by Tom Wright
Tidwell was caught that afternoon at the back of the old cemetery on Spring Road. There were no civilians at the scene yet, and the uniforms who had run him down double-checked that their collar microphones were off and sent word back mouth-to-ear to ask if Bo and I wanted to come up. Bo should have been on leave by then, and he shouldn’t have been carrying his weapon. Everybody knew it was a mistake for him to be here and armed, but it was a mistake everybody in the department was willing to make. Anyway, nobody had been able to look into his eyes and ask for his gun or try to make him go home.
‘Suspect’s right in there, sir,’ a uniform said tightly. ‘You want to take him?’
The killer, wearing a sleeveless T-shirt, old jeans out at one knee and ratty sneakers, stood with his back against the wall of the sexton’s shed, trying to pull a couple of sprigs of chokecherry over in front of him as if they could protect him. He was thin, with jailhouse swastikas, skulls and dragons up and down his arms, SS lightning bolts on one side of his neck and a patchy beard that had never quite come in. As I registered these things I clearly saw what was going to happen, but too late, because in the same moment I was already hearing Bo’s gun clear its holster.
‘Give yourself time to think, Bo,’ I said. ‘That’s all I’m asking – just think about where we’re goin’ here, partner.’
‘Hey, man, I give up, okay?’ the tattooed doper whined. ‘I give up, man. Don’t shoot. Jesus Christ, my hands are up, dig?’ He cried and snuffled, a worm of snot tracking down his upper lip. ‘Don’t shoot me, man.’
But my attention was on Bo. The muscles and tendons in his hands stood out like cables under the skin as he gripped his Glock, sweat gathering in beads on his unshaven face. He was a man chiselled out of grey rock, not moving, disconnected from ordinary time and space, his reality now only himself, Tidwell, and the .40 he held dead on the bridge of Tidwell’s nose. The uniforms silently scanned the cemetery, the road and the edge of the woods, looking everywhere except at us, the energy of the moment so monstrous that it filled the air with the smell of hot metal.
‘Bo,’ I said. ‘Not like this.’
‘Yeah, just like this,’ Bo said softly, and I saw his will build and converge and flow down his arms toward his white-knuckled hands and the trigger of the Glock.
In some ways I knew Bo’s reactions better than my own. I screamed ‘YOUR SIX!’, and in the half-second it broke Bo’s concentration and he involuntarily glanced back over his shoulder, I was on Tidwell. I feinted a quick left and then threw the best right I had, and he was down, me right there on top of him, driving the right in again and again, no skill or timing, only force, seeing Lynn and Kim lying dead and posed like white dolls in the privet.
‘Like THIS!’ I screamed, now as disconnected from the rest of the universe as Bo had been, my reality turning the colour of arterial blood and time itself grinding silently to a standstill as I slammed my fists again and again and again into the murderer’s face, until the broken bones of my hands and Tidwell’s face protruded in bloody splinters through the torn skin. From somewhere came the sound of hopeless sobbing in a voice like the hoarse bellow of some scaled thing out of another age, but I had no understanding then that the soul-sick, chest-ripping sound was coming from my own throat.
Some unmeasurable time later the uniforms entered my red dream and pulled me off the guy. They told me the next day that it had taken five of them. Holding me back, they turned their collar mikes back on. ‘It’s okay, sir, you got him,’ one of them enunciated. ‘He’s down, sir,’ said another. ‘You can take it easy now – we’ll cuff him and get the meat wagon out here, get the EMTs to check out your injuries.’ And, ‘The suspect never should have resisted arrest like that, sir.’ And, ‘Lucky you were able to restrain him before he could injure any more officers.’
And Bo, braced against a black marble headstone, retching himself dry.
Tidwell survived to stand trial, where he was found guilty and condemned to death by lethal injection – a sentence that was never carried out because sixteen months after he cleared through intake at Huntsville another inmate shanked him in the neck over a cigarette.
But to Bo none of it seemed to matter. After the deaths he said less and less and began gradually slowing down, like a man moving underwater. And even though he became more like them every day, he didn’t belong to the communion of the dead either. He wouldn’t talk to me about it or let me make an appointment for him with Max, his belief in any world outside the darkness he now inhabited apparently gone for ever.
But eventually he started trying to talk a good game. ‘I’m okay, man,’ he said. ‘I think I’m starting to pull out of it.’
It’s amazing how being told what you want to hear can shut down your cerebral cortex. And, to be fair, Bo did seem to come back just a little, reconnecting with the world here and there. I noticed it as we sat on the deck behind my house drinking Dos Equis and keeping watch over a smoking brisket. I had just had the cast cut off my hand and wrist and was trying to get used to two-handedness again.
Bo said, ‘See you still got Boat-zilla over there – ’
‘Bufordine,’ I said.
‘Okay, Bufordine. You gotta be the only guy in the world who’d name a bass boat – ’
‘LA named her,’ I said.
‘Well, that explains it,’ he said. ‘So, ever take that monster out to the lake any more?’ There was a hint of life in his voice that I hadn’t heard since before the killings.
‘Not as much as Jana and LA say I should. Why?’
‘Just thinking. I used to be so hot for it, but I haven’t been out in years. Now I doubt I’ll ever get the old mojo back.’
‘I don’t want to hear you say we’re getting too old for it, Bo.’
He smiled. ‘Too old? Naw, never gonna happen, bud.’
Eventually, he gave me all his gear, the Shimanos, graphite and boron rods and fancy Garcias, sonar rigs and trolling motors, a thousand dollars’ worth of crankbaits, spinnerbaits and topwaters, stacking the stuff in a corner of my garage one afternoon after shift, the suspicion of bourbon on his breath just strong enough to make you think of looking at your watch.
‘Somebody should get some use out of the stuff,’ he said. ‘Might as well be you.’
It wasn’t until almost a week later that I got it. Leaning back in the recliner, thinking of nothing, I must have drifted back to some Psychology 101 lecture and connected it with other bits and pieces, including the ghostly calendar that floated up before my mind’s eye, today’s date circled in red. But not just any red – this was the red of still-wet blood. Today was the first anniversary of the murders.
‘Holy Jesus!’ I yelled, lunging up out of the chair, grabbing for the phone I knew would be useless, jabbing in the numbers for Bo’s desk at Three, his apartment, his cell, his sister in Sugar Hill. No answer anywhere.
Clawing at my pocket for the keys, I made it across the lawn to the driveway in my best imitation of a dead run – what Jana called my homo habilis hustle – got the 250 started and burned out for Sylvan Memorial Park. I blew through the lights all the way out to the interstate and south on the bypass to 77, fishtailing through the gate at Sylvan, slewing past the great angel standing vigil over Joy Therone, jumping the curbs to cut across the orderly islands of dead on my way back to Lynn’s and Kim’s graves under the old willow oaks near the fence at the eastern edge of the cemetery.
I called in an Officer Needs Assistance when I saw Bo’s dark blue Mustang up ahead on the gravel drive, driver’s door open. Standing beside his wife’s pink granite headstone, dressed in wrinkled white cotton shorts, a yellow golf shirt with food and coffee stains down the front, and unlaced sneakers, Bo waved carelessly to me as I slid to a stop. In his other hand he held his Glock loosely at his side, tapping it against his thigh as he watched me, a cockeyed smile on his face. He hadn’t shaved in days, and his fly was open. He was well into the false-clarity stage of drunkenness.
‘Wait,’ I s
aid as I got out. ‘Just wait, Bo.’ I was hearing the first sirens in the distance and thinking hard about the distance between Bo and where I stood.
‘Hi, Bis,’ he said, raising the Glock, jamming the muzzle up under his chin. ‘And ’bye.’
The ten feet separating us looked like a light year to me, but our time was up. My knees grated with shards of glass as I charged. Bo knew all about the knees. But never in our years as partners had he seen me motivated like I was at this moment; maybe he’d underestimate me. Maybe he’d smell the cold breath of eternity and slow his trigger-squeeze half a second.
Something about his expression in that microscopic sliver of time told me it did surprise him to see how fast I was coming. But of course I wasn’t fast enough. The automatic popped as I slammed into him, a pink spray of blood, brain and bone fragments fanning up and back from the crown of his head, his body collapsing through my arms as I caught hopelessly at his slack dead weight. Trying idiotically to break his fall.
Kneeling beside him, looking down into the now-vacant coolness of his eyes, I tried to see some hint, some microscopic reflection, of Bo and his family finally together again. I wanted them to be – willed them to be – and to know it. I couldn’t make myself believe it, but neither would I ever let go of the hope.
I stared at the message slips in my hand for a few more seconds, but I had stopped reading them because I’d stopped caring what was on them. I had no heart for phone calls or reporters. There was nothing I wanted to say to anybody about the murder, the investigation, or anything else. I tossed the pink squares at my desktop, watching a couple of them catch the air and flutter across the desk and onto the floor.
Bertie appeared beside me carrying several sheets of paper and handed them to me, saying, ‘Crime scene update. Wayne told me to tell you it’s on the website, and maybe this would be a good time for you to say a little prayer for all the trees out there laying down their lives so we can have our hard copies.’
‘Wayne said all that?’
‘I’m sure he would have if I’d kept him on the line.’
I tossed the update sheets on my desk and started picking up stray message slips from the floor, thinking about what people pray for and what kind of answers they think they’re getting.
ELEVEN
Zion Hope, lit from inside, looked like a Japanese lantern against the night woods of Elam Road as I pulled up to let Kat out. A dozen vehicles, most of them as old and beat up as mine, were clustered in the parking lot near the side door, a new passenger van sitting in their midst like a slice of wedding cake among corn muffins. I tried and failed to imagine what kind of meeting was going on inside and who might be there and how Kat fit into it all, watching as she slid out of the passenger seat and held the door open.
‘G’night, Biscuit.’ She blew me a kiss.
‘Goodnight.’
When she smiled at me, closed the door and disappeared into Zion Hope, I suddenly knew this was an ending of some kind, one whose shape and significance were hidden from me, and the knowing left the night emptier than I would have imagined possible, the darkness denser and more absolute.
Less than forty-eight hours later, the telephone voice of Father Beane, edged with fear as jagged as torn steel: ‘Have you seen Kat today?’
‘No, sir,’ I said, blood thumping in my ears as his mood instantly invaded my veins like a nerve gas. ‘Isn’t she there with y’all?’
‘I don’t know where she is, Biscuit. No one’s seen her since yesterday.’
In my mind I saw Kat again, smiling, blowing me a kiss, but suddenly my mental image of Zion Hope behind her was no longer a Japanese lantern against the soft, starry sky – it was a demonic face leering at me from a darkness beyond darkness, blinding, hellish flames roaring behind the eyes and grinning mouth. I wanted to ask Father Beane what he was going to do, and what I could do to help, but my lips wouldn’t move and my tongue had turned to stone.
Later that night and into the next day, believing they were what they pretended to be and were trying to do what they said they were – and wanting desperately to help them find Kat – I talked to Jerry Casteel, the police chief, and Sheriff Morris Fellows at the police station in town, where the air was heavy with the smells of old smoke, gun oil, dirty feet and vomit. They asked me hundreds of questions, but as the hours went by these gradually condensed down to just a few coming over and over again, until it was obvious that they believed I was responsible for Kat being missing.
The sheriff said, ‘Did you have sex with her?’
I hung my head, my ears burning. ‘Yes, sir.’
They wanted to know how many times, where and when. Then they started asking questions that assumed none of that really happened, at least not the way I was telling it, that Kat had turned me down, that this had hurt my pride and made me angry. Maybe I forced her, even got rougher than I meant to. It was an accident. They could understand that. Hell, any man would. They guaranteed me the prosecutor would make allowances –
As I was beginning to think about the electric chair in Huntsville, wondering how many volts it was going to take to kill me and whether it was actually true that electrocution is a quick and painless way to go, Dusty, listening from his own chair against the wall, said, ‘Hold it.’
The chief lifted a hand to silence him and started to say something else, but Dusty said, ‘I told you to hold it and I meant it, Jerry.’ He stood up. ‘You too, Mo. Biscuit, don’t you say another word.’
Dusty hired Lucas Fine, the richest lawyer in Rains County, a tall, thin, preacherly man with soft, blueveined hands and big white hair who never asked if I had hurt Kat or knew what had happened to her. Instead he talked about evidentiary rules, admissibility, arraignment, going to trial, the appeals process, the Supreme Court, until I finally understood that he believed as much as Jerry Casteel and Morris Fellows did that Kat was dead and I had killed her.
‘Just relax, son,’ he said. ‘This is a long way from over.’
‘But I didn’t do anything.’
‘That’s right.’
It was hard enough to be wrongly blamed for doing something terrible, but it was a hundred times worse to be blamed for doing it to somebody you loved, and Kat’s disappearance – along with what came afterward – wasn’t just hard or terrible, it was impossible, and it destroyed something inside me once and for all. I didn’t understand exactly what it was, but I never went to church again except for occasions like weddings and funerals, instead spending Sunday mornings with Dusty in the training paddocks or out on one of the stock ponds trying to catch enough catfish for supper while Aunt Rachel took off alone in her Volvo for the services at First Methodist in town – not because I necessarily stopped believing in what people called a higher power, but because I didn’t trust higher powers any more. I didn’t trust any power any more. I lost the ability to take anything on faith, and when human life was at stake I was no longer willing to make allowances for negligence and wrongheadedness on anybody’s part, whether it was mine or God’s. Or a police chief’s.
And I realised for the first time that what was called criminal justice had nothing at all to do with justice, nothing to do with guilt or innocence, and most of all, nothing to do with the truth, but only with which story the lawyers and judges and juries liked best.
Meaning that my innocence didn’t matter; they had me dead to rights. My life was finished. I was going to be executed for something I hadn’t done. This new understanding uncovered a vein of stubbornness in me that I hadn’t known was there, and I made up my mind to kill myself, by stuffing my socks down my throat if I had to, rather than let that happen.
But when the investigators had satisfied themselves about where I was when Kat disappeared they lost interest in me. Lucas Fine shoved everything back in his briefcase and drove away in his red Jaguar. The investigators talked to the whole Bragg football team and all the VISTA volunteers, Reverend Hooks and the members of Zion Hope, and everybody who worked at the Skillet.
They kept coming back to Coach Bub, Father Beane and Reverend Hooks, but none of it did any good. For a while they took a special interest in Claude McCool, our defensive end, because he got stubborn and wouldn’t say where he’d been during some of the time they were asking about. But that didn’t help them either. The strict-looking men from Washington in dark suits and sunglasses, who said very little and went everywhere in pairs, had no better luck. Neither did the dowsers, reporters, photographers, the packs of slobbering bloodhounds or the two different psychic ladies with big straw hats and white gloves who bristled when they ran into each other.
As we watched Sheriff Fellows climb into the FBI helicopter warming up on the lawn beside the fire station, Daz, pale and obviously shaken up, said, ‘This here’s a sure enough cluster-fuck, ain’t it?’ The helicopter roared and lifted itself in a curling cloud of dust and grass clippings, tilted forward and thumped away over the trees.
Dozens of Rains County deputies and reserves, along with volunteers from as far as three counties away, fanned out across the countryside on foot, in cars and on motorcycles and horses, scouring the hills, woods and fields for any sign of Kat. A lot of them were riding horses from the Flying S, Dusty turning them over to the searchers only according to how the horse’s personality matched up with the rider’s skill, even though some of the animals were dressage stock or big-purse racers worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The horse I rode was called Mephisto, and I had never liked him because every time he sensed a lapse in my concentration he bucked me off, and he’d never liked me, maybe because no matter how many times he did it I always got back on. He had unbelievable stamina and intelligence, but what I picked him for was his vigilance. He noticed everything – a broken branch, a dead mouse, even the tracks of another horse in an unexpected place.
Every morning Dusty and I, and any of the Flying S hands who could be spared for the day, or for an hour, rode out as soon as there was light enough to see by, straggling back sometimes hours after dark to put up the horses and search each other out to ask if anybody had seen anything. But of course even before they could answer, it was obvious from the set of their shoulders and the bleakness of their eyes that they hadn’t.
