The Taking of Libbie, SD Read online

  “Certainly not. Why would I do such a thing?”

  “To get a little vigilante justice for all the fires Church set.”

  “Why would I do that? He never burned anything I owned. ’Course, if you disagree, you should consider that charging me with arson might compromise the county attorney’s case against both Church and Paulie. I’ve been told that confusion is a criminal defense attorney’s best friend, and additional arson arrests might cause plenty of confusion. Instead of copping a plea, Church and Paulie could even try their luck at a trial, and who knows what an energetic defense lawyer might do to the amateur prosecutors you have working for you. What do you think?”

  “I think I should throw your ass in jail.”

  “A lot of people say that.” I got up from the chair and headed for the door just in case he was serious. “I’ll see you around.”

  “Wait a minute.”

  I held my breath while I did.

  “There were fingerprints on Mike Randisi’s gun that didn’t belong to him or to Tracie.”

  The sheriff knew I’d handled the gun, so I felt safe in asking, “Were they mine?”

  “No. I ran your prints. Your prints are on file, did you know that?”

  “I knew that.”

  “Of course. You’re an ex-cop.”

  He gave the “ex” a little more emphasis than I liked, but I said nothing.

  “Any thoughts of who they might belong to?” the sheriff said.

  “Not yet.” I held my thumb and index finger about an inch apart. “I’m that far away from putting it all together.”

  “Putting it together, or taking it apart?”

  I had nothing to say to that.

  “I’ll be watching you, McKenzie. You try something like this again, what you did last night…” Big Joe Balk stared at me for five hard beats, then said, “Go home.”

  I didn’t know if he meant go home to my hotel in Libbie or go home to St. Paul, and I didn’t ask.

  It wasn’t a long drive from Mercer to Libbie, it just seemed that way. Partly it was because of the unending darkness. I did not see a single light besides my own headlamps from one city’s limits to the other, not even the light of a farmhouse or ranch. It was so cold I had to roll up my windows, and then I had to turn on my defrosters when the windows began to fog up. Mostly what made it such a long trek, though, was my conscience. I was wrong to set up Church the way I did, to destroy his house and pickup, and I knew it. I knew it before I did it.

  “What the hell am I doing?” I said aloud.

  I used to be a cop, a good cop, I think, for well over eleven years. I quit when I became independently wealthy. I was going to take care of my father; we were going to travel. Dad died before we had much of a chance. Still, I have no regrets about pulling the pin. Only the thing is, I liked being a cop. I liked helping people. I saw a lot of terrible things when I was in harness; I was forced to do some of those terrible things myself, yet I always slept well at night. When my head hit the pillow and I looked back on the day, no matter how lousy the day had been, I could always say, “The world’s a little bit better place because of what I did.” It made me feel good; it made me feel useful.

  After Dad passed, I had money but no plans for it, not to invest it, not to spend it, not to give it away. It was just there, making my life simple and easy, yet not particularly fulfilling. I began to feel restless and out of place. To relieve the boredom and discontent, I started doing favors for my friends, and friends of friends—favors they couldn’t do for themselves. They were small favors at first. Gradually they became bigger and more dangerous. Yet they gave some meaning and significance to my life. And fun. Nina once compared me to a Wild West gunfighter, a white knight, and the Scarlet Pimpernel all in one breath. Certainly, it was a more interesting way to spend my time than working nine-to-five. Mostly, though, I did the favors to be useful. I did it to help make the world a better place. At least, that’s what I told myself. What should I tell myself now? I wondered.

  Is the world a better place because I burned down Church’s house, because I blew up his truck? Yeah, he’s off the streets; he won’t be hurting anyone in the near future. Really, though, didn’t I merely substitute one asshole for another?

  As for Libbie, it could blow away like a tumbleweed tomorrow and it wouldn’t bother me a bit. I came here for payback—Nina was right about that, too. I came here to get even with the man who used my name.

  So where does the better world come in?

  Have I ever made the world better?

  Maybe I should heed Big Joe Balk’s advice, I told myself. Maybe I should go home to St. Paul. The difference between right and wrong seemed much more apparent there. Or was it that I never doubted myself there?

  I continued to follow the onrushing, unchanging road.

  Damn, it was a long drive.

  Evan sat in an overstuffed chair, his chin resting on his chest, his arms crossed beneath his chin, his legs extended and crossed at the ankles, looking as if he were at the airport waiting for a plane and not expecting it anytime soon. I startled him when I opened the front door to the Pioneer Hotel. He leapt out of the chair and rubbed his eyes nervously. Probably he had been sleeping and wasn’t supposed to, I told myself.

  “McKenzie,” he said.

  “Hey.”

  “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  “You have? Why?”

  “Sharren,” he said and paused. During the pause all kinds of terrible things came to mind.

  “What about her?” I said.

  “Sharren told me that if you had another late night, I was supposed to feed you something from the kitchen.”

  I expressed my relief in one long exhale. “That’s okay,” I said at the end of it.

  “It’s no trouble,” Evan said.

  “It’s late, and I’m not that hungry.”

  I moved toward the staircase, but Evan blocked me.

  “You need to eat something,” he said.

  “I’m fine, really.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “What don’t I understand?”

  “Sharren—Sharren has taken a keen interest in you.”

  “That’s kind of her.”

  “If you don’t eat something after she told me to feed you, she’s going to give me hell.”

  “Well, we can’t have that.”

  Evan seemed relieved as he led me to a chair. I slipped off my sports jacket, folded it, and set it on an empty chair across from me before sitting down.

  “Don’t move,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

  True to his word, he returned within minutes with a stein of beer.

  “Drink this,” he said.

  It sounded more like a command than a request. I took a sip. Evan smiled.

  “I’ll be right back with your sandwich,” he said.

  I took another sip of beer, then another. It had a slightly bitter taste but altogether wasn’t bad. I wondered if it had been brewed in South Dakota like Ringneck. I would have to ask Evan when he returned, I told myself. I drank until the glass was half empty, then balanced it on my knee, telling myself that I would finish it with my sandwich. I closed my eyes …

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I opened my right eye. It was daylight, and I was lying on my stomach on the ground and staring at a plant I couldn’t identify. I raised my head slightly and attempted to open my left eye. The lid was clotted with blood and remained closed. I touched my cheek just below the eye and winced. It was swollen, the skin taut and painful. I explored gently with my fingers. No shattered cheekbones, no broken eye socket—so I had that going for me. After some effort, I managed to roll onto my back. I rubbed the dried blood out of my left eye and opened it. The sky was vivid blue and cloudless. I tried to sit up. I felt a deep pain in my left side, clutched my ribs, and sagged back down. A sudden chill gripped my entire body; my teeth began to chatter violently; I felt nauseous. I waited until the symptoms subsided and tried sit
ting up again, twisting as I did, leaning on my left forearm, using my right hand for support. My head throbbed, and I had a nasty taste in my mouth. With some effort, I managed to kneel. The dirt beneath my knees was dry and hard-packed. Around me were more of the unidentified plants. They had narrow stems about seven inches high with thin, flat leaf blades and short bristles at the top. There were tens of thousands of them, and they stretched to the horizon. The horizon seemed to be a hundred miles away in all directions.

  “Uh-oh,” I said.

  Holding tight to my ribs, I managed to stand. If anything, it made the horizon seem farther away.

  “This is very bad.”

  If you were to put me on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, Jeopardy, or any of the other TV game shows that test your knowledge, I would probably fail miserably. On the other hand, if you gave me a little context by, oh, I don’t know, abandoning me on a prairie in the middle of nowhere, suddenly I’d be able to access all the pertinent information stored in my head. It’s like my grasp of languages. I studied French for seven years yet can barely speak a word unless I’m on a beach in Martinique or a boulevard in Paris, and then I can speak it quite well. I don’t know why my brain works that way, it just does. I tell you this so you’ll understand why, at that precise moment in time, I knew exactly how much trouble I was in.

  The Great Plains consist of four hundred and seventy-five thousand square miles of barely populated land, of which over half are range and pasture land, and I seemed to be stuck in the very middle of it. ’Course, a hundred and fifty thousand of those miles are in Canada. I didn’t know where I was, but it wasn’t Canada.

  How would you know? my inner voice asked.

  I examined my wristwatch. It was 8:32 a.m. …

  How do you know it’s morning?

  The sun is rising …

  How do you know it isn’t setting?

  Dammit, it’s morning. The sun is rising.

  All right. Relax. Take a deep breath.

  I did, and immediately felt a stabbing pain in my left side that caused me to clutch my ribs again. Once the pain lessened, I coughed up some phlegm and spat on the ground at my feet. The saliva seemed clear to me.

  What does that tell you?

  I’m not bleeding inside.

  Oh, yeah, like you would know.

  I went back to my watch. It was 8:34 a.m. I knew for a fact that I had been in Libbie at four fifteen. That meant I was just over four hours away from where I was. Figure a vehicle traveling at seventy miles per hour out of town, and forty miles an hour over this rough terrain, at the very most I should be about two hundred twenty-five miles from Libbie.

  Which tells you what?

  I’m not in fucking Canada!

  “How the hell did I get here?” I said aloud

  The answer was obvious enough—Evan. He drugged me. I remembered that the beer he gave me had a slightly bitter taste. Chloral hydrate tasted bitter. Chloral hydrate was the first depressant developed for the specific purpose of inducing sleep. Add it to alcohol and you have what the Victorians called a Mickey Finn. It works in a relatively short period of time, figure thirty minutes. I went down quicker than that, which means either he gave me a lot of it or the lack of food in my system accelerated its effects.

  Why would he do it?

  He wouldn’t unless someone told him to, paid him to.

  Sharren Nuffer?

  I didn’t think so. Evan used Sharren’s name because Sharren had fed me late Saturday night. He knew this because he poured me a Ringneck. Only Sharren wasn’t working Sunday. I was aware of that, yet I didn’t call him on it. Why not? How come I didn’t remember about the taste of chloral hydrate last night?

  It was late. You were tired. Tired people make mistakes.

  I moved my fingers gingerly up and down my rib cage and then across my face. Someone had kicked me while I was down, while I was unconscious. Someone who didn’t like me at all.

  It was Dewey Miller. He owns the Pioneer Hotel. Evan works for him.

  “Ahh, Mr. Miller,” I said aloud. “This time I think you have pushed your luck too far.”

  Now what?

  Despite the pain, I stretched my body. Then I brushed the red-brown dirt from my bare arms, my rust-colored polo shirt, and my blue jeans. It would have been nice to have my sports jacket with the cell phone in the pocket, but I doubted I’d have coverage out there anyway.

  I was in for a long walk; there was no doubt about it. The question was, which direction? I slowly spun in a tight circle, examining the skyline as best I could. I saw no transmission lines, no water towers, no power or telephone poles, no fences, no roads. There was not a single tree anywhere, not a river or lake, not a bump of high ground to break the monotony of the limitless horizon.

  “I guess they don’t call it the Great American Desert for nothing,” I said.

  I set off, walking in a large circle, scrutinizing the ground intently. I found no tire tracks, from a car or a truck or an ATV.

  “How the hell did I get here?” I said. “I didn’t fall from the sky.”

  I circled again, moving more slowly this time, more carefully, examining the prairie grass as well as the ground, looking for bent stems, anything to indicate where a vehicle might have come from or in which direction it went, anything to follow. I failed.

  Oh, this is not good.

  Would you stop saying that?

  I reached down and pulled up a stem of grass. Next, I removed my watch from my wrist. I held it horizontally, pointing the hour hand directly at the sun. I took the blade of grass and placed it halfway between the hour hand and the numeral twelve. This gave me the north and south line. Due east was at ten fifteen.

  “That way,” I said.

  Why that way?

  “It’s the direction home.”

  The way my father taught it to me, you pick a point in the distance and walk directly to it, then pick another spot in the distance and walk to that. This way you’re always moving more or less in a straight line; the strength of your right leg—I was right-handed—wouldn’t push you into a circle. Yet I came to realize that I could not follow those instructions here. I could not walk with an eye to a far goal because there was no way to measure the distance I was closing anymore than I could with a mirage. There simply were no reference points. The land was without water, without trees, without rocks, without discernible hills; there was nothing to help you determine where you’ve been or where you are going. I began to feel like I was on a gigantic conveyor belt and the earth was rotating at walking speed beneath my feet so that I gained no ground.

  I stopped and used my watch to align myself again.

  Dammit.

  What?

  My watch was set to Daylight Saving Time, not the natural arch of the sun. I was hiking northeast.

  Does it matter?

  Of course it matters.

  I reset my watch, turning the hands back an hour, and realigned myself. I decided that I could no longer look to the horizon, so I concentrated on what was nearer my feet—a tuft of grass fifteen paces in front of me, a shrub twenty paces in front of that. All the while, I scanned the horizon, searching for a fence line, a silo, any kind of man-made structure that might lead me out of the wilderness.

  A jackrabbit appeared. He was about two feet in length and gray, with those distinctive long ears pointed straight up from his head. The ears twitched while he watched me, a contemptuous expression on his otherwise placid face. I stamped my foot and said, “Hasenpfeffer,” which is the name of a German stew made with marinated rabbit. Either he was an uneducated rabbit or he didn’t fear the implied threat. After a moment he hopped away, moving in no particular hurry.

  I bet he knows where he’s going.

  I figure there are three modes in life. There’s action mode, during which the present and the immediate future are all that concern me. It’s the mode I slide into when I’m working, doing all those favors for people, setting up arsonists like Church. In action
mode, there is little room for reflection; everything moves with extreme speed; vision narrows to only those people and things within reach. It’s an intense living in the moment. Time stands still. True, immediately afterward, time becomes a living thing again. It sweeps forward at its own deliberate pace. One can anticipate the future and all the responsibilities that it entails—to family, to friends, to oneself—and be weighed down by them. It is like coming down from an immense high. Still, I liked it.

  Then there is intellectual mode, where most activities take place inside the head. This is where I spend most of my time—reading, listening to music, going to ball games, enjoying a few beverages with the boys, whipping up gourmet meals for my friends, attempting (badly) to emulate Tiger Woods on a golf course, studying the habits of the ducks that live on the pond in my backyard, working out, taking martial arts training, practicing with my guns, solving puzzles like where the Imposter came from and where he went. It’s simply the exploration of life, of keeping yourself open to its countless surprises. I liked this, too.

  Then there is where I was now—plodding mode. I was simply moving forward, step by step, hour by hour, into an unknown future, trying to maintain a straight line and hoping for the best. There was no cheering, no cursing, no real thought. I was merely putting one foot in front of the other and trusting, hoping, that eventually I would get somewhere worth going. I think this is how most people go about their day-to-day lives. It is what Oliver Wendell Holmes meant when he wrote, “Alas for those that never sing but die with all their music in them.”

  “Hell with it,” I said aloud. “I have never lived like that; I’ll be damned if I’m going to die like that.”

  To prove it, I started singing, mostly tunes from the American Songbook, until it became too exhausting to walk and sing at the same time.

  Hours passed. My legs became sore, especially my ankles. You’d think a guy who’s played hockey thirty weeks out of the year since he was five years old would have stronger ankles, but there you are. My feet were beginning to ache as well, and I was sure I was developing blisters; my sneakers were not designed for this kind of travel.