The Snow Falcon (27 page)

He stood aside and let her through the door, swept an arm to indicate the disarray. “It’s kind of a mess.”

They faced each other a little awkwardly. There was nowhere for

them to sit, not even a counter to position themselves beside; the remains of it lay broken on the floor, parts of the top laid against the wall.

“How’s it going?” she asked.

He ran a hand through his hair. He looked tired, she thought, studying his face as he looked around. He appeared a little bemused by all the wreckage, the lines at the corners of his eyes crinkling.

“Okay, I think. I’m afraid I can’t offer you anything.” He made a small gesture with his hand. “I’m sort of not set up for visitors yet.” “That’s okay. Actually, I wanted to thank you. I know Jamie’s been coming over to your place this last week or so.” “Thank me?”

“For tolerating him. He’s not in the way, I hope.” “He just watches me train Cully.” Michael hesitated, then added with a faint note of wariness: “He just stands in the woods.”

She thought she detected uncertainty, as if he wasn’t sure of her motive. “He’s not very good with people,” she said quickly.

He nodded. “Well, he’s no trouble. To be honest, I like having him there.”

Susan sensed he had been on the verge of saying more. “You do?” “He likes watching Cully as much as I do.” He shrugged. “I catch something in his face that makes me think he feels the way I do.”

His voice trailed off, and it struck her then what his life must be like, working in this store by day, seeing nobody, sitting in that house alone at night. It made her wonder why he’d come back to a town where nobody wanted him. What kind of man was he? she wondered.

“When’s the grand opening?” she said, aware suddenly that he was watching her.

“I’m not sure how grand it will be. A few weeks, maybe.” “What are you going to sell?” “I don’t know yet.”

It was a strange thing to say. To be doing all this work without any real plan—she didn’t know how to respond. She wanted to ask him if he knew that it would be tough for him to attract business in Little River, but there was no way for her to say that to somebody she barely knew. Apart from anything else, it would imply that he hadn’t thought this through. It wasn’t her place to offer unasked-for

advice. Unable to think of any comment, she made a show of checking the time, as if she had a pressing appointment.

“I have to go,” she said, and he opened the door for her. She hesitated. “Thanks again. For letting Jamie watch you.”

“Like I said, it’s no trouble.”

They said good-bye, and as she walked back toward her office, she heard the faint sound of hammering again.

IT WAS LATE IN THE AFTERNOON. COOP AND Miller were sitting in a patrol car five miles out of town, just off the main county road that joined the highway to Williams Lake.

“Hey, this guy’s in a hell of a hurry,” Miller said, his eye on the radar monitor.

Coop glanced over at the display. “He’s picked us up,” he said, looking in the mirror.

A truck had come around the bend a half mile behind them. The driver’s detector had warned him there was a radar trap ahead. As soon as the alarm had sounded, he’d hit his brakes, trying to slow down, but it was too late.

Miller started to get out, pulling on his cap, and Coop watched him go. He had a youthful swagger to his walk; the 9-millimeter on his hip and the uniform were still novelties. He was from a place called Banner, which was about a hundred miles south, but he’d applied to transfer to Little River when he saw the vacancy. He was twenty-two and college-educated, fresh out of training, and he still had a hell of a lot to learn about being a smalltown cop.

He wouldn’t stay. Coop knew that. Miller was eager and ambitious. He’d be around until he thought he knew what this kind of police work was all about, then he’d be looking to move on, maybe to Kamloops or Vancouver. He probably had a strategy all written out neatly, maybe done on his computer. Coop wouldn’t have been surprised if Miller had his whole career mapped out form start to finish.

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He was probably planning to be commissioner or something. Miller was that type.

Coop watched as Miller stepped out into the road and flagged down the oncoming truck, which Coop could already see belonged to Tommy Lee. He could picture Tommy in the cab, a thin cigarette stuck between his lips, already cursing when he saw Miller up ahead. Coop allowed himself a smile and decided he wouldn’t get out just yet. Maybe it was time Tommy met the rigid arm of Miller’s law; it might encourage him to take things a little easier than he had been lately.

Coop wondered if he’d ever been as enthusiastic about writing people tickets as Miller was. He didn’t think so. He’d never been the ambitious type, and couldn’t exactly say what had appealed to him in the first place about becoming a cop. Apart from his training and a short spell up in Prince George, he’d worked for all of his eighteen-year career in the town he’d grown up in, only making sergeant after Dan Redgrave had retired a few years back. He fully expected that to be the last promotion he would ever receive, because he planned to remain in Little River until he retired.

He liked the job. He knew he was respected and thought himself generally fair. He was paid well enough and liked the freedom he had away from the hierarchy that existed in bigger towns, and the crime around Little River was of a fairly undemanding nature. He’d never had to threaten anyone with his gun, and he never expected to. Most people took one look at him and thought twice about getting into a fight, and those that knew him were aware that he could throw a pretty good punch if the occasion demanded. It rarely came to that, however. The worst he’d ever had to do was crack a few skulls in a barroom fight in Clancys now and again, then throw the perpetrators in jail for the night to sleep it off.

Outside, Coop could see there was a lively discussion going on between Tommy and Miller, and he thought it was about time he went over and sorted things out.

“Listen here,” Tommy was saying animatedly, his cigarette bouncing up and down in his mouth. “If I kept to the damn speed limits all the time, I’d never get through enough work to keep myself going. It ain’t easy running a trucking business around here, son, let me tell you that.”

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“That’s not the point,” Miller said, his jaw jutting out. “The laws are made for a reason, and you have to obey them just the same as everyone else. Now let me see your paperwork.”

“Jesus.” Tommy looked away and spat in disgust. “Don’t you have some real criminals to catch, son?”

Coop smiled to himself. Miller was getting agitated at the way Tommy was treating the whole thing as a personal affront. His manner toward Miller’s youth was starting to become patronizing, which was only going to make matters worse. Tommy saw Coop approaching then and looked relieved.

“Hey, Coop. I didn’t know you was there.”

“Hey, Tommy. Everything okay here, Miller?”

“This guy hasn’t given me his paperwork, Sergeant Cooper,” Miller complained. He glowered at Tommy Lee. “I already told him we got his speed on the radar and I’m going to have to write him a ticket.”

“Jesus Christ, Coop, you know how it is,” Tommy said. “I have to get this load down to Jordan’s, and then I have to get back over to fetch another for Paul Davidson at the mill. How the hell am I ever going to get that done if every time I come around a corner I got to worry about other people trying to give a man grief when he’s just trying to earn a living?”

“Well, Miller here’s right, you know, Tommy,” Coop said. “You had a fair head of steam on back there.”

“Now wait a minute…” Tommy was indignant.

“Hold on,” Coop said. “All I’m saying is, it would be good if you just kept it down a little. That’d be fair, don’t you think?”

Miller’s expression creased in puzzlement and a faint suspicious consternation. There was a second or two while everybody absorbed what Coop was saying.

“So I can go then?” Tommy said hopefully.

“I guess we can overlook it this time,” Coop said. He stared at Tommy, then at Miller, who compressed his mouth into a tight line.

Tommy Lee climbed back into his cab, and they watched him drive away, gunning the gears as he started to build speed for the climb he had ahead, the big Kenworth spewing fumes out the back.

“Why’d you do that?” Miller demanded.

Coop sighed. Miller’s self-righteous and aggrieved expression gave him a cramp in his stomach. The truth was, he’d enjoyed it just a little, showing him up the way he had.

“I did it because the man’s trying to make a living and he only just gets by. He’s got a wife and three kids, and if he gets behind on the payments on that truck, the bank’s gonna call in the loan, and then he won’t be able to make any kind of living. Then the bank’ll foreclose on his house. I can’t see how that would help anybody, can you?”

“He should’ve thought about that before he decided to break the limit. I mean, what about the law here?”

“Around here,” Coop said, “I decide what the law’ll be.” He turned away and started back toward the cruiser.

HE GOT HOME around six-thirty and took a shower. Afterward he dressed in clean Levi’s and a freshly ironed shirt and combed back his hair, then went into the kitchen and took a beer out of the refrigerator and sat down at the old kitchen table to polish his boots. He lit a cigarette and listened to a country show on the radio while he worked, singing along to the odd verse here and there when he knew the words.

Coop was confident that he could claim never to have been envious of another man in his life. With one exception. When that had happened, he’d been puzzled as much as anything, then later he’d accepted the situation, expecting the feeling would sooner or later go away. It never had, though, and when he thought about it, as he did sometimes while he smoked a cigarette on his front porch with a cold beer in his hand, it troubled him that he’d discovered things about himself of which he’d previously been unaware.

Coop took a pull of his beer. Dave Baker had always wanted to be an architect, and he’d been smart enough to achieve his aim. Coop had expected him to do well, just like Ron Taylor, who’d always had a flair for business and was now a big-shot developer, and Carl Jeffrey, who had always been bound to become a lawyer like his dad and do okay. The thing was, Coop hadn’t minded that he’d always known success wasn’t part of his own story. He’d wanted to become a cop, and he had, and a good one at that. He’d never envied other men their money or an easy way with women, which is what Dave had always had in spades. That was just the way it was, and everybody was different. He’d seen people over the years like Billy Deveraux, who yearned for something he wasn’t ever going to have. Billy had

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had ideas about selling cars in Prince George, but his business had gone belly up and cleaned him out of everything he owned. Coop could have saved him the trouble, could have told him from the start he just didn’t have what it takes. Billy ought to have been content with an ordinary life. Ambition and failure can go hand in hand and destroy a person.

It had shaken Coop when Dave had come back to Little River, bringing Susan with him. Even now he couldn’t say for sure what it was about her that had taken such a hold of him, but for the first time in his life he’d envied another man. She had something about her, cool intelligent eyes that lit up when she laughed, hair that made him want to feel its texture beneath his hands, a slim body he dreamed about at night. Back then, if he was with another woman, it was Susan’s belly he imagined his hand lying on, her parted thighs he caressed while she lay with her head turned back and the soft graceful curve of her throat exposed.

He would be over at their house sometimes in the summer for a barbecue and watch her in a light dress with the sun showing her body when it was behind her. He’d think about her and Dave in bed, wondering what it felt like to have her feet against his chest, her sex open like an offering below him. All the time, he’d known it would never happen. She always smiled at him, never seeing what his eyes told her. Dave would affectionately smooth her rump when he thought nobody was looking and she’d grin at him. Coop would look away and hope nobody could read what was on his mind.

He’d believed it would pass, but it never had. He’d never liked Dave any less, but he’d found reasons not to visit the house so much. There was a bitter taste in his mouth sometimes when he got drunk and introspective. Then came the day he’d formed a search party to look for Dave after Susan had called, her voice tense with worry. Even then, at that exact moment, he believed he’d started to hope Dave was dead, though he hadn’t admitted it to himself for a long time. When they found Dave, Coop’s first thought at seeing all that gore on Jamie was that nobody could have survived losing that much blood, and following right on that he’d experienced a kind of grim satisfaction. Later, after he’d broken the news to Susan, he’d held her while she cried, and all he could think of was how warm and soft she felt. His fingers had brushed against the skin of her neck, just at

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the nape, so lightly she wouldn’t have noticed. He’d felt her thigh against his own.

That night, he’d got drunker than he’d ever been. People thought it was because his best friend had died. He tried not to think about it anymore, but sometimes it came back to him.

His thoughts turned to Michael Somers, trying to recall him when they’d been at school, but school was about all they had in common. Coop had played sports, as had the people he’d been friendly with, including Dave Baker, and though Somers was a year younger, Coop might have known him if he’d been on the baseball team or something. But Somers hadn’t ever had much to do with sports. From what Coop remembered, he’d kept to himself a lot of the time. Everybody had thought he was a little strange, though the probable truth was he’d just been a loner. The strangeness people liked to label him with came from his mother, who everybody knew wasn’t playing with a full deck. It was no secret the way she spent most of her time in that house, rarely venturing into town, going around in her nightgown all day and treating herself for all kinds of illnesses she thought she had. Even Ralph Webber, who’d been the doctor then, could be heard in Clancys some nights shaking his head over a beer and remarking that the woman drove him to distraction. It was no wonder that Somers’s dad had taken refuge in the bottom of a glass, which over the years had made him kind of a drunk. Basically, as people said, they were pretty fucked up as a family.