Chapter 20

He wakes up with an erection. It surprises him considering how drunk he was last night and consequently how hungover he is this morning. He blames Zoe. She was in a dream, the snatches he remembers, disjointed action spattered among slices of spinning-room wakefulness or lingering in his consciousness when he stumbled to the bathroom to gulp water from the tap. If he recalls the dream correctly it wasn't nice and so he's a bit troubled by his body's reaction, and a bit amused. He rolls over and sits up and looks down at his shorts sticking out in angles and decides not to do anything about it as penance, though for what he's not sure. Lately it's often he feels a need for penance. Too much of the wrong kind of religion growing up, he thinks, and recalls the last time he attended church which was also the last time he saw his crazy sister. Her way of coping with their childhood was to embrace everything that was wrong about it. She's worked hard at not growing up. She called him a warmonger that last visit. He told her to fuck off. He snorts thinking how little hold that world has on him when those memories do nothing to help his current situation. He looks back at his shorts. Damn Zoe.

A shower then. But the bathroom door is closed and the light showing beneath it means that Raylan is there ahead of him. He shuts himself back in his bedroom, flops onto his bed and jerks off. At some point he realizes the water isn't running. Maybe Raylan needs a towel. Being a good host is not a skill he tries to cultivate but he gets out of bed and pulls on a t-shirt and goes to find a spare towel hoping to hurry Raylan along. He's holding it like a hotel maid, hand up to knock on the door when Raylan opens it. They stand there awkwardly eyeing one another and Tim wishes someone were there filming the whole thing so he could have a laugh about it later.

"I'm leaving," Raylan says eventually, still in the clothes he slept in, eyes bleary and bloodshot, hair sticking up. He looks rough. "But you, young man, have got some cleaning up to do downstairs before you go anywhere." He's being funny, wagging his finger like he's the responsible one.

Tim holds up the clean towel to explain why he's standing right outside the door, feels silly doing it. "You wanna shower before you head out?"

"Don't think it would help." Raylan makes a shooing motion and Tim turns sideways to let him by. He sets his hat on his head and treads heavily down the stairs, calls over his shoulder. "We gotta stop doing this. I'm getting too old."

The admission stuns Tim into silence, but only for a moment. He calls down the stairs after him, "Christ, Raylan, quit nagging. I'll go to the liquor store this afternoon and stock up."

He hears a chuckle, the front door open and close. He drops the towel on the floor at the top of the stairs and trails down after him and locks the door then wanders without purpose or thought through the house and ends up in the kitchen staring at his subcompact. Raylan has left it beside the sink. It's as if he's penned a note: "When are we going to Las Cruces?"

In t-shirt and shorts he can't carry it on him but he picks it up anyway and holds it, sets it down again on the counter while he makes a pot of coffee then picks it up again. It's quiet but for the brew dripping into the pot, the aroma the only good thing about this morning. He draws in a deep breath to wring some pleasure out of the moment, rubs his free hand along his cheek taking the measure of a two-day old beard. He trudges back upstairs and gets out his razor hoping it'll somehow help with the third hangover in a week.

The face in the mirror looks older than thirty, eyes staring back a copy of Raylan's, red and weary. It's hard to shave holding a gun so he sets it down on the window sill. He picks it up again when he's finished, unaware he's doing it, uses his left hand to turn on the shower then looks stupidly at the gun in his right. He sets it down again. He stands in the hot shower longer than he normally would, head bent under the steady stream watching the water swirl and disappear down the drain, precious and wasted. He hates catching himself acting like people he despises, people like Tara's brother-in-law. He shuts off the water and stands dripping.

He's back into bad habits this week with the drinking. He doesn't want to go there again. He's had his fight with alcohol and once is enough.

He dries off and dresses. Gun in hand he trots downstairs.

He should go to the gym, or the range, or running. Instead he finds a garbage bag and takes stock of the destruction in his kitchen. The handgun is in his way again but he's loathe to set it down out of reach. He locates his back holster and secures the gun then gets to it, collects up the larger bits of chair and drywall scattered around his kitchen, drags a broom around the floor to gather up the bits. Everything he needs to patch the wall is in the old garage in the yard. It's heavy work, not physically but mentally. It's not the first time, likely won't be the last that he's had to repair damage from an outburst of anger. His skills at mudding have improved since leaving the military. The coffee he drinks while he works sits raw in his stomach, percolating with his thoughts. After he has the drywall patch in place and the first coat of mud applied, he takes a break and eats at the table. It's a poor choice of seat facing the repaired wall, a reminder. And the toast and peanut butter don't go down any better than the coffee, mix noisily with it and the acid remains of too much whiskey. It complements his mood. He's thinking about his breakdown in front of Raylan last night. It's clearly festering, an unseen wound. He needs to fix that too but he's unsure how to proceed. It's dangerous ground he has to tread to make that repair, not like walking across the yard to the garage for tools.

There's a momentum now to the events – the beatings, the pain, the long recovery, the investigation, the breakthrough, and now the breakdown. Something has to happen. In the piercing focus that can only occur with a pounding headache from a hangover, he sees two ways to proceed, three if he wants to include the possibility of passing his findings over to the special investigative team in DC. There's a derisive snort at the thought.

The first plan is simple, instinctive, and the most appealing: pack a selection of firearms and maybe a few things from his toolbox, get into his truck and drive to New Mexico and do what he was trained to do – violence of action, surgical or blunt depending on the circumstances that present. He has the abilities to deliver either method effectively, and he doesn't much care which it is or how the bodies look at the end of it, only that the number matches the total on his current hate list. The satisfaction of hands-on and immediate results, that's the plus of the first option. But there's a downside. He'd lose his job, maybe do prison time. He rephrases that in his head to 'definitely do prison time.' The thought of a cell doesn't deter him, it's loyalty that gets in the way of his shooting spree, stops him from packing up right now and heading southwest. He feels he owes something to Art, to Rachel, to his buddy in Ohio to whom he's indebted for much of his success reintegrating into civilian life. His buddy wouldn't judge, would understand more than anyone if the need for payback bent to the illegal. Anyone except maybe Raylan. There's someone he could count on to visit him in prison since Rachel won't. He considers which penitentiary they'd likely send him to. No country club for him, not with his background, not when he swore an oath to the federal government to uphold the law, not when the bodies were found and the evidence photos were put in front of a judge and jury. Despite all that, it's still an appealing option.

The second plan is a logistics nightmare, not nearly as satisfying to contemplate, no guarantee of success, but it will accomplish something close to the same thing if he can make it work, and, if he works it carefully, it might keep him out of prison and in his job. That's the plus. The minus is he needs help to make it happen, and it's a lot to ask.

He slides a finger along his knife, wiping off the trace of peanut butter and licking it from his finger. He clears his dishes and finishes cleaning the kitchen. The mud won't dry fast enough. He wastes ten minutes standing and watching it cure, attempting to hurry it along with sheer willpower so he can sand it and paint it and forget about it, but it'll be hours until it's dry enough. It'll be there to remind him until tomorrow at least. He finds himself wishing he had a ruck march to do this afternoon. As much as he hated them there was nothing like it for clearing the head, anything to keep himself from thinking about what happened last night.

He calls his buddy in Ohio but it goes to voicemail. He calls Rachel and hangs up when her recorded voice asks nicely that he leave a message. The junk shop around the corner where he bought a chair last time is closed on Sundays. Restlessness is part of his routine but some days it's impossible to subdue.

He's already in sweats, so he laces on runners and heads out the door, out beyond his usual route, out around the reservoirs and over the New Circle Road and then he's in Art's neighborhood. It's like he planned it, but he didn't. He slows down to a walk on Art's street and lets the breeze cool him down, past Art's house, stops, turns around and stares at the number, and then he's standing on the porch and knocking at the door.

Leslie answers. "Well, hello Tim. Is it Deputy Marshal migrating season? You're the third one I've spotted in my yard today."

"Third?"

"You just missed Raylan, and Rachel came by after church to talk to Art about something."

"Rachel? What did she want, do you know?"

"I don't like to eavesdrop when it's business."

"Maybe I should go," he says, feeling awkward now about showing up on a Sunday afternoon. "I can talk to Art tomorrow at the office."

But Leslie won't let him leave. "I think he'll be happy to make time for you, Tim." She takes his arm and pulls him inside. "How've you been? Art says you're pretty much back to normal. No lasting problems from what happened?"

"No, ma'am."

"I'm glad to hear it." She gives his arm a little squeeze and smiles. "Did you run here?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"From your house?"

"Not directly. I kinda meandered a bit." He looks at his watch. "Maybe a lot."

"Oh to be young again."

Art appears from a doorway off the hall, looks surprised to see him. "Tim? Everything alright?"

Tim thumbs back out the front. "I was just running past and…" He stops and looks down at the floor, wipes a hand across his mouth. "I just wanted to talk to you about...something."

"Come on then. I'll get us something to drink."

Leslie turns and heads to the kitchen before Art finishes his invitation. "I just put some fresh coffee on," she says. "Help yourselves. I'm going to get out of your hair, take the opportunity to call my sister."

They stand quietly together and watch her walk away down the hall. Art says, "Maybe you'd prefer a beer?"

He shakes his head, no. As soon as he does he knows he's blown it, given away that he's hungover again. He never turns down a beer. "Coffee's good," he says, "since she's gone to the trouble of making it and all." He hopes that might fool Art. As if.

"Funny," says Art, "but Raylan didn't want a beer either. Leslie took one look at him and offered him coffee. I think she has a sixth sense for hangovers." He waves Tim down the hall to the kitchen. "Coffee then, though I was hoping for a beer. I guess you two were drinking last night? Raylan hasn't looked that bad since, well, since last time he got drunk with you and that would be…this past Wednesday, or I guess that was actually Thursday." He looks Tim up and down. "You look almost as bad as he did. Christ, I hate it when you two are getting along. It's always trouble for me."

"Leslie said that Rachel was by this morning?" Tim grasps at another topic hoping to distract Art from digging into why he and Raylan were drinking together on a Saturday night, and by all evidence drinking hard.

"Yep." Art lines up two mugs and gets cream out of the fridge.

It occurs to Tim too late that what he and Rachel were up to last night would likely meet with equal disapproval as his excessive drinking with Raylan. So much has happened between then and now that their Facebook hunt seems like weeks ago. He tries to sound innocent. "Everything okay with Nick?"

"Why? Did she say something to you about him?"

"No, I was just…" He shrugs.

Art studies his face. "Tim, enough of the coy act. I'm sure you can guess that she was here to talk about you. She's worried you're going to do something really, really stupid to get revenge for what those assholes did to you. And then along comes Raylan on a Sunday afternoon – and I'm always worried that he's going to do something really, really stupid – and he asks me if he can borrow you this week, take you down to Harlan for a few days to chase something that's got his hillbilly senses tingling in that direction. It was his usual bullshit. And lo and behold, doesn't the man that everyone is interested in show up not a half hour later looking the same shade of Saturday binge-drinking green as Raylan. And you stand there shuffling your feet and shifting your eyes like you're up to no good or hiding something, or actually probably both. Can we just get to it? Tim, if you don't start talking, to me or anybody, about what's going on in your clearly distressed brain, I'm going to take away your gun and put you back on a desk."

"I got more than one gun."

"So, smartass, go ahead and shoot yourself in both feet – see if I care – just not with a USMS-issue sidearm, please."

He hears Art's hands slap onto his hips even with his eyes fixed on the floor. "I'm more careful than that," he says.

"It's a figure of speech, you dumb shit." Art pulls the coffee pot out and pours two mugs, slams it back onto the hotplate. He raises his voice for the next part. "Why are you here, Tim? Are you looking for me to talk you out of a shooting rampage or are you looking for absolution to go and do just that?"

"Would you blame me if I did?"

"No. In fact, I'd like to put a couple of them down myself, but I know better than to even consider it. Apparently you and Raylan don't. He seems happy to help you, and on Marshal time. But think about what you'd be losing. You'd get caught. I promise you. Maybe, if you're lucky, they'd have the decency to cuff you at your house rather than doing it in front of all of us at the office…"

Art's still ranting but Tim's stopped listening. He already knows he's not going to do it. Harshly he thinks that he's getting soft in civilian life. Or maybe he's finally getting his priorities straight. It's a bitch that he can't know which until he's at the end looking back and summing it all up, and then it's too late. Maybe it changes depending, and you have to change with it. Whatever, it feels shitty right now. He feels like he's been cut loose, set adrift. If he felt off-center before, now he feels upended. He knows he's not going to do it, and just making a decision should give him direction. Instead he feels lost.

The acknowledgment guts him. His face twists under the pressure and he brings up a hand to wipe at his eyes hoping Art won't see that he's losing control. He feels a heavy hand on his shoulder. It gets a grip and pulls him in. He feels like a child. He lets it happen. He drops his head on a broad shoulder and cries a second time in twenty-four hours. It's freeing to stand down but part of him hates it.

"I don't know what to do," he says.

A comforting pat and Art pushes him back out to arm's length but keeps a grip on him. His face softens, saddened. "It's been a tough six months. I can only imagine how badly you want to hurt somebody. Find a way to do it that won't come back at you. I'll do anything I can do to help as long as it's not out-and-out murder. I can't support that. I can't. But I can't let it drop, either. It sits badly with me that they could get away with it, doing that to one of my people." He lets go his hold and gives Tim's shoulder another pat. "Shit," he says. "Time to ante up, I guess. Rachel says you got a name?"

"Derek Hutter."

"Derek Hutter. And you're sure it's him?"

He nods.

"So that's two – Derek Hutter and Deputy US Marshal Taylor, though he doesn't deserve the title and I wish I could be the guy to beat him till his badge falls off." Art pours cream into the mugs and hands one to Tim. "I suspect, knowing you, that you've been thinking and that you've already got another idea?" He looks at Tim for confirmation, hopeful.

Tim squints and thinks about the second option.

"So that's a yes." The relief in Art's voice comes in a rush. "Well, let's hear it then."

Art leads the way into the living room, listens while Tim talks, laying out the idea that has been fighting for attention, shouldering its way to the front of the line past his desires and his instincts.

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