“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “If I don’t have to read about it in the paper tomorrow, then it never happened.”

I threw a couple bills on the bar. There were two men sleeping on their bar stools, their heads buried in their arms. The only difference was the man on the left was snoring and the man on the right wasn’t. I didn’t think either of them was an Indian. Just two white men who come into the place every single night, I would bet, and drink themselves unconscious. Somebody once told me that 3 percent of the people who live in Michigan live in the Upper Peninsula, and that they drink 28 percent of the alcohol. That’s not just the Indians drinking all that. And yet I didn’t hear anybody telling me what a disgrace it was, those white men, they’re all just drunken degenerates.

“Hey,” the bartender said, “aren’t you that private investigator? The one that was working for Uttley?”

“I was,” I said.

“Where’d he go, anyway? I never see him anymore.”

“I honestly don’t know,” I said. It was the truth.

“He had a tab going here,” the man said. “He never paid it.”

“How much is it?” I said. I pulled my wallet back out.

He held his hands up. “It’s between him and me,” he said. “I’m not gonna let you pay it. If you ever see him, though, you tell him he owes me.”

“If I see him, I’ll tell him.” The thought of it made me smile a little. Just a little.

When I stepped outside, the cold wind off the lake slapped me across the face. I closed my eyes and held my gloves against my face. When the wind died down, I took a deep breath. The air had a smell and a weight to it that held the threat of more snow.

I looked out across the St. Marys River. It had been frozen solid for almost a month. The locks were shut down for the winter. The next freighter wouldn’t pass through them until March at the earliest. From the other shore the lights of Canada beckoned to me. I could walk right across the river if I wanted to. No customs, no toll. I wouldn’t be the first to do it. There were stories of men who left their wives and families behind them and walked across the ice to a new life in another country.