Brian Freeman: The Cold Nowhere

‘She won’t stay beautiful for long,’ Stride said. ‘Not if she stays in this life.’

‘You think I don’t know that? I had a sweet face, too. I know what I did to myself, you don’t need to remind me.’

‘How long has Cat been heading downhill?’ Stride asked.

Dory shrugged. ‘Two years, I suppose. Since she was fourteen. That’s when she started running away. She’d show up at my door, or I’d come back to the city and find her sleeping in my bed at the Seaway.’

‘Did she say why?’

‘No, but I figured the shit with Michaela and Marty was finally backing up on her. You can’t go through something like that and not get screwed up. Sooner or later, she had to pay the price.’

‘How bad is it?’

‘Hey, she’s still a good kid, you know? She’s not far gone like some of them. That’s why I thought Brooke could help her, but you want the truth? I’m scared to death.’

‘Drugs?’ Stride asked.

‘Yeah, sometimes.’

‘Do you supply her?’

Dory leaped to her feet. He thought she was ready to slap him. ‘No! Never! You think I would do that to my own niece?’

‘I had to ask.’

‘I never give her anything!’

‘You’re not clean, Dory,’ Stride said. ‘You think I can’t tell?’

‘Yeah, okay, it’s been a shitty year, and I’m circling the drain. If that’s what you want to hear, fine. But Cat? No way. She never got so much as one fucking pill from me.’

He sat her down again. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘I wouldn’t trust me, either, but it’s the truth.’

‘Who has their hooks into her, Dory? I need a name.’

‘I don’t know. It could be anybody. Try Curt Dickes. Greasy little bastard. He’s a janitor at one of the hotels in Canal Park. Word is, he’s been fixing tourists up with the local girls. Cat mentioned him a couple times.’

‘I know Curt,’ Stride said.

He and his team knew most of the repeat offenders by name. Curt Dickes had been on his radar screen for ten years, ever since Stride caught him coming out the rear door of the Great Lakes Aquarium with half a dozen stolen stingray pups in a tank of water. The kid came from a big family of girls. He was the little brother who always got into trouble. He was mostly a petty thief and con artist, but if he’d expanded into prostitution, Stride needed to talk to him.

‘Listen, Dory,’ Stride went on, ‘Cat thinks someone is trying to kill her. Did she talk to you about that?’

‘Yeah, I didn’t know whether to believe her.’

‘Why not?’

Dory hesitated. ‘Look, Cat’s pretty scrambled upstairs. You and me, we both know why. Some days I don’t know what’s real with her and what’s not. I’m not sure she knows herself.’

‘Can you think of a reason why anyone would want to hurt her?’

‘Most guys don’t need a reason to hurt street girls,’ Dory said. ‘You know that.’

‘I want to check on some things she told me, but I don’t want her on her own when she’s done. I’m afraid she’ll take off again. Can you make sure she stays here until I get back?’

Dory looked at the clinic building and frowned, but she nodded. ‘Sure, whatever.’

He stood up to leave but Dory tugged on his sleeve. ‘Hey, Stride, can I ask you something? Why are you doing this for Cat?’

‘It’s my job.’

‘Yeah? A lot of cops would dump a girl like her at County and forget about her. Is this because of what happened to Michaela?’

‘Partly,’ he admitted.

Dory lit another cigarette and shook her head. ‘Michaela wasn’t perfect, you know. I warned her about Marty. I said he’d keep coming after her. She didn’t listen.’

‘It wasn’t her fault,’ he said.

‘Yeah, maybe not, but I blamed her for being so stupid. I blamed myself, too. If I’d had my head on straight, I could have done something to stop him. As it is …’

She closed her eyes. Her lips squeezed into a thin, pale line. He could see guilt licking at her insides like flames. He knew what that was like.

‘I have to go,’ he said. ‘Believe me, Dory, I’ll do whatever I can to protect Cat.’

Dory opened her eyes. Her face darkened, not with anger, but with sadness. ‘Like you protected her mother?’ she asked.

Stride lived in a place that never forgot the past.

Duluth was a small town masquerading as a big city, and small towns had long memories. Fewer than one hundred thousand souls lived inside its borders. It sounded like a lot, but for a native, it was nothing. When Stride dragged a middle-aged man to the drunk tank, there was a good chance it was someone who’d gone to Central High School with him. When he found a drowned child in the Lester River, he usually knew the parents. It made the job harder and the wounds more personal. He couldn’t see the people as strangers. They were neighbors and friends.

Other towns tore down the past and built on top of it. Not Duluth. The terraced streets that rose off the shore of Lake Superior still boasted Victorian homes that dated to the early part of the previous century, when shipping and mining had made the city a glamour town. The wealth of that era was long gone but the houses remained, decaying like sorrowful echoes. The same was true of the Canal Park factories near the water, even after they’d been shuttered and converted into shops and restaurants for the tourists. You could still see old industrial names etched into the building stone, like Dewitt-Seitz and Paulucci.

When something did get torn down in Duluth, people complained. Where Stride lived, out on the sliver of land known as the Point that divided the harbor from the wild waters of Superior, the shabby old lake homes were slowly disappearing, replaced by condos and hotels and new mansions. No one liked it. The house where he’d lived with his first wife for twenty years was gone. Every time he crossed the lift bridge over the shipping canal, he remembered the homes and the faces of the people who weren’t there anymore.

He’d spent his whole life here. It was an extreme place, like a frontier outpost on the border of the Canadian wilderness. Tourists flooded the town for the brief, warm summers, but the endless winters defined the city and gave it its fierce beauty. For months the waves of the great lake made ice sculptures on the beach and the smaller lakes simply froze into roads for fishermen. Blizzards buried the empty highways, and Alberta winds swept snowdrifts up to the roof lines. Living here was harsh, but Stride couldn’t live anywhere else. When he’d tried, he always came back. This was his home.

Locals boasted that Duluth toughened anyone who survived the winters, but Stride knew that it also made you old before your time. You couldn’t fight the elements and not feel the damage to your body. You couldn’t weather the storms and not get broken. There were other, less visible scars, too. The more time he spent in Duluth, the more he learned about keeping things inside. You hung on to the pain and locked it away. You stayed closed off to the world. After a while, it became a way of life.

Serena had complained that he kept every death harbored in his soul, and she wasn’t wrong. He never forgot the people he’d left behind. To Stride, loss was like the parade of giant ore boats coming and going through the city’s ship canal. Every boat arrived weighted down with black cargo, and every boat had a name.

Like the one in his mind dedicated to Michaela Mateo.

*

‘Private party,’ the guard told Stride, holding up a beefy hand to stop him as he boarded the Charles Frederick .

Stride peeled back the flap of his black leather jacket, revealing his badge pinned to the inside pocket. ‘I have an invitation.’