The gun goes off a second time, the bullet puncturing the ceiling. Wyatt digs his knee into Grayson’s stomach until Grayson can feel the contents of what he digested roiling.
He spits up vomit that spews through his teeth. Wyatt squeezes his neck even tighter, digging fingernails into flesh through thin gloves.
“This is who I am,” Wyatt declares.
Grayson’s eyes bugging. He had seen the devil from the start in this man but didn’t take the threat as seriously as he should’ve. None of them will.
His body goes slack, twitching as it clings to the last bit of life. A layer of film covers Grayson’s eyes, his murderer nothing more than a phantom blur. He doesn’t have a flash of all the great moments from his existence. Death doesn’t allow this pleasure. It only brings forth excruciating pain and it’s hard to focus on anything else. The gun slips from his fingers, bouncing around the floor. His last hope hiding under the seat. In the brutal haze, he visualizes Wyatt leaving his human form. Turning into a wolf, primed only for survival. No other instinct allowed. Grayson’s body stops twitching, his soul detaching.
Wyatt climbs off, dipping the dog tags in Grayson’s blood, and leaving them by the seat-belt for the police to find. The car remains running so someone might locate this terror even sooner. But he will be far gone, satisfied by destroying two of his enemies with one solid blow.
54
Lorinda has gotten used to Grayson phoning her every day around the time she’d close up Pizza Joint, so when three days pass without a word, she thinks it weird. Granted, she hasn’t answered his calls since she kicked him out but can’t help worrying about him. On the fourth day, she mentions it to Callie, who’s been taking some time off after getting back from California. Callie explains that Travis and Grayson went camping for the weekend, but Travis already came home. So she calls the police station where the recep-tionist says that Grayson took off to go camping but hasn’t returned or gotten in touch.
The sheriff gave him a day pass, figuring maybe he’d gotten sick, or was sleeping off a weekend hangover.
By the fourth day, Stu is concerned as well and heads over to Grayson’s to see what’s going on.
Stu hopes he’s wrong about Grayson’s proclivities, but no one answers the door. He’s ready to ream the lug nut for being such a fuck up. It scares him that the lights are off and two days’ worth of newspapers have piled up on the doorstep. Meaning Grayson returned to pick up the weekend edition but hasn’t been back since. His deputy’s wagon isn’t parked either, indicating Grayson hasn’t set off on foot. Easier to find a car than a missing man anyway.
He puts out an APB for the plates.
Another day passes before it’s called in. Two hunters had been out in the woods past Main Bluff and smelled car exhaust. Approaching the car, they found the engine killed and the dead body of Grayson Hucks. Stu first thinks it’s suicide by carbon monoxide.
Grayson had been depressed as of late, especially after being dumped by Lorinda. He drank too much and one night could’ve decided on this terrible fate. Stu brings his deputies Cole and Bickley to the site where it’s clear from the marks on his neck that Grayson had been strangled. They call in the crime scene investigators who discover that two bullets had been shot from Grayson’s gun into the window and the ceiling. There’s blood on the seat from the scuffle, but no major arteries had been hit. Dipped in the blood is a pair of dog tags belonging to Tohopka Oxendine.
Stu’s knees go weak when he hears this. Over the past two years, Stu mentioned his private investigation into his son’s death even when the rest of the local police gave up.
It’d been deemed a drowning early on, no sign of foul play. Yet Grayson was always supportive and listened about the underbelly in Laner that had hooked Bobby. Stu even spoke about the Native American settlement he’d visit frequently for clues. He can’t remember if he’d brought up Tohopka by name, causing Grayson to decide on his own type of vigilante justice.
He goes back to the settlement to bring in Tohopka’s cousin Aylen for questioning.
Wyatt isn’t there, which makes it easier for her to comply. They spend hours grilling her about Tohopka’s whereabouts. He’s unsure how innocent she may be, but unless she’s a spectacular actress, she seems to know nothing about his dealings. Toward the end, a thought pops in her head and she mentions the town of Elwer, where Tohopka used to go
to score meth. She assumes he would want to get away from the immediate area and Elwer is about an hour and a half up north. A tiny town with a motel that was a stop before the oil port of Valdez. Stu figures it’s as good a shot as any to try.
He waits to tell Travis the news. Better to have the perpetrator behind bars first. He can’t take both Cole and Bickley, since that would leave Laner with zero police force manning the town, so he chooses Bickley because he’s a year Cole’s senior. Bickley drives while Stu asks for complete silence until they reach Elwer. He thinks of the years spent with Grayson as his deputy. Bickley would take Grayson’s place and do a fine job, but Stu doesn’t have the history with Bickley like he did with Grayson. He’d watched the boy grow up. Grayson came from a tough home. A dad who drank himself to death early on. A mother that did whatever possible to scrape by. Grayson lost his mother to cancer a few years back, so at least Stu wouldn’t be left with the unfortunate job of breaking the news that her son had been killed. He’s not ready to watch someone’s face as he’d destroy their life like that. And while Grayson was far from perfect at his job, he was loyal and he tried. He would be missed.
Elwer makes Laner look like a bustling metropolis. A literal one-stoplight kind of town where only the yellow and green lights work. Almost telling whoever is driving to not stop here. The only motel has a diner connected on the ground floor where they find a few oil workers who stopped for a bite on the way to Valdez. The cook takes their orders and they ask if he’d seen a Native American man, twenty-five years old, lean build, possibly on drugs. The cook says someone like that was staying at the motel all week, so they tell him to keep their meals warm while they inquire.
At the Elwer Motel, a pleasant woman mans the desk and hands over the keys to the room where Tohopka stays. She says she hasn’t seen him leave for days and he’d refused maid service. She says the maid described a weird odor coming from there but eventually it went away, so she didn’t bother to investigate.
The room is at the end of the second-floor balcony. The blinds shut but they can hear a rustling inside. Stu indicates for Bickley to hug the rim of the balcony in case Tohopka shoots out when Stu enters. Bickley gets his gun ready. As quietly as possible, Stu puts the key in the hole and turns. The lock opens and Stu catches a glimpse of a tweaked-out Tohopka naked and yelling before he raises his own gun and Tohopka crashes through the front window. Bickley fires once and misses.
Tohopka leaps to his feet, body cut up from the glass, and runs toward the edge of the balcony. Bickley fires and the bullet catches Tohopka clear in the back, spinning him over the railing where he falls head-first twenty feet below. His skull cracks open upon impact while Bickley and Stu run down the stairs and hover around the corpse.
“Ah shit,” Stu says. The plan had been to take the sumbitch in alive. Bickley apologizes over and over, the kid practically crying, but Stu tells him it’s okay. This was as open-and-shut a case as they come. Grayson had likely picked the perpetrator up and Tohopka had snapped. Maybe he couldn’t cut it running for the rest of his life. Maybe he wanted to end it in a way that wouldn’t lock him up for good. It’s not a case to lose sleep over. The son of a bitch had taken away a man Stu considered like a son, so he hocks up a good hunk of phlegm and spits it on Tohopka’s brutalized face. Then they go and have the lunch that the cook kept warm, a country-fried chopped beef steak in gravy with two eggs, hash browns, a side of reindeer sausage, and two tall beers, before they called into the station with the details.
55
Aylen’s spent the last couple of weeks getting her life in or
der. She sold the trailer since there’s no highway system to make it possible to drive straight to California. Only way out of Laner is flying from Nome, and she’s tired of living in a trailer anyway. Her whole life fits in a suitcase, which actually makes her kind of proud. She says goodbye to Raye, who’s been like a mother, and to all the girls who have been like sisters. They all tell her she has a place if she ever decides to come back, but she knows she’ll never return.
The police stopped questioning her shortly after Tohopka died. She reacted more strongly than she would’ve thought. When they were children, Tohopka was like a brother. They would wander the settlement catching critters. Tohopka grew up without parents as well, similarly raised by whoever felt like it. They had a bond that even in his brutality was hard to deny. He’s the last link to her past and, now that he’s dead, it’s time to sever the rest.
She packs up her small loom in a separate bag from her clothes and mementos. She’s flying to San Diego where she hears it’s forever seventy-three degrees. She wants to make blankets and throw rugs, intricate quilts with Tlingit designs. She will be leaving her past but not where she came from. Proud of her heritage, she will use it to help her succeed. With a ticket in hand for an afternoon flight, she drives her piece of shit car to Wyatt’s place for one last goodbye before she drops it off at the lot to turn into spare parts.
Wyatt attempts to get rest whenever he can, since he hasn’t been sleeping. The most he can do is nod off for a moment of peace. There’s an element of guilt. He didn’t like Grayson but can’t say the man entirely deserved to die. He wonders if anyone does. Did Carl Finnegan Langford? Or Frank? Soapy and his men? Or even Wyatt himself? He certainly didn’t deserve to freeze and lose his family, so why should he feel upset over anyone else’s fate?
To make use of the long nights, he spends the hours mimicking Trav. Getting the pitch of his voice perfect. He’s got the man’s walk down pat. He’s ready to no longer be himself anymore, slip into another’s shoes. Maybe that will stop the madness.
The doorbell rings. A curious sound since no one has ever rung it before. An element of fear makes his hairs stand on end. That somehow the police traced Grayson’s death back to him. He had pinned it all on Tohopka, but did he make a mistake at some point?
He’s relieved when he opens the door to Aylen.
She looks beautiful as usual, but lighter than normal, like a weight has been lifted. Her long hair is parted down the middle. She wears old jeans and a heavy purple fleece. Even in the summer, Laner barely hits over fifty-something degrees. Been some time since he’s seen her, too preoccupied. Or maybe he felt they had said all they needed to each other and it was best to let things end.
“Can I come in?” she asks.
He sweeps his arm out. “Of course.”
She observes his place like it confuses her.
“It came furnished,” he says, cracking his fingers. “Easier.”
She picks up a large shell on the mantle and listens to the roll of the ocean.
“I’m leaving,” she says.
He motions to her suitcase. “I figured.”
“With what Tohopka did to the deputy. It’s a glaring sign for me to go.”
“I’m sorry about your cousin.”
“I’m not. Well, that’s not true. I’m sorry his life took a turn. He should’ve had a better one.”
“Shouldn’t we all?”
She narrows her eyes. “I’m going to California. San Diego. Trading these fleeces for tank tops.”
“What will you do for work?”
“Not what I’ve been doing. I want to weave, make things. Feel good about myself.”
“Where will you live?”
“I have a little saved. But maybe sleep on the beach until I have enough for a place.”
“Hold on.”
He goes to the fireplace where he removes a box tucked behind the logs. He hands it to her. “It’s money.”
“Why are you giving me this?”
“It’s twenty thousand.”
“No, Wyatt. I don’t want to be—”
“What?”
“Beholden.”
“Think of it as a payment for what you did for me.”
“I’m trying to get out of that racket.”
“Not for sleeping together! More like how you uplifted me. I was frozen on the streets when you took me in, remember?”
She fingers the money. “I can’t fly with more than ten thousand.”
“So put the rest in the bank.”
“It’s too much.”
“I don’t want you sleeping on a beach. I want you with a roof over your head. Go on, it’s done. The money’s yours.”
She holds a stack of bills close to her chest. “Thank you.”
“You could teach me how to drive in return.”
“Drive?”
“Yes, I believe it is something I should know how to do.”
They go outside and get in her car, Wyatt behind the wheel. She shows him how to turn on the ignition, drive forward, back up, signal for a turn, check his blind spots, make a U-turn. He adapts quickly, having watched Trav. When they finish, she follows him back inside, standing by the box of bills like she’s afraid he might change his mind.
“I don’t wanna worry about you is all,” he says, and she lets out a heavy exhale.
“I’m more worried about you.”
He catches his reflection in the mirror. Tries to smile through but it’s difficult.
“You don’t look well,” she says.
“Haven’t been sleeping much.”
“You don’t look like yourself.”
“Who am I anyway? I’m a mixture of some of the past, some of this new present. It ain’t a fully realized person. Bits and pieces, you know?”
“That doesn’t have to be the case.”
“Will you do one more thing for me?” he asks, and disappears into the bathroom. He returns with scissors and an electric shaver. “I wanna lose the beard.”
“I’m not sure I’m ready to really see your face.”
“I’m not sure I am either.” A smile pokes out of his beard. “So see, I don’t know how to use this machine thingy. They sold it to me and there are directions.”
She takes it out of the box and directs him into the bathroom. Sits him on the toilet.
“Are you ready?” she asks, holding the scissors.
He nods and she cuts a big chunk of beard, capturing it in her fist. A hundred some-odd years of growth, a part of his history. She lets it fall to the floor where it looks like a dead animal. She runs a towel under hot water and pats his face. Then she plugs in the electric shaver and glides it down his cheeks, across his chin, up his neck, until only a fine layer of stubble remains. She dabs another towel under cold water to close his pores.
Standing up, she plants him in front of the mirror in the medicine cabinet. He rubs his jawline, mesmerized by the smooth feel. Trav looks back at him, more of an identical twin than ever before.
“Not such a bad mug,” she says, sweeping the discarded hair into a garbage bin. She leaves him to take in his new visage. After a while, he joins her outside on the couch where she fingers her new money.
“This is really amazing of you to do for me, Wyatt.”
He waves it away like it’s nothing.
“I want you to promise me something, though,” she says. “Can you be happy finally?”
“I have a plan in mind.”
She looks at him crossly. “What does that entail?”
He stares at his palms, lost in the cracks. “I aim to get a new family.”
“Well, good.” She takes a deep breath, maybe expecting the worst. “I think that’s good. But there’s not much chance for dating around here. Maybe you should think of moving to a bigger town?”
“No, what I want is right here.”
“Your friend’s family?”
He gives a solemn nod.
“But they’re not yours, Wyatt.”<
br />
“Who says?”
“Think of how you would’ve felt if someone came along and took your wife and son away?”
“But they were taken—”
“Not like this. He’s your friend. And besides, do you know if she even wants that?”
“He’s not my friend. He’s my…Anyway, I can tell it’s meant to be.”
“How?”
“Smell her despair. Her need for something different. For me.”
“Be careful is all. Sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.”
“Or it can be the greatest decision I’ll ever make in my life.”
She closes the box with her new money, ready to go. “I don’t believe it’s all your decision.”
A shadow haunts the room, darkens Wyatt’s face as he adds: “It is my decision.”
Goose pimples spring up Aylen’s arms.
She wonders if she should stay, talk him out of this nonsense, but he’s stubborn like her. That’s the most they had in common. No one could tell her not to move and leave behind everything she knows. Just like no one will ever come between him and what he desires.
“Okay,” she says, because it’s getting late and if she wants to hit the bank before her flight she must go.
They say goodbye like business partners, a shake of the hand. There was never really love between them. Sometimes a guide can fall into your life who can mean more than a love. And she’ll think of him occasionally, this she swears. The twenty thousand becoming a huge factor in starting her business.
She’ll be able to work from her home office, a little studio apartment in Escondido, crime-ridden but nothing she can’t handle. And without worrying about putting food on the table, she can focus on her weaving. Selling her wares on the beaches to locals and tourists, catching the eye of a woman who owns a boutique in La Jolla who buys a few blankets that sell out immediately, who soon devotes an entire section of her store to the intricate designs of Aylen Oxendine, who eventually finds a boyfriend, a sweet man twice her age that owns a septic tank business, and treats her well, and one day she’ll get pregnant, and he’ll marry her while her belly’s swelling, and they’ll have a small wedding with mostly his family and friends, and when he asks her what to call the baby, she’ll say the name Wyatt because she hasn’t thought about him in a while, and much like dreams, sometimes we dream about those we have forgotten, our mind’s last chance at remembering. Her husband loves this name, and before she can tell him no, it’s decided. But she’s okay with this. For without Wyatt, she never would’ve been able to start her business and probably wouldn’t have met her husband. She had never tried to contact Wyatt, or vice-versa, but she hopes he found happiness. Whether with the family he craved, or through some other means. But deep down, she’s aware that won’t happen.
The Ancestor Page 33
