It was a slightly overcast afternoon. The trees’ fall colors had become impossibly brighter and, with a cool and persistent breeze, large white caps formed on Lake Michigan.
The four of us made our way to downtown Traverse City. The narrow streets were crowded with fall vacationers and color-tour sightseers eager to spend their money on gooey fudge, cherry-flavored anything and sundry trinkets and trash that had traverse city emblazoned across them. Japanese tourists were always the most fun to watch. They seemed unabashed in their enjoyment of all things Traverse City, from cherry-shaped snow globes to X-rated dolls with cherries for testicles.
Traverse City had always been a beautiful place, but the last thirty or so years had proven to be a real boon for this Northern Michigan town: Emerald-green golf courses, luxury condos and boat clubs, pricey restaurants and upscale retail shops. Multimillion-dollar log cabins hugged the Lake Michigan shoreline. Any one of them would have left Abraham Lincoln speechless.
Traverse City in the fall was to Michigan what Cape Cod in the summer was to Massachusetts: Faux-quaint, crowded, and frantic. An indisputable fact of Traverse City was that increased tourism and the nouveaux riches had been good for the local police: More traffic tickets. More boating tickets. More bail money from drunk-and-disorderlies. More property taxes. Money that could be put to serious use ferreting out the numerous meth labs that continued to pop up in the surrounding backwoods like toadstools after a hard rain.
The four of us went to the Me & Us Cafe, a little Greek restaurant on Front Street near the water. It wasn’t the type of eatery that a “foodie” would acknowledge in a masturbatory food blog. But the food was good, the atmosphere friendly and the big-screen TVs were broadcasting a roundtable postmortem on the Tigers’ season.
Greek food and American baseball. What else could one hope for?
I was surprised Vivian and Colleen suggested the place since they were vegetarians and the aroma of slowly roasting lamb was inescapable. But they were convinced Frank and I were suffering from “meat withdrawal.”
“And besides,” Vivian said, “they have the best veggie stuffed peppers and Spanakopita around. Plus we can watch the Red Wings!”
My astonishment apparently showed.
Colleen shrugged. “Don’t look at me. I’m a hockey fan only by association. My game’s football. Go Lions.”
Frank and I ate our fill of lamb gyros and fries. Colleen had a bowl of the lemon-rice soup and a small Greek salad with extra pepperoncini. Vivian surprised us all by making short work of her Spanakopita and stuffed veggie peppers. I guess watercolor painting takes it out of a person.
None of us had booze.
At about five the sun had lost its silver sheen and was starting to sink into the Lake Michigan horizon. We needed to get back to the house. First, though, we stopped at a hardware store. I bought a package of twelve light bulbs, lighter fluid, dish soap and utility rags.
“What’s this for?” Vivian said.
I started to answer, but Colleen beat me to it.
“Sticky bombs,” she said. “A poor man’s grenade. Unscrew the bottom of the light bulb, pour in some dish soap and lighter fluid, screw the bottom back on. You could screw it into a socket; flipping a light switch would explode it. You can also wrap half the bulb in a rag strip that has some lighter fluid on it. Light the rag, throw it against something—the bulb shatters and boom.”
“Why the dish soap?”
“So the fire sticks to whatever the bulb shatters against,” Colleen said. She gave Vivian a quick kiss. “The product of a misspent youth, baby.”
“They won’t do much damage,” I added. “But they’re a helluva distraction.”
“Mmmm. You’re so dangerous,” Vivian said, snuggling closer to Colleen.
“Kids, kids, kids,” I said. “What say we focus on the job ahead, awright?”
Near their house, Colleen got a phone call: the night manager at the Ramada on I-31 east of 3 Mile Road North. Two men had just checked in carrying identical black duffle bags. When the manager asked them in her friendly front desk way what brought them to Traverse City, they both hesitated. Finally one of the men said, “Golf.”
Colleen turned on the speaker of her phone and we listened.
“You know me,” her front desk friend said. “I like talkin’ to people. And Lord knows, golfers they loves talkin’ ’bout golf! These guys? Not a smile between ’em. Might as well been headin’ to a funeral. So I ask ’em, I says, ‘Where you fellas golfin’? The Legend, the Bear, Coogan’s Bluff?’ One of ’em, he says, ‘Last one.’ You know as well as me, Colleen—there ain’t no damned Coogan’s Bluff! That’s the name of an old Clint Eastwood movie! Plus, these fellas—well, they just give me the creepin’ willies if’n ya know what I mean.”
They paid for two nights.
Cash.
I would have said two’s not bad until Colleen got a second call, this time from the Lakeside Motel on I-72 near I-31: Two men, same deal. It was pretty much the same story from the other hotel. Two nights, cash.
Brewster’s men knew that Frank and I were there. I had to assume. Why else a four-man team to take out a watercolor artist and her companion? Then again, Brewster had gotten sloppy by killing Ray Danbury. It was an emotional action. And emotions were dangerous in the game he was running. This time it would be cold, calculated and clean: two women who disappeared in the night. Until, that is, Brewster handed me an ear, an eye, a finger—or worse.
Once inside the house, I stopped Vivian by the door, gave her a hard look and said in a low voice, “Are you ready for this?”
With a catch in her throat, Vivian uttered a barely audible, “Yes.”
Frank and I moved our cars into some low bushes at the southwest corner of the property. I unlocked the shed door and made sure the keys were in the ignition of Colleen’s old Ford pickup and the attached snow plow’s bottom edge was leveled waist high. Then we all sat at the kitchen table making sticky bombs. Colleen and I made the first four, demonstrating the art and science. We lost three bulbs—the metal contact ends were too tightly secured to the glass and the effort of unscrewing them shattered the bulbs. But the hard truth was if we needed more than nine stickies, then we weren’t coming out of this. At least not with all our pieces and parts.
Considering the fact that pitch black October nights dropped early and hard up here, I figured the four-man crew was well equipped with night vision goggles. Normally they wouldn’t need them; in Traverse City the wealthy year-round residents made sure you could admire their fabulous properties day and night thanks to extensive landscape lighting. At night, the houses shone like coveted jewels. Vivian and Colleen’s property was no different.
On my street in Mexicantown we were lucky to get eight streetlamps courtesy of a charity.
We turned off the external lighting but kept the juice flowing to the razor wire on the sunroom side of the house.
Darkness would be our ally.
Of course the key to any good plan is having other plans that have absolutely no association with the original plan.
Colleen made three calls: the sheriff’s department, the Staties and the local police. She told them several suspicious men had come into town. She gave them the motel locations where the men had registered. And she said she believed she and Vivian might be the targets of a robbery or worse. All three said they’d send men over as soon as possible, but every local cop seemed to be “busy.” Another meth lab bust. Nothing like Michigan wilderness for cooking meth.
“Just keep the lights on and doors locked,” the local police chief had suggested.
Exactly the opposite of our plan.
I made one last call to O’Donnell.
“You got a helicopter?” I said.
“Why?”
“Because in about an hour a ton of shit’s gonna hit a very small fan up here,” I said. “Your consultant guy’s got a team coming for Vivian Paget and her partner. If you’re lucky, you can get at least one Black Tree guy alive. Otherwise, we’ll be obligated to kill ’em all.”
O’Donnell cursed at me. It had taken every bit of good will and political capital she had to get the DPD to pull its APB on me. And now this. Against her better judgment she also had pulled several warrants for the bank. They would be going in hot and heavy in a day or two.
“Earlier than I want,” O’Donnell said. “But you’ve kinda pushed the needle into the red zone.”
“You don’t go in the next forty-eight to seventy-two hours, you won’t have anything—including your job,” I said.
“Remember our deal, August,” she said.
“Signed in blood,” I said. “I’m going to hell for this.”
“We’re all going to hell on this one, August,” she said before disconnecting.
By eight o’clock it was, as my Grandpa Snow used to say, “blacker than a coalminer’s ass.” The only light in the house came from the pale grey disc of moon off Lake Michigan.
“You ever seen any of them Halloween movies?” Frank whispered to me.
“Can’t say I have,” I said.
“Yeah, well, I have,” Frank said. “This place looks all Halloween creepy in this light. It’s kinda cool.”
“Don’t freeze your ass off out there, Army,” I said.
He saluted, then, carrying the Remington Versa Max rifle, two handguns and his Rangers utility knife, exited the front door. He ran flat out for eighty yards until he disappeared into the undulating shadows of the woods.
The wind was up from the north, pushing down from Canada and carrying with it signs of a bone-chilling winter. Frank was right: in this light, the house was definitely creepy. The wind battering against the shutters didn’t help. And the fact that men were coming to kill us definitely darkened the mood.
Frank’s voice came in over the walkie-talkie. He was in position. Next was Colleen. I wished them luck and told them to stay sharp.
I made one last check on Vivian, upstairs in a locked bedroom. There was reasonable cover in the bedroom and only one window—a decorative round leaded glass window that would take an average man at least four seconds to squeeze through. Time enough to kill him and let his body plug the hole. I’d given her my Glock. I went over how to shoot the gun and what to do if the door to the room was breached. If the intruders made it to that room, then she was as good as dead, but I didn’t tell her that.
“Five minutes, tops,” I said to her, “and this will be all over.”
I started to leave the room to take my position when she said, “August?”
I turned back to her. “Yeah?”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” I said. “You remember the safe word, right?”
“Wet burrito.”
“That’s my girl.”
I closed the door behind me and listened for the click of the lock. I tried the door several times. It was secure.
For twenty minutes it was as quiet as a nun’s prayer. Aside from the wind buffeting against the house, the only sound was my breathing as I lay in the downstairs hallway facing the foyer and front door, stock of the Browning Citori 12-gauge snug against my shoulder, a walkie-talkie and my Smith & Wesson .32 on the floor next to me.
My phone vibrated.
I quickly extracted my phone from a pocket. The number was UNKNOWN.
“Hello?” I whispered.
“Mr. Snow?”
Brewster.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m kinda in the middle of something.”
“There’s still time to accept my offer,” he said. “But I would suspect very little time. Say, perhaps thirty seconds.”
“Listen,” I said. “Why don’t you call me back in about ten minutes. If I answer, you’ve lost. If I don’t, you’ve won.”
I hung up and shoved the phone back in my pocket.
“Moving, moving, moving,” Frank’s hushed voice said over the walkie-talkie. “Seven, August, seven! Two, front entrance. Three wide, north. Two, south side.”
Four men I was ready for. Four was a battle.
Seven was goddamn a war.
“Flush ’em out, Army.”
We’d been betting on a front breach of the house. Frank’s job was to come out of the forest shooting. The idea was to drive whatever he missed to the left toward the electrified barbed wire concealed in the bushes beneath the sunroom windows or right to Colleen’s shotgun. Any trouble coming through the front door got the barrel of my Browning.
Outside, a rifle exploded.
A second after the rifle fire, the front door of the house blasted off its hinges. A man in head-to-toe black tactical gear rushed into the house, his Street Sweeper automatic with suppressor leveled and ready.
I unloaded my Browning at him, center mass. He went back hard against the splintered door jam, but not before his weapon churned out enough rounds to chew up the hallway wall left of me.
Body armor. Otherwise the rifle I had would have shredded a man into hamburger at close quarters. But the blast had only knocked him off balance. He was hurt. But hurt wasn’t good enough.
He struggled to bring his Street Sweeper up at me.
A blast from my rifle and his head blossomed crimson.
“Splash one,” I heard Frank’s voice say over the walkie-talkie.
“Splash two,” I replied, moving quickly to the sunroom.
The party had begun.