Ryan Hayes worked for one of those big-box chain stores that sold everything you could possibly need to take care of your house and yard, which kind of threw me. He had spent the last twenty-two years of his life in federal custody. I wouldn’t think he’d have much experience with landscaping, carpentry, or plumbing. If someone asked him for a thingamajig to attach the whatchamacallit to the doohickey beneath the kitchen sink, how would he know what to tell them?
I found him in the millwork aisle. I didn’t know what millwork was, although the doors, molding, trim, wall panels, and flooring suggested that it had something to do with wood.
He turned to face me. Hayes was about five years younger than I was, but he could have easily passed for ten, maybe even fifteen. He was wearing a cheerful smile, an orange apron, and a Santa hat. His name tag was on one side of the apron, and a button proclaiming that he was Employee of the Month was pinned to the other.
“How can I help you?” he asked.
“I’m McKenzie.”
I didn’t know what I was expecting. Fear? Anger? Indifference? What Hayes gave me instead was an even brighter smile.
“I thought you’d be taller,” he said.
“I thought you’d look older.”
“Nah. In prison you have regular meals, regular exercise, a good night’s sleep, free medical care, a general lack of stress—it does a body good.”
“I’ll have to take your word for that.”
“’Course, I’m talking about federal prison. I have no idea what goes on in those state shitholes.”
“I hear you’re looking for me,” I said.
“Why would I do that?”
“I can think of 654,321 reasons.”
“Do you believe in ghosts, McKenzie? Do you really believe the old man would come from the grave to pay that kind of coin to zero you out?”
“I don’t know what to believe.”
“You’re here, so you must believe somethin’.”
“Mostly I’m here to find out what you believe.”
“I owe you one, McKenzie, so tell you what. There’s a snack bar towards the front of the store. Why don’t you meet me…” Hayes looked at the silver watch around his wrist. “Thirty-five minutes? Is that too long a wait?”
“No. I’m fine.”
“You might want to take a look over in electrical. We’re having a sale on all of our light bulbs, including the ones that your computer can turn on or off. Brighten up your life, McKenzie.”
I gave him a nod and walked away.
Now you know how he got to be Employee of the Month, my inner voice told me.
I killed some time wandering through the store. It had so many “perfect” Christmas gifts for sale that I began to reevaluate the meaning of the word. Plus the music; one Christmas song after another played over invisible speakers. It made me want to run out into the cold. On the other hand, it also reminded me that I still had plenty of shopping to do. What could I get Nina that was better than a brick of nickels? Two bricks?
Eventually I wandered over to the snack bar. It sold what you’d expect: hot dogs, Polish sausages, popcorn, chips, candy, coffee, soft drinks, ice cream bars and cones. I bought a small bag of popcorn and sat on a metal chair next to a round metal bistro table like the kind you could buy in the store’s outdoor furniture department. Five minutes passed before Hayes appeared. He gave me a wave and went to the snack bar. A couple minutes later, he sat across from me. He had a paper boat filled with a Polish sausage in a bun with mustard, ketchup, and relish, a bag of barbecue potato chips, and a black coffee.
“In prison, all of the meals are nutritionally balanced,” Hayes told me. “The first time I ate fast food, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. But after eating it for a solid week or so I thought I really would die. It made me feel sick and lazy. Just wasn’t used to it, I guess. All that sugar and salt. I had to go back to the diet I’ve known for the past twenty years. Every once in a while, though…”
Hayes took a bite of the Polish sausage and hummed almost exactly the way the alpacas had hummed at me the night before.
“Other stuff,” Hayes said. “I have no taste for pop, Coke, Pepsi, whatever. Those energy drinks, too—they just zap me, man. It’s all just too damn sweet. And alcohol—I drank two beers the day I got outta the joint and threw ’em both up. I suppose I could develop a taste for it, but what’s the point? Really, the only thing I can drink is coffee. Black coffee, too. I can’t doctor it up like they do in all those coffeehouses, Starbucks and Caribou and Dunn Brothers and—I can’t believe there are so many coffee shops. How the hell do they all stay in business? In them Hallmark movies, the coffeehouses are always about to go out of business till the women who own ’em find the men of their dreams and they work together to save ’em, you know? Coffeehouses and bookstores.”
“You watch the Hallmark Channel?” I asked.
“Not when I was at Big Sandy. That was all community TVs, and I watched whatever the other inmates watched; didn’t say a word about switchin’ no channels, either. You learn to pick your battles inside, and I sure as hell wasn’t gonna fight over Law & Order: SVU, you know?
“In Sandstone, I was able to watch TV in the cell; forty channels, man. I bought myself a thirteen-inch flat-screen from the commissary for $200; paid for it outta my wages working maintenance, forty cents an hour. That’s how I got the experience for this job. Whaddaya think, McKenzie? On the Hallmark Channel, even the villains are nice people. Think it’s like that in the real world?”
“No.”
“I learned that in a hurry. Gotta tell ya, though, gotta tell ya—if you’re nice to most people, mostly they’ll be nice to you. Am I talking too much, McKenzie? I’ve been told that I have a tendency to talk way too much.”
“I don’t mind.”
“Lot of people do. They don’t wanna hear the sound of someone else’s voice when they can hear their own, you know? So what do you want to talk about? My old man, who came to me when I went to see the psychic? Hannah Braaten? Man, I’ve never seen anyone as beautiful as her. Growin’ up in prison, I thought women like that only existed on TV, you know? Somethin’ created by the special effects guys. I had sex only once before I went inside, and she was pretty but not that pretty. I didn’t get laid again until—I hired a prostitute after I got out. She wasn’t as pretty, either.”
“Why did you go to see Hannah?” I asked.
“There was this woman I met, nice woman; met her after my thing with the prostitute. She heard about this Hannah Braaten and said we should go, kinda like a date, and I said sure because, well, a date. Then I fucked it up, grabbing Hannah like that and yelling. Shoving that guy. I don’t know what I was thinking, what came over me. Never done anything like that, not even when I was inside. It was like I was possessed. Do you believe in possession? Anyway, the woman … I don’t blame her for telling me to get lost.
“Then I did it again when I went to see the other psychic, the young one. She was pretty, too, but real, you know? Not like Hannah. And I lost it. Well, I didn’t lose it; I didn’t start screamin’ like I did the first time. But I was rude to her, tellin’ her to fuck the money, like who gives a shit, really? It’s the fucking old man being an asshole. I don’t give a shit about him. I didn’t go to the psychics to see him, anyway. I wanted—you want to know the truth, McKenzie? When the woman suggested going to see a psychic, my first thought was that this was a chance to talk to my mom.
“All I really know of the world is what I’ve seen on television, ’kay? I watched all them shows about psychics talkin’ to the dead—the woman on Long Island and the kid in Hollywood and the guy drivin’ the taxi and the other woman, the big woman, I don’t know where she lives. Saw the paranormal shows on TLC and Destination America and the Travel Channel. The Travel Channel, no kidding, like they’re expecting people to visit all those haunted houses when they go on vacation or something. I believe it, too, you know? I mean, they can’t be making up all of this stuff, can they? So when the woman mentioned seeing a psychic, I thought maybe I could talk to Mom.”
“I get that,” I said.
“Do you?”
“I’d like to talk to my mother, too. She left me when I was twelve, just like yours.”
“Did she leave you with a sadistic sonuvabitch who spent the rest of his life fucking up yours?”
“No.”
“Well, then we don’t have as much in common as you think. My mom, all I had of her was a single photograph that I kept hidden beneath the floorboards of this shed we had out back where I’d go to hide from the old man, which was stupid because that was like the first place he’d look when he wanted to give me a beating. He’d find me, but I made sure he never found the photograph. I knew he’d tear it up or something if he did.
“I’ll tell you, McKenzie. The reason I’m even here talking to you is because I figure I owe you one for putting a round in that bastard’s head. The best thing that ever happened to me. That piece of shit—the only person I’ve ever hated. Except for maybe that prick judge who put a seventeen-year-old kid in prison for twenty-five years and one month for somethin’ his fucking old man made him do. Ahh, you can’t dwell on it. Can’t dwell on it. Gotta move forward.”
“Speaking of which…”
“Speaking of which, what exactly do you want, McKenzie?”
“First, I’d like to know that you’re not going to shoot me for the reward your old man offered.”
“What the cops wanted t’ know, too. Did I shoot some guy named Fogelberg thinking it was you cuz I wanted to collect a reward from a dead man? Whaddaya say to a question like that?”
“What did you say?”
“I asked ’em when the murder took place, and then I showed ’em my time card to prove that I was here when it happened. Got the boss to vouch for me, too, which was hard cuz then I had t’ explain what was going on, all the time wondering if I was going to lose my job because, you know, cops comin’ here thinkin’ I’m a person of interest every time somethin’ goes down, the boss ain’t gonna like that. He was cool, though.
“McKenzie, I’m not a criminal. I know that asshole judge slapped the word across my forehead and stuck me inside, but tellin’ the truth, man, I never hurt anyone in my life, except for maybe that guy I shoved at the reading, and I’m really sorry ’bout that. That’s why I went to that thing yesterday, that fair, and told Hannah I was sorry. I ain’t my old man, ’kay?”
“You went to see Hannah?”
“I didn’t want her t’ think I was this raving lunatic, you know? She was cool about it, though. Friendly. Way friendlier than I thought she’d be. What else do you wanna know?”
“I’m thinking about going after the money,” I said. “If I find it, it’ll take the incentive out of shooting me. Want to help?”
Ryan chuckled. “That’s what Hannah wanted, too; probably why she was so friendly,” he said. “She wanted me to help her find the money. I nearly said yes because—have you seen Hannah? I mean seen her up close?”
“Yes.”
“Wow.”
Wow, indeed, my inner voice said.
“But you know what?” Ryan said. “I haven’t thought about the money once in all these years. Why would I?”
“It would give you a nice start on the rest of your life.”
“No, man. What I told Hannah, it would just chain me to the past, you know? Besides, even if I did know where it was and went out and dug it up, I couldn’t keep it. If I tried, they’d toss my ass back inside. You’re not allowed to profit from your crimes, McKenzie. Don’t you know that?”
“What if I found a way around the statute?”
“A legal way?” Ryan asked.
“Yes.”
“I don’t know, man. I gotta think this would only dig up a load of bad shit for me, you know?”
“Worse than your old man calling your number from the grave—one one eight eight zero zero four one?”
“That’s another thing. All this is based on the idea that the ghost of my old man is speakin’ from the other side and that he’s tellin’ the truth, which he’d never done once when he was alive. I still have a hard time believin’ it even after goin’ to the second psychic to get, you know, confirmation. I just wanna forget the whole thing. Gotta move on, man, like I said.”
Another employee wearing an orange apron walked up next to our table. He was about thirty with Hispanic features and looked as if he spent a lot of time outdoors even in the winter. His name tag read ROGER.
“There you are,” he said.
Ryan looked quickly at his watch. “Am I takin’ too long a break?” he asked.
“No, no.” Roger set a hand on Ryan’s shoulder. “No, God, take as long as you want. If everyone was as conscientious as you my job would be a breeze.”
“If there’s somethin’ that you need…”
“I need you to move a display, no problem. It can keep.” He offered his hand. “Roger Flores.”
I shook his hand.
“McKenzie,” I said.
“Yeah, yeah, boss, this is the McKenzie I told you about,” Ryan said.
Roger’s face lit up as if he’d just discovered that the Tooth Fairy was real after all. “No kidding,” he said.
“Listen, I gotta get back to work,” Ryan said.
“No hurry, kid,” Roger said.
“I’ve already wasted too much time.” Ryan stood and gathered up the remains of his snack. “Good t’ see you, McKenzie. You take care.”
“If I find a way for you to keep the money…?”
He waved at me. “I don’t want it,” he said.
I stood abruptly and reached into my pocket. Ryan waited while I withdrew a card with my name and cell phone number. I offered the card and he took it.
“If you change your mind or if there’s anything I can do for you,” I said.
“Why would you do anything for me?”
“If you’re nice to most people, mostly they’ll be nice to you—words to live by.”
Ryan waved the card at me in a kind of salute. A moment later, he deposited his debris in a waste can and disappeared deep into the store. I sat back down. Roger sat across from me.
“‘Kid,’” he said. “Ryan’s eight years older than I am and I call him kid. I suppose it’s because everything seems so new to him that he’s like a kid. The world today is way different from the one he knew when he was sent to prison a couple of decades ago. He’s still trying to figure out how computers work, smartphones. Heck, he just got a driver’s license last month. If you’re McKenzie, you know all about that.”
“A little,” I said.
“He told me about you and what happened to his father and all that nonsense with the psychics. Ryan’s not very good at keeping secrets. You’d think he would be after spending all that time behind bars. In prison, he said, you don’t talk to anyone about anything. Out here, all he wants to do is jabber. He won’t talk about prison, what happened to him in there. He’ll talk about everything else, though. What he had for dinner last night. I can see that.”
“Still…”
“Yeah, probably not the best thing. He’ll grow out of it. Listen to me—he’ll grow out of it. Like he really is a kid. So, you’re McKenzie.”
“I am.”
“None of my business, but you mentioned money. Are you talking about the money Ryan’s father stole?”
“If Ryan told you what’s been happening, then you should know, it is not about the money. Rather it’s about what some people might try to do to get the money.”
“Ryan’s a good kid. He’s trying to get past all that. I wish you’d let him.”
“Unfortunately, it’s not just me. There seems to be a growing movement toward finding all that cash. Others might want to see if Ryan is interested in joining it. Just so you know.”
“All right.”
“He looks like he’s doing okay.”
“My wife keeps trying to line up women for him, but I don’t know. Can you imagine being thirty-eight years old and having been on a grand total of three dates?”
“It’s nice of you to look out for him.”
Roger shrugged the way some people do when you congratulate them on being decent human beings, like it was no big deal. But it was.
“Good-bye, Roger,” I said. “Thanks for your time.”
A few moments later, I was in the parking lot and walking to my Mustang. Out of my peripheral vision I noticed a man moving quickly on an intercept course. It was twenty-two degrees and cloudy, yet his jacket was unzipped and he wasn’t wearing a hat or gloves. That suggested he just threw on his coat when he saw me.
Had he been waiting in a car or the store? my inner voice wanted to know.
He couldn’t have followed me, I decided. I had checked my car for a GPS transmitter before I left the condominium and was extra careful ensuring that I wasn’t being tailed. Which meant he had been sitting on Ryan or …
The man reached me just as I reached the Mustang. I quickly raised my hand, a cop stopping traffic. He stopped and stared.
Amateur.
“If you’re a friend of Ryan’s you have no problem with me,” I said. “Just ask him. If you’re not a friend you should walk away right now, because I’m feeling a little cranky.”
He smirked and moved forward. His hand dipped into his coat pocket.
“You think you’re so fucking smart,” he said.
I pulled the fingers of my right hand back and tucked in the thumb, preparing for what the karate guys call Shotei Uchi. As soon as he was within striking distance I drove the heel of my palm hard under his nose, knocking his head back. The blow wasn’t necessarily meant to break his nose, but a cracking of cartilage suggested that I might have. He staggered and brought both hands up. He took two steps backward and sat on the dry pavement. Blood began spilling between his fingers.
“What are you doing?” he wanted to know.
“What are you doing?”
I stepped next to him and reached into his jacket pocket. Instead of a gun, I found a thin wallet. I opened the wallet. It contained a gold coplike badge with the word DETECTIVE embossed on it and a laminated card with a name, address, photograph, physical description, and the words PRIVATE printed across the top and INVESTIGATOR across the bottom in block letters reversed out of black bars.
“Karl J. Anderson, Private Investigator,” I said. “Why are you following me?”
Anderson pinched the soft part of his nose just above his nostrils and tilted his head forward so the blood would drain through his nose and not down the back of his throat. Breathing through his mouth made him sound like he had just finished a race.
“I’m not,” he said.
“Maybe not this time, but before.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“That wasn’t you following the Braatens all the way from the Minnetonka Community Education Center in Excelsior last Thursday? That wasn’t you waiting for me outside Gracie’s Power Academy Friday? C’mon.”
Anderson didn’t have an answer for that.
“Esti Braaten told me that you were stalking her daughter,” I said.
Anderson tilted his head toward me and lowered it back down again.
“If she said so, it must be true,” he said.
I nudged his leg with the toe of my shoe.
“C’mon, Karl,” I said. “May I call you Karl?”
“May I call you asshole?”
“You should have identified yourself before you put your hand in your pocket.”
“You’ve got a point. Look, Esti wanted me to keep an eye on Hannah from a distance. She was worried because of what happened with Ryan Hayes, but she didn’t want her daughter to worry. Afterward, she asked me to check you out. She wanted to know if you were going to be a sail or an anchor.”
“Sail or anchor?”
“Words she used.”
“For what?” I asked.
“To find the money.”
“What money?”
“I can’t believe I let someone so dumb get the jump on me.”
“Yeah, okay, the money that Leland Hayes stole. Why do they want to find it?”
“Guess.”
“So they can give it back in front of every TV camera they can find.”
“Was that so hard?”
“You’re starting to annoy me, Karl.”
“You have no idea how upset that makes me.”
“When did the Braatens hire you?”
“None of your business.”
“C’mon.” I nudged him with my toe again. “Let’s be friends.”
“With friends like you…”
“Partners, then, to go after the money.”
Anderson tilted his head again to look up at me. “Did Ryan tell you something?” he asked.
“He told me a lot of things; said he owed me for shooting his old man.”
Anderson lowered his head again.
“When did the Braatens hire you?” I asked again.
“I met them for the first time last Monday.”
The day before the reading that Shelby attended, my inner voice reminded me. Before Leland Hayes made his appearance.
“Did you tag my Mustang with a GPS transmitter?” I asked.
“The St. Paul cops asked me the same question. I didn’t give them a straight answer either. McKenzie, I had nothing to do with what happened to Frank Fogelberg. As soon as I realized that I was tailing a silver Lexus, I knew you pulled a fast one and I let it go.”
“Can you prove it?”
“I already have, to that female homicide dick—what was her name?”
“Jean Shipman.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Anderson said. “A real ballbuster, but I like her.”
“I can’t imagine why.”
“She’s smart. She’s pretty. She’s a good cop.”
“If you say so. Why are you here?”
“After Esti decided that you were an anchor, they asked me to sit on the kid, Ryan Hayes. They were hoping that he might have a brainstorm and go searching for the money or that someone might come looking for help in finding it. Imagine my surprise when you showed up.”
Anderson released his nose and snorted a couple of times. The blood stopped flowing. He slowly stood up. I could have helped him up but decided against it.
It’s not like we’re friends all of a sudden.
“This is where I warn you to stay out of it,” Anderson said.
See?
“Hannah and Esti came to me last night and asked for help,” I said.
“And you turned them down, so now you’re out of it. Stay out of it, McKenzie.”
“Since you asked so nicely…”
“Next time I won’t give you the benefit of a doubt.”
“Next time you had better not let me see you coming.”
Anderson stared at me.
I stared back.
“We’re having some fun now, aren’t we?” I asked.
“Shut up.”
Anderson turned around and walked off. I watched him go. Once I became bored, I slid inside my Mustang and started it up.
Now what? my inner voice wanted to know.
I made a hands-free phone call even though I hadn’t left the parking lot yet.
A man’s voice said, “Special Agent Brian Wilson.”
“Harry,” I said. “About those Minnesota Wild tickets I mentioned…”