Six months, a year ago… maybe it wouldn’t have felt like another life. But it did now. He felt as if that young man back in Ann Arbor had faded away or even died. And this new man in his place? Far from perfect and riddled with spaces that still needed filling. Yet… this man, this newer him, this man was comfortable in his skin, had made a home for himself on this island. When had that changed? And what had caused it? The nearness of the people he had allowed into his life? Margaret and Sam Dodie, Mel. And Ben, of course, because maybe it took the love of a young boy to help make you grow up.
And Joe…
She was the one who had really saved him.
Louis heard a grunt and turned. Mel had stretched out on the sofa. He was asleep.
Louis took the beer from Mel’s hand and set it on the table. An old throw lay nearby, and Louis laid it across Mel’s legs, knowing he would want it in a few hours when the cooler breezes snuck into the old cottage.
He looked back to the answering machine. Something Shockey had said suddenly registered.
He replayed Shockey’s message, but there was no other information. He paused, then dialed Joe’s home number. For the third time in two days, the answering machine picked up. He listened to the crisp words in her low voice and waited for the beep.
“It’s me again,” he said. “I’m coming north.”
Chapter Three
The air smelled of freshly turned earth. Was it just the wind bringing in the odor of a nearby farm? But Louis didn’t remember there being any fields this close to the city.
That’s what Ann Arbor was now, still a college town, the one he remembered from his four years here. But since he had left, it seemed to have taken on the rigor of a bigger place, with traffic and noise encroaching on the quiet sanctity of the University of Michigan campus.
Louis left the rental car in a lot, thinking a walk to the police station would do him some good after the long trip. Two hours sitting on the ground at the Tampa airport before they finally got in the air. Another lost hour at Detroit Metro while a Northwest clerk tried to find his missing suitcase. It had turned up in San Antonio, and the clerk promised it would be delivered to his hotel that night.
The one sweater he had packed — hell, the one sweater he had kept since moving to Florida — was in the suitcase. And now, as he headed down South University, he zipped his windbreaker to his chin against the chill, thinking maybe he should have driven after all.
A bell tolled. He couldn’t see it, but he knew it was the Burton Tower. He counted three bells. Shit, on top of everything else, he was going to be late. He spotted a phone and dialed the police station.
“Don’t bust your hump,” Shockey said. “Where are you now?”
“By the Law Quad,” Louis said.
“You know Krazy Jim’s?”
“The burger place?”
“Yeah. Meet me there.”
Louis stepped out of the phone booth into a cold drizzle. He hurried across the street and through the stone archway leading into the cloistered confines of the old Law Quad.
He didn’t stop. Neither did the memories.
The cold marble floor of the dining hall where he usually ate alone. The cell-like feel of his dorm room. The sound of his roommate’s drunken snores that drove him to the quiet solitude of the Law Library’s reading room. There, under the fifty-foot vaulted ceiling, there, under the soft glow of the brass lamps, there, under the stained- glass weight of tradition, time seemed to stand still. There, in that vast Gothic cathedral of a place, the ache of loneliness was somehow lessened.
As he neared the western arch, his eyes went up to the old leaded windows of the Lawyers Club. It was where the law students lived. It was where he had so desperately wanted to be.
Once. Another lifetime ago.
He emerged onto State Street, heading west. On Division, he spotted the red awning of Krazy Jim’s Blimpy Burgers. The windows were fogged over, blurring the sign that boasted “Cheaper Than Food.” Inside, a vapor of grease and smoke enveloped him.
Louis spotted a man in a gray raincoat at the front corner table. He was red-faced and beefy, with the kind of hard, darting eyes that could never belong to a college professor. The man stood up as Louis approached.
“Kincaid?”
“Yeah. You Shockey?”
“That I am.” When Shockey held out his hand, Louis caught the glint of his gold detective’s badge and a holstered automatic beneath the raincoat. Shockey’s handshake was hard, his hands rough. Not the hands of a detective who spent long hours at a desk.
“So,” Shockey said, “you remember me now that you’re looking at me?”
Louis took in the pockmarked but roughly handsome face with its coffee-colored eyes and chopped dark hair.
“No, I don’t. Sorry.”
“I remember you,” Shockey said. “I was there the first day you showed up in uniform. We all wanted to get a look at the poster boy.”
“What?”
“You know, the new cop of the 1980s. Someone who was-”
“Black?” Louis said.
Shockey stared at him, then broke into a crooked-tooth smile. “No, man,” he said. “Someone with a friggin’ college degree.”
Louis let the words just hang there until Shockey cleared his throat. “You hungry?”
The smell of frying onions made Louis’s stomach churn with hunger. “Yeah, I could use a bite,” he said.
“Let’s get in line, then,” Shockey said.
Shockey went to the counter and got a plastic tray. Louis followed suit.
“You know,” Shockey said, “when I looked you up, I was expecting to see attorney-at-law after your name. Kinda surprised to find out you weren’t nothing but a lousy peeper living in a cottage and working insurance crap.”
Louis dug a Coke out of the cooler and slid his tray behind Shockey’s.
“I heard you got kicked out of Michigan a few years back for screwing up some big case the state guys were working on,” Shockey said.
Louis stayed quiet.
“But I guess that just proves what I been saying all along,” Shockey continued. “Police work is all about instinct and guts. Either you got them or you don’t, and you can’t get them from a diploma.”
They had moved up to the griddle, where a big black woman in a white apron and a red head scarf was making hamburgers in a fog of steam.
“Gimme a quint egg on onion roll, Irma,” Shockey said.
The woman grabbed five golf balls of meat, slapped them onto the grill, and smashed them with her spatula. She cracked an egg next to the meat. Then she looked up at Louis.
“Cheeseburger with fries,” Louis said.
The woman pointed the spatula at him. “You need to order the fries first! And the cheese last!”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
Shockey held up a hand. “He’s a virgin, Irma.”
The woman glared at Louis. “Don’t care if he’s a eunuch. Rules is rules.”
Shockey turned to Louis. “What do you want?”
