he stood next to Jackie and looked out. A breeze brought the damp smell of the river into the room.
I went to the window, making the same sounds as Vargas on the broken glass. Peeking over their shoulders, I saw the wreckage on the ground below. One of the maps was halfway out of its frame, a corner flapping as the wind picked up. Vargas’s telescope lay a good thirty feet from the house, right on the shoreline, half of it on land and half in the dark water. A thousand shards of glass twinkled in the light from the back deck.
Vargas looked out for a long moment. Then he looked at Jackie and me again. “They knew where the safe was,” he said. “That’s the thing. How did they know that?”
I didn’t think it was a question we were supposed to answer, so I didn’t even try.
“How did they know that?” he said again.
“Come on,” Jackie said. “Let’s go downstairs.”
He took Vargas by the arm. Vargas didn’t seem to want to move at first, but finally he did. We all crunched our way out of the room and down the stairs. Kenny had finally gotten off the floor, God bless him, but he still looked like somebody needed to slap the color back into his face.
“Win!” he said. “What the hell happened up there?”
“He made me open the safe,” Vargas said. “Then he smashed the window and every fucking thing in the room.”
“Police are on the way,” Bennett said. “Gill is outside.”
“Where’s my dog?”
“They broke one of your doors,” Bennett said. “I guess the other two must have been unlocked.”
“Yeah, I didn’t figure on getting invaded,” Vargas said. “If they hurt that dog…”
The shock was wearing off, I thought. I’ve seen this before. Now it’s time for him to start getting mad…
“Come here, Miata,” he said, opening the closet door. The dog came bolting out into the room, ready to kill somebody. He ran out into the kitchen, legs skittering all over the place, and then back into the poker room, the living room, every room in the house, barking himself hoarse.
“Is that the bravest little fucking dog you’ve ever seen or what?” Vargas said. “At least somebody put up a fight.”
“I seem to recall Bennett taking a nice shot for you,” Jackie said.
“When was that?” he said.
“For God’s sake,” Jackie said, “when they pulled you off the floor, he told them to leave you alone, remember? They kicked him right in the ribs.”
Vargas looked at Bennett, and seemed to be playing the scene back in his mind.
“Doesn’t matter,” Bennett said. “It was stupid, anyway.”
Vargas kept looking at him, and was about to say something when Gill came into the room. “No sign of the police,” he said. “They should be here by now.”
“Did you call the Soo police?” I said. “Or the state troopers?”
“Soo,” he said. “I mean, that’s where we are, right?”
Vargas picked up the bottle of Jack Daniels from the poker table and took a hit off it. Then he went to the sliding door, opened it, and went out onto the deck. The thought of fresh air must have appealed to everyone at that point, because we all followed him.
I was the last one out. By the time I was on the deck, Vargas had already walked down the steps to the river. He picked up the telescope from the shoreline and held it in his hands.
Kenny went down and stood next to him. The rest of us stayed on the deck, watching over them. “What did they take?” Kenny said.
“They cleaned out the safe,” Vargas said.
“What was in it?”
Vargas looked at him, and then up at us. “You all know what was in the safe,” he said.
“How much money was in there?” Kenny said.
“When the police get here,” he said, “let me talk to them about the safe. Everybody got that?”
Another freighter came moving down the river. It was at least seven hundred feet long, moving too quietly for something that big. Bennett, Jackie, and Gill all leaned against the rail and watched it pass. The flag was American.
“What else did they take?” Kenny said. “Anything?”
“It looks like they just threw all this shit out the window,” Vargas said. “Some of it made the water. The rest of it…”
“Here’s something from your display case,” Kenny said, picking up a small bell. “These maps are kind of ruined, though.”
“This was a thousand-dollar telescope,” Vargas said. With one sudden motion he coiled it back around his body and then sent it spinning out into the river. It hung high in the air and then landed with a splash a hundred feet out.
“That might have been evidence,” Kenny said.
“Excuse me?” Vargas said. He looked like he very much wanted to throw Kenny out there with the telescope.
“I’m just saying,” Kenny said. “I mean, never mind.”
“They didn’t touch the jewelry,” Vargas said. “All those diamonds I buy my wife every fucking Christmas. They went right to my room, right to my secret safe, and then they did this to me. Anybody have any ideas?”
Nobody said anything, but I had a feeling this was all tied to what he was getting at before the robbers broke in-this whole business with Swanson and his wife.
And good God in heaven, the private eye he had apparently hired to follow them. In all the excitement, I had almost forgotten about that little piece of news.
“Anybody?” Vargas said. “Don’t be shy.”
We heard the sirens then. It sounded like three cars, maybe four, all hitting his street at once.
“You know something?” Vargas said. “The man who took me upstairs, I got a real good look at his eyes. If I ever see those eyes again, I’ll know ’em in a second.” He snapped his fingers to emphasize his point.
We heard a voice from inside. “Hello! Who’s here?”
“Remember,” he said, coming up the steps, “I’ll do the talking about the safe.”
We ended up with four Soo police officers in the house, plus the on-duty detective. I kept expecting the police chief himself to arrive on the scene. He and I had a bit of a history, after all, and everything else that could have gone wrong that evening had already happened. So I figured a visit from Chief Roy Maven was inevitable.
“Where’s the chief?” I asked the detective. “I kinda figured he’d be here by now.”
“He was downstate today,” the man said. “I don’t think he’ll be back until tomorrow.”
“There is a God,” I said. “That’s the first good thing that happened all night.”
He didn’t argue the point. He worked for Maven, after all, so he knew what I was talking about. I told them everything I knew-the partial descriptions of the two men who had stayed downstairs, the heavier man in the athletic shoes with blue stripes, the fair-haired man who sounded Canadian. The Glocks. It wasn’t much, but he wrote it down and thanked me.
It was well after midnight when they finally finished with us. I knew they’d be back the next day to do a good daylight search of the place. The investigation would be the center of Vargas’s life for the next few days, but the rest of us were through with it, or so I hoped. I had had quite enough of this house. I wanted very much to never see it again. Or its owner.
“Let’s go, Jackie,” I said, as soon as the police left. “We’ve gotta get you home. You must be exhausted.”
We left Vargas sitting there at his bartop, next to the poker table. All of the chips and cards were still lying there. Nobody bothered to settle up.
Jackie let me drive his car. He sat in the passenger’s seat, looking out the window. I went back the same way we came, across town to Six Mile Road, all the way out to Brimley, past the two Indian casinos with their signs glaring in the night and their parking lots full, the golf course with the heavy equipment sitting all together
