A Small Town

by Thomas Perry

  Leah drove up the approach to where the pavement narrowed a bit, and then all the way along the gradual incline to the center of the bridge. She reached to the dashboard, turned on her emergency blinking lights, and slowed down. As she slowed, cars raced past her on the left, and the ones in her lane slowed with her, waiting for a chance to pass. But before long, the rush of the oncoming traffic to the left, with cars coming every couple of seconds, made the line of cars behind her too long. People stopped passing.

  Leah came to a complete stop, brought her untraceable pistol from her purse, stuck it in her belt, flung her door open, jumped out, and slammed the door. She stepped to the right side of the bridge’s pavement, where there was a little space to stand, and pressed the lock button on her key fob.

  As she stepped away, drivers in cars stuck behind her abandoned car honked their horns over and over in a frantic rhythm or leaned on them, tried in vain to swerve to the left to get around her car, fumed, and swore.

  Leah strode back eastward toward Monroe, working up to a trot and then to a run. The orchestra of car horns behind her grew louder, and then, after a minute, the sound was augmented by the distant scream of sirens, which soon overwhelmed the horns, eventually silenced them, and took their place.

  Leah had slowed the movement of traffic across the river from Monroe toward West Monroe to a complete stop. She ran hard toward the sound of sirens, hearing them grow louder and louder. Just as she reached the end of the swing bridge, she spotted the Chevrolet Malibu with the four men in it. They had pulled up into the traffic jam, trying to shoulder their way ahead. The traffic had by then grown dense enough that they had come to a complete stop. Now the jam in the right lane looked at least a half mile long, and it was growing.

  Leah saw the police cars coming, partly because her vantage on the swing bridge gave her a little extra height. She saw about a half dozen police cars, their lights flashing, stop on the approach to the bridge. Behind the first group of police cars, others stopped at angles to prevent civilian traffic from getting past them into the mess on the bridge.

  The police officers in the first set of cars opened their doors and got out, some of them pulling on body armor over their shirts, others lifting the shotguns from their cars, and still others advancing between the cars, carrying only their sidearms.

  Leah ducked low and began to make her way across the front ends of the stopped cars toward the Malibu. When a man hung out of his window and yelled something at Leah, she drew her pistol and held it muzzle-upward, took out her ID wallet with her badge in it, and held them up to show him and the other drivers nearby. The noise subsided and she advanced.

  The badge and gun and the way Leah moved from car to car, sometimes squatting and other times crouching and running, had convinced the drivers near her that she was a cop. The flashing lights of the dozen or more police cars were now visible to everyone on the bridge, and most could see the armed uniformed cops advancing up the bridge between the lines of cars toward them.

  When Leah was only one car length behind the Malibu and two lanes to the left, she could see the faces of the men in the car. She recognized Lee Wolf in the driver’s seat.

  She stayed low and ran to the next lane, keeping in the blind spot so Wolf didn’t pick her up in his mirror or his peripheral vision. At the moment he was focused on the rearview mirror, where he could see police officers making their way up the bridge between lanes of stalled cars toward him. He appeared to be talking, giving his companions instructions for ambush-shooting the approaching police officers. Leah approached across the front of the car beside the Malibu.

  Suddenly Wolf seemed to sense it was time to look around him, and he turned to his left just as Leah bobbed up ten feet away from him with her gun aimed at his head, and fired.

  Wolf’s blood, a bit of brain tissue, and tiny shards of cranial bone sprayed the inside of the car. A half second later, Leah was at the side window with her gun aimed at the tall man in the passenger seat. She flung his door open and shouted, “Get out!” She yelled louder. “Get out with your hands up! If there’s a gun in your hand, you’re dead too!” She yelled louder than she had ever yelled in her life. “Out of the car!”

  The three men had already begun trying to get out, speckled with Wolf’s blood and not inclined to try to shoot anyone. As they came out, Leah hastily patted each of them down, but found their only weapons were on the car seats.

  Leah shouted, “Keep your hands high in the air at all times as you walk down the bridge toward those officers. Do it now!” She gave the one nearest her a push in that direction, then gave each of the others a push that sent the man a few feet. She kept the pistol aimed at the men for the first twenty feet.

  Leah lowered her Glock and the crowd of people in their cars began to applaud. A couple of the people yelled, “Great work, Officer!” and “You got them!” Leah waved, and began to trot the other way toward the center of the bridge, where she had left her car. After a hundred feet or so, she raised her speed and ran between cars, speeding up to a full run as she went.

  By the time she reached the rental car, she was winded and sweating. The lane was clear ahead of her, since she was the sole cause of the traffic jam, so she got in and drove fast toward the west.

  38

  July 19 was always a somber, quiet day in Weldonville, Colorado. It had been seven years since the first bad July 19, but to most people in town, it felt as though that night had been so big that it couldn’t be confined to a specific year. Every day when they woke up, the memory of the dreadful events reached their minds with the return to consciousness and became real all over again. For Weldonville there were two times: the time before and the time after.

  The time before was the world they’d been born into, where their childhoods had taken place, and their parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles had towered over them and taught them how a person was supposed to be. For Leah Hawkins, it had also been the time when people first noticed her ability to dominate the boards for the rebound and then make the three-point shot at the other basket a few seconds later. There was the glory of being the first real female athletic phenomenon in that part of the state, and then the parade of college recruiters had arrived. Next came college, and the bright, early days of her career. It was the time when she first fell in love.

  Leah had stopped being resentful about the awful circumstances of that love some time ago—being the other woman, the long-term mistress her married lover had to hide. She was just glad that love had happened, that she’d had those times with Mark. She had not blamed him even then because the circumstances had not been his fault any more than hers, and Mark had, after all, died at her side trying to protect her. That had been on July 19, the final moment of that other lifetime.

  After she had visited Marcia Ballard this morning, she had been busy doing practical tasks, and now she was waiting, sitting at one of the best round tables at Steele’s food stand across from the city park, her place shaded by one of the giant oaks. She was having a root beer float, something she hadn’t had in years. That was one blessing Leah had never fully appreciated when she was younger. She had complained to the silent universe about being a tall, skinny, big-footed scarecrow, awkward except when she was on a court or a field. But the compensation was that she could still eat anything without consequences.

  She looked up at the oaks. She had noticed during her errands this morning that some of the saplings the city had planted on empty lots where houses had burned down seven years ago were already fifteen-foot trees. Someday they would be as big as these, and the reason for their planting would be forgotten.

  A couple walked up the sidewalk past the stand and the man, Carlos Estrada, noticed her and stopped. “Hi, Chief.”

  “Hi, Carlos,” she said. She stood and hugged him and then hugged his wife. “Hi, Lois.” She added, “You know it’s not ‘Chief’ anymore though. I’ve been retired for years.”

  “I know.” Carlos looked down for a second
, then up. “And I know this is a hard day. But I, uh—”

  “It is for everybody,” Leah interrupted. She patted his shoulder. Then her eyes focused on something in the distance, far behind his head. “I’m sorry to be distracted, but Ken has the kids at the movies, and I think I see them coming out of the Tivoli. They’ll be looking for me.”

  Carlos turned and said, “Yep. That looks like them.” Ken Long was as tall as Leah, and he had the three children walking with him. Carlos said, “Well, it’s always good see you, Chief.” He and his wife walked on down the sidewalk toward their car.

  “Bye, you two. Drive carefully.”

  Leah watched her family’s approach. They had come to her as part of the post–July 19 world. She had first learned of Ken’s existence as a name on a list, the father and ex-husband of three victims. Now he was the husband she wished her parents could have lived to know.

  Sometimes it felt to her as though she had learned everything she knew after she and Ken had adopted the kids, because she had known none of it before. Other times she thought maybe she was just trying to mimic what she had loved having her own parents do. The kids were the new world, and her job and Ken’s was to take care that they grew and learned, then launch them into a future she and Ken would probably only see at its beginning.

  Raymond, the eldest, walked with his father, both of them talking seriously about something, which she guessed was probably the capabilities of several kinds of dinosaurs. He was starting to carry himself like Ken, even to sound like him. God, they grew up fast.

  When Ken reached her, she kissed him and took the younger kids, Bill and Kristen, by their hands. “Let’s go, you guys,” she said. “I’ve got your clothes and swimming suits and jackets and stuff packed in the car, and the car is in the lot behind city hall.”

  “Are we going straight to McClellan’s?” her son Raymond asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “How were the dinosaurs?”

  “Pretty good,” he said. “They have a couple of new ones in this.”

  Leah knitted her brows. “New ones?”

  “Yeah.”

  Ken shrugged. “You know, genetic research.”

  Leah smiled as they reached the car. She clicked the key fob to open the doors and then scooped Bill up into his car seat and put Kristen in hers, and locked the fasteners. Then she handed Ken the keys while she watched Raymond click his seat belt closed and then gave it a tug of her own to test it before she got into the passenger seat.

  Ken drove to the Parkman House, the restaurant where Ray McClellan had tended bar when he’d first returned to Weldonville after retiring from the ATF. He and Marjorie had bought it, attached a comfortable fifteen-room hotel with high ceilings, thick beams, and stone fireplaces to the historic structure, and called that part McClellan’s Inn. Marjorie had been one of the Clays who had inherited the local hardware business after the murder of her parents and uncle, and the project had provided work for some of the Clays’ employees at a slow time.

  When Ken pulled into the parking lot and he and Leah began to extricate the kids from the confinement of their car seats, they saw Ray and Marjorie come out the side door of the restaurant.

  The children took their first steps at a run, but Ken yelled, “Freeze!” They all did. “Do not run across the parking lot,” he said. “Cars pull in here too fast all the time.” They all stepped off the edge of the pavement and ran across the grass to where Ray and Marjorie McClellan waited.

  Marjorie said to the kids, “We’ve been waiting for you people. It’s been months.”

  “That’s right,” said Ray McClellan. “And I notice that all three of you got shorter.” He turned to Marjorie. “Aren’t they supposed to be growing?”

  “We are!” Raymond said. “We’re all taller.”

  “You’re tall enough,” said Marjorie. “You’re already Longs. We set aside a room for you Longs that opens onto the courtyard where the pool is. We’ll get you settled, and then you can change for a swim. That okay, Mom?”

  “Sounds great,” Leah said.

  The whole group set off for the room near the pool, with Ken and Leah trailing behind carrying the duffel bags full of clothes. When they were settled and had changed, Marjorie led them back to the pool. “All right, ladies and gentlemen.” She pointed at a young man and young woman in bright red bathing suits. “These two lifeguards are Felicity and John. They are qualified, certified, and thoroughly tested by the state of Colorado. What they say goes.” The two young lifeguards got into the water to help the children descend into the shallowest part of the pool.

  Leah and Ken Long stood in the water, not quite relinquishing their children to the lifeguards, and Marjorie and Ray sat down beside them, dangling their legs in the pool. Leah said, “Thanks so much for doing this again, Marjorie. It makes me think about the things I want to remember and not the rest of it.”

  “I know what you mean. It’s the anniversary of the deaths of all the people I loved. That’s true for Kristen, too, and Bill. If you guys didn’t come, we’d all be crying in public. How long are you all here before you go back to New York this time?”

  “We’re here until school starts.”

  “Good. We’ll have some fun with the kids. Some grown-up evenings too.”

  “You and Ray have to come out and stay with us at the ranch while we’re here. You won’t have to be in charge of anything, and nobody will have to drive home after a few drinks. I lived here all my life without spending a day on a ranch, but I married a guy from New York, so now I have a ranch. We might as well use it to keep from earning a DUI. And you have to come visit us in New York again in the fall when the tourists move up to the mountains to break their legs.”

  “I promise.”

  “Oh, look.” Leah pointed. Bill Halvorsen was standing by the hotel door, still straight-spined and muscular after seven years out of the marines. He was holding it open while Kristen came out to join him. Each of them had a toddler cradled on one arm and a bag slung over the other shoulder. They waved at the group and walked toward them along the side of the pool.

  Leah said, “Look at them. Sometimes I wonder if I’m just not capable of remembering between times how good they look. Especially her.”

  Marjorie sighed. “Being a beauty made her a great partner in our detective agency. But it wasn’t always a blessing in her life. I think the first time she ever felt happy about what she sees in the mirror was after he turned up. It was like she found out who it was for.”

  Leah, Ken, Ray, and Marjorie climbed up on the deck as the Halvorsens walked into their midst. Leah and Marjorie took the two little children, Nick and Stephanie, in their arms and fawned over them and rocked and bounced them to make them laugh, while the others hugged Kristen and Bill.

  Ray McClellan looked across the pool at the window into the bar and waved at someone, and then a man came out carrying a tray of drinks. Ray said, “I’ve placed an order for the drinks that each of you usually have when you come. If your order has changed since I wrote them down, please tell Walt, or you’ll drink the consequences until you do.”

  Kristen picked up a glass from the tray and handed it to her husband, then took the one that was meant for her. “Thank you for doing this again, Ray and Marjorie,” she said. “On the nineteenth, I always feel grateful when I see certain people.” She lifted her glass toward Leah and drank. She and the others said no more, just turned their attention to the children, who were unaware that anything had just been said.