Then I was a state trooper for over twenty years. And then I retired and came back home to Orcus Beach. They asked me to take over as chief of police. Even when the furniture plant closed and we lost half our population, the town council kept the police force. And me.”
“Don’t tell me,” I said. “Rocky and Harry are the town council, too.”
He let that one go. “My grandfather practically built this town himself,” he said. “I grew up here. I’ve lived all around the state, but I keep coming back. I know every single person who lives here right now. I’m sure they’ll bury me here someday.”
“Why are you telling me all this?” I said.
“Because I want you to understand, Mr. McKnight. I’m a lifetime cop, not somebody who wrote tickets for eight years and then became a private eye. This shooting happened in my town. It’s my case. I don’t want the county guys here. I don’t want the state guys here. And most of all, I don’t want you here. Am I making myself clear?”
“What if I have information you need?”
“Like what?”
“Like a white Cadillac,” I said. “The license plate is on the pad your… your officer took from me. I’m not sure if one of the letters is a V or a Y. You’ll have to run it both ways.”
“And what will this tell me?”
“The name of the guy who’s following her,” I said. “The same guy who was casing out her family’s house in Farmington. You did talk to her family, right?”
“We’ve been in contact,” he said. “I told you that at the hospital.”
“So you know about this man named Harwood?”
He tapped his fingers on his desk. “You say Rocky has this number?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m not even going to ask you if I can have my pad back.”
“You’ve had a long day, Mr. McKnight. We should let you go home now.”
“I can’t go anywhere,” I said. “My tires are flat and the gas station is out of air.”
“We’ll see if we can find you some,” he said. “Then you can be on your way.”
“It’s a long drive home,” I said. “And I’ve been up since four this morning. I think I’ll grab a room for the night.”
“Won’t find one here,” he said. “Closest motel is in Whitehall. They’re probably full, though. Your best bet would be Grand Rapids.”
“So you’re all out of rooms, too,” I said. “April is your peak tourist season.”
He just looked at me. He almost smiled. “You’re a funny man,” he said. “Let’s go pump up your tires.”
He let me sit in the front seat this time on the ride back to the gas station. We passed a small motel called the Orcus Arms. It was a little six-room affair facing Lake Michigan. The chief caught me looking at it, and the empty parking lot in front. “It’s closed,” he said. “Doesn’t open until June.”
The sign in front of the motel was decorated with a big cannon in a mound of sand, just like on the chief’s hat. “What’s with this cannon, anyway?” I said.
“Goes back to the turn of the century,” he said. “When a ship got caught in a storm, it would try to get as close to the shore as it could. There’d be a crew of men here who would use the cannon to fire a rope out to the ship. They could fire that thing a good half mile if they aimed it right.”
I tried to picture it. It would take a hell of a shot to hit a boat that far away.
“Just goes to show you,” he said. “A gun doesn’t always kill you. Sometimes it saves you.”
With that thought ringing in my head, we pulled into the gas station. Stu managed to find some air to put in my tires. He pumped up my tires himself and then he stood next to the chief while I climbed into the cab. When I closed the door, the chief stepped closer and rapped a knuckle on my window. I rolled it down.
“Sleep well tonight, Mr. McKnight,” the chief said, “and then have a safe trip back home tomorrow morning. I hope you enjoyed your visit to Orcus Beach.”
There were a couple things I could have said to him, but I decided to keep my mouth shut. I turned the key and gunned the engine.
“Seriously, Mr. McKnight,” he said. “I know we’ve got some pretty extreme characters around here. You gotta understand-people in this town, they just have a habit of acting very protectively. You know what I mean? As a matter of fact, I’d say overall, you caught us on a good day. The next time, we might not be so friendly.”
I pulled away and left him standing there in the light of the gas station. He got smaller and smaller in my rearview mirror as I headed south, away from Orcus Beach and everyone who lived there.
“Good night, Chief,” I said as he faded out of sight. “I’ll be seeing you.” In my mind’s eye, I pictured the pad of paper and the license numbers I had written down. I recited the numbers to myself, just to make sure I remembered them. One for Maria. And the other for whoever was driving that white Cadillac.
CHAPTER 15
I woke up the next morning in a strange bed, in a motel room in Whitehall, Michigan, twenty miles south of Orcus Beach. I had pulled in around eleven o’clock, my eyes burning from driving all day, my stomach empty. The motel was called the Whitehall Courtyard, and each room had a bright green light above the door that made you think you were in an aquarium. I asked the man at the front desk if there was a restaurant open at that hour. He just looked at me and laughed. “In Whitehall?” he said. “That’s the best one I’ve heard all day.”
So I settled for cheese and crackers and Oreo cookies from the vending machine, and then I closed the blinds against the green light and went to sleep. I had disjointed dreams about shotguns and woke up suddenly in the middle of the night, dead certain that I was about to feel the hot blast of buckshot in my chest. It took a few seconds to remember where I was, and what I was doing there. I went back to sleep for a few hours. When the morning came, I sat up in the bed and reached for the telephone. Leon picked up on the second ring.
“Alex!” he said. “Where are you?”
“I’m in a motel in a town called Whitehall,” I said. “I need you to run a couple plates for me.”
“Whitehall? Where’s that? What’s going on, Alex?”
I gave him the five-minute version. Seeing Randy in the hospital, going back to Leopold’s house, then my adventures in Orcus Beach.
“How can you be sure it’s Maria?” he said. “You didn’t even talk to her.”
“I know it’s her,” I said. “It has to be. Let me give you those plate numbers.”
“All you gotta do is call the secretary of state,” he said, “and give them your PI number.”
“That’s right,” I said. “I remember you telling me that now.”
“I’ll do it,” he said. “You’ve got another call to make.”
“What’s that?”
“A Dr. Havlin called here looking for you,” he said. “Early this morning. He had one of our cards, so he tried both numbers.”
“What did he say?”
“They’re going to operate.”
“Is it… I mean…”
“He didn’t say, Alex. He just said you should call him.”
“Okay,” I said. “Thanks. I’ll do that.”
“So give me those plate numbers.”
“Here’s Maria’s plate,” I said. I closed my eyes and called up the three letters and three numbers.
“This could get us her current address,” he said.
“It might,” I said. “And whatever name she’s using now.”
“Okay, give me the other one.”
I gave him the three letters and three numbers from the white Cadillac, then told him he’d have to run it two ways, with a Y and a V.
“This white Cadillac,” he said. “You really think it’s the same guy who was staking out her family’s house? There are lots of white Cadillacs in the world.”
