He didn’t say anything else. Neither did I. Not until we got to Paradise and I pulled into the Glasgow Inn parking lot. “I’m gonna get something to eat,” I said. “You coming in?” It was as close to a peace offering as he was to going to get from me.
“No, thanks,” he said. “I’ll walk home.”
“It’s a long walk,” I said.
“Not for me,” he said.
“Another Indian thing.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
“Have a nice night,” I said. I got out of the truck and watched him walk up the main road toward his cabin. A good two miles in heavy snow. I shook my head and went into the place.
I sat at the bar by myself and had some dinner and a couple of cold Canadians. Jackie knew by the look on my face that it was a night to leave me alone. So did a couple guys from my regular poker game who were sitting by the fire.
I thought about what had happened in the past twenty-four hours. I didn’t like anything I had done. I was stupid enough to leave her alone in the cabin. Then I spent the whole day chasing my own tail, and wondering why everybody was acting strange around me.
The reason they were acting strange, Alex, is because you were making a fool of yourself. They were right and you were wrong, and they even tried to tell you that. Brandow said it in his own way, and Maven laid it out straight. Go home and leave it to the real cops.
There was nothing else I could do. I saw that. Finally, sitting there at the bar, having my third Canadian after I had pushed the plate away. For once in my life, I had to just accept that something bad had happened and there was nothing in the world I could do about it. Bruckman and Dorothy were probably a thousand miles away by now.
And the business with Vinnie, maybe he was right, too. What right did I have to judge the Parrishes’ reactions? How could I know what they were really feeling? Or what they had been through with their daughter in the years leading up to that point?
I needed to talk to him. And then I needed to go to bed. I threw a twenty on the bar and went back out into the unending snowfall. The snow had gotten lighter at least. Maybe we wouldn’t be totally buried by the next day.
I fired up the truck again, went up the main road to my access road. Vinnie walked this whole way, I said to myself, in this snow.
I put the plow down and pushed my way down the access road. The snow was powder but deep enough to make me work at it. I struggled to keep the plow straight. When I came to Vinnie’s cabin, I saw him outside with a shovel in his hand. He had just started shoveling, and had a long night ahead of him if he was planning on clearing his driveway.
I stopped and rolled down my window. “Get out of the way,” I said.
He didn’t say anything. He kept shoveling. He had taken his coat off and hung it over the mailbox. He must have had a good sweat going already.
“Vinnie, get out of the way,” I said. “So I can plow your fucking driveway.”
Nothing. He didn’t even look up at me.
“Vinnie, come on,” I said. “Talk to me.”
He kept shoveling.
I looked at him for a long time. There was only the sound of his shovel scraping against the ground. The shovel wasn’t long enough. A couple hours of working with that shovel would give him one hell of a sore back.
“Fine,” I said. “The hell with you.”
I rumbled past him and all the way down to the end of the road, plowing as I went. I saw lights in most of the cabins, the snowmobilers either in for the night or recharging for one more run. When I got back to my place, I cleared my driveway and got out of the truck. And then I stopped.
My front door was open.
I stood there, waiting, listening for any sound inside the cabin. A snowmobile whined in the distance and then stopped. Then there was silence again.
I crunched through the snow to my door and gently pushed the door all the way open. I owned a gun, but it was hidden in a shoebox at the bottom of my closet. So it wasn’t going to do me any good at the moment.
I saw a single light in the back of the cabin. It was the lamp on my bedstand. The shade was angled down over the bulb, giving the whole place an eerie glow. There was smoke coming from where the shade was burning against the heat of the bulb.
I stepped into the cabin and looked around the place. I looked at the wreckage of what had once been my home. I couldn’t touch anything yet. I just walked from one end to the other. The only sound was my own breath, and my own heartbeat. In the kitchen every drawer had been pulled out and upended. The refrigerator was open. Food, milk, eggs-everything was all on the floor mixed in with the contents of the drawers. The cushions of the couch had been pulled off and slashed. The mattress was pulled off the bed. It was slashed as well. The burning lampshade woke me out of the trance long enough to take the shade off the bulb and put it upright again. I went into the bathroom. Everything that had once been in the medicine cabinet was now floating in the toilet. The shower curtain was pulled off its rings and torn in two.
The closet was on the other side of the bathroom wall, next to the front door. I went to it and sorted through all of the clothes that had been thrown onto the floor. At the bottom of the closet I found the shoe-box open. The gun was still there, the cylinder open and empty. I picked it up and put bullets in it, one by one. Somehow it made me feel better.
I looked at the door. The molding was in splinters. Somebody had just kicked it in. I always knew it wasn’t a good door. I always figured that way out here in the middle of the woods where nobody could see the place, if somebody really wanted to break into the place, they’d find a way no matter what I did. I was apparently right.
“Bruckman,” I said aloud. He did this. But why didn’t he take the gun? I went back through the place and looked everything over as well as I could. There was nothing missing. Unless…
Unless whatever it was he was looking for wasn’t here for him to find. With that thought, I reached into the pocket of my coat. The compact weight had been there all along, on the edge of awareness. Now I remembered the hockey puck and held it up in the dim light to read the inscription once again. Gordie Howe, Number 9.
Could it mean that much to him? An autographed hockey puck?
Or did he break in just to trash the place? Just to get back at me for trying to help Dorothy get away from him?
I stood there for a long time, looking at the puck. I felt the anger building. And along with the anger, there was a sick sort of fascination with just how crazy this man could be to do this. Or how stupid. Or both. He should be far away from here by now. But instead he decides to stay around just so he can do this to me.
With that anger and that fascination, there was something else. A little burning spark of anticipation, something almost like gladness. Because now I knew that he was close. And if he was close, then I had more than an even chance of finding him.
CHAPTER NINE
When I woke up the next morning, I saw the underside of the bunk bed above. For a moment, I forgot where I was. Then it all came back to me.
My cabin. I couldn’t imagine one man doing so much damage. He probably had his whole hockey team with him.
I had called the sheriff’s office the night before. It was Saturday, so Bill wasn’t in. The deputy had wanted to send someone out to see the damage, but I had told him not to bother. No sense sending some poor sap all the way out here on a cold winter’s night just so he could look at the place and say, “Yep, somebody doesn’t like you
