The Long and Faraway Gone (34 page)

Hey.

Hey.

Mr. Bingham's going to be in there another hour at least.

Okay.

Wyatt's hotel room was too hot. Every breath he took was an effort. He kicked off the sheet and swung his legs off the bed. He stood up, too quickly. The room grew hotter. The drapes were pulled wide, and the sky outside his window was blue and bright and empty. He made it to the thermostat on the wall and punched it down to sixty degrees.

Donald, Wyatt realized, wasn't waiting for Mr. Bingham to get off work—­he'd been casing the theater. He'd been sitting on the teeter-­totter and clocking the routines of the doormen, of the mall security guards.

And Donald had access to Mr. Bingham's keys. He was Mr. Bingham's one and only friend. He had better access to the keys than anyone else.

Mr. Bingham had sent Wyatt home early. It was the first time he'd ever sent the second doorman home early. Corporate had told him, only that morning, to cut back on weekday hours. So Donald hadn't expected to see Wyatt come walking across the park toward him.

Pet Shop Boy.
He was the inside man. He'd given copies of Mr. Bingham's keys to the killers. He'd cased the theater for them.

Wyatt felt like he'd crashed through a glass door he hadn't realized was there, the world around him shattering into fragments of bright, winking light.

What was Donald's last name? Wyatt tried to remember. He knew he knew it. At one point in his life, he'd known it. What was it?

Wyatt rested his forehead against the wall next to the thermostat and let his mind float. He pictured the pet shop on the second floor of the mall. The lamps that kept the reptile tanks heated. Donald, when he was at work, wore a white smock that made him look like a pharmacist. The sleeves were too short for his long arms. Next door was a shop that sold pipes and fancy pipe tobaccos. Next to that were two vacant stores and then the bar directly above the movie theater.

Wyatt floated. A name bumped up against him.
Furst.
That was it.
Donald Furst.
Pet Shop Boy's father was a Donald, too. Donald had liked to introduce himself as “Furst the second.”

O'Malley had thought Donald's chances of finding a woman willing to procreate with him were slim. So sometimes O'Malley had called him “Furst the last.”

Wyatt moved to the desk and opened his laptop. A Donald David Furst Jr. lived on Penn, just past NW 122nd, barely five miles from the hotel room Wyatt was sitting in.

He got dressed again. His own clothes this time, a pale blue shirt and dark gray suit, leather oxfords. He wasn't thinking about the pain anymore. The front-­desk clerk sent the bellhop to whistle up one of the cabs lurking along the side of the hotel.

The apartment complex on Penn was a shabby, anonymous cluster of two-­story boxes painted a chalky shade of green, with rusting gutters and dead leaves trapped in the ivy. Wyatt had lived in places like this before, his first month or two in a new city, before he found a house he wanted to buy. An apartment complex like this was just nice enough—­an ornamental wrought-­iron fence around the perimeter, a perfunctory stab at landscaping—­that you could talk yourself into believing it was nice enough. Most of Wyatt's neighbors had been single, middle-­aged men who looked like they'd lost everything in the divorce. They came and went quietly, at odd hours of the day and night.

Wyatt told the cabdriver to wait for him, however long he took. There was a small swimming pool between two of the buildings, but this wasn't one of the complexes Wyatt and the others had snuck into after work. This one was too far north, too depressing.

He found number 219, a second-­floor unit, and rang the bell. He didn't have a plan if Donald Furst Jr. no longer lived here or wasn't home or wasn't the one Wyatt was looking for. Wyatt was just concentrating on each breath he took, in and out, nice and easy.

Donald opened the door.
Pet Shop Boy.
Twenty-­six years later, Wyatt recognized him immediately. The awkward tall kid's stoop, the teeth too big for his mouth, the heavy freckles. Wyatt had forgotten about the freckles until he saw them now.

Donald had aged badly. He was even skinnier than he'd been before, cadaverous, with sunken cheekbones and, beneath all the freckles, skin the unhealthy color of dirty dishwater. An incisor was missing. He reminded Wyatt of one of the elongated, decomposing zombies in Lyle Finn's Halloween army.

He was wearing slacks and a dress shirt, untucked. No shoes or socks.

“Can I help you?” he said.

“I'm Michael Oliver,” Wyatt said. “From the Pheasant Run.”

The sound of the TV from the apartment next door came through the thin walls. Judge Judy. She was haranguing some poor bastard. Donald nodded. He didn't seem surprised to see him.

“Oh, sure,” he said. “I didn't recognize you. Heinz.”

“Yes.”

“Come on in.”

He shuffled back inside. He had to duck his head beneath the hanging pendant light in the foyer, the frosted glass speckled with dead bugs. Wyatt followed him. In the living room of the apartment, there was what looked like a brand-­new sofa and nothing else—­no other furniture, no TV, nothing on the walls. Against the wall leaned a black-­and-­yellow foam-­board sign that said
OIL CHANGE $22.90!

Donald lowered himself to the couch. Wyatt kept standing.

“Did you just move in?” he said.

Donald gave him a blank look. “No.”

Wyatt walked over to the wall and pounded on it. “Turn the fucking TV down!” he yelled.

Judge Judy continued to harangue away.

“He's not home,” Donald said. “He's never home.”

Wyatt had brought his new painkillers with him, in the pocket of his suit, as well as three miniature bottles of booze from his hotel room. Gin. He swallowed a ­couple of painkillers and washed them down.

“Why do you have an oil-­change sign?”

“I work there. Sort of. It's where I work.”

“Do you know why I'm here?”

“No.”

“You look like shit, Donald. Are you sick?”

Donald laughed, a sound like bare winter tree branches scraping against a roof. Wyatt offered him the second bottle of gin. Donald shook his head. His laughing had turned into crying. The sound was basically the same, just different branches on a different roof.

“Tell me what happened,” Wyatt said.

“Nobody was supposed to get hurt.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“It was just supposed to be me and the one guy. Dale. He seemed like an okay guy. But the night everything went down, he showed up out of nowhere with his two friends. He said his friends wanted in on the score. It was just supposed to be me and Dale that night. That was the plan. We were just going to scare Tim and make some serious money. It was supposed to be quick and easy. Nobody was supposed to get hurt.”

Who was Tim? Wyatt realized that was Mr. Bingham's first name. And
Dale.
Dale Earl Barrett was the killer who'd worn the pantyhose over his head.

Wyatt didn't feel anything yet. It was like he was standing in the desert, dispassionately watching the flash of a distant explosion, waiting for the shock wave to trundle across the flats and reach him, to sweep him off his feet and carry him away.

He walked into the dining room. There was no furniture there either. In the kitchen he found a single metal folding chair. He carried it back into the living room and sat down across from Donald.

“Start from the beginning,” Wyatt said. “How did you know Dale?”

“At the bar. He used to come in and drink there. That little bar upstairs at the mall?”

Wyatt nodded. The bar directly above the movie theater, where ten movie passes were worth a bottle of bottom-­shelf booze, if a bartender was inclined to cut a deal with O'Malley.

“Dale was a tough guy,” Donald said. “You could tell. But he seemed like an okay guy.”

“Was it your idea to rob the theater?” Wyatt said.

“Was it my idea?” Donald said. “No. No! It was a lot of money, though. It was a lot of money because it was the end of the weekend. The money from both nights, Friday and Saturday? It was supposed to be quick and easy.”

“You said that.”

“But right beforehand, when we met to drive over, Dale shows up with his two friends. They were psycho. They were high on some crazy shit. Angel dust or something. I had a really bad feeling about it. So I bailed. I just . . . I bailed.”

Wyatt, from habit, had taken out his reporter's notebook. He flipped it closed and put his pen away. “That's why there were only two rubber masks,” he said. “That's why the third guy had to use pantyhose to cover his face.”

Donald nodded. “I only had two masks. One for me and one for Dale. But then his psycho friends showed up, and I bailed. I wanted to bail even earlier than that. I'd been having a bad feeling about Dale, too. Everything was getting out of hand.”

“What do you mean?”

“First we weren't going to have a gun, and then yes we were. Then we were going to have two guns. And then Dale showed up with his psycho friends, and I bailed. Dale said it didn't matter. He said I was part of it now. He said I was in the mix now, whether I liked it or not.”

Donald was crying again.

“The next day I saw what happened on the news,” he said. “What happened. You don't know how crappy my life has been since then. Every single day I wake up.”

Wyatt waited for the rest of the sentence, but there was no “and” or “but.” That was it:
Every single day I wake up.

Wyatt still didn't feel anything. He didn't hate Donald. He didn't pity him. Wyatt just wanted to know, now, after all these years, why he alone had been left alive in the projection booth that night.

“Donald,” he said. “Why did they kill everyone but me?”

Donald just keep crying. Wyatt scooted the folding chair a ­couple of inches closer. The shock wave from the explosion still hadn't reached him yet. He didn't know what would happen—­or what he might do when it did.

“Donald.”

“What?”

“Look at me. Why did they kill everyone but me?”

Finally Donald looked up. He wiped his nose with the cuff of his shirt. The cuff was already filthy. He shook his head. “I don't know.”

“You have to know.”

“I don't, Heinz. I swear. They weren't supposed to hurt anyone! Dale said that! He swore! Nobody gets hurt.”

He shook his head again. His big head, his skinny neck. Donald's neck was so skinny that Wyatt thought he could grab it with one hand, he could squeeze slowly, he could squeeze until there was nothing there.

Wyatt scooted the chair another inch closer. “Think,” he said. “What did they say? Did one of them know me?”

“No. I don't know. I know that Dale never went down to the theater. Before that night, I mean. He said . . . he said it was safer that way. He said he was being careful.”

Wyatt had been too young to pass for eighteen, so he'd never set foot in the bar upstairs. But had he crossed paths with Dale on the mall escalator? In the parking lot?

Had they exchanged a few words? What words?

“Did you hear them say anything, Donald?” Wyatt said. “Can you remember any detail? The smallest thing might matter. Why would they kill everyone but me?”

Donald wiped his nose again. He bit his bottom lip. His effort to remember seemed genuine.

Wyatt waited. Donald started crying again.

“I don't know, Heinz,” he said. “I really don't.”

Wyatt stood. He carried the metal folding chair back to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. Inside were a few cans of Coors Light and a half-­empty package of cotto salami. He went back to the living room. Donald was watching him.

“Are you going to turn me in?” he said.

Wyatt couldn't tell if he looked hopeful or hopeless.

“Shut up,” Wyatt said.

“I should have turned myself in. But I didn't know—­ After the police killed Dale and his psycho friends, I didn't think that—­”

“Shut up.”

Wyatt knew he could turn Donald in, but what was the point?
Every single day I wake up.
Wyatt didn't find it hard to believe Donald when he said how crappy his life had been for the past twenty-­six years.

It was an odd sort of numbness that Wyatt felt. He still didn't hate Donald. He didn't pity him. He just felt a profound, empty indifference.

“I'm so sorry, Heinz,” Donald said. “I'm so sorry. I swear. After they drove off, Dale and his psycho friends, I tried to stop it. You remember! I tried to warn him.”

“I remember?” Wyatt said. He didn't know what Donald was talking about. “I remember what?”

“You answered the phone when I called! I was calling to warn him! But I couldn't do it. Dale said I was in the mix now, whether I liked it or not. One of Dale's friends, the really psycho one, said I was a dead man if I said anything to anyone. They knew where I lived. When I bailed, when I was walking back to my car, I thought they were going to shoot me.”

Wyatt thought back. The night of the murders, the pay phone in the lobby rang just after the ten o'clock show started to roll. Wyatt had answered.

“Pheasant Twin,” he'd said.

“Who is this?”

Wyatt had recognized the voice. He'd wondered why Donald was calling Mr. Bingham in the lobby and not in the office like he usually did.

“Heinz speaking,” Wyatt had said, just before Mr. Bingham pounced and grabbed the receiver. Mr. Bingham was always trying to catch them in the act of using the lobby pay phone for personal calls, but tonight the tables were turned—­the personal call was for him.

“It's your friend,” Wyatt had told Mr. Bingham pointedly. “Pet Shop Boy.”