The Hunting Wind: An Alex McKnight Mystery (30 page)

“Almost there,” he said. He took a hard right turn onto a side street. He didn’t hit the stop sign head-on, but the pole scraped the passenger’s side of his car with a loud metallic screech. I grabbed the dashboard and held on.

“Ouch,” he said. “That one hurt. There goes the police budget.”

“Chief, please,” I said. “Stop the car.”

“We’re here,” he said. “Home away from home.”

He pulled up to a small cottage, slamming on the brakes as he hit the mailbox. When I got out of the car, I saw the long scrape on the side of the car, and in the headlights, the mailbox post bent over at a forty-five-degree angle. Aside from that, no problems.

“Come on in,” he said, walking to the front door. I reached into the car and turned off the lights and the ignition, took the keys with me. I figured I’d just see him inside, make him lie down, and then leave. I could walk back to my truck.

“How do you like it?” he said as he turned on the light. It wasn’t much of a place, just one tiny living room with a patched-up couch and a coffee table. A small television sat on one of those metal caddies with the plastic wheels, the kind you used to see back in the sixties. There was a table for two in the dining room, with metal chairs covered in vinyl. Also from the sixties. He turned on the dining room light and pushed a pile of papers onto the floor. “Sit down,” he said.

I hesitated a moment, then sat. Humor the man, see this through, then get the hell out of this town and never come back.

He brought back a bottle of Wild Turkey and two glasses. “Set us up,” he said. “I’ll go get exhibit A.”

“I don’t think either of us needs any more to drink tonight,” I said.

“Just pour,” he said. He left the room, going into what had to be the bedroom. I just sat there in the cheap glare of the overhead light, waiting to see what he was talking about.

He came back into the room with a shotgun. Just what I needed to see at that point. Another shotgun.

“You know what this is?” he said, sitting in the chair across from me.

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t breathe.

“For God’s sake, McKnight, I’m not going to shoot you. Relax.”

He laid the gun on the table. It was pointed away from me. I tried to breathe again.

“I bet you don’t know what this is,” he said.

I shook my head.

“This is the gun Maria shot Wilkins with.”

I just looked at it.

“I bet you’re wondering why I have it.”

I nodded my head.

“After she shot him, she called me. It was about nine o’clock at night. I figured, This is it. This is the call. She wants me to go over there.”

“I thought I told you to pour us a drink,” he said. He took the bottle and poured himself three fingers, then poured the same for me and put it down in front of me. I didn’t touch it.

“She wanted me to come over all right,” he said. “Because she had just shot a man on her front porch, and she didn’t know what to do. I went over there and saw what had happened, told her to get in her car and get on over to Rocky’s place, quick. Act like nothing had happened. I took the gun, looked around outside a little, made sure nobody was around. Then I left. When I got back to the station, the phone was ringing, somebody calling in about the gunshot. I let Rocky go down first. Then I was right behind him, after I stopped in here to hide the gun.”

He drank half the glass and looked at me. “You ever do something that stupid?” he said.

“Chief, you made a mistake,” I said. “I can understand how it happened. Why don’t you put the glass down and go to bed.”

He shook his head. “It gets worse,” he said. “Once you do something stupid, you gotta do something else. And then something else. It kinda just builds on you, you know? Until you don’t have any control over it anymore.”

“What else did you do?”

“Oh, not that much,” he said. “Besides compromising a crime scene, hiding evidence . . . What else did I do?” He drained the rest of his glass, leaned forward to pour another. He missed the glass with some of it, dribbling whiskey onto the barrel of the shotgun.

“I almost killed you, for one thing,” he said. “When I dragged you in for no reason. Took the cuffs off you. I was thinking maybe I could shoot you right then, tell everybody you tried to jump me. Then you wouldn’t be trying to find out what’d happened to
Wilkins, and wouldn’t be . . .” He looked to his right, as if he could see all the way across town. “You wouldn’t be in that house. With Maria.”

“You didn’t do it,” I said. “It didn’t happen.”

“Rocky showed up,” he said. “If he hadn’t, I think I would have done it. I really do, McKnight. I would have killed you. That’s how far it’s gone. One mistake, then another. Until you don’t even recognize yourself anymore.”

“Chief . . .”

“You know what else?” he said. “Your man Wilkins there. The con artist. I’ve been talking to the doctor. I know they took that piece of buckshot out of him. He could wake up any minute, you know? I’m sitting here thinking, If he remembers what happened, all hell is gonna break loose. Maybe it would be better for everybody if he didn’t wake up. That county man who’s watching him, I’m thinking maybe I could go tell him to go home. I’ll watch him myself. Nobody’s looking, I’ll pull the plug on the respirator thing. I’m actually thinking this, McKnight. This is what I’ve come to.”

I sat there and listened to him. He was staring down at the gun.

“I know I’d kill that Harwood in a second,” he said. “That much, I’m sure of. I even told Maria that. I told her I’d kill Harwood for her, if that’s what it took. She didn’t believe me. She said she knew I’d never be able to do that.”

“Chief . . .”

“It gets even better,” he said. “There’s more to the story. I bet you’re wondering why I’m letting her lead me around by the dick this whole time. Aren’t you?
Doesn’t it seem a little strange to you that I’m doing all this?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Delilah.”

“What about her?”

“What about her?” he said. “You want to know what about her? Maria told me she was my daughter.”

I didn’t have anything to say to that one.

“She told me it wasn’t her husband. They’d been trying for years. It was me, she said. I’m Delilah’s father.”

“When did she tell you that?”

“When she showed up here in Orcus Beach,” he said. “Eighteen years later, she tells me I’m her father. That was all part of the package, McKnight. When everything settled down, it was gonna be me and Maria together for the rest of our lives. With a daughter to come visit us.”

I let out a long breath, then sneaked a look at my watch. It was almost three in the morning. My hand was throbbing. I needed more ice.

“I bought it,” he said. “I totally bought it.”

“You don’t think it’s true?”

“I wanted to know for sure,” he said. “I knew she was born down in Florida, after Maria ran away. I called the vital records office down there, asked them to help me find Delilah’s birth certificate. They found it in two minutes, read it to me right over the phone. You know how hard it is to get a birth certificate in Michigan, McKnight? Things are different down there, I guess. Anyway, it said the father was Arthur Zambelli, deceased, but that was no surprise. Who else was she gonna say? But it also had the hospital
where she was born, in Tampa. I called over there and got the medical records. This time, I had to tell them I was a police officer, but they didn’t even make me fax a letterhead or anything. They just gave me the information.”

“What did they tell you?”

“It said that baby Delilah’s blood type was B, and mommy Maria’s was O.”

“And yours is . . .”

“I’m an O,” he said. “An O and an O don’t make a B.”

“Okay, so she lied to you.”

“You know what else I did? Just for the hell of it?”

“What’s that?”

“I got the forensics report on Arthur Zambelli. From when he fell down that ditch and broke his neck. They did an autopsy. You wanna know what his blood type was?”

“Go ahead.”

“He was an A,” he said. “An O and an A don’t make a B, either.”

“Okay,” I said. “So what? What does it matter?”

“I think I know who Delilah’s real father is,” he said.

“Who?”

He just looked at me. He didn’t say anything.

“No,” I said. “No way.”

“They were together,” he said. “All that time when she was married to Zambelli. I know it.”

“You gotta be kidding me.”

“They’ve always had this sick thing between them,” he said. “I can see it now. I can see the whole—”

“For God’s sake,” I said.

“The whole sick thing,” he said.

He looked at his drink. He put it down, picked up the shotgun with one hand. With the other, he fumbled around in his shirt pockets, finally pulled out a piece of paper folded in half. “You want to know what I was seriously thinking about doing this afternoon?” he said. “Here, read this.”

I took it from him and unfolded it. It was a piece of official Orcus Beach stationery, with the little cannon insignia on the top. It read, “For Maria, and everything I wanted to believe.” That was it.

When I looked up, he had the shotgun barrel in his mouth. I dove over the table and knocked the gun away from him. He grabbed at it. For one horrifying instant, it was pointed right at my face. I knocked it away again, flipping the table right over into his lap. He fell backward in his chair, with the table and me and the gun all flying in different directions. Somehow, the gun landed without firing, without blowing either of us into pieces. He lay there on his back, his knees up in the air over the edge of his chair. I crawled over to him and looked at his face.

“Was that necessary, McKnight?” he said. “I was just seeing if I could reach the trigger. In case I work up the nerve someday.”

“Why are you doing this to me, Chief? Why did you bring me here?”

“Are you Catholic?”

“No,” I said. “I’m not Catholic.”

“So you’ve never been to confession.”

“No.”

“Father, forgive me for I have sinned,” he said. “It has been forty-five years since my last confession.”

“I’m leaving,” I said. “You need to sleep this one off.”

“I thought you’d understand, McKnight. I thought you’d be the one person in the world who I could tell this to. To whom, I mean. To whom I could tell. All of it.”

I got to my feet, turned the table back upright. I was going to leave the gun lying there in the corner, then thought better of it. I broke the gun open and put the shells in my pocket. Then I put the gun, still breached, on the table. I put his car keys next to the gun. I picked up the suicide note and put that next to the gun, too.

“McKnight,” he said. He was still on his back. His eyes were still closed.

“Good night, Chief,” I said.

“Give me the phone,” he said.

“Good night.”

“I want to call her,” he said. “Give me the phone. I want to call Maria.”

“Don’t call her,” I said. “Go to bed.”

“I’ll get it myself,” he said, not moving. “I’m going to call her. I’m going to wake her up and tell her that I know. She’s not my daughter.”

“Good night, Chief.”

“Don’t go,” he said. “You can’t go. You have to be my witness. I want somebody else to hear this.”

“Good night, Chief.”

“You can’t go,” he said. “You’re under arrest. I order you to stay here and be my witness.”

“Good night, Chief,” I said. And then I left. I walked out into the cold air, past the chief’s car and the leaning mailbox. I walked back down to the main road, all the way back to Rocky’s place. It still looked open, even after three o’clock in the morning.

This is what you do in Orcus Beach, it would seem. You sit around and you drink, and you think about all the mistakes you’ve made.

I fired up the truck and got myself out of there. At the edge of town, I saw the sign in the rearview mirror,
WELCOME TO ORCUS BEACH
, the letters backward, and under that the cannon in the sand.

I rolled down my window and threw out the two shotgun shells. And then I just kept driving.

A sound woke me up. A bird chirping at me, then stopping, then chirping again. No, it was a phone. I picked my head up. I was still in my clothes, lying on the motel bed in Whitehall. I hadn’t even turned down the covers, just walked in at 4:30 in the morning and fell over. My right hand was still swollen, a little reminder just in case I thought it was all a bad dream.

What time was it now? I couldn’t see the clock, but there was daylight in the room, brighter than anything I’d ever seen.

The phone rang again. I pulled myself up. I picked up the phone. Dial tone.

I lay back down and stared at the ceiling. The phone rang again. It wasn’t the motel phone. It was my cell phone. Which was impossible, because it was out in the truck.

The phone rang again. Okay, it wasn’t my cell phone. My phone doesn’t sound like that. My phone isn’t nearly as annoying.

Whitley’s phone. It was still in my coat pocket, and apparently still on. I got up and grabbed my coat, took the phone out of the pocket. It rang one more time before I could answer it.

“Who is this?” I said.

“Is that you, McKnight?” I knew the voice.

“What is it, Harwood? Why are you calling me?”

“You stole Whitley’s phone,” he said. “Not to mention his car. He’s not happy.”

“And yet somehow I’m not overcome with guilt,” I said. “Is that all you wanted to say?”

“Sounds like you had quite a night,” he said. “I mean, unless she was exaggerating.”

“Good-bye,” I said.

“Why did you ask me about Randy Wilkins?”

“I thought you said you didn’t know him.”

“He was the pitcher, right? For the Tigers. The guy who got destroyed in his only game. I was at that game. Did you know that?”

“You don’t say.”

“His father was a real estate developer out in California. We were going to do some kinda deal, but it fell through. I guess that’s why I went to the game. His father couldn’t make it, so I said I’d go. Man, did he get shelled, though. What did he give up, like eight runs in the first inning?”

“Harwood, that’s the only contact you ever had with him? Just going to his game?” I didn’t know what to make of this. It was too much of a coincidence.