Steve Hamilton - A Cold Day in Paradise (Alex McKnight Mysteries)

Id like to thank the people of Chippewa County, Michigan, for their hospitality, and for their patience with downstaters like me. To anyone who hasnt been there, if you ever find yourself driving from Sault Ste. Marie to Paradise, dont worry about getting your car stuck in the snow. Thats not to say it wont happen. If its between November and March, it probably will happen. But the first person to come by will help you. You can bet on it, because thats the kind of people who live there. So if any local characters in this book behave less than honorably, please believe that theyre nothing more than a product of my overactive imagination.

Thanks, also, to my writing groupBill Keller, Frank Hayes, Vernece Seager, Douglas Smyth, Kevin McEneaney, and Laura Fontaine. Without you Id still be promising myself that Id start writing again some day. Thanks to Liz Staples and Taylor Brugman for your time and local knowledge. To Chuck Sumner and Alfred Schwab for your encouragement. To Ruthe Furie, Bob Randisi, and Jan Grape from the Private Eye Writers of America. To the incomparable Ruth Cavin, Marika Rohn, and everyone else at St. Martins Press.

For technical assistance, I need to thank Cheryl Wheeler from the Private Security and Investigative Section of the Michigan State Police; Larry Queipo, former Police Chief, Town of Kingston, New York; and Dr. Glenn Hamilton from the Department of Emergency Medicine at Wright State University.

And most of all, thank you, Julia, my wife and best friend. And Nickieyou are my perfect little boy, and always will be.

T HERE IS A bullet in my chest, less than a centimeter from my heart. I dont think about it much anymore. Its just a part of me now. But every once in a while, on a certain kind of night, I remember that bullet. I can feel the weight of it inside me. I can feel its metallic hardness. And even though that bullet has been warming inside my body for fourteen years, on a night like this when it is dark enough and the wind is blowing, that bullet feels as cold as the night itself.

It was a Halloween night, which always makes me think about my days on the force. Theres nothing like being a policeman in Detroit on Halloween night. The kids wear masks, but instead of trick-or-treating they burn down houses. The next day there might be forty or fifty houses reduced to black skeletons, still smoking. Every cop is out on the streets, looking for kids with gasoline cans and calling in the fires before they rage out of control. The only thing worse than being a Detroit policeman on Halloween night is being a Detroit fireman.

But that was a long time ago. Fourteen years since I took that bullet, fourteen years and a good three hundred miles away, due south. It might as well have been on another planet, in another lifetime.

Paradise, Michigan, is a little town in the Upper Peninsula, on the shores of Lake Superior, across Whitefish Bay from Sault Ste. Marie, or the Soo, as the locals call it. On a Halloween night in Paradise, you might see a few paper ghosts in the trees, whipped by the wind off the lake. Or you might see a car filled with costumed children on their way to a party, witches and pirates looking out the back window at you as you wait at the one blinking red light in the center of town. Maybe Jackie will be standing behind the bar wearing his gorilla mask when you step into the place. The running joke is that you wait until he takes the mask off to scream.

Aside from that, a Halloween night doesnt look much different from any other October night in Paradise. Its mostly just pine trees, and clouds, and the first hint of snow in the air. And the largest, coldest, deepest lake in the world, waiting to turn into a November monster.