The Taking of Libbie, SD Read online

  “Why would he do a thing like that?”

  “Money, of course. Mr. Kramme, Christopher’s father, was partner with Mr. Miller in a lot of things. The grain elevator, for one. They had an agreement built into their contracts that if either of them died, the business would buy out their heirs for half the value of the business. That way their businesses were protected and neither of them would get stuck with a partner that they didn’t want. Whether or not they added the clause to their partnership agreement because Mr. Miller didn’t like Christopher I couldn’t say, although Mr. Miller really didn’t like Christopher. He considered him a wastrel. That’s the term he always used, ‘wastrel.’

  “Anyway, they fought over the true value of the businesses until a court-appointed arbitrator settled the matter. Mrs. Kramme got all the money. She gave Christopher a monthly allowance, not huge money, just enough to live comfortably. She said she wasn’t going to give Christopher what he thought was his fair share of the estate unless he got a real job and made something of himself. Maybe he would have. He was kind of afraid of his mother. Only she moved to Sioux Falls. She had family there. Sisters.

  “Christopher and I remained in Libbie because I love it here. I love the vistas. I love the people. I even got myself elected to the city council despite Christopher’s attempts to sabotage my campaign, like showing up drunk to meet-and-greets. He did it because he wanted to go back to Chicago, and he figured if I lost—Christopher and I never got along as well as we should have. I loved him to death. There was no one more charming than he was. Except it was like living with a frat boy.

  “He got himself arrested before we could do anything about it. He pleaded guilty; the Feds took his plane and gave him eighty-four months. We divorced somewhere around the tenth month. It was his idea, not mine. We had a prenup when we were married—his mother had insisted—so I collect his allowance until he gets out.”

  “When is that?” I said.

  “He has eighteen months to go, assuming good behavior. Jimmy.” Tracie held up her empty glass for the counterman to see. Jimmy nodded. A moment later, he set a fresh glass of wine in front of Tracie.

  “For you, sir?” he said.

  “Do you brew your own iced tea?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll have that.”

  Tracie waited for Jimmy to leave before she said, “Iced tea?”

  “After I eat something, I’ll be happy to trade shots with you. In the meantime, tell me about myself.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  I came this close to asking her if I was good in bed but managed to smother the impulse. Some people just don’t have a sense of humor. Instead, I asked her to tell me about my childhood. Turned out I was a helluva kid—a superathlete, popular with the girls, good in school—all of which was true, of course. Yet going by what Tracie said, it became clear to me that the Imposter was not a St. Paul boy. If you came from there, you didn’t say you played ball at “the park.” You said you played at Dunning Field, or Linwood, or Oxford, or Aldine or Merriam Park, or the Projects, or even Desnoyer. You didn’t say you hung out down at “the Mississippi River.” It was simply the river, or more specifically Bare Ass Beach, the Grotto, Shriner’s Hospital, the Caves, Hidden Falls, or the Monument. And while we have called it many things, including its given name, to my certain knowledge, no one from St. Paul has ever referred to Minneapolis as “the big city.” Unfortunately, none of this gave me any indication of where the Imposter was actually from.

  While we talked, the counterman took our orders, delivered our food—I followed Tracie’s recommendation and tried the roast beef—and cleared our plates when we were finished. I ordered a shot of Jack Daniel’s. It didn’t do my headache any good, but it made the rest of me feel just fine.

  “These questions,” Tracie said. “Does this mean you’re going to help us?”

  “I haven’t decided yet.”

  “What are you afraid of?”

  “Heights, spoiled food, getting shot at—you know, the usual things.” I was also afraid that one morning I’d wake up and discover that my life was boring, but I didn’t tell her that. “I don’t like it that I’m a long way from home. I don’t like it that I’m cut off from my resources, my friends, my support systems. I don’t like it that I don’t have a wallet, ID, cash, credit cards—nothing to prove that I’m who I say I am. It makes me feel vulnerable. Besides, this isn’t my town. This isn’t my ground. Hell, I have to look at a map just to find out where I am.”

  “I can get you a map. I can get you everything you need.”

  “Not everything.”

  “Do you mean sex?”

  “Where did that come from?”

  “I bet Sharren would be happy to oblige you.”

  “I didn’t mean sex. I meant backup. Don’t be so defensive.”

  “Men are all alike. You only care about one thing.”

  “The Super Bowl?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “No. Tell me.”

  “Rush—”

  “I’m not that guy.”

  “He was a liar and a thief.”

  “What does that have to do with me and all the other men you know?”

  “You can’t be trusted.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. If we didn’t open jars, there’d be a bounty on us. I gotta tell you, Tracie, if we’re going to continue this conversation I’m going to need another drink.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “What?”

  I followed Tracie’s gaze to the entrance. A large man stepped into the café. There was a sneer on his lips that looked as if it had been in place for twenty years. A smaller man slipped in behind him. They were wearing cowboy hats, cowboy boots, and clothes that looked worked in. For a long moment, they reminded me of the bounty hunters who had Tasered me that morning.

  “Who are they?” I said.

  “Don’t ask.”

  I didn’t need to. The big cowboy announced himself by shouting, “Lookie what we got here,” and walking to a small table in the center of the café. A man in his midthirties was sitting at the table across from a woman of the same age. He was eating what looked like a club sandwich and fries. The cowboy grabbed a couple of fries from the plate and shoved them in his mouth. I felt my body tense as I watched; the roast beef became a heavy, unmoving thing in my stomach.

  “Whad I tell you, shithead?” he said. “I said I didn’t want to see your ugly face anywhere in town again.”

  The man was considerably smaller than the cowboy was, yet he started to rise anyway. The woman reached across the table and grabbed his wrist, holding him in place.

  “Ya wanna do somethin’?” the cowboy said. “C’mon. I’m waitin’.”

  The woman tightened her grip.

  “See this, Paulie,” the cowboy said. “Shithead wants to be brave, but the bitch won’t let him.”

  Paulie grinned and shook his head as if he had seen it a hundred times before.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “Town bully.”

  “His name is Church,” Tracie said. “He’s been terrorizing people going back to high school.”

  “You put up with him—why?”

  “A couple of years ago a man challenged him, a rancher; slapped Church in public. The next day his house was burned down. My ex-husband told him off not long after I moved here. A week later, they burned his plane. Everyone knew it was Church, but nothing could be proved, and now everyone is afraid to stand up to him.”

  “Who are the vics?”

  “Vics?”

  “Victims.”

  “Rick and Cathy Danne. I don’t know what Church has against them except that the Dannes are nice people.”

  Jimmy moved quickly around the counter, putting himself between Church and the Dannes. “We don’t want no trouble,” he said.

  Church shoved him hard against the counter.

  “Ain’t gonna be no trouble, ol’ man, cuz shithead here is leavin’,” he said. “Ain
’t that right?”

  Again Danne tried to rise, and again the woman pulled him back down.

  “I’m done eating, honey,” she said. “C’mon, let’s go.”

  The man was thinking about it when Church knocked over awater glass, spilling the contents into the man’s lap. The man pushed away from the table, but the water had already soaked the crotch of his pants.

  “Lookee,” Church said. “He’s so scared he pissed himself.”

  Something happened to me then that I have a hard time explaining, even to myself. I slipped out of the booth and started closing the distance between the cowboy and me. The café was suddenly very quiet. I could hear the squeaking of my new sneakers on the floor, I could hear my lungs breathing in and out, I could even hear the throbbing in my head, but precious little else except the cowboy’s voice. I could hear that very clearly.

  “What do you want?” he said. There was contempt in his tone.

  I kept walking, my hands loose at my sides. I moved in close so I wouldn’t have to fully extend my arms. Church tried to back away. I matched him step for step.

  “What do you want?” he said again. This time I could hear a tinge of fear.

  He put his hands on my chest to push me away, but I knocked them aside.

  “Listen, shithead—”

  He raised his hands in self-defense, only it was already too late. I curled my fingers into a hammerfist and drove it at a forty-five-degree angle into a nice little pressure point positioned in the neck, just to the side of the windpipe and just above the collarbone. This is where the carotid sinus nerve lives. By attacking this point, I artificially triggered a carotid sinus reflex, basically tricking Church’s brain into thinking that there was too much blood pressure in the head and telling the heart to stop the supply of blood it was pumping. This should have caused Church to pass out. Only it didn’t.

  Church’s hands went to his throat, and he made a kind of gagging sound. His face became a sickly white, and his knees buckled, but he did not fall. I pivoted so I was standing behind him. I raised my foot and stomped down hard on the inside of his knee, driving his knee to the floor. At the same time I slapped his hat off his head with my left hand, grabbed a fistful of hair, and yanked his head backward until I could look directly down into his eyes. They held both confusion and terror—I doubt anyone had ever hurt him before. I drove the tip of my right elbow down against the bridge of his nose. The blood was flowing freely when I released his hair and he crumbled to the floor.

  I turned to his partner.

  “Hey, Paulie,” I said. “You want a piece of this?”

  He didn’t say if he did or didn’t, just stood there with his mouth hanging open. I took two steps toward him. His mouth closed, and he backed toward the door, ready to make a run for it into the bar.

  I glanced at the customers sitting in the booths and at the tables. “Does anyone want to help Mr. Church?”

  No one said a word. No one moved. I nudged Church with the toe of my sneaker.

  “This should tell you something about the kind of man you are,” I said, “but I doubt it will.”

  Church reached out a hand for the leg of a table as if he wanted to pull himself up. I stomped on it. An older woman sitting in the nearest booth heard the bones crack. She winced, closed her eyes, and clamped a hand over her mouth as if she were afraid she would vomit. Church howled with pain. He brought his hand near his face and stared at it through tear-filled eyes. I had done a lot of damage.

  “Oh no, oh no,” he chanted, his voice low and hoarse.

  I squatted next to him. I spoke softly. “You’re hurting right now, but soon you’ll be thinking what you can do to get back at me like you have at everyone else who’s stood up to you. Better put the thought out of your head. If anything happens to me or my property, if anything happens to anyone in this room or their property, especially the Dannes—I don’t care if we’re struck by lightning—I will come for you. Not the cops. Me.”

  I stood. Everyone in the café was staring. I had a feeling that at that moment they were more afraid of me than they had ever been of Church.

  “I cannot abide a bully,” I said.

  Probably I was smiling. All the stress and frustration and fear and confusion of the day had drained out of me. My headache had miraculously disappeared. I no longer felt vulnerable. Suddenly I was a manly man accomplishing manly feats in a manly way. It was exhilarating.

  “Anyone want to call Chief Gustafson, I’ll be sitting right back here.”

  I turned and made my way to the booth. Tracie was standing next to it and watching intently. She wore the same expression of disbelief as all the other customers.

  “Oh, my God, McKenzie,” she said. “My God. What you did to him. How could you do that to him?”

  “It’s easy if you know how.”

  “They’ll arrest you for this. They’ll put you in jail for real.”

  “I doubt it,” I said.

  I gazed around the café as I slid into the booth. I didn’t see anyone on a cell phone. Not even Paulie. He had managed to regain enough courage to help Church off the floor and ease him out of the front door. Paulie paused only long enough to shout in my direction, “You’re a dead man.”

  Like I hadn’t heard that before.

  Tracie reluctantly sat across from me.

  “McKenzie,” she said. That was all she said, but at least it was better than being called Rush again.

  A moment later, Jimmy was at the booth with two fresh drinks. “On the house,” he said. A party of four decided it was as good a time to leave as any. The two women smiled at me. One of the men gave me a nod of approval while the other looked straight ahead, seeing nothing, knowing nothing.

  “Word will spread,” I said to no one in particular. “Some stranger took Church down. People will become more confident. They’ll be more willing to stand up to him. If he pushes, they’ll push back.”

  Tracie continued to stare. Finally she said, “Well, I guess he had it coming.”

  “This town should have dealt with him long ago. Tell me about your ex-husband.”

  “He was brave, but he didn’t know how to fight. Not like you. McKenzie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Why did you do it?”

  I had been expecting the question, yet I hadn’t been able to form much of an answer. “I guess I had just seen enough bullying for one day.”

  Rick and Cathy Danne paid their tab, rose from the table, and headed for the door. Neither of them looked even remotely pleased. If Church ignored my warning and decided to retaliate, it probably would be against them.

  “Do me a favor,” I said. “The Dannes—keep an eye on them if you can. Let me know if anyone bothers them.”

  “Let you know—you’re leaving, then.”

  “I want a car outside the hotel at six tomorrow morning. A rental. Something I can return in the Twin Cities.”

  “I thought—I hoped—I’m disappointed in you, McKenzie.”

  “You wouldn’t be the first.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I had a long conversation with H. B. Sutton, my financial adviser, who assured me that my finances were unaffected by the Imposter’s use of my name, although she ran every check she could think of to make sure. She said I wasn’t a victim of identity theft so much as the credit card company was a victim of fraud, since the Imposter used my name yet nothing else that could be linked directly to me.

  I had an even longer conversation with the FBI, who seemed reluctant to drop the kidnapping investigation. They wanted to prosecute the bounty hunters as an example to all the other punks out there who like to play fast and loose with the law. I told them I was all in favor of that—they could arrest Dewey Miller, too, for that matter—as long as the cops were left out of it. This precipitated a somewhat acrimonious discussion over exactly who in hell I thought I was to dictate policy to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We decided to get back to each other at a later date.

&nbs
p; “You’re lucky they didn’t throw your sorry ass in jail,” Bobby Dunston told me.

  “Bobby,” Shelby said. She gestured with her head toward her children sitting at the picnic table.

  Katie giggled. Victoria rolled her eyes. “Mom, we go to a public school,” she said.

  I had known the girls their whole lives; I’d greeted them while they were still in the hospital and wearing tiny pink hats. I have worked tirelessly to spoil them ever since. So far I had been only moderately successful, largely because their mother would give me that look whenever I attempted to give them something expensive and wholly frivolous. It was more than enough, Shelby insisted, that I had made them my heirs. They were still both quite young, though. Katie was eleven, and Victoria was pushing fourteen. One of these days they were going to need cars.

  I buttered the corn on the cob that Bobby had roasted on the grill. The grill and picnic table were on a brick patio behind Bobby’s house in the Merriam Park neighborhood of St. Paul, the house Bobby grew up in, that he bought from his parents when they retired. It was just a stone’s throw from the house where I grew up, although I think I might have spent more time in Bobby’s home than I did my own. I had helped Bobby build the patio—brick by brick—and I was proud of it.

  “I’m surprised that the news media didn’t pick it up,” Nina said.

  Normally she and I wouldn’t get together on a Wednesday until after closing time, which was never a problem with me—one of the advantages of having a lot of money is that a guy can sleep in. She had taken the evening off for the Dunstons’ backyard barbecue. Lately she had been doing things like that with increasing frequency, abandoning Rickie’s to spend “normal” hours with me. I convinced myself it was solely because she had her jazz club humming like a well-oiled machine and didn’t need to be constantly on-site to work the controls.

  “If I were a pretty thirteen-year-old girl, the media would have been all over it,” I said.

  “I’ll say,” Victoria said.