to be a serious crime involved, outside of being criminally stupid enough to drive an expensive wooden boat into an old bridge piling. If they found enough alcohol in the driver’s system, they’d have something to ring him up on. But beyond that the whole thing would probably go to the DA and not much else would happen.
“Those pilings,” the trooper said. “On a night like this? Those guys must not be from around here.”
“I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often,” Tyler said.
“You got that right. Hey, you don’t have any coffee, do you? It feels like November out here.”
I never saw the big orange Coast Guard boat show up. I was finally on my way home by then. Around Whitefish Bay, up the lonely dark road to Paradise. The sign in my headlights. WELCOME TO PARADISE, WE’RE GLAD YOU MADE IT! The one blinking light in the center of town.
Then the Glasgow Inn on the right side. It was still open, but I didn’t stop. I was still wet enough to be uncomfortable, and besides, I didn’t feel like hearing it from Jackie just then. Why I wasn’t there all night, what I was doing instead. He’d love the story I’d have to tell him, but it would have to wait until tomorrow.
Come to think of it, some of the evening was almost comical. The way the one guy had asked us if we had hit them. Like we’d actually be out there trying to ram any boats that came by. The big guy throwing up all over the place.
And Leon and the Leopards. That made the whole thing worthwhile, right there. I’d have that over him forever.
I turned onto my access road. There was an almost theatrical mist hanging in the air, like something out of a Frankenstein movie. I passed Vinnie’s house. It looked empty. He must have been at the casino still, not yet aware of what had happened out on the bay. I thought he’d probably get a kick out of the whole story, too.
That’s what I thought. And would go on thinking until the next morning.
Then after that…Hell, if I had known…
It seems like an impossible question now, but what were we supposed to do that night, let all three men drown?
I came to my cabin. It was the first of six, all built by my father back in the sixties and seventies. This first one was the one I helped him build myself, back when I was eighteen years old and thought I knew everything, which explains the imperfect fitting of the logs and the cold drafts that come whistling through the walls on a windy night.
When I was out of my truck, I had to wait a few moments while my eyes adjusted to the total darkness. Pine trees, birch trees, an old logging road. A small shed out back and my snowplow sitting up on cinderblocks. And my cabin. That’s all there was.
Nobody there waiting up for me.
I checked the answering machine as soon as I got inside. A green glowing zero on the display. She still hadn’t called.
I didn’t want to think about, didn’t want to wonder where she was at that moment, or what she was doing. It was becoming a routine for me, all the things I tried to keep out of my mind. I was getting pretty good at it.
Until I finally lay down in my bed, and turned out the lights. Then they were all there, the doubts and the worries and the mortal fear, having their way with me until I finally fell asleep.
And then on this night, the dream. Me back on the shore, standing in the fog. Thicker in the dream, so thick I can’t even see my feet. The sound of something on the water, something I can’t see. Just like when the boat was coming, although somehow I know this thing is bigger and moving twice as fast. I can’t move. I don’t know which way to run, even if I could. I’m just waiting for it, as it gets closer and closer. The thing, whatever it is. Coming right at me, out of the fog.
Chapter Two
Two months earlier, a fine day in May, the snow finally gone and spring officially in the air. You could feel it. That was her last day in Blind River, as we packed up the old house forever.
There weren’t a lot of happy memories there, but it was the only home she ever knew. It was the very same house I had found my way to on a cold and snowless New Year’s Eve, five months before, driving up across the International Bridge and following the shore of the North Channel until I finally arrived in this little town. An old logging town with a statue of two men hooking logs in the water. I came that night with a lump in my throat and no clear idea of what I was doing, or if this woman would have any interest in seeing me on her doorstep.
Natalie was her name. Natalie Reynaud.
She was a police officer, a member of the Ontario Provincial Police Force. I had met her when I had come up to northern Ontario with Vinnie, to look for his brother. The results of that search were tragic for everyone involved, Natalie included. She did the one thing that no cop is ever supposed to do. She walked away from a case while they buried her partner.
It doesn’t matter what the circumstances might be. Who’s at fault. What you could or couldn’t have done. Your partner’s life is your greatest responsibility as a cop. If he ends up dead, you failed. Simple as that.
I knew this myself. I knew it all too well. On a different police force in a different country, in a different time. Back in 1984, in Detroit, just before crack cocaine made its big debut, when the auto industry was still in a severe slump, the local economy in ruins, when the summer days were too hot and the nights gave no relief. My partner Franklin and I, responding to a simple nuisance call, an emotionally disturbed man who was bothering everyone at the hospital, hiding behind the plants in the emergency room. We found his apartment on Woodward Avenue, sat down with him at his kitchen table, tried to talk to him man to man. The aluminum foil all over the walls, that was our first clue he had precious little connection to the planet Earth.
He had the gun taped to the underside of the table. An Uzi automatic with a. 22-caliber conversion kit, retrieved from the Dumpster in his alley. A minute, maybe two, an eternity as we tried to talk some sense into him. Rehearsing my draw in my head, over and over, waiting for the right moment to shoot him in the chest.
He shot Franklin first. Then me. The purr of the automatic weapon, no louder than a sewing machine. Both of us on the floor, looking up at the ceiling. No aluminum foil on the ceiling. I remember that.
Franklin dying next to me, the light going out in his eyes. The hospital, the recovery. Three bullets in my body, the shoulder, the top of the lung, the cavity behind the heart.
The bullet behind my heart still there. It was too dangerous to try to take it out. Whenever I think about it now, it’s a constant reminder of my failure that night. Franklin is in the ground, a wife and a daughter left behind. I walked away from the force and right into a liquor bottle. It’s not a terribly original story, and certainly not something I’m proud of. On top of that, I developed a preoccupation with painkillers. To this day I’ll still get little cravings for that codeine buzz. The warm embrace that makes you feel like nothing can ever hurt you.
It took a long time for me to be myself again. Or at least something resembling a real human being. I came up here to Paradise to sell off my father’s cabins, this lonely place at the mercy of a cold inland sea. The desolation, it somehow felt like home to me. I’ve been here ever since.
The years passed, each one much like the last. I rented out the cabins to people from downstate. Tourists in the summer, hunters in the fall, snowmobilers in the winter. I chopped wood and kept the cabins clean. That plus the disability checks from the Detroit Police Force, it was enough to live on. I spent my evenings at the Glasgow Inn.
That all changed when I got talked into being a private investigator. Trying it on for size, anyway. As an ex- cop, I was qualified in the state of Michigan. I tried it, it blew up in my face, and it’s been one trouble after the next ever since.
Until Natalie.
The first time I saw her, she was jumping out of a moving float-plane as it came in to dock. One simple movement and I could see that this woman was an athlete. It turned out she was a hockey player back in college. A hockey player who led her team in penalty minutes-that summed her up pretty well right there.
She has green eyes. She has a little scar on her chin. What hockey player doesn’t have scars? She has brown hair, and she usually has it tied up. When she reaches up to unpin it and it falls down to her shoulders… Well, let’s just say the image stays with me for a while.
She was a good cop until her partner was killed. Then she took a leave of absence. At the time, I felt like
