The Taking of Libbie, SD (5 page)

“What was his name? Where did he live?”

“His name was Andrew Manning. He lived in Grand Rapids.”

“If you knew all this, why did you send the bounty hunters after me?”

“I didn’t.”

The chief glanced down at Miller, who was pretending to be somewhere else.

“Are you going to help us?” Tracie said.

“I’m still thinking about it.”

“What will it take to convince you?”

I spread my arms wide. “Clothes, food, a place to clean up, a telephone, aspirin.”

Miller rose slowly from the chair and reached behind him. He produced a thick, worn wallet from the sucker pocket, unfolded it, and slipped out a credit card. He handed the card to Tracie.

“Anything he wants,” he said.

I snatched the card from Tracie’s fingers.

“It’s gonna cost you, pal,” I said.

I could read the startled expression on the face of the old woman behind the cash register when I entered the store. “Sir?” she said.

There was a row of wire shopping carts near the sliding glass door, and I took one.

“Sir? Sir? You can’t be in here.” She left the cash register and circled the counter. “Sir, the sign says no shirt, no shoes, no service.”

I gave her a smile, which must have been pretty damn frightening considering my appearance—no doubt she thought I was an escapee from the nearest fun house.

“You do sell shirts,” I said. She stopped on the other side of the cart. “You do sell shoes, and I presume you do provide a modicum of service.”

“Sir?”

“So clearly the sign is inaccurate.”

The woman placed both hands on the front of the cart. I pushed forward. She steadied herself and shoved back. She was a strong woman.

“Lady, you’re making my headache worse.”

“Sir, don’t make me call the manager.”

Tracie came in through the sliding doors, collapsing the cell phone that had delayed her and dropping it into her bag.

“What’s going on?” she said.

I pushed hard against the cart, causing the cashier to slide backward about three inches.

“He can’t come in here,” she said.

“It’s all right, Linnea,” Tracie said.

“No, it’s not. I’m calling the manager.”

Linnea stepped out of the way and released the cart. I shot forward a good three feet before I regained my balance.

Linnea grabbed a red phone beneath her cash register. Her voice echoed from every corner of the store as she spoke into it.

“Manager to the front, please. Manager to the front.”

I smiled at Tracie. “Now you’re going to get it,” I said.

“Having fun, McKenzie?”

“Take this.” I rolled the cart toward her. “Follow me.”

Munoz Emporium came closer to an old-fashioned general store than any I had ever seen outside of the movies. It was square with a high ceiling and hardwood floors aged by traffic and time. The shelves were high against the walls and stacked with just about everything you might want to buy—eggs, milk, cheese, meats, bakery, canned goods, packaged goods, ice cream, beer, wine, pharmaceuticals, home furnishings, appliances, yard supplies, sporting goods, toys, cell phones, MP3 players, DVDs, CDs, TVs, and even a few lower-end PCs. The selection was small, but the categories were immense. I marched up and down the aisles, Tracie trailing along.

My first stop was for aspirin. I opened the bottle, tossed the cotton on the floor, and poured three tablets into my palm. The instructions said to take only two, but my headache screamed for more. I swallowed the aspirin and tossed the plastic bottle to Tracie.

“Think fast,” I said.

She caught the bottle with both hands.

“You’re hysterical,” she said.

I headed for the clothing racks. I grabbed shorts, socks, jeans, and shirts from the shelves and dropped them into the cart. I checked for my size, but not once did I look at the price, not even when I seized a pair of white, green, and black Adidas TS Lightswitch Garnett basketball shoes and pitched them on top of the jeans—and I haven’t been a fan of Kevin Garnett or his shoes since he left the Minnesota Timberwolves.

The manager of Munoz’s caught up to us in toiletries. He was wearing a blue smock with the name Chuck sewn above his pocket, and he didn’t like the look of me any more than his cashier did. Tracie worked to calm him while I fired containers of shaving cream, razors, toothbrushes, shampoo, and hair gel into the cart. He didn’t appreciate that, either, especially when I launched a tube of toothpaste from three-point range and it caromed off the wire rim and relocated a jar of face cream from the shelf to the floor.

“This is my store,” he said.

“You’re the owner?” I said.

“That’s right.”

“You should be pleased that I’m here, then.”

“Pleased that some half-naked clown is throwing merchandise around?”

He had me there. Still, my muscles continued to ache from the hours I’d spent curled up in the trunk of a car, and my stomach, which hadn’t seen a meal in nearly twenty-four hours, was making disconcerting grumbling sounds.

“Be nice, Chuck,” I said. “Or I just might leave this happy hovel you all call home.”

“See if I care.”

“You don’t want me to stick around and help catch the great Imposter?”

“It doesn’t matter to me one way or the other.”

“No, I don’t suppose that it would.” I made a sweeping gesture, taking in everything around us. “I can see why the mall might have given you a few sleepless nights, but now that it’s gone south…”

“I would have been all right. This store has been here for over fifty years. My customers know me. They know I treat them fair, just like my father and grandfather did before me. They would have stayed loyal.”

“Yeah. That’s why Walmart does so poorly.”

“What do you know about it?”

“I know that when it comes to money, loyalty doesn’t mean squat.”

Munoz quickly glanced at Tracie. She averted her eyes.

“I’m learning that,” he said.

“It wasn’t just me,” Tracie said. “The whole town wanted the mall. The county wanted it.”

Munoz pointed at the shopping cart. “You finished here?”

“Do you offer gift wrapping?” I said.

Munoz turned to exit the aisle, but Tracie blocked his path.

“Chuck,” she said.

He didn’t even say “excuse me” when he nudged her out of the way and moved to the front of the store.

“He’s upset,” Tracie told me.

“You think?”

“He’s convinced we betrayed him by supporting the mall. He said so in a city council meeting.”

“He was right.”

“We did it for the town.”

“‘Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel,’” I said, then added, “H. L. Mencken,” in case Tracie thought I made it up.

She studied me for a moment before pushing the cart up the aisle.

“You’re not what you seem,” she said.

I did a quick inventory of my appearance.

“I certainly hope not,” I said.

Her head swiveled left, then right, when she exited the store, as if she were uncertain which way to turn. Tracie paused for a beat and went left. Again, I noticed that she walked with gliding grace, her head high, her toes angled in slightly, her salmon skirt swishing back and forth in a most delightful manner. Men turned to look at her. She seemed to accept this as if they had always looked and always would. I followed her, enjoying the view, until she stopped so abruptly that I nearly ran into her. She brought her hand up to shield her eyes from the glaring sun.

“Must you walk behind me like that?” she said.

“It’s your town, honey. I’m just following your lead.”

“Must you call me honey?”

The question jolted me, serving notice that I had been behaving like a jerk ever since the chief removed the cuffs. Maybe I had cause. My head continued to throb; I was still naked except for my spoiled shorts and apparently a figure of some curiosity and amusement according to the expressions of the people who walked or drove by. Plus, I wasn’t altogether sure where I was or how I was going to get home. Yet I could hear the old man admonishing me when I was a kid playing ball and I had a bad day at the plate. “That’s no excuse for poor manners,” he’d say.

“I apologize,” I said. “I won’t do it again.”

Tracie blinked hard. I don’t know if it was because of the sun or because she was startled by my response.

“You mentioned a hotel,” I said.

“Just up the street.”

“Here, let me carry those.”

I took the two shopping bags filled with my purchases from her hands. Tracie blinked again.

“Something else?” I said.

“I keep comparing you to Rush. He was very polite, very considerate—he seemed like a nice man. Looking back, I realize now that it was all for show. You, on the other hand—you don’t seem like a nice man at all, and yet you were angry when Mr. Miller hit his daughter, and what you said about Chuck … Who are you, McKenzie?”

“Well, I’ll tell you. I don’t know if I let a week go by when I don’t ask myself that same question.”

Sharren Nuffer grinned when we went through the front doors of the Pioneer Hotel, and she kept grinning as Tracie and I approached the registration desk. Her tumbled-down, chemically enhanced hair resembled raw blue-black silk, and her rich tan reached all the way to the valley between her breasts, which she displayed beneath a black sleeveless shirt. Apparently she didn’t like buttons, because she used only a couple of them and they were straining to keep her shirt closed.

“How many times do I have to tell you, Tracie,” she said. “We don’t rent by the hour.”

“You’re hysterical, Sharren,” Tracie said.

Sharren must have agreed, because she laughed long and hard. When she finished, she waved a slender hand at me and said, “Seriously, what is this all about?”

“I need a room for McKenzie here,” Tracie said.

“McKenzie? Rushmore McKenzie? You’re not Rushmore McKenzie.”

“Actually, I am,” I said. Sharren looked like she didn’t believe me. “It’s a long story.”

“Tell me,” she said.

I didn’t, but Tracie did. Only the way she told it, what had happened to me since four forty-five that morning didn’t seem like anything to get excited about.

“I knew Rush,” Sharren said.

“Did you know him well?” I said.

Sharren hesitated before she answered. “As well as I could.”

She’s the first person you should talk to
, my inner voice told me. I literally shook the thought from my head. Who said I’m staying? I asked myself.

It took some wrangling, yet Tracie managed to book a room using Miller’s credit card—eighty-nine dollars a night. Sharren procured my key from a row of boxes behind the desk, a real key, not a plastic card. While they went at it, I looked around. From the outside, the Pioneer seemed almost quaint, a dignified redbrick Victorian with three floors and no elevator. Yet the inside had an air of quiet dissipation. The reception area was crammed with faded couches, armchairs, and marble-top tables with ceramic figurines, ashtrays, fake Roman busts, and lamps with shades fringed with tassels. It didn’t seem old-fashioned as much as it seemed merely old.

After checking in, I carried the key and my shopping bags to the worn-carpeted staircase. Tracie tried to follow. I stopped her at the base of the stairs.

“This is where I draw the line,” I said.

“But—” Tracie said.

“No buts.”

“Ahh,” said Sharren. “Too bad, so sad.”

She said it with a smile, yet it was obvious that the two women did not like each other. It was equally obvious that they were very much alike.

Tracie frowned. “Dinner? Say in an hour?”

“Make it an hour and a half. I have calls to make.”

Tracie was looking at Sharren when she said, “There’s a diner down the street.”

“We serve a very nice filet if you want real food,” Sharren said. “Perhaps you’d care for room service.”

Sharren batted her long, fake eyelashes at me, but I assumed that was for Tracie’s benefit. The way I looked—seriously, not even an aging divorcée in Libbie, South Dakota, could be that hard up.

“Where is the diner?” I asked.

“Café Rossini,” Tracie said. “Out the door and to the left.”

“I’ll meet you there.”

“Ninety minutes.” Tracie turned and left the hotel, but not before throwing Sharren a triumphant smirk.

Sharren smirked back.

“You won’t be getting much from her,” she said. “Very cold, that one. Very dry.”

I was startled by the remark, and if I had been standing closer to Sharren I might have said something or done something about it. I don’t know why I had become defensive of Tracie, yet I had. Or maybe it’s just that my nerves were still keyed up by what had happened to me earlier; I wanted payback and didn’t particularly care who suffered for it.

I said nothing, did nothing, except turn and climb the stairs.

CHAPTER THREE

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.