Let It Burn (7 page)

“You remember my partner,” she said. “Agent Fleury.”

“Nice to see you again,” he said, shaking my hand. He was younger than us. His suit was tailored. His hair was perfect. He reminded me a little of Detective Bateman, back in his prime.

He didn’t stick around for small talk. He wished us both a good evening, and then he left.

“You look good,” she said as soon as he was gone. “But you must be tired. It’s a long way from Paradise to Detroit.”

“In more ways than one.”

“I remember how you drive,” she said. “Still using that ex-cop with a bullet angle, huh?”

“It would be a shame not to.”

“So I thought we’d have dinner in Greektown. Does that sound all right?”

“That sounds perfect. You want me to drive?”

“This is downtown,” she said. “We’ll take the People Mover.”

We walked a block to the station on Cass Avenue. For fifty cents you can get on this raised monorail that makes a three-mile loop around downtown, stopping at Joe Louis Arena, the Renaissance Center, Greektown, a few other destinations. It’s slow as hell, but it gets the job done, and you don’t have to drive your car. Maybe even more importantly, you don’t have to park somewhere you might not feel that good about.

We hopped on the tram and stood there looking down as the streets passed below us. Everybody was getting off work in the financial district, and in the GM headquarters. Men with suits and briefcases were walking down the street, many of them joining us in the People Mover.

“It’s good to see all these people downtown,” I said. “You’d almost think the old city was doing okay.”

“It can feel that way some days,” she said. “Especially in the summer. Especially down here by the river.”

When we finally made it to the eastern side of the loop, we got out at Greektown and walked to the restaurant. We passed right by the Greektown Casino, one of the three casinos in the city now. Hard to even imagine back when I was on the police force, going the Atlantic City route and inviting everything else that comes with the gambling money. Yet here they were. I’m sure they were all doing decent business, but I couldn’t help thinking they were really just huge monuments to the city’s desperation. Once the greatest manufacturing center in the world. Now just a place where you can go to play the slot machines.

“This one was owned by your neighbors,” Janet said as she looked up at the bright lights on the Greektown Casino.

“It was,” I said, shaking my head. After the Bay Mills tribe started the ball rolling with the first Indian-run blackjack casino in the country, the Sault tribe over in Sault Ste. Marie jumped in with both feet, building the huge Kewadin Casino, and then eventually expanding their operations down here when Detroit passed the new gaming law. Not a year later, the Gaming Board took the casino away from them and gave it to a new group of investors. You can still guarantee yourself an interesting conversation by walking into any bar or restaurant in Sault Ste. Marie, finding a Sault member, and asking him what he thinks of the tribal leaders who let that happen.

The restaurant was just down the street from the casino. A Greek place, believe it or not. We got a table upstairs, and Janet ordered us some wine.

“This is on me,” I said.

“Think again, mister. You’re the one who drove all the way down here.”

We put that fight off for later. I sat there and drank my wine and looked at her. There was a calmness to her face that I had found appealing from the first moment I had seen her. She was up in the UP, trying to solve what would turn out to be multiple murders, going back years. Yet there was always this air of self-assurance about her.

I liked her hair, too. The way it framed her face.

“Remind me again,” I said. “How old are you?”

She laughed at that one. “Is that your opening line on all your dates?”

“So this is a date, you’re saying.”

She shook her head, but she was smiling. “God, we really don’t know each other very well, do we?”

“We never got the chance. We were both so preoccupied when you were up there. Then you had to go.”

“Yeah, I made you promise to come down and take me to dinner,” she said. “I have to admit, I was starting to think you never would.”

“I’m sorry. I should have come down sooner.”

“So why now?”

“One of the last collars I made when I was down here,” I said. “Right before … I mean right before I left the force … It was a homicide over in the old train station.”

“You’re the one who caught him?”

“Eventually. I ID’d him, anyway. Was there when he was finally arrested. He’s getting out this week, so I got the courtesy call. Not that I think in a million years that he’ll be coming for me.”

“Then why did you need to come down here?”

“I got talking to the old sergeant,” I said. “He said I should come down and see the place. So I figured what the hell.”

“Ah, so it
wasn’t
just to see me.” She had a little smile on her face as she said it.

“A few reasons put together,” I said. “Just call it that. Keeping my promise was the best reason of all.”

She looked over her wineglass at me, like she wasn’t quite buying it.

“I spent a few hours driving around today,” I said. “I couldn’t believe it.”

“I know. It’s not like I spend a lot of time in the neighborhoods, but…”

“Why are they all leaving, Janet? It’s turning into a ghost town.”

“Well, I’ve worked on more than a few corruption cases,” she said. “Not that Detroit is the only city where it happens, but you’d be amazed. We seem to have elevated it to an art form.”

“But that can’t be the only reason.”

“The city is broke, Alex. I mean, absolutely flat-out busted. They can’t even keep all the streetlights on anymore. They can’t run the buses. They want everybody to pick up and move closer together, basically cut the size of the city in half.”

“And do what with the rest?”

“Hell if I know. Urban farming? Just let it go wild? Some of the city’s half wild already.”

“Yeah, I heard about the bears living in the abandoned buildings.”

“I think that’s just an urban legend.”

“Oh, really? It seemed like such a good deal for the bears.”

“Just the fact that it sounds almost believable,” she said. “That we’d really have that many empty buildings and so much open space…”

“I can’t believe how many burnt-out houses I saw today. That’s one thing we always had to deal with. But then they’d come through the next week and knock them all down. Sometimes even rebuild.”

“They don’t need people to set fires anymore,” she said, looking out the window, like she could take it all in from where we were sitting. “The city is burning itself down.”

“How do you mean?”

“In the summertime, when it’s dry … Sometimes the power lines will come down and start fires. There was one day a couple of years ago, you couldn’t even walk down the street without choking on it. There were hundreds of houses burning down all at once.”

“All right, we have to stop talking like this,” I said. “There must be something good going on around here.”

“The Tigers have a nice new stadium.”

“Oh, don’t get me started on that. I don’t care how beautiful Comerica Park is…”

“It’s not Tiger Stadium. I know. I grew up here, too, remember?”

We drank a toast to Tiger Stadium. Then to the old Olympia Stadium, the redbrick building where Gordie Howe and the Red Wings once played. We toasted the Bob-Lo Boat that took kids down the Detroit River. We toasted Vernors Ginger Ale, back when it was as strong as rocket fuel. We toasted Greenfield Village and the automobile shows that would bring classic cars and hot rods from all over the world coming back home to the Motor City, to cruise up and down the streets all day long and into the night, while thousands of people gathered along the sidewalks and parking lots to barbecue and drink beer and argue about which cars were the best.

We had our dinner. We eventually got around to talking about our past relationships. It turned out we were both married once, something else I didn’t know about her. We started getting closer to the present, and to the unspoken question about what might still happen between the two of us. Even that very night.

“You live really far away,” she said as we had our dessert. “You’re aware of that, right?”

“Yes, I am.”

“It would be next to impossible to do much else besides what we’re doing right now.”

“If we both stay where we are, yes.”

“This is nice, though. I’m glad you came down.”

“I’m glad, too.”

“But tell me the truth,” she said, looking me in the eye. “Why are you really here?”

I had the same two or three answers I’d already given her. I didn’t have the one single answer that would really satisfy both of us.

In the end, after we battled over the bill and finally ended up splitting it, we got up and walked outside and into the night. We didn’t go into the casino. We just walked down the sidewalk, back to the People Mover. Back to her car and to my truck. She hugged me and gave me a quick kiss. Nobody said a word about us spending the night together, and I have to believe that maybe we were both a little relieved that it never came up. I promised her that I’d see her again soon.

She hesitated as she opened her car door. “Are you sure you’re not thinking about moving back down here? Somewhere we could see each other more than once or twice a year?”

“Well,” I said, “let’s just say I now have one more good reason to do that.”

She came back to me and gave me another kiss.

“You’re damned right you do.”

Then she got in her car and she drove home.

I stood there under the streetlight for a while. Then I got in my truck and drove down Michigan Avenue. A police car cut in front of me, lights and siren going, and for one second my old instincts told me to follow the car so I could help out. It was these same streets, after all. For eight years I had done this.

I turned off into a parking lot next to the first bar I saw. It was just a concrete box, as far away from the Glasgow Inn as you could imagine, but it was all I needed that night. I sat at the bar with a double Scotch and looked at my own face in the mirror.

You will always be alone, I told myself. That’s just the way it is.

When I finally left that place, I knew it had been too long a day, with a little bit too much to drink, for a five-hour drive back home. I’d thrown a toothbrush and a few things into a bag, not making any kind of plan, just being ready for whatever happened. I drove a few blocks down to the little motel on Michigan Avenue where once upon a time you could open the drapes and look down the street at the gray walls of the stadium. The stadium was gone now, as I kept proving to myself every time I drove by it that day, still surprising myself every time. But the little motel was still there and now I suppose it was officially the most forlorn place in the world, with no special view from your window to set it apart.

I checked in for one night. I lay on the bed for exactly two minutes, listening to another police car’s siren in the distance. Then I got back up and went out to the truck. There was no way I’d be able to sleep.

I got in the truck and drove around the city. One more time, just to see it again. What it had become.

I went to the train station. Of course I did. I parked in the same place, got out, and walked down the same sidewalk, stood on the same piece of cracked pavement and looked up at all of the broken windows. How unnatural for there to be no lights on inside at all, not one single light in an eighteen-floor building.

Something horrible happened here, I thought, and I never really got the time to process it. I never understood it or made my peace with it, because just a month later, in that very same summer, something else happened that obliterated my entire life.

So now that I was here again, standing in this very spot where that first thing happened … It was like I finally had the chance to make some sense of it, all these years later.

I was feeling that hum again. Louder this time.

Something is not right. That’s the thing that came to me. Something is not adding up for me. Not then. Not now. Not ever.

This is why you came all the way down here, Alex. This thing that you knew deep down but could only start to put words to when you got the chance to stand here in the dark, in this exact moment.

This is why you’re here.

CHAPTER SIX

The first thing that hit me was the smell of urine mixed with sweat mixed with a dead animal or two mixed with God knows what else. It should have just been the musty stale air of a place locked up tight, but obviously someone had found the way in and a few others had followed.

It was a small vestibule in this empty corner of the train station, with a half-dozen stairs littered with cigarette butts and trash, leading up to an old waiting room. There, the big arched windows looked out over the tracks. The glass was streaked with grime, and as I turned to look around at the rest of the room, I saw all of the chairs pushed together, covered with sheets. There was an elaborate chandelier hanging from the ceiling, ringed with cobwebs. There was enough daylight coming through the windows that I could see halfway into the room, but then it all turned to darkness.

“Anybody in here?”

I took my gun out, because that’s what a cop does when he doesn’t know who might be waiting and watching.

“It’s okay if you are. I’m just looking around. If there’s anybody here, you can come out.”

I felt a low rumbling then. In the floor, coming up through my bones. Then the sound. A train was coming. I looked out the window and watched it go by. A freight train. It wasn’t stopping here at the station for any of the few passengers that were waiting. It was going southeast, toward the long tunnel that ran under the river, to Canada.

I took the flashlight off my belt and turned it on. In the dark side of the room, it showed more furniture covered with sheets. Nothing moved.

My radio squawked, startling the hell out of me. “Alex, what are you doing in there?” My partner.