Blind Fall (6 page)

“And what did you say? When he asked you?”

“I told him based on what he’d said about you I thought you would spit in the one eye he had left.”

John’s anger got the best of him and he sat up quickly on the side of the bed, as if Alex were standing against the wall in front of him. “Then why the hell are you talking to me right now?”

Alex went so silent John thought the connection between them had broken. Then, in a quiet voice he said, “The flat sheet’s gone.” John didn’t catch his meaning at first, but Alex gave him some time to. “Last night, when I got back to the house, I went to unmake the bed, and the flat sheet was missing. There was just the comforter and the pillows. So I checked the mattress, and there’s a stain. It could be any—”

“Have you told Duncan?”

His answer was implicit in his silence. John felt his hand tense around the receiver. “Something else was going on in that house last night that you don’t want Duncan to know about.”

“We ass-raped some choirboys as soon as we got done designing a nice dress for your sister. Fuck you, asshole. It was our
home
. You want to get to me? Then go back to treating me like a killer.”

“No.”

“Something changed your mind?”

“Yeah. You’re not strong enough to do what I saw.” Only after he hung up did John feel a startling urge to apologize. Sure, he didn’t like being called an asshole, but he had not intended the words to wound, even though he was sure they were God’s truth.

After he hung up on Alex, John wrote out a list of possible courses of action, all of which seemed insane as soon as he put them to paper. Contacting some of the men who had served with him and Bowers on their last tour so they might put some heat on the Hanrock County Sheriff’s Department would require him to try to convince each one that he hadn’t gone off the rails, had truly seen Bowers with his chest cut open. The idea made his palms sweat. Maybe it didn’t matter—the guys who hadn’t been deployed again were scattered to the four winds.

There was no other choice but to drive to Phoenix himself and confront Mike’s parents face-to-face, and he was getting ready to pack an overnight bag when something slammed into the side wall of his trailer, right below his window. Having forgotten that he had lost the Sig the night before, he reached for the holster behind the headboard and broke into a cold sweat when his fingers grazed empty leather.

When John opened the front door of his trailer a crack, Alex Martin stepped forward into the security light’s near-blinding halo. No strange car parked nearby. Obviously he’d been trying to sneak up on him. But he wasn’t dressed to do harm. He wore a dark green polo shirt with an alligator label, jeans that showed off his time at the gym, and a heavy black waffle-print coat with a faux fur collar. A branch had clawed him during their race through the rain, leaving a long scratch on his left cheek that was starting to scab over. John didn’t remember him being so tall, probably because he wasn’t hunched over sobbing or running like hell to get away from him. The muscles he had were vanity muscles, the kind he’d lose in a few weeks if you got him away from whatever protein powder he was devouring every morning.

With a wave of his right hand, John invited him inside. Alex followed, reaching into the flaps of his coat. As soon as John took a seat, Alex gently set his Sig on the tiny table in front of him, then backed away from it as if it were radioactive. “I found it a few yards from the house,” Alex said.

“Thank you.”

Alex nodded, gave his full attention to the floor. He stood with his back to the fridge, his arms crossed, and if John hadn’t known how much time it had taken him to get there, he probably would have assumed he didn’t intend to stay for more than a few minutes.

“Tell me what you saw,” Alex finally said.

The tone of his voice was gentle, not the lisping parody of homosexuals John had acted out and laughed at all his life, but something strangely close. His lips were parted slightly; John thought it looked almost like he was anticipating a kiss.
I’m not a homophobe,
John thought, wondering why this word had entered his vocabulary so easily.
But he better make it clear he’s not expecting anything out of me that requires me to drop my drawers.
Telling Alex what he had seen the night before would be equivalent to signing some sort of pact that wasn’t quite clear to him. Nevertheless, he needed to be believed.

So John told him, starting with his decision to deliver the gift in person and his long drive through the rain. He described how he had been forced to ask for directions from a gas station attendant who had treated him as if he were dirt—now he could see that this woman had known Mike’s secret and had been afraid of what a reunion with John might bring. He told Alex about how he saw the Force Recon decal through the rain and debated going back to town for a room before he headed up the driveway, entered the house, and found Mike lassoed to the bed’s headboard, his chest hacked open, and his blood the color of ink in the dark.

Then he remembered the detail about the V-shaped bloodstain on the doorknob. When he mentioned this, Alex blinked and straightened against the counter he had been leaning against.

“You saw it, too?” John asked, hating the desperate note in his voice.

Alex nodded. “On the front door, when I started running.”

In the silence that followed, John expected the guy to break down in front of him, to sob like he had done in the woods. Instead, Alex appeared to be in a daze, as if he were straining to visualize the scene John had just described.

“He never told me that you had a way with words,” Alex said.

John almost asked Alex if he were being sarcastic, but he could tell he was sincere from the way he was standing, still dazed, staring away from John now, as if his image were too bright to look directly into. “Right,” John said. “He was too busy telling you about how I wasn’t a real man because I…how did he put it? Because I live in my sister’s shadow?”

Alex seemed surprised to hear his own cruel words repeated back to him. It looked as if he had forgotten about making the comment just hours earlier, and John realized that given the events of the past forty-eight hours, that was probably the case. Then Alex lowered his eyes, shamefully. “He said all kinds of things about you depending on what kind of mood he was in. Picking one over the other…that was unfair of me.”

John felt a tightening in the center of his chest, but he wasn’t sure which small revelation had caused it. Mike, whom he had been too ashamed to face for months after their return home, had respected him enough to say all manner of things about him. And now someone he had almost killed the night before was apologizing to him. The sound of his sudden deep breath startled them both. Embarrassed, John got to his feet and brushed past Alex, pulling a beer from the fridge and blaming the four he’d already had for the change that had just come over him. It was easier than entertaining the idea that Alex Martin’s gentleness was responsible for the knot in the center of his chest.

“I was high,” Alex said. “I hadn’t planned on it, but I was.”

John was too startled by this admission at first to realize that Alex was coming clean about what he was covering up about the night before.

“You didn’t plan to be? What does that mean?”

“I think Mike spiked my drink with a drug called GHB. Because we’d been fighting. Because he wanted me to loosen up. I’d told him you weren’t supposed to mix it with alcohol, but I guess he thought he had the right dose. He didn’t. I passed out downstairs.” In the silence that followed, Alex must have seen confusion on John’s face because he said, “A few months ago we went down to San Diego to hit the bars. A friend of mine gave Mike some to try, said it was for people who wanted to get buzzed but didn’t like to drink.”

John said, “It’s the date rape drug.”

“I know that,” Alex said, an edge to his voice. “I didn’t exactly sign off on this habit, okay? I thought it was a one-time thing. Just that night, you know? Going out to the bars. It was hard for him.”

“Because he didn’t want anyone to know he was gay.”

“No. Because he had one eye. Gay guys aren’t exactly charitable when it comes to being overweight, let alone physical deformities.”

“What about you?”

“I couldn’t have cared less. But it didn’t matter how many times I said that to him. He started taking it whenever we had sex. He felt…incomplete.”

Be cool with this,
John told himself.
He’s testing you. Don’t be the hater he thinks you are.
“He could get it up on that stuff?”

“He didn’t need to get it up to do what he liked to do. I did.”

In any other circumstance John would have quickly excused himself and beelined to the nearest shower. But instead a bark of laughter escaped him before he could stop it. In the silence that followed, he looked up to find Alex glaring at him. John said,

“I’m just waiting for the next big revelation, that’s all. Was he going to have a sex change, too?”

“I’m sorry I’m such an oddity to you, John.”

“I wasn’t talking about you. I was talking about Mike.”

Alex rolled his eyes, gave a throaty grunt, and sucked in a deep breath through his nostrils, a series of gestures John found to be so condescending, he tensed his fists against his lap. Maybe Alex sensed his anger because when he spoke again, it was quickly, almost breathlessly. “After I got off the phone with you I went to see Duncan and I told him everything I just told you. I also told him the flat sheet was missing from the bed. Then when I told him about the stain, I figured he would place a call to the sheriff in Boswell. Instead he interrogated me for three hours. Several times he asked me if I wanted a lawyer. I declined.”

Alex gave him a chance to respond, but John was too stricken by this information to come up with something to say. Alex said, “Tonight at midnight will be almost twenty-four hours since Mike went missing. Another day and he’s officially a missing person and Duncan starts taking all this seriously. And if he starts thinking it’s a murder, he’s got two primary suspects: a Marine and a faggot. And mark my words, he will pick the faggot, because that’s who he is. That’s how he was raised and that’s how his mommy and daddy were raised and so on and so on.”

John said, “Is that really the world you live in?”

“The thought never crossed your mind last night that I could live in that house too, did it?” Shamed by this fact, John broke eye contact with Alex for the first time since they had started talking to each other across barely three feet of space that felt like a gulf. “Then I’d say it’s the world you live in too, John.”

When John didn’t make eye contact, Alex said, “I’m going down to San Diego to stay with a friend. All I ask of you is that if you really believe that I’m not strong enough to do what you saw, that you make that very clear to Captain Ray Duncan before he charges me with murder.”

John was positive Alex was overreacting, misreading the situation. How could Duncan have gone from disbelieving the entire tale the night before to being on the scent of blood after being told about nothing more than a set of missing bedsheets? But Alex’s request seemed shockingly humble given the situation he believed himself to be in, so John nodded, which seemed to take the wind out of Alex’s sails. He looked around the trailer as if he were searching for another conversation topic.

When a knock cracked against the front door, Alex jumped and backed away from the fridge. John peered around the edge of a window shade. His blood went cold when he saw who was outside. When he turned to Alex and mouthed Duncan’s name, Alex lifted one hand, as if he thought this simple gesture might put everything on pause. Then he looked to his feet in deep concentration. Another knock. Because he could think of no better option, John pointed to the bedroom door, as if Alex were a cheap mistress. Alex took a step, saw the Sig resting on the table, and picked up the weapon by the handle before moving off into the bedroom and shutting the door behind him.

Duncan was out of uniform, in blue jeans, scuffed cowboy boots, and a blue and red checkered long-sleeved shirt. As he stepped into the space that Alex had occupied just moments earlier, he studied the kitchen with a sad-eyed look, as if everything about it were a great disappointment but he cared about John too deeply to say anything.

“You want something?” John asked him.

“Coffee would be nice,” he said.

Duncan took a seat at the table, kept silent, so silent John wondered if he were waiting to be asked just what the hell he was doing there. John made coffee instead. Duncan locked eyes with him as John delivered the steaming mug and apologized for not having anything to put into it.

After blowing into the cup for a few seconds, Duncan said, “I think I owe you an apology, John.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes,” he said. “I had some conversations earlier this evening. Conversations that have led me to believe you may have walked in on something last night, something you weren’t supposed to see.” John kept his mouth shut because he thought it was the best way to hide the fact that he wasn’t surprised by this information. “I know you went through a lot last night, and I know I might have come across as flip. But I thought it was in your best interests to—”

“I know what you thought. You thought I was some fucked-up vet having a meltdown.”

“I thought you were a decent Marine who had just discovered something very…
unpleasant
about a friend of his. Something his friend had obviously kept a secret from him. And to be frank, I happen to sympathize with you.”

“How so?”

Duncan lifted his hands to the sky and looked up as if he were asking for divine guidance for his next words. The gesture allowed John to see the Band-Aid around Duncan’s right thumb: it was flesh colored and easy to miss, but it explained why Duncan had been holding the handle of the coffee cup almost delicately by hooking it with his forefinger and holding the bottom in his left palm.

Duncan said, “I’m no bigot. But I’m not a fan of the
oppressed,
the
victimized.
This is a good country. As long as a man’s sober and in his right mind, you’d be hard pressed to get him to say otherwise. And people need to do certain things to get along and that’s the way it is and most people are fine with it. But when an entire group of people come together and try to make some kind of identity out of their
strangeness
…well, they usually end up convincing themselves they’re allowed to do any damn thing they want. No matter the consequences.”

“Alex doesn’t strike me as…an
activist.
”

“Alex Martin got kicked out of his parents’ mansion down in Cathedral Beach for being a fruit. His daddy gave him their vacation cabin as a consolation prize, but the whole deal left Alex with a mighty big chip on his shoulder that I’m tired of dealing with. My concern here is that Mike was tired of dealing with it, too.” John was startled by this kind of admission from an officer of the law, but Duncan seemed unfazed by his reaction. “Look, I know it’s a new day and age, but I sure as hell don’t know what put a man like Mike in that house with a man like Alex, and I don’t think it was very strong, whatever the hell it was. I think it came apart.”

“Are you out of uniform so you’ll feel more comfortable talking to me like this?”

“I don’t follow,” Duncan said.

“You’re being very candid with me, Captain Duncan. This might be a murder investigation we’re talking about here.”

“It might be. But I don’t investigate murders, even when they happen in my jurisdiction. That’s the job of the homicide guys out of Boswell. But it is my job to make sure they are fully apprised of those facts of which I’m aware. And one of those facts is that you walked in on a very bad scene in a manner that is
incredibly
hard to explain, in a manner that makes you look like a suspect. Now, how that gets presented to them is not just up to me. It’s up to you, too.”