The Taking of Libbie, SD (8 page)

“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.”

CHAPTER FOUR

I had a long conversation with H. B. Sutton, my financial adviser, who assured me that my finances were unaffected by the Imposter’s use of my name, although she ran every check she could think of to make sure. She said I wasn’t a victim of identity theft so much as the credit card company was a victim of fraud, since the Imposter used my name yet nothing else that could be linked directly to me.

I had an even longer conversation with the FBI, who seemed reluctant to drop the kidnapping investigation. They wanted to prosecute the bounty hunters as an example to all the other punks out there who like to play fast and loose with the law. I told them I was all in favor of that—they could arrest Dewey Miller, too, for that matter—as long as the cops were left out of it. This precipitated a somewhat acrimonious discussion over exactly who in hell I thought I was to dictate policy to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We decided to get back to each other at a later date.

“You’re lucky they didn’t throw your sorry ass in jail,” Bobby Dunston told me.

“Bobby,” Shelby said. She gestured with her head toward her children sitting at the picnic table.

Katie giggled. Victoria rolled her eyes. “Mom, we go to a public school,” she said.

I had known the girls their whole lives; I’d greeted them while they were still in the hospital and wearing tiny pink hats. I have worked tirelessly to spoil them ever since. So far I had been only moderately successful, largely because their mother would give me that look whenever I attempted to give them something expensive and wholly frivolous. It was more than enough, Shelby insisted, that I had made them my heirs. They were still both quite young, though. Katie was eleven, and Victoria was pushing fourteen. One of these days they were going to need cars.

I buttered the corn on the cob that Bobby had roasted on the grill. The grill and picnic table were on a brick patio behind Bobby’s house in the Merriam Park neighborhood of St. Paul, the house Bobby grew up in, that he bought from his parents when they retired. It was just a stone’s throw from the house where I grew up, although I think I might have spent more time in Bobby’s home than I did my own. I had helped Bobby build the patio—brick by brick—and I was proud of it.

“I’m surprised that the news media didn’t pick it up,” Nina said.

Normally she and I wouldn’t get together on a Wednesday until after closing time, which was never a problem with me—one of the advantages of having a lot of money is that a guy can sleep in. She had taken the evening off for the Dunstons’ backyard barbecue. Lately she had been doing things like that with increasing frequency, abandoning Rickie’s to spend “normal” hours with me. I convinced myself it was solely because she had her jazz club humming like a well-oiled machine and didn’t need to be constantly on-site to work the controls.

“If I were a pretty thirteen-year-old girl, the media would have been all over it,” I said.

“I’ll say,” Victoria said.

I saluted her with my bottle of Summit Ale. She returned it with a can of orange pop.

“I guess that’s the end of that, then,” Nina said.

“Well…”

“Well, what?”

“The Imposter used my name.”

“I understand, but if he had called himself Bill Smith, I’d hardly think that would be reason enough for all the other Bill Smiths in the world to be outraged.”

“He didn’t use Bill Smith.”

“Why do you think the Imposter used your name?” Shelby said. “Do you think it’s someone who knows you?”

“I doubt it.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Bobby said. “He called himself a Raider. He could have gone to Cretin–Derham Hall.”

“He could have gone to Roseville or Hastings or Norwood–Young America for that matter,” said Victoria. “Nicollet, Northfield, Greenway, Fulda…” She stopped reciting teams when she found Bobby and me both staring at her. “What? I read the sports page.”

“Geez,” Katie said.

“I doubt the Imposter and I have ever met,” I said. “Everyone I know is here or from here, and this guy doesn’t know diddly-squat about the Twin Cities.”

“Does it matter?” Nina asked. “What is it you guys like to say—no harm, no foul?”

“There was plenty of foul.”

“Yes, but nothing lasting. ‘Living well is the best revenge.’ How many times have you quoted that at me? I thought it was your code.”

I shrugged my reply and gnawed more corn. It seemed as if Shelby purposely waited until my mouth was full before she changed the topic.

“So, when are you kids going to get married?” she said.

I damn near choked to death. The expression on Bobby’s face was of pure horror—he couldn’t believe Shelby had said that.

“That’s a good question,” Victoria said. “You guys have been sleeping together since when?”

This time it was Shelby’s turn to be shocked. “Victoria,” she said.

Only Nina remained calm. She flicked away Shelby’s question as if it were a bothersome fly. ’Course, she had practice. Her daughter, Erica, had asked the same question a few days earlier.

“McKenzie asked me,” she said. “He asked a couple of times, only I keep turning him down.”

“I don’t blame you,” Bobby said. “You could do so much better.”

“After my last experience with marriage, I’m kinda sour on the institution.”

“Besides, a woman doesn’t need a man to complete her life,” Victoria said.

“Yeah,” Katie said. She usually agreed with her older sister.

“Were we speaking to you?” Shelby asked.

“You said ‘kids.’” Victoria pointed at herself and Katie.

“It won’t be long,” I said, “before these two start dating.”

Shelby and Bobby glared at me as if I’d told an off-color joke. I ate more corn.

Between bites of the corn, grilled chicken, and shrimp and sips of wine, beer, and orange pop, we talked. We talked about the president, and the weather, which seemed cooler than it had been in past summers despite fears of global warming, and the price of gas, and the Twins, who were once again in the thick of the American League Central Division race. Finally Victoria said, “McKenzie, when are you going back?”

“Tomorrow,” I said.

Nina dropped her fork on her plate. Her startling silver-blue eyes became as dark as her shoulder-length black hair. She spoke very slowly.

“Back to Libbie?” she said.

I nodded.

“When did you make that decision?”

“Monday night.”

“Give me one good reason.”

Before I could, Victoria answered for me. “Because they broke into his house and kidnapped him and kept him in a trunk—a trunk! They kept me in a trunk, too.”

Shelby tried to slip an arm around her shoulders, but Victoria slid off the picnic table and out of reach. I thought she might cry. There were no tears in her eyes, though. Only rage.

“They kept him prisoner,” Victoria said. “They hurt him and they kept him prisoner and maybe it was mistaken identity like you said, but someone has to pay for that. The guy who started it all, the Imposter, he’s got to pay for that. Him and everyone who helped him. Otherwise—otherwise you’ll always wonder. You’ll always be afraid. I’m not afraid anymore because the people who hurt me, they’re dead or they’re in prison. The people who hurt McKenzie, they’re still out there and they’ll probably hurt other people, too, unless someone stops them. If McKenzie doesn’t stop them, who will?”

No one had anything to say to that except Victoria’s younger sister, who filled the uncomfortable silence that followed with a simple declaration.

“Listen to her,” Katie said. “She’s an honor student.”

Nina sat on the edge of a stool in my kitchen and held the stem of a wineglass against the counter as I filled it with pinot noir.