North of Nowhere by Steve Hamilton Page A

Soo.
    I didn’t feel like taking Lakeshore Drive again, didn’t feel like seeing the machines working on the golf course, or the old railroad car that had put such strange thoughts in my head. I took the main roads, M-123 to M-28, a straight line east through Raco and Strongs and then north on I-75 to the Soo. The City-County building is on the east side of town, just past the locks and not that far from Vargas’s house on the river. I didn’t feel like seeing that house again, certainly not the very next day.
    I parked behind the City-County building, back by the entrance to the jail and the little twelve-foot-square cage that serves as the outdoor grounds. There’s one picnic table in there, and on this day two men were sitting on top of it, one lighting a cigarette off the end of the other’s.
    I told the receptionist at the desk that I was there to see Chief Maven. She led me to the little waiting area outside his office. It’s a place I knew well enough, having spent some time there on a couple of memorable occasions. Chief Maven and I had taken an instant chemical dislike to each other, and it had gone downhill ever since. I remembered reading about Prometheus, and how the gods punished him for giving fire to mortals by chaining him to a rock where a raven would come every day for eternity to pluck out his liver. For me, this would be my ultimate punishment, to sit outside Chief Roy Maven’s office every day, waiting to go inside to see the man himself.
    Today, he didn’t keep me waiting. No sooner had I sat down when the door opened and he stuck his head out. “Alex,” he said. “Come in.”
    I followed him into the office and sat down in front of his desk, trying to remember if he had ever called me by my first name before. His office hadn’t changed. It was still four walls of concrete. Maven hadn’t changed, either. He had the drill sergeant haircut, the weather-beaten face. He was yet another tough old bird, like Jackie, like Bennett O’Dell. It was a sort of natural selection at work. Men in their sixties who lived up here year-round had to be as hard as granite. If they weren’t, they either died of heart attacks shoveling snow, or just gave up and moved to Florida.
    “I appreciate you stopping by,” he said. He looked down at the police report in his lap. “I understand from my men that it was a pretty tense situation you were in last night. I’m glad nobody was harmed.”
    “Okay,” I said. “Me too.”
    “The owner of the residence, Winston Vargas, he invited you to play poker? Are you a friend of his?”
    “I had never even met him before. He really didn’t invite me, but Jackie is one of the regular players, and they needed a sixth.”
    “Three men broke in around eleven o’clock, it says here. All with handguns. Glocks, according to you. One of them took Mr. Vargas upstairs, the other two stayed downstairs with the other five players. It looks like you got as much of a description of those two as would be possible under the circumstances. It’s fortunate you were there, Alex. Your training as a police officer came in pretty handy.”
    “Anything to help, Chief. You know me.”
    He let that one go without even blinking. “Breaking and entering, armed robbery, vandalism. It sounds like they were pretty cool about it. Like it was all business.”
    “I’d say so. You have any suspects in mind?”
    “Not at this point. We sent a copy of this over the bridge today, based on your judgment that one of the perps sounded Canadian.”
    “What was the grand total, anyway?”
    “Grand total?”
    “You know,” I said. “What they stole, what they destroyed.”
    “Mr. Vargas says he had just under five thousand dollars in the safe. Says he likes to pick up hundred-dollar bills at work. I guess he’s got an appliance store down in Petoskey. Custom kitchens, that sort of thing. When he sees a hundred in the drawer, he says he puts a hundred of his own money in, takes the bill, puts it