A Stolen Season (21 page)

“Okay,” Tyler said. “We can let go.”

We both did at the same time. The box went straight down, sending a plume of water right into our faces. We both had to sit there rubbing our right arms for a while before we could speak.

“What the hell is so heavy in that thing?” he finally said.

“Good question,” I said.

“Let’s get it to shore.”

He jumped over the gunwale and landed in water up to his knees. He pushed the boat toward the dock, so Liz could tie it up. I got out and came around to where Tyler was standing. I waded out into the water and helped him drag the box onto the shore.

It was a large scuba box, mostly yellow with a black watertight seal running all around the top. I bent down and saw the damage to one side of it. There was a large dent in the plastic, and the seal had obviously been compromised.

Tyler lifted the padlock on the front latch. “Whatever’s in here is so heavy,” he said. “It’s a wonder this thing ever floated.”

I thought about it. “Maybe floating was never a consideration,” I said. “They weren’t thinking about crashing the boat. They just wanted to keep something locked up tight.”

“I wonder what’s in it?”

I looked at him. “You work on cars, right?”

“Yeah?”

“So you must have quite an assortment of tools.”

“We can’t open this.”

“I think we probably can.”

“We need to turn this over to the police.”

“We will,” I said. “Right after we open it.”

“I don’t know, Alex…”

I was standing there, soaking wet from the knees down. If I had been wavering in my reasons for coming here to see Tyler in the first place, here was a small mystery I could at least solve. This box those men had wanted to find so badly…I had assumed all along that it was filled with cash, brought along in the boat to give to someone in Canada in exchange for a large amount of prescription drugs.

But money didn’t weigh this much, not unless it was solid gold.

“Tyler, I can’t even tell you what I’ve been through in the last few days. What I’ve lost. I have nothing else to lose now, so I’m going to open up this box. You can help me or you can stand aside.”

He looked at Liz, then at me. “Sounds like if I want to stop you, I’ll have to go get one of the shotguns.”

“That’s probably what it’ll take, yes.”

“In that case, I’ll be right back.”

I watched him walk to the garage. He emerged a few seconds later. For one second I thought I saw the shotgun in his hands. But no, it was a long crowbar.

“Here you go,” he said as he handed it to me. “I’ll tell the police this is how we found it, that it must have gotten damaged in the wreck. If they look close enough to see crowbar marks, you’re on your own.”

“Thank you, Tyler. I owe you a drink.”

The front latch looked solid, so I started in on the side that was already damaged. I slipped the crowbar in through the cracked seal, working it back and forth until the opening got bigger. Some dark water came seeping out. I kept working the crowbar, bending back the lid. The plastic started to give way. I saw Liz flinch when a large piece came off with a violent cracking noise. Looking inside, I saw another box. This one was made of wood. It was stained dark from the intruding water.

I had to keep working hard on the lid until I could get the inner box out. At this point, there was no way it would look like damage from the crash, but I didn’t care. I pulled at the wooden box. It slid out. There was another box underneath it. More beside it. There had to be a dozen of them.

I held the wooden box in my hands for a moment. I had a gut feeling I already knew what was in it. I opened the box and saw that I was right.

It was a gun. Some kind of small machine pistol, like a miniature Uzi. There was black felt inside the box, molding perfectly to the gun and showing it off like it was some kind of exotic jewel.

I put the box down, took out another. When I opened it, I saw a pistol. A Colt .45. Things were coming together in my mind now. I felt a cold, sick wave flowing right through me.

“This is some serious hardware,” Tyler said. “It explains the lock, I guess.”

“If they got stopped by somebody,” I said, “the box couldn’t be opened without a warrant. That’s enough reason right there.”

“How much do you think these are worth?”

I shook my head. “I’m sure these are worth something. But you know…I mean, how much can a dozen guns go for these days? A few thousand dollars, tops?”

“Those guys acted like they really, really needed to get this box back,” Tyler said. “I was expecting to see a lot of money. Or diamonds. You’re telling me it’s just a few thousand dollars worth of guns?”

“I bet the dollar value wasn’t the point,” I said. “They wanted to find this box so nobody else would. They didn’t want anybody to make the connection, to figure out what these guys were really up to.”

“They were selling guns, you mean. So these guns here…Hell, these were—”

“Samples,” I said. “These were samples.”

“Just like salesmen. God damn, Liz, those guys were selling guns.”

“No,” I said. “No. They weren’t selling guns.”

I was already moving. Tyler called after me, but I didn’t even turn around. After almost losing my steam, now I had a new mission. I ran to my truck, sprayed gravel as I spun out of his driveway and hit the road.

They weren’t selling guns.

They were trading them.

Guns for drugs. It made a terrible kind of sense. God knows, America had enough guns, in every shape and size. Legal, borderline legal, or way over the line illegal, America had them. Of course, there was no shortage of hunting rifles in Canada. But handguns, concealable weapons, little submachine guns you can tuck into your jacket…that was a different matter. If you wanted to buy something like that in Canada, you were out of luck.

What Canada did have in abundance was drugs. Especially painkillers. Hell, you could walk into any drugstore in Canada and buy Tylenol with a low dose of codeine right over the counter. The stronger stuff, the serious opiates like Vicodin, Oxycontin, sure, you’d need a prescription. But nowadays, how many Americans were doing mail-order business with Canadian pharmacies? It was a gray area in United States law, whether it was legal to fill your prescriptions in Canada. But as long as the different federal agencies were bickering about it, the gates were wide open. That meant lots of drugs being made in Canada, lots of drugs being moved around from one place to another. Some of them getting lost, maybe. Some of them not quite reaching their intended destinations.

Certain people in one country, with access to lots of drugs, needing a certain kind of gun. Certain people in another country, with access to lots of guns, needing a certain kind of drug. Both countries right next to each other, with a long, mostly open border.

Imports and exports, like Mr. Gray had said to me.

Imports and exports.

That’s what was ringing in my head as I drove down to Hessel. As badly as my first two visits to Mr. Gray’s summerhouse had gone, something told me I needed to make one more trip. Cap was probably long gone by now, but hell, maybe Brucie would still be there, hanging on to the hope that he was still working for Mr. Gray. I didn’t imagine he’d be terribly happy to see me, but that would be the least of his problems.

It was starting to get cloudy again, the sun retreating already after just a few hours of bright light, of warmth. Saying, this is all there is. See you next year if you’re lucky. I kept driving as the lead-colored sky took over again and the temperature dropped. I could feel the air itself changing.

I turned off the highway, found the road that ran down the peninsula to Mr. Gray’s summerhouse. My third trip there…The first I had parked at the neighbors’ so I could sneak up on the place. The second time I didn’t even make it to the house at all, catching Cap on his way out of Dodge and beating him half to death right there on the roadside. Now, finally, I drove my truck down the driveway like a regular human being and parked it in front of the house. Cap’s Escalade was long gone. The red Viper and the silver Mercedes were both there. I had to think back for a moment, remembering that Mr. Gray had taken his son with him, and had left Harry’s car here. The other car must have been Brucie’s, although I couldn’t picture him driving a Mercedes. He seemed more the kind of guy who’d drive a shiny new Hummer.

I stuck the gun in my belt again, just in case. For all I knew, Brucie had gotten over his little hang-up about shooting people. I went to the front door and knocked. Nobody answered. I knocked again. Nothing.

Two cars here, but no people? It didn’t make sense. I tried opening the front door. It was locked. Then I remembered how I’d gotten in the first time.

I went around to the back. Everything looked exactly the same. A horseshoe pit. Beer bottles. An empty dock. I tried the patio door. Just like last time, it was unlocked.

One step into the house and I knew something was seriously wrong. There was a sickly sweet smell hanging in the air. One part death and one part something else, probably just as evil. The primitive part of my brain started hitting the evacuation button—the red alert, just-get-the-hell-out-of-here-right-now button. But I wanted to take one quick look through the house first.

I walked through the main room. The whole place had gone from a mess to a disaster. There weren’t just beer bottles all over the place now. There were pizza boxes, ice cream cartons, the remains of three or four frozen dinners. Lots of cigarettes. Mr. Gray would have been sincerely disturbed to see his place looking like this. And I knew it was about to get much worse.

The smell got stronger as I went up the stairs. For a moment, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to take it. Then the wave of nausea passed and I kept going. The first bedroom was cleaned out now. This must have been where Cap had slept. The second room was pretty much the same story. Harry’s room, I was guessing. The third room was where everything had gone straight to hell.

There were more empty beer bottles, at least thirty of them all over the floor, the bed, the dresser. There were overflowing ashtrays. More food containers. That’s where some of the smell was coming from. Mixed with that was the unmistakable aroma of marijuana smoke. The rest of it had to be Brucie, or what was left of him. But I didn’t see him anywhere.

I looked on the other side of the bed. He wasn’t there. I knew he was a big man, so there weren’t many places left to hide. Then I saw the closet door.

When I slid it open, the smell washed over me like a hot wind. I thought I’d lose it right there. I had to cover my face to stop from retching all over the place. He was curled up on the floor of the closet, drawn into himself in this tight little space like some kind of sick animal. Typical junkie behavior. His eyes were open, all white, as the pupils seemed to be rolled back in his head. I saw a couple of needles on the floor next to him. A belt he had obviously used to tie off. A spoon. Matches.

I remembered what Cap had told me, the last time I saw him. Brucie was the one with the pill problem. He wasn’t lying about that one, I said to myself. Brucie was the one stupid enough to dip into the merchandise and get himself hooked.

Then the conversation with Terry LaFleur, the woman from the clinic, came back to me. I replayed everything she had said, me and Vinnie on one side of the table, in the restaurant at the Kewadin, Terry on the other side. She was ratting out Caroline and her little scam, getting those prescription painkillers and selling them. The big danger, Terry had said, was that the pills went outside of the clinic’s control, and whoever took them did so with no supervision, no safety net. Once they got hooked, if the pills stopped coming…that’s when things got really dangerous. Because someone hooked on Vicodin will do anything to hold on to that feeling, even if it means going to something else. Something more dangerous. Something deadly.

Just like this.

I knew there was heroin up here now. Vinnie would talk about it now and then, having heard about it from some of the younger guys on the rez. From the poppy fields in Afghanistan or wherever else they were growing it these days, I couldn’t imagine a farther trip for a bag of the stuff to make. But here it was right in front of me, having stopped the heart of a man stronger than an ox. It must have been one hell of a hit.

I couldn’t think of one thing to do about it. Call the police, tell them I found an OD, tell them they should come get him out of here? No rush on that one. He wasn’t going anywhere. Right now I had other things to do.

I worked my way back through the house, looking in each room, then down the stairs. When I was in the kitchen I could almost breathe again without gagging.

What are you looking for, Alex? What do you think you’re going to find?

The map was still laid out on the kitchen table. All the major waterways, all around the Les Cheneaux Islands, Lake Huron, around Drummond Island. I bent down to the map, examining it closely, trying to see if someone had made a mark somewhere. A little X to mark the spot. If they had, I couldn’t see it.

Imports and exports. Guns for drugs. I stood up straight, looking around the rest of the kitchen. The last time I was here…There were some pill bottles there on the counter. Beer bottles, trash. What else? I had seen something else before I was interrupted, before they came back in and I had to hide.

Before they came back in.

All three of them. Cap, Brucie, Harry. I had assumed that morning that they had gone into town, that they were out eating breakfast or something. That they had just come back while I was standing there. Like the three bears returning home…

But there were three vehicles outside that day. The two that were still out there now, plus Cap’s Escalade. Three people, three cars. If they had been in town, how did they get there?

Unless they hadn’t been in town. Unless they hadn’t driven anywhere at all. Which would explain why I hadn’t heard a vehicle when they came back. All of a sudden, there they were at the front door.

They couldn’t have been in the boat. The boat was wrecked. The dock was empty.

Boat keys. There was another set of boat keys sitting here on the counter. I had assumed they were just duplicates for the wooden boat. Although if you had a duplicate set, why would you leave them lying around on the counter?

I looked on the counter. I opened the drawers. There were no keys here now. Did Brucie have them? Would I have to go back upstairs and search his clothes? That was the last thing in the world I wanted to do.

You’re getting ahead of yourself, I thought. First go see if there’s another boat out there. Then worry about the keys.

I went out the back door, stood on the porch for a moment, sucking in the cold, fresh air until I was dizzy. Then I went down to the edge of the water. There was a heavy mist forming on the surface now, the relative heat of the day giving way to the cool evening. I went out on the dock, looked down the shoreline in both directions. There was a big willow tree, its long leaves touching the water on one side. Some tall weeds standing in the shallows. But no boats.

I looked across the channel. I could barely see another dock on the far side. It was just as empty as the one I was standing on. All these summer homes here on the channels, most of them empty at the moment, with no summer, no reason for anyone to come all the way up here.

An idea. All these other houses…Most of them empty.

I went back through the yard, looking for some kind of path, some break in the trees and the high tangles of sumac, wild raspberry, poison ivy, whatever the hell else. I found a path of sorts, followed it, the brambles cutting into my arms. From the next yard, I looked down at the water. There was a canoe overturned on the shore, nothing tied to the dock. So much for this one.

I worked my way back through the brush, fought through the opposite side of the yard until I was standing on yet another shoreline. Another empty house. Another empty dock.

Now what?

Now you use your head for once. They had come in through the front door, not the back. Instead of fighting my way back to the yard, I went up the driveway. I walked down the street until I was at the front of Gray’s property. I hadn’t seen a driveway on the other side of the street yet. Until…Over there. Down a hundred yards more.

I went to the driveway, walked all the way down to the house. It looked like one of the older houses on the peninsula. It might have been one of the first, built way back when, before Les Cheneaux turned into a hot property. A one-story cottage, everything you’d need in a summerhouse without any of the fancy architecture. No strange angles on the roof, no soaring windows.

The house looked dark inside. There were no cars parked outside. Nothing going on here at all. Then I walked around to the backyard and saw something interesting.

Down by the shore, there was a boathouse, the kind they used to build right on the water, after dredging a channel underneath. You don’t see a lot of them anymore. Maybe they’re too hard to maintain. Or maybe if you have a big enough boat, you dry-dock at a marina. No matter the reason, here was one of the originals, and even though the paint was peeling and the whole thing was starting to lean to the right, it was at least forty feet long and another twenty feet high. It could obviously hold a lot of boat.

I walked down and looked through the little window in the door. I could see a big cabin cruiser inside. It had to be at least a thirty-footer.

I tried the door. It was locked. The only other way in was the big overhead door leading out to the water. The door probably came down right to the surface, maybe with a couple of inches to spare. If I really wanted to, I thought, I could dive into the channel, swim underwater, and come up inside the boathouse. Yeah, sure, I could do that.

I took a quick look around, picked up a rock the size of a softball and broke the window. I reached inside and fumbled around with the doorknob. The door swung open.

The boat had been parked nose out. The lettering on the back read
Ruth’s Revenge
. I walked around the gangplanks on all three sides, looking her over. The boat was wrapped up tight, like it hadn’t been taken out in weeks. But of course that may have been a deliberate ruse. One other thing I did notice—either this boat was built to ride low in the water, or else it was holding a very heavy load.

As I unsnapped the cover on the starboard gunwale, I remembered another boat, about this size, owned by a man who was now very much dead. He had used it to smuggle high-end kitchen appliances into Canada without paying the tariffs. At the time, it had seemed like some major-league criminal activity to me. But if this boat here was holding what I thought it was, it would make the appliance scheme look like kid’s stuff.

When I had unsnapped enough buttons, I stepped down inside the boat. There was a little table on the rear deck with four chairs around it. There was an ashtray still overflowing with butts. A cooler filled with empty beer bottles. A short ladder led up to the top deck, but I wasn’t interested in going up there. Instead, I opened the door to the cabin and looked inside.

When my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw the crates. They were stacked in the cabin, as many crates as you could possibly fit in there. I grabbed one and pulled it down, slid it back to the rear deck so I’d have a little more light. It was made of rough wood, about four feet long, two feet wide, two feet deep. Like a miniature coffin. I didn’t think I even had to open it, but I did anyway, just to confirm what I already knew.