Read Online North of Nowhere by Steve Hamilton - Free Book Online Page A

police officer’s uniform and watching what it does to everybody else around me.
    On this day in July, while the rest of the country stewed and simmered, it was eighty-one degrees in the Soo, with a constant breeze off Lake Superior. I didn’t feel like getting right back in my truck. I just couldn’t do it. The City-County building sits at the east end of Locks Park, so I took a walk along the St. Marys River. There was one freighter heading toward the locks, along with a few smaller boats and a couple of jet skis. The center of town was busy. It was a holiday week, and such a goddamned gorgeous day, I wasn’t surprised to see all the people. I suppose I couldn’t blame them for wanting to be here. I’d take the tourists any day over a man like Win Vargas, with his new-money dreams of condos and golf courses. The tourists came up here for a few days at a time, they stayed in one of the new hotels, they watched some ships go through the locks, bought T-shirts for their kids at the gift shops. Maybe they had their own boats on trailers, took them out on the lake for a few hours, caught a few whitefish. With the casinos up here now, maybe we had a few more tourists than we ever did before. But I could live with them. They come, they spend some money, they take some pictures, and then they go home.
    I walked up Water Street, past the Ojibway Hotel. This was one of the original buildings in town, with a formal dining room overlooking the locks. All the new hotels, they were out on the Business Spur, close to the highway.
    Vargas had said something about one of those hotels, about his wife being there with Swanson the lawyer. And his private investigator documenting every move. I thought about that and laughed out loud. Then I replayed my little meeting with Chief Maven and laughed out loud again.
    Hell, I was in town anyway. I had to see for myself. Ashmun Street, the Chief said. His office had to be right here in town, with Ashmun running perpendicular to the river, through what passes as a business district and then across the old power canal. I didn’t figure it would be too hard to find. Hell, I knew it would be the only private investigator’s office in this part of the state, let alone this particular street.
    I started at the intersection with Portage Street, and worked my way south. There were gift shops on either side of the street, where you could buy your postcards, your imitation Indian headdresses, and of course your little iron-ore freighter replicas, with “Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan” embossed on the side of the hull. There was an ice cream shop after that on one side, a bookstore on the other, another gift shop, this one specializing in crystal jewelry and those little ceramic figurines that people collect. A restaurant, one more gift shop, and then it crossed Spruce Street. I knew I was getting warmer, because I was seeing serious business going on now. A three-story bank on one side, an accounting office on the other, then a travel agency and a place where they’d make you a sign for your business in twenty-four hours.
    I almost missed Leon’s door. It was set between the sign place and a car insurance office. The lettering on the door read “Prudell Investigations, Second Floor.”
    I opened the door and went up a narrow flight of stairs. There was a small hallway at the top, with a couple of different offices that looked empty. I stood in front of the last door on the left, looking through the glass at my old partner Leon Prudell. He was sitting at his desk, looking out his window at the street below. He was the same man I knew, fifty pounds on the heavy side, and that hair, so red it was orange and pointing in every direction. He didn’t have his flannel shirt on, though, or his hunting boots. He was actually wearing a white shirt and tie. For a moment I just stood there watching him, remembering the night he had come out to Paradise and waited at the Glasgow Inn for me, drinking Jackie’s