‘That’s all?’
‘Thomas LaFlora got executed last night,’ I said. ‘We thought Haussen did the crimes.’
‘Right. When did you see him last?’
‘It’s been a while,’ I said.
‘Because he’s gone missing. You know that, don’t you?’
‘Maybe he ran,’ I said.
‘Maybe.’ He moved in close the way he moved in close eight years ago in the interview room. ‘A couple of nights ago, we got a report of shots fired over by the motel where you’re living. Middle of the night. Pretty common in your neighborhood. But this time the people who glanced out their windows said they saw you with a man who looked like Haussen. What do you know about that?’
‘The people must be mistaken,’ I said.
‘I hate it when that happens.’ He touched my collar, as if he was straightening it out. ‘Seems to be the story of your life. Mistaken identity. You say you’re an angel but you look like the devil.’
THIRTY
‘Fuck!’ I shouted when Cynthia and I got outside. ‘Fuck!’
Two cops in uniform eyed me as they came up the steps from the sidewalk.
‘Calm down,’ Cynthia said.
‘Fuck!’
One of the cops stepped toward me. ‘Sir?’
Cynthia moved between him and me. ‘It’s all right.’
The cop considered us. ‘Get him off the street,’ he told her.
As we drove from the Sheriff’s Office, she said, ‘Higby doesn’t know.’
‘Someone saw me,’ I said, and hit the gas.
‘Someone saw someone who looked like you and someone who looked like Haussen. That’s different from seeing you. If Higby knew, he wouldn’t have let you walk out of the station.’
‘Fuck,’ I said.
‘Calm down. You’re going to get us in a wreck.’
I breathed in deep and turned to cross the river on the Main Street Bridge.
I breathed out.
In deep.
Out long.
Reality.
Denial.
The sun glinted through the windshield, blinding me to the traffic at the end of the bridge. A hot river-wind blew through the broken passenger window.
Cynthia said, ‘I actually thought that went pretty well – until you panicked.’ When I said nothing, she added, ‘He doesn’t know what happened with Haussen, but you told him that you know what happened between him and the Skooners and also what happened to Duane and Steven Bronson and the others.’
My mind spun, turning from Higby’s insinuations about Haussen to his insistence that I killed the Bronson boys and then to Judge Skooner, smug with his dirty honors. I glanced at Cynthia as she picked up the bullet from the cup holder. The tiny gravity in the lump of metal seemed all that held me together. If the bullet flew from her hand, out the window – if it disappeared – then what would become of me?
‘Put it down,’ I said.
She looked at me.
‘Put it down.’
She dropped it back in the cup holder, reached over, and steadied the steering wheel. ‘Don’t lose yourself now,’ she said.
She wanted to call in sick and stay with me, but at noon I dropped her off at the Cineplex. ‘I’ll be all right,’ I said. ‘I’ll do better alone for a few hours.’
‘You can’t even drive straight,’ she said.
‘I made it for eight years on my own,’ I said.
She looked doubtful. ‘Are you going to lock yourself in your room again?’
A tempting idea. ‘I told Lynn Pritchard I would check on her,’ I said. ‘And I’ve got to meet with my reintegration therapist.’
‘Pick me up at eight?’
‘Sure,’ I said.
‘You really are crazy,’ she said, though I heard no criticism. She kissed me long, as if she could radiate life and love into me.
I drove to Lynn Pritchard’s house in Ponte Vedra, watching my hands on the steering wheel like a drunk determined to thread a highway without getting pulled over or drifting across the yellow line.
I glanced at the bullet in the cup holder, back at the road, and at the bullet again. It needed a vault with armored walls. I pinched it out of the cup holder. It felt hot from the sun through the windows. Like a man standing on the edge of a roof, tugged toward open air by invisible forces, I worried that I would drop it into a void. I clenched it in my fist.
You really are crazy.
I touched the bullet to my lips – my tongue. It tasted of salt and mineral. A drop of blood. Blood of the earth. Blood of the Bronson boys – and Jeremy Ballat and Luis Gonzalez and Rick Melsyn and Darrell Nesbit.
Don’t lose yourself now.
For the rest of the drive to Lynn Pritchard’s house, I held the metal in my sweating fist. After pulling up her driveway, I dried it on my shirt and put it in my wallet.
Lynn Pritchard came to the door when I rang. She wore tight, low-riding, bleach-white pants and a bleach-white T-shirt that showed her belly. Her nails gleamed with red polish again, and her lips shined wet with red lipstick. She looked past me toward the road as if afraid someone might have followed me to her house, then ushered me inside and locked the door.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked.
She nodded toward the room where her twin daughters had cribs and said, ‘They’re sleeping.’
We went to the living room. She’d pulled the drapes, and even in the early afternoon she needed to turn on the table lamps.
‘What happened?’ I said.
‘I think, nothing,’ she said. ‘Someone called last night. First around midnight. Then after two in the morning and again an hour later.’
‘What did they say?’
‘They just hung up.’
‘Wrong number?’ I said.
‘Maybe.’ She glanced at the drapes. I expected that she glanced at them a lot. Her husband may have built a house to protect her, but he couldn’t save her from her own fear.
I said, ‘I talked to the judge. He knows that I know.’
She shook her head. ‘He’ll come after you. He has to.’
‘I feel like he’s been coming after me for the last eight years. Now I’m going after him.’
‘It doesn’t work that way.’
‘I can almost prove what he did. If you’ll tell your story, that might be enough.’
‘No one listens,’ she said, echoing Andrew Skooner. ‘When you talked to the judge, did you mention me?’
‘I asked about the boys who were killed near Tomhanson Mill. I asked if Duane and Steven broke into his house.’
‘Yeah, he’ll come after you,’ she said.
‘I also talked to Higby. He gave me nothing. As you said, no one listens. But if you talked to him—’
‘No.’
I understood her fear, but it also infuriated me. I said, ‘If you—’
‘No.’
I could yell at her and shake her until I broke through. I said, ‘I’ll come by to check on you again tomorrow morning. If the phone rings tonight, don’t answer it.’
‘Can you stay for a while? I’m alone with my girls.’
‘Where’s the nanny?’
‘She left this morning.’
‘When’s she coming back?’
‘She isn’t. This house freaks her out. Or I do. The whole thing does.’
‘How about your husband?’
‘He comes back tomorrow before lunch. Then he leaves again next week. He’s going hunting in New Hampshire.’
‘Then I’ll swing by again tonight.’
‘You can sleep here,’ she said. ‘We have extra rooms. I’ll pay you.’
‘You’ve paid me enough.’
On my way back to the city, I stopped at Lupido’s Auto Glass. Lupido looked at the broken-out passenger-side window, looked at the torn interior of the car, and said, ‘I’ll put in a new one, but it won’t make you any prettier.’
Then I drove to the Sheriff’s Office. If I could have split th
e bullet in two – dividing the part that, according to Andrew Skooner, would match the ballistic markings on the bullets that killed the Bronson brothers from the part that, also according to him, his brother Josh had fired at Higby – would I have done it? Would I exonerate myself but not Higby?
I had no answer when I asked the deskman to call Deborah Holt’s desk, and I had none when she came through security and said, ‘What did you say to Higby to piss him off this time? He’s been ranting about you all afternoon.’
‘Can we take a walk?’ I asked.
We went up the block to the Bay Street Café and got coffee. When we sat at a table, I said, ‘If I give you something that my life depends on, what will you do with it?’
‘What is it?’ she said.
‘Not just my life either,’ I said, and, with my head buzzing, I took the bullet from my wallet and set it on the table between us.
She picked it up, studied it. ‘Twenty-two caliber,’ she said. ‘Jacketed. I see them all the time. Go to a gun range, and you can sweep up a hundred pounds of them at the end of the day.’
‘Get it tested.’
She rubbed the roughness of the bullet with her thumb. ‘You say your life depends on it? And you’re putting your life in my hands?’
‘Yeah, I suppose so.’
‘Where did you get it?’
I shook my head.
She put the bullet on the table and stood up. ‘I don’t play games.’ She started toward the door.
‘It’ll clear Higby,’ I said.
She stopped.
I picked up the bullet and offered it to her. ‘When Higby arrested me,’ I said, ‘he ran tests on the gun I had in my trunk – my dad’s gun. He wanted it to match the bullets that shot Steven and Duane Bronson. Everyone else seemed to want it to match too. So at my trial the ballistics expert said the gun “could have” shot the bullets. I don’t know enough about ballistics to tell the difference between “could have” and “must have,” but I know that my dad’s gun didn’t shoot those bullets.’
‘So, what will a ballistics test tell me that I don’t already know?’ she asked.
‘Do the test and find out.’
She stared at me, then snatched the bullet from my hand. ‘I don’t play games,’ she said, and she walked out of the café.
THIRTY-ONE
At eight, I picked up Cynthia at the Cineplex. We went to a Texaco Food Mart and bought hot dogs off the roller grill and bags of pretzels and Cheetos. Cynthia filled a big plastic cup with crushed ice and topped it with Coke. As we ate in my car, I told her about my visit to Lynn Pritchard, and we agreed that fear can rip up the inside of a body, leaving the outside bleach-white and pretty. I told her I’d given Deborah Holt the bullet, and she looked relieved. ‘If the police have it,’ she said, ‘Eric Skooner has no reason to hurt you.’
I figured the judge still had plenty of reason, but I said, ‘You might be right.’
Her parents would be out past midnight, and so, for the first time, we went back to her house instead of my room. We stepped inside like thieves and climbed halfway up the stairs, where she stopped and unbuttoned my shirt. I started to take off her shirt too, but she said, ‘Uh-uh,’ and ran up to the landing.
Her bedroom was furnished as if for a twelve-year-old. The childhood toys were gone, but a pink duvet covered a twin bed, and daisy decals were pasted on the sides of a set of pressboard bookshelves. A green teddy bear watched over the room from a night table. A mobile made of cut-out construction-paper stars – dusty, bent, childish – hung in the corner.
‘This is the first time I’ve had a guy up here,’ she said.
I took off my pants, and nodded at the mobile. ‘What’s that?’
‘I made it when I was seven,’ she said, and she unzipped hers.
I went to her and lifted her shirt off. ‘Why do you keep it?’
‘I made it before the fire.’ She unhooked her bra and let it fall to the floor. ‘The paint peeled on the ceiling around it. The firemen sprayed the room with water. I don’t know how it survived.’ We stood together, naked, in her childhood room and looked at the paper-star mobile. ‘It seems like it would be bad luck to take it down,’ she said.
She pulled the duvet off the bed. The bed sheets were yellow, with a flower pattern that had faded from years in the wash. She pulled off the top sheet. The mattress with the remaining sheet looked like a slab or an altar.
Cynthia said, ‘I want you to do things to me.’ Then she put her body on the mattress.
I left her, sleeping, at one in the morning. In the light of the bedside lamp, the skin on her breasts glistened with sweat. Her burned legs shined. I covered her with the top sheet and kissed her on the lips.
I spent the rest of the night on Lynn Pritchard’s couch. I meant to stop by, make sure she and her daughters had had a quiet evening, and go back to my room at the Cardinal Motel. But when she answered the door, still dressed in the pants and T-shirt she’d worn that afternoon, she said she’d gotten more phone calls. She’d ignored the first two but picked up the third. A man who didn’t identify himself said he was calling to see if she was home and then hung up. She thought she recognized the judge’s voice.
She looked terrified. Couldn’t I come in? she asked. Couldn’t I answer the phone when it rang again? Couldn’t I let the caller know there were two of us in the house? One of her babies started crying while we stood at the door, and when she went to soothe her, I walked to my car, got the pistol, and returned.
She fed her daughter, put her back in her crib, and joined me in the living room. I sat on the couch with the gun on my lap. She sat in an upholstered chair and stared at the gun as if she hated it but appreciated my having it.
The phone never rang, and, after a while, she slept. With her white pants and T-shirt, and her pale skin, she would look little different if the judge broke into the house and shot her, except her blood-red nail polish and lipstick would have a matching blood-red bullet wound. I looked down at the pistol, which could shoot as blood-red as any gun the judge carried.
As if she sensed my thoughts, she jerked awake. I told her to go upstairs and sleep in her bed.
‘But—’ she said.
‘I’ll stay,’ I said. ‘I’ll stay.’
When she left, I closed my eyes and slept too. I dreamed of a man standing on an icy bridge. At first it was daytime in the dream, and then it was night. And at first the man stared over the bridge rail at an icy river, and then he played the French horn. The instrument gleamed like a tangle of engine pipes. As the man played, a van burned on the bridge behind him – my grandfather’s van – and a girl crawled from the burning wreckage. At first the girl was the singer in my grandfather’s band – the one who survived the southern Georgia crash along with my grandfather’s horn – and then she was Cynthia with her legs burning, flaring like logs soaked in kerosene. The man playing the French horn shifted tempo and tone, and soon he played screaming jazz.
I jerked awake to the sound of Lynn Pritchard’s babies wailing.
Although she soothed them again and the house became quiet, I stayed awake the rest of the night. I thumbed the safety on the pistol. I probed the barrel with the tips of my fingers. I tried to recall the tunes the man in my dream played as the world around him turned to fire and ice. A little before seven, I got up and opened one of the window curtains. The sun was rising, and points of dew glowed on the grass, brighter than the brass gleam on the horn I’d seen in my unconscious. The van-spinning ice had melted in southern Georgia. The fires that burned my grandfather and Cynthia had extinguished. The world was a beautiful place, temperate and pointed with dew. From behind Lynn Pritchard’s window, it looked like a place where one could live happily and peacefully. Except that the world still had Judge Skooner in it.
For the next three days, little happened.
I stopped by to see Deborah Holt each morning and afternoon. I wondered whether the bullet that Andrew Skooner had given me really would show the
ballistic marks he said it would. ‘No news,’ she said, and ‘Still no news. These tests take a while.’
I wondered when the judge would make a move. Most of the time, my mind spun. I woke up four or five times each night, sweating, and I had to fight off the fear that poked and prodded at my thoughts before I could sleep again.
Cynthia and I hung out when we could. We went back to Cardice Cold Storage, but a new guy was manning the desk and he looked confused when Cynthia explained that she was a regular. So, we lay on my bed and watched TV, and, one morning, got in my car and drove the length of the 295 ring road around the city, because much of the road hadn’t existed before I went to prison and I was curious and driving sometimes helped with the knives of anxiety.
I met with Dr Patel once a day. He asked if I was feeling suicidal and if my relationship with Cynthia was going well. I told him I’d bought into the value of denial – and so, no new suicidal thoughts. I said Cynthia and I were swimming along like fish.
‘Are you having sex?’ he asked, ‘and, if so, are you suffering any dysfunction? Many men in your circumstances do.’
‘We’re great,’ I said, and he seemed perplexed.
He said, ‘I ask all this because, honestly, you don’t look so good. Are you losing weight?’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘Are you sleeping well?’
‘Not particularly.’
‘I can write new prescriptions if you need them.’
‘I’m good,’ I said.
‘Are you? Because you don’t look it.’
Each day, I stopped by Lynn Pritchard’s house and phoned between visits. The late-night calls stopped, she said, and her husband – a heavy-set man who grinned whenever he glanced around his big house and at his young wife – returned from Argentina and hadn’t started packing for New Hampshire. But whenever he left the room, she looked like she was falling apart. She said she had Xanax and Ambien in her medicine cabinet but was afraid to take them. What would she do if the judge arrived? I wondered what she would do even if she was totally conscious, but kept that thought to myself.
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