The Taking of Libbie, SD (7 page)

I found Tracie sitting in a booth nursing a glass of white zinfandel. The booth had a nice view—we could see the new concrete of Libbie’s main drag. When I mentioned it, Tracie told me that it took the contractor one full day to pour the concrete for a single block of First Street from curb to curb. Two cement trucks at a time would dump their loads into a machine that kept edging forward, leaving a smooth and leveled surface behind it. Tracie was not only proud of the street, she was proud that she and the Libbie City Council had the presence of mind to set up a table with coffee, lemonade, and donuts for the nearly three hundred people who stopped by throughout the day to watch the work.

“You’re wise to public relations,” I said.

“Not wise enough to hide the fact that I’m upset that you kept me waiting,” Tracie said. “Why are you so late? Was it Sharren?”

“The various law enforcement agencies that had been searching for me all day had many questions.”

That slowed her down. “What did you tell them?”

“The truth.”

“The truth?”

“It’s always a good idea to tell the truth, especially to the FBI. They get cranky when you don’t.”

“The FBI?”

“When the home security people answered my alarm this morning and found the door smashed open and me gone, who did you think they were going to call? The Boy Scouts of America?”

“I didn’t realize it was that big of a deal.”

“Ever hear of the Lindbergh Act?”

“McKenzie, are you going to press charges? Are you going to sue us?”

Probably not, I decided. I didn’t care what happened to Libbie, South Dakota, and I certainly had no love for Miller and his bounty hunters. Harry was right, though—I wasn’t a guy to take legal action against cops, and that’s what it would eventually amount to, me suing the Libbie Police Department. ’Course, I didn’t want Tracie to know that. At least not while I could use the threat to leverage a meal. I grabbed a menu from behind the napkin dispenser.

“What’s good?” I said.

“Rush was like that. Whenever someone asked a question he didn’t want to answer, he’d change the subject.”

“Did you spend much time with him?”

“Some.”

Tracie glanced casually across the restaurant toward the front door. Of course, she had slept with him. She didn’t need to say it; I could see the words written on her face.

My, my, my
, my inner voice chanted.
He did get along, didn’t he?
If what Miller had said earlier was true, the Imposter had bedded at least three attractive women using my name. I discovered that I was more than a little jealous.

“Tracie, what are you doing here?” I said. “How the hell did you end up in Libbie, South Dakota?”

“You make it sound like a Russian gulag.”

“There are those who’d agree with me.”

“Honestly, McKenzie, this is the only place I’ve been where I’ve felt completely at home, completely relaxed.”

“Mayberry.”

“Hardly that. Still … I don’t know, McKenzie. Either you like small-town life or you don’t. I like it.”

“Were you born here?”

“No, no. My ex-husband was. Christopher Kramme. He was from Libbie. I met him in Chicago. He was taking graduate courses in aeronautical engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He wanted to build airplanes. I didn’t discover until much later that he was more passionate about that than he was about me. Oh, well.”

“Were you a student?”

“I was a model. And an actress.”

I knew it
, my inner voice said.

“Really?” I said.

“Not a supermodel by any means,” Tracie said. “I can’t complain, though. I worked steady. A lot of advertising work—catalogs, brochures, a lot of weekly supplements for department stores like Nordstrom’s, Macy’s, Value City. Some TV spots, too, some video work, plays. I acted in a couple of small theater productions doing
Harvey
, Agatha Christie’s
Murder Is Announced
—I once played Typhoid Mary in
A Plague of Angels
. They made me look thirty years older than I was. That was sobering. I read somewhere that the average career expectancy for a professional football player is something like four-point-four years. I bet it’s the same for models. Still, it was fun. Not as much money as you’d think, but a good time. People stopping me on Michigan Av and pointing at an outdoor board, my face twenty feet high, and saying, ‘Is that you?’ What a rush.”

Tracie took a long sip from her drink before continuing.

“Anyway, we lived in the same apartment building. At least once a week Christopher would come to my door carrying a pitcher of strawberry margaritas, and we’d sit on my balcony and get pleasantly stoned. Not once did he make a pass. Whenever the evening would start to take a romantic turn, he’d glance at his watch, jump up, and say, ‘Gotta go.’ For the longest time I thought he was gay. Then I discovered he was a member of an entirely different minority group.”

“What’s that?”

“He was a gentleman.”

“Ahh.”

“We finally went out on a real date—I had to ask him—and we just hit it off. He proposed, I accepted, and suddenly I was packing to go to Libbie to meet his parents. Unfortunately, his father died at the same time. Heart attack. He was only sixty-one. They say he was a great guy. They also say that it was the shock of his son settling down that killed him. They were wealthy people, the Krammes, and Christopher took advantage of that. Never held a job. Never wanted one. All he wanted to do was build and fly his airplanes, which he never actually did—build them, I mean.”

“What happened to him?”

“Christopher? He went to prison.”

“What?”

“The Feds got him. What happened, one day he jumped into his plane and flew off. The next day he called me. They had arrested him at the airport in a rinky-dink town called Mineral Point in Wisconsin. The Feds got an anonymous tip and asked the sheriff’s department to detain him. Turned out Christopher had a hundred and fifty pounds of high-grade marijuana squirreled away in compartments in his plane worth something like seven hundred thousand dollars. Christopher never explained where he got the dope, or where he was taking it, or why he landed in Mineral Point, or who ratted him out. At least not to me.”

“Why would he do a thing like that?”

“Money, of course. Mr. Kramme, Christopher’s father, was partner with Mr. Miller in a lot of things. The grain elevator, for one. They had an agreement built into their contracts that if either of them died, the business would buy out their heirs for half the value of the business. That way their businesses were protected and neither of them would get stuck with a partner that they didn’t want. Whether or not they added the clause to their partnership agreement because Mr. Miller didn’t like Christopher I couldn’t say, although Mr. Miller really didn’t like Christopher. He considered him a wastrel. That’s the term he always used, ‘wastrel.’

“Anyway, they fought over the true value of the businesses until a court-appointed arbitrator settled the matter. Mrs. Kramme got all the money. She gave Christopher a monthly allowance, not huge money, just enough to live comfortably. She said she wasn’t going to give Christopher what he thought was his fair share of the estate unless he got a real job and made something of himself. Maybe he would have. He was kind of afraid of his mother. Only she moved to Sioux Falls. She had family there. Sisters.

“Christopher and I remained in Libbie because I love it here. I love the vistas. I love the people. I even got myself elected to the city council despite Christopher’s attempts to sabotage my campaign, like showing up drunk to meet-and-greets. He did it because he wanted to go back to Chicago, and he figured if I lost—Christopher and I never got along as well as we should have. I loved him to death. There was no one more charming than he was. Except it was like living with a frat boy.

“He got himself arrested before we could do anything about it. He pleaded guilty; the Feds took his plane and gave him eighty-four months. We divorced somewhere around the tenth month. It was his idea, not mine. We had a prenup when we were married—his mother had insisted—so I collect his allowance until he gets out.”

“When is that?” I said.

“He has eighteen months to go, assuming good behavior. Jimmy.” Tracie held up her empty glass for the counterman to see. Jimmy nodded. A moment later, he set a fresh glass of wine in front of Tracie.

“For you, sir?” he said.

“Do you brew your own iced tea?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll have that.”

Tracie waited for Jimmy to leave before she said, “Iced tea?”

“After I eat something, I’ll be happy to trade shots with you. In the meantime, tell me about myself.”

“What do you want to know?”

I came
this
close to asking her if I was good in bed but managed to smother the impulse. Some people just don’t have a sense of humor. Instead, I asked her to tell me about my childhood. Turned out I was a helluva kid—a superathlete, popular with the girls, good in school—all of which was true, of course. Yet going by what Tracie said, it became clear to me that the Imposter was not a St. Paul boy. If you came from there, you didn’t say you played ball at “the park.” You said you played at Dunning Field, or Linwood, or Oxford, or Aldine or Merriam Park, or the Projects, or even Desnoyer. You didn’t say you hung out down at “the Mississippi River.” It was simply the river, or more specifically Bare Ass Beach, the Grotto, Shriner’s Hospital, the Caves, Hidden Falls, or the Monument. And while we have called it many things, including its given name, to my certain knowledge, no one from St. Paul has ever referred to Minneapolis as “the big city.” Unfortunately, none of this gave me any indication of where the Imposter was actually from.

While we talked, the counterman took our orders, delivered our food—I followed Tracie’s recommendation and tried the roast beef—and cleared our plates when we were finished. I ordered a shot of Jack Daniel’s. It didn’t do my headache any good, but it made the rest of me feel just fine.

“These questions,” Tracie said. “Does this mean you’re going to help us?”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“What are you afraid of?”

“Heights, spoiled food, getting shot at—you know, the usual things.” I was also afraid that one morning I’d wake up and discover that my life was boring, but I didn’t tell her that. “I don’t like it that I’m a long way from home. I don’t like it that I’m cut off from my resources, my friends, my support systems. I don’t like it that I don’t have a wallet, ID, cash, credit cards—nothing to prove that I’m who I say I am. It makes me feel vulnerable. Besides, this isn’t my town. This isn’t my ground. Hell, I have to look at a map just to find out where I am.”

“I can get you a map. I can get you everything you need.”

“Not everything.”

“Do you mean sex?”

“Where did that come from?”

“I bet Sharren would be happy to oblige you.”

“I didn’t mean sex. I meant backup. Don’t be so defensive.”

“Men are all alike. You only care about one thing.”

“The Super Bowl?”

“You know what I mean.”

“No. Tell me.”

“Rush—”

“I’m not that guy.”

“He was a liar and a thief.”

“What does that have to do with me and all the other men you know?”

“You can’t be trusted.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. If we didn’t open jars, there’d be a bounty on us. I gotta tell you, Tracie, if we’re going to continue this conversation I’m going to need another drink.”

“Oh, no.”

“What?”

I followed Tracie’s gaze to the entrance. A large man stepped into the café. There was a sneer on his lips that looked as if it had been in place for twenty years. A smaller man slipped in behind him. They were wearing cowboy hats, cowboy boots, and clothes that looked worked in. For a long moment, they reminded me of the bounty hunters who had Tasered me that morning.

“Who are they?” I said.

“Don’t ask.”

I didn’t need to. The big cowboy announced himself by shouting, “Lookie what we got here,” and walking to a small table in the center of the café. A man in his midthirties was sitting at the table across from a woman of the same age. He was eating what looked like a club sandwich and fries. The cowboy grabbed a couple of fries from the plate and shoved them in his mouth. I felt my body tense as I watched; the roast beef became a heavy, unmoving thing in my stomach.

“Whad I tell you, shithead?” he said. “I said I didn’t want to see your ugly face anywhere in town again.”

The man was considerably smaller than the cowboy was, yet he started to rise anyway. The woman reached across the table and grabbed his wrist, holding him in place.

“Ya wanna do somethin’?” the cowboy said. “C’mon. I’m waitin’.”

The woman tightened her grip.

“See this, Paulie,” the cowboy said. “Shithead wants to be brave, but the bitch won’t let him.”

Paulie grinned and shook his head as if he had seen it a hundred times before.

“Let me guess,” I said. “Town bully.”

“His name is Church,” Tracie said. “He’s been terrorizing people going back to high school.”

“You put up with him—why?”

“A couple of years ago a man challenged him, a rancher; slapped Church in public. The next day his house was burned down. My ex-husband told him off not long after I moved here. A week later, they burned his plane. Everyone knew it was Church, but nothing could be proved, and now everyone is afraid to stand up to him.”

“Who are the vics?”

“Vics?”

“Victims.”

“Rick and Cathy Danne. I don’t know what Church has against them except that the Dannes are nice people.”

Jimmy moved quickly around the counter, putting himself between Church and the Dannes. “We don’t want no trouble,” he said.

Church shoved him hard against the counter.

“Ain’t gonna be no trouble, ol’ man, cuz shithead here is leavin’,” he said. “Ain’t that right?”

Again Danne tried to rise, and again the woman pulled him back down.

“I’m done eating, honey,” she said. “C’mon, let’s go.”

The man was thinking about it when Church knocked over awater glass, spilling the contents into the man’s lap. The man pushed away from the table, but the water had already soaked the crotch of his pants.