The Hunting Wind: An Alex McKnight Mystery (33 page)

“I had already gotten my revenge,” he said. “Or so it turns out anyway. There was this man in Detroit named Harwood. He was trying to put together a deal with my father. The minute I met him, I hated him. You ever meet somebody like that?”

“Yes,” I said. “Just last night, in fact.”

“He was such a fraud. Everything he did, everything he said, it was all such an act. He was the most arrogant, pompous jackass I had ever seen in my life. And here he was, trying to suck up to me just because he wanted something out of my father. He made my skin crawl. He came to the game. Did you know that? He was there. I saw him a couple days afterward at the Lindell. I was getting drunk. Again. With Maria a couple blocks away, with her whole con artist family, probably putting the screws on some other sucker even as I was sitting there. And in walks Harwood,
just the man I needed to see that night. He starts telling me how sorry he was I had gotten blown out of the game, how embarrassing it must have been, all this other crap. I could tell he was loving it. If he hadn’t still been trying to put the moves on my father, he’d have been standing there laughing at me. So I told him he really needed to go see Madame Valeska down the street to get his fortune told. It would really be an eye-opening experience for him, and he’d really get something out of it. I was hoping he’d go see them. I was really hoping. I knew they’d put him through the wringer. He was such a sleazebag. He was smart about money, but I knew he’d lose his head over Maria. And Maria would actually have to spend time with him. Even . . . get close to him. So in the end, they’d both get what they deserved.”

He stopped. He looked out the window, at nothing but darkness.

“Is that why you came back?” I said. “To see what they’d done to each other all these years?”

“No,” he said. “Don’t you understand? I had no idea. I didn’t even know if Harwood ever went to see them. I was long gone by then. And I never looked back.”

“You had no idea?”

“When we found her family’s house,” he said, “when they told us about Harwood and how they thought he had sent us? That was the first time I had heard his name in nearly thirty years. It was the first time I had even
thought
of him. It was just a drunken, spur-of-the-moment thing when I saw him that last time in Detroit. My little good-bye present to both of them. I never dreamed it would become something
like that. It was all my fault, Alex. I made it happen. At that point, I didn’t want to drag you into it anymore, so I sent you home. I wanted to see if I could . . . I don’t know. I guess I was thinking I could fix things somehow. I wanted to try to help her.”

“Why even bother? After what she did to you?”

“I remember it so well,” he said. “How it felt. Back in 1971, when I realized she was just setting me up. All those things she said to me. All those lies. It was so easy to believe, because I wanted it to be true. I wanted it too much. When I was finally done playing out the string in baseball, when I finally went home, I knew I had to start acting like a real grown-up. My father’s business was doing well. Everybody was expecting me to take it over someday. I tried to do it the right way, Alex. I tried to work hard, the same way my father did. But then when the real estate market crashed out there . . . I was afraid I was going to lose everything. Again. The same feeling, everything going down the drain again. There was this woman, one of our clients. She was very rich. She liked me. I could talk her into anything. It was so easy, Alex. It was so easy.”

“Okay,” I said. “A con man is born. I can fill in the rest. But you still haven’t told me why you came back in the first place. Before you knew anything about Harwood, when it was just you deciding to come back here after all these years. You could have made things right with your family. You could have tried at least. Why did you come back here?”

“Think about it,” he said. He managed a weak smile. “When was the last time everything was good,
Alex? When was the last time I was on top of the world?”

“When, Randy?”

“When I was pitching for Toledo, and Alex McKnight was behind the plate, that was the last time I had it right. That was the last time I felt like I could do anything I wanted to. After that, it was all downhill, Alex. On roller skates. Before I went down for good, I had to come back one more time. Just to see if I could be that person again.”

I just shook my head.

“And Maria. This is kind of crazy, but I may be the only person in the world who can understand her now. After everything I’ve done, you know what? You can love somebody, Alex. You can really love somebody, even though you
know
you’re using them.”

“Randy, that’s the most depraved thing I’ve ever heard.”

“It’s true,” he said. “I’ve been there. My family will never forgive me, Alex. And I don’t blame them. The people I’ve hurt, the people I’ve taken money from. They’ll never forgive me.”

“She barely remembered you,” I said.

“She remembers me.”

“No.”

“That’s what she said to you. I know she remembers me.”

“Yeah? You know that?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know this?”

“Because we’re the same,” he said. “That’s how I know. We’ll always have a connection.”

“A connection,” I said. “That’s good. That’s real good. How about this instead? You know her so well, you gotta figure she’s got a lot of money stored up after all these years. Am I right?”

He didn’t say anything.

“You’ve worn out your welcome everywhere else. You know you’re about to take your last fall, so you figure, Why not? You’ll come back, see if you can tap into her again. After all these years.”

“No.”

“It was a long time ago. You don’t have much leverage. But you
know
she’s running something now. You get in on it. Or you threaten her, tell her you’ll scare away the mark, or God knows what. You’d think of something. Am I getting warm here?”

“No.”

“This was your last chance. Take her down, whatever you had to do. Take the money and run. Where else were you going to go, anyway?”

“You got it wrong.”

“Give me one reason why I should believe you.”

“Because I can’t lie to you.”

“You could lie to anybody,” I said. “You could look God himself in the eye and tell him the sky is green.”

“Not you,” he said. “I could never lie to you.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because you’re my catcher.”

“Come on, Randy. Enough with that. It was thirty fucking years ago.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’m telling you the truth, and you
know
it. I’ve got no reason to he to
you now. In your bones, you know it. You just have to trust me.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it.

“You believe me, right?”

“I don’t know what to believe anymore.”

“Tell me you believe me. I gotta hear you say it.”

“Randy . . .”

“Say it, Alex. Tell me you believe me.”

“Let me think about it,” I said. “I get nervous when people tell me I have to say things.”

“Is there really a cop outside?” he said. “Right now?”

“I’m surprised he hasn’t come in yet. He must have heard us talking.”

“Maybe he’s asleep. Do you think we’d wake him if we sneaked out of here?”

“I think he’d wake up, yes.”

“We could tie these sheets together,” he said. “And go out the window.”

“I hope you’re not serious.”

“I’m never serious,” he said. He rubbed the bandages around his neck for a moment. “Is she safe?” he finally said. “Tell me that much.”

“She’s safe,” I said. “Harwood’s dead.”

“Did you kill him?”

“No.”

He thought about it. He didn’t ask me anything more.

“You want me to get the doctor now?” I said.

“Yes. I need some water.”

“You should call your family.”

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “You know. You talked to them.”

“Call your son,” I said. “Terry, the catcher. He’ll want to know.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll do that.”

There wasn’t much else to say. When I finally said good-bye to him, I wasn’t sure how much I should hate him. In a way, he was exactly the same person I had known back in 1971. Now, almost thirty years later, after all the trouble he had caused me, I still couldn’t make myself hate Randy Wilkins. No matter how hard I tried.

And I still didn’t know if I believed him.

I drove home, four and a half hours straight north in the middle of the night. The sun was just coming up as I crossed over the Mackinac Bridge. There was still snow on the ground in the Upper Peninsula. As always, it felt like a different world. Maybe that’s why I came up here in the first place. And why I’ve stayed so long.

I went to my cabin and slept a few hours. When I got up, I found my old catcher’s mitt and wrapped it up in a cardboard box. I addressed it to Terry Wilkins, care of the UC-Santa Barbara Athletic Department. I got myself cleaned up and took the box to the post office.

And then, of course, I went to the Glasgow Inn for lunch. Where else was I going to go? Jackie was there waiting for me with a cold Canadian. He asked me about everything that had happened. I spent the rest of the afternoon telling him about it.

Around dinnertime, a wheelchair came through the front door. For one sickening second, I thought it was
Harwood’s ghost come to get me. It was Leon, both of his ankles still in casts, his wife pushing the wheelchair.

We all had dinner together, and I got to tell the whole story again, this time for Leon. After dinner, I told Jackie to mix me up a vodka and root beer. “One slinky, coming up,” he said. It was truly awful.

We drank to the past. To money and to lies. To youth. To crazy left-handed pitchers.

We drank until the sun went down again on another day, keeping the fireplace fed and staying close to its warmth. Even when it’s springtime in the rest of the world, the nights are still cold in Paradise.

Turn the page for an excerpt from Steve
Hamilton’s next mystery

NORTH OF NOWHERE

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St. Martin’s/Minotaur Paperbacks!

That summer, it was all about secrets.

It was the summer I turned forty-nine years old, which made me start thinking about fifty, and what that would feel like. Fifty years with not a lot to show for them. One marriage that was so far in the past, it was like something you’d dig up out of the ground. My baseball career—four years of minor league ball and not a single day in the majors. And my career as a Detroit police officer, which ended one night with me on my back, watching my partner die next to me. That’s what I saw when I looked back on my life.

On the plus side, I was getting a lot of reading done that summer. And, though I didn’t know it yet, I was about to meet some interesting new people. I wouldn’t get to see any fireworks on the Fourth of July, because I’d spend most of that evening lying facedown on a stranger’s floor, a gun held to the side of my head. I would wait for one final blast, maybe one final blur of color. And then nothing.

I already had one bullet inside me. I knew I didn’t have room for another one.

More than anything else, it was the summer in which I had to make a big decision. Was I going to rejoin the human race or was I going to keep drifting until I was too far away to ever come back? That’s
what the summer was really all about. That and the secrets.

Jonathan Connery, AKA Jackie, owner of the Glasgow Inn in Paradise, Michigan, raised in Scotland, alleged second-cousin to Sean Connery, and in his opinion anyway, just as good-looking—this is the man who took me to that house on that Fourth of July evening. The Glasgow Inn is just down the road from my cabins. I live in the first cabin, the one I helped my old man build back in the sixties and seventies. The other five I rent out. My customers are mostly hunters in the fall, snowmobilers in the winter. In the summer, they’re families who want to do something a little different. They come up here from the Lower Peninsula to Paradise because it’s the most out-of-the-way place you can go to without leaving the state—hell, without leaving the country. After driving forever on 1-75, they think they’re almost there when they cross the Mackinac Bridge. But it’s another hour through the emptiest land they’ve ever seen until they finally get close to Lake Superior. Even then they still have to circle around Whitefish Bay, driving deep into the heart of the Hiawatha National Forest. By then, they’re wondering to themselves how anyone could actually live up here, so far away from everything else in the world. When they finally hit the town, the sign says, “Welcome to Paradise! We’re glad you made it!” They go through the one blinking light in the middle of town, keep going north along the shore a couple of miles, past Jackie’s Glasgow Inn, until they get to my cabins. When I see their faces as they get out of
the car, I know how it’s going to be. If they look around like they just landed on the moon, they’re in for a long week. There’s not much to do up here, after you go to the Shipwreck Museum one day and then to the Taquemmenon Falls State Park the next. If they get out of the car, close their eyes, take a deep breath, and smile, I know they’ll like it here. They’ll probably come the year after, too. And the year after that.

Which is why I have mostly repeat customers now—people with standing reservations who come up here the same week, every year. In the summertime I don’t have to do much for them. They don’t use much firewood, maybe just a little when the winds off of the lake cool things down at night. They sure as hell dbn’t need me to tell them what to do or where to go. They’re just as happy to never see me.

I was spending a lot of time alone that summer. It’s what I had to do. There was a time when a certain lawyer had talked me into becoming a private investigator. I tried it and got my ass kicked. Then I met a young Ojibwa woman and tried to help her out of a jam, and got my ass kicked even worse. I got my ass kicked in ways that nobody’s ass has ever been kicked before. Then an old friend from my baseball days came back, thirty years after I had last seen him, and asked me to help him find somebody. I agreed to help him. You’d think I would have known what was about to happen. Although this time I got my head kicked along with my ass.