The 37th Hour (31 page)

Maybe twenty minutes passed before I was allowed to leave. First they let me sit up on the side of the reclining chair, and after a few minutes of that, I was allowed to go to the recovery area, a folding table and chairs with orange juice and Fig Newtons set out. They felt my face and watched me walk, before I was finally released to go down to the parking ramp and my car, a bright green gauze wrap around my arm. I’d given about half the usual allotment of blood.

I
felt
mostly recovered, just a little tired, when I kicked open the stubborn kitchen door at home, my duffel bag slung over the shoulder of my unpierced arm. I dropped the bag unceremoniously on the kitchen floor. There wasn’t time for unpacking.

At the phone I dialed one of two numbers I’d come to know by heart: the one from the back of Shiloh’s plane ticket. I dialed it with the 507 area code. That number had reached the bar, and at the time I’d figured it didn’t mean anything.

But there had been way too much southern Minnesota karma in my life of late, and none of it had been good.

“Sportsman.” It was my friend Bruce again. Crowd noise in the background.

“This may seem like a stupid question,” I said, trying to sound light and at ease, “but where exactly are you guys?”

“Right on the west edge of town,” Bruce said.

“West edge of what town?” I asked.

“Oh, you really don’t know where we are,” he said, sounding surprised but still jocular. “Blue Earth.”

Blue Earth.

“I need directions, then,” I said.

“Where are you coming from?” he asked.

“Uh, Mankato,” I said, stumbling on the lie.

But Bruce didn’t notice the hesitation in my voice. He quickly rattled off the directions for me in a practiced way, then he asked, “Are you coming all the way from Mankato for a drink? Boy, we’re all fun guys to drink with here, but I didn’t know our reputation had got around that far.”

“Is Shorty there?”

A beat passed before he answered me, and his voice was more puzzled now than flirtatious. “No. Who is this?”

I hung up, thinking,
I knew it.

Blue Earth would be a long drive, about three hours, but time was on my side. The problem was that Bruce of the Sportsman sounded pretty tight with the “fun guys” at the bar, and he was liable to tell Shorty that a strange woman had called asking about him, and had hung up rather than give her name. He might even remember the call from Sarah Pribek, who’d left her name and number days earlier. Shorty might have a rare wised-up moment and leave.

The Lowes’ number was the second one I’d carved into my memory, and I didn’t have to look it up this time. Deborah answered.

“Hi, Deb, it’s me.” By now she surely recognized my voice. “Can I talk to Genevieve?”

Genevieve came on the line. “What’s going on?” she asked, but her voice was incurious.

“I need something from you.” I didn’t answer her question. “You know Shorty’s address, right?”

“What?” More alert now.

“You’ve been keeping track of this guy for a while. You must have his address. I need it.”

“What’s going on?” she asked again.

“I just need the address.”

“I have to go look for it.” She set the phone down.

The subject of Shorty was the only thing that I’d ever seen rouse Genevieve from her depression, and now, true to form, she was showing signs of interest. When she gave me the address, she’d probably realize I was going down there. She might want to meet up with me, come along.

In a way, I would have liked to have her with me, but it was a bad idea. Maybe I’d need to reason with Shorty, make nice with him. I didn’t think I could do that with a maternal avenging angel riding shotgun.

Genevieve came back on the line and gave me the address. It came as no surprise that he lived on Route 165.

“What’s going on?” Genevieve asked again.

“Maybe nothing,” I said. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Are you going down there? What did he do now?”

“I’ll call you,” I repeated.

“Sarah—”

I hung up on her. I didn’t have time for my twinge of guilt, instead collecting the things I needed: my keys, jacket, my service weapon. I was itching to be on the road. Just like Shiloh had been.

chapter 21

Every time I drove 169 south,
and this was my third time in a week, I did it faster than before. It was a testament to the unhappy acceleration of my life in the past seven days. When I reached the Mankato city limits, I saw I’d shaved nearly thirty minutes off my last time. Amazingly, there wasn’t a single speed trap along the way. It wasn’t much longer before I was cruising through the quiet streets of Blue Earth.

Would Shorty be at home, or at the bar? People liked to say that barflies were in their favorite watering holes “every night,” but that was usually an exaggeration. For all I knew, Shorty could have stayed at home tonight.

I wouldn’t have long to wait to find out. Already I could see ahead a bright neon duck, flying away from a low building with tinted windows. I didn’t have to cruise past to know I’d found the Sportsman.

If I were smart, if I were careful, I would wait for tomorrow. I would approach Shorty at his job, in the sober light of day, under the full color of my authority. But I’d never been smart, and what I’d painfully learned about being careful was drowned out under the relentless drumbeat of my need to know.

The place wasn’t busy for a Saturday night. The Timberwolves were on the TV, and the jukebox was so low you could actually hear the play-by-play. Shorty was at the bar with two friends. Well, barroom friends at least. They might not even like him in daylight.

I walked directly to him, and virtually everyone in the bar watched me do it.

Shorty had seen me on the stand at his pretrial hearing, where I’d been established as Kamareia’s friend and as the main prosecution witness against him. And of course, Shorty had known I was a cop. Now, when he saw me coming his way, his eyes widened. He looked so alarmed for a moment I thought he might just bolt for the back door.

Then he got control again, remembering that the case against him was dead. His face hardened from alarm into contempt and he didn’t take his eyes off me.

I stopped a foot from his bar stool and said, “I need to talk to you. Outside.”

That was my first mistake, specifying “outside.” He only had to refuse and I would lose face. He looked at his friends and started to smirk. “Uh-uh,” he said.

I looked at his friends, making them for more-or-less law-abiding types. I took my badge out and laid it on the bar, not opening the holder until it was down on the bar. I didn’t want everyone to see me flash it around. But Shorty’s pals saw it and looked back up at me.

“Leave,” I said succinctly.

They got up, carrying their steins, and went to a booth. The show of authority took the edge off Shorty’s good mood; his expression was moving toward being a scowl. I slid onto a stool one of his drinking buddies had vacated.

“So what do you want?” he said.

“Tell me about Mike Shiloh.”

Unease wiped the last of the smirk away. “I don’t know who that is,” he lied. Then he took a sip of his beer, the mug a symbolic foxhole for him to dive into.

“Yeah you do. You can tell me about it now, or I can get a warrant for your arrest.” It was my turn to lie. I didn’t have anything near probable cause.

“You’re harassing me,” Shorty said. “Everyone will know it’s because of that stuff in the Cities. They won’t listen to you.”

That rape and murder, you mean, is that what you mean by “stuff”? No, don’t antagonize him or you’ll never get what you need. Easy.

“Tell me what happened now, before this gets any deeper,” I persisted. “It’ll be easier that way.”

“Easier than what? I beat you last time. It couldn’t get any easier than that.”

Then Shorty realized that what he had said was dangerously close to an admission. The case against him was dismissed for insufficient evidence, but double jeopardy didn’t apply because he hadn’t actually been found not guilty in a trial. Shorty didn’t know, in light of that, what was safe to say and what wasn’t.

“Do you really want me on your case, Shorty?” I demanded. “If you do, keep on like you’re doing. Keep your mouth shut and don’t tell me what you know.”

“I already told you what I know,” he said sullenly. “Jack shit.”

I got off my bar stool and walked to the door, not looking back to see if he was watching me or not.

Outside the bar I made an illegal U-turn and headed out of town. It wasn’t long before I pulled over on the side of the road. I was there so long, trying to think, that I finally switched off the Nova’s idling engine.

Shorty would not tell me what I wanted to know. There was no reason for it. Neither would he let me look inside his home, which was what I wanted to do next.

While I thought, I was trying to chew on the nail of my middle finger; biting my nails was a bad habit I fell back on at difficult times. I also realized that I couldn’t really get any purchase under the edge of the nail, because they’d still been too recently clipped. Not by me, but by Shiloh, who’d sat on the edge of our bed and held my hands in his and pared my nails for me.

Prewitt had cautioned me that he expected me, in the course of my investigation of Shiloh’s disappearance, to consider myself a representative of the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Department. By that he certainly did not mean breaking and entering.

All my thinking on the roadside wasn’t really thinking. I was justifying a decision I’d already made.

The darkened road that the Nova ate up so greedily was the same highway that Shorty walked to get home from the bar. It wasn’t terribly far from town to his house, but it wasn’t what most people meant by “walking distance.” Surely it wasn’t just the alcohol that led Shorty to walk it late at night, even in wintertime and early spring. He could have drunk more cheaply and conveniently at home. But it wouldn’t have been the same. Shorty would probably have gone without groceries before giving up the cost of tap-drawn Budweiser with his buddies.

Shorty’s “house” was nothing more than a garden shed behind a two-story farmhouse. I cut off my headlights, gliding past with only parking lights on. The lights in the front house were off, the windows dark as sightless eyes. Even so, I rolled gently into the yard as though my Nova could tiptoe if I were light enough on the gas.

Following the rutted dirt, I drove all the way around the back of the shed, where my car wouldn’t be visible from the road. I killed the lights, then the ignition. When I got out, I left the door cracked so it would make no sound in closing, switching off the dome light first so it wouldn’t drain the battery.

I held the flashlight under my armpit while I laid out the tools I’d need for the lock. The door actually looked flimsy enough that it would have come down under a couple of kicks, if I had the luxury of being so obvious.

As soon as I touched the knob, I knew I wasn’t going to have to pick the lock. The door was already unlocked.

Something about that struck me as wrong. But I told myself,
Come on, relax. What does a guy like Shorty have that’s worth stealing anyway? Everything’s fine. What are you waiting for?

Then I stepped inside and switched on the flashlight.

A figure rose up in the beam, close and fast. I went for my .40.

“Sarah, wait, it’s me!”
The shadow before me was already dropping to the ground.

“Gen?” I pointed the flashlight down. She squinted up against its glare, one hand coming up against the flashlight’s beam. “What are you doing here?”

“Waiting for you,” she said. “I had a head start. Don’t shine that thing in my eyes.”

Later I would realize how changed she was at that moment, how revived in comparison to the zombie of weeks past.

My heart started slamming belatedly. “Are you crazy? I almost shot you!”

“Could you get the light off me?” she said again. “There’s something you should see.”

As she got to her feet, my light played over her hand. She was holding something.

“What is that in your hand?” I asked.

Wordlessly she held it into the light and tilted it. Something flashed: the holographic seal of the State of Minnesota. It was a driver’s license. Michael David Shiloh’s driver’s license.

I’d been sure, but I hadn’t been ready to face it, not really. I don’t know how long I would have stared at his license if she hadn’t spoken again.

“What the hell is going on?” she demanded.

“Where’d you find this?”

Genevieve pointed. I followed her hand with the flashlight’s beam.

There was a backpack on the floor. Also Shiloh’s. He’d used it sometimes when he’d had to go to the library for research and bring home a lot of books. He’d taken it out infrequently enough that I hadn’t even missed it in my search of the closet.

I walked over to it and knelt. Inside was a railroad atlas and a bruised, cidery apple. And the billfold, empty of money.

“Shorty,” I whispered. “That son of a bitch.”

“Yeah,” Genevieve agreed. “But what happened? How’d you know to look here?”

I pointed the flashlight up at the white ceiling, so we’d both have ambient light to see each other in.

“You were wrong,” I said quietly, and my voice was steady enough. “Shorty didn’t steal that truck. Shiloh did.”

“Shiloh?” She was incredulous.

“He came down last week, while I was visiting you. As soon as I was out of town, he jumped a freight.”

“A train?”

“He and his brothers used to ride freights over short distances, for kicks. He knew how. And that’s why he didn’t leave a trail: Greyhound, Amtrak, nothing. Nobody saw him, nobody picked him up hitchhiking. The train took him right to the Amtrak station, where he could steal a vehicle that no one would miss for a while. Afterward he could ditch it and get a freight back home.”

“But why?”

“Kamareia,” I said, and was about to go on when noises from outside distracted me, the creak and slam of a gate very like the one between this property and the road. Genevieve heard it, too, and went to the dirty, unshuttered window, pressing her face close to the glass to see what could be made out in the dim night.