“Good morning, men!” Lane Uttley appeared among us. Edwin was right, he had his lawyer suit on. It looked like he had showered, shaved, and stopped at his barber’s house to wake him up for a quick trim. “Alex,” he went on, slipping right into his lawyer voice. “Thank God you’re here. Edwin, you look terrible. Chief Maven, Roy, please, tell me what’s happening here.”
Maven looked at the lawyer for a moment. “Wait here,” he said. “All of you.” He went to the room and opened the door. We watched him from behind as he poked his head in. He stood there for a full minute, motionless. Finally, he closed the door and spoke to his officers again. They had woken up the owner of the motel, a bewildered old man who was standing between them wearing boots and a coat over his pajamas.
“How bad does the guy look?” Uttley asked me.
“He was shot in the face and his throat was cut open,” I said. “Aside from that, he looks fine.”
Maven rejoined the party. “Gentlemen,” he said, “it looks like the Soo just lost a bookmaker.”
“Tony Bing,” Edwin said. “I came to give him some money.”
“I know who he is, Mr. Fulton. We’ll talk about the rest of it down at the station while my officers do their work here.”
“Of course, Roy,” Uttley said. “We’ll do anything we can to help.”
“I appreciate that very much,” Maven said. “Now Mr. Fulton, may I have your left shoe?”
“Excuse me?”
“Your left shoe, Mr. Fulton. If you look at the bottom of it, I think you’ll find some blood.”
Edwin put one hand on my shoulder and lifted his left foot. “Oh God,” he said.
“Take it off,” Maven said.
“Right now?”
“Roy, come on,” Uttley said. “Surely you can-”
“You have corrupted the crime scene, Mr. Fulton. Give me the shoe.”
Edwin pulled the shoe off and gave it to him. It was made of soft gray leather, probably worth more than my truck.
Maven pulled a plastic bag out of his coat pocket and put the shoe in it. “Thank you,” he said. “Now if you and your lawyer would care to accompany me to the station…”
“Roy, for God’s sake,” Uttley said. “You took the man’s shoe.”
“Mr. Uttley,” Maven said, “I think you should advise your client to hop on his right foot. Like this.” He lifted up his own left foot and hopped a couple steps, his keys jangling in his pockets. “See? It’s easy. It’s almost as easy as dialing nine-one-one on a telephone.”
I DROVE BACK to Paradise. It’s a thirty minute trip when you’re flying, forty-five when you stick to the speed limit. I was in no rush to get home.
The sun was coming up, the night wind gone. Route 28 takes you away from the lake, then a road crosses, giving you one more chance to go to the Bay Mills Casino or the King’s Club. If you keep going straight, the road takes you deep into the Hiawatha National Forest, through pine trees and a couple of small towns named Raco and Strongs. You take a right on Route 123 and soon you see the lake again. You pass the Taquamenon State Park and then you’re in Paradise. There is a sign that says, “You Are Entering Paradise! Glad You Made It!”
I tried not to think. It didn’t happen. It was a bad dream.
Uttley thanking me. Telling me to go home and get some sleep. Edwin standing there with that lost look on his face. For once all the money in the world wasn’t going to make a problem go away. Chief Maven, playing his little hard-ass games with us. I had known so many cops just like him.
Way back when, Alex. Back in Detroit.
Stop right there. Don’t think about anything else. You didn’t really go into that motel room. You didn’t really see it. The red, the red, all that red.
I tried to stop the next image from coming into my mind, but I could not. I saw the blood again. A vast shivering red lake of blood.
That day in Detroit. I am there again. The blood, just like tonight. The same color. The same quality. Blood is always the same.
Franklin is down. My partner is down. My partner is bleeding. Do something. There’s too much blood. Get up. Get up and help him.
Am I bleeding, too? Is this my blood? Does it even matter? Blood is the same. It is always the same.
Goddamn it. I thought I was over this. I thought it was gone.
As I pulled into my driveway, I tried to remember where I had put those pills. I hadn’t taken them for so long. And only on the bad nights. Just to get through those bad nights.
I had to find those pills. Just this once. One more time. I needed to sleep. Just a couple hours. I needed to close my eyes and not see Franklin on the floor next to me.
I found the pills in the back of my medicine cabinet. Without looking at myself in the mirror, I took one, and then another.
The pills will help you one more time. Like an old friend. They’ll make everything go white. No more blood. The red will fade away. From red to pink as you go higher and higher. And then the pink will fade away into pure white as you reach the clouds.
CHAPTER THREE
When I woke up, my head was hanging over the edge of the bed. I opened my eyes and stared at the wooden floor. My mind was perfectly empty for a long moment. Then it all came back to me.
I bolted out of the bed and into the bathroom, still wearing the same clothes from the night before. The eyes that stared back at me were red at the rims, and there was a nice little bruise over my left eye where Prudell’s keys had hit me. Despite the November chill in the air, I was sweating. I looked at myself in the mirror, letting the anger build. When there was just enough of it, I went outside.
There was a pile of white oak outside the cabin. I grabbed the ax and attacked. I split each log in half, and then each half into quarters, aiming the ax with my left hand alone and then bringing it all the way back with both hands, slowly and carefully, letting the weight of the ax head build its own momentum as I brought it all the way up over my head and then down, all the way through the log. Not even aiming at the log, but at the center of the chopping block. I swung right through each log and right through the pain that was building in my shoulder where they had taken out the second and third bullets.
I needed to feel the rhythm of it, just like batting practice once felt. For those few minutes every day when nothing existed but a steady stream of baseballs, fed right down the middle to you so you could hit them deep, off the wall or into the seats, again and again.
When I finished the pile, I backed the truck up, my hands still tingling. I could still feel it in my body, the aftereffects of the fear. There was a soreness in my muscles as though I had run a marathon.
I drove down the dirt road to the first rental cabin and unloaded a half cord, stacking it next to the front door so the men wouldn’t have to go far to get it. I did the same for the next cabin, came back for another load, and then dropped off the wood at the third, fourth, and fifth cabins, working my way deeper and deeper into the woods. It was late in the morning, so I didn’t run into anybody. They were all out hunting.
It was still archery season for deer. Or so I thought. It was hard to keep all the seasons straight. I knew that regular firearm season would be starting soon, and then muzzleloading season a couple of weeks after that. Bear season had just ended, although I wasn’t sure about wild turkey season. Gray and red fox were open all winter, I knew, as well as bobcat, raccoon, coyote, rabbit, squirrel, pheasant, grouse, and woodcock. Elk season was closed but would start again in December. By now, most of the hunters were repeat customers, downstaters who came back for the same week every year. They liked the cabins and the fact that they could walk a hundred feet and be on state land. And they liked that I delivered the wood right to their door.
When I got back to the cabin, I fired up my own wood stove to get a little heat going. I stripped down to my undershorts and did some push-ups and sit-ups. The wooden floor was cold against my bare back, but I kept working until I had a good healthy sweat going. I was trying to flush the chemicals out of my system, work it out of my muscles, out of my blood.
