Steve Hamilton - North of Nowhere

A bell rang as the gates closed behind us. Slowly the boat began to rise, as the water from the other side was fed in from below. The gates on the far side were holding back the crushing weight of Lake Superior, which seemed at that moment like a ridiculous idea. A thin stream of water was leaking through the line where the two gates joined, like they would break open at any second. But of course they didn’t. Ten minutes later, the boats had risen the twenty-one feet, and the gates began to open. The people on the viewing platform were at eye level now. A few of them waved to us. The dog barked back at them.

Once we cleared the locks, we still had a couple of miles of river to negotiate, under the International Bridge. We went around the bend where the river narrowed, past the Shallows, O’Dell’s place prominent on the shoreline.

I could be in there right now, I thought, having a cold beer and watching a baseball game. Instead I’m on a boat with Vargas and his dog.

When we passed the last bend, we finally hit the open water of Whitefish Bay. The sun came out from behind a cloud and lit up the water, turning it a thousand shades of green and blue. Vargas pushed the throttle up and we were off, the bow rising as we gained speed, the cold spray lashing at our faces. He tried to say something to me, but his words were lost in the noise of the engines. The lake was as calm as it ever gets, but even so we started bouncing around on the deck. I grabbed onto the gunwale. The little dog was getting thrown around like a beanbag, until Vargas caught him in midair.

He really opened it up, pushing the boat to the limit and sending us screaming out into the heart of the bay. Any boats that were puttering around behind us were long gone. I imagine he was trying to impress me. I just held on and waited for him to slow down.

Finally he did, kicking it down to an idle and letting us drift. We were miles from shore now, so far out I could see only the barest outline of land on the horizon.

“Tell me the truth, Alex,” he said, wiping off his face. “Is this a boat or what?”

“You’ve got a boat here,” I said. “I’ll give you that one.”

“I’ve got some poles here, if you feel like catching some whitefish. Of course you can’t depend on catching your lunch, so I brought some sandwiches. And some cold beer.”

“I’ll pass on the fishing for now,” I said. “I was hoping you’d tell me what’s on your mind.”

“Fair enough,” he said. “But not on an empty stomach.” He pulled out a big cooler and opened it, set me up with a pastrami and Swiss on rye bread, and a cold Molson’s. It was American Molson’s, but it went down well enough as I sat there in the glare of the midday sun. It was all starting to feel a little surreal, with the bright light and the gentle rolling of the boat on the lake. I felt like I was being lulled to sleep.

Finally, Vargas broke the spell. “You have some problems with me, don’t you,” he said. “I picked up on that the other night, before everything else happened.”

“I’m sitting on your boat, eating your food and drinking your beer,” I said. “I’m not sure this is the right time to criticize you.”

“But I know you’ll give me an honest answer,” he said. “You’re a straight shooter.”

“Let’s just say I don’t agree with you on some things.”

“Like what?”

“We don’t have to go through them,” I said. “I know I’m not going to change your mind about anything.”

“Who says you won’t? Try me.”

“Look, the other night you were telling me how much you love it up here, right?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, but it doesn’t seem to mean much to you if you can’t own it-if you can’t buy it just for yourself and maybe a few of your friends, rope it off and put a ‘No Trespassing’ sign at the gate.”

“Like Bay Harbor,” he said.

“Like Bay Harbor.”

He took a bite of his sandwich, and looked out at the lake. The dog watched him, waiting for some food to come his way.

“Even that stuff you collect,” I said, “up in that room of yours. Those things from the shipwrecks. The Indian artifacts. It’s not enough to just appreciate what they mean. You have to own them and put them in a glass case. In your own little room where nobody else can see them.”

“You seem to have a strong opinion about that.”

“Not strong enough to break into your house and destroy the whole room,” I said. “But yeah, it does bother me.”

“Like I said, I knew you were a straight shooter. I respect that. I happen to think you’ve got it all wrong. I don’t think you understand me at all. But that’s all right. That’s not why I brought you out here.”

“Are you gonna finally tell me why you did?”

“It’s simple,” he said. “I wanted to ask your opinion.”

“On what?”

“On what happened the other night. And who might be responsible.”

“I don’t see why you’re asking me,” I said. “And to go to all this trouble…Hell, I know it wasn’t fun getting robbed, Vargas, but if you only had five thousand dollars in the safe…”

“That’s the figure I gave the police.”

“Okay, so it was more. A lot more?”

He didn’t say anything. He just looked at me.

“Why would you want to keep a lot of money in your safe?” I said. “A guy like you, I figure you’d invest it in something. This way, you don’t even get any interest…”

“Yeah, no interest,” he said. “I also don’t have to give a big chunk of it to the IRS. Or to my first wife, for that matter. But let’s not talk about why I had money in my safe, or how much, or how it got there. I just want it back. I thought you might be able to help me.”

“You already have a man working for you.”

“Yes,” he said. “Your ex-partner, it turns out. Wasn’t that an interesting development.”

I didn’t say anything.

“But you’re the one with the experience,” he said. “You’re the one who wore a badge, down in Detroit. You’re the one with the bullet in your chest.” He looked down my chest, like everybody does when they happen to be talking about it. Someday I’ll get used to it.

“Look, Vargas…”

“Let me lay it out for you, Alex. Then you tell me what you think. That’s all I want. Then we’ll go back, I promise.”

“Lay it out.”

“Besides myself,” he said, “there were only five people in this world who knew about that safe. Not even my wife knew about it.”

“Come on, how could she not know?”

“I had the builder put that in. She hardly saw the place until it was done. Anyway, I’m at a poker game a couple of months ago. At O’Dell’s place, in the back room. Bennett was there, Jackie, Gill, Kenny, and Swanson. That was before I had any idea about Swanson and my wife, mind you. That was back when I still thought I was happily married. I had a few drinks that night. Too many, I suppose. I was losing a lot of money, and I said something stupid like maybe I had to go into my safe, to get some more cash.”

“That was it? That’s all you said?”

“All right, I may have said a little more. You know, I may have bragged about it a little. All the cash I had in my wall safe, and how my wife didn’t know about it. How she’d spend it all. Or something. Hell, I don’t even remember half of what I said.”

“So based on that…”

“Based on that, my first reaction to the other night is that it had to be Swanson. He knew it was poker night. He knew I’d be there to open the safe. It makes sense, doesn’t it? Isn’t that what you’d be thinking?”

“I only met Swanson once,” I said. “At Jackie’s place. We didn’t say more than ten words to each other. So I don’t know what to tell you.”