The Morgue and Me (13 page)

Black Bear was a Native American casino a few hours south of Petoskey. Dana was putting more of her weight on me as she talked—if anybody saw this, they were going to get the wrong idea.

“That’s why she’s kicking him out,” Dana continued.

“Because he hit on you?”

“No, because he’s a degenerate gambler and never comes to work.”

“Right,” I said, nonchalant, furiously taking mental notes. It couldn’t hurt to have some dirt on Lovell, the object of Tina’s misplaced affection. “So she’s making him leave the firm.”

“Basically.” Dana’s eyes fell closed as she nodded. “Newell, are we done with this yet?”

“Yeah, let’s go,” I said, pretty sure I wasn’t going to get any more details.

Dana grabbed fast to the banister and led the way to a hot basement full mostly of guys who’d already graduated from Petoskey High. Dana had always hung out with people in classes ahead of her. Almost always male. It was a key part of her allure, I think.

I expected Mike to be holding court, but he was shrunken in the corner with some burnouts I barely remembered. His eyes tracked Dana as she floated ahead to group of freakishly tall dudes in paper-thin T-shirts that put their biceps on strategic display. I think they’d been football players, or maybe Nordic gods. Dana nuzzled next to one of them like she’d done with me in the kitchen. He was getting the enhanced version. Without missing a beat, the guy slung his arm around her waist. I understood the lost look in Mike’s eye: it must have been like this all night.

Before I could get over to him, I caught a glimpse of Julia through the crowd. She was leaning against the wall, listening to some babble from a stray Nordic god/football player with a peeling suntan. Julia had a beer in her hand that the guy must have given her, and that she probably hadn’t touched. Her nail polish was gone and her hair was down—she looked sort of stunning in an effortless, hippie-child kind of way. The guy was working overtime to entertain her. I almost felt sorry for him.

He rambled on, oblivious when Julia’s eyes met mine and held for a moment—both of us checking, I think, to see how things were sitting after last night. Something hopeful spoke from Julia’s look. I’d been trying to protect myself in the morgue, but now I found myself wanting to talk again, to pick up the jokes, to go with the magnetic pull coming from her spot against the wall. I did a tiny nod toward the man-god standing next to her and rolled my eyes just a hair. The barest smile twitched on Julia’s face.

Before anything else could happen, a hand descended on my shoulder. “Took you long enough,” Mike said.

“Yeah, sorry.”

“We’re out of here. Like, ten minutes ago.”

T
wenty minutes later, Mike and I pulled into the Hideaway’s dirt parking lot. Mike parked his Porsche between a red Ford Ranger and a blue Ford Ranger.

Time didn’t seem to move in the Hideaway. Mike ordered us two Buds again and the same bartender brought them to us. The Red Wings pennants still hung from the beams, the same smell of chicken wings and carpet mold suffused the air. Maybe it wasn’t the best atmosphere, but I was glad he’d stolen me away from the party. Strange thoughts about Julia had started congealing in my mind back there—like maybe it could happen this time, maybe she’d like me enough. I’d been on the verge of a colossal mistake, and Mike had saved me without even knowing it.

“So who was he, anyway?” I said, knowing Mike would be incapable of talking about anything but Dana.

“Some guy from the pool,” he said.

Dana worked at the public swimming pool, which none of the tourists knew about and which was actually pretty nice. Mike and I had gone there just about every day two years ago, when he and Dana were a more definite thing. My mom took Daniel swimming there once a week.

“Have you ever seen them together there?” I said.

“I haven’t gone there since we used to.” He shook his head in deep dismay. “They’ve probably been at it all summer.”

Maybe it was true, but I couldn’t say I cared. Dana fed off drama like cupcakes. In eighth grade a rumor had started about her and the twenty-five-year-old swim coach, this guy who played in a band and had good hair that the girls could never stop talking about. The rumor swept through the school like wildfire. When Dana didn’t exactly deny it, the details grew into a richly embroidered legend. (Supposedly it happened backstage at one of his shows, with body shots of tequila, a canister of whipped cream, and other stuff I forget.)

Finally the principal brought the coach in to question him, and there was talk that he’d be fired—that’s when Dana cracked and admitted she’d started the rumor herself. She’d made the whole thing up, just to put a spotlight on herself.

It made me think: maybe Lawrence Lovell hadn’t hit on her after all. It could have been just another one of her stories, something that made her seem interesting and wanted. Maybe Lovell wasn’t even a gambler, and Kate Warne wanted him out of the firm for some other reason entirely, one that involved Mitch Blaylock. Maybe she was protecting her brother, the sheriff.

Dana had probably invited the pool guy to the party just to start a fight between him and Mike—a spectacle for people to talk about for the rest of the summer, with her at the center. Whatever. I was glad I didn’t have to worry about it; I was glad I didn’t have to worry about Julia.

I waited out Mike’s doldrums awhile, then dragged him over to the dartboard. His game was off, but the competition brought him out of his dark hole. Eventually he put an old White Stripes song on the jukebox and took an interest in the Tigers game playing on the bar TV. After the Tigers shut down the White Sox in the ninth, Mike checked his betting slips and came up beaming. “I just made three hundred bucks.”

“Cheers,” I said, glad to have him back again.

Mike waved for the bill. “I got it, bro,” he said, watching his hand peel bills from his money clip like he was a third party to the action. He flicked some jagged tens onto the bar. It was too much money, but Mike didn’t care—his dramatic streak was coming out.

Before we walked out the door, he stopped me. A firm hand on my shoulder, just like he’d done at the party.

“Swear to God, I’m done with her forever,” Mike said. “You don’t know what I’ve been through with that.”

“No, I probably don’t. But glad to hear it anyway.” I clapped him on the back and we pushed out into the starry night air, leaving chicken wings and carpet mold and problematic girls behind.

Mike burped on the way to the Porsche. I stuffed him into the passenger’s seat and walked to the driver’s side.

That’s when I sensed a presence at my back. It had beer breath.

Someone pushed me in the back. My chest crashed against the car. He kicked my legs—they swung out from underneath me, and my chin struck the top of the car on my way down. My neck snapped back as my teeth sunk into my tongue. Fluid shot through my mouth like right before you puke.

A trickle of blood slid down my throat. The man who grabbed me had black hair fanning out from underneath a Tigers cap. When he spoke, I saw his chipped tooth.

“Hello,” Snaggletooth Shales taunted.

He flattened me against his pickup and scraped for something on the flatbed. He came up with it quick, and I saw a brief flash of crowbar just before a metal sting lanced the base of my neck. My skull rang like a tuning fork.

In the brief second before I passed out, I sensed my body toppling and my right cheek thudding into pebbles and dirt. I caught a sideways view of Snaggletooth’s weathered Adidas shoes.

 

 

I woke up in a recliner. I might have been out for three days, I didn’t know. My tongue felt roughly the size of the Goodyear blimp and I couldn’t move my limbs.

A waifish woman was balled up on a couch across the narrow room. Lines of shadow and light sliced her body. Her face fell into the light as she scooted away from me. Abby Shales.

I tried to bring my hands out from behind me, but my shoulders strained uselessly under the pressure. The sting of rope bit into my wrists.

“I’m tied up.” It probably wasn’t news to her, but I was just getting back to reality. My tongue was getting in the way of everything. “What’s going on?”

Abby didn’t reply. Snaggletooth had tied my feet, too; I wasn’t going anywhere. The room had fake wood paneling and poles running down the middle. Drains spotted the linoleum floor. We were in somebody’s basement, and my expert powers of deduction told me it was the Shaleses’.

Abby walked to a doorway.

“You need to let me go,” I said.

She hesitated at the door, biting her lip. I think she wanted to help me.

It hit me then that this was really happening—I was in a basement, tied up, in some kind of serious danger.

“Just let me go.
Please.
”

But she didn’t. She opened the door, revealing a flight of stairs, and shut it firmly behind her. The stairs creaked on her way up. I could barely turn my head to look around the room. Small windows up to the street. Seven steps to the door. A case of motor oil in the corner. I focused on details so I wouldn’t hyperventilate. Maybe some of them would come in handy, like in a
Die Hard
movie. A minute later, the stairs creaked again and Abby reappeared, fear still written on her face. She put her back to the door.

“Listen, don’t—”

The door jiggled and threw her aside. Snaggletooth walked in with a beer in one hand and a crowbar in the other. The crowbar that had knocked me out. He wore the same flannel shirt and Tigers cap he’d had on in the Hideaway parking lot. I hadn’t been out that long after all.

“What do you want?” I said. Stand up to the bullies—that’s what they used to tell us.

He laughed and tapped the end of the crowbar against my shoulder. It was still tender from breaking my fall in the parking lot. He leaned into my ear and spoke with stale, revolting breath. “I think you know.”

“I really don’t.”

He jammed the bar into my shoulder. “You’re scaring my wife, man.”

He stepped back and threw his empty bottle at my face. I ducked, and it burst apart on the concrete wall. He pointed to Abby. “She ain’t done nothing! She’s a nervous wreck!”

“I swear I don’t know what you’re talking about.” A sudden sweat chilled my back. I tried to piece it together as fast as I could. Somebody was harassing her, but I had no idea who or why Snaggletooth thought it was me.

The crowbar made a cold line under my Adam’s apple. I swallowed saliva traced with blood. He pressed the bar harder into my neck, sending off starbursts behind my eyelids.

“She doesn’t have anything. She doesn’t know anything.”

“Swear to God,” I said before the sting in my throat got to be too much. My Adam’s apple bobbed painfully with each word. “I don’t know anything.”

He was keeping the bar at my neck, making my eyes tear with pain and panic, when something clicked.
The silver car that followed me—could it have been tailing Abby, too?

“Wade . . .” It was Abby’s voice, small and scared like her face. He released the bar. I sucked air.

“Shut up. Get out of here.”

“Wade, no.”

He wasn’t having any of it—he took a backswing, focused on my knees. I shut my eyes, ready for the worst, when Mike’s voice broke across the room.

“Don’t.”

Something made Snaggletooth drop the crowbar. It clanged to the floor, horribly loud in the confined basement.

Mike was drawing slowly toward Snaggletooth. I saw him but I couldn’t really believe it—he was carrying a silver gun, pointed right at Snaggletooth’s chest. White light gleamed off the barrel. Mike took a split second to check me over.

“Okay, bro?”

“Yeah.” I was still seconds behind everything, catching up from the shock of it all.

Mike motioned Snaggletooth into a corner with the gun.

“Easy, son,” Snaggletooth said. He put his hands halfway in the air and retreated backward. Mike advanced, keeping a body length between himself and Snaggletooth, whose face had gone oily with sweat. He looked feebly to his wife as he passed her on his way to the corner.

“You, too,” Mike said to Abby.

He shifted the gun to her for a brief second, getting her to comply.

The instant he did, Snaggletooth lunged.

Mike saw it. He swiveled, swinging his arm with his body like a backhand, and cracked Snaggletooth across the head with the gun barrel.

He fell to the floor like a sack. Silence rang through the basement.

“Oh, God,” Mike said.

He swallowed hard and took a dazed step back from the body. I was across the room, but I knew why Mike had gone white. There was something instant and final about the way the guy’s body had caved. Mike had caught him too perfectly.

“You couldn’t have—” I cut myself off. I didn’t know anything.