Die a Stranger (14 page)

We got up to the neighbor’s house. I willed the front door to stay shut, the neighbor and the customer safely inside, waiting for Dukes to make his way back with a bag of the good stuff. When we got to Dukes’ house, Lou gestured to the far side and went across the front lawn, keeping his head down. Now we were split up and approaching him from both sides of the house.

I heard the back door opening and I had to make a quick decision. There was no need to give the man a heart attack, but at the same time it would be better to surprise him than to give him time to react.

Okay, maybe you didn’t quite think this through, I told myself. Maybe you’re about to force the man to do something stupid.

I kept my back pressed against the side of the house. Wait until he’s close, I thought, then step calmly around the corner. Hands up, showing him you’re unarmed, but still ready for anything. Tell him you just want to talk to him. Nobody gets hurt. Piece of cake, just like that.

I waited for the sound of his footsteps. Where the hell was he? Was he walking on the grass? Hell with it. Time to move.

I stepped around the corner and saw him standing a good eight feet away from me. Not the distance I had planned.

“Mr. Dukes,” I said, barreling right ahead. “I need a word with you.”

He was tall and gangly enough to do a good Ichabod Crane impression, complete with the expression of wide-eyed, pants-pissing shock. He was wearing an untucked striped rugby shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and as he took one step backward he reached under his shirttails and drew out a revolver.

“Don’t shoot!” I said, already bracing myself for what I knew was coming.

He barely had time to raise the gun when Lou was already on top of him. Lou spun him around and grabbed the gun with his left hand, giving Dukes a quick chop to the throat with his right. It wasn’t deadly force, just enough to surprise him and to loosen his grip on the revolver. As Dukes doubled over, Lou gave him a little hip check and knocked him to his knees.

“This thing is cocked,” Lou said, as he carefully let the hammer down. Then he flipped open the cylinder. “And loaded. What were you just about to do?”

Dukes was trying hard to catch his breath, one hand on his throat and the other on the ground.

“I asked you a question,” Lou said. “Were you seriously going to shoot us just now? Was that your plan?”

Dukes shook his head, but he still couldn’t speak.

“Not to mention having a cocked pistol stuck down your goddamned pants,” Lou said. “You’re lucky you didn’t blow your own dick off.”

“Lou, take it easy,” I said. It was finally starting to catch up to me, the simple fact that this man on the ground probably would have shot me if Lou hadn’t stopped him.

“Take it easy yourself,” Lou said. “We could both be lying dead on the ground right now.”

“I didn’t mean it,” Dukes said, finally finding his voice. “I’m sorry. You guys just scared me. I didn’t mean to hurt anybody, I swear.”

“Oh just shut up,” Lou said. “I oughta put one through your head just for being such a dumbass. We came here to talk to you, all right?”

Dukes swallowed hard as he looked back and forth between us. That’s when his neighbor came bursting out his back door, holding a baseball bat.

“Put the bat down!” Lou said, pointing the gun at him. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“Put it down, Eddie!” Dukes was making no effort to get up yet. “For God’s sake, put it down!”

Neighbor Eddie did as he was told. He stood there on the other side of the driveway, his hands in the air and the bat at his feet. I looked around and wondered if the police cars would be here in two minutes or just one. But the street looked quiet.

“Can we take this inside,” I said, “before we all get arrested?”

We led them back into Eddie’s house. The customer took one look at us and the gun in Lou’s hand and bolted out the front door. Which was fine by me. Lou told the two men to make themselves comfortable on the sofa. I stayed on my feet, pacing back and forth across the room and trying to bring my heart rate back into double digits. Lou just stood there glaring down at both men, his arms folded and the gun still in his right hand. Never mind the fact that we had just spent most of the last twenty-four hours together … The way he had disarmed the man, and now the absolute calm on that ageless weathered face, made me realize how little I really knew about him.

“Lou,” I said, “you can put the gun away.”

“I’ll keep it right here, Alex. We don’t want these gentlemen to get any funny ideas.”

“Okay, now you sound like a gangster. We all need to turn it down a notch.”

“This clown brought the gun into the equation,” Lou said, nodding toward Dukes. “It wasn’t our idea.”

“The man is scared out of his mind,” I said, and as I looked down at him I could see how true that was. His hands were shaking so badly that he could barely keep them together. Beside him, Eddie was trying to look small and inconspicuous, probably for the first time in his life. He was failing miserably.

“What are you scared of?” Lou asked Dukes.

He started fumbling around for an answer, but it was like he just couldn’t put the sounds together into words.

“Okay, stop,” I said. “We’re not here to hurt you, I swear. Just take a breath.”

He nodded his head and did his best to compose himself. As he did, I took a good look around Eddie’s house. It was the house of a man living alone, that much was obvious. The furniture was ugly and simple. There was a big-screen television across from the couch and a collection of empty beer cans on either side table. The carpet needed vacuuming.
Everything
needed vacuuming, including the air itself. On what passed as a dining room table, there were newspapers and magazines and a small scale. Something told me it wasn’t a Weight Watcher’s scale for measuring out food portions.

I grabbed one of the dining room chairs and positioned it in front of the two men.

“Let me start,” I said. “My name is Alex. I know your name is Andy Dukes and this man here is Eddie, right?”

They both nodded.

“We’re looking for two men. One is named Vinnie LeBlanc, the other is Buck Carrick. They’re both from Bay Mills. Do either of those names mean anything to you?”

“No,” Dukes said. “No, I swear.” He looked me in the eye for the first time since sitting down. He didn’t look away. I would have bet everything I owned that he was lying to me.

Lou obviously had the same impression, because he went right over to Dukes and put the revolver to his temple.

“You know how much I hate liars?” Lou said.

Eddie made a move to get up.

“Sit down or I’ll shoot both of you.”

Eddie sat back down and closed his eyes. He was shaking just as badly as Dukes now.

“Lou, for the last time,” I said, wondering how many felonies we’d actually end up committing that day, “put the gun away before somebody gets killed.”

This was not going the way I had planned it, to say the least. This was light-years away from any possible way I would have imagined it. But we were here and the gun was in Lou’s hand and I figured, what the hell. If there was ever a time for a little game of good cop/bad cop …

“I don’t want him to shoot you,” I said, “but I honestly think he might if you lie to us again.”

“What do you want from me?” Dukes said. “Who are you guys?”

“I told you, I’m a friend of Vinnie LeBlanc’s. This is his father. He’s going to try to cool it for a minute so you can talk.”

Lou looked over at me for a moment, then he took a step backward.

“Buck Carrick is Vinnie’s cousin,” I said. “We have reason to believe that Buck may have been at the Newberry airport the other night when those five men all had their shootout. We know that the airplane was carrying in marijuana from Canada, and we know that you’re a dealer.”

“Who told you that?”

“One of your customers. It doesn’t matter.”

“Who was it?”

“I told you, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’re obviously connected to what happened at the airport. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t be hiding in your next-door neighbor’s house.”

“I’m not connected to it. I swear I’m not.”

“Here’s a little tip,” I said, sneaking a quick look at Lou. “Every time you say, ‘I swear,’ you give yourself away.”

“I’m not,” he said. “I’m not really connected. I just…”

He let out a long breath and looked down at his hands.

“You just what?” I said.

“I didn’t think anything like that would happen. I just helped them with an idea. That’s all I did.”

“Who are we talking about?”

“Some people,” he said. “From downstate.”

“All right, we’ll come back to who those people are. Tell me about this idea you helped them with.”

“They wanted to find another airport, after what happened the last time. With those guys ripping off the delivery in Sandusky. Or wherever that was. When the plane landed, the regular pickup dudes who were going to meet the plane, they were handcuffed to the fence. These other guys took all the bags and they told the pilot to fly back to Canada and to tell the growers over there that they had new contacts in the States.”

“That part I know about,” I said. “So you’re telling me your friends decided not to stand by and let this happen?”

“They’re not my friends,” he said quickly. “Come on, this is all business. I just get my supply from them. But when I knew they were looking around for another airport, I told them they should think about up here.”

“So it was
your
idea, you’re saying. You weren’t just
helping
them with the idea.”

“Yeah, I guess it was. It was my idea.”

“It got five people killed,” I said. “You realize that, right?”

“Those guys weren’t supposed to find out. It shouldn’t have happened.”

“Whatever you say. Keep talking. What happened next?”

“These people from downstate, they came up here to check it out, and I was showing them around, you know, and at first they weren’t too sure about it, because for one thing you gotta take everything back down over the bridge. But I was like, hey, you just pull up and pay your three-fifty toll. It’s not like they’re gonna search the truck or anything. So then they were like, okay, let’s see some of the airports, and I took them around to Saint Ignace and Sanderson, and then I finally took them out to Newberry. And they were like, this would be perfect if it wasn’t so deserted.”

“Wait,” I said. “I thought that was the whole point. I thought you
wanted
it to be deserted so nobody would notice the plane landing.”

“You don’t want anybody to notice,” he said, “but you also need to have more than one road out of there. That way, if somebody
does
see you, you can still get away. With Newberry, you just got the one road going east–west, or maybe you could take the crossroad north, but then you’d just be driving all that way up to Paradise and then you’d still have to loop back around. It wouldn’t take more than two cop cars to totally nail you.”

“All right,” I said. “I guess I see the logic there. If it’s forty miles to the next turn, they can seal you right off. So what changed their mind?”

“The off-roads. There’s hundreds of them, all over the place. Hell, we got more off-roads up here than regular roads. I even got this map out and showed them. Right there at the airport, you can jump right on a trail and go to another trail, and pretty much go wherever you want to go, all over the UP. You practically never have to hit a main road once.”

“I’m sure they appreciated your creative thinking,” I said, “and that would explain that truck I saw at the airport. I’m sure it was four-wheel drive, big tires, perfect for getting down those trails, right?”

He nodded.

“So let’s get to the part of the story where Buck gets involved.”

He didn’t say anything for a moment. He didn’t have to. I was already racing to the answer, picturing that all-terrain vehicle parked on the grass next to Buck’s driveway.

“Oh, don’t even tell me,” I said. “I don’t even want to hear this.”

“What?” Lou said. “What happened with Buck?”

“He’s the guy who knows the trails,” I said. “Am I right?”

Dukes nodded again.

“And you actually hooked him up with those people? Is that what you’re gonna tell me?”

“Buck was always riding out there,” Dukes said. “He talked about it a few times. So I just introduced him.”

“You just introduced him,” I said. “To a gang of drug dealers from downstate.”

“It’s not like that. You don’t know these people.”

“Oh, am I misrepresenting them? Are they not a gang of drug dealers who fly in massive amounts of pot from Canada and sell it to people all over the state? Is that not an accurate description?”

“They’re not a gang, for one thing. There’s just two of them, and they’re old. Like in their fifties.”

As if I didn’t already have enough reason to smack him in the face.

“Two old pot dealers,” I said, trying hard to maintain my composure. “So those were two of the dead bodies at the airport? Is that what you’re saying?”

“No, they don’t take the deliveries themselves. They don’t do that kind of stuff anymore.”

“On account of being in their fifties and therefore so old and decrepit,” I said. “Is that it?”

“They just don’t. They always have these guys hanging around them all the time, working on the farm or whatever. Which kinda explains why they took such a shine to Buck.”

I looked over at Lou. He didn’t seem to be understanding this any better than I was.

“What in holy hell are you talking about?” I finally said. “Who are these people?”

He kept quiet then. Maybe he was thinking he had already said too much. Not that I cared at that point.

Eddie raised his hand like an elementary-school student. “Can I go now?” he said.

“Shut up and don’t move,” I said to him. Then I turned my attention back to Dukes. “Tell me who these people are.”

“I can’t.”

“I’m pretty sure you can.”

“No. Really.”

“Really, you can. Lou, shoot him in the hand. Either hand will do.”