Die a Stranger (17 page)

“We should eat something,” Lou said, looking at his watch. It was past lunchtime by now. “It’ll make us think better.”

I didn’t argue with him. We ordered a couple of hamburgers, and as we were waiting I looked around the place, as if Vinnie and Buck would be sitting right there at one of the tables. They called our number a few minutes later, and that’s how we saw the way they ran their operation there. They’d tape your receipt with your magic number on it, right there on the outside of the brown paper bag.

I didn’t feel like burning an hour sitting down for lunch. I would rather have taken the food in the car while we drove around the rez. But Lou insisted.

“Let’s sit here and let it sink in for a while,” he said. “Vinnie and Buck may have sat right here at this table. Just yesterday.”

“Something tells me they didn’t do that,” I said. “If that bag was in his truck…”

“They ate on the run, okay. But just the same, let’s watch out the window for a while, get the rhythm of this place. I bet you something will come to us.”

So that’s what we did. I don’t know if we ever got into any kind of rhythm, or what the hell that even means, but we did get to sit there for a few minutes and plan out our next move.

And yes, we were both starving. Taking a few minutes to eat a couple of big hamburgers was the right idea.

“So imagine you’re Vinnie,” Lou said, wiping his mouth after a big bite. “You’ve got your crazy cousin with you, and you’re trying to take care of him. He’s bleeding—”

“So you take him to the hospital.”

“But you’re worried about him getting in trouble.”

“You take him to the hospital anyway.”

He waved that away. “If you go to the ER with a gunshot wound, they have to call the police, am I right? Isn’t that the rule?”

“Gun, knife, anything deadly,” I said. “Actually, any kind of violence at all. If you’ve been assaulted in any way, bad enough to go to the hospital for treatment, then they’re supposed to call it in.”

“Seriously? Anything?”

“That’s the Michigan law. It might be different in other states.”

“Damn,” he said. “But okay. That makes my point even stronger. As soon as Buck walks in with a gunshot wound, the police are on their way.”

“So where else would they go? And why all the way down here?”

“Because they know somebody. Buck, Vinnie, one of them. They come down here because they’ve got a friend on the rez who can help them without calling the cops.”

“It’s the biggest reservation in the state,” I said. “Where would we even start?”

“We already have. We’re retracing their steps. Backwards, maybe, but we know they drove to that farmhouse and left Vinnie’s truck there. Before that, they were here.”

He gestured to the counter.

“There’s no drive-through here,” he said. “Did you notice that? That means they were standing right there at that counter. Or maybe just Vinnie, I don’t know. But he was
right there
like twenty-four hours ago.”

“So what are we going to do, ask the cashier if she remembers seeing an Indian man with long black hair? She probably sees a hundred of them every day.”

“I don’t see a lot of long hair here,” Lou said, looking around the place. “But no matter. It wouldn’t do us any good even if she was here yesterday and even if she did remember him. I don’t imagine they talked about much more than what he wanted on his hamburgers.”

“Okay, so we’ve gotta take one more step backward. To wherever they were before they came here.”

“That’s the idea,” he said, wadding up his wrapper and throwing it into the bag. “Let’s go find it.”

A simple enough plan, even if I had no idea where we’d begin.

*   *   *

There was a walk-in clinic just down the street from the Five Guys. It seemed way too much to ask for this to be the place where Vinnie and Buck had come for help, but we walked inside and right there on the wall was a board with all of the doctors’ names. They were Indian names, all right. But we were just off the rez now and these were not the kind of Indians we were looking for.

“Patel, Singh, Alyeshmerni,” Lou said, going down the list. “Yeah, I’m thinking we’re not going to find our long-lost friend of Vinnie or Buck here.”

“We need to find something on the rez itself,” I said. “But even if we find the right place, how are we gonna know? If they came down here to get Buck treated off the books, how can you expect the doctor to talk to us about it?”

“That’s the tricky part,” Lou said as we got back into the car. “We’ll have to rely on the old eyeball test.”

I looked over at him.

“You know the eyeball test,” he said. “I mean if you were any kind of cop…”

“I know the eyeball test,” I said. “You ask them a question and you watch their eyes. If they’re lying, you’ll know it.”

“So you’ve done it before.”

“A few hundred times. Once in a while it even works.”

We spent the next half hour driving around, looking for the clinic. We knew it had to be there. Any decent reservation would have a walk-in clinic and this one was so far beyond decent. We drove by the Soaring Eagles Casino and it was truly spectacular, even bigger than the Sault tribe’s Kewadin. It even had its own entrance road, with a big sign arching over it. We kept going past that and finally found the clinic just a few blocks to the south. It was called the Nimkee Medical Clinic, and, no surprise, it looked so clean and new and state-of-the-art, you’d feel lucky to be wheeled through the front doors with a bullet in your head.

“I can’t believe any of this,” Lou said as he drove through the parking lot. There was a covered canopy you could stop under, complete with valet parking, so you could walk into the place without being bothered by the weather. “I told you about the Paiutes in Moapa Valley, right? With the coal plant next door?”

“You mentioned it, yes.”

“You know what kind of…”

He took a breath.

“Never mind,” he said. “If these people are making a good life for themselves, then more power to ’em. I’m gonna go talk to somebody.”

“
You’re
going to?”

“We’re on the rez now, Alex. Besides being an obvious paleface, you look like a cop, too.”

I didn’t fight him too hard. Probably because I knew he was right. This was the one place I’d be of no use to anybody. I sat there and babysat the car while he walked through the front doors. I looked at my watch. It was almost three o’clock. This day had started up in Sault Ste. Marie, staking out Dukes, rousting him, getting his story. Then down to Cadillac to see just how badly one could trash a nice farmhouse, not to mention four vehicles. Now we were here on the Saginaw rez, still trying to retrace Vinnie and Buck’s steps. It didn’t feel like the longest day of my life quite yet, but then the day was still young.

A few minutes later, Lou came barreling back out the front door. He didn’t look happy. He got into the car, slammed the door, and started the ignition. As soon as it was in gear, he laid down tracks and we were out of that parking lot in seconds.

“Slow down!” I said. “What the hell happened?”

“We’re supposed to be one people,” he said, sounding more like he was talking to himself than to me. “One big family, no matter what.”

“Lou…”

“One people. That’s what the word means, right?
Anishinabe.
The people.
One
people. That doesn’t mean anything anymore?”

I let him burn it off on his own. A few minutes later he had stopped talking, but he was still driving a little bit too fast.

“I take it that didn’t pan out,” I finally said.

“I just asked them if anybody from Bay Mills had come down to the clinic. I told them there were two men, and that one of them was my son. ‘He’s my son,’ I said. ‘I’m looking for my son.’ You think that would evoke a little empathy, right? But no. As soon as I walked up to the desk, that woman is already looking up at me like I’m some kind of criminal or something. I didn’t even get to finish explaining and she had already called security.”

“Are you serious?”

“A few more seconds, hell, I might have been arrested in there. Just because I was looking for my son.”

“You mentioned that part about them being from Bay Mills,” I said. “You said that before she called for the goons?”

“Why does it matter?”

“I’m just asking. Did you mention Bay Mills at the beginning of the conversation?”

“Yeah. I guess so.”

“Somebody got the word out,” I said. “You remember how antsy everybody got when you were asking about Vinnie yesterday? We might just get that same reaction on every other reservation in the state. If anybody comes snooping around, asking about two men from up north…”

“You might be right,” he said. “I should have had you come in after all.”

“Where are we going, anyway?”

He was driving back toward the center of town. But then as we were about to pass the entrance to the casino, he made a hard left.

“What are we doing here?” I said.

“You got any better ideas? This is where half the tribe is, probably. Somebody might know something. At the very least, we can put your theory to the test, see if every Indian in Michigan is really looking out for suspicious strangers. Besides, I could use a drink about now.”

We parked in a lot filled with at least a thousand other cars. It was the heart of the afternoon, on a gorgeous Michigan summer day, so what better place to spend it than inside a casino, pumping money into a slot machine? We took the long walk across the hot pavement and went inside, feeling the sudden icy chill of the air conditioning. Lou found the bar in twenty seconds and the bartender in twenty-one. He ordered a shot and a beer. I asked the man for a Coke.

“You’ve been driving all day,” I said. “When we go back outside, it’s my turn, okay?”

He looked at me over his shot and then he downed it in one swallow. The bartender filled him back up and he downed that one, too. The beer was apparently just for show.

“Hey, friend,” he said to the bartender. “How long you been working here?”

“Five years.” The man had the wide face of an Ojibwa, along with the calm eyes and the black hair.

“You ever been up to Bay Mills?”

“Nope.”

“You don’t know anybody from up there?”

“Don’t believe so.”

“I was born there myself. Haven’t been around for a while, but if I came down here looking for help, where would I go?”

“I don’t follow you, sir.”

“I’m just saying, if I was in trouble and I needed somebody to help me out. You know, patch me up and send me on my way?”

“I think I know what you mean,” he said, sliding right into an acting job so blatant it was like he was reading his lines off a cue card. “I’m gonna go get somebody to help you. Wait right here.”

He disappeared through a door at the far end of the bar. Lou took out a twenty-dollar bill, threw it onto the counter, and took off for the door. When I caught up to him in the parking lot, he was taking the keys out of his pocket. I grabbed them from his hand and got into the driver’s seat before he could say a word. He got in on the other side and told me to get going. A minute later we were out on the main road, heading back toward town. I couldn’t remember the last time I had driven a car instead of a truck. It felt strange to be so low to the road.

“You were right,” he said. “The word is out. Anybody looking for two men from Bay Mills is an automatic red flag.”

“I don’t know what we can do now. Next place we stop, we’re likely to be arrested.”

“You don’t carry an old badge or anything?”

We were back on Pickard, heading right back to the Five Guys. Presumably there was nowhere else to go but back to the freeway. And back home.

“I technically have a private-investigator license,” I said. “But I don’t use it.”

“Excuse me?”

“It doesn’t matter anyway. I don’t have it with me.”

“You never told me you were a private eye. We could have—”

“Look, it doesn’t matter. It wouldn’t have helped, believe me. It never does.”

“I don’t even understand what you’re saying. How can you not—”

I hit the brakes and nearly sent him through the windshield. There was a horn blaring right behind me and the screech of tries, and I suppose I almost did get us killed right there. But I didn’t even notice.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Lou said.

“Look there,” I said, pulling off the road. “We didn’t even notice it the first time we came by here.”

It was a low, squat building made of brick, not unlike a dozen other buildings all up and down the street. The thing that set this one apart was the statue of a dog out front. It was painted white with black spots, like a Dalmatian, and it was wearing sunglasses.

“I bet they take the glasses off that dog when it rains,” I said, “and put on a raincoat.”

He just looked at me like I had lost my mind.

“You still don’t know why I stopped.”

“No, I most certainly do not.”

“Read the sign.”

“Isabella County Animal Hospital.”

“Keep reading.”

“What, it’s just the names of the—”

He stopped.

“Ronald Carrick, DVM,” he said.

“You can practically smell the hamburgers from here,” I said, nodding toward the Five Guys. “Perfect place to stop after you leave this office. And if I’m not mistaken, there aren’t a whole hell of a lot of Carricks running around who don’t belong to Bay Mills.”

It was one of the family names that dominated the reservation, right up there with Parrish, Teeple, and LeBlanc.

“You realize,” Lou said, “this means Buck got fixed up by a vet instead of a doctor.”

“A vet
is
a doctor. What do you think the
D
in
DVM
stands for?”

We got out of the car and went inside. There was a diploma from Michigan State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine on the lobby wall. Next to that were some newspaper clippings, all to the effect that Ronald Carrick was one of only a handful of Ojibwa tribal members in the state with such a degree. We didn’t have to read any further. We knew we were in the right place.