Free Beneath the Book Tower: An Alex McKnight Short Story by Steve Hamilton

 
    We were driving down Woodward, just past midnight. It was the third watch. The night shift. Franklin and me in the car. This is going back, you understand. I mean way back. I was still a cop, I was still married, Franklin’s second daughter hadn’t even been born yet. I was what, seven years into the job that summer, Franklin maybe five. So twelve years seniority between the two of us and yet we were still pulling nights. On account of the hiring freeze, the city running out of money like it did at least once a decade. No more new cops, no more new vehicles, no more new anything for anybody.
    God, it was hot that night.
    “Now, wait a minute,” Franklin said to me. “Are you telling me this place is in Michigan ? And it’s called Paradise ?”
    “It’s a real place, yes.”
    “How come I never heard of it before?”
    “It’s way the hell up there,” I said. “On Lake Superior.”
    “What, you mean in the UP?”
    “That’s what I’m telling you. All the way up there.”
    “What’s up there? Just little cabins by the water?”
    “A few of those, yeah. A lot of trees.”
    It was a hot, hot summer night, and cars were cruising up and down the street, all around us. Everybody noticed us. Everybody maintaining their cool but keeping one eye on us at all times, taking note of our location and direction of travel, the way you keep your eye on a bumblebee in the corner of the room.
    “What do you do for fun up there?”
    “I’m not sure,” I said. “I never had any fun up there myself. I just helped my old man build his first log house.”
    “Is he still up there?”
    “He’s working on number six now. His masterpiece, he calls it.”
    “Sounds impressive,” Franklin said. “Maybe I’ll get to see it someday Never even been over that bridge, believe it or not.”
    “You’ve lived in this state your whole life,” I said, “and you’ve never once been over the Mackinac Bridge?”
    “I’m not sure they even let black people up there, am I right? Don’t they stop them and direct them back to Detroit?”
    This is the kind of thing Franklin would say. Making a joke out of it but at the same time you could tell there was a grain of hard truth inside. He was born in this city, grew up here, played high school football at Cass Tech. If he hadn’t been given oversized physical gifts, there’s no telling where he would have ended up. Maybe on these same streets we were rolling down tonight. But the game was his ticket. He went to the University of Michigan on a full scholarship, played three years on the offensive line until he got hurt. Missed out on his red-shirt senior year but kept his promise to his mother and graduated. Then he went to the academy and became a Detroit cop. He was still hovering somewhere around his playing weight of 260 pounds, and he never looked comfortable wedged in behind that steering wheel. But tonight it was my turn to drive anyway, so he sat in the passenger’s seat and watched the night go by through his window.
    Me, I was a baseball player. Which meant we had our own little running argument about which sport was the hardest to play. Every night another round in the ongoing debate. But not tonight. For whatever reason, Franklin had a whole different vibe going on. Maybe because his wife was getting close to delivering that second daughter. Or maybe because of the “mission” he was set on accomplishing that night. He hadn’t told me anything about it. Which wasn’t unusual. He just said he had a favor he wanted to get to when we had a chance and left it at that.
    “So what’s with the name, anyway?” he said. “Paradise? What makes it Paradise?”
    “There’s a shipwreck museum up the road,” I said. “And some nice waterfalls.”
    He looked over at me. “That’s it?”
    “It gets a lot of snow.”
    “So far you’re not really describing a place I’d call Paradise.”
    I gave him a shrug. “I didn’t name it.”
    “Your old man seems to like it,