A Stolen Season: An Alex McKnight Novel (An Alex Mcknight Novel Series) Read online

  “Nice try. I’m not buying it.”

  He took another step.

  “I was at the boathouse a long time before you got there. You think I just sat there waiting?”

  He didn’t say anything this time.

  “I put it right under the deck,” I said. “Right there.” I pointed to a spot on the deck behind him.

  In the same motion, I reached for the barrel of his gun. I felt it tingle in my hand as he fired it again. I pushed the gun upward, tried to get it over our heads so I could get a clean shot at him with my free hand. I swung him around as hard as I could, driving my left elbow into his chin. He kicked at me, tried to knee me in the groin, tried to swing the gun back around toward my head.

  I went with his motion, ducked as he pulled the trigger again, and pushed him all the way through until he lost his balance. I got my knee up onto his back and drove him into the ladder, twisting the gun out of his hand. It fell away from both of us, clattering across the deck.

  He swung around and elbowed me in the gut, knocking the wind out of me. Then he tried to drive the crown of his head into my nose. I turned away just in time, but everything went white when I caught most of the blow right in the cheekbone.

  I tried to hold on to him, but I could feel him slipping away from me. I tackled him from behind as he went for the gun. He kicked at me, caught me a few times in the stomach, in the hip. I dug my fingers into his sides, grabbed onto his belt, and pulled him back as hard as I could. He had the gun in his hand. He tried to turn over to shoot me. I grabbed his wrist, tried to bend it back. I needed to get up on my knees, get some leverage on him, but he was beating me to it. He was pulling himself up off the deck.

  I got up on one knee. Then the other. I got one foot under me and put my shoulder into him. I felt all the air go out of him as I drove him hard into the gunwale, right next to Rhapsody’s body.

  Whatever leverage I had now, I lost when I stepped in the blood. There was just enough of it on the wooden deck to make us both start sliding around like we were on ice, until I finally got both hands around his right wrist. I pounded his arm against the edge of the gunwale. Again. Then again. I could see the gun slipping from his hand. One more time and it was free.

  It fell into the water and sank. It disappeared forever, just like Rhapsody’s gun, like all the other guns that were down there, every gun in the world on the bottom of the lake.

  Every gun except the small pistol still strapped to my ankle.

  Cap swung at me a few times without connecting. I hit him in the gut. Then I hit him in the face. He went down on the deck and rolled over. When he came back up, he had Rhapsody’s black bag. Before I could get to him, he reached inside and pulled out a switchblade. He hit the button and I saw the long gleam of metal.

  “I’m going to carve you up like a turkey, McKnight.”

  I bent down for the ankle holster. He came at me, faster than I would have thought possible. I dived backward, reaching out one leg to trip him as he made his rush. I felt the lick of the blade against my forehead.

  When I turned around, he was getting back to his feet. Blood trickled into my left eye.

  He stood there for a moment, breathing hard. He spat blood as he wiped the blade clean against his coat.

  “Everything was just great,” he said. “Until you came along.”

  “I feel the same way,” I said. I pulled up my pant leg and drew the pistol. I pointed it right at his face.

  “Oh, fuck me.”

  “Drop the knife.”

  “I don’t believe this. What next?”

  “Drop it,” I said. “Throw it overboard.”

  He tossed the knife in the water. He stood there with his arms hanging at his sides.

  The blood was really flowing into my eye now. I picked up Rhapsody’s bag and turned it over. Her wallet fell out. Her cell phone. A makeup bag. A little dispenser of tissues. I pulled out all the tissues and held them to the cut on my forehead. There was blood all over my face, all over my hands. My clothes. Rhapsody’s blood mixed with Cap’s mixed with mine.

  “So what are you going to do now?” he said. He wiped more blood from his mouth.

  It was getting dark now. There was no fog tonight. The stars were starting to appear high above us. The only sound now was our breathing and the boat creaking gently as it drifted in the water.

  “I’m not moving,” Cap finally said. “I’m going to stand right here.”

  “Good. You’ll make an easier target.”

  “You can’t shoot me.”

  “Why not?”

  “You can’t do it. You know that.”

  I kept the gun pointed at him. I didn’t say anything.

  “You don’t have it in you, McKnight. Neither did Brucie, remember? Hell, neither did Rhapsody, it turns out. There aren’t many people in this world who can kill a man in cold blood.”

  “Brucie didn’t have a good enough reason,” I said. “Neither did Rhapsody.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Either you can or you can’t.”

  I stood there. I held the gun.

  “You’re not a killer,” he said in a low voice. It was almost a whisper. “You can’t do it.”

  He stared into my eyes. He didn’t blink.

  “You can’t do it.”

  I picked up Rhapsody’s cell phone off the deck and turned it on. After it played a few notes of music, I could see in the faint glow that it was getting a weak signal. She obviously had a much better phone than I did.

  I fumbled with the buttons, looking up at him every couple of seconds, finally found the menu, then the call history. I went through the numbers, saw my own number in the outgoing calls, the three times she had called me, kept going, saw another number appear several times. I recognized the 416 area code. I knew it well from every time I had called Natalie in Toronto.

  “What are you doing?” Cap said.

  “Just a little trick I learned from you guys.”

  I hit the talk button.

  “McKnight,” he said. He couldn’t keep the panic out of his voice. “Who are you calling?”

  “You’re right,” I said. “I’m not a killer. I can’t shoot you in cold blood.”

  The signal was weak, but the call was going through. It was ringing.

  “But I know someone who’d be happy to.”

  He grabbed one of the plastic deck chairs. He threw it at my head and made a diving lunge for the gun.

  I ducked the chair and shot him dead.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  The warm weather finally arrived in September. It stayed for ten and a half days. The sun was bright and in the evenings it shone against the trees and made everything look like a postcard. The sunsets were the very definition of breathtaking. You would literally stop breathing when you stepped outside to see them.

  Far from being lost on me, I think I felt those days more deeply than anyone. They were so beautiful, but the beauty was tinged with a great sadness because you knew there would be so few of them. Each perfect day making you wonder if it would be the last.

  A white man would have called these ten and a half days an Indian summer. I asked Vinnie what the Ojibwa called it. He said it was dagwaging.

  I had apologies to make, to Vinnie more than anyone. I had shut him out, had treated him like no brother should ever treat another, even before I shot him with a fifty-thousand-volt stun gun. Someday maybe we’d be able to joke about that one. But not yet.

  Vinnie finally asked me what had happened that day, after I left him. I figured I owed him the full story. We sat outside and watched the sunset while I told him. When I got toward the end, the moment of truth, I wasn’t sure quite what to say.

  “He told me I couldn’t kill him in cold blood,” I said. “I wanted to. I really did. But I couldn’t do it.”

  “You had the only gun at that point,” Vinnie said. “He was defenseless.”

  “After what he had done, that shouldn’t have mattered.”

 
“No…but it still came down to shooting an unarmed man.”

  “That’s why I called Laraque. I knew he’d have no problem with it.”

  “So when he figured who you were calling…”

  “He came right at me. He probably thought it was his last chance.”

  “You had to shoot him then.”

  “Yes. I did.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “I couldn’t do it straight up,” I said. “So I had to force his hand. I think I knew he’d try something.”

  “But it wasn’t a bluff. You really did have Laraque on the line.”

  “If the situation was reversed, Cap would have shot me right away. No hesitation. So does this make me a better man, Vinnie? A weaker man? What?”

  He looked at the sky while he thought about it. It was painted with every shade of red, orange, yellow. Some blue, some purple. Even some green. A painter would have lost his sanity trying to capture it all.

  “You did what you had to do,” he said. “You found the one way to get it done. I think you can let it go now.”

  I didn’t say anything to that. We both sat there for a while.

  “So what happened with Laraque?” he said. “What did he say when you called him?”

  “I didn’t really get to talk to him until after I shot Cap. Then I tried to explain everything. He told me to give him my GPS so he could send somebody out to meet me. He had those men with a boat on St. Joseph Island.”

  “They wouldn’t have let you live. I mean, talk about loose ends.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “So what did you say?”

  This was the only part I didn’t tell Vinnie—the part about me sitting there in the boat, asking Natalie what I should do. Wait for the men, let them find me so I could join her, wherever she was? Or find a reason to keep on living in this world for a little bit longer.

  “I came up with some coordinates, miles away from where I was. I gave those to him and told him I’d wait. I figured those guys would be going out no matter what, might as well send them in the wrong direction. Then I called the Coast Guard.”

  “That must have been some scene…”

  “Two dead bodies. Me standing there covered with blood. Yeah, that got their attention.”

  “Sounds like you still have their attention.”

  He knew I’d already been interviewed by the ATF and the Mounties. The ATF agent in particular wanted to hold an obstruction of justice charge over my head, but Sergeant Moreland called me himself to tell me the guy was just blowing steam. Laraque was still out of reach, he told me. The guns at the bottom of the lake could be tied back to Gray, but Gray was already dead. Moreland told me they might want me to testify against Laraque someday, if it ever came to it. I thanked him for all the times he had been watching out for Natalie. He thanked me, totally off the record, for killing the man who had killed her.

  “It’s ironic,” Vinnie said. “You wanted to go after Laraque so bad, and it turned out he had nothing to do with it. Now he might have reason to go after you.”

  “He wouldn’t dare right now. Things are still a little too hot for him.”

  “Yeah, but someday…”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  “You’d better sleep with a gun, Alex.”

  “I can’t. They’re all on the bottom of the lake, remember?”

  The sun disappeared. The colors stayed in the sky, darkening one degree at a time.

  “I miss her, Vinnie. I really do. It’s not getting any better.”

  “You’re done running around for a while. It’s time to grieve now.”

  He was right, of course. It was time.

  Vinnie helped me move all my stuff to the second cabin. We left the first cabin empty for now. I’d figure out what to do with it later.

  We worked on the new cabin at the end of the road. We built the interior stairs. Then we started in on the kitchen.

  I spent my evenings at the Glasgow Inn. I sat by the fire and remembered the one night Natalie was there.

  Ten and a half days. On the eleventh day, it was gone within an hour. You knew it wouldn’t be back for a long time. The leaves all seemed to turn at once and you could feel the cold wind coming. You could practically smell the snow in the air.

  I asked Vinnie what the Ojibwa word was for fall.

  “It’s dagwaging.”

  “Wait a minute, that’s the same word you gave me for Indian summer.”

  “There’s no difference,” he said. “The sun may be shining. Or it may be cold and gray. It is what it is. It’s still dagwaging. You accept it and you go on living your life.”

  That night, Vinnie came to me and told me that Caroline was having some real trouble again. Things were getting bad with Eddie, now that she wasn’t making those few bucks on the side selling her prescription painkillers. He asked me to drive over to the Soo with him, so we could both have a little talk with Eddie, maybe suggest to him that beating up his wife wouldn’t solve any of his problems.

  He drove. I sat in the passenger’s seat of his truck, watching the leaves blow around in the cold wind. He could have done this himself, I thought. He’s taking me with him for a reason, maybe to show me that I still have some fight left in me.

  I looked over at him, at his stone-calm face. “You won’t give up,” I said, “will you.”

  He kept his eyes on the road. “Never.”

  Caroline was at work that night. Eddie was at home, sitting at his kitchen table with his beer and cigarettes, just like the first time I had met him. Here was a man lucky enough to have a woman who loved him, lucky enough to spend every day of his life with her. I could barely stand to look at him.

  I’d run into my share of domestic violence before, back in Detroit. A beat cop sees it all the time. There’s only so much you can do about it. You can arrest the man, talk to the woman, help her with her options. You may feel like bouncing the man off the walls a few times, but you can’t.

  I wasn’t a cop anymore.

  By the time we left him, I think he was thoroughly convinced that Vinnie would be watching over her every day in the casino. Looking for a bruise. The slightest mark on her. Red eyes, maybe from crying. A bad hair day. That’s all it would take for us to pay him another visit.

  It was one thing I could do. One good thing for one person who needed help. Maybe another thing the next day, for someone else. Maybe getting one step closer to being the kind of man who’d deserve having someone like Natalie Reynaud in his life, if only for a short time.

  Yes, being that man, living with the dagwaging I’d been dealt. Then getting through another long winter so I can see how the world looks when springtime comes again.

  Also by Steve Hamilton

  Ice Run

  Blood Is the Sky

  North of Nowhere

  The Hunting Wind

  Winter of the Wolf Moon

  A Cold Day in Paradise

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

  An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

  A STOLEN SEASON. Copyright © 2006 by Steve Hamilton. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.thomasdunnebooks.com

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hamilton, Steve, 1961–

  A stolen season: an Alex McKnight novel / Steve Hamilton.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-0-312-35360-5

  1. McKnight, Alex (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Private investigators—Michigan—Upper Peninsula—Fiction. 3
. Upper Peninsula (Mich.)—Fiction. 4. Smuggling—Fiction. 5. Drug traffic—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3558.A44363S76 2006

  813’.54—dc22 2006044485