Very Bad Men (54 page)

NICK SQUARED OFF the cards and tucked them in his pocket. He retrieved the pistol from the carpet and flicked the little lever on the side. That would be the safety. He worked the slide the way he had seen it done in movies. Now there would be a bullet in the chamber.

He stood over the sofa and listened to John Casterbridge snoring. The man's hands, wrinkled and spotted, lay folded over his stomach. There were deep creases in the loose flesh of his neck. A patch of white stubble showed along his jaw where he had missed shaving.

Nick aimed the pistol at the center of the old man's chest. He felt a tightness in his own chest, a fluttering like a current running through him. He held his arm straight, but the gun trembled. He looked up and closed his eyes, willing his arm to hold still.

When he opened his eyes he saw his father's sparrow calendar on the wall behind the sofa. He saw his own portrait in a frame beside it.

Not here
, he thought.

John Casterbridge shifted in his sleep. Nick stepped closer and jabbed the muzzle of the gun into the old man's shoulder.

“Wake up,” he said.

 

 

I BROUGHT THE REVOLVER with me into the woods, when we went looking for Nick and the senator. It wasn't a conscious decision. I had the thing in front of me in the open glove compartment when Elizabeth swung onto the lane that led to Charlie Dawtrey's cabin. It was there when we passed the rusted pickup, when Elizabeth pulled over onto the grass. And when we got out of the car I took it from the cloth pouch and tucked it under my waistband at the small of my back. Sometimes I wish I'd left it behind.

The roadside near the cabin was thick with cars: the senator's under the canvas tarp, Madelyn Turner's, a cruiser from the Michigan State Police. The last was Hannagan's doing, the best he could muster by phone on short notice. Brimley didn't have its own police department.

Hannagan drove in just behind us. We joined him near the porch of the cabin, where a sergeant from the state police was waiting—a young guy with ginger hair. His name was Cooper. He had arrived only five minutes before us.

“I found the door open and the Turner woman inside,” he said. “There was no one else here.”

“Where is she now?” Hannagan asked him.

He pointed vaguely eastward. “She went to talk to some neighbors. See what she could find out. There's no sign of a struggle,” he added, glancing into the cabin. “You'd hardly know anyone was living here at all. Is it true—John Casterbridge has been staying here?”

Hannagan looked to Elizabeth. “It's true,” she said.

“And the truck down the road,” Sergeant Cooper said. “That's the one the Turner woman's son was driving?”

Elizabeth nodded.

“I think you were right to be worried, then,” said Cooper. “I found this in the truck.” He stepped into the house to retrieve something just inside the doorway. I recognized it as Sam Tillman's gun belt. The holster was empty.

We heard footsteps on the lane—Madelyn Turner coming back from the neighbors'. She hurried up the stone walk to the cabin and told us that the couple she'd talked to hadn't seen or heard anything unusual. “It's been a quiet night,” she said. “No shouting, no loud noises—they would have heard.”

She was breathless and talking fast. Her eyes were a little too wide.

“They would have heard,” she said again. “No loud noises. That has to be good.”

Loud noises.
She couldn't bring herself to say “gunshots.”

Hannagan took charge, speaking to her in a reassuring voice. “That's fine. Now, do you have any idea where your son might be? Is there someplace nearby where he likes to go?”

“I'm not sure. He's been wandering around these woods almost since he could walk. He knows all the paths.”

“Can you give me a direction, anything at all?”

She looked around as if there might be a trail of footsteps to follow. The only light came from inside the cabin and from the full moon high above. The ground was a carpet of pine needles and low grass. It was dry. It didn't give up any secrets.

She looked up and faced south, her back to the cabin's door. “You go that way, you'll hit the main road before long.” She made a slow turn to the north. “The woods are deeper in back of the cabin. That's where most of the paths are. Go far enough north and you come to the lake.”

“You think he might have gone to the lake?”

“I don't know.” Madelyn's head moved side to side. “I can't—I need to look for him.”

Hannagan touched her shoulder. “Ma'am, you should stay here, in case he comes back. We're going to search for him. I'll make some calls, get more people out here. We'll find him.”

Madelyn answered him, but I didn't wait to hear. I slipped back to the car and found the flashlight I'd used at Delacorte's. Rooting around in the trunk, I found another.

Elizabeth joined me and I passed her the second flashlight. I nodded toward Hannagan. “We're not going to wait around until he organizes his search, are we?”

“No,” she said.

Madelyn didn't wait either. She vanished into the woods, shouting Nick's name. The sergeant went to look after her. Hannagan stayed behind to make his phone calls.

Elizabeth and I walked around to the back of the cabin and picked our way north through the trees. Soon we stumbled onto a path that bent northeast—a narrow track of hard-packed earth.

We followed it down into a gully, and when it rose again it sent off a spur to the left—roughly northwest. We followed the spur through a small clearing rich with wild fern. Climbed over the rotting trunk of a fallen birch. Soon after, the path divided once more.

We halted there. Madelyn's calls to Nick had faded into the distance.

“There's too much ground to cover,” Elizabeth said.

“I know.”

She aimed her flashlight down the right-hand path. “I don't like the idea of splitting up.”

“I don't like it either.”

The trees stood quiet around us, waiting.

She kissed me once, and fast. “Don't get shot again.”

“What are the odds?” I said.

I took the left-hand way, which ran west for a while before angling north. It crossed an unpaved road and ran past a dark cabin, bigger than Charlie Dawtrey's. I aimed my flashlight at the windows and doors and found nothing broken.

After the cabin, the path widened out and the woods began to thin. The land sloped down, the exposed roots of trees forming a series of natural steps. When I got onto level ground again I pulled my phone from my pocket and dialed Nick's number, listened to his careless fifteen-year-old's voice telling me to leave a message and maybe he'd call.

Farther on, the air got cooler. Somewhere a wood fire burned. The path bent a little to the east and the packed earth gave way to sand. Lake Superior came into view, green-black beneath a blue-black sky. Moonlight glinted on the foam near the shore.

I found him huddled on the sand, his arms wrapped around his knees, his head bowed. Strands of his black hair obscured his face.

I knelt in front of him. “Nick, are you all right?”

He lifted his head and wiped his face with the heels of his hands. “What do you want?”

“I've been looking for you.”

“Why don't you leave me alone.”

“Your mother's worried. We thought we'd find you at the cabin.”

He stared out at the darkness of the lake. “I couldn't do it at the cabin.”

I felt a twist in the pit of my stomach. “Do what?”

“What do you think?”

“Nick, where's the senator?”

He waved his right hand over his shoulder. “Look for him down the beach. That's where I left him.”

I saw a black sheen on his fingers. The beam of the flashlight turned the black to red.

“Are you hurt?” I said.

He shook his head and wouldn't meet my eyes.

“You're bleeding.”

He held his hand up to study it. “Not mine, sport.”

I tried to make sense of the blood. There'd been no shot. I would have heard it.

“Where's the gun, Nick?”

“I don't know.”

“What happened?”

He clutched his knees again and bent his head over them. He didn't answer me.

“I want to help you,” I said gently, “but I need to know what happened.”

“I don't want your help.”

“What am I going to find down the beach, Nick?”

“See for yourself. Nobody's stopping you.”

I reached to brush his hair out of his face. “Tell me what happened to the gun.”

He slapped my hand away. “Get away from me.”

“Tell me.”

I saw him shudder, and then the words struggled out of him. “What do you want me to say? I made him kneel in the sand and I put that gun against his head. And he admitted it—he told me he had Terry killed.”

Nick buried his face in his arms and I reached again to touch his hair. This time he let me. He rocked himself forward and back, and his voice was raw as a wound. “He admitted it, and I still couldn't do it. I couldn't pull the trigger. Why couldn't I do it?”

I sat beside him on the ground, got an arm around his shoulders. I watched the waves come in to the shore as the pace of his rocking gradually slowed to nothing. I helped him up when he was ready and took him down to the water, where he rinsed his hands and washed his face.

“I want you to wait here for me,” I said. “We'll go back to the cabin together.”

He answered with a distracted nod.

“I won't be long,” I said, and leaving him the flashlight I set off down the beach.

The shore curved to the south and before long I came to a grassy hill that ran down from the woods almost to the water's edge. Once I navigated around that, the moonlight showed me a seated form on the sand. The senator's legs stretched out before him and as I drew closer I could see that his feet were bare, the cuffs of his pants turned up. His shoes and socks were nearby. He leaned back on his arms, taking in the sky full of stars.

He didn't see me until I was almost on top of him, and then he only sat up slowly and folded his legs. His soft laugh was barely audible. “You get around, don't you?”

I dropped down onto the sand, facing him. “I could say the same about you.”

“What do you think of Brimley?”

“It's a nice little town, what I've seen of it.”

He nodded, gazing past my shoulder at the lake. “I always liked it. I spent some time here when I was younger. Camping. Hiking. Before they opened the casino. If you wanted excitement you drove to Sault Sainte Marie. You crossed the bridge to Canada.” He shook sand from his pant leg. “Back then you could cross without a passport. That was a more innocent time. Do you have one?”

I took a second to realize he meant a passport. “Not with me,” I said.

“But you have one. Is it current?”

“I think so.”

“You should keep it current,” he said. “You never know when you'll need it, and it takes weeks to renew one. That's something I never got around to.”

“Renewing your passport?”

“No. Fixing the system. Streamlining it. I always meant to. But that's the State Department, and it's a slog to get them to make any kind of change.”

I regarded him silently for a moment. Then: “Is this the way it's going to be?”

He frowned, confused. “Beg your pardon?”

“Lucy Navarro told me you get tired. You go off on tangents.”

The frown went away and he laughed. “Well, what do you expect, son? I'm losing my mind. Didn't you see my press conference?”

“I saw it,” I said. “I believed it, then. Now I'm not sure.”

“Oh, you can believe it. My affliction's real. All the best doctors have told me so.”

“You seem to be getting around all right. You're still driving.”

The senator's right hand rested on the ground at his side. His fingers dug into the sand. “They'll take that away from me in time,” he said softly. “But not yet. Wait long enough and I won't be able to dress myself. I'll have nurses to do it for me, and to wipe the drool off my chin. That's what they've got planned for me. But I don't think I'll stick around for that.”

His voice dropped down to nothing on the final words.

“You're not expecting me to feel sorry for you,” I said.

“No. I suppose not.”

I'd been studying him as well as I could in the moonlight and I could see what looked like a smear of blood at his temple, and a cut there, just below the hairline. A rag of white linen lay in the sand to his left—a piece torn from his shirttail. There were dark smudges on it, as if he had used it to stanch the bleeding.

I pointed at his temple. “How bad is the damage?”

He touched the cut with a fingertip. “It's nothing. A scratch.”

“How did it happen?”

“I tripped in the woods.”

“And landed on your head? That's bad luck.”

He didn't say anything.

“Are you sure Nick didn't hit you with the gun?” I asked him.

“Why would you think that?”

“It's what I would've done, if I couldn't bring myself to shoot you.”

J
ohn Casterbridge looked away from me. He moved his hands restlessly until they found half a cigar and a box of matches in his shirt pocket. I watched a match flare and listened to him puffing smoke. He shook out the match, held the cigar in his right hand resting on his knee.