“You know as well as I do Conrad doesn’t think much outside of himself. His neighbor’s house could burn down and he wouldn’t pull himself away from the TV to give a damn. I’m not saying it’s right, him not helping that girl when he overheard those boys, I’m saying that’s how he is. The thing that grates on my nerves the most, son, is that you know that’s the way he is.”
“He took her,” I tell him. “If he hadn’t, he’d have told me when I first questioned him about his story.”
“You mean when you started torturing him.”
“Look, let’s pretend for one second he was telling me the truth. If so, then his sitting there taking everything I did to him makes him the dumbest guy in the world. He would have told me right away what he’d overheard. He wouldn’t have waited till I shot him.”
“He ain’t dumb,” Sheriff Haggerty says, “but he ain’t bright either,” he says, but surely he can’t believe what he’s trying to sell me. He knows anybody in their right mind would have given up those two search and rescue guys the moment I showed up.
“We found her bag in his truck.”
“He says somebody else put it there.”
“And his fingerprints are on her headband,” I say.
“There’s a thousand ways that could have happened.”
“That’s what he said.”
He says nothing. I say nothing. We stare at each other for a few moments. Then I break the silence. “Come on, Sheriff, you know it didn’t take a beating to fire up Conrad’s memory.”
“You should have brought him in.”
“You wouldn’t have been objective.”
I see it coming, and he knows I see it coming, this big lumbering right hook that he winds into, but I don’t try to avoid it. It catches me in the jaw and makes my teeth ring and numbs my entire face, and I drop to the ground.
“Don’t get up,” he says, and I don’t. He stands over me, a light creating a halo effect around his head as he looks down. “Here’s what’s going to happen. You hurt my son and you shouldn’t have. You crossed the line so goddamn far there’s no coming back for you. I’ve always liked you, son. Back when I was throwing your dad into the drunk tank every second day, I was happy to help you out because you were a good kid who didn’t deserve the father he got. I was proud of you when you entered law enforcement. Hell, you’ve been more like a son to me over the years than my own son. We have history, you and me, and right now that history is the only thing keeping me from throwing your ass in jail. You’re going to hand me your badge and your gun and the keys to the car, then you’re going to get the hell out of Dodge and you ain’t ever going to come back. If I see your face in this town again, I swear to God I’m going to lock you up and leave you to rot.”
Twelve Years Later
Six
It’s a big-city bar with neon in the windows and big-screen TVs on the walls. There’s a lot of blonde-colored wood around the bar, darker stuff on the walls, and a lot of character knocked and chipped and worn into all of it. There’s a jukebox in the corner that doesn’t play anything recorded either side of the seventies and a pool table that needs new felt after somebody spilled their drink on it a few weeks ago. We serve thirty different kinds of beer, thirty different kinds of wine, and spirits from all different countries. Friday nights we have a live band, Tuesday night is ladies’ night, and Sunday night — so it seems — is armed robbery night. I’ve been working here for the last twelve years and have been part owner for the last ten, and in that time we’ve been robbed twice and the guy in front of me is amping to make that a third, and every time it’s been a Sunday. His floppy hair is dirty and his face is covered in acne and he’s skinny and jacked, and if the gun accidentally goes off it could hit me or maybe it could hit something a mile to my left.
“This isn’t a bank,” I tell him, and my hands are out to my sides in a nice peaceful gesture because I’m a peaceful gesture kind of guy. “Why don’t you put the gun down and walk on out of here and we all go about putting this behind us?”
He looks left, then he looks right, and whatever he’s looking for he doesn’t see it. Or maybe he does. Pink Floyd is coming from the jukebox, the band singing about being comfortably numb, which sums up half of what I’m feeling.
“Just give me what you have.”
“I have some advice,” I tell him.
“I don’t want your advice.”
“It’s free. That and the peanuts, those are two things in here you don’t have to pay for, though if you’re going to have the peanuts it’s understood you’re going to have bought yourself a drink. We give away peanuts to everybody who doesn’t buy a drink, well, we’d end up not being able to afford peanuts anymore.”
He looks confused. He looks left and right again, and this time it’s only his eyes that move. The gun wavers a little.
I carry on. “And if we couldn’t afford peanuts, then we couldn’t afford a lot of other stuff too. You’d be wasting your time coming in here waving your gun around because there’d be nothing to steal.”
“Seriously? Dude? Seriously? Do you want to die?”
I shrug, as if it’s no big deal, but of course it’s a big deal. My heart is hammering but guys like this are like dogs — you show fear around them, they’ll use it against you. He’ll take the cash out of the till, then take my wallet, take wallets and phones and jewelry from everybody here, maybe take a hostage, maybe kill somebody. Of course guys like this are also unpredictable, so if you don’t show fear they’re equally likely to put you down for disrespecting them. The gun might be unloaded, or it might be he’s itching to shoot somebody today, or maybe it’s loaded and he thinks it isn’t. There’s no right or wrong. There just is.
I open the till. There are a dozen people in the bar, some of them watching and some unaware of what’s going on. Sunday-night crowds are generally low key. It’s why an hour ago I gave the other bartender the rest of the night off.
Pink Floyd ends and The Doors take over, playing something also recorded just in time to make the cut. The thing about small towns is I got used to dealing with small-town assholes — now living in a big city I have to deal with guys who asshole things up on a bigger scale. I rake out the cash and put it on the counter. There can’t be more than four hundred bucks. It’s not worth dying for. Then again, no amount is.
“The coins, man, the coins too,” he says.
“You catching the bus?”
“You want to catch a bullet?”
I scoop out the coins and put them on the bar and a couple roll off and land on the floor on my side and I go to bend down for them and he tells me to stop, which is a real shame because there’s a gun down there and it’s why I let a couple of nickels roll off the bar.
“Put them in a bag.”
“I don’t have a bag,” I tell him.
“Why not?”
“Do you have one?”
“No.”
“Then don’t give me a hard time for not having one. You’re the one who had all this planned out, not me.”
He grabs the notes and stuffs them into his pocket. “Give me your phone too.”
“I don’t have a phone.”
“What?”
“I don’t have a phone. Look, buddy, you’ve got what you came for, so how about you leave while things are still good?”
“Just . . . just give me your phone, your phone, man, just . . . just hand it over without all your grief about, about not owning one, because everybody