I sat in that bar for the rest of the day. There was nothing more I could do about Dorothy. I didn’t even have any renters to take care of anymore, thanks to the agents. I just sat there by the fire, feeling almost normal again, except for the fact that everything hurt and it took me five minutes to get up to go to the bathroom.
When the sun had gone down, the place started to fill up. Snowmobilers came in fresh from the trail, their faces red from the cold.
The men were all talking about their snowmobiles and where they would ride the next day. There was laughter. Somebody lit a cigarette next to me.
The smell of it. The smoke.
Dark outside. The sound of the men in the room.
It all came back to me. The night she was here in this room. Sitting right here talking to her. The way she looked into the fire when she was talking.
She was so afraid.
I know this. It is not a new thing to me. But now it hits me in the stomach. Now I feel it myself.
She was so afraid.
I thought it was Bruckman she was afraid of. The boyfriend she ran out on. The usual story.
But no.
It was something bigger. Bruckman was nothing.
It was Molinov. I didn’t even know his name that night, didn’t know that he existed. But now I see it. It all comes to me at once. It runs down my spine and into my gut.
What did she say about the wolves? You shoot the wolf closest to your door. But there are other wolves behind him. Bigger wolves. With bigger teeth.
Molinov was the bigger wolf. That’s who she was afraid of all along, from the very beginning.
And now he has her.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
A voice, from far away: “Alex.”
I came back. I was in the Glasgow Inn again, sitting in front of the fire.
“Welcome back to planet Earth,” Jackie said. “Do you want dinner or not?”
“I need the phone,” I said. “Can you bring it over here?”
“That’s why I have a cordless phone,” I heard him say as he left me. “So you don’t have to get out of your chair.”
When he brought the phone back to me, he set it down on the little table next to my chair and bowed. “Your highness,” he said.
“Thank you. Now go away.”
He shook his head and went back to the bar. “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” I said aloud as I punched in the numbers. An officer answered.
“Is Chief Maven still there?” I said.
“He’s just about to leave,” the man said. “May I tell him who’s calling?”
“This is Alex McKnight,” I said.
I heard some muffled voices on the other end and then Maven’s said, “McKnight, what do you want?” he said.
“Chief Maven,” I said. “I just called to thank you again.”
“The hell you did,” he said. “State your business. I’m on my way home to dinner.”
“I want to talk to Agent Urbanic,” I said. “Can you have him call me?”
“What am I, your secretary now?”
“I figured you’d know how to reach him,” I said. “They don’t seem to be staying here in town anymore.”
“All right, all right,” he said. “I’ll have them call you. Let me guess, you’re at the Glasgow Inn.”
“Not Champagne,” I said. “I want to talk to Urbanic.”
I heard him muttering something to himself. “Is there anything else you want me to do, McKnight? Come out and shovel your driveway for you?”
“No, thanks,” I said. “I have a plow. Oh, but while you’re having the DA drop charges, how about throwing out Vinnie’s assault charge?”
“That officer came back to work today,” he said. “He looks almost as bad as you do. Good night.”
“Good night, Chief,” I said, but he had already hung up.
The phone wasn’t lying on the table more than two minutes before it rang. “McKnight,” I said.
“This is Champagne.”
“I wanted to talk to your partner,” I said.
“You’ll talk to me.”
“That’s what you think,” I said, and hung up.
The phone rang again a minute later.
“This is Urbanic. What the hell’s going on?”
“I wanted to talk to you,” I said. “You seem like you might be half human.”
“So talk.”
“Tell me about Molinov.”
“Why do you want to know about Molinov?” he said.
“Because he took her. We have to find him.”
“Who’s ‘we,’ Mr. McKnight?”
“You, me. I don’t care. Damn it, Urbanic. If you could have seen how scared she was that night…”
“We’re working on it,” he said.
“No, you’re not,” I said. “You’re looking for that stupid bag. I know how you guys operate.”
“The bag came from Molinov,” he said. “Find the bag and you find the man. Find the man and you find Dorothy. At least according to you. Am I right?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Just.” I hesitated. “What’s your first name? I don’t want to keep calling you Agent Urbanic.”
“My name is John.”
“Okay, John. John Urbanic. Is that German?”
“Polish,” he said.
“John, you gotta tell me what’s going on. Who is this Molinov guy?”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. I sat there listening to the silence, watching the fire. “We don’t know that much about him,” he finally said. “The name is Russian, that much is obvious. Whether it’s his real name or not, we don’t know. Nobody has ever seen him, not in America anyway.”
“Bruckman said he saw him,” I said. “He said he stole the bag from him in New Jersey.”
“We heard that much,” he said. “We’ve been trying to catch up with Bruckman for about two months. We were about to put a move on him last week, but we weren’t sure where the bag was.”
“The football,” I said.
“That’s my partner talking,” he said. “He likes code words.”
“What’s in the bag?”
“It’s methcathinone,” he said. “It’s a synthetic stimulant, similar to methamphetamine.”
“Speed,” I said.
“It’s like speed,” he said. “Maybe a little worse. They call it ‘cat,’ or ‘wild cat’ if it’s got a little crack mixed in. It’s got the same energy boost on the way up, but sometimes it’s a hard ride down. Paranoia, hallucinations. Seizures, even.”
“So that powder they put in my truck,” I said. “That wasn’t from the bag?”
“No,” he said. “That was good old-fashioned cocaine. Not even good cocaine. I guess they didn’t want to waste any of the good stuff just to set you up.”
