Very Bad Men (2 page)

Three names, in rich black ink.
Henry Kormoran. Sutton Bell. Terry Dawtrey.
The letters flow gracefully. The pen is a Waterman, an heirloom from Lark's father.

Kormoran and Bell should be relatively easy. Both of them live in Ann Arbor—Kormoran in an apartment, Bell in a modest house with a wife and daughter. The wife and daughter complicate things, but on the whole Lark is unconcerned. He can manage Kormoran and Bell.

Dawtrey is another story. He's serving a thirty-year sentence at Kinross Prison, twenty miles south of Sault Sainte Marie.

 

 

LARK LEFT his notebook on the hotel bed and padded barefoot to the ice machine down the hall. He caught ice chips in a plastic bag, just a handful, enough to soothe his brow. The headaches had been coming more frequently.

He had been fine this afternoon when he drove past the gates of Kinross Prison. He didn't know what he expected to see, maybe something like a fortress. Tall buildings of stone. Ramparts and buttresses. Lofty walls with turrets for the guards.

The reality was less impressive. There were a few broad buildings of homely tan brick. The sun cast the shadows of the guardtowers across the yard. Two high chain-link fences, topped with razor wire, surrounded everything.

Lark had been raised in a working-class neighborhood in Dearborn, on the outskirts of Detroit. Take away the towers and the fences, and he might have been looking at his old high school.

Still, the fences and towers would be enough to keep him from Terry Dawtrey. In theory, he could make a go of it, if a dozen things went his way. He could acquire a high-powered rifle. He could find some cover in the flat, featureless land that surrounded the prison. Dawtrey could walk out to the front gate with a target painted on his chest.

Lark pondered the problem in his hotel room, lying against the pillows with the ice pressed to his forehead. There was another alternative. He could find some pretext for a visit to Dawtrey. He could walk through the gate, submit to a search. They would lead him to a room with bland cinder-block walls. A common room with lots of tables, full of convicts' wives and their restless children. He would sit at a table across from Dawtrey. There would be no glass between them, not like in the movies. He would have no weapon, but he would only need something sharp—a stem broken off from a pair of eyeglasses. It could be done.

But there would be no going out again past the guards. It would be a oneway trip.

A hard problem. He needed to consider it some more. He pressed the power button on the television remote and flipped through the channels. Cop shows, infomercials, cable news. He wasn't really looking for the woman, but he found her on CNN. Sometimes it happened that way. She was at a podium with a crowd around her. Young people holding up signs. She had as much of a tan as you could get, living in the state of Michigan. She had hair like black silk and wore it in a short, stylish cut.

He had the sound muted, so he didn't hear what she was saying, but it hardly mattered. She smiled, and the people applauded and waved their signs. The smile was wondrous. Without it, she could seem stern, aloof. With it, she was joyous and mischievous at the same time. He remembered something he'd heard once: That smile alone should be worth ten points at the polls.

Watching her helped. The ice helped too. It cooled the ache behind his brow. He was tempted to check out in the morning and drive south to Ann Arbor. That was what most people would do. Take the easier way. Deal with Kormoran and Bell. Save Dawtrey for last. Put off confronting the problem. But that's not the way he was raised.

Always do the hardest thing first,
his father used to say.

 

 

THE NEXT NIGHT, Anthony Lark found himself in a town called Brimley on the shore of Whitefish Bay, sixteen miles southwest of Sault Sainte Marie. He ate dinner at the Cozy Inn, a restaurant that catered to tourists. He sat at a table in a corner and kept his eyes on an old man who had settled in on a stool at the bar.

Lark knew there were Chippewa Indians in Brimley. They ran the Bay Mills Casino, the area's main attraction. The old man at the bar looked like he had Chippewa blood. He had a weathered face marked with deep vertical lines, the kind of face you might find carved into the side of a cliff. He had a compact frame and limbs that might once have been sturdy and thick—before time diminished them.

Lark knew the man's name. He had found it in the Brimley telephone directory. He had written it in his notebook with his Waterman pen.

The man lived in a cabin not far from the shore of Lake Superior. A wooden shanty, really, one of a score of cabins scattered in the woods, with a warren of unpaved lanes running between them. It would be a pleasant place to live now, in the summer, in the dense shade of old birch trees. In the winter, Lark thought, it would be hell.

He had spent an hour in the cabin around midday; he had found a key under a wooden bucket on the porch. The old man had been away at work. A drawer full of pay stubs told the tale: he had a job at the casino, probably on the cleaning crew. His wages were pitiful.

The cabin had a cramped living room, a small kitchen, a smaller bath. No bedroom, just a fold-out sofa bed. A bare minimum of possessions. The medicine cabinet over the bathroom sink held a straight razor, a toothbrush, toothpaste. The furnishings of the living room included a TV set with rabbit ears and a wall calendar illustrated with watercolor sparrows. Lark leafed through the pages. Someone had written the letter “T” on every other Saturday.

A framed photograph hung next to the calendar: a school picture of a boy fourteen or fifteen years old.

A ringing telephone startled Lark as he studied the photo. He followed the sound to the kitchen, where a battered beige phone sat on the counter beside a primitive-looking answering machine. The tape in the machine began to turn, the old man's outgoing message. Then a beep and a woman's voice, rough with cigarette smoke.

“Charlie, are you there?” she said. A pause. “Maybe I'll see you at the Cozy later.”

When the old man got home from work, Lark was sitting in his Chevy a little distance down the lane. He watched the man step down from the cab of a pickup and trudge to the cabin door. He might have done it then, might have simply followed the man inside, but it seemed too abrupt somehow. And it was still daylight. Better to do it after dark.

Lark drove to the Cozy Inn and had a leisurely dinner—fish caught from the bay, french fries, coleslaw. He had brought a newspaper with him from Sault Sainte Marie, and after the waitress cleared his plate away he started reading the front page. She brought him the bill and he gave her a sizable tip and after that she left him alone.

The old man came in at eight and took up his position at the bar. He drank shots of Irish whiskey and mugs of beer. By ten o'clock most of the tourists had left and the locals began to fill the place with raucous voices and laughter. At eleven a woman came in wearing a leather skirt and a knitted blouse. Hair dyed black. Fifty-five years old, Lark thought, hoping to pass for forty.

“There you are, Charlie,” she said to the old man.

“Madelyn, you vixen,” he said, patting the stool beside him.

As Lark watched them from the corner—Madelyn producing a cigarette from a beaded purse, Charlie lighting it with a Zippo—he wished that he were done. He should have taken care of things at the cabin. He felt a headache coming on and took a pill (
Imitrex
) from a small tin that once held breath mints. He didn't expect the pill to work. He could feel the pain creeping into the space behind his eyes, curling and twisting like the smoke of Madelyn's cigarette.

A voice in his mind said,
The headaches are a symptom.
His doctor's voice. It was something his doctor had told him again and again.

The trouble started near midnight. Lark had a beer in front of him that he'd been nursing for an hour. He watched a crowd of young people heading for the exit. Clean-cut, well-dressed—dealers from the casino, if he had to guess. The last of them held the door for a brawny man heading in.

That one's not a dealer,
Lark thought.
A laborer or a fisherman maybe.

Madelyn knew him. She got up and met him halfway across the room.

“Kyle, my love,” she said carelessly.

He was a younger man, maybe forty—the age she was pretending to be. He wore denim work clothes and heavy canvas boots. She led him to the bar, ordered him a drink. She chattered away at him, her hands brushing his collar or resting on his arm. She had the nervous energy of a woman caught where she shouldn't be.

The old man, Charlie, sat forgotten beside her, his face souring as the minutes passed. The other patrons at the bar seemed to lean away from the three of them, as if they sensed what was going to happen.

Lark watched it from his corner table. Charlie putting a hand on the back of Madelyn's neck. A proprietary gesture. Madelyn turning to shoot him a look. Kyle, hunched over his glass, doing his best to ignore what was happening, until he couldn't ignore it any longer.

Kyle got to his feet, and Charlie followed. Madelyn made a halfhearted effort to get between them, but Kyle pushed her gently aside.

Lark knew that the quickest way to win a fight was to break the other guy's nose. A broken nose puts a man down, takes all the struggle out of him. Charlie knew it too. He made a fist of his right hand and jabbed at the bigger man's face.

Kyle saw it coming and ducked down to catch the punch on his forehead.

The bones of the hand are delicate, the bones of the skull less so. Charlie drew his fist back with a cry. Kyle shook his head to clear it, then stepped forward casually and scuffed a work boot over the wooden floorboards, sweeping the old man's legs out from under him. Charlie landed on his backside and on his wounded hand, howling and curling up on the floor.

Kyle reached behind him for his glass, drained it, and headed for the door, beckoning for Madelyn to follow. She glared at him and growled, “Damn it, Kyle,” but she went with him after only the briefest of glances at the old man.

Lark left the bar a few minutes later. By then some of the locals had helped Charlie up onto his stool and wrapped a handkerchief around his knuckles and set him up with another beer.

 

 

DARK UNDER THE BIRCH TREES. Lark found the cabin again, drove past it, and parked at the side of the lane. He cut the Chevy's engine and waited. A tire iron lay on the seat beside him.

Charlie's pickup truck appeared at one in the morning, rolling to a stop on the lawn. The old man stumbled up the stone-paved walk and went inside. Lark got out of his car with the tire iron, crossed to the porch, and retrieved the key from underneath the wooden bucket.

The door squeaked on its hinges when he opened it, but not enough to catch the old man's attention. In fact, when Lark stepped into the cabin, the old man was nowhere to be seen. A table lamp cast its glow over the sofa and the television. Over a pair of worn shoes abandoned on the carpet.

Lark saw the lamp reflected in the dark glass of the window behind the sofa and quickly crossed the room to draw the curtains. As he stood by the window he heard the rush of water running, and without thinking he vaulted the sofa and pressed himself against the wall beside the bathroom door.

With the tire iron raised in his right hand, he waited for the door to open. A minute passed, then two. From his earlier visit he knew that the window in the bathroom was a frosted square too small for a man to climb through. Charlie must be waiting on the other side of the door.

Lark said, “You may as well come out. How did you know I was here?”

A brief delay, and then the old man's voice came through. “You stomp around like an elephant. Who are you? A friend of Scudder's?”

“I don't know who that is.”

“Kyle Scudder. You're one of his pals?”

“No, but I saw what he did to you at the bar. You should have your hand looked at. I can help you.”

“Are you a doctor?”

“I know some first aid.”

“I don't need your help. You clear out, before I call the cops.”

“The phone's out here.”

“I've got a cell.”

Lark looked around at the ragged sofa, the threadbare carpet, the wornout shoes.

“I don't think so,” he said.

He could hear faint sounds through the door. The old man's breathing. The medicine cabinet being opened, then softly closed.

“All right, I'm coming out.”

Lark lowered the tire iron and stepped in front of the door, pivoting so that his right shoulder faced it. He braced his feet, waited for the knob to turn, and hit the door with everything he had.

T
he razor won't do you any good,” Lark said.

“Fuck you.”

The old man sat on the floor where he had fallen, his back against the vanity of the sink, the straight razor from the medicine cabinet clutched in his left hand. His right hand, still wrapped in a handkerchief, came up to wipe the blood that ran over his upper lip.

“Your nose is broken,” Lark said.

“I've had it broken before,” said the old man, his speech distorted only a little, like someone talking through thick glass.

“Ice might help.”

“Fuck you.”

“Leave the razor and come out,” said Lark, “and I'll get you some ice.”

He backed out of the doorway and watched as the old man laid the razor on the floor and pulled himself up the vanity and to his feet. The man swatted away the hand Lark offered and made his way to the sofa, where he fell back against the cushions and pressed the heel of his left hand gingerly against his nostrils.