A Cold Day in Paradise Read Online Free PDF Page A

There was a lot of debris on the rocks from the night’s winds, driftwoodand a few pieces of what was once a small wooden boat. The water was fairly calm, but it had that November feel to it. It was ready to turn ugly at any time.
    I must have walked north for an hour, past the last of the boat launches and up into the wild shore where there was no trace of human life. There were more birch trees up there, along with some balsam and black spruce. I was far enough from everything, I could let myself think about the night before. Okay, so somebody killed a bookmaker. I had known many bookmakers back in Detroit. I could remember arresting two of them. They took it in stride. It was part of the deal. You get picked up, you pay your fine, you go back to your business. Aside from that, it was a pretty monotonous way to live, sitting by your phone all evening handling bets. Most of a bookmaker’s customers are regular people. Some are cops even. As criminals go, a bookmaker is practically an upstanding member of society. So why did this guy get slaughtered in his motel room?
    He didn’t pay someone. Somewhere up the line, somebody got it in their head that this guy was taking liberties. So they took him out. I’m sure it happens. Not every day, but it happens.
    Whoever it was, the killer obviously had it worked out ahead of time. He probably used a silencer, after all. So why cut his throat? You just shot him in the face. If he’s not dead already, he’s dead within two minutes. Why make a mess of the place? Somebody who kills people for a living doesn’t do that, not unless it’s a message. To other bookmakers who might make the same mistake? Maybe. Or maybe it was just personal.
    I threw a few rocks in the water until my shoulder complained. The sun went behind a cloud, the wind started to pick up again. The waves started to hit the rocks with a littiemore feeling. As I started to walk back I picked up a petoskey stone and put it in my pocket for good luck.
    I walked a lot faster on my way back to the cabin. Having gone over it in my mind, having put some distance between myself and a random act of violence that had nothing to do with me, I felt a little better. I walked over those rocks like a man who had someplace to go again. And besides, I was starting to get too damned cold.
    I watched for hunters this time as I walked through the woods. The six cabins I owned were strung out down an old logging road. My old man had bought this land back in the early sixties, came up here every weekend, clearing the trees and planning his first cabin site. He built them the old-fashioned way, the “right way.” You take some good solid pine and you scribe it all the way across with a chain saw so that each log fits perfectly on top of the other. He didn’t do any chinking at all. That wouldn’t have been the right way.
    I helped him that summer. That was 1968, the year the Tigers won the World Series. I had one more year of high school, and then I was on my way to minor league ball instead of college. He wasn’t too happy about that. But he didn’t talk about it much. I caught the tip of the chainsaw on a log one afternoon and almost took my ear off. He drove me to the hospital in the Soo while I held a rag against the side of my head. “You like to learn things the hard way, don’t you,” he said. “I wish I was young and stupid again.” Then he went on to tell me how I wouldn’t last a day in the minor leagues if my throws to second base kept sailing on me. He had caught some himself when he was younger. He told me again about the four-seam drill, even though I had heard it a hundred times already. “When I was your age,” he said, “I had a baseball in my hand every waking minute. You grab it, you turn itso you have four seams across your fingers. Grab it, turn it, again and again until it becomes a part of you. Then your throws to second don’t sail.”
    That was what, thirty years ago? He died a couple years after