Chapter 40
When he doesn't respond, I enter anyway.
He's sitting at his desk in the low light, hand at his forehead, thumb and forefingers creating a visor, hiding his eyes.
He doesn't look up.
I'm fatigued now to the point where standing is a risky proposition, so I sit down across from him.
"What's going on?" I say.
I don't even know what I'm asking. I want to deal with us, to talk it down off the ledge, but I want to respect what I'm here for, too. That's not to say, of course, that I believe I'm here for any truly legitimate reason.
"That kid in Sheridan," he says.
I have to strain to hear him.
He drops his hand, leaning back in his chair. "He died twenty minutes ago."
"Oh, man."
"She doesn't know anything. Only that someone was injured. Thinks it was the boyfriend."
"At most I'm guessing he's the ex-boyfriend. His interests obviously lie on the other end of the spectrum."
"Even so, they'd been close at some point. The cameramen confirmed that this morning. They'd been set to share the spotlight, but somehow he got the show and she was out."
"They didn't know what that somehow was?" I ask.
"According to them, it was a decision high up. But they seemed to think Karl knew."
"So she doesn't know about Smith?"
He shakes his head. "It was definitely intended as destruction of property. She thinks they all left. Smith was in the Van der Horn house using the bathroom."
"Gross," I say.
He looks over at the darkened window, then through the open door out into the main office, anywhere but at me.
"What evidence have we got?"
"A box in the trunk. Pipe pieces, gunpowder, nails, Vaseline. The rifle used at the Cowpoke. Shoelaces."
"Plenty of bullet fragments at the motel I'm assuming."
"Plenty," he says. "And receipts for everything."
"That's weird. She's smarter than that."
"She is. I guess getting caught was part of the plan."
He gathers the papers spread out across his desk and closes the file. My weariness and paranoia tell me it represents us.
"Can you look at me, Walt? Please."
It takes him a while, but he does.
"I know it's bad, but none of us thought she'd do something like this. I figured she might boil Karl's pet rabbit or something."
"Me, too," he says, and it catches me off guard. I'd expected to have to fight for any type of cooperation.
"It's bad, but so is everything else about this stupid case."
He picks up a pen but does nothing with it.
"I didn't mean I wanted to end this," I say.
My head is heavy and my entire upper body aches.
"Vic," he says in that placating tone with that pitying slight smile. "Not now."
"Why the hell not now?"
"You're tired," he says.
"Don't act like you're stonewalling out of kindness."
"Stonewalling?"
The word seems to trigger some thought or memory in him, and he gets stuck there.
"That's what you're doing," I say, though I'm not certain he's with me, "and it sucks."
I am exhausted. With every passing second the desire to have this conversation descends another rung on my ladder of priorities.
Standing up, alert suddenly, he says, "You should lie down on the couch for a while."
"What, you just remembered I matter?"
I sound weak and pathetic.
"Actually," I say, "I think I will lie down if you don't mind."
I stand and walk slowly towards the door, but I don't get far before his hand is on my lower back, gently turning me.
"The couch is over there," he whispers, close to my ear, to my unclean hair.
"I need my drugs."
"I've got it. Just go lie down."
I only realize I've fallen asleep when I wake up and he's sitting next to me, the side of his leg touching the side of my torso, the feel of his body against mine so warm and already so familiar.
He's holding a coffee mug in one hand and the pill in the other.
"Can you sit up?"
"Probably not."
He helps raise my upper body enough for me to take the pill, then he puts a pillow under my head, covers me with one of the scratchy, musty jailbird blankets, and sits back down.
"We'll talk when I take you home," he says.
"So you like me again?"
He smiles.
"I always like you, Vic."
It seems like the conversation goes a little further, but I'm on the border between wake and sleep, and my cognition is choppy. He leans down and kisses my lips, lingering for long enough to suggest his behavior and his feelings are way out of alignment.
Before it's over, I slip off into blurry darkness.
Hours later I awaken with a jolt to raspy, obscenity-saturated yelling, and what sounds like the cell door slamming over and over. Through the partially closed blinds, I can see the sky, leading me to the conclusion that it's nearly dawn, and Sherry Mendenhall has snapped.
"You're a fucking misogynistic, fascist asshole!" she says.
Kind of redundant, but whatever.
"You want me to pee on the floor in here?" she threatens. "'Cause I will."
"I believe you," he says, the smooth calmness of his voice a stark contrast to the grating intensity of hers. "I'll get Deputy Moretti to escort you to the restroom when you stop kicking the bars."
"I have stopped," she says.
"When you've stopped for a while longer."
"Maybe I can't wait that long."
"I'll risk it," he says.
He's pulled a chair over to the cell, and he's sitting maybe fifteen feet back from the bars, probably because the furthest we've seen a prisoner spit is twelve.
When I come out of his office, he stands up and runs his hand over his hair. I'm both flattered and embarrassed.
"What happened to you?" Sherry says.
"I'm just run down, I guess," I say.
"I mean what happened to your arm?"
"Oh." I thought she'd seen me earlier. "I fell at work."
"You didn't get shot?"
"No," I say.
I almost ask her how she's doing, but I decide it would sound weird, so I just stand there acting weirder.
"Your jerk boss won't tell me what's going on."
"Really?"
I look at him and he shrugs.
At this point I can't see any reason to hold out. With so much forensic evidence, it's not like we need her to fill in the gaps.
"What's your question?"
"Is Karl dead?" she asks.
"Walt?"
"Go ahead," he says.
"No. He's not dead."
"How badly is he hurt?" she asks, sounding hopeful with maybe a trace of regret.
"He's not hurt, Sherry," I say. "You didn't get him."
"What?" she says, and her pale complexion becomes noticeably paler.
"He's fine," I say.
"Then who?"
"One of the cameramen. Jason Smith."
She sways and grabs hold of one of the bars, then she lowers herself to the cement floor and crosses her legs.
"Jason?" Her voice is airy and mild now, all the aggression gone. "How?"
"He was still there," I say. "Inside the house. He was walking back towards the trailer when it blew."
"How is that possible?"
"I don't know what kind of precautions you took, so I really can't say."
"Fuck you," she says, and it surprises me because for once in my life I really wasn't copping attitude.
"He's in critical condition."
"Critical but stable," Walt adds. "He'll pull through. May never walk again and probably won't speak, but he'll make it."
"What?" she says, white knuckling the bars.
"The other victim died last night," Walt says.
"What other victim?"
She slaps her hands up to her face and bends down into her lap.
"In the room," I say.
For long minutes, she sits like that.
When she looks up I'm expecting tears and swollen eyes, but there's nothing. She looks exactly the same. The thick-rimmed glasses are gone, but I don't think she was wearing them when Walt brought her in.
"I have to pee," she says.
She could quite easily incapacitate me right now, so I'm relieved when Walt follows us over to the reading room.
"He can't come," she says.
"He's not."
I stand sideways in the doorway where I can see her on the toilet and him standing by the coffee maker.
Based on the time it takes her to finish, I'd guess she was well-hydrated upon arrival and held on quite a time before asking to use the facilities.
"He was with a woman?" she asks me as she's zipping and buttoning her pants like I am no longer able to do.
"No," I say, and I genuinely feel bad for her, for what she doesn't know and for what's about to come down on her.
She's processing information, trying to make sense of it without having to ask for more.
"Then what?" she says, and I'm thinking she has to know. How could you not know something like that, not feel it somehow?
"It was a guy," I say.
"Michael?"
"Who?"
"His best friend Michael," she says. "He's on a design show based in Orange County."
"Florida?"
"California."
"Okay."
The only ideas coming into my head are ignorant generalizations, so I wait.
"Was it Michael?" she asks.
"What was the deceased's name, Walt?"
"Franklin Wong," he says.
"No," I say. "It wasn't Michael."
She's chasing leads around in her head and I'm half expecting smoke to start coming out of her ears.
"Franklin Wong," she says.
"Sherry," I say, "I don't think the name matters."
"He met him at the Flying J," Walt says as she comes out of the bathroom.
Once she's safely back inside the cell, he goes into his office and I take the chair he was sitting in.
"The truck stop?"
"Yeah," I say.
"A whore?"
"I don't know if they call men that, but yeah, basically."
Walt comes back out and says the detention center will be by in half an hour then he goes across the street to get us all breakfast and coffee.
After he's been gone for a while, she says, "Karl's gay?"
"At least a little, I guess. How long were you together?"
"Two years."
She sits down on the floor facing the bars again.
"He ended it right after we signed with Latrans and Cable 420."
I have no idea what to say so I just nod.
"I'm such an idiot," she says.
"We all make mistakes like that."
"I bet you don't," she says, and it's filled with contempt.
"I've made my share of bad choices where men are concerned."
"But you stopped making them?"
"I plan to stop making them," I say. "I've finally learned it's not worth it."
"What's not worth it?"
"Messing up your life for some guy who doesn't love you the way you deserve to be loved. If that's the price, guys aren't worth it."
"I'm educated and liberal. I should know that already, shouldn't I?"
"You know it now."
"How do I apply it?"
Though realistically, she will probably never get an opportunity to apply it, I can't bring myself to tell her she doesn't have to worry about next time.
"They're a dime a dozen," I say. "Got one that isn't working out, go find another one. Fuck all that emotional retardation bullshit, just move on."
She laughs, and I'm glad. Yes, she made some extraordinarily bad choices, but the mistake she made is really just an extreme version of the mistake so many of us make. She'll spend the rest of her life paying. I don't want to leave her alone with it yet.
"Uh-oh," she says, pointing towards Walt's office. "Looks like someone's offended."
I see movement out of the corner of my eye, and I swear my heart actually stops beating. As I turn, my chest aches with my body's frantic effort to restore the natural rhythm.
He's standing there in the doorway, hat still on, glassy-eyed and stunned.
Forty-five minutes later I'm in the passenger seat of the Bronco, squinting against the rising sun. Besides my thank you when he gave me my coffee and bagel, we haven't spoken.
We're almost to my house when I say, "I think you misunderstood what I was saying."
He looks at me briefly over his shoulder.
"Again?"
"What do you mean?"
"I misunderstood you yesterday morning then I misunderstood you again today?"
"I wasn't even talking to you today. You came in half way through the conversation."
He shakes his head and I clench my teeth. A shuddering anger vibrates through me.
"And yesterday you weren't listening," I say, trying to keep my voice from trembling. "You left before we finished the conversation."
He pulls into the driveway but doesn't shut off the engine.
"You can't be serious," I say.
"You know, Vic, I figured there was a chance this might happen, but I didn't expect it to happen so soon."
"A chance what might happen?" I say.
"That you'd push me away the way you . . ."
"Don't say it," I say. I'm losing control, hand shaking, ears burning, lip quivering. "Do not go there."
He stops, and he takes his hand off the wheel as though he might be opening up to me.
"I just wanted a little time, Walt. It has nothing to do with what I said to Sherry and nothing to do with my past. You only heard part of what I was saying. It wasn't about you and me."
I feel like I can't breathe and the gas fumes are making my stomach churn, but I make a conscious effort to give him time to respond, to not just get out and slam the door, to not just run away.
But he looks straight ahead, and it's clear he's finished, at least for now.
"I wasn't ready, Walt," I say, releasing my seatbelt then opening the door. "I just needed a little more time."
"Well I'm sorry I pressured you into it," he says, bloodshot eyes glaring at me. "It won't happen again."
Everything in me wants me to scream, to throw something at him, or to tell him to fuck off, but everything in me has misled me too many times before.
So I say, "Okay. I'm sorry I hurt you," and I get out of the truck, and I close the door.
As I start down the front walkway, I hear him pulling out of the driveway, but I don't look back.