stepped closer. “It was the exact plan, Alex. The bullet that went through your chest was the bullet he was going to use to kill me.”
I lay there and looked up at him.
“They found Sean Wiley in the cottage,” he said. “He’d been shot in the chest, too.”
I closed my eyes.
“They can increase your medicine if you want them to,” he said. “Just say the word.”
“I’m okay. Where are the agents, anyway?”
“They were here a while ago. They’ll be back.”
“How long have I been out?”
“Eight hours, give or take.”
“Feels like longer,” I said. “Hey, there’s a young woman down in Bad Axe, Sean’s girlfriend, she was waiting to hear from him.”
“I believe some state officers went out there. Don’t worry.”
“I promised her I’d find him, Chief.”
“You did, Alex. You found him.”
“Come on…”
“You did everything you could have done.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said. “But I’m glad your daughter’s okay. That’s the one thing that went right.”
“No, the other thing that went right is that the agents had everybody out looking for you. One of them spotted your truck from the road.”
“I’ll thank them when I see them.”
He nodded his head. He looked like he wanted to say something else, but couldn’t find the words.
“What is it, Chief?”
“I still don’t understand how I got put on this guy’s list,” he said. “It’s driving me crazy. Did he happen to tell you why?”
“He didn’t mention you specifically. Although he did say one thing.”
“What was it?”
I tried to replay everything in my mind. I felt dizzy right about then and had to take a moment to breathe.
“Take it easy, McKnight. You don’t have to do this right now.”
“No, I have to remember. It was strange, because it was like he was just making a movie about everything. Like I was just an actor, and none of it was real.”
“Okay… very strange, yes.”
“At one point, he asked me if I had ever played a state police officer. Then he asked me how many people I’d put in jail. How many families I had torn apart.”
I kept going over it, moment by moment. The pain in my shoulder started to radiate across my chest.
“I’m getting the doctor,” Maven said. “I’ll be right back.”
“No, wait.” I reached out and grabbed him with my right hand. “He asked me if I had ever taken a kid who was trying to climb out of hell and thrown him back in.”
“A kid? Like how old?”
“He didn’t say that. But when Wiley was arrested, Bergman must have been around twelve years old.”
“A twelve-year-old kid. Thrown back into hell. What could he have been talking about? I don’t see how that could have had anything to do with me, I swear.”
“I believe you.”
“But this must be based on something.”
“I don’t know, Chief.”
The doctor came in to examine me. I was ready to hear the whole story about the X-ray and the bullet and if the doctor had a sense of humor, how I should try to get shot in another body part next time. Maven got shooed out of the room, but I could see he was still working it over in his mind.
One minute later, he came charging back into the room.
“The governor’s daughter!”
“You’re gonna have to leave, sir,” the doctor said.
“The governor’s whole family was on Mackinac Island,” Maven said, waving off the doctor. “There’s a summer residence up there for the governor, and the governor’s daughter had this horse show she was supposed to go to. The rest of the family would come down the next day, but on that day, they told me and Raz to run up there and pick her up and bring her back down to Lansing. That was the ‘Admin’ on our daily logs. But there were thunderstorms all over the area, so we knew the horse show would probably be cancelled, and we kept telling them that. This is a waste of time, you want us to drive all the way up there to bring the governor’s daughter down here for nothing. Not to mention that’s a total waste to begin with. A sergeant and a trooper driving four hundred miles round-trip so a teenager can ride a horse around some barrels.”
I was mesmerized now, and I think the doctor was, too. I sat there on the bed and he stood there with the blood pressure cuff around my good arm, and we watched Maven go.
“I think we took one of the unmarkeds. That part I don’t remember for sure, but I do remember both of us riding all the way up there while the black clouds are building up and the thunder’s starting to roll in, and we’re on the radio saying, hey, this is stupid, guys, but nobody wanted to actually go bother the governor to get the official word. So we get all the way up there and we go to Mackinaw City to catch the ferry. That’s why St. Ignace wasn’t registering, because if you come from the south you go out of Mackinaw City, right? Anyway, we get on the ferry and now we’ve gotta sit on that stupid boat like a couple of tourists and ride all the way out there, and then when we get there, there’s one of the regulars from the governor’s attachment, and he says, sorry guys, change of plans, no horse show after all. Except we can tell he’s busting a gut trying so hard not to laugh. So we get right back on the boat and go back to the lot and get back in our cars and now we’ve got to drive all the way back to Lansing for nothing. No horse show, no daughter in the car, just a couple of idiots who obviously picked the wrong career. That part I remember now, because I think that might be the exact day I decided it was time for a change.”
“But if you took the ferry from Mackinaw City, how did you ever get up to St. Ignace?”
“That’s the part that comes later. That’s the part I forgot, because I wasn’t even thinking about picking up some kid. I was trying to remember actually arresting somebody, remember?”
“So what are you saying? You were the guys who picked up Bergman?”
He let out a sigh of exasperation. “Maybe. I mean, we picked up some kid on I-75, okay? We’re driving back and we get a few miles and there’s this kid hitchhiking right on the expressway. We pull over and we pick him up.”
“Wait, he was alone?”
He squinted for a moment as he thought back on it.
“Yeah, it was really strange. He hopped in the back of the car like it was nothing, and he starts talking about nothing, I don’t know, but then he realized we were cops. So I guess we must have been in the unmarked. But anyway, he gets real quiet then and he doesn’t say one single word again. So we call in and they tell us to turn around and take him to St. Ignace.”