name some more dead people. My mother. My old partner. Who else?
No, don’t say it. Don’t you dare.
It’s light out now. The sun rising on the world. It’s still cold. Jackie comes to sit with me. He doesn’t have much to say. He folds his hands together and presses them between his knees. He asks me what he can do for me.
Nothing.
He stays a long time. Vinnie comes to relieve him. I am apparently not to be left alone. Jackie on the way out, telling me he’ll be back. Vinnie taking the chair, his face still a swollen mess.
Minutes pass, or hours, or days. He’s not looking at me.
“Alex…,” he finally says.
“Yes.”
“Alex, how did this happen?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who did this?”
I say nothing.
“Alex, who did this?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“You have an idea. You think it was them.”
“Them who?”
“You know who I’m talking about.”
I shake my head. The rage still on the upcurve, not all the way there yet. Not by a long shot.
“Alex, what are we going to do?”
“We can’t bring her back,” I say. I haven’t lost it yet. I can still say things like this. “We can’t bring her back, so it doesn’t matter what we do.”
His hand on my shoulder, squeezing hard. “Don’t worry about it right now. We’ll figure it out.”
“Yeah. We will. We, uh…”
Then I can’t talk anymore. From one moment to the next, I lose the ability to make words. I’m rocking in my chair. Back and forth, back and forth.
If I had never gone up there on that New Year’s Eve, this thing wouldn’t have happened.
If she hadn’t come out here from Toronto, this thing wouldn’t have happened.
If I hadn’t left her alone in the cabin, this thing wouldn’t have happened.
Or at the very least, we’d both be dead now. That would have worked just fine. Much better than living in this black hole.
Then something happens. Time snaps back into place. The clock starts ticking again. I realize that twelve hours have passed since the thing happened.
That’s the other important change. It’s the thing now. For the rest of this day, it will be the thing. I’ll feel the pain of it, but I’ll know that the thing itself can be kept at bay, as long as I start moving, and stay moving. For a few hours, at least, I can keep the thing just far enough away to function.
Leon showed up. He stayed outside the cabin for a minute, talking to Vinnie, their voices a low rumble in the wind.
“Guys,” I said. I could speak again.
They didn’t hear me.
“Guys!”
They both came in at once.
“Give me a little time here, okay?”
“What do you mean?” Leon said.
“Give me an hour. Go down to Jackie’s, get some breakfast.”
They didn’t want to leave. They kept standing there.
“Come on. Please. I need to be by myself for one hour. Go get some breakfast. Vinnie, you must be starving.”
“The police will be coming back soon,” Leon said. “They’ll have some more questions.”
Meaning what, I wanted to say. Like that will do any good for anybody. “I know,” I said. “I know. I just need an hour to myself. Then I’ll be ready.”
“We’re not leaving you,” Vinnie said.
“Please. One hour.”
“You shouldn’t be alone.”
“I need some food. You can bring me back something.”
“I’ll stay. Leon can get you some breakfast.”
“That’s a good idea,” Leon said. “I’ll do that. I’ll be back soon.”
“Guys, please.”
But Leon was gone before I could say another word.
“Just go down there,” I told Vinnie. “You don’t have to stay here.”
“I don’t have any choice, remember? You cut my battery cables.”
So take my truck…The next logical thing to say, right? I didn’t say it.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”
We sat there. I felt the thing coming closer. I had to move.
“Do me a favor,” I said. “I need some aspirin. There’s some in the bathroom.”
Vinnie got up. He went for the aspirin. As soon as he was out of sight, I stood up and went to the door. I tried to be quiet about it.
“I don’t see it,” I heard him say. Whatever came next, I didn’t catch it. I was out the door and in my truck.
And then I was flying.
I passed Jackie’s place. Leon might have heard me roaring by, might have stuck his head out the door and caught my taillights vanishing down the road, but there was no way he was going to catch me. He didn’t even know where I was going.
I went south, leaving Lake Superior, heading straight for the other lake. The sun was out today. I had to flip the visor down. If the sun was actually warming things up, I didn’t notice. Leon’s gun was still in the box under my seat.
It couldn’t have been Laraque, I thought, or anyone else from Canada. They had no idea that Natalie was here.
No, I had another person in mind.
If he had found out that Brucie couldn’t do the job, whether Brucie admitted it to him, or whether he just knew somehow…Either way, if Cap knew I was still alive, he would come for me. If I wasn’t there, who the hell knows…Instead of waiting, instead of coming back…
God damn, why couldn’t I have been there?
Or maybe he really did want to take her. Maybe that was his plan. Do that to me first, break me into little pieces, then come back later to finish up. From what Brucie had said about him…
I tightened up on the steering wheel, nearly lost my wheels for one sick moment, fought my way back. The road was empty.
I got off I-75, took the two-lane road east, along the shore of Lake Huron. I drove into Hessel, took the secondary road that ran down the peninsula, took the smaller residential road off of that, turned the corner.
I saw the black Escalade on the road, saw the face behind the wheel. On pure impulse I swung hard, veering across the road. I felt the impact on the corner of my bumper, the Escalade sideswiping me and then running headlong into the ditch. I left the road on the opposite side, obliterated a mailbox, then a small tree. I was out the door before the truck had settled.
Cap came out of the Escalade, lost his footing, and had to put one hand on the ground to keep from falling on his face. He staggered back too far the other way, trying to find his feet, looking like a man who’d been spun in a blender. I was on him before he even saw me.
