Читать онлайн «North Of Nowhere»
Автор Стив Гамильтон
North of Nowhere
Steve Hamilton
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
North of Nowhere
Steve Hamilton
Chapter One
That summer it was all about secrets.
It was the summer I turned forty-nine years old, which made me start thinking about fifty and what that would feel like. Fifty years with not a lot to show for them. One marriage that was so far in the past, it was like something you’d dig up out of the ground. My baseball career-four years of minor league ball and not a single day in the majors. And my career as a Detroit police officer, which ended one night with me on my back, watching my partner die next to me. That’s what I saw when I looked back on my life.
On the plus side, I was getting a lot of reading done that summer. And, though I didn’t know it yet, I was about to meet some interesting new people. I wouldn’t get to see any fireworks on the Fourth of July, because I’d spend most of that evening lying facedown on a stranger’s floor, a gun held to the side of my head. I would wait for one final blast, maybe one final blur of color. And then nothing.
I already had one bullet inside me. I knew I didn’t have room for another one.
More than anything else, it was the summer in which I had to make a big decision. Was I going to rejoin the human race or was I going to keep drifting until I was too far away to ever come back? That’s what the summer was really all about. That and the secrets.
Jonathan Connery, AKA Jackie, owner of the Glasgow Inn in Paradise, Michigan, raised in Scotland, alleged second-cousin to Sean Connery, and in his opinion anyway, just as good-looking-this is the man who took me to that house on that Fourth of July evening. The Glasgow Inn is just down the road from my cabins.
I live in the first cabin, the one I helped my old man build back in the sixties and seventies. The other five I rent out. My customers are mostly hunters in the fall, snowmobilers in the winter. In the summer, they’re families who want to do something a little different. They come up here from the Lower Peninsula to Paradise because it’s the most out-of-the-way place you can go to without leaving the state-hell, without leaving the country. After driving forever on I-75, they think they’re almost there when they cross the Mackinac Bridge. But it’s another hour through the emptiest land they’ve ever seen until they finally get close to Lake Superior. Even then they still have to circle around Whitefish Bay, driving deep into the heart of the Hiawatha National Forest. By then, they’re wondering to themselves how anyone could actually live up here, so far away from everything else in the world. When they finally hit the town, the sign says, “Welcome to Paradise! We’re glad you made it!” They go through the one blinking light in the middle of town, keep going north along the shore a couple of miles, past Jackie’s Glasgow Inn, until they get to my cabins. When I see their faces as they get out of the car, I know how it’s going to be. If they look around like they just landed on the moon, they’re in for a long week. There’s not much to do up here, after you go to the Shipwreck Museum one day and then to the Taquemmenon Falls State Park the next. If they get out of the car, close their eyes, take a deep breath, and smile, I know they’ll like it here. They’ll probably come the year after, too. And the year after that.
