Tunnel of Night Page 2

  All these things were on my mind that Saturday morning as I drove toward Lake Albert. Getting out of New York had gotten to be more than just a good idea; it was mandatory. I’ve never handled stress well, and I could feel it building to record levels. I had to get away, and I had to see my father. I felt that he had been avoiding me ever since Vermont, and I knew it would just get worse if we didn’t talk about it.

  I was about a half hour past Detroit when I saw the red strobe light in my rearview mirror. Since I wasn’t speeding, I decided that they were not after me. Then the Michigan State Police vehicle pulled alongside mine and the trooper motioned for me to pull over.

  I pulled off on the shoulder of the road and rolled down my window. The trooper walking toward me looked to be in his early twenties, with a face full of freckles.

  “What’s the problem, Officer?” I asked.

  “Is your name Lane Frank?”

  Something was wrong. Nobody except Pop and my boss, Captain Hanson, knew that I would be traveling that stretch of road that day. My cop-mode immediately kicked into high gear.

  I flashed my shield, climbed out of my car, and stared down at the cop’s sunglasses. “Trooper, I’m a homicide detective. Who notified you? What’s happened?”

  “We were asked to intercept you,” he said, appearing unnerved by my height—a shade over six feet tall.

  He pulled a paper from his pocket and read it before continuing. “Chief Semple wants you to come to City Hall, not to the house, when you arrive in Lake Albert.”

  Buck Semple was the chief of police in Lake Albert. He and Pop had been friends for years.

  “Buck? How’d he…”

  “There’s been an accident.”

  Oh, no. I’d been a cop long enough to know that “accident” can mean exactly that: a collision, or maybe a pratfall on broken pavement. But it’s just as likely to be a euphemism for death.

  “Where’s my father?”

  “I’m sorry. You’ll have to talk to Chief Semple about that.”

  Oh, my God. I slipped back into my car, hit the accelerator, and merged back onto the road. I don’t know why I was in such a hurry to hear the bad news that I was sure was waiting for me, but I pushed the speedometer up to eighty-five and kept it there.

  Why would Buck Semple send out an intercept order? It had to be bad. A heart attack? No. Pop’s heart was fine. Besides, the cop said “accident.” What could Pop do to himself splitting wood or fishing?

  A drowning? No. Pop was a great swimmer, and he knew every inch of that lake.

  I remembered a summer on the Cape when he taught me to swim. He was so patient—holding me in the water while I practiced the strokes he described, then letting me go, gradually, with me swallowing a little water, but exulting in the idea that I was doing it on my own.

  Whatever had happened, I knew that I had to get to Lake Albert fast.

  AS I PULLED INTO THE MUNICIPAL PARKING LOT in front of the converted church that served as Lake Albert’s City Hall, Buck Semple stood at the curb waiting for me.

  “He’s gonna be okay,” he said, his hands up, palms out, as if he expected me to come roaring out of the car at him.

  “What happened?” I asked, surprised by how composed I sounded.

  “He took a couple of superficial wounds from a hunting rifle. One creased his side, the other grazed his head. Local guy delivering cordwood found him. There was a lot of blood, but Doc Grissom says it looked worse than it was.”

  “A shooting? What? Who shot him?”

  “We don’t know that yet. That’s why I didn’t want you going out to the house. The shooter could still be prowling around out there.”

  “Where’s Pop?”

  “The county hospital.”

  “How do I get there?” I was already turning back toward my car.

  “I’ll drive,” Buck said. “It’ll probably take both of us to keep him from walking outta there. They’ve got him doped up, so he’s been drifting in and out of consciousness. He says he wants to go home.”

  When Buck told me that Pop had been shot, my first thought was that an overzealous hunter had mistaken him for a deer. Then I figured that some crazy had picked him at random—that it was one of those sicko things you see reported on CNN every day. “There’s no way that a lunatic with a gun hit Pop by chance,” I told Buck. “Not two shots.”

  “He fired three times,” Buck said. “Third shot cracked the patio. Lucas says the shooter was there to kill him. We’re treating it as an attempted homicide.”

  He pulled the car onto the country road and drove north.

  “He’s helped put away a lot of killers,” I said, already putting together a to-do list. “What about inmates who have escaped or been paroled?”

  “That’s in the works.”

  We drove along in silence for several minutes, the road signs, guardrails, and trees all a blur.

  “After I’ve seen Pop, I’ll want to see the house.”

  He turned and looked hard at me. “You can’t get involved in this, Lane.”

  I could feel the anger rising in me. “I’m already involved. He’s my father. I’m a cop.”

  Buck was getting heated, too. “I’ll take care of the investigation, Lane. You manage your father.”

  I didn’t say anything more. I knew better than to argue with Buck. But I did start organizing my own investigation in my mind.

  I WAS IN A COUNTY HOSPITAL IN UPSTATE MICHIGAN.

  As contact with reality washed over me, then departed, I was also a boy again, fishing the waters off Hull, Massachusetts. I was doped-up, flirting with the edges of consciousness. My sea breeze carried the pungent odor of disinfectant.

  I pushed a red pram from the sand into the shallow breakers of low tide, then climbed in, pulling the oars through the waves. A quarter mile. A half mile. The houses that lined Beach Avenue grew smaller. A mile.

  I didn’t bother with an anchor—just drifted—the currents and the wind pushing me first to the south, then north. I had no worries about being ripped to the east into the open sea. The currents were not that strong; the prevailing winds blew from the opposite direction.

  It was all so detailed. I knew I was there, and I knew I was not.

  The shallows ended, and the land was a thin stripe across the horizon. Ocean swells gently rocked the boat between two lines of lobster buoys.

  Armed with an ultralight spinning rod and a Mitchell 300 reel loaded with two-pound-test line, I tried a few casts with a mackerel jig, a slender silver lure designed to move through the water like a darting bait fish. I flipped out a short cast and had a hit immediately. The fish ran hard to the left, dove once, then yielded to the slow, steady pressure I exerted. I boated a slapping one-pound mackerel.

  A second and third fish followed in quick succession—all about the same size—when, without warning, the placid surface of the ocean rose to a boil. It had to be a big school. I had another one on, this time running right, when a second slam hit the line.

  The rod bent in half, and the bail screamed as line tore off the pool. The slender monofilament snapped.

  “What the hell was that?” I said out loud.

  I looked out at the water that was in constant turbulence now. With a chill, it hit me. The hunter had become the hunted. Bluefish, maniacal killing machines with razor-sharp teeth, were chasing and devouring the mackerel, just as the smaller predator went after the shiners.

  I popped off the spool of line, then snapped in one of eight-pound-test. I found a wire leader and a hook that looked about the right size. Then I took my fishing knife and cut a long, bloody slab from the side of a mackerel. I flipped the new rig and bait into the middle of the maelstrom and watched as it began a slow descent, pendulum fashion, through the clear water. This time the streak appeared from below. It looked gray, not silver, as I felt the smash on the line. I leaned back— setting the hook with several yanks on the rod and watching the blue run. Each time that I thought he was tiring, subdued, he
would take off again.

  By the time I had him beside the boat, my arms were weary, just about useless. I lowered a net under him as sweat ran in rivers down my neck. I had what I estimated to be about six pounds of blue, what the locals called a “chopper.”

  As I dragged him into the boat, the flat gray eyes of the fish seemed to look into mine. The mouth kept snapping, as if the blue were trying to wrap its teeth around my forearm. Then it did.

  I watched my blood flow down my arm.

  “This didn’t happen,” I shouted.

  I heard a voice saying, “Pop, leave it alone.”

  My eyes opened. Lane and I were struggling over the IV in my right arm. I was trying to pull it out.

  “Pop?”

  “Okay.”

  “Leave it alone.”

  “His teeth,” I explained.

  “You must have been dreaming.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You awake now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  And I didn’t. “There’s fog across my bow,” I said, starting to laugh, then stopping because it hurt.

  “Someone shot you, Pop.”

  There was an edge of urgency in my daughter’s voice. She was trying to tell me something that I needed to know. The fog cleared. The bow was gone. I wasn’t a child anymore. I was a fifty-five-year-old man stepping outside my back door with a towel in my hand, gazing at the flat calm of Lake Albert. Then I was watching blood pool on the tiles in front of my nose.

  “Someone shot me,” I parroted.

  “Right.”

  “Where am I?”

  “County hospital.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Just after midnight.”

  Everything faded, then snapped back into focus.

  “Lane?”

  “I’m here, Pop. I wish you were, too.”

  Then I did laugh. “I’m here. Shit. What am I on?”

  “Demerol.”

  My head was beginning to clear. “That explains my fishing trip. What a dream. Who shot me?”

  Lane shrugged and shook her head as she handed me a cup of ice chips.

  “Where’d I get hit? My side?”

  “Doc Grissom said it’s not nearly as bad as when Hinckley shot Reagan. The shooter also grazed the side of your head. You were moving.”

  “Wait. I remember,” I said, wishing that I had a plain old glass of water. “The sunlight reflected off the rifle scope.”

  I could see the flash of light, feel the damp towel in my hand, see the man casually lower his rifle into firing position. The bastard knew exactly what he was doing. “He was trying to kill me.”

  I also remembered the crazy thoughts that were going through my head—the words to a song that I hadn’t heard in years, Chester Arthur Burnett’s “Killing Floor.” Weird.

  “He was up in the field by the fence line. Has Buck been in?”

  “He dropped me here. You must’ve been conscious enough to tell him I’d be staying in Toledo. He had the state highway cops stop me. Last I heard, he was still up at the house. He called once.”

  “Did anyone let Janet know?”

  Lane and Janet Orr had met only once. The two of them seemed to get along, but I sensed an uneasiness. Savvy and I have remained married despite the years and the thousands of miles between us. I think Lane has never stopped hoping that well work it out—get back together—and I think she assumed that there was more to Janet’s and my relationship than there was.

  “I haven’t seen her,” Lane said. “I don’t know if Buck called her. Couple of other people have been in. Chuck Logan’s wife brought the flowers.”

  I glanced at the wildflower arrangement on the table to my right. “How long do I have to stay wired up here?”

  “Pop…”

  “With the drugs they’re pumping into me, I doubt that I’ll stay awake long. Let’s get this worked out. Besides comparing me to a B-movie actor, what did the doctor say?”

  “She says she wants you on your feet first thing in the morning. And maybe …”

  “Provided there are no complications,” I said, well aware of the drill.

  “Provided there are no complications, you can go home in a day or two.”

  “Insurance company probably told her to get my ass out of here. That’s fine. I don’t much care for the steel and vinyl ambience. Does Buck know that this was no accident?”

  “You told him that. He said he was treating it as an attempted murder.”

  “Sounds like you’ll live,” Buck Semple said as he walked through the doorway.

  Semple had put in twenty-five years with the Massachusetts State Police, retired, then took the job as Chief at the Lake Albert PD—a three-person operation (two of them part-time). Despite my tenure in the Boston area, Buck and I never crossed paths back there. He’s a tall, slender man with a 1950s crew cut—one of those cops who have law enforcement in their blood. Over the years, he had been out to the house a couple of times, asking me to help unravel a series of sexual assaults and one particularly nasty homicide. On my twice-monthly trips into the village, Buck and I usually had lunch at the Lake Albert Diner.

  “It wasn’t a good day to die,” I muttered.

  I remember reading somewhere, many years ago, that a Native American tribal chief—maybe it was Crazy Horse—said that any day was a good day to die. It was a way of showing respect for life.

  “Doc tells me you’re gonna be sore for a while,” Buck said. “You were lucky.”

  “Uh huh. Find anything out there?”

  “I can point to the matted grass where he walked down from the fence, and the place where he stood and waited. That’s about it. I tried to follow his path back toward North Road, but the guy knows the woods. He didn’t leave much of a trace trail.”

  Lane said something, but I didn’t hear it. I was drifting off—not to sleep, but to a place that my mind often visits. A compartment that is both open and confined, filled with chaos and control.

  Paradox. The blood of my life.

  I was groggy, and losing it, struggling to grab hold of what had happened. Why was I here? My mind slammed against a desolate reality that made no sense.

  It was beginning.

  That’s what my dream about the bluefish had been telling me.

  The hunter had become the hunted. It was a terrible feeling.

  WHEN POP AWAKENED, HE ASKED, “WHERE’D Buck go?”

  “That was hours ago, Pop.”

  Pop looked and sounded irritated. “Usually, I don’t mind not knowing what day or time it is. Right now it’s pissing me off. I want to get back out to the lake. Buck’s a good guy and a decent cop, but I have to get a look at this myself.”

  “Last thing he said was that I should stay the hell out of the investigation. That’s the second time he’s warned me, Pop. Anyway, how do you know the shooter won’t come back and finish his business with you?”

  “I don’t know anything right now.”

  I left it at that. Pop and I were both frustrated, and nobody knew anything at the moment. It was time to start finding out a few things.

  I caught a ride with a nurse who was headed into Lake Albert Village. I retrieved my car from the municipal lot, then drove along the south side of the lake, past the marina, until I found a motel—Paul’s Lakeside. The place was a collection of separate cabins, each one with its own small beach, tucked into stands of pine for privacy. Mine was the last cabin at the end of a lighted walkway framed with railroad ties that had been cut into the natural slope of the land.

  I brought in my suitcase and opened it. The only item I wanted was the Colt .38 I had packed. I slipped the holster clip over my belt and tucked the gun into place on my right hip, then drove back to the hospital and fell asleep in the chair beside Pop’s bed. By the time the breakfast trays were being distributed the next morning, Pop was acting so cantankerous, I thought it would be safe—even pleasant—for me to escape the hospital for a few hours.

&nbs
p; Dr. Grissom had decided to keep him another day. “The managed care outfit will probably send a hit man after her,” Pop muttered. “She sure I got hit with enough bullets to rate another day? Maybe I should shoot myself a couple more times, to be sure.”

  “I need a decent cup of coffee,” I lied, easing toward the door, “and I’m not going to find one here.”

  I drove out to Lake Albert. Something that Pop had said kept going through my head. He described stepping out his back door and seeing the sunlight bounce off a rifle scope. The reflection came from somewhere along the fence line, up on the hill. I wanted to go up there and take a look around.

  I had no trouble finding the matted grass that Buck had described. It was midmorning when I began walking back and forth in the field, studying the ground. I walked the length of the chain-link fence, then took a half step farther away and walked the same distance again. I must have done that twenty times. Nothing.

  Pop’s cat, Max, sauntered up through the field and wound himself in figure eights around my legs. Finally, a little company. “Hey, big guy,” I said. “I’ll bet nobody thought to feed you.”

  I picked up the fifteen-pound cat and headed toward the house. When I used my key to open the side door, Max jumped down and led me to his dishes in the kitchen. I scooped out some dry food for him and changed his water.

  It felt strange being in the house without Pop there. The place was like a slice of his life, interrupted. His keys, wallet, and pocket change were on the counter. The latest bills were thrown into a basket. There was an open box of garlic crackers, two empty ale bottles, a pot of burned pasta sauce on the stove. His leather work gloves lay crumpled on a stool.

  I smiled when I saw a round, sea-polished piece of granite on top of his spice rack. Pop had accepted the baseball-sized rock from an indigent patient as payment for services. He had kept it all these years. I remembered other times that patients had paid him with baskets of tomatoes from their gardens, or jars of dilly beans from a family recipe.