Dire

by Jeff Carson

  Wolf pulled his eyebrows together.

  “He knew I’d have to make a decision about whom I’d believe,” MacLean said, now pacing in front of the window. “He came to me saying he’d go to the media with his side of the story if I chose your version.” MacLean smiled and bounced his eyebrows. “Well, he screwed up. Because your voice is on that LoStar recording, and your pal Patterson saved the day.”

  “So … what’s happening with Barker?”

  MacLean swallowed. “We need to be smart about this whole thing.”

  Wolf shook his head.

  “Listen, Barker denied working with Adam Jackson and that bitch. And there’s no way to prove it either way.”

  “But there’s a false report he filled out, citing me as being negligent in my duty on numerous occasions within it. There’s dishonesty. Betrayal of a fellow deputy.”

  MacLean pointed at the manila folder. “And now there’s this report.”

  Wolf frowned. “I’d much rather just have Detective Sergeant Greg Barker gone.”

  MacLean turned his back on him again. He clasped his hands behind his back and stepped closer to the window, staring at Wolf’s reflection.

  “But, of course,” Wolf said slowly, getting it now, “you still want Barker’s father’s support in the next election.”

  MacLean remained silent.

  “You still have the false report Barker wrote earlier,” Wolf said. “And now you have this corrected report and this LoStar audio file. You have evidence that Barker made a colossal screw-up, so you’re using it to blackmail Barker’s father for support in the next election. Support for your campaign in exchange for his son keeping his dream job.”

  MacLean turned around, looking pleased with himself. “For that, and keeping his son out of jail for what he did to my best employee.”

  Wolf opened the door. “I’m not your employee. And from now on you’d better just keep Barker away from me and my squad.”

  Chapter 50

  A month later …

  Wolf crested the mountain with heaving lungs and the taste of copper in the back of his throat, legs tight from the exertion of the short hike.

  Piercing reflections twinkled and moved in town at the bottom of the valley. A solitary eagle screeched and circled in the powder-blue sky above, floating on the light breeze that wicked the sweat from his face.

  Clumps of melting snow trundled off the trees, and water trickled somewhere beneath the foot of compacted snow blanketing the forest floor.

  “I’m coming,” Lauren shouted from below. “Sorry.”

  Wolf turned and watched her climb the final incline.

  Her breathing was fast and rhythmic, matching the strong, determined stride of her thin legs.

  “You done?” Wolf asked.

  “Yeah.” She beamed a smile up at Wolf, and it was much brighter than the morning sun’s glare off the snow. “I shouldn’t have drunk that last cup of coffee on the way over.”

  Jet followed behind her, panting loudly with his tongue out, tail wagging side to side, moving with the spryness of a dog half his age.

  “Jet kept look out for me.”

  Wolf shook his head. “I think he likes you.”

  “Oh, wow.” She came up next to him and marveled at the view below.

  She was an attack on Wolf’s senses—a coconut-and-flower scent, body heat, soft breathing of young, healthy lungs, beautiful skin with tendrils of copper hair curling on her cheek.

  She turned to him and exhaled deeply, and her breath smelled like candy. “Thanks. I needed this.”

  He smiled, finally prying his eyes from her face to the view below. “I come up here a lot.”

  They stood in silence for a few moments, atop the hill on the northern edge of Wolf’s property. His barn’s red-and-white façade popped through the trees below.

  Jet pushed his way between them and sat, panting and clucking his tongue.

  “Such a cutie.” Lauren leaned over and rubbed Jet’s neck.

  She looked up at Wolf, still gripping Jet’s head. “Your ankle seems to be doing great.”

  He shrugged. “It’s fine. Don’t even feel it anymore.”

  She watched him take off his gloves and unzip his jacket.

  “And your finger?” She grabbed his left hand and held it up to examine the bandage over the stump where his pinkie finger used to be. “Does it itch?”

  Hell, yes, it itched! The thick scab had morphed into a web of scar tissue that got irritated the more he sweated—and he was sweating profusely now.

  “How’s Ella doing?” he asked.

  She let go of his hand. “Good. Really. She’s doing better.” She gazed down the forested hillside in front of them and nodded. “Heck, I don’t remember much about being five years old. I guess I hope the same applies for her. Getting out of that house helped. The new place is good. It’s a rental right in town. Margaret Hitchens sold my other place, did you know that?”

  Wolf nodded.

  “She talks about you incessantly,” Lauren said.

  Of course Wolf knew she’d been talking to Margaret, because Margaret had been talking to Wolf incessantly about Lauren. It was clear that Margaret liked her and she wanted Wolf to like her too. According to Margaret, Lauren was incapable of committing to a new property, and Margaret’s assessment was that she had one foot in and one foot out of Rocky Points.

  “I was surprised you called,” she said. “I didn’t think you would.”

  “I … wasn’t sure you wanted me to.”

  With a shrug, she said, “I probably didn’t want you to at first. But I’m glad you did. Ah, I don’t know about you, but I’m hot.”

  She took off her hat, revealing a tight ponytail. She rubbed her hand over her head, letting her fingers linger behind her ear for a moment, and for the first time Wolf got a good glimpse of the tiny tattoo. It was a bar of music, a measure, with three notes on it.

  Turning toward him, she read his thoughts. “‘Also sprach Zarathustra.’”

  Wolf raised his eyebrows.

  She smiled and then laughed at his confusion. “The theme song for 2001: A Space Odyssey?”

  “Ah. Yes. Also sprecken …”

  “Sprach Zarathustra.”

  Her lips were curled in a playful grin as she watched Wolf repeat the words. “My dad used to lecture my brother and me on the importance and genius of the piece, how it was inspired by a Friedrich Nietzsche novel. There’s a series of notes in the final section of the piece, a melody that resolves in two different keys, which supposedly refer to the ‘World Riddle’—something Nietzsche wrote about, which basically was his banging his head against the wall about the meaning of life and the nature of the universe and how it was all an unsolvable puzzle.” She twirled a finger in the air and then laughed. “And it’s actually way more notes than are tattooed behind my ear, but these are just the first three in the piece. You know, at the beginning—duh … duh … duh?”

  When she was done, she opened her eyes and noticed Wolf and Jet gazing at her like crushing schoolboys, and her face went bright red.

  “Anyway, my father, the weirdo that he was, used to blare this music in the house, quoting Nietzsche, drinking his Scotch, all the while lecturing his two children about the meaning of life.”

  Wolf watched her—the way her face animated as thoughts flitted from her mouth. He decided he could watch her talk for hours on end and it would never bore him.

  But she fell silent, her eyes unfocused.

  The breeze freshened, bringing on it the scent of the surrounding pines.

  “How are you doing?” Wolf asked.

  “Not bad, I guess, considering.”

  “I hear Keith Lourde dropped his charges,” Wolf said.

  She rolled her eyes. “Yeah. My lawyer did some investigating. Turns out he was broke, lost most of what he had in his divorce, because he was screwing every other woman in Denver, and what little he had left he was losing in the stock market.”

&nb
sp; Wolf nodded.

  They stood in silence for a long minute, listening to the sounds of the forest and Jet’s panting.

  “It was my fault,” she said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “What my brother did. What he became in life.”

  Wolf shook his head. “You can’t blame yourself for—”

  “No, I mean, it really was my fault.”

  Wolf held still as she gathered her thoughts.

  “When we were kids, I did something horrible.” She looked up at him, but said nothing.

  He got the sense she was desperate to get something off her chest, so he asked, “What happened?”

  “We went on this trip to West Virginia once. My brother, my parents, and me—to some resort in the middle of the mountains. It was all green and lush, and there were all these fun outdoor activities to do. I was … twelve? Yeah, and he was fifteen. It was one of the best trips we’d ever had as a family, like we were firing on all cylinders, you know? We laughed so much.

  “And for my brother … it was even better for him. Because my father was so strict with us growing up, so hard on Michael especially, but on that trip there was some connection that happened between them. Some change in my father we could all sense. The way he’d pat Michael on the back. The proud smiles from both of them. It was the opposite of how my father would usually act—pushing my brother in sports he never wanted to play in the first place, shunning his artistic talent as if it were embarrassing. It was different on this trip. I remember Michael playing a song on the piano, the Peanuts Song, and we all danced, and my father actually patted him on the back after he played it.

  “It was like they were getting to a better place. And for some reason, it ticked me off. My dumbass little twelve-year-old pre-pubescent brain was thinking that my brother was getting too uppity about the whole thing. That he needed to be knocked down a notch.”

  Jet let out a small whine.

  Wolf said nothing.

  “So one day, my brother and I went for a hike, and my father told Michael to keep an eye out for me. ‘The woods can be dangerous,’ he said. And Michael said, ‘Don’t worry, Dad, I’m the big brother. I can do it,’ or something to that effect.

  “So we went. I remember it was very dense woods. Hot and steamy, thick underbrush. And I led the way, and we talked and talked, mostly about Dad. Michael wouldn’t shut up about music school, and how cool it was that Dad wanted him to go, and … all the while I was burning with jealousy. I was Daddy’s little girl. I’d even drawn a little picture of my dad and me together, and he was supposed to be impressed with me, not my brother. Dad kept the picture in his pocket at all times. He used to pat it and wink at me. And now Michael was butting in.”

  Wolf knew the picture. It had been framed and hanging on her home office wall, splashed with her father’s blood.

  “We kept walking like that along the path for ten or twenty minutes, and then we switched places. He went first, and I followed. And that’s when I decided to duck into the trees and hide.”

  Lauren’s eyes locked open.

  “I sat there behind a downed log, just a few yards off the path, and I watched my brother freak out. He stopped, didn’t see me. Couldn’t. It was too dark and thick. He started calling my name, ran back and forth yelling for a while. And I just sat there watching.

  “I was going to come barging out laughing, point at him and say ‘ha-ha!’ But for some reason I just stayed there. And then the joke was no longer a joke any more, and it was getting serious, and I just … sat there. Then he was gone. Back the way we’d come, off to get help from the grownups.”

  Wolf put his hand on her shoulder and she flinched.

  “Sorry. This is depressing.”

  “Then what happened?” Wolf asked.

  She looked up in his eyes for a second, then back out over the valley. “I waited a few more minutes and started walking back. Ran into my father and a couple of men who were running up the path, screaming my name at the top of their lungs. Dad hugged me. I said I was fine, had somehow wandered off the path and got lost. But I was fine now, all better. Thanks for coming to find me.

  “It was ridiculous. Michael had been screaming my name at the top of his lungs, and I couldn’t hear him? I’d wandered off into the woods? My story didn’t hold water. I was sure he could tell I was lying and I was found out. But he never second-guessed me. But my father was so angry with Michael. Didn’t speak to him for the rest of the afternoon, and when he finally did the next day, it was at the top of his lungs, a red-faced lecture on discipline and lost trust.

  “In the end, I couldn’t take the torturing my father was giving Michael so I confessed everything. Told him how I’d snuck into the woods and hidden, not wandered off, and it was all a cruel joke. And I apologized to everyone, but my father just thought I was lying to help my brother. It was hopeless. Of course, my brother knew the truth at that point.

  “He was fifteen on that trip. And when we returned home, back to Denver, that was the beginning of the rest of his life—a struggling kid with a drug problem.”

  They stood listening to the wind breathe through the tops of the trees.

  Wolf ran through options in his head of what to say. From his time in group therapy over the past year and a half, he’d observed many good moderators who instilled comfort in somebody who’d just spilled their guts.

  “Thanks for telling me that,” he said. He blinked, cursing himself for the wooden response.

  She turned toward him and looked up with hard eyes. “Thanks for saving my daughter’s life.”

  He looked past her.

  She put both hands on his cheeks and steered his gaze downward. “I’m serious. Like I said, Margaret talks about you a lot, and I’ve learned a lot about what happened that night. How you went against direct orders and came and got me in Frisco. If you hadn’t … we’d all be dead.”

  He shrugged. “Don’t mention it.”

  She snorted and gazed out at the valley.

  They stood in another minute of silence until she snapped him a look.

  “What?”

  “I think your dog farted.”

  “Jet.”

  Jet looked up at the sound of his name and wagged his tail.

  “I think that’s our cue to head back,” Wolf said.

  Jet immediately slipped next to Lauren and followed her down the trail.

  “Jet, come!”

  He stopped and looked back with a disappointed arch of his eyebrows.

  “Don’t worry. He can stay.” Lauren scratched the fluffy neck of the German shepherd. “Mr. Farty.”

  Wolf watched with interest as Lauren walked away from him, her perfect backside creasing her jeans just so.

  During the twenty-minute return hike down the hill to Wolf’s ranch house, the mood was buoyant enough, but he sensed she was regretting opening up to him so much on the top of the mountain.

  When they reached the barn, and then passed along the front side of its red boards, she headed straight for her Audi.

  Wolf ushered Jet inside the kitchen entrance to his house, took off his snowshoes, and walked over.

  She already had her own snowshoes off and she stood with crossed legs, leaning up against the hood of her car.

  “You probably think I’m pretty screwed up by now, huh?”

  “You know, it’s pretty difficult to change people.”

  She squinted and tilted her head. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  They stared at one another for a few seconds and she rolled her eyes. “I’m not sure where you’re going with that.”

  “Do you think your father had a choice that day?”

  “About what?”

  “Could he have believed your confession and forgiven your brother?”

  She swallowed and thought about it. “Yeah, I guess he could’ve.”

  “But you said your father went back to treating him badly after that trip. He reverted back to old pat
terns of judging your brother, looking down on him.” Wolf shrugged. “It’s tough to change people.”

  The side of her mouth curled a little. “You’re a regular psychologist.”

  “Are you going to stay in Rocky Points?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. There’s not really a reason to.”

  “What about your job?”

  “There’re other places I can get nursing jobs. Other hospitals in places where people don’t point and whisper at me and my daughter as we walk past.”

  He stepped up and kissed her.

  At first her lips were dead fish beneath his, but then she let out a high-pitched moan and they parted. Her tongue swirled eagerly, but softly, inside his mouth, tasting faintly sweet.

  She reached her hands up behind his head and pulled, and her back arched as she pressed hard into him.

  Jet barked from somewhere inside the house as they writhed against one another for what seemed like five seconds, but proved to be ten minutes by the time Lauren came up for air and looked at her watch. “Shit, I’m going to be late for work.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Ten forty-three.”

  “Me too.”

  She smiled wide, and her eyes did that squint that almost gave Wolf a heart attack. “You said you had the day off.”

  He shrugged. “I lied.”

  With a soft peck on Wolf’s lips she lowered herself, ducked out from his arms, and opened her door. She gave him one last look, an unreadable flat expression over her shoulder, and disappeared inside.

  With the ferocity of a close lightning strike, Sarah’s face flickered into his mind. Just like the countless times she’d come to him in the past few months, she had that same sad expression—arched eyebrows, close-lipped smile—and in that moment Wolf understood.

  The thump of Lauren’s car door snapped him back. He approached his reflection in the tinted window and knocked.

  It rolled it down, revealing her soft, concern. “Are you okay?”

  “Will you go out with me?”

  She laughed, and her smiled wavered. Then she studied his sincerity and nodded. “Sure. I’d love to.”

  “Okay.”

  The Audi’s tires squished on the mud, the engine humming softly as she drove away through the horned headgate his father had built so many years ago.