Last Ragged Breath (7 page)

There wouldn't be any children here, boy or girl. If Nick hadn't known that on the day he and Mary Sue moved in, he surely knew it now.

“If you get hungry again later, there's plenty left,” Mary Sue said.

She had stopped eating after a few bites, her dinner finished, but she continued to sit with him, her chin in her hand, her elbow propped on the table next to her glass of sweet tea. She had once been lovely, but the mental illness with which she had long contended had left its mark, like a line high on the sand where the tide had reached before sliding back again. Her gray face was too long. She was too thin. Too solemn. It was the joy of Nick Fogelsong's life now when he could make her laugh.

“I gotta say, though—man, oh, man, that's good chili,” he said. “Best yet.”

“Well, I made enough for Bell, too. Wish she'd been able to join us.”

“Said she had a date tonight.” He used the same skeptical inflection he had routinely used for reporting a suspect's exceptionally lame alibi.

“No reason why not. She's allowed to have a social life, isn't she?”

“Not what I meant.”

“Oh.” Mary Sue nodded. “You mean—what about Clay?”

Nick shifted his feet under the table. “Not even sure they're in close touch anymore.”

“They are. I hear from Clay myself from time to time. He calls here, looking for you. Never likes to trouble you at work. We end up talking for quite a while. He loves her. I'm sure of it.”

“He told you that?”

“Oh, heavens, no. I'm extrapolating from the things he says. His observations. Being away has given him a new way of looking at the world.”

“I thought the old way was working just fine,” Nick muttered. “Never understood why he's got to go all that way—Boston, Massachusetts, for crying out loud—just to read a bunch of books.”

“It's called graduate school.”

“I know what it's called.” Nick was a great reader himself, a man who felt half-dressed unless he had a book in his hand. It wasn't the books he had a problem with. “I just don't think that's where he belongs. Makes no sense to me.”

Mary Sue smiled. Her smile was edged with irony. “Oh. I see. So Belfa's supposed to give you the benefit of the doubt and accept your decision to leave the sheriff's office—but you won't extend the same favor to Clay about his decision to go to MIT?”

Nick grunted. She was right, dammit. And now he'd have to pretend to be perturbed about that. But he wasn't. Not really. He enjoyed it when she challenged him, calling him out on his hypocrisy, after which they'd laugh. This was how it had been between them all the time, until she got sick. These glimmers from the past, these stray moments of casual happiness, kept him going. They enabled him to get through the hard times, times when her disease seemed to stand in every doorway and block out all the light.

“Anyway,” he said, “Bell can date anybody she pleases. Not my lookout anymore. She doesn't talk to me. Not about personal matters.”

“That's a shame.”

“I guess.” He shrugged. “Her loss.”

“Nick, there's nothing wrong with admitting that you miss somebody.”

“I didn't say I missed her. It's just damned awkward, that's all. I still have to deal with her. Security matters at the stores, you know? But if she can't get past the fact that I'm not sheriff anymore—well, too bad.”

“Give it time.”

“Got no choice.”

“Speaking of security—did you ask her about Albright? You've been concerned about that, I know.”

“Nope. Never had the chance. She was in a hurry.” He scratched an ear. “Maybe I'm worrying about nothing. Not everybody keeps good records. I can get a little sloppy myself. And Walter's an old man. Probably just got tired. All those years with the state police and then a security job. Law enforcement's no picnic. Takes a toll.” Walter Albright's incident reports for the months before his firing were spotty, irregular, with few specifics. It was almost as if he thought he could make the negatives go away by ignoring them. Nick heard that he'd built himself a palace of a house with some money his wife had inherited and settled down into a comfortable retirement. Should've done it sooner.

Mary Sue picked up her bowl. She started to rise, intending to clear the table. Nick waved her back down in her seat.

“We'll clean up in a bit,” he said. He was restless tonight, just as he'd often been after dinner back when he was sheriff and they waited for the next lightning-strike of bad news.

His simple request to delay the cleanup had thrown her, knocking her off her rhythm, but she didn't want him to know that. And so she shrugged—
whatever
—and put her bowl back in the precise spot where it had been. She would try. She always tried.

But she was rattled now. Her plan for the next few minutes had been to collect the plates and bowls and silverware and stack them all in the dishwasher, then to check the contents of the refrigerator and the cupboards and make the penciled list for Lymon's Market. Sunday was food-shopping day. Mary Sue planned her time minute by minute; it was the price she paid for being able to function, for keeping her mood pitched to a livable level.

“Guess I thought Belfa would understand why I had to make the change,” he said. “You remember how it used to be. I mean, did we ever make it through a whole danged meal—not to mention a week's vacation—without being interrupted by a phone call? Or a dozen phone calls? Always another crisis.” Nick didn't like making speeches but he made one now anyway, revving himself up, because he needed to make sure she understood:
It wasn't you
. He never wanted Mary Sue to think she was the reason he'd given up the sheriff's job. Yes, her illness was part of it—he'd taken a leave of absence the year before, they'd gone to Chicago to see a specialist there, she'd tried a new antipsychotic medication—but only a part. The biggest reason? He was tired to the bone. And sick of other people's problems. That was it. Really.

“You remember,” he said. “Know you do. If it wasn't a traffic accident, it'd be a drowning. Or a drug overdose. Or a fistfight. A fire. Or somebody's car getting stolen. Or their cat. Or their lawnmower. Or just somebody bellyaching about something. I got so goddamned
sick
of it, Mary Sue, all the time, year after year. I know you know that, but sometimes I don't think anybody can really know just how deep it ran in me. I was getting to be a cranky old fart. All I saw was people at their very worst. I was starting to—”

Abruptly, he stopped talking. She had come around to his side of the table. Instead of getting up, he wrapped his arms around her waist and turned his face into her apron. She stroked the back of his head. He could smell her hands, and the pungent scent of the onions she'd chopped to put in the chili, and he knew that his head was greasy with sweat, after his long workday. But it didn't matter. She was trying to soothe him, console him, just as he had often consoled her, and those other things—smells and sweat, the body's small persistent betrayals—were irrelevant. Over the years they'd gone back and forth like this, healer and wounded, changing roles as the need arose. If, in the final reckoning, her problems had been more profound than his, if her mental instability had kept their lives churned up while his issues were ordinary, a matter of a bad day every now and again, then so be it.

“You did a good job for this town for so many, many years,” she said, her voice soft, with a gentle ripple moving through it, like a sheet hung out to dry in a mild spring breeze. “You gave it everything you had. All of your time and your energy and your passion. You were a hell of a sheriff. But it's all over with now.”

She meant to be kind, so he couldn't tell her what he was really thinking:
That's exactly what I'm afraid of
.

*   *   *

Later, dinner dishes loaded and dishwasher under way, the furry thrum of its work sounding like another kind of digestion, they retreated to the big living room. Nick sat in his recliner with a book open on his lap—
An Army at Dawn
by Rick Atkinson—and Mary Sue occupied a small corner of the couch, her long legs tucked up under her, watching a TV show with the sound turned low. The phone rang. They looked at each other. It felt at once like one of those Saturday nights before he'd changed jobs, when they would barely be settled into their chairs when the phone exploded over and over again like a series of benign bombs, leaving the evening in shreds and tatters. Those nights, Nick had rarely bothered to take off his boots after he got home for dinner. He knew he'd just have to put them back on again, along with his hat and his coat and his holster.

“Hey, Nickie, my man.”

Nick recognized the voice of Vince Dobbs, grandson of Bundy Barnes, a Raythune County commissioner. Vince ran a car wash a mile or so outside the city limits. He and Nick had gone to Acker's Gap High School together. That was about the only thing they had in common.

“Just wanna make sure you heard,” Vince went on. He spoke rapidly, so rapidly that Nick had once compared his cadence to a squirrel's frisky scamper. “Gonna be all over town by morning. 'Member the guy who was running the show around here for the resort? Big man? Lotsa hair? Kinda loud? Real asshole?”

“Ed Hackel.”

“That's the one. Well, they found him dead this morning and it weren't no natural causes. And guess who got dragged in for questioning? Okay, you'll never guess, so I'm gonna tell you. Royce Dillard.”

Nick scratched his cheek. The twinge he'd just felt had nothing to do with any special kinship with Hackel or Dillard; it was the fact that, until a few months ago, no one had had to call and tell him the news. He knew the news. He knew it ahead of everybody else—including a nosy fool like Vince Dobbs.

“Huh.” He didn't want to give Vince the satisfaction of his interest.

“Yeah. Guy's head was all bashed in, way I hear it. Big ole mess.”

Gossip was a commodity, a fungible, tradable article of commerce. It was currency. And always before, Nick had controlled the asset side of things; he was the one who decided to whom to dole it out, and when, and how much. Now he was on the outside. Now he was no different from Vince Dobbs. Or Rhonda Lovejoy, come to that, one of Bell's assistant prosecutors, another renowned purveyor of local information—except that Rhonda, given her position, would already know a hell of a lot more than he did.

Two homicides had occurred since Nick had left the sheriff's office in November, but they were routine, unexciting: First, a domestic violence case in December, for which the crazy-jealous SOB was now serving a life sentence at the Mount Olive Correctional Complex. And then there was a shooting death on New Year's Eve at a tattoo parlor along Route 6; the perpetrator had thoughtfully shot himself after shooting his girlfriend, saving the county the trouble and expense of a trial. At the news of those tragedies, Nick had felt only relief. He wasn't responsible anymore. Let Pam Harrison handle them.

This, though, was the first case that was unusual, compelling. Nick instantly felt a familiar zip of adrenaline, and a slight fizz across the top of his brain, as if someone had doused it with ginger ale and then wiped it dry again, all within seconds. He said good-bye to Vince Dobbs and heard the man on the other end of the line hang up, but Nick still held the phone, aware of a faint tremor in his hand. There arose within him the old fire. He felt a poke in the back, prodding him. That force had a voice, and the voice was his own, and it said,
What the hell happened to Ed Hackel?
, and after that he automatically began to assess, recollect, calculate, speculate. He couldn't stop himself. He took the known facts and he spread them out like the greasy parts of an engine, the tiny levers and gears and washers and springs and bolts, and then he started to put the thing back together again, reverse-engineering it, trying to figure out how the pieces all worked together, how the crime had been committed, and why.

The resort was the biggest new project around here in a long, long time. Tens of millions of dollars were on the line, and Hackel had been right at the center of it. And Royce Dillard—he was an unusual character, you bet, strange as all get-out, but capable of murder? Or maybe it was an accident. Tempers flare, angry words are hurled back and forth, Dillard grabs a weapon—a sledgehammer, maybe, or a post hole digger—and, blinded by hurt and fury, he takes a wild swing, and …

“Nick?”

He looked over at his wife. But he didn't see her.

 

Chapter Eight

The Raythune County Courthouse at night was a different place from what it was during the day. In daylight, it was a haggard, benign-looking building where forms were filled out, licenses applied for, parking tickets either paid or argued over, and copies of birth certificates issued, a place at which people also tended to congregate even when they didn't have specific business there, just because they might run into somebody they liked talking to. At night, though, it was a cold, forbidding Gothic pile that exhaled the sour breath of its buried secrets: a multitude of criminal trials and the systematic passing of judgment on overlapping waves of human souls. The ground-floor windows at the rear—where the booking office of the jail was located—were illuminated all night long, as if the courthouse itself suffered from bad dreams and needed a nightlight.

“Sheriff's waiting for you in her office,” Mathers said.

Bell had gone to the side entrance, the one that led directly to the interrogation rooms, in case Harrison was still in there with Royce Dillard. Deputy Mathers met her. He was a large, dark-haired man with a gut that tormented the bottom two buttons on his brown uniform shirt. He was a reassuring presence in the courthouse. He'd been doing this job a good long while and even if all hell was breaking loose, chances were that Charlie Mathers had been through worse and was happy to tell you about it; he could make you feel as if the present crisis maybe wasn't so bad by comparison.