world you would let my son come up here without calling me immediately…”
He turned to me once more, and now it was like he was really seeing me for the first time.
“Please tell me who this gentleman is, and why he had a gun pointed at my son’s head.”
“Actually, I have no quarrel with your son,” I said, finally speaking up. “If you’ll let me explain.”
“That won’t be necessary. Alex, was it? What’s your last name?”
“McKnight.”
He thought about it for a second. “No, I’ve never heard that name before. What do you do for a living?”
“I was a cop once. Then a private investigator.”
“Is that right?”
“My partner knows I’m here right now,” I said. It was time to find some way to climb out of this. “He’s expecting me to call him about now.”
“I’m sure he is.”
“I’m serious, Mr. Gray.”
He put his hand up to shush me, a simple gesture like a man waving away the man trying to top off his water glass.
“I think it would be a good idea,” he said to Cap and Brucie, “if I removed myself from this situation as quickly as possible. If I don’t, I’m honestly afraid that I’ll end up killing both of you. You take care of our guest, you come back here and you clean this place up, and you give me a call when you’re done. At that point, I’ll tell you what we’ll be doing next. Do you think you guys could do that much without totally fucking it up?”
Take care of our guest, he says. This was not sounding good at all. It was time to start looking a little harder for a quick exit, no matter what I had to do.
Mr. Gray left the place without giving me another glance. As soon as the door closed behind him, Brucie started breathing again.
“We’re dead,” he said.
“Relax,” Cap said.
“We are totally, completely dead.”
Cap looked at Leon’s gun. “Is this piece of shit loaded?” The way he took out the cartridge, it was obvious this was not the first time he had handled a gun.
“What are we going to do with him?” Brucie said, nodding in my direction.
“You heard the man,” Cap said, slamming the cartridge back in Leon’s gun. “Let’s go take care of him.”
Chapter Ten
Brucie drove the car. The black Escalade. I didn’t have much chance to enjoy the luxury. Cap was next to me in the backseat, holding Leon’s gun. I had no idea where we were going.
Neither did Brucie, even though he was at the wheel. “Where are we going?” he said. He spoke quietly, with a perfect calm that sounded almost resigned.
“I know the place,” Cap said. With his free hand he rubbed his jaw.
“You gonna tell me where?”
“Just drive. I’ll tell you.”
“We need a place by the water,” Brucie said. “With nobody around for miles.”
“I think that’s the whole goddamned Upper Peninsula.”
Brucie didn’t react to that one. He kept driving.
I tried to study Cap without making it obvious. Gun in right hand. Maybe thirty inches away from me, a lot of room back here in this big vehicle. If he was distracted for a second, could I get the gun away from him?
Hell, what other shot did I have? I needed to wait for the right moment, maybe when he was talking to Brucie, maybe looking out at where we were going. Anything.
But no, he kept watching me closely. No expression on his face at all. Brucie kept driving. The speed limit on this road was fifty-five. He was going fifty-four.
It was so obvious to me now. I was a cop once. I saw plenty of criminals. I saw enough regular-issue bad guys to last a lifetime. But only once in a great while did I see men like this.
They were professionals. If either one of them had ever had a moral compass, it had been carefully dismantled until nothing was left. Now they were driving me to a safe place, far away from anyone else so they could kill me with my own borrowed gun and leave my body to rot in the water. They were driving like it was a trip to the hardware store. How did I not see this in them from the very beginning?
We were going east now on M-134. It was a lonely highway, just trees and occasional views of Lake Huron. The sky was getting cloudier, like it would rain again soon. We came to Port Dolomite, passing the big limestone quarry, the high walls of white stone. This will be the place, I thought. It makes perfect sense, find some abandoned corner of the quarry, shoot your man, and leave his body there.
Leave his body there.
I started to feel dizzy. I couldn’t breathe.
Think, Alex. Think. There has to be a way out of this.
We passed one entrance to the quarry, then another. There were security gates everywhere. Brucie kept driving until it was just the trees and the water and the sound of the car again.
“That one stretch of road,” Brucie said. “The other day, when we were out driving around.”
“What I’m thinking,” Cap said.
I kept waiting for him to take his eyes off of me. Just for one moment. I could go for the gun, try to twist that bad hand, take the gun, and shoot him quickly. Then either make Brucie stop or shoot him in the head and take my chances.
At the same time, while I watched and waited, the seconds ticking by, there was another part of my mind thinking about Natalie, playing back everything we had ever done together. From the moment I had first laid eyes on her. On that lake in northern Ontario, seeing her jump off that plane onto the dock. The way she moved. The way she looked in that old farmhouse, when I drove all the way up there to find her and to share a bottle of champagne on a lonely New Year’s Eve.
She wasn’t here with me now. From the sadness of it, the loneliness, to a strange calm I felt when I realized what a good thing that was. She wasn’t here to take this last ride with me, wouldn’t be standing next to me when the bullets started to fly. She was five hundred miles away, and now for the first time that distance was a comfort to me.
She’ll be okay, I thought. She’ll feel bad when she hears what happened to me. Then she’ll get over it and she’ll go on with her life. This thing we were trying to hold on to, this impossible, unworkable thing-it will be nothing but a memory.
We were heading into the heart of the DeTour State Forest Campground, the darkness under the trees making everything look colder. What little sun there was, all but gone.
“Hey, Cap,” Brucie said.
“What is it?” He didn’t take his eyes off of me. The barrel of the gun still thirty inches away, his hand rock solid. If I went for it, I’d have no chance. My options were running out.
“I want him.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m saying, I want to do him.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s always you doing this part,” Brucie said. “Me waiting with the car. I want to switch it around this time.”
“This is my gig. You’ve never done it. Not one goddamned time.”
“That’s what I’m saying. It’s about time. You remember in the bar?”
“What about it?”
“When they came after us. You got the Indian, remember?”
“Yeah, so?”
