Gun Lake (31 page)

She kept asking him if he was doing okay. And he would tell her when he wanted another. He didn’t want to tell her the truth. He couldn’t tell her the truth.

“You’re not in your uniform today,” Pete said as he came up beside Don at the bar and tapped him on the shoulder.

Pete was a lean, short guy with curly hair and olive skin. He had opened the Joint about five years ago. He lived on the lake by himself, occasionally visited by his kids from his first marriage. Rumor had it that Pete and Kay were an item. Don figured, why not? Lately he had been wondering if that’s what would happen to him. He’d move into a place by himself and see the boys occasionally, occasionally be a father.

“I’m taking some time off,” Don told Pete.

“Good for you. Someone else can deal with all the troublemakers out there.”

Pete walked off as Don finished his drink. Norah came over to get the tumbler. The only other customers were a group of four men in their thirties still drinking pitchers and watching sports scores on the corner television and a younger fella who sat several seats down from him at the bar, drinking a Lite.

“Want another one?” Norah asked Don.

“I think I might. I’m not working tomorrow, you know.”

She nodded and didn’t react, just filled up the glass again. The drink was six bucks, but he gave her a ten and told her to keep it. She thanked him and went over to the cash register.

This wasn’t bad. He wasn’t hurting anybody, and he was fine. He felt
fine
. He wasn’t blasted or bombed, and he’d be leaving soon enough, and tomorrow morning he could sleep things off. And then he could get busy putting his life back together, work on getting Collette back.

“Excuse me?”

Don watched the skinny young guy sit down on the bar stool next to him. He nodded at the scruffy guy.

“Mind me sitting here?” he asked Don.

Don shook his head. He didn’t.

“Not too busy tonight, huh?” the guy asked him.

“Nah. A little unusual too. It’s usually pretty busy on Saturday nights.”

Don looked at the guy and noticed that one of his eyes was
bruised badly. He hadn’t shaved for a while and had the spotted start of a light-colored beard growing.

“How’d you get that?” Don asked.

“Long story.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“I tried to keep a guy—a friend—from driving drunk. He was pretty determined to get behind the wheel.”

Don nodded, admiring the guy’s determination. “So who won?”

“I got the keys away from him.”

“Live around here?” Don asked.

“No. I’m from Chicago. You?”

Don nodded, took a sip of Jack Daniels, heard the jukebox begin to play something he didn’t recognize, and felt a wave wash over him. It gave him goose bumps. He could finally feel the difference between Jack Daniels and beer.

“Somebody said you were a cop?”

“I’m a deputy for Barry County.”

“On a little vacation?”

Don nodded, took another sip, felt another wave breeze over him.

“That’s kinda nice, you know. You don’t have to go anywhere else. You just vacation around here.”

“Sometimes,” Don said.

For the next twenty minutes, the two men talked, the younger guy doing more of the talking. His name was Mike, and he was visiting some cousins who had a place in the area. After a while, Mike bought Don a couple of drinks, and when Norah gave them last call, Mike got them shots to do. Tequila shots. Awful-tasting tequila shots, two each. But Don was game. When was the last time someone had bought a shot for him? So he downed them both and finished drinking his Jack.

He was feeling it.

He wasn’t sure he’d be able to even walk.

When Pete began to turn off the lights—Norah ready to leave, with the bar clean—Don stood up.

The whole world spun, but not in a bad way. This felt good,
in fact. He sorta liked this uneasiness, this lack of control. Sometimes he liked trying to battle it, trying to overcome it.

The two men walked outside. The night air felt better and woke him up a little. He would be sleeping good tonight, no doubt about it. But right now he didn’t want to go to sleep. He wanted to go somewhere else.

“I always say this place closes too early,” Don said, adding a few curse words to accentuate his thought.

“You game to go somewhere else?”

Don came up with another curse and said he was.

“You’re the law around here, right?” Mike asked him.

He nodded, lit up a cigarette, leaned against his car.

“So you might know a good place a couple of guys like us can go and have some beer? Without causing trouble, of course.”

Don thought of his home but overruled himself. What if Collette came home? And even if she didn’t, he didn’t know this guy. It wasn’t a matter of trust. It was just a matter of privacy. He had already told this guy way too much—about Collette leaving him, about missing the boys, about taking some time off. Things like that. About how boring life could be around Gun Lake. Telling him stuff like that was one thing, but having him come over?

Instead, Don thought of another place.

“Why don’t you let me drive there?” Mike asked.

“You okay to drive?”

“I’m a lot better than you are.”

“I reckon that’s true. You got beer?”

The kid had a cooler in his trunk. Ice cold, waiting just for this moment.

What’s he doing with beer in his trunk?

It didn’t matter. Tonight Don had hit a jackpot. Tonight would be like some of those long, memorable college nights.

There was a road marked “Private Property” that wove through woods down to the lake. It ended near a dilapidated house that had been abandoned for years. The owners had gotten divorced and were fighting over the property, and in the meantime, the house was going to pot.

Everybody gets divorced these days, so I’m no different
.

They took the cooler out with them and walked out on the dock that jutted out over the lake. No boat floated alongside it. For a while, they both stood while they drank the beer. Then Don needed to sit down.

After about an hour, with Don’s head spinning and thoughts rushing through his mind, his body tired and his sobriety long since trampled, Don was caught off guard by Mike’s question.

“Want to get a promotion?”

Don laughed a little too hard at Mike’s comment.

“Son, at this point in my career, the only logical next step is retirement.”

“Whaddya mean? How old are you?”

“Age don’t matter.”

“How old?”

“I’m forty-three.”

“Come on. That’s the prime of life.”

“Not my life.”

“But what if I told you something that would guarantee—I mean
guarantee
—a pay raise? That would make you a local hero? What would you say to that?”

“I’d say you’re dreamin’.”

“What was it you were telling me—that nothing exciting happens around here?”

“Nothing does. Occasional boat accident. Or drunk driver. Or domestic case. Nothing.”

“So what would you do if you knew something big was going down around here? Something huge?”

Don sipped his can of Coors. “I don’t know. Call it in, I guess.”

“No. You see, that’s the wrong thinking.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re on vacation.”

“You’re talking right now? If something happened this very instant?”

“If you knew about something,” Mike said.

Don felt the woozy clouds pull aside just a little as he began to get a sense of what Mike was getting at. “What is it? What do you know?”

“Well, you know how sometimes you stumble upon information and wonder what to do with it?”

“Whatcha got? Come on, spit it out.”

“There’s reward money involved too.”

Don looked at the guy. Under the moonlight, he could make out the outline of his face, the narrow eyes, the wry grin.

“For what? For who?”

“You ever hear of the Stagworth Five?”

For a moment the name meant nothing. But then it registered. Somewhere down South—escaped convicts who had ended up on the West Coast.

“Yeah, I heard of them.”

For a moment he wondered if they’d been caught. Then he thought back on Mike’s words and studied him again. “So what are you saying?”

“I’m saying that I think—I
think
—that these guys might be up here on the lake.”

“What makes you think that?”

“I’m friends with a guy who—it’s a long story. Anyway, my roommate knows a guy from Chicago who suddenly disappeared. He says something went down. He says the guys came to Chicago and got this guy and they disappeared. They said something about Gun Lake.”

“A guy who knows someone who said something …” Don shook his head and cursed.

“No, come on. I’m not giving you everything I know.”

“Have you seen them?”

Mike shook his head. “But I’ve been looking. And here’s the thing. There’s a four-hundred-thousand-dollar reward for their capture.”

“Half a million?” Don asked.

Mike nodded. “With that sort of money, you could retire, you know?
I
could retire.”

“So that’s why you came up here? To find the Stagworth Five?”

“My source was pretty good. I’m telling you, I think they’re up here.”

“Normally that sort of info goes through channels. There are ways—”

Mike grabbed him by the shoulder. “No, man. Listen to me. You want this place to notice you? You want to get your wife back? This could be huge.”

“And you don’t want credit?”

“I just want cash. I don’t need to be a hero. You get to be the hero if you help me find them. And we split the money.”

Don opened another can of beer. He laughed and looked out over the lake. “This is crazy.”

“I know. But just think. There might be five guys out there right now, hiding out, thinking the rest of the world doesn’t know they’re here. But you and I know. And we’re going to find them.”

“Well, cheers to that,” Don said, his mind numb and questioning whether he’d even remember this conversation tomorrow.

But tomorrow was already here.

KURT TOUCHED HER CHEEK, softly. He moved his hand underneath her jaw, positioning her face close to his. Then closer. Then close enough to touch her lips. And he kissed her long and hard, unusually so, so much so that he had a vague premonition that this wasn’t really happening, that he wasn’t really kissing Norah’s full lips, that something else was going on.

Am I dreaming?

But he wasn’t because this had already happened. The dark hair wasn’t dark and wasn’t as long and he noticed that she looked different. She didn’t look like Norah at all but

Erin

she did look like his ex-wife.

Only she wasn’t his ex-wife at the time. Once she belonged to him, and he belonged to her. And nights were long and they
could belong to one another as much as they wanted. And for a while, things were good. Things were great, in fact. But it changed. Everything changed.

You know why
.

And he did. And he fought it. He pulled away from kissing Erin, but he saw her tears, and tears from a strong woman like that scared him. Because tears meant something awful had happened, something terribly wrong.

What have you done?

She asked this of him and he shook his head, shook it and backed off, backed away from her.

This is all your fault
.

But it wasn’t, and he hadn’t done anything, and he wasn’t guilty—it wasn’t him. It couldn’t have been him. He couldn’t remember …

Norah looked at him and shook her head.

So did Sean.

And Ossie. And the rest of them.

He stood with blood on his hands and looked back at his wife, who was following him now. Her tears still flowed. But they looked tainted. They looked like

no this can’t be happening let me please wake up and get away from this

crimson droplets.

Her tears had turned into blood.

And Kurt woke up on a sheetless mattress in a hot sweat.

He sat on the edge of the bed and breathed in and out and tried to erase the images from his mind. But the longer time passed, the more images came to him.

All he wanted was to get rid of them. Once and for all.

THERE HADN’T BEEN a lot of talk in the last few days. After dragging Jared to church a second time—and for a few moments this morning, she had thought she would literally have to drag him out of the cottage—Michelle had driven Jared to McDonald’s to grab some lunch. The conversation, if one could call it that, had been stilted and limited. She had gone from being irritated to being actually angry. Jared’s defiance, his indifference to everything she tried to do, was getting to her.
I’m your mother
, she thought as she ate a chicken sandwich minus the fries.
I’m your mother, and I’m getting tired of this attitude
.

Even her obvious, brewing anger did nothing to move her son.

On the drive back home, Michelle decided the sick ache in her gut needed to go. They drove past a field with a farmhouse deep in the background. Giant rolls of hay lay wound up and scattered underneath the blue sky. Wind licked at the blades of grass as she got out of the car while Jared asked her what was wrong.

Everything’s wrong and I’m a failure as a mother and I’m sick and tired of this, of all of this
.

The ache had turned into a sickening acid feeling. It was in her mouth, gagging her, weighing down her jaw. Her stomach churned. Something was not right.

Everything’s wrong
.

It was the worry. The constant nauseous feeling of being dragged under, sucked in and unable to breathe, of being

helpless

alone and unable to do a thing. Not being able to swim up and not being able to breathe in and out and just not being able.

And then, on the side of the road, the car engine still going, Jared watching from the car, Michelle lost her lunch in a couple of violent hurls. Her eyes watered, and she didn’t know if it was from throwing up or from tears or from both.

“Mom?”

Now he cares
.