North of Nowhere by Steve Hamilton Page B

in the safe. He’s got a five-year anniversary with his wife coming up, his second marriage, I presume. Says he was going to give her five thousand dollars in hundreds, tell her to go buy whatever she wanted.”
    “Five thousand dollars,” I said. “That’s not big a score, for all the effort they put into it.”
    “Good point,” he said. “The vandalism hurt him a lot more. All that stuff he was collecting. And the telescope. Just about all of it they threw into the river. It doesn’t make any sense. What do you make of it, Alex? Do you have any theories?”
    “Do I have any theories? Chief, if you’re setting me up for something, I’d appreciate it if you could cut to the chase.”
    “I’m not setting you up for anything. Why would I be setting you up?”
    “It’s either that or you’ve been taken over by aliens,” I said. “If I go to your house, I’ll find pods in your basement, right?”
    “Alex…”
    “In fact, that’s why you weren’t there last night. Your detective said you were out of town. Little did he know.”
    “You want to know where I was last night, Alex? I’ll tell you. I was on my way back from a retreat down on Mackinac Island. My wife and I went together. You want to know why?”
    “This is even scarier than the alien thing,” I said. “It’s starting to sound like you’re talking to me like one human being to another. But go ahead.”
    “It’s really a couple of different things that all happened at the same time,” he said. “First thing was, my doctor told me I was killing myself. I mean, literally killing myself. High cholesterol, high stress, no exercise. I was a coronary waiting to happen. Second thing was my wife tells me one day, she says, Roy, we’ve been married almost forty years now, and I’ve never had the nerve to tell you this until now. You’re bringing your job home with you every night, and I’m sick of it. You either quit the job, or you talk to somebody about how to handle it better, or you find yourself a new wife. I’m not going to watch you kill yourself.”
    He stopped. I just sat there. I couldn’t think of a single thing to say to him.
    “The third thing,” he said, “was my oldest daughter told me I was going to be a grandfather. She’s due in…” He looked behind him at a calendar sitting on a credenza. “Ten weeks, Alex. I’m gonna be a grampa.”
    “Congratulations,” I said, finally finding a word.
    “So this retreat, it was just something my wife and I did. There was a lot of New Age mumbo-jumbo they were talking about. I didn’t have much use for most of it. But one thing they said made sense. You want to hear it?”
    “Why not?”
    “They said that in life there are all sorts of things you have no control over. The only thing you can control is your reaction to those things. It’s a pretty simple idea, but I don’t know, it just hit me. All this stuff I get upset about every day, I can’t stop it from happening, no matter how hard I try. But I can choose how to react to it.”
    “Okay…”
    “This is a perfect example,” he said. “In fact, maybe it’s a little test. You know, somebody upstairs seeing how I’d do. Here I come back from vacation and I’ve got three men breaking into one of the most expensive houses in town. They’re holding six men at gunpoint, breaking into a safe, destroying the man’s valuables. I look at the list of people who were in the house, and who do I see? Alex McKnight! What do you think my reaction’s gonna be?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “But it wouldn’t be pretty.”
    “That’s how it would have been,” he said. “That’s how the old Chief Maven would have reacted. But not now, Alex. Not now. In fact, it’s a good thing you were there. Look at this report! You’re the only one who gave us any kind of physical description. For all I know, you were the only guy there who kept his cool and showed everyone else how to get through it. If you weren’t there, it