Widow Town (15 page)

Gray guided the cruiser into the center of Widow Town.

The sun slanted in hot rays against the buildings, washing the streets with a baking amber light. A small child played in
the shade of a dying tree in a yard, his mother watching him from the corner of their porch, one of her hands fanning herself with a paper plate.

“If it was Donald Hudson behind all this, there’s a good chance Rachel would’ve seen him around the neighborhood before Joslyn was taken,” Gray said. He glided the car to the curb in front of Rachel’s home and shut the engine off.

“But wouldn’t she have mentioned seeing someone like him before when you questioned her?” Ruthers asked, opening his door to let the heat pour in.

“She most likely would have, but maybe we can jumpstart her memory. We’ll give her a description of the pickup that was registered to Hudson a year ago, ma
ybe she’ll remember seeing it.”

“But you
don’t think so.”

“No, but right now I’d rather exhaust the possibilities of what we have, not what we don’t,” Gray said, stepping from the car.

They moved across the wilted lawn to the porch and stopped before the door. Gray knocked once and waited. Ruthers scanned the street behind him and readjusted his duty belt. Gray knocked again, his eyes beginning to narrow.

“Joseph, go look in the windows of the garage and tell me what you see.” Ruthers said nothing and left the porch. Gray kept watching for movement inside the house, saw on
ly the ticking hands of an old clock on the wall.

“
Garage is empty, sir. She has a vehicle?”

“She does
.”

“Maybe she went shopping.”

“Maybe.” Gray put his hand on the doorknob and turned it. It opened. “Rachel?”

He waited, listening for
a full minute before he pushed the door all the way in and stepped across the threshold. Gray glanced at the floor and walked toward the living room. Ruthers followed a few paces behind.

Toys
littered the floor. A colorful book sat at the edge of the large couch. Shadows gathered near the toy basket in the corner. Gray turned and walked out of the living room and through the kitchen. There were dishes beside the sink, clean ones on the right, dirty on the left. The smell of cigarette smoke hung heavy here. Over a dozen butts covered the bottom of the glass tray on the table. A wine glass with a sip left at its bottom rested beside a cup with a straw hanging from its side.

Gray moved into the narrow hallway, pushing open a door to a room painted in yellows and blues.
He stepped inside and opened and shut several drawers on a low dresser using the bottom of his shirt to cover his fingers. His gaze traced the room, the walls, the ceiling, the floor. A hanging mobile featuring grinning monkeys turned slowly in the still air above the crib.

The next room was the master. A queen bed took up most of the space. A picture of a lake dotted with
slender-necked geese hung above the headboard and a small bathroom led off to the right. Gray walked to the closet and peered in through the open doors. Kneeling, he scanned the area beneath the hanging clothes. He stood and moved to the bathroom, opened the four drawers in the vanity before stopping to stare at his reflection in the mirror.

“Sir?” Ruthers asked from the bedroom doorway. Gray moved back into the room.

“They’re gone, Joseph,” he said, glancing out the window. “They were taken.”

“
What? How do you know?”

“There’s nothing in any of the drawers in the bathroom but only a
few empty hangers in the closet.” Gray motioned to the closet. “There’s three pairs of shoes on the floor, but none in the front entry.”

Gray
walked toward the hallway and sidled by Ruthers. “And this,” he said, entering the living room to point at the little chair he’d seen Ken sleeping in on his first visit. “She told me her son loves to sleep in this chair. Even if she left in a hurry, a mother wouldn’t forget something like this.” He paused, the image of the hand-carved sign at his house along with the smell of baby powder overwhelming him for a moment.

The smell.

“Cigarettes,” Gray said, stepping into the kitchen. He sat in the chair before the mostly empty glass of wine. “She wouldn’t smoke inside the house with her son.”

“Looks like she had something to drink,” Ruthers said, walking toward the garbage can in the corner of the kitchen. He popped t
he lid. “The empty bottle’s in here, Sheriff.”

Gray didn’t turn in his seat. Instead he
leaned forward, staring at the full ashtray. With one hand he began to mimic stabbing the butts out in the glass bowl.

“They wanted i
t to look like she was unstable, ready to do something rash. Smell the sink, Joseph.”

“What?”

“Put your head in the sink and take a whiff. See if you can smell anything near the drain.”

Ruthers moved to the sink and bent over it, pushing his f
ace down close to the drain.

“I’ll be damned.”

“You smell wine, don’t you?”

“I do. It’s fain
t but it’s there.”

“They poured it down the drain after they made her drink this glass.” Gray
studied the wine glass, the light catching the ghostly marks of a lower lip on its rim. “And look at the cigarettes, they’re stabbed out in different ways, like the person smoking was standing up and moving around instead of sitting in one place drinking a full bottle of wine.”

“I’ll call for forensics,” Ruthers
said, walking out of the room.

Gray gazed at the backyard, bathed in strong afternoon sunshine. His eyes gradually unfocused until they saw only blurred shapes and colors, the brown death o
f life under the constant heat.

“They won’t find a thing,”
he said to the empty kitchen.

“Wake up, little brother.”

Ryan opened his eyes and stared into Darrin’s cold pupils less than six inches away. His fetid breath hung in the air between them and Ryan had to resist from shoving his o
lder brother away in revulsion.

“You’ve been sleeping all afternoon, champ. Time to rise and shine, you’ve got a busy
night ahead.”

Darrin moved away from Ryan’s bed as he sat up and swung his feet over the edge. His head ached and
there was a broken spring above his shoulders where his neck had been. When he stood, his knee throbbed but bent normally and didn’t seem near as swollen as the night before.

“Knee looks better, gel does the trick, doesn’t it?” Darrin asked as he watched Ryan gain his bearings.

“Yeah, it’s not so bad today.”

“The plan worked, Ry-Ry. C
razy Hudson is dead.”

Ryan froze. “He is?”

Darrin nodded. “Yep.”

“What happened?”

“They used a dog, just like I thought they would, so I dragged your project’s undies on the ground from where he was found to Hudson’s property. Our good sheriff was canvassing the area and Hudson’s place was the first he went to. Hudson tried to kill him with some gas and the sheriff shot him.” Darrin laughed, a sound like a rusty hinge. “They found everything, the blades, the chains, the hooks. Not to mention Hudson’s lab.” Darrin held his hands like a book before him and then slammed them together. “Open and shut, little brother. Didn’t even have to call it in like I was going to.”

Ryan sighed.
“I wasn’t sure it would work.”

“Always the doubter.”

“But what if they find that lady’s car?”

“We dumped it in one of the abandoned mine pits where they were digging for lithium. Even with no rain there’s still sixty feet of water a
t the bottom. No trace, Ry-Ry.”

Ryan put his forehead in
his palm. “God my head hurts.”

“Take a couple pain killers, you need to be ready to move when it gets dark.” Darrin
came toward him and dropped something in his lap. Ryan picked up the square, hard piece of plastic with a key-ring hole in one corner.

“He left that for you this afternoon. It’ll get you in the rear maintenance entrance.
From there you take the stairs up. There’s a switch on the inside of the stairwell on the landing. Flip it off and it’ll kill the lights on that end of the hall. The camera will be blind. First door on the left.”

“Is
Dad—”

“He’s working again tonight. He came home this afternoon, got some
sleep and then went back in. You can’t let him see you or everything’s fucked. Got it?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t worry, it’ll be fine. You can still make it right. Here.” Darrin reached behind his back and drew out a long knife with a gracefully curved blade. It was one piece, its handle forged out of the same steel as the edge. When Darrin dropped it in his hand, its heft surprised him.

“My other one was in the bucket with the rest of the toys I left in Hudson’s barn. This is my new one, so don’t
lose it.”

“I won’t.”

Darrin appraised him, his eyes two dead spots in his face. “There’s no other chances past this one, little brother. You fuck this up ...” Darrin shrugged. “You’re done.”

Ryan tried to nod but didn’t know if he actually
managed to or not. Darrin left the room, swirls of dust twisting in the evening light like miniscule tornados. Ryan swallowed and looked at the blade in his hand. His reflection gazed back at him from the polished steel.

Danzig was sitting on the tailgate of his ancient pickup next to Gray’s house when he drove into the yard. His friend smiled at him as he pulled even with the truck and shut the cruiser’s engine off.

“I always said you were too stubborn to die,” Danzig said when he stepped out of the car.

“So far,” Gray said, stepping up to the back of the pickup. “I expected you to be at my bedside when I woke up this afternoon.”

“Didn’t hear
a peep of it until an hour ago. Happened to run into Monty at the gas station. He filled me in.” Danzig’s paused. “You okay?”

“Yeah, just fine. Got this to cure me,” Gray said and held out the inhaler. He took a pull off of it and felt the now familiar cool blast coat his throat.

“You interested in something stronger?” Danzig turned and pulled a bottle of Harbinger Whiskey out from the bed of the truck.

Gray smiled. “Have I
ever told you that I love you?”

“Nope, and
let’s keep it that way,” Danzig said, hopping down. The truck’s springs squealed as its bed rose four inches.

They sat on the deck behind the house. A warm breeze pushed against the trees that barely concealed the sun’s outline, now sinking like a wounded ship below the horizon. Their glasses beaded with condensation and pooled about their bottoms in interlocking rings. A woodpecker rattled against an o
ak at the edge of the yard.

“Quiet,” Danzig said.

“Yep.”

“So you gonna tell me?”

“Tell you what?”

“About your dreams. What do you think, Mac? About how you almost got yourself
snuffed out today.”

Gray sipped the whiskey. It stung in a blaze of honey to roots of his stomach.
He wondered if the doctor would approve of him drinking and then cast the thought aside.

“For your information I didn’t attempt
to get myself killed, it was the axe-wielding maniac with a drug-addled mind that tried to perform said duty.”

“Smartass.”

Gray shrugged and drank. He set his glass down, turned it in a circle. He could feel Danzig waiting. “I don’t think it was him,” he said finally.

“You think he was a fall guy?”

“Something like that. If he wasn’t, there were others in on it with him. There are just too many things that don’t add up.” Gray tapped his glass once against the tabletop. “It was a package too neatly tied. Like I was meant to find everything.” He glanced at Danzig and then shook his head.

“Do you think, and don’t take this the wrong way, that you’re
wanting it to be someone else?”

“Now you sound like Tilly.”

“Mmm, how is my Tilly?”

“As stu
bborn and thickheaded as ever.”

“Gotta love her.”

“I don’t, but you can. Why, after all these years have you not asked her on a date?”

The big man shifted in his seat. “
She and I are two very different people. Wouldn’t work, that’s all.”

“Never know until you try.
What was that metaphor about alloys you were trying to sell me?”

Danzig grunted. “So the doctors said you’re
going to make it?”

“Yeah, just have to keep sucking on this
nebulizer for a few more days.”

“You should tak
e a day for yourself, rest up.”

“I can’t, Dan, not wi
th everything that’s going on.”

“But don’t you see, nothing’s going on now that you shot that guy. Everyone involved thinks it’
s over, that you got your man.”

“Joseph is still with me.”

“Okay, you’ve got a young, impressionable deputy on your side. Bitchel and your good friend Mark the DA will hang a solid case on this Hudson and unless another murder crops up with the same MO, it’s finished, my friend.”

“Maybe. But if and when Miles wakes up
, he can either confirm or deny that Hudson was the guy holding him hostage.”

“You said it, Mac, ‘if’.”

“Miles will wake up. He’s the one person that can blow this thing wide open. And if he identifies Hudson, then I’m wrong. I can live with that. In fact I’d be more than comfortable with it.”

“Still,
until then, you’re shut down.”

“I know, I know, but there’s something bigger going on here, Dan. The woman over in Widow Town who called in a
missing-person report on her friend is gone now too. Her and her son. Zip, gone, vanished in the middle of the night. No witnesses, no evidence, nothing.”

“Maybe she got
tired of the view over there.”

Gray stared down at the boards beneath his feet. “History’s more than just facts and dates. It’s a pattern, a circle of events, and it’s everywhere. We’re history right now, every second that ticks by. That woman and her son were stuck, Dan. They were mired in the days since her husband and all those other men got blown to pieces by a faulty explosive. Every moment she stayed
, there was another chain, she’d made her decision.” Gray emptied his glass. “She didn’t leave under her own will. She couldn’t.”

The yard became dimmer, a blanket of evening drew closer from the east. Danzig finally sat forward and tipped the bottle over Gray
’s glass, filling it once more.

“Going to the celebration tomorrow?” Gray asked. His head swam a bit but he took a long
pull from the amber-full glass.

Danzig laughed, topping off his own tumbler. “When’s the last time yo
u saw me at the town festival?”

“Twenty years ago.”

“If that.”

“Till
y might be there.”

“I’
m un-temptable, you know that.”

“You’re
incorrigible is what you are.”

“I’m assuming you’re going?”

Gray tapped the badge hanging from the breast of his shirt. “Have to make an appearance.”

“Wouldn’t have anything to do with Lynn being there on Mark’s arm?”

“Not at all.” Gray sipped more whiskey, waited. “She stopped by the hospital today while I was out.”

“Really?”

“That’s what Joseph said. I guess she spoke to me. I wish I knew what she said.”

“I could hypnotize you.”

“You could pour me more booze.”

Danzig chuckled and drizzled more alcohol into his glass.
The bottle was over half empty.

“I’ve never not been
able to fix something so simple. For such a long time my eyes were stuck on the job. Lynn said I wasn’t there emotionally. Sometimes I wonder if I’m the sociopath, killing the ones I love with neglect.” Gray said, his eyes half lidded, looking at the streambed. It was arid and cracked into a thousand fissures.

“You’re not a
sociopath, you’re an asshole.”

Gray huffed a laugh and shrugged.

“And you think a relationship is simple? My God, Mac, I took you for an educated man,” Danzig said.

“Educate me.”

The giant remained quiet for a while. Stars began to stitch themselves into the sky as the sun’s bloodshot eye dropped fully below the horizon.

“You talk about history, you always have. There’s a lot there to learn, more than I ever wanted to know. Applying it to the future is important, it’s how we avoid mistakes of the past, but we can’t forget what tomorrow is, what it really is.”

“What is it?”

“It’s nothing. It’s
blank, waiting to be filled in. We’re history, you said so yourself. But tomorrow is different. Tomorrow we
write
it.”

Gray opened his mouth to speak but poured whiskey into it instead, drowning out the word
s.