I went around to the back. Everything looked exactly the same. A horseshoe pit. Beer bottles. An empty dock. I tried the patio door. Just like last time, it was unlocked.
One step into the house and I knew something was seriously wrong. There was a sickly sweet smell hanging in the air. One part death and one part something else, probably just as evil. The primitive part of my brain started hitting the evacuation button-the red alert, just-get-the-hell-out-of-here-right-now button. But I wanted to take one quick look through the house first.
I walked through the main room. The whole place had gone from a mess to a disaster. There weren’t just beer bottles all over the place now. There were pizza boxes, ice cream cartons, the remains of three or four frozen dinners. Lots of cigarettes. Mr. Gray would have been sincerely disturbed to see his place looking like this. And I knew it was about to get much worse.
The smell got stronger as I went up the stairs. For a moment, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to take it. Then the wave of nausea passed and I kept going. The first bedroom was cleaned out now. This must have been where Cap had slept. The second room was pretty much the same story. Harry’s room, I was guessing. The third room was where everything had gone straight to hell.
There were more empty beer bottles, at least thirty of them all over the floor, the bed, the dresser. There were overflowing ashtrays. More food containers. That’s where some of the smell was coming from. Mixed with that was the unmistakable aroma of marijuana smoke. The rest of it had to be Brucie, or what was left of him. But I didn’t see him anywhere.
I looked on the other side of the bed. He wasn’t there. I knew he was a big man, so there weren’t many places left to hide. Then I saw the closet door.
When I slid it open, the smell washed over me like a hot wind. I thought I’d lose it right there. I had to cover my face to stop from retching all over the place. He was curled up on the floor of the closet, drawn into himself in this tight little space like some kind of sick animal. Typical junkie behavior. His eyes were open, all white, as the pupils seemed to be rolled back in his head. I saw a couple of needles on the floor next to him. A belt he had obviously used to tie off. A spoon. Matches.
I remembered what Cap had told me, the last time I saw him. Brucie was the one with the pill problem. He wasn’t lying about that one, I said to myself. Brucie was the one stupid enough to dip into the merchandise and get himself hooked.
Then the conversation with Terry LaFleur, the woman from the clinic, came back to me. I replayed everything she had said, me and Vinnie on one side of the table, in the restaurant at the Kewadin, Terry on the other side. She was ratting out Caroline and her little scam, getting those prescription painkillers and selling them. The big danger, Terry had said, was that the pills went outside of the clinic’s control, and whoever took them did so with no supervision, no safety net. Once they got hooked, if the pills stopped coming…that’s when things got really dangerous. Because someone hooked on Vicodin will do anything to hold on to that feeling, even if it means going to something else. Something more dangerous. Something deadly.
Just like this.
I knew there was heroin up here now. Vinnie would talk about it now and then, having heard about it from some of the younger guys on the rez. From the poppy fields in Afghanistan or wherever else they were growing it these days, I couldn’t imagine a farther trip for a bag of the stuff to make. But here it was right in front of me, having stopped the heart of a man stronger than an ox. It must have been one hell of a hit.
I couldn’t think of one thing to do about it. Call the police, tell them I found an OD, tell them they should come get him out of here? No rush on that one. He wasn’t going anywhere. Right now I had other things to do.
I worked my way back through the house, looking in each room, then down the stairs. When I was in the kitchen I could almost breathe again without gagging.
What are you looking for, Alex? What do you think you’re going to find?
The map was still laid out on the kitchen table. All the major waterways, all around the Les Cheneaux Islands, Lake Huron, around Drummond Island. I bent down to the map, examining it closely, trying to see if someone had made a mark somewhere. A little X to mark the spot. If they had, I couldn’t see it.
Imports and exports. Guns for drugs. I stood up straight, looking around the rest of the kitchen. The last time I was here…There were some pill bottles there on the counter. Beer bottles, trash. What else? I had seen something else before I was interrupted, before they came back in and I had to hide.
Before they came back in.
All three of them. Cap, Brucie, Harry. I had assumed that morning that they had gone into town, that they were out eating breakfast or something. That they had just come back while I was standing there. Like the three bears returning home…
But there were three vehicles outside that day. The two that were still out there now, plus Cap’s Escalade. Three people, three cars. If they had been in town, how did they get there?
Unless they hadn’t been in town. Unless they hadn’t driven anywhere at all. Which would explain why I hadn’t heard a vehicle when they came back. All of a sudden, there they were at the front door.
They couldn’t have been in the boat. The boat was wrecked. The dock was empty.
Boat keys. There was another set of boat keys sitting here on the counter. I had assumed they were just duplicates for the wooden boat. Although if you had a duplicate set, why would you leave them lying around on the counter?
I looked on the counter. I opened the drawers. There were no keys here now. Did Brucie have them? Would I have to go back upstairs and search his clothes? That was the last thing in the world I wanted to do.
You’re getting ahead of yourself, I thought. First go see if there’s another boat out there. Then worry about the keys.
I went out the back door, stood on the porch for a moment, sucking in the cold, fresh air until I was dizzy. Then I went down to the edge of the water. There was a heavy mist forming on the surface now, the relative heat of the day giving way to the cool evening. I went out on the dock, looked down the shoreline in both directions. There was a big willow tree, its long leaves touching the water on one side. Some tall weeds standing in the shallows. But no boats.
I looked across the channel. I could barely see another dock on the far side. It was just as empty as the one I was standing on. All these summer homes here on the channels, most of them empty at the moment, with no summer, no reason for anyone to come all the way up here.
An idea. All these other houses…Most of them empty.
I went back through the yard, looking for some kind of path, some break in the trees and the high tangles of sumac, wild raspberry, poison ivy, whatever the hell else. I found a path of sorts, followed it, the brambles cutting into my arms. From the next yard, I looked down at the water. There was a canoe overturned on the shore, nothing tied to the dock. So much for this one.
I worked my way back through the brush, fought through the opposite side of the yard until I was standing on yet another shoreline. Another empty house. Another empty dock.
Now what?
Now you use your head for once. They had come in through the front door, not the back. Instead of fighting my way back to the yard, I went up the driveway. I walked down the street until I was at the front of Gray’s property. I hadn’t seen a driveway on the other side of the street yet. Until…Over there. Down a hundred yards more.
I went to the driveway, walked all the way down to the house. It looked like one of the older houses on the peninsula. It might have been one of the first, built way back when, before Les Cheneaux turned into a hot property. A one-story cottage, everything you’d need in a summerhouse without any of the fancy architecture. No strange angles on the roof, no soaring windows.
The house looked dark inside. There were no cars parked outside. Nothing going on here at all. Then I walked around to the backyard and saw something interesting.
Down by the shore, there was a boathouse, the kind they used to build right on the water, after dredging a channel underneath. You don’t see a lot of them anymore. Maybe they’re too hard to maintain. Or maybe if you have a big enough boat, you dry-dock at a marina. No matter the reason, here was one of the originals, and even though the paint was peeling and the whole thing was starting to lean to the right, it was at least forty feet long and another twenty feet high. It could obviously hold a lot of boat.
