“Come here, Miata,” he said, opening the closet door. The dog came bolting out into the room, ready to kill somebody. He ran out into the kitchen, legs skittering all over the place, and then back into the poker room, the living room, every room in the house, barking himself hoarse.
“Is that the bravest little fucking dog you’ve ever seen or what?” Vargas said. “At least somebody put up a fight.”
“I seem to recall Bennett taking a nice shot for you,” Jackie said.
“When was that?” he said.
“For God’s sake,” Jackie said, “when they pulled you off the floor, he told them to leave you alone, remember? They kicked him right in the ribs.”
Vargas looked at Bennett, and seemed to be playing the scene back in his mind.
“Doesn’t matter,” Bennett said. “It was stupid, anyway.”
Vargas kept looking at him, and was about to say something when Gill came into the room. “No sign of the police,” he said. “They should be here by now.”
“Did you call the Soo police?” I said. “Or the state troopers?”
“Soo,” he said. “I mean, that’s where we are, right?”
Vargas picked up the bottle of Jack Daniels from the poker table and took a hit off it. Then he went to the sliding door, opened it, and went out onto the deck. The thought of fresh air must have appealed to everyone at that point, because we all followed him.
I was the last one out. By the time I was on the deck, Vargas had already walked down the steps to the river. He picked up the telescope from the shoreline and held it in his hands.
Kenny went down and stood next to him. The rest of us stayed on the deck, watching over them. “What did they take?” Kenny said.
“They cleaned out the safe,” Vargas said.
“What was in it?”
Vargas looked at him, and then up at us. “You all know what was in the safe,” he said.
“How much money was in there?” Kenny said.
“When the police get here,” he said, “let me talk to them about the safe. Everybody got that?”
Another freighter came moving down the river. It was at least seven hundred feet long, moving too quietly for something that big. Bennett, Jackie, and Gill all leaned against the rail and watched it pass. The flag was American.
“What else did they take?” Kenny said. “Anything?”
“It looks like they just threw all this shit out the window,” Vargas said. “Some of it made the water. The rest of it…”
“Here’s something from your display case,” Kenny said, picking up a small bell. “These maps are kind of ruined, though.”
“This was a thousand-dollar telescope,” Vargas said. With one sudden motion he coiled it back around his body and then sent it spinning out into the river. It hung high in the air and then landed with a splash a hundred feet out.
“That might have been evidence,” Kenny said.
“Excuse me?” Vargas said. He looked like he very much wanted to throw Kenny out there with the telescope.
“I’m just saying,” Kenny said. “I mean, never mind.”
“They didn’t touch the jewelry,” Vargas said. “All those diamonds I buy my wife every fucking Christmas. They went right to my room, right to my secret safe, and then they did this to me. Anybody have any ideas?”
Nobody said anything, but I had a feeling this was all tied to what he was getting at before the robbers broke in-this whole business with Swanson and his wife.
And good God in heaven, the private eye he had apparently hired to follow them. In all the excitement, I had almost forgotten about that little piece of news.
“Anybody?” Vargas said. “Don’t be shy.”
We heard the sirens then. It sounded like three cars, maybe four, all hitting his street at once.
“You know something?” Vargas said. “The man who took me upstairs, I got a real good look at his eyes. If I ever see those eyes again, I’ll know ’em in a second.” He snapped his fingers to emphasize his point.
We heard a voice from inside. “Hello! Who’s here?”
“Remember,” he said, coming up the steps, “I’ll do the talking about the safe.”
We ended up with four Soo police officers in the house, plus the on-duty detective. I kept expecting the police chief himself to arrive on the scene. He and I had a bit of a history, after all, and everything else that could have gone wrong that evening had already happened. So I figured a visit from Chief Roy Maven was inevitable.
“Where’s the chief?” I asked the detective. “I kinda figured he’d be here by now.”
“He was downstate today,” the man said. “I don’t think he’ll be back until tomorrow.”
“There is a God,” I said. “That’s the first good thing that happened all night.”
He didn’t argue the point. He worked for Maven, after all, so he knew what I was talking about. I told them everything I knew-the partial descriptions of the two men who had stayed downstairs, the heavier man in the athletic shoes with blue stripes, the fair-haired man who sounded Canadian. The Glocks. It wasn’t much, but he wrote it down and thanked me.
It was well after midnight when they finally finished with us. I knew they’d be back the next day to do a good daylight search of the place. The investigation would be the center of Vargas’s life for the next few days, but the rest of us were through with it, or so I hoped. I had had quite enough of this house. I wanted very much to never see it again. Or its owner.
“Let’s go, Jackie,” I said, as soon as the police left. “We’ve gotta get you home. You must be exhausted.”
We left Vargas sitting there at his bartop, next to the poker table. All of the chips and cards were still lying there. Nobody bothered to settle up.
Jackie let me drive his car. He sat in the passenger’s seat, looking out the window. I went back the same way we came, across town to Six Mile Road, all the way out to Brimley, past the two Indian casinos with their signs glaring in the night and their parking lots full, the golf course with the heavy equipment sitting all together under a single security light mounted high on a wooden pole, and then out to Lakeshore Drive. There was a half moon, reflected in the lake. There were no clouds.
The old railroad car was there on the corner, in shadows so dark you wouldn’t notice it if you didn’t know it was there. For some reason, that railroad car felt like the perfect thing just then. It felt like I could stop the car right there and go open the door and climb inside. For me, the door would open. I’d go to sleep on the bare floor next to the rats and raccoons and God knows what else, in an abandoned, useless old railroad car that would never go anywhere ever again.
I don’t know what made me think this way. I don’t know what made me imagine going to sleep in that old railroad car and never waking up. It was a hell of a thing to think about on your way back from an armed robbery.
“Well,” Jackie said, finally breaking the silence. “At least I got you out of your cabin tonight.”
“You did,” I said. “I can’t wait to see what you’ve got planned for tomorrow night.”
“What were you thinking?” he said. “When we were lying on the floor?”
“With the guns pointed at our heads?”
“I seem to recall them pointed a little more at your head than at mine, but yeah, what were you thinking then?”
“You know the old expression about your life flashing before your eyes?”
“Yeah?”
“Turns out it’s true,” I said. “That’s exactly what I was thinking about. My whole life.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“What did it all add up to?” he said. “Your whole life, I mean.”
“You really want to know?”
“I really want to know.”
“Not a hell of a lot,” I said. “What about you? What were you thinking?”
“Same thing, more or less. But mine had a happier ending.”
“How’s that?”
“I was thinking,” he said, “that if this was my last night on earth, then at least I don’t have to see this place get destroyed.”