Free The Hunting Wind: An Alex McKnight Mystery by Steve Hamilton Page A

else happened in my whole life? Fine, I’m gonna show you.”
    I got up. As I walked out of the place, I heard Randy saying something to the boys at the bar, something cute about how they could go ahead and jump him now that I was leaving. I stood outside on Michigan Avenue, breathing in the night air. A spring night in Detroit, cold but not painful. I waited twenty seconds and then headed back inside, figuring I was going to get that bar fight whether I wanted it or not. But Randy came popping out the door and almost ranme over. He was alone and without a mark on him. Either he had talked his way out of another one or he’d killed both men with his index finger. For once, I didn’t care. This whole escapade was starting to feel like a mistake. I looked at him for a long moment without saying anything, and then I started walking down Michigan Avenue. He fell in beside me, matching my silence with his own.
    We walked past Leverette Street, the street where Randy’d had his fortune told in 1971 and met Maria and fell in love with her. Or whatever the hell had happened. Mr. Shannon, the man I had just spoken to on the phone, he was probably sitting in his living room at that very moment, a half a block down, watching the Tigers on television. Randy looked down the street but did not break stride. He did not say anything.
    The stadium loomed above us. It was dark except for a blue neon sign at the very top. DETROIT TIGERS in blue letters. Tiger blue. And a sign that glowed white, with black letters that read HOME OPENER, APRIL 19 CLEVELAND INDIANS .
    When we hit the motel parking lot, I opened up the door on my side of the truck, leaned over, and unlocked the other door. Randy got in. I pulled out of the lot, took a right and then a U-turn to go west. Because long ago somebody had decided that you don’t take left turns on major roads in the greater Detroit area. Thirty-four years, I’d lived down here, and probably one full year of that was making rights and U-turns to go left.
    I took Michigan Avenue west all the way out of Detroit, past Roosevelt Park to Dearborn. I switchedover to Ford Road, drove past River Rouge Park and the Dearborn Country Club. All the way to Telegraph Road, where I had to take another right and a U-turn instead of going left. I found the old street, took a left, an honest-to-God left this time, because I was leaving the main road, went down two and a half blocks. I pulled the truck over and stopped.
    Brick houses. Just like the neighborhood back in Detroit. Maybe a little nicer. The lawns were watered a little bit better. The backyards were a little bigger. But the same idea. Brick houses in a row, with just enough room between them to drive your car into the detached garage.
    “This is where I grew up,” I said.
    Randy looked out the window. “This house here?”
    “Yes.”
    “Looks like a nice house.”
    “It’s a nice house,” I said. “When I was seven years old, my mother got pancreatic cancer. She lasted a year and a half.”
    He didn’t say anything. He kept looking at the house.
    “You think a seven-year-old kid even knows what pancreatic cancer is? Or what a pancreas is? Where you even find a pancreas in your body?”
    He didn’t say anything.
    “All I knew was that my mother kept losing weight and getting sicker and sicker and there was nothing I could do about it.”
    “I’m sorry,” he said.
    “My father worked for Ford Motors,” I said. “Most people did back then. He got up every morning at five o’clock and took care of her and made me breakfastand got me off to school. We could actually walk to school back then. When school was over, I walked home. I would be alone with my mother for a couple hours. Just sitting with her. Watching her die a little bit more every day. And then my father would come home and make dinner. I never went to one baseball game the whole time she was sick, you know that? I never
played
baseball when she was sick. Not once. A couple months