He came back to my side of the truck, smiling. ‘No need for my gun.’ He opened his palm, showing me four bits of twigs. ‘You been pranked, is all. All four tires. Kids jammed these into your valves to let the air out. I’ll have you on your way in no time at all.’
He started the compressor on the truck bed and uncoiled a long hose. Moving around the Porsche, he inflated each of the tires.
I got out, but had to lean quickly against the door. My legs were still rubber.
He gestured at my filthy wet clothes. ‘Be a shame to sit like that in such a nice car.’
‘I’m going back to the Loons’ Rest to get cleaned up.’
‘I probably owe you some change, mister,’ he said, coiling the hose. ‘This wasn’t a hundred-dollar job.’
‘It was a bargain,’ I said, as much for the company of his gun as it was to fix my tires.
‘Fair enough, then,’ he said, climbing into his truck.
I led us out of the woods and we drove back to town. As he turned into his old station, I gave him a wave and continued down to Loons’. The parking lot was just as empty as when I’d checked out that morning. I grabbed my duffel from the trunk.
Wanda frowned as the bells inside the door danced.
‘I need to get cleaned up. I’ll pay for another night, though I’ll only be a half-hour.’
‘We’re full up.’
I stared at her for a couple of seconds before I pointed a finger at the empty parking lot outside. ‘There’s nobody here.’
‘They’re out sightseeing.’ She looked away from me, and out the window at the parking lot. She wasn’t just being deliberately rude; there was something in her eyes. Fear, maybe.
‘And I suppose it’s your friend Herman leading them around, in that new pickup truck I’ve been seeing absolutely everywhere?’
She kept looking out the window, as though waiting for someone to pull in. ‘Full up,’ she said.
It had been no kid with twigs and a gun back in those woods. It had been Herman. I was being warned.
‘Tell that son of a bitch I’ll see him again,’ I said at the door.
It was true enough.
THIRTY-ONE
I drove several hours, almost to Milwaukee, before my subconscious quit tensing for bullets whizzing past my ear.
An enormous truck stop just north of the city had showers and a dour-looking cashier who expressed no surprise when I asked to use the showers. I rewarded him with a much fresher smelling me when I emerged in changed clothes, looking and smelling like the Porsche driver I might have been, had I learned more lucrative career skills. I bought paper towels, leather cleaner, carpet shampoo and, as a particularly elegant touch, a three-pack of little air fresheners that looked like flattened pine trees and smelled like urinal cakes. I scrubbed and patted and daubed the driver’s side of the Porsche’s interior in the parking lot. An hour later, satisfied that the car’s interior would heal, given time, air and prayer, I took my little three-pine forest on the road.
I called Delray Delmar’s cell phone when I got to the Illinois state line. There was truck noise in his background. I had to shout to ask him where he was.
‘In my office,’ he yelled. ‘Lousy office. Trucks outside. Let’s meet tonight.’ He named a restaurant we both knew, five miles southwest of Rivertown.
I would have shouted back that any place at all would have been fine, so long as it wasn’t in Wisconsin, but I didn’t have the strength.
Since it was dark when I set out from the turret, I figured I could head over to Leo’s, leave his keys under the mat and switch the Porsche for my Jeep unnoticed before I went to the restaurant. I’d gone over the interior once more after I got back to the turret, even rubbed the three little pine trees together to release more of the fresh, Wisconsin urinal cake smell before throwing them out. As a provenance specialist for high-end auction houses, Leo made his living searching for small inconsistencies, but I was hoping that he wouldn’t go into the car until the next day, when the carpet might be dry and the lingering scent of the tiny flat pines had eradicated any last lake muck smell. I parked the Porsche in front of his mother’s bungalow, found my own key under the Jeep’s mat, and was gone like a bandit in less than thirty seconds.
The notion that I’d pulled off the switch unnoticed lasted barely fifteen minutes.
‘Did a bear pee in my Porsche?’ Leo demanded when I answered my phone.
‘Does it smell like a bear peed in your Porsche?’ I countered, trying to sound offended.
‘My car looks and smells like a bus station men’s room. The floor is wet and it stinks of urinal cakes.’
‘There you have it, then,’ I offered, smooth as greased glass. ‘Bears don’t use bus station restrooms, even in Wisconsin.’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’ was all he could finally sputter, and even that took a number of seconds.
By then I’d gotten to the restaurant, a dark, beef and brew place. I told him I’d call him tomorrow, and added he ought to lock the Porsche’s doors, in case any bears had followed me south.
‘Nasty bites,’ Delray observed as I slid into the booth in the corner farthest from the door.
I’d daubed clear ointment every place that itched, and I glistened like the sidewalks of Bent Lake at nightfall. ‘Wisconsin offers more than just cheese,’ I said.
Our waitress came and we ordered beer and cheeseburgers. As she started to walk away, I called out, telling her to hold the cheddar. I’d had enough of the notion of that.
Delray grinned. ‘What did Wisconsin offer you, exactly?’
‘No more than you learned up there,’ I said, testing to see how much he’d reveal.
His expression didn’t change. ‘Tell me anyway.’
I told him about Arthur Lamm’s car, seemingly abandoned at his camp; Herman and his shiny new truck; an orange row boat that should have been bailed out; the Porsche’s deliberately deflated tires. And I told him about getting shot at.
‘Shot at, but not getting shot?’ he asked.
‘I’ve come to realize the difference.’
‘You were being run off.’
‘It worked.’
‘I’ll bet. But it was a cheesy way of doing it…’
I groaned.
‘Forgive the pun,’ he said. ‘You’re guessing the shooter was Herman?’
‘He was nearby.’
Our burgers came. Delray squirted a massive glob of yellow mustard on his fries, as I remembered kids did in high school. ‘The question is why Herman wanted to run you off,’ he said.
‘So I wouldn’t find Arthur Lamm.’
‘Maybe, or maybe not,’ he said, playing with a smile.
‘Herman Canty need not have worried,’ I said, not understanding. ‘Too many lakes; too many trees. Even with an army and a fleet of boats searching for him, Lamm might be able to stay hidden up there for years, if he didn’t go to Canada.’
‘Think harder. Go back a little, consider what else Herman might have been up to.’
‘After Lamm’s Chicago people called, the sheriff started looking him. It was Herman who remembered Lamm always went camping this time of-’ I stopped, remembering a thought I’d had, talking with the Bohemian.
‘Do you see?’ Delray asked.
‘Herman established that Lamm is up there, when perhaps he’s not up there at all.’
‘Herman wasn’t afraid of what you’d find, but rather what you wouldn’t find.’
‘No Lamm,’ I said.
‘Exactly. Herman could have driven the Mercedes up there, let it sit until Lamm’s people in Chicago thought to report him missing, at which time Herman says it’s all a false alarm, that Lamm’s out camping on one of the million lakes around there.’
‘When in reality, Lamm didn’t go up there at all,’ I said.
‘The truck’s the proof,’ he said.
‘The truck’s the pay. Herman got rewarded with a shiny new truck.’