If I hit it with my shoulder, shards would rain over my face and body.
I kicked it.
The window exploded into the house. I ran through the empty frame into the living room. The room was blacker than the night outside and smelled like metal and salt – the jagged odor of blood.
Somewhere nearby, Lynn Pritchard’s babies cried. Outside, the sirens whined.
I moved through the dark toward the front hall. The babies were only a room away. I went up the stairs.
One light was on, in the room I’d seen from outside.
I stopped at the second-floor landing and tried to see into the dark at the ends of the hall. I saw only blackness – deep as the deepest hole.
Lynn Pritchard made a sound in the lighted room. A low sound. The sound of someone at the black bottom of the deepest hole.
I went in. I held the pistol in my sweating hands.
Lynn Pritchard was alone. The judge had tied her wrists and ankles to the bed. She stared at the ceiling and made that sound. She had wounds on her legs and hips. I pulled my eyes away and looked at her face – pale except for the wet red lipstick. Her tongue lolled against her lips.
The judge had taken the shade off a table lamp, converting the space into a kind of theatrical stage, as if he wanted to see everything, the way you see it in a burst of brightness before the world goes dark.
‘Lynn,’ I said.
She stared at the ceiling.
‘Where is he?’ I said.
She was lost in her pain and fear.
I said, ‘I’ll get—’
She turned her face toward me, sensing what I couldn’t see. In the moment between her turning and the butt of the judge’s pistol crashing against the back of my head, I knew that I was too slow – that I was already falling into a black tunnel even as my feet stood on the floor.
Then I saw a flash, as if the gun metal sparked against my skin.
I seemed to fly upward – my muscles jolting, my legs no longer mattering – and then I fell and kept falling.
I woke again – seconds or minutes later.
I lay on the floor next to the bed.
Crushed.
Fingers of blood caressed my neck and probed my ears.
I wondered if the judge had already shot me in the forehead.
I wondered if I was dead.
I touched my lips, my nose, my eyes. They felt like the lips, nose, and eyes of a dead man. I ran my fingers over my forehead. I found no hole.
Sounds came from the bed. Lynn Pritchard. The judge.
I tried to sit up to see. The edges of my vision collapsed, and blackness rained down on me.
I woke again to the sound of Lynn Pritchard. The sound of the judge.
The babies crying in a far-off room.
Sirens.
I felt my face. My forehead.
Then all went silent. Inches from me. Miles from me.
I pushed myself to my elbows. My vision narrowed – widened.
My ears flooded with sound. Babies. Sirens. The judge speaking softly, tenderly, incomprehensibly.
He straddled Lynn Pritchard. He wore pants but had removed his shirt. The graying hair on his chest was dabbed with blood. Blood wrapped a clownish mask around his lips.
He hung over her. His pistol lay on the mattress, touching her cheek, where she could have grabbed it if he hadn’t tied her hands.
The babies cried.
The sirens came.
I sat on the floor by the bed, watching.
The judge seemed blind to all but the scene he’d created, deaf to all but his own pleasure. Whatever he was telling her. Whatever he was telling himself. Whatever judgment came from the hole that was his mouth.
I watched for the longest time.
Then he reached for the gun.
And I reached to my belt for mine.
It was gone.
The judge pressed his gun barrel against Lynn Pritchard’s forehead.
I looked around the room for my pistol. It glinted in the light of the shadeless lamp – inches from me on the floor.
The judge was enjoying himself. He caressed the trigger as if he could give it a sexual thrill.
He spoke softly, tenderly, lovingly, his words creating worlds.
I drew the pistol into my hand.
I understood his words then. What he would do to Lynn Pritchard. In the minutes or hours before he shot her in the forehead. Or maybe – maybe – he would just shoot her now. He leaned and kissed her forehead. Gently. Like a loving father. Then he sat up and held his pistol barrel against the wet kiss stain he’d left on her skin.
I spoke to him. ‘Judge.’ The word felt like twisted wire in my throat.
He turned. Surprised to see me among the living. Irritated by the interruption.
So I shot him in the belly.
He whirled, as if I’d lashed him. He looked at his ribs – the blood streaking – and looked at me. Uncomprehending.
He raised his gun in an unsteady hand and aimed it at my face.
I shot him in the chest.
He looked down. Amazed at the new wound. His gun fell to the mattress, and he put a hand over the torn skin. If only he could stuff it back inside. He looked stricken and bewildered. And then he fell. Toward Lynn Pritchard – as though he would crush her in his own death – then sideways and down and down, over the side of the bed, on to the floor.
I pulled myself up and stood. More or less stood.
Lynn Pritchard stared at me.
‘It’s OK,’ I tried to say, and my words sounded as incomprehensible to my ears as the judge’s words. ‘It will be.’
As if to answer me, the judge made a sound of pain and righteous anger. He seemed to think he might live to win another battle.
Lights strobed through the window then. Police cars and vans came up the driveway, and the sirens drowned out the crying babies and my mumbling and the judge’s fury.
I set my pistol by the judge’s gun on the bed and untied Lynn Pritchard’s ropes. She drew her hands around her body as if she could pull them inside her and make herself disappear.
Downstairs, the cops hammered at the front door.
I untied one ankle and then the other.
‘It’ll be OK,’ I said, and I made myself look her in the eyes.
But she picked up my pistol, wrapped a finger over the trigger, and aimed at me.
‘No,’ I said.
‘No,’ she agreed.
She turned and aimed the gun at the judge. He lay on the floor, his hand covering his chest wound. He stared back at her. Smiling stupidly.
She pulled the trigger. Once. Twice.
When the noise of the second gunshot rang in my ears, the judge no longer had a face – none that anyone would know.
Lynn Pritchard raised the gun, considered it, and put the barrel against her own temple.
‘No,’ I said, and I crawled over the bed to her. ‘No.’
She looked at me with anguish, with eyes that seemed to ask the same question I’d asked a thousand times when looking in a mirror. Why not?
‘No,’ I said.
I eased the gun from her hand. It seemed to weigh nothing now. It had become bird bone.
Boots pounded up the stairs. A dozen men and women, led by Bill Higby and Deborah Holt. Shouting incomprehensible words.
As they burst into the room, I wrapped Lynn Pritchard in a bed sheet. She stared at them as if they’d come too late and she and I were already dead.
THIRTY-FOUR
Too much rode on the judge’s reputation to let it collapse completely. Too many cops’ and lawyers’ jobs. Too many years of trials and verdicts.
The next morning, the city officials started to spin the story. A sheriff’s spokesman said that, under pressure of his family crisis – Josh’s recent death, Andrew’s disappearance – Judge Skooner suffered a breakdown. Yes, the judge had encountered Lynn Pritchard and become fixated on her. Yes, the judge went to her house late at night pursuing an
interest she didn’t share. Yes, as he pressed himself on her, she shot him – once in the chest.
That afternoon, the District Attorney, while calling the shooting an act of self-defense, said Judge Skooner was more to be pitied than vilified.
When Higby and Holt visited Lynn Pritchard at the hospital, she agreed to go along with the story. She was still in shock. Scared to death of future trauma. Wanting – needing – to have all that had been out of reach since the murder of Duane Bronson when she was just a kid.
But when they visited me, I said, ‘He wrecked me’ – I looked at Higby – ‘with your help.’
He said, ‘I did my—’
‘I want the story in the open,’ I said. ‘Every detail. I’ll tell it if you won’t.’
Holt said, ‘All of Skooner’s court cases would fall apart. That’s hundreds and hundreds.’
‘Maybe they should fall apart. Skooner must’ve railroaded others too.’
‘This would shake everyone who’s ever brought a case through his courtroom,’ Higby said. ‘That’s a lot of the Sheriff’s Office. You’re talking about people’s lives.’
‘I’m talking about your life,’ I said.
‘And the lives of a lot of others.’
‘I’ll be happy to shake you,’ I said.
‘You don’t want to do this,’ Holt said.
‘Yes, I do. I need to.’
‘Sometimes it’s better to tell only part of the story,’ Higby said. ‘Even if it’s a lie.’
‘And sometimes it’s better to tell the whole truth,’ I said.
‘The truth can hurt all of us,’ he said.
‘But mostly you.’
He shook his head. ‘Are you ready to tell the truth about what happened to Randall Haussen?’
A better man might have choked on his own hypocrisy. Not me. ‘I’ve told you, I know nothing about him. You never had anyone other than the judge saying he saw us together.’
Higby said, ‘And the judge is dead, so you’re safe from his testimony.’
‘That’s right.’
Holt asked quietly, ‘How about the testimony of a body in the Trail Ridge landfill?’
‘Bullshit,’ I said.
‘The medical examiner found a single bullet in the cranium. How about the testimony it will give if we compare it with the bullets you and Lynn Pritchard shot into the judge?’
‘Goddamn it,’ I said.
‘Or maybe we can rewrite that story too,’ she said. ‘Maybe the story could be about an unidentified body found at the landfill.’
‘He was going to kill me.’
‘That’s your story now?’ Higby said.
‘Let’s tell the stories the best way,’ Holt said.
I wanted to lunge at her. ‘What about Felicia Bronson? Doesn’t she deserve to know what happened to her boys?’
‘We’ll never know exactly,’ she said. ‘Whatever was in the papers the Bronsons stole from the judge is buried.’
‘What about you?’ I said to Higby. ‘You still have charges against you for shooting Josh Skooner. You’ll go to trial.’
‘We can protect the judge’s reputation only so much,’ he said. ‘Next week, while doing yard work, one of the Skooners’ gardeners will find the bullet you gave us. Our men must have missed it. An embarrassment to us. It’ll be enough to get the charges dropped. The union will insist that the State Attorney drop them.’
Andrew Skooner, who, it turned out, was hiding in upstate New York only a few miles from Cornell, gave the eulogy at the judge’s funeral, and, that evening, the news aired large portions of it. His father had been a hard man, he said, but he also called him a hero, while acknowledging that all heroes are flawed. He concluded by saying, ‘I love you, Dad.’ Terror never really dies. You can put it in a steel box and bury it in six feet of sand and dirt, but it will still breathe down the necks of its victims.
I stayed away from the service. Instead, that afternoon, I went to the Cineplex and watched Singin’ in the Rain in the Golden Oldies Series, and afterward Cynthia and I went back to my room and pretended the world outside my four walls was black and white and tuned to the soundtrack of a happy musical.
I tried to go easy on myself. The doctors at the hospital said the judge had given me a concussion and I should expect headaches, nausea, and double vision. When I said, ‘Nothing new, then?’ they looked at me as if I might be suffering from the effects of my smashed head. ‘Take it slow,’ they told me. ‘Sleep. Protect yourself against further head injuries.’
When I went back to Dr Patel at the Medical Services Building, he agreed with those recommendations and added, ‘Maybe freedom is too big of a word. What if you don’t need to move a thousand miles an hour? What if you don’t need to fly into the clouds? Maybe freedom comes from knowing how to live small and well.’
‘Maybe that’s a cop-out,’ I said, though in the slow days that followed, I wondered if he might be right. Denial of big possibilities might mean contentment with the small ones. Complacency might make life livable.
So, when Jared knocked on my door one evening while Cynthia and I were lying in bed watching TV, I sent him away.
‘What?’ he said. ‘We can’t be brothers anymore?’
I said, ‘My doctors tell me to avoid any head trauma.’
He looked at me as if I’d sunk below his lowest expectations. ‘Did they also tell you to act like an asshole?’
But a week after the judge’s funeral, I started waking up in the middle of the night again.
After the third night of that, I put my box cutter in my pocket, drove to the Sheriff’s Office, and asked to see Deborah Holt. When the deskman sent me through to the Homicide Room, I found Higby sitting back-to-back with Holt in the cubicle they shared. He had returned to duty with apologies from the sheriff and the prosecutor for the regrettable but necessary moves against him in the aftermath of Josh Skooner’s shooting.
‘Hey,’ Holt said, as if we were on the same side. ‘What’s up?’
‘The double vision’s gone,’ I said. ‘The headaches too, mostly.’
‘That’s great,’ she said, and even Higby looked glad to hear it.
‘I’m thinking clearly again,’ I said. ‘Or as clearly as I ever did.’
‘Good, good,’ she said.
I said, ‘It’s made me curious.’
‘That can be dangerous,’ Higby said. As if it was a joke.
So I asked him, ‘You’ve lived on Byron Road for a long time, right?’
He smiled, unsure where I was going. ‘Twenty-three years next spring.’
‘Long enough to know what’s happening in the neighborhood.’
‘Sure.’
‘If kids were breaking into houses and stealing liquor and jewelry and things, you would know that, right? And, because you’re a cop, if those kids got arrested in another neighborhood for similar burglaries, you would see the link – you would have access to the reports and the files.’
‘I’m busy with my own work,’ he said. ‘We have enough homicides—’
‘Right. So if the kids who were doing the burglaries got killed, you would make connections. I mean, like the Bronson brothers. When they broke into Eric Skooner’s house, they’d already gotten caught for other burglaries, and you would’ve seen the connection. Or if you didn’t see it right away because you were so busy, you would’ve seen it once they died and you started investigating.’
‘What are you implying?’ he said.
‘I’m saying, all the pieces were there. Before I went to trial, you also knew about the dead boys downriver near Tomhanson Mill – Jeremy Ballat and Luis Gonzalez. And you knew about the judge’s connection to that area. You’d brought Josh back from there yourself. If you talked to Lynn Pritchard, you also knew that she and the Bronson boys had snuck on to the mill property and swum in a contaminated pond. All the pieces. You just had to put them together.’
‘There were a lot of other pieces too,’ he said. ‘Thousands of them. Mos
t didn’t fit.’
So I asked the question that had been waking me at night. ‘What did you get from protecting the judge? I mean, while it lasted.’
Higby looked shocked. ‘Fuck off,’ he said.
‘It must have been something,’ I said.
He shoved his chair back and stood. To the day he died, he would be a big man, graying but dangerous. ‘Get the hell out of—’
Holt, who’d been listening with fascination, said, ‘Bill?’
He spun toward her. ‘What?’ and when she just looked at him, ‘What!’
I said, ‘Tell me. You owe me that much.’
‘I owe you nothing,’ he said.
Again, Holt just said his name. ‘Bill.’
He seemed to waver – as if he still might break me. He said, ‘I had … suspicions. That’s all. Nothing solid. Nothing I could do anything about.’
I stared at him.
He said, ‘Putting the killings on Skooner too soon would do no good. You don’t try to take down a man like him unless you know you can keep him down. If he gets up, you won’t have a second chance. But I never stopped trying, never stopped working it.’
‘You put me on death row and let me sit in prison.’
‘I thought you did it – for a while.’
‘You couldn’t have.’
‘If it wasn’t him, it was you,’ he said. ‘That’s the way it always was.’
‘You’re as evil as the judge was,’ I said.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I did my best.’
‘It wasn’t good enough. It never will be.’
If Holt hadn’t stood up then – if she hadn’t gotten between us – he would have grabbed me by the throat and I would have sliced him with a blade.
Outside, the September sun glared on the sidewalk. And on the hoods and roofs of cars parked at the meters. And on the curbside crepe myrtle trees, which were shedding tissue-like flowers. And on me.
I got into my car, started the engine, and rolled down the windows.
I felt as if I was made of broken pieces. Maybe we all were – at least men like me and Bill Higby.
I pulled into traffic, drove north on the Interstate, and exited on Dunn Avenue. Ten minutes later, I walked into a store called Music Time. The place was cluttered with used horns, drums, and violins, racks of sheet music, counter displays of guitar picks, valve oil, and clef-shaped key chains. Dust hung in the air. The lights were dim.
Monument Road Page 28
