Lake Country (10 page)

His mobile went off. Toby grabbed it, saw the screen, and said, “Hey, Uncle Buck.”

“Howdy, sport,” Uncle Buck said. “Listen, put Bryce …”

Toby was already handing the phone over.

Bryce took it and said, “I’m here.”

Toby didn’t even bother trying to listen this time. It was no use. He sat there behind the wheel, looking out the window at nothing in particular, until Bryce said, “I’ll let you know,” and handed the phone back.

Toby took it. Waited.

Silence.

Then Bryce said, “Barlowe’s in the wind.”

In the wind. It sounded mystical. “He’s where?”

“Exactly,” Bryce said.

Whatever. More silence.

Toby waited.

“So here’s what I’m thinking,” Bryce finally said. Talking like they were partners again all of a sudden. “You and me, we split that eleven grand of yours. What’s left of it, anyway. Then we take that twenty-five-K reward money, and we split that too.” Bryce winked. “You’re the numbers guy, you tell me. What’s that come to each?”

“Eighteen grand,” Toby said.

“Yeah, that’s what I got.”

“Depending,” Toby said.

“On?”

“On how much of my eleven grand there is left.”

“Right,” Bryce said. “Good point.” He turned in his seat toward Toby, got comfortable. “So, figure we get no luck. There’s nothing left of the dough Potter took from your restaurant guy. That leaves us with, what? Only twelve? Each?”

“Twelve and a half,” Toby said.

“Hey. You really are a numbers guy.”

Toby felt like he was having a perfectly logical conversation that made absolutely no sense. He sat a minute, wanting to avoid saying something dumb,
which would only give Bryce something new to crack on him about, then said, “Tell me again how we get the reward money?”

“Same way we get your eleven grand back,” Bryce said. “We find this Potter genius.”

Who’s the genius?
Toby thought, but held his tongue. He took another moment, chose his words carefully, and said, “Isn’t that sort of the whole problem?”

Bryce smiled. It looked like the bones in his face shifted position. “You be the numbers guy,” he said. “Let me be the ideas guy.”

Mike Barlowe had joined the Marine Corps straight out of high school because he couldn’t think of anything better to do. He’d grown up in foster homes and had no blood siblings. His girlfriend—who he’d always known was out of his league anyway—had gone out east for college and met a new guy by Halloween. His buddies were good for laughs and trouble, but they were all going nowhere fast, and even though he’d never had much evidence to support it, Mike always had the idea that maybe he’d amount to something more.

He’d been a sophomore at Sibley when the towers came down in New York City. Though he’d never said so to anybody, inside he’d always admired the seniors he knew that year who signed up to go off and do something about it. Three years later, he signed up himself, one otherwise pointless Saturday afternoon, at a recruiting depot set up for the weekend at the Mall of America in Bloomington.

Three years after that, Mike came home from the Marine Corps with a plastic knee, 63 percent hearing loss in his left ear, and a bunch of grisly sludge where his nighttime dreams used to be. And if not for Darryl
Potter, he most likely would not have come home at all.

They’d been getting ready to turn over Ramadi to the next bunch of Marines after six months in the combat zone. September in Anbar Province was nothing like early autumn in Minnesota, and Mike had been daydreaming about fishing for lunker northerns and watching the leaves change back home.

Two weeks before shipping back to the States, his team found an ambush on patrol and ended up in a hell of a jam. They’d been outpositioned, pinned down in a side street for a quarter of an hour by the time support arrived. From his cover in a doorway, Mike laid down rifle fire while his men piled into the Humvee, then he broke out after them.

He’d made it about three steps when an RPG round screamed over on a rope of exhaust from a ground-floor window across the street, detonating high on the wall above the doorway behind him. The next thing Mike knew, he was deaf, half blind, concussed out of his gourd. He found himself bound up in a pile of rubble with no feeling in his leg, AK-47 rounds kicking up silent puffs of sidewalk all around him.

Potter, they told him later, hadn’t even waited for the big truck-mounted .50-cal to swing around and start hammering. They said he just jumped out of the Humvee and bolted straight into the hail. Pulled Mike out of there. Dragged him all the way back by his flak vest with one hand, firing his regulated M4 across the street with the other. Burst after burst, they said, straight out of the movies. They said all he needed was a chewed-up cigar clamped in his snarl.

But Mike couldn’t remember any of that. The next
thing he remembered was bouncing around in the back of the Humvee, hauling ass out of the hot zone, looking up into Darryl’s grime-caked face. He remembered how white Darryl’s teeth had looked against the battle dirt. He remembered saying thanks, though he couldn’t hear his own voice.

He couldn’t hear Darryl’s either, but he’d been able to read his grinning lips:
Don’t worry about it. Next time you can save mine
.

The lane to Rockhaven was so grown up with brome-grass and sumac that Mike might not have seen it in the dark if he hadn’t known where he was going. The Power Wagon’s headlights found the break in the overgrowth, then fell across the familiar sign, the old barn door Hal’s grandfather had nailed across a pair of gnarly hedge posts sometime during the Truman administration. Its last paint job was nearly scoured away by the elements, and Mike wondered how that could be. He was the one who’d last repainted it—a thank-you to Hal for letting him use the place—and it didn’t seem like it had been all that long ago.

He sat there a minute at the mouth of the lane, engine idling, headlights illuminating the path ahead of him. He’d driven two and a half hours nonstop, and the truck’s big dual tanks were nearly empty.

Mike’s tank was nearly empty. His leg was stiff and aching. His eyes felt raw. After about a quart of bitter Go Stop coffee, his stomach was sour and full of acid, and his bladder felt ready to burst.

He killed the ignition, got out of the truck, and relieved himself in the tall grass. He limped a circle
around the truck, tried to work the rigor out of his leg. He was miles from anything, and everything was quiet. No bugs, no night birds, not even the whisper of a breeze in the trees.

All he could hear was the sound of the truck’s engine ticking under the hood. The sound of his own feet kicking through the gravel along the rutted lake road, swept down to hardpan by the winter melt. Drifting clouds of tree pollen swirled in the headlight beams, otherwise invisible to the eye.

You’re stalling
, he thought, and climbed back in the truck.

Ahead of him, just beyond the reach of the headlights, the rock-topped lane made a bend and disappeared into the trees. The lane wound through the timber another quarter mile, wide enough for a single vehicle abreast, and now that Mike was here, he realized he didn’t want to go down this road after all. Didn’t want to face whatever was waiting for him at the end of it.

Half an hour to midnight, according to the clock in the dash. Almost a new day.

Hal would be waiting for his call.

He forced his hand up to the ignition. Turned the key. The new starter fired up on the first try. The engine rumbled. No excuses.

Mike dropped the truck into gear. Rocks crunched heavily under the tires as he turned into the lane.

When this is over
, he thought,
I’m repainting that sign
.

By the time the guys from Dobry Automotive came back across the street, jingled the bell over the door on their way in, and ordered their first free pitcher of Leinenkugel, Hal Macklin was about ready to crawl out of his own damned skin.

“What’s the matter with you?” Regina finally wanted to know, drumming her nails across the damp cork of her drink tray while he made change out of the register for the guys in booth five. “You’re even grouchier than normal.”

“I got a pain in my ass, that’s what,” he said. “It costs me nine bucks an hour and keeps going, ‘What’s the matter with you?’ ”

“Fine, be that way,” Regina said. “See if I give a shit.”

“Like you don’t give me enough shit already,” Hal said, as if it was her fault he’d let himself get talked into waiting around here with his thumb up his ass while who knew what was happening up at the lake.

It wasn’t right. He knew that now, only two hours along. Hell, he’d known it two hours ago.

But he’d given his word.

He gave Reggie her change, wiped down the bar for the hundredth time, and tried to stop checking the clock over the jukebox every five minutes.

When the ten o’clock news came on, Hal left Regina behind the bar and went back to watch on the little twelve-inch set on his desk in the office, where he could hear better.

Five minutes later, he came out, cut the juke, turned on the lights, and said, “Drink up, folks. Closing time.”

It took half an hour to round everybody up and get their mopey asses all moving in the same direction. First nobody believed him. Then came the griping and the bellyaching.

“Tommorrow night, first round’s on the house,” Hal kept telling them, herding and prodding them along. “Sorry, Bill; sorry, Tom; sorry, fella. Can’t be helped. Here’s what you do: You come in tomorrow night, you order a drink, you tell me, ‘This one’s for last night.’ Got that? Now your left. Right. Left. Attaboy.”

On his way out, Wayne Miller from the garage winked and handed Hal most of an unfinished pitcher of free Leinenkugel. “I see how it is,” he said.

Ray Duncan joined in, saying, “Gotta watch you all the time, huh, Mackie?”

“I’m sorry, boys.” Hal nodded to Wayne, clapped Ray on his meaty shoulder. “I owe you. Mark it down.”

Reggie was the last person out the door. She stood there with her purse and jacket, arms crossed, until Hal thought he was going to have to go back to the stockroom, get the hand truck and some bungee cords, and wheel her out to her car at the curb.

She said, “What’s going on, you?”

“Nothing,” he told her.

“Don’t give me that.”

“I got some business.”

“What kind of business?”

“The none-of-your-business kind of business.”

“Harold William,” she said, and gave him that look of hers. It was one of the reasons he’d married her, that look. One of the reasons he’d given her the divorce, come to think of it.

“Regina Christine,” he said. Left it there.

She stood planted like that and stared at him a minute before she finally gave up. Right before she walked out, she did the last thing Hal expected: She leaned at him quickly, planted a hard kiss on his cheek, and said, “I don’t like the look on your face.”

She smelled like lipstick and cigarettes. Hal missed her a little just then.

“Shoo,” he said.

He watched her to the curb, digging around in that twenty-pound rucksack she called a purse until she found her keys. Reggie looked back at him once, shook her head, then opened up her little Honda and got in.

She needed a new muffler, Hal thought, watching her drive away. He decided he’d talk to Wayne and Ray about that next time he saw them. He flipped the
OPEN
sign to
CLOSED
and locked the door.

The place seemed too bright and too quiet, now that it was empty. Hal killed the main lights on his way to the office. When he got there, he grabbed the phone and the pad of notepaper he’d left next to it.

Barlowe wouldn’t be more than halfway to the lake by now, he figured. Hal didn’t like selling the boy out.

But that was how it was going to have to be. He couldn’t let it go now. Not after what he’d just seen on the news.

Sorry, kid
, he thought, and began dialing the Sheriff’s hotline number he’d scribbled on the pad two hours ago.
This wasn’t the deal
.

Halfway through the number, Hal heard a muffled jangle in the bar: the bell over the front door.

“Jesus H. Jones,” he said, and slammed the phone down. He went up front to run off whoever had wandered in already, knowing as he went that he’d locked that front door.

He came out into the bar and stopped. Saw the guy in the front entrance, just now stepping out of the shadows. In the light from the back bar, Hal recognized him right off the bat.

“Gotta be hard staying in business,” the guy said. “I mean, a bar? Closing at ten when everybody else in town stays open ’til two?”

The kid had said the guy’s name before. Hal couldn’t remember it.

The face was too ugly to forget. Hal didn’t bother asking the guy how he’d gotten in; he could see him slipping a little flat black case inside his jacket as he
strolled on in, helped himself to a bar stool. That would have been the lock picks.

Hal felt his heart beating. All his senses sharpened up. He said, “The hell do you want?”

The guy smiled. “How about a beer?”

“Hey, I got a joke for you,” the guy said. “You like jokes?”

Bryce
, Hal thought. That was his name.

Didn’t look like a Bryce. Hal came around the bar, taking care where he put his eyes. He could play casual too. Son of a bitch was going to find that out soon enough, whatever his name was.

“Sure, I like jokes,” he told him, pulling up a mug from the rack under the taps. “If they make me laugh.”

“Here’s a good one,” Bryce said. “Guy’s selling brains on the black market. Right?”

“Brains,” Hal said.

“Human brains, yeah. Like for transplants.” Bryce waved a hand. “It’s a new science.”

“Why not,” Hal said. He set up the mug and started pulling a beer. Shittiest brand he carried.

“So he points to a jar with a brain floating in it and says to his customer, ‘This one’s from a schoolteacher. Cost you twenty thousand bucks.’ ”

Bryce pointed along in the air with his finger while he narrated, indicating imaginary jars.