Misery Bay by Steve Hamilton

want?” he said.
    “I left you a message. You never called me back.”
    He shook his head and turned away from me. “Come on in.” He was wearing old jeans and a T-shirt speckled with paint. “Wipe your feet.”
    I went inside and did as I was told. There were plastic drop cloths everywhere, and the unventilated smell of paint was almost overwhelming. It took me back to my days right after baseball, when I kept from starving by painting houses.
    “I’m kind of busy here,” he said, his voice coming to me from the kitchen. “So make it quick.”
    “Good to see you, too.”
    “What was that?”
    “Nothing,” I said, turning the corner. The kitchen had been virtually taken apart. The table and chairs were gone, and everything else that wasn’t bolted down had been removed. Beneath the paint smell I caught a strong undercurrent of bleach. There was a plastic tarp on the floor and from the bare wood along the edges I could tell he had ripped up all of the tiles.
    The chief poured more cream-colored paint into his tray. It looked like he was about halfway done with his first coat.
    “How’s your wife?” I said.
    “She’s in Amsterdam.”
    “Really?”
    “My daughter’s been traveling around Europe since right after Christmas,” he said, rolling the paint on the wall. “Kind of a lifelong dream. When this happened here…”
    He paused for just a half second to look down on the floor, at the exact spot where Raz breathed his last breath.
    “When this happened, my wife took the chance to go over and spend some time with her.”
    “That sounds like a good thing.” I tried to remember what I knew about Chief Maven’s daughter and came up with only one thing. The very first time I sat in his office, I saw the picture of a young girl on his desk and asked him if it had come with the frame.
    “Do you know how much it costs to fly to Amsterdam at the last minute? Take a guess.”
    “I have no idea.”
    “Soo to Detroit. Detroit to New York. New York to Amsterdam. Twenty-three-hundred dollars.”
    “That’s impressive.”
    “It was worth every penny to get her out of this place. I don’t know how she’ll ever be able to live here again.”
    “What about you?” I said. “It looks like you’ve been here nonstop. Do you think that’s a good idea?”
    He looked up at me as he went to put more paint on his roller.
    “Where the hell else am I going to go? They took away my badge, you know.”
    “I hear you were driving those FBI agents a little crazy.”
    “The FBI can kiss my ass. They can’t touch me. But the mayor, that little spineless weasel, he kinda suggested that maybe I’d be better off taking a personal leave of absence for a while.”
    “That doesn’t sound like taking away your badge.”
    “Don’t be an idiot. They forced me out. Like what the hell else am I supposed to do with myself? The job is all I know anymore.”
    That much was true, I thought. It was hard to imagine him doing anything else.
    I watched him paint. He accidentally got some wall paint on the white ceiling and spent the next five minutes trying to fix it. He was getting more and more aggravated and I knew he’d blow up at me if I stayed there. But for some reason I knew I couldn’t leave.
    What he was doing … it was something I knew so well myself. He had already cleaned the place within an inch of its life and now he was painting, and if I left him there he’d probably start knocking down the walls. Anything to change the one thing that couldn’t be changed.
    “I can’t believe I’m about to say this,” I said, “but I wonder if you’d like to help me keep my promise to Raz.”
    He stopped painting. “What are you talking about?
    “I’ll tell you the whole story, but first I need to use your phone.”
    “For what? Who are you calling?”
    “The undersheriff of Houghton County.”
    *   *   *
     
    An hour later, we were making our plans. We’d be leaving early the next morning and driving all