Highway 61 (12 page)

“For two?”

“Yep.”

Dammit,
my inner voice said.
The sonuvabitch did lie to you. God! If you had known that this morning, think of all the trouble you could have saved yourself. Your poor Audi!

“I don’t know what to say,” I said.

“Say, ‘Thank you, Detective Constable Wojtowick, for your generosity and high degree of professionalism.’”

“Thank you, Detective Constable Wojtowick, for your generosity and high degree of professionalism.”

“Think nothing of it. Don’t forget, McKenzie, if you find the girl, I want to know about it.”

“I promise.”

EIGHT

“I lied,” I said.

“To who?” Nina asked. “Bobby?”

“I lied to him without even thinking about it, not a moment’s hesitation. I just did it. He knew I was lying, too. That’s why he was so angry.”

“Why should he be different from the rest of us?”

After taking a cab home, I changed clothes. Both my shirt and sports coat were lost causes, stained with so much blood I just balled them up and tossed them in the trash. Some of the cuts started bleeding again when I washed up, and it took me a few minutes to get them back under control. Even so, my face made me look like I had been mugged by a pack of angry cats. Nina noticed it the moment I knocked on her front door. Most people would have asked what happened. She said, “What now?” I told her. She was not amused. Now she was pacing in front of the chair in her living room where I was sitting. I asked her to stop. She ignored me.

“I withheld evidence that I knew to be pertinent to his investigation,” I said. “I never did that before.”

“About Jason?”

“Yes.”

“You were protecting Jason.”

“No. Hell, no.”

“Rickie, then.”

“My father never in his life did a thing that embarrassed me, that made me think less of him—as far as I know. I don’t want to know.”

“And you don’t want Rickie to know. You were protecting Rickie from the truth about her father.”

“Hell, Nina, I don’t even know what the truth is. Maybe your ex-husband is just a dupe. Maybe—ahh. Sometimes I feel like Yul Brynner in
The King and I
. I’m no longer positive of the things I know for sure. Maybe if someone else had been involved I would have come clean. If it wasn’t just me, if it wasn’t just my car…”

“Isn’t that enough? They nearly killed you. They destroyed your Audi.”

“I figure that’s just the price you pay for doing the things I do.”

“It seems like an awful lot of risk for so little.” Nina took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Sometimes, McKenzie, I just want to slap your face.”

“Please don’t. I’ve already lost too much blood.”

She stopped pacing and looked down at me. Somewhere inside her head a switch was turned. The expression on her face turned from anger to something else.

“Oh, hell,” she said.

“What?”

Nina sat on my lap, her legs hanging over the arm of the chair. She wrapped one arm around my shoulder, her hand resting on the nape of my neck.

“If I kiss you, will you start bleeding again?” she asked.

“I suppose you could give it a try. Think of it as a science experiment.”

Nina leaned in and kissed me on the side of the mouth and then moved her lips to my cheek. She leaned back.

“Nope, no blood,” she said.

“Call that a kiss?”

“Are you suggesting my kisses aren’t what they should be?”

“I’m just saying the results of your experiment would have greater validity if you were more aggressive in your research.”

“Oh, the things I do for science.”

She kissed me again, kissed me to the depths of my soul. I sat there and took it, my eyes closed—it was like receiving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Suddenly the gloom that had fallen over me since the assassination attempt was lifted. I felt alive again. It seemed hardly possible that this same woman had just spent the better part of a half hour berating me for taking unnecessary risks, for dancing with danger—she actually used those words, “dancing with danger.” I told her she made it sound like one of those silly made-for-TV movies on the Lifetime Channel. That made her even angrier. The kiss, however, suggested that she might be willing to forgive me my many trespasses if only I could resist saying something dumb—“A man has to do what a man has to do” came to mind. I had used that line on her earlier. I was joking at the time; I said that you could tell I was joking because I was smiling. I was never one of those guys, I insisted. Nina rolled her eyes and said, “McKenzie, you’ve always been one of those guys.” I argued that, while I wasn’t completely immune to all that macho bullshit, I usually had a good reason for what I did. The remark only antagonized her, causing her to harangue me even further. So now I just sat there and kept my big mouth shut and let her kiss me.

When she finished, she rested her head against my chest, and I gently stroked her hair.

“How does that Chinese curse go, the one you like to quote?” she asked.

“May you live in interesting times,” I said.

“You’re the most interesting man I know. I think that might be a curse, too.”

“Yeah, but which of us is cursed? Me, or you for knowing me?”

“Both.”

We kissed again. At just about the time the kissing was starting to lead to someplace more interesting, the front door opened and Erica stepped across the threshold, keys in one hand and a backpack in the other. The backpack made a heavy thud on the floor when she dropped it.

“Would you kids like some iced tea?” she asked.

Nina quickly scrambled off of my lap. She tried hard to mask her amusement from her daughter, only her eyes gave her away. I stood next to the chair, pretending the chair wasn’t there and I had never been sitting in it.

“Iced tea?” I repeated.

“A couple weeks ago my mother caught me in a similar position with a boy.” The expression on Erica’s face suggested that she had yet to forgive her. “She asked us if we wanted iced tea and then insisted we come to the kitchen to drink it.”

“I was only being polite to your guest,” Nina said.

“Sure you were.”

Erica and Nina glared at each other until they both felt a smile coming on, and then each turned away so the other wouldn’t see it.

“I am so leaving home to go to college,” Erica said.

“Good. I’ll turn your bedroom into a sewing room,” Nina said.

“I can see it now. You in a rocking chair with a comforter around your legs, crocheting while you watch
I Love the 80s
retrospectives on VH1, a cat sitting on your lap. We’ll call him Snookums. ‘Would Snookums like some iced tea?’ McKenzie, what happened to your face?”

“I was cut a little bit,” I said. “Nothing too bad. You won’t even notice tomorrow.”

Nina wouldn’t let it go at that, though. Her expression changed from amusement to anger.

“Someone tried to shoot him,” she said.

“Oh, no,” Erica said.

“They missed McKenzie, but they wrecked his car.”

“Oh, no. The Audi? They wrecked the Audi. They almost, they almost—it’s all my fault, isn’t it? It’s my fault.”

“It’s not your fault,” I said. “It had nothing to do with you.”

“If I hadn’t asked you—”

“If you hadn’t asked him to get involved in your father’s problems,” Nina said.

“I’m not sure it had anything to do with your father,” I said.

“If I hadn’t,” Erica said.

“If you hadn’t,” Nina said.

“Stop it, now,” I said.

“I am so sorry, McKenzie,” Erica said.

“Erica, there’s no need for that,” I said.

“I am so sorry.”

“You should be,” Nina said.

“I’m sorry.”

“Nina, stop it,” I said.

She turned toward me. The look in her eyes made me take a step backward.

“I need to think,” Erica said.

She picked up her backpack and slowly carried it up the stairs. She was high enough on the stairs that I could only see her lower legs when she stopped.

“I’m sorry, McKenzie,” she said.

“There’s nothing to be sorry about,” I said. I was looking directly into her mother’s eyes when I spoke. “This is me, remember? This sort of thing happens all the time.”

Erica disappeared upstairs. Nina stepped closer to me.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she asked. Her voice was low and sharp.

“Don’t you blame her for what happened,” I said.

“She’s my daughter.”

“I don’t care. If you want to blame Jason, I’ll be the first to pile on, but don’t you blame her.”

“If she hadn’t asked for your help, none of this would have happened.”

“If she wasn’t your daughter, I would have said no.”

“So it’s my fault?”

“Why are you so angry?”

“I always get angry when people shoot at you.”

“I’d think you’d be used to it by now.”

“Dammit. Dammit, dammit, dammit, McKenzie. Don’t you make a joke out of this.”

“Nina, aren’t you the girl I was making out with five minutes ago? What happened?”

“I was angry when I was kissing you.”

I raised my hand as if I were attempting to stop traffic.

“Wait,” I said. “Give me a minute to think that through.”

“Shut up, McKenzie.”

Erica called to us from the top of the stairs. “McKenzie,” she said. She waited a few beats before descending the staircase. I figured she paused because she thought Nina and I might be making out again and she didn’t want to embarrass us a second time. I liked this girl.

“McKenzie,” she said. She was carrying a laptop. “Did I ever show you my fencing photos?”

“No,” I said.

“Now’s not the time,” Nina said.

“I thought McKenzie should see them,” Nina said. “Would you like to see them, McKenzie?”

Should—she said should,
my inner voice told me.

“Yes,” I said.

She set the machine on a coffee table. I sat on the sofa next to her. Erica had already opened a file and was now riffling through the electronic images. I watched them appear and disappear on the large screen, not at all sure what I was looking for. Nina stood in front of the coffee table, her arms crossed over her chest. She seemed as confused as I was.

“These were taken at the St. Paul Academy Invitational last year,” Erica said.

She paused at a shot of a large gymnasium floor filled with white-clad swordsmen dueling across gray strips measuring about fifteen meters long and one and a half meters wide. An electrical cord ran from the hilt of each sword to a plug attached to the fencer’s white jacket. From there the cords extended to a reel attached to the floor that gave out and took in slack depending on the movement of the swordsman, then from the reel to an electronic box on the scorer’s table that kept track of the competitor’s touches.

“Mother,” Nina said, “may we have some iced tea?”

Nina hesitated for a moment.

“Sure,” she said.

When her mother disappeared into the kitchen, Erica brought up the next shot. It showed both her and another young woman sitting on folding chairs and mugging for the camera. They were wearing white knickers and white jackets that closed around the throat. Erica’s companion looked like she was about fourteen. She had bright brown eyes and hair the color of roses and wheat that was tied in a ponytail with a red ribbon. Erica was pretending to pull the ponytail. It was the girl’s hair that set the alarm bells ringing.

After a few moments, Erica went to the next photo.

“Go back,” I said.

She did.

I studied the young woman some more.

“Who is this?” I asked.

“Her name is Vicki Walsh,” Erica said. “She went to Johnson.”

“Johnson Senior High School? She looks too young.”

“She’s a year older than I am. This was taken last January.”

“How do you know her?”

“From fencing. There’s only about a dozen girls in the entire state who are any good at épée; that’s the sword I use. We see each other at all the tournaments, and most of us are friendly. We’re not friendly on the strip, no way. Before and after, though—it’s like we’re members of the same exclusive club, you know?”

“Tell me about the girl.”

“The others and I teased Vicki because she looked so young, and she would tease us back, saying how sad it was that we were already past our prime, that we already looked like old women. She was smart. You talk to someone and you know right away if they’ve ever read a book before. I guess she wasn’t all that good in school, though; didn’t have the grades like I do. Vicki said something about missing a lot of time when she was fifteen and that she never really caught up—I guess she was sick or something. She never said. On the other hand, Vicki said that she had been accepted by Cornell University. You don’t get into Cornell with just good looks. She had a lot of personality, always smiling. Even when she lost, when I beat her for the trophy at SPA, she smiled. I liked her a lot.”

Erica turned in her seat so she could look me straight in the eye.

“So did my father,” she said.

From the sound of her voice, I guessed it took a lot for her to tell me that. It took a lot more for me to keep from wrapping my arm around her shoulder and hugging her to my chest, but Erica wasn’t looking for comfort.

“Your father knew Vicki Walsh?” I asked.

“He came to the tournaments. He would joke around with my friends, with the other girls.”

“He joked around with Vicki?”

“Yes.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“It’s because of Vicki that my father is in trouble, isn’t it?”

“What makes you say so?”

“The last time I saw Vicki was at the University of Minnesota in late June. We were working out with the college guys. They let us do that. Fencing is a big club, like I said. Anyway, she seemed kind of tense during practice; what’s the word—preoccupied. That wasn’t like her. I thought she was in trouble.”

“Pregnant?”

“Why do people do that? If a girl seems depressed, the first thing they think is that she’s pregnant?”

“It happens even in the best families.”

“No, not pregnant—but something. Anyway, she asked if I had plans for the Fourth of July. I said a bunch of us were going down to Harriet Island for Taste of Minnesota, listen to some free music and watch the fireworks. I said she should come with us. She said she couldn’t because she was going up to Canada. I said where in Canada, thinking it might be Toronto, which is like my favorite city in the whole world. I know a great French restaurant in Toronto. Only she said she was going to Thunder Bay.”