My room was on the second floor. It was small and stylish with a soaring ceiling and black-and-white tiles in the bathroom. There was a double bed with a blue-green spread and a mattress that sagged slightly in the middle. The other furnishings were simple oak—a desk, a chair, an armoire, and a table in front of a window facing First Street. Inside the armoire was a TV that offered HBO; a phone sat on the desk.
I dropped the bags on the bed and went straight for the phone. There was something instantly comforting about it. It gave me a connection to the world—to my world—that the kidnappers had taken from me. Unfortunately, the feeling lasted only until I picked up the receiver and listened to the dial tone. I couldn’t remember the numbers of my friends, of the people I wanted to call. I hadn’t memorized them; I had seen no need. Instead, I programmed all the numbers into my cell or the phone hanging on the wall in my kitchen. When I wanted to make a call, I would just scroll through the memory for a name. Without my cell—I returned the receiver to the cradle. My headache became worse.
Still, there was directory assistance. The instructions attached to the base of the phone told me that local calls were free but that there was a surcharge for long distance. What the hell, I decided—Miller was paying for it. I dialed nine, followed by four-one-one. After a mechanical voice recited the number I requested, the telephone company announced that it would dial the number for a nominal fee. Fine with me. A moment later, I was connected to the Minneapolis office of the FBI, and a moment after that I reached Special Agent Brian Wilson.
“Hi, Harry,” I said.
“Jesus Christ, McKenzie, where are you? Are you all right?”
I knew he was concerned because he didn’t admonish me for using the nickname Harry, which he never approved of.
“I’m fine. I’m in Libbie, South Dakota,” I said.
“Why are you in Libbie, South Dakota?”
I explained. Harry interrupted several times, mostly to ask for names. Afterward, he told me that they had issued an alert in my name and that the FBI, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Investigation, the St. Anthony Police Department, and the St. Paul Police Department had launched a full-scale kidnapping investigation.
“Wow,” I said.
“Wow is fucking right,” Harry said. He demanded more names. I gave him what I had. He said heads would roll. I said as long as they didn’t belong to the Libbie Police Department, I didn’t care. He said, “Once a cop, always a cop.” I said, “We protect our own.” He said he wanted to speak to me—in person—as soon as possible. “There are people to see, paperwork to sign.” I told him I would be home soon.
“Have you spoken to Bobby yet?” Harry said.
“Not yet.”
“Give him a call. I know the St. Paul Police Department has put a lot of resources into this.”
“Really?”
“Kinda makes you feel important, doesn’t it?”
“A little bit, yeah.”
“Well, they don’t know you the way I do.”
Victoria Dunston answered the phone on the second ring. When she heard my voice she sighed deeply. Victoria had been kidnapped for ransom a year earlier, and while it all worked out in the end, it had been a traumatic experience for her—I doubted that she had fully recovered from it, or that she ever would.
“You okay?” I said.
“I’m fine. Are you okay?”
I told her I was just swell.
“I had a few tough moments,” she said. “You made me cry a little bit.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Somehow I knew it would be all right, though. Just like I knew it would be all right when they kidnapped me. God, McKenzie. Why do these things happen to us?”
“Just lucky, I guess.”
I heard voices on Victoria’s end of the phone. “McKenzie? Didyou say McKenzie? Are you talking to McKenzie?” There was a muffled sound as the receiver was wrestled away from the girl.
“McKenzie?”
“Hey, Shelby,” I said.
A moment later Bobby Dunston picked up a second receiver and called my name.
“Hey,” I said.
They both demanded a detailed explanation, especially Bobby—I had the feeling he was taking notes. Bobby was a commander in St. Paul’s newly minted major crimes division but wasn’t running the investigation into my disappearance because the department had claimed he was too close to the case. We had been friends since the beginning of time. I gave him everything I had told Harry, and then some. When he was satisfied, he said he had to make a few calls and left me on the line with his wife.
“Are you really all right, Rushmore?” she said.
I met Shelby three and a half minutes before her husband did, and often I have wondered what would’ve happened if I had been the one who spilled a drink on her.
“I really am, Shel,” I said. “A bit of a headache, some aches and pains, nothing more. I’m sorry if you were frightened, but it wasn’t my fault.”
“As opposed to all the other times you frightened me when it was your fault.”
“Exactly.”
She sighed deeply. It was the same sigh that Victoria had given me. Like mother, like daughter.
“I’ve given you and your family a few anxious moments over the years,” I said. “I apologize.”
“The good has always outweighed the bad.”
“Thank you for saying that.”
“What did Nina have to say about all this?”
“I haven’t spoken to her yet.”
That caused Shelby to pause for a few beats.
“You called me before you called her?” she said.
“No. I mean yes. I mean, I called—I knew Bobby would beworking the case…” This time I sighed. “Yes, I called you first.”
“Dammit, McKenzie.”
“What?”
“You’re supposed to call the woman you’re in love with first.”
“Sure.”
She paused again.
“Be safe, Rushmore,” she said. “Hurry home.”
Shelby hung up before I could say anything more.
Nina was not at the jazz club she owned near the cathedral in St. Paul, named Rickie’s after her daughter, Erica. Jenness, her assistant manager, said she had been too anxious to work. When I reached her at home, she shrieked my name so loudly I had to pull the receiver from my ear. After I assured her that I was “fit as a fiddle and ready for love,” she told me that everyone was looking for me, including Harry and the FBI. I told her that I would call them as soon as I was finished talking to her.
“You called me first?”
“You’re the only one that matters,” I said.
I believed it with all my heart when I said it. I admit that on occasion I allow myself to become confused. Yet all I have to do is see Nina or hear her voice and everything becomes perfectly clear to me. I see the world in its entirety, and it is exactly the way it should be.
I told Nina what had happened in detail, even confessed to how frightened I had become, which I had not admitted to anyone else. I told her that I was tempted to help the City of Libbie because I was angry that the Imposter had used my name. I also told her that the idea made me uneasy because I would be cut off from my resources, from Bobby and Harry and from her. Nina told me she would support any decision I made, although she wouldn’t have an untroubled moment until I returned safely to her. She was like that, supporting my crusades, as she called them, without entirely embracing them.
God, I love this woman, I told myself.
Then why did you call Shelby first? my inner voice said.
“I’ll be home as soon as I can,” I said.
“I’ll be waiting,” Nina told me.
After I shaved and showered, I stood naked in front of the bathroom mirror and fingered the puncture wounds in my shoulder and waist. The Taser marks seemed smaller now, yet they throbbed like first-degree burns. I would have liked some salve to soothe them, but all I had was aspirin tablets that I was starting to pop like M&M’s. They hadn’t done my headache any good at all.
I stared at my reflection.
“Screw Libbie, South Dakota,” I said aloud. “Screw the Imposter. Screw everyone.”
I finished dressing and peeked at my reflection yet again. For some reason I didn’t look like myself. Certainly I didn’t feel like myself.
“Go home, McKenzie,” I said.
The reflection nodded in agreement.
Sharren gave me a wolf whistle from behind the registration desk when I reached the lobby. She spoke in a low, husky voice that sounded as if a lifetime of talking had taken its toll.
“My, oh my, but don’t you clean up nice,” she said.
“Clothes make the man,” I said.
“I don’t know about that, Rush. I kinda liked what you were wearing before.”
“I’d rather you didn’t call me that—Rush. McKenzie is just fine.”
“Buy you a drink, big boy?”
I glanced up at the clock behind Sharren’s left shoulder. Even if I took my time, I would probably be about five minutes early to the café, and I couldn’t have that.
“Yes, you can buy me a drink,” I said. I didn’t mind at all that she called me “big boy.”
The star attraction of the Pioneer Hotel was its cathedral-like dining room with a huge stone fireplace. It was half filled, a good crowd for a Monday night, Sharren said. Heads turned to watch as she led me through the room, and there were whispers.
“News travels fast in a small town,” I said.
“Hmm?”
“Nothing.”
At the far end of the dining room was an ancient bar, the kind with a long, graceful mirror. A young man with sparkling eyes and a winning smile stood behind the stick. The way he ran his fingers through his blond hair made me think he knew how to get girls. On the other hand, the way his white dress shirt strained at the buttons made me think that if he didn’t start investing in some exercise, the girls wouldn’t stay gotten for long. He greeted us with two coasters that he quickly set in front of us and a prediction that we’d like it there.
“Evan, this is Rushmore McKenzie,” Sharren said. “McKenzie, this is Evan.”
“The one and only,” Evan said as he extended his hand. I didn’t know if he meant me or himself. “What’ll ya have?”
We ordered a double Jack Daniel’s for me and bourbon and water for Sharren. I took a long pull of the liquor. It burned all the way down to my empty stomach. I heard my inner voice say, You should eat something before you set to drinking. In a minute, I told it, and took another sip.
“So, what do you think of Libbie?” Evan said.
“It’s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live here.”
Neither of them thought my answer was particularly funny.
Sharren asked if I would mind taking our drinks back to the hotel lobby in case an errant traveler might seek lodging for the evening. I said that was fine. On the way out, I caught Evan giving Sharren a wink and the thumbs-up sign. Sharren responded by sticking out her tongue.
As we worked our way back through the dining room, Sharren told me about the swimming pool and sauna that were added in the early seventies and how people would often book rooms just to lounge around them, especially in winter.
“We added a water slide two years ago,” she said. “It’s become a big profit center for us.”
Once again, I noted the turned heads, whispered words, and more than a few twisted smiles as we walked past. This time, though, it occurred to me that I was only peripherally the object of curiosity. It was Sharren that the diners followed. I began to suspect that I wasn’t the first “big boy” Sharren had treated to drinks. I also wondered at what point her dalliances had become a spectator sport.
“Small towns,” I said.
“Tell me about it,” Sharren said.
Apparently this time she knew exactly what I meant.
I followed her to the lobby. We found a pair of overstuffed chairs with an uncluttered view of both the front door and the registration desk and settled in.
“Are you really going to try to find Rush—I mean—you know who I mean,” Sharren said.
“Do you care?”
“I wouldn’t mind seeing him get punished for what he did to the town.”
“What did he do to you?”
Sharren surprised me by smiling. She waved her glass at the arched doorway leading to the restaurant.
“You saw those people giving me the eye,” she said. “That’s what he did to me.”
“What do you know about him?”
“I know he used to be a cop in the Twin Cities and that he quit the force to collect a reward on an embezzler he tracked down—a couple of million dollars. I know he graduated with honors from the University of Minnesota, he speaks three languages, he’s single, and his parents are dead, that he has a big house in Falcon Heights…”
I took a long pull of the whiskey.
“That’s all you, isn’t it?” Sharren said.
“Yeah.”
“Sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry about. I like being me.”
“Yes, but him using your name like that—I’m sorry.”
“What else do you know about me?”
“I know you like sports. Do you like sports?”
“Yes.”
“You played hockey?”
I nodded.
“And baseball?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And football?”
“Football? No. He said I played football?”
“He said you lettered as a wide receiver and backup quarterback.”
“Did he say who I played for?”
“Central High School in St. Paul. He said you were a Raider.”
That caused me to lean back in my chair.
“You didn’t go to Central High School?” Sharren said.
“I did, yes. We were called the Minutemen.”
I bet you could catch him if you really wanted to, my inner voice told me. There are probably a thousand high schools in the U.S. with the nick name Raiders, yet if you could narrow it down … Stop it! You’re going home, remember?
The clock above the registration desk told me if I hurried, I would be only fifteen minutes late for my meeting with Tracie. I drained my drink and stood up. The pain in my head made me wince.
“Are you okay?” Sharren said.
“I need to get something to eat.”
“I’m off at ten, but I could stay later if…”
Sharren leaned forward. The front of her shirt fell away, as I’m sure she intended, and I could see the swell of her breasts encased in flimsy black nylon and lace. I forced myself to look away but could do nothing about the all too familiar stirring somewhere south of my belt. Will you never grow up? my inner voice asked. What are you talking about? I looked away, didn’t I?
“I don’t know when I’ll be back,” I said.
“If you’re having dinner with Tracie Blake, you won’t be out too late,” Sharren said. “So if you want to chat some more, we could have another drink. Or two.”
I knew an invitation when I heard one. Just in case I was brain dead, though, Sharren rose slowly from her chair, stepped in close, and rested her slender fingers on my shoulder at the base of my neck.
This is probably a good time to mention Nina, my inner voice told me. You remember her, don’t you? The love of your life? Only I didn’t want to get into it.
“Be careful,” I said. “People will talk.”
“People will talk anyway.”
I eased Sharren’s hand off my shoulder, gave it a friendly squeeze, and released it.
“I gotta go,” I said.
I stepped around Sharren and headed for the door.
“Have a good time,” she said.
“Don’t wait up,” I told her.
Café Rossini was located on the corner of First and Main, and it had two entrances. Enter from the west like I did and it looked like a neighborhood bar with plenty of worn wood and lights that discouraged reading. The entrance to the dining room was at the north end of the building, and I had to walk through the bar to get to it—you could not see the bar from the dining room.
Unlike the bar, the dining area looked like it had been built in the fifties—it was all stainless steel, Formica, and cold fluorescent lights. A long counter with a dozen round stools bolted to the floor faced the kitchen; slices of various fruit pies were set on small plates and displayed in clear plastic cases near the cash register. Each of the half-dozen booths against the wall had a metal napkin dispenser, bottles of ketchup and mustard, and shakers of salt and pepper. So did the small Formica tables arranged between them. Tinny, unrecognizable music poured from cheap speakers.
I found Tracie sitting in a booth nursing a glass of white zinfandel. The booth had a nice view—we could see the new concrete of Libbie’s main drag. When I mentioned it, Tracie told me that it took the contractor one full day to pour the concrete for a single block of First Street from curb to curb. Two cement trucks at a time would dump their loads into a machine that kept edging forward, leaving a smooth and leveled surface behind it. Tracie was not only proud of the street, she was proud that she and the Libbie City Council had the presence of mind to set up a table with coffee, lemonade, and donuts for the nearly three hundred people who stopped by throughout the day to watch the work.
“You’re wise to public relations,” I said.
“Not wise enough to hide the fact that I’m upset that you kept me waiting,” Tracie said. “Why are you so late? Was it Sharren?”
“The various law enforcement agencies that had been searching for me all day had many questions.”
That slowed her down. “What did you tell them?”
“The truth.”
“The truth?”
“It’s always a good idea to tell the truth, especially to the FBI. They get cranky when you don’t.”
“The FBI?”
“When the home security people answered my alarm this morning and found the door smashed open and me gone, who did you think they were going to call? The Boy Scouts of America?”
“I didn’t realize it was that big of a deal.”
“Ever hear of the Lindbergh Act?”
“McKenzie, are you going to press charges? Are you going to sue us?”
Probably not, I decided. I didn’t care what happened to Libbie, South Dakota, and I certainly had no love for Miller and his bounty hunters. Harry was right, though—I wasn’t a guy to take legal action against cops, and that’s what it would eventually amount to, me suing the Libbie Police Department. ’Course, I didn’t want Tracie to know that. At least not while I could use the threat to leverage a meal. I grabbed a menu from behind the napkin dispenser.
“What’s good?” I said.
“Rush was like that. Whenever someone asked a question he didn’t want to answer, he’d change the subject.”
“Did you spend much time with him?”
“Some.”
Tracie glanced casually across the restaurant toward the front door. Of course, she had slept with him. She didn’t need to say it; I could see the words written on her face.
My, my, my, my inner voice chanted. He did get along, didn’t he? If what Miller had said earlier was true, the Imposter had bedded at least three attractive women using my name. I discovered that I was more than a little jealous.
“Tracie, what are you doing here?” I said. “How the hell did you end up in Libbie, South Dakota?”
“You make it sound like a Russian gulag.”
“There are those who’d agree with me.”
“Honestly, McKenzie, this is the only place I’ve been where I’ve felt completely at home, completely relaxed.”
“Mayberry.”
“Hardly that. Still … I don’t know, McKenzie. Either you like small-town life or you don’t. I like it.”
“Were you born here?”
“No, no. My ex-husband was. Christopher Kramme. He was from Libbie. I met him in Chicago. He was taking graduate courses in aeronautical engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He wanted to build airplanes. I didn’t discover until much later that he was more passionate about that than he was about me. Oh, well.”
“Were you a student?”
“I was a model. And an actress.”
I knew it, my inner voice said.
“Really?” I said.
“Not a supermodel by any means,” Tracie said. “I can’t complain, though. I worked steady. A lot of advertising work—catalogs, brochures, a lot of weekly supplements for department stores like Nordstrom’s, Macy’s, Value City. Some TV spots, too, some video work, plays. I acted in a couple of small theater productions doing Harvey, Agatha Christie’s Murder Is Announced—I once played Typhoid Mary in A Plague of Angels. They made me look thirty years older than I was. That was sobering. I read somewhere that the average career expectancy for a professional football player is something like four-point-four years. I bet it’s the same for models. Still, it was fun. Not as much money as you’d think, but a good time. People stopping me on Michigan Av and pointing at an outdoor board, my face twenty feet high, and saying, ‘Is that you?’ What a rush.”
Tracie took a long sip from her drink before continuing.
“Anyway, we lived in the same apartment building. At least once a week Christopher would come to my door carrying a pitcher of strawberry margaritas, and we’d sit on my balcony and get pleasantly stoned. Not once did he make a pass. Whenever the evening would start to take a romantic turn, he’d glance at his watch, jump up, and say, ‘Gotta go.’ For the longest time I thought he was gay. Then I discovered he was a member of an entirely different minority group.”
“What’s that?”
“He was a gentleman.”
“Ahh.”
“We finally went out on a real date—I had to ask him—and we just hit it off. He proposed, I accepted, and suddenly I was packing to go to Libbie to meet his parents. Unfortunately, his father died at the same time. Heart attack. He was only sixty-one. They say he was a great guy. They also say that it was the shock of his son settling down that killed him. They were wealthy people, the Krammes, and Christopher took advantage of that. Never held a job. Never wanted one. All he wanted to do was build and fly his airplanes, which he never actually did—build them, I mean.”
“What happened to him?”
“Christopher? He went to prison.”
“What?”
“The Feds got him. What happened, one day he jumped into his plane and flew off. The next day he called me. They had arrested him at the airport in a rinky-dink town called Mineral Point in Wisconsin. The Feds got an anonymous tip and asked the sheriff’s department to detain him. Turned out Christopher had a hundred and fifty pounds of high-grade marijuana squirreled away in compartments in his plane worth something like seven hundred thousand dollars. Christopher never explained where he got the dope, or where he was taking it, or why he landed in Mineral Point, or who ratted him out. At least not to me.”
“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.”