Comanche

by Brett Riley

  She sipped her Coke. He’s workin twelves. He’s either at work or in bed.

  Tell me about you then. What’s kept you in town?

  She ate a French fry. The University of Miami.

  Pardon?

  I’m twenty-six and livin with my parents.

  Okay.

  I used to hate it here. There’s nothin to do. So when I got a full ride at the U, I thought I’d never see this town again, except on holidays. But I didn’t even last two years.

  Thornapple took one of her fries and dipped it in gravy. How come?

  Because I majored in vodka and minored in smokin blunts with frat boys. I was on academic probation after my freshman year. Daddy like to killed me, so I settled down. Took a couple of summer courses, came home for six or seven weeks, and headed back in the fall. One day, I got invited to a party. Figured, what the hell, I’ve been good. They had enough Jell-O shots to get most of Dallas drunk. I barely remember the rest of that semester. They suspended me for the spring, but I could tell I’d never make it there. Too much temptation. So I came home and worked at Brookshire’s for a year and a half. Got into Tarleton and majored in nursin. After graduation, Community Hospital hired me. And you know what? I’m happy. I like my job. I know most everybody. And I love the cheeseburgers here. They’ll probably put me in my own ER one day.

  She smiled. Her teeth were white and straight, her skin tan. Her long, dark hair spilled over her shoulder.

  Thornapple took a long swallow of tea and then said, So what do you think about this business with our ancestors?

  It’s pretty cool that somethin happened in this town once.

  The mayor shook hands all around and excused himself. John Wayne tapped Garner on the shoulder and launched into a dirty joke about a Baptist minister, a farmer, and an automatic milking machine. Garner laughed so hard, his belly shook the table. Pat Wayne rolled her eyes and started a conversation with Joyce Johnstone. A few minutes later, Thornapple joined them. Wayne eventually turned back to her husband, but Thornapple and Johnstone kept chatting. At some point, Lorena Harveston left, too. Red Thornapple did not think of her again until he heard her scream.

  Chapter Eight

  July 4, 2016, 9:05 p.m.—Comanche, Texas

  Lorena Harveston left the diner alone, with her purse slung over her shoulder. She had not wanted to spend her off evening with people at least twenty years older than her, but their stories and their laughter had been entertaining, even though that Thornapple guy had barely written down anything she said. The big truck driver—Garner? Garland?—and that John Wayne guy, whose parents must have hated him if they saddled him with that name, had made her cackle and blush with their awful jokes. The woman named Joyce had complimented Lorena’s skin and earrings. Even the mayor, who cut out early, seemed nice enough.

  Overhead, the waning moon was a great piece of chipped marble. A few clouds drifted across the sky. Fireworks shrieked nearby, shrill and earsplitting as trains’ brakes must have been. The July air was hot and smelled of gunpowder. She smiled. Not so long ago, this kind of evening would have made her long for a big city near an ocean, a place as different from Comanche as possible. Funny how things changed, what kinds of evolutions your life wrought.

  Lorena stopped and turned back toward the diner. Framed by a window’s drawn curtains, a couple bent over their food. A waitress passed behind them and appeared in the next window, this one otherwise empty, before moving out of sight again. Three evenly spaced carriage lights illuminated most of the porch and two or three feet of the grounds. A Kenny Chesney song blasted from the jukebox the Redhearts liked to crank up after dark. When my friends at college asked me what small-town Texas was like, this is the kind of picture I wish I had painted, instead of makin us all sound like redneck ignoramuses. She turned back toward the lot. The streetlamps along Austin provided plenty of light.

  She reached the end of the concrete walk before they flickered. A cold breeze passed over her. Gooseflesh broke out on her arms and legs. She shivered and looked about.

  The hell?

  In front of the diner’s storage building, something moved. All the lights in the diner dimmed and then went out. The muffled music from the jukebox cut off midsong. From inside, cries of surprise and dismay.

  Lorena peered into the shadows. A man stood in front of the building. He did not move or speak. His arms dangled at his sides.

  The lights, that weird wind, this guy—it was all a little too much like a scene from a bad horror film. He was so still. She had never considered how often people shift or twitch, even when standing in one place. Nobody just let their arms hang. They clasped their hands at the waist or stuffed them into pockets. This man seemed more like one of those life-size cardboard cutouts of famous people.

  Screw this. Lorena turned on her heel.

  When she reached the grass, the figure moved out of the shadows, ten feet in front of her.

  How did he get over here? Nobody’s that fast. Yet there he stood. She backed onto the concrete lot. An icepick stabbed her lungs.

  Don’t panic. Don’t you dare run.

  He came forward as she backpedaled, keeping perfect pace with her, always ten feet away. She looked about. No one in the lot, on the street, on the diner’s porch.

  You come any closer and I’ll scream, she said. Go on now. Leave me alone.

  She struck an SUV, the front bumper hitting the backs of her knees. She managed to stay upright and leaned against the grille, heat radiating from the engine. The man stopped, too.

  Her voice trembling, Lorena whispered, What do you want? Her throat and mouth had gone dry.

  The man said nothing. He just stood there, watching her.

  I’m not waitin on him to jump me. I’m callin the cops.

  She dug through her purse, fingers slipping over her keys, through loose change and lipstick and mascara and eye shadow, until they found her phone. She yanked it out and dropped the purse. It hit the concrete, and everything spilled out like the guts of a dead animal someone had left in the middle of field dressing. She dialed 911, willing her hands not to shake. But before she could even raise the phone, it exploded. Tiny pieces of plastic and metal shrapnel, hot and sharp, scraped her arms, her torso, her face. She screamed and clawed at the wounds, her hand numb from the impact. The phone’s misshapen remains, gnarled like a fragment of a crashed airplane, clattered to the concrete. She wheezed. The world began to go gray.

  Harveston slapped herself across the face as hard as she could. Her head rocked to one side, her teeth clicking together, and the parking lot swam back into focus. The man stood there, ten feet away. In one hand, he held a gun big enough to kill a rhino. It was aimed right at her. He was so pale, he practically glowed, like a television tuned to a dead station.

  Jesus Christ. He shot my phone. He shot it right out of my hand.

  She ran for the diner, sprinting as if all hell were after her, heart hammering in her chest.

  If I can just make it inside. If I can just make it inside.

  A bang, and pain exploded in her right thigh. She fell to her knees and onto her chest and face, skidding between an old Buick and a Chrysler with rusting white paint, her head near the Buick’s front tire. A nail protruded an eighth of an inch from the tread. Dried mud had caked on the car’s undercarriage.

  Her face and chest ached. She touched her nose, and her hand came away bloody.

  If I can just make it inside. If I can just make it inside.

  Six or eight people emerged from the diner. They were talking, though she could not make out the words. Then one of them, a woman, raised her voice and said, I’m tellin you, I heard somebody scream.

  Probably a firecracker, said a man’s voice.

  Help, Harveston screamed, her chest aching. Using the Buick as a crutch, she pulled herself to her feet. With every heartbeat, fire raced from her leg
to her chest.

  There she is, in the lot, someone said. Come on, fellas.

  The pale man still stood ten feet away. He looked like someone’s black-and-white drawing come to life. Only that was not exactly right. He was gray, as if age had consumed all the natural hues, leaving only shades of blacks and whites. His hair spilled from under his wilting cowboy hat in long, greasy jags. His body was slender but strong. He wore what appeared to be jeans, chaps, a shirt made of some woven fabric, a leather vest, a gun belt festooned with bullets, and holsters slung low on each hip. One holster held a gun. One was empty. He still aimed that pistol at her. If she stared into its cavernous barrel long enough, she might fall headlong into its depths. Her leg throbbed and pulsed.

  Footsteps on the concrete. Beyond the apparition, three shadowed forms made their way down the walk and among the cars on the paved lot.

  Where are you? one of them called.

  Look, said another. You hurtin a woman, shithead?

  Lorena opened her mouth to cry for help again, but as soon as her lips parted, another shot thundered—the sound seemed to come from inside her head—and then her guts exploded.

  One of the men cried out.

  What the hell was that? shouted another.

  Lorena gripped her abdomen and moaned. When she pulled her hands away, she expected them to be covered with gore.

  They were scraped and dirty but otherwise bare.

  Her head spun. Her stomach churned. She looked at the man who had shot her and found she had no capacity for surprise left when he faded before her eyes. She could see right through him.

  A ghost. A ghost shot me.

  The apparition disappeared. Lorena closed her eyes.

  The pain seemed to be lessening. Perhaps the ghost took it with him. Or maybe she had not seen him at all, had not been shot. Maybe she had stumbled in the lot and hit her head, and the rest had been a concussion-induced dream. But then nausea struck again, and she vomited a column of blood. It coated the Buick’s dirty, leaking tire. The footsteps had gotten much closer now, but she no longer cared. She felt tired, sleepy.

  Men surrounded her, their faces blocking out the stars. Red Thornapple, the trucker whose name might have been Garland, the Indian man who worked the grill. They looked frightened.

  The grillman leaned over her. From a thousand miles away, he said, Aw shit—hey, you okay?

  Strong hands grabbed her arm and shook her, but she closed her eyes, too tired to talk.

  Hang on, lady, the cook said. I’m callin 911—yeah, hello, this is Morlon Redheart down at the Depot Diner. There’s a woman hurt in the parkin lot. Looks like she’s in bad trouble. Naw, I can’t see nothin. Look, just send somebody, okay? I ain’t a goddam doctor.

  Chapter Nine

  August 12, 2016—New Orleans, Louisiana

  Raymond groaned and sat up, rubbing sleep from his eyes. His new alarm clock could double for an ambulance siren on its day off. Its puke-green digital readout said it was 7 a.m. Wonder if I can get away with a couple more hours? He sat for a while, his phone in one hand, ready to text LeBlanc some excuse.

  No. You already missed too much work.

  He got up and went to the kitchen, where he made coffee and drank a cup, pouring the rest of the pot into his silver thermos. Then he showered, brushed his teeth and tongue, and got dressed. No need to shave. Given all the pulp fiction and film noir most people had consumed, his customers would look with suspicion or outright distrust on any private detective without a five o’clock shadow. Besides, even one more task seemed like too much. Maybe it’s depression. I hear that makes you feel tired all the time. I wonder if it makes you feel old, too. Raymond Turner was only forty-one years old but felt twice that age, like a man who has outlived his family and most of his friends.

  That goddam picture.

  He had found the photo in his office desk while cleaning out a drawer a few weeks back, and it had hit him like a sledgehammer between the eyes—a years-younger Raymond and Marie standing in front of the old capitol building in Baton Rouge. Seeing it somehow underscored his loneliness in a way even the empty house did not. Back then, they had still believed they would have children, three or four at least. So much hope in the photograph, two lives stretching out and intertwining, hope that had survived the discovery that Raymond was sterile, that local adoption agencies disapproved of his transient and dangerous profession. He had seen them all in that photo—Marie and the children who never were—felt the vacuum of their absence, and then he had made some piss-poor excuse to LeBlanc and left, dropping the photo, not even thinking about where it might land or who might see it. On the way home, he bought a case of Shiner Bock and felt only mild surprise when LeBlanc was waiting on his porch. The big man had unfolded himself from the swing and stood with his hands in his pockets as Raymond hesitated, afraid to take out the beer, afraid not to.

  Might as well bring it on in, LeBlanc said. Using the spare key Raymond kept under the welcome mat, he let himself in.

  Raymond followed him, carrying the beer and wondering if he would weep when LeBlanc resigned from the agency and left.

  This about that picture I found on the floor this afternoon? LeBlanc said.

  Yeah.

  LeBlanc sighed. I get it, but we’re not doin all that shit again. Hand it over.

  I wish Betsy McDowell was here. She always made Raymond feel better, just like she did with the clients.

  LeBlanc poured the beer down the sink and stayed until bedtime. But Raymond had awakened from dreaming of the bridge every night since.

  Now, he locked up the house and got in his car. Then he looked at his left hand and saw his ring finger was naked. He got back out and went inside. In his bedroom, the ring lay on his nightstand, where he had left it before taking his shower. It was a silk-fit gold ring filigreed with palm leaves and tiny doves—Marie’s idea, to remind him of the inner peace everyone should seek. He picked it up and slipped it on, as he had done every day for sixteen years, thinking, as he always did, of the words ’til death do us part.

  He intended to do better than that.

  Chapter Ten

  August 27, 2016—Comanche, Texas

  Morlon and Silky had gone home at five. The staff planned to close around ten. Of course, sometimes around ten became one in the morning when the truckers and shift workers rolled in, and while the night cooks and manager liked the extra hours, both servers rolled their eyes and griped to each other. They never gave back their tips, though.

  At 9:30 p.m., John and Pat Wayne pulled into the parking lot. It seemed like a slow night—only seven or eight cars, most of them probably the workers’. John smiled. Perhaps he and Pat would get their food faster than usual and be home in time for the news. Beside him, Pat looked skittish, probably thinking about how that poor Harveston girl had died not five minutes after saying goodbye. That had been sad and strange, and the cops had no leads on the man spotted in the lot that night. John had come back to the diner since then, but this was Pat’s first time.

  He drove his brand-new Ford Mustang GT, royal blue with gray interior. He had driven the old one until you could damn near see through parts of the chassis that had rusted away. He had bought that car as a kid and had kept it up as best he could over the years. He had driven it to his senior prom and to his wedding and to the hospital when Pat miscarried the only child they ever conceived; he had picked up his first date in it and lost his virginity in its back seat and drove Pat to Dallas for what they called a honeymoon, squirreling away a little money every month toward his next Mustang. John Wayne paid his bills on time and owned a nice house, a bass boat he pulled behind his crummy work truck, a savings account, a sixty-inch television, and a growing retirement fund. When the old Mustang had finally decayed beyond his powers to repair it, he took a big chunk of his savings and paid almost a third of the $32,000 price on the spot. The salesman had nea
rly choked.

  Now John parked on the lot’s fringe, sure that if he pulled in next to another car, someone would back into the ’Stang or sit on it and leave their ass prints on his hood. He killed the engine, and they got out, the night’s heat descending on them like a wave. The recently mown grass clumped around their feet. Shit fire. I just washed her, too. As he walked away, he trailed his fingers down the length of the car.

  If you’re thinkin of makin love to it, I’d advise you not to use the exhaust pipe, Pat said.

  John laughed and put his arm around her. She had always made him smile without resorting to the usual jokes about his name. If they had lived in a big city, he would have advised her to try stand-up insult comedy, like that old fella Rickles. But they lived in Comanche, so she practiced her art at Pat’s Hair and Nails, her own little shop. Humor had helped them stay together during the tough times when bills and work and Texas summers upped the everyday tensions of their lives. Except during the most serious of crises, she always cracked the first joke.

  Pat slipped her arm around John’s waist and hooked her thumb into his Wranglers’ back pocket, and together they stepped out of the grass and onto the parking lot proper.

  The streetlights along Austin flickered.

  When they reached the walkway, John saw movement in his peripheral vision. He stopped.

  A figure stood beside the old storage building—a man dressed in Old West garb, complete with pistols. He slumped as if exhausted and looked somehow bleached, as if he had walked out of the Llano Estacado and brought half its sand and dust with him.

  He watched them.

  I think I’ve seen that fella before.

  Pat clutched his arm. Come on, she said, tugging him. Let’s get inside. Her voice carried an edge that John registered in some part of his mind. She tugged harder.