Lake Country Read online

  Hal flopped his rag over a shoulder. “Already paid for ’em, kid.” He dealt the full glasses out: one for Mike, one for Darryl, one for himself. “How’d you know the girl?”

  If Darryl registered any of this, he didn’t let on. If he noticed the free shooter full of Old Crow sitting on the bar in front of him, he didn’t announce that either. He’d gone dark since the news went to sports. For the past few minutes he’d been sitting on his stool, hunched over his beer, generating his own surly atmosphere.

  Mike said, “We knew her brother.”

  “You don’t know him anymore?”

  “Not anymore.”

  Looking at Darryl, Hal put two and two together. “This brother have a name?”

  “Lance Corporal Morse,” Mike said. He’d actually graduated Sibley High a year ahead of the guy, though they hadn’t known each other in school. Hadn’t once met, in fact, before landing in the Sunni Triangle together with the 4/8 Marines. “First name Evan.”

  “Lance Corporal Morse,” Hal repeated. “Final rank, I take it.”

  “E-3 for life,” Mike said. He took a pull from his beer. “Died the same day, the way it went. How’s that for a story?”

  “Same day as what?”

  “As his sister.”

  Hal glanced at the television, where the girl’s picture had been a few minutes ago. Nothing about a brother.

  “They weren’t together at the time,” Mike told him.

  Hal waited for the story, which sounded more mysterious than what it was. The 4/8 had been banging full tilt inside sunny Ramadi for three days straight when word came in through forward command that Morse’s sister had been in a car wreck back home. The kid’s company commander had cleared him to take the ten-day emergency leave, but Morse decided to stay put with his squad, which had lost guys already. He’d figured he could keep in touch with his family from outpost until they had more news.

  More news came two days later, when a team from Fox Company—Sergeant Mike Barlowe, a machine gunner from West Virginia named Darryl Potter, and a couple of other available grunts—had pulled Morse from his team’s position in a shelled-out café in the market square. They’d shuttled him back to command, where a lieutenant colonel informed him that his sister had died stateside that morning.

  Morse hitched a ride from the forward operating base back to Camp Ramadi with a returning supply convoy after nightfall. The rear gun truck—the same up-armored Humvee Morse had climbed into—hit a roadside IED on the edge of town, and that had more or less been that.

  “Christ,” Hal said.

  “Their old man went so low over it that he offed himself after the funerals.”

  Hal raised an eyebrow. “No shit?”

  “Negative shit,” Mike said. “Drove himself to this little place they had up in the lake country. Paddled a canoe out to the middle of the water, sat up on the gunwale, and shot himself in the gourd.”

  After a minute, Hal said, “Congratulations. That’s the saddest goddamn story I’ve heard this week.”

  “Yeah, well,” Mike said. “It’s only Tuesday.”

  Pool balls clacked around the tables. The wrench monkeys threw darts and the old-timers bitched. The jukebox played Springsteen now. On the television, the weather guy called for more rain tomorrow.

  Hal picked up his glass. He studied it a moment, then said, “Lance Corporal Morse.”

  Mike sighed. “And his kid sister.”

  “Ooh rah,” Darryl muttered, and knocked back his shot without waiting for them.

  They drank more to Lance Corporal Morse as the night wore on. And his kid sister. They drank to the 4th Battalion, 8th Marines. They drank to Lily Morse, who’d lost her family one member at a time until she’d woken up all alone one morning in a tidy house in West St. Paul. Nobody could decide whether to drink to Bill Morse or not, checking out the way he had, but they erred on the side of sympathy. They made the rounds again every so often, just to be thorough. By closing time, Darryl was only getting warmed up.

  “Guy straight up kills somebody,” he said, still talking about the architect driving the other car. Wouldn’t let it go. “And he does ten days for it.”

  “Yeah, well.” Mike shambled over to the wall and racked his cue stick. They hadn’t really been playing anyway. “I’m sure he’s sorry.”

  “Hell. Killed three people, if you look at it.”

  “Depends how you look at it, I guess.”

  “Get more’n ten days for a bar fight,” Darryl said. “That’s how I look at it.”

  “Good point,” Mike agreed. He could have made the counterpoint that Darryl had started that bar fight, and he’d broken a guy’s cheek, and there was his record to contend with, and he’d also called the judge a not-so-nice name at the arraignment. But it was getting late.

  “Guy’s still got his wife and kid. Still got his nifty address. Bet he’s made himself a pile more dough than he had five years ago too. What’s Lily Morse got?”

  “I don’t know, man.” Mike didn’t really know Lily Morse, and neither did Darryl. “I gotta hit the head.”

  By the time Mike came back, Hal had turned on the lights. He caught Mike’s eye from behind the bar, then glanced toward the rear. His expression delivered the message: Better deal with him.

  Darryl was leaning on his pool cue, beer in hand, staring at the eight ball as if daring it to look back.

  “Come on,” Mike said. “Man says it’s time to clear out.” He’d wanted to go home for an hour, and his leg was killing him.

  But Darryl felt like driving around. And since Darryl had filched the keys out of Mike’s unattended jacket while Mike had been in the men’s, they drove around.

  “Tell me another thing,” Darryl said at one point, waiting at a red light on Fairmount, over by the college. “You see anything about the kid’s big bro on that news story? One word about any dead Marines at all?”

  “Not a one,” Mike said. He couldn’t see any reason why there should have been, but arguing with Darryl only made him stubborn, and Mike wanted to avoid making Darryl stubborn tonight. He only wanted a Vicodin and some sleep.

  At some point, they crossed the river. At some point after that, Mike nodded off.

  When he woke up, they were parked at a curb on a leafy, darkened street on the south shore of Lake Calhoun. Not that Mike knew where the hell they were, until Darryl told him. The clock in the dash said 3:35 a.m.

  “Right there he lives,” Darryl said, looking out his window.

  “There who lives?”

  “The asshole.”

  “Who?” Mike yawned. His mouth had gone dry, and his tongue felt thick. He leaned forward, looked at the house Darryl was watching. It was one of those stylish modern-looking things, set back on a wooded rise, all geometric planes and cantilevered sections and floor-to-ceiling views of the lake. All at once Mike felt nervous. “You mean the architect?”

  Darryl made a rough sound in his throat. He swiveled his head, nodded out Mike’s window. Across the dark water, beyond the far shore, downtown Minneapolis glittered in full view against the night sky. It looked nice.

  “Some punishment, huh?” Darryl said.

  He’d gotten into the glove box while they were rolling, Mike saw. Darryl sat with an elbow on his door, resting the open pint of Old Crow on his knee. His eyes had taken on that loose, liquid sheen Mike knew for what it was: a warning sign. Like clear oil shimmering in a hot pan. It seemed to Mike that he’d been seeing this look of Darryl’s more often than he used to.

  “Jesus,” he said. Rubbed his face. “We gotta get better jobs, man.”

  Darryl was quiet. After a bit his mouth twitched. Not quite a grin, but closer than a few seconds ago. “Speak for yourself,” he said.

  Mike glanced at his friend’s eyes and breathed a little easier. The storm had passed. “Gimme the damn keys,” he said. “You lose your turn.”

  He opened his door and got out. It was a clean night, scrubbed fresh by the rain. The cloud cov
er had pulled apart in spots overhead, showing starry black patches here and there, and the moon looked like a puddle of silver on the water. The tangy spring air felt good on his face.

  Mike breathed it in. Limping around the car, he checked up and down the empty street, hoping nobody happened to look out the window at a quarter of four in the morning, see two guys casing houses in a rust-bucket Skylark, and call the cops.

  As he rounded the front bumper, he glanced through the cracked windshield and saw Darryl, already shoved over into the passenger seat, washed in the light from the overhead dome. Darryl’s eyes looked red and his hair stood on end. If Mike had been closer to sober and more than half awake himself, it might have occurred to him to ask how the guy had known where the architect lived in the first place. But he didn’t think about that until later.

  CITIZEN CON

  1

  For the first time in as long as he could remember, Mike Barlowe woke up from one of the old dreams.

  He’d been sighting down his rifle from the edge of a rooftop, unable to see the ground below. A hot wind blew in from the desert, obscuring his view. He could feel the tension mounting beneath his trigger finger. He couldn’t make out his target in the void.

  The moment he fired, Mike bolted up in a clench of panic, heart hammering, unaware of his position.

  Then, little by little, the hollow, scouring sound of sand blowing against his helmet resolved itself into the soft patter of rain on the bedroom window. Gray daylight seeped in through the curtains. As his surroundings slowly came into focus, so did the real-world noise that had roused him:

  Somebody banging on the front door.

  Mike dragged in a rattling breath, dimly recalling the echo of distant artillery as the last of the dream fell away. He looked around and found himself on top of his own unmade covers, still in his clothes. He glanced at the clock beside the bed and saw that Wednesday morning had already come and gone. It was nearly three o’clock in the afternoon.

  A fresh barrage thudded through the walls while he sat there, still blinking away the fog. Mike hauled himself out of the rack and shambled down the hall in his stocking feet, thinking, All right, already. Don’t break it down.

  He was halfway across the living room when the door fell silent, then thundered once in reply.

  Mike stopped in his tracks as the jamb splintered. For a moment, standing there frozen, watching the door burst inward on its hinges, he wondered if he was still dreaming after all.

  A guy Mike had never seen before came strolling into the house like he had an invitation: Mid thirties, dressed in jeans, a leather sport-bike jacket, and lug boots. He was built low and lean, with a Kevlar bulge under a black nylon T-shirt and a face that looked like it had been broken and healed wrong. Seeing Mike, the guy’s eyes went hard. “Got him,” he yelled over his shoulder.

  “Really?” another voice said from out on the stoop.

  A new face appeared in the doorway, and this one Mike recognized. The expression on this face changed from relieved to surprised to disappointed, all in a few seconds.

  “Oh, crap,” the newcomer said. “Mike. Sorry, man. We sort of thought nobody was home.”

  Mike stood in his spot, flat-footed, still scrambling to assess the situation in front of him. He couldn’t seem to untangle his reflexes. It occurred to him that if the dream had been real and he’d been back in the desert, he’d have had his ass shot off by now.

  “Toby,” he said. It came out like a croak.

  The first guy through the door rolled his eyes.

  Toby Lunden shook rainwater from the sleeves of his windbreaker. He looked embarrassed. “We tried knocking.”

  “Oh,” Mike said. He released the breath he’d been holding, still waiting for his pulse to settle. “In that case, come on in.”

  Mike wasn’t a gambler, but he’d known a few bookies, and Toby Lunden wasn’t like any of them.

  He was a kid, for one thing, barely twenty years old, with bad eyes and thin bones and a complexion like pancake batter. If the stories Mike had heard about Toby were true, Toby started up his first sports book as a sophomore in high school. By the time he was a senior, he had faculty from across the public school district on his weekly bottom sheet.

  Toby’s facility with numbers was said to be such that he’d pulled straight Ds in math class, yet he’d been able to pay cash for a restored ’64 Shelby Cobra on graduation day (the same car he’d supposedly driven into an overpass abutment on graduation night). Even if those stories weren’t true, they summed up Mike’s impression of Toby Lunden well enough: a young guy with big ideas and all the smarts he needed to get himself more horsepower than he knew what to do with.

  “I can get a guy to fix that,” he told Mike, nodding at the busted door frame as he stepped through. He dried his shoes politely on the crusty bath towel laid down as a mat in the entryway. He took a look around and said, “Did we get you out of bed?”

  “That’s okay,” Mike said. “I had to get up to answer the door anyway.”

  The guy with the brutal face and the ballistic undershirt seemed impatient. “Where’s your roommate?” he said.

  Mike looked at him.

  The guy looked back.

  “I didn’t get your name,” Mike said.

  “You don’t want it.”

  “That’s Bryce,” Toby jumped in. He turned to his man and said, “Mike’s okay.”

  “Hey, what a relief.” Bryce watched Mike but spoke to Toby. “Future reference, you could have mentioned there might be two in the house.”

  “Sorry.”

  Mike waited.

  “So … yeah,” Toby said. He looked around some more, shifted his feet, and said, “Hey, Mike? You haven’t by any chance seen Darryl around, have you?” He paused. “I mean like today?”

  “You mean like in the five minutes I’ve been awake?” Beyond Toby’s shoulder, the open front door gave a view to the street; through spits of rain Mike could see a black Lincoln Navigator with Minnesota plates parked at the curb in front of the house, blocking the driveway. To his left, he had an angle on the window overlooking the empty carport alongside the house. No Skylark. Mike couldn’t help wondering why they’d bothered blocking the driveway.

  “Like, maybe he rolled over and nudged you before he slipped out of bed this morning,” Bryce suggested. “Nibbled on your ear, made spoons, told you where he was off to? No?”

  Mike reminded himself that he didn’t know this guy Bryce from a hole in the ground. But he knew this game: pick a fight, establish dominance, make sure the other guy knew when he’d been alpha-dogged. Barracks Douche Bags 101.

  “Darryl’s old-fashioned,” he said, ignoring the bait. “He never talks to me about his work.”

  “How could he with your knob in his mouth?”

  “Hey, okay,” Toby jumped in. “Let’s just, you know. Right? Bryce, I’ve got this.” His eyes said, Please?

  Bryce smirked. “Whatever you say, boss. I’ll give myself the tour.” He brushed past Mike on his way into the house. His eyes said, Stop me.

  Mike caught a glimpse of a shoulder holster under the bike jacket as Bryce passed. None of this seemed like a promising way to start a day.

  “Sorry,” Toby said when they were alone. “Bryce has an intensity.”

  “I got that,” Mike said. “Where’d you find him?”

  “Works for my uncle.” Toby shrugged. “He’s sort of on loan for the day.”

  “No kidding.” Toby’s uncle was a bail bondsman with billboards all over town. Television commercials too. Late at night it was hard to miss them. “Real live bounty hunter, huh?”

  “Fugitive Recovery Specialist,” Toby said. “He has business cards and everything.”

  “Neat. Why did he kick my door in?”

  Toby sighed. “Maybe we could sit a minute?”

  “Sure,” Mike said.

  As they arranged themselves like civil people, Mike could hear Bryce the Fugitive Recovery Specialist movin
g room to room through the house, sweep-searching. Mike did his best to let it go for now.

  He left the beat-up couch for Toby, took the beat-up recliner for himself, observing the state of the place as he picked his way through the mess. The coffee table, and the floor all around the coffee table, were littered with half-crumpled beer cans. Mike saw the Old Crow bottle from the kitchen cupboard, more than half full last he remembered, empty now. The ashtray, which he’d dumped yesterday, overflowed with butts. By the look of things, Darryl had kept right on drinking after they’d come in at 0-dark-30 and parted company. That, or he’d gotten an early start. Either way, he’d put some work into it.

  “Let me guess,” Mike said. “You lost Darryl’s cell number?”

  “Hey, I’ve been calling it,” Toby said. “Believe me, Mike, he hasn’t been answering.”

  “What’s so urgent?”

  “Finding Darryl, at the moment.”

  “Feel free to elaborate.”

  Toby leaned forward on the edge of the sofa cushion, elbows on his knees. He seemed unsure how to begin.

  “Okay,” he finally said. “A couple hours ago, I get this call from one of my regulars. Lunchtime or so. Nice guy, owns a steak and chops place on Nicollet. Chevalier. You ever been there?”

  “Can’t say that I have.”

  “Serve a mad porterhouse,” Toby said. “Anyway, this guy, he’s a good customer, been on my sheet for, I don’t know, two, three years? He wins, he loses, I let him ride, it evens out. He owns his place but he’s also the head chef, works like a dog; he’s at the restaurant all the time. So I send a guy to him every week. He’s always ready with the commission, lays whatever action he wants that week, on we go. No problems.”

  “Okay, less elaboration,” Mike said. He couldn’t listen to Toby while listening to the rest of the house with his other ear; he couldn’t hear anything out of Toby’s man Bryce, and he didn’t like the quiet. The house wasn’t exactly big enough to get lost in. “Fast forward to lunch.”

  Toby nodded. “Like I said. My guy calls me. This is during his busy hour. He tells me that Darryl came by the restaurant this morning, regular time or so, early, when the place was empty.”