‘Fuck!’ I shouted when Cynthia and I got outside. ‘Fuck!’
Two cops in uniform eyed me as they came up the steps from the sidewalk.
‘Calm down,’ Cynthia said.
‘Fuck!’
One of the cops stepped toward me. ‘Sir?’
Cynthia moved between him and me. ‘It’s all right.’
The cop considered us. ‘Get him off the street,’ he told her.
As we drove from the Sheriff’s Office, she said, ‘Higby doesn’t know.’
‘Someone saw me,’ I said, and hit the gas.
‘Someone saw someone who looked like you and someone who looked like Haussen. That’s different from seeing you. If Higby knew, he wouldn’t have let you walk out of the station.’
‘Fuck,’ I said.
‘Calm down. You’re going to get us in a wreck.’
I breathed in deep and turned to cross the river on the Main Street Bridge.
I breathed out.
In deep.
Out long.
Reality.
Denial.
The sun glinted through the windshield, blinding me to the traffic at the end of the bridge. A hot river-wind blew through the broken passenger window.
Cynthia said, ‘I actually thought that went pretty well – until you panicked.’ When I said nothing, she added, ‘He doesn’t know what happened with Haussen, but you told him that you know what happened between him and the Skooners and also what happened to Duane and Steven Bronson and the others.’
My mind spun, turning from Higby’s insinuations about Haussen to his insistence that I killed the Bronson boys and then to Judge Skooner, smug with his dirty honors. I glanced at Cynthia as she picked up the bullet from the cup holder. The tiny gravity in the lump of metal seemed all that held me together. If the bullet flew from her hand, out the window – if it disappeared – then what would become of me?
‘Put it down,’ I said.
She looked at me.
‘Put it down.’
She dropped it back in the cup holder, reached over, and steadied the steering wheel. ‘Don’t lose yourself now,’ she said.
She wanted to call in sick and stay with me, but at noon I dropped her off at the Cineplex. ‘I’ll be all right,’ I said. ‘I’ll do better alone for a few hours.’
‘You can’t even drive straight,’ she said.
‘I made it for eight years on my own,’ I said.
She looked doubtful. ‘Are you going to lock yourself in your room again?’
A tempting idea. ‘I told Lynn Pritchard I would check on her,’ I said. ‘And I’ve got to meet with my reintegration therapist.’
‘Pick me up at eight?’
‘Sure,’ I said.
‘You really are crazy,’ she said, though I heard no criticism. She kissed me long, as if she could radiate life and love into me.
I drove to Lynn Pritchard’s house in Ponte Vedra, watching my hands on the steering wheel like a drunk determined to thread a highway without getting pulled over or drifting across the yellow line.
I glanced at the bullet in the cup holder, back at the road, and at the bullet again. It needed a vault with armored walls. I pinched it out of the cup holder. It felt hot from the sun through the windows. Like a man standing on the edge of a roof, tugged toward open air by invisible forces, I worried that I would drop it into a void. I clenched it in my fist.
You really are crazy.
I touched the bullet to my lips – my tongue. It tasted of salt and mineral. A drop of blood. Blood of the earth. Blood of the Bronson boys – and Jeremy Ballat and Luis Gonzalez and Rick Melsyn and Darrell Nesbit.
Don’t lose yourself now.
For the rest of the drive to Lynn Pritchard’s house, I held the metal in my sweating fist. After pulling up her driveway, I dried it on my shirt and put it in my wallet.
Lynn Pritchard came to the door when I rang. She wore tight, low-riding, bleach-white pants and a bleach-white T-shirt that showed her belly. Her nails gleamed with red polish again, and her lips shined wet with red lipstick. She looked past me toward the road as if afraid someone might have followed me to her house, then ushered me inside and locked the door.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked.
She nodded toward the room where her twin daughters had cribs and said, ‘They’re sleeping.’
We went to the living room. She’d pulled the drapes, and even in the early afternoon she needed to turn on the table lamps.
‘What happened?’ I said.
‘I think, nothing,’ she said. ‘Someone called last night. First around midnight. Then after two in the morning and again an hour later.’
‘What did they say?’
‘They just hung up.’
‘Wrong number?’ I said.
‘Maybe.’ She glanced at the drapes. I expected that she glanced at them a lot. Her husband may have built a house to protect her, but he couldn’t save her from her own fear.
I said, ‘I talked to the judge. He knows that I know.’
She shook her head. ‘He’ll come after you. He has to.’
‘I feel like he’s been coming after me for the last eight years. Now I’m going after him.’
‘It doesn’t work that way.’
‘I can almost prove what he did. If you’ll tell your story, that might be enough.’
‘No one listens,’ she said, echoing Andrew Skooner. ‘When you talked to the judge, did you mention me?’
‘I asked about the boys who were killed near Tomhanson Mill. I asked if Duane and Steven broke into his house.’
‘Yeah, he’ll come after you,’ she said.
‘I also talked to Higby. He gave me nothing. As you said, no one listens. But if you talked to him—’
‘No.’
I understood her fear, but it also infuriated me. I said, ‘If you—’
‘No.’
I could yell at her and shake her until I broke through. I said, ‘I’ll come by to check on you again tomorrow morning. If the phone rings tonight, don’t answer it.’
‘Can you stay for a while? I’m alone with my girls.’
‘Where’s the nanny?’
‘She left this morning.’
‘When’s she coming back?’
‘She isn’t. This house freaks her out. Or I do. The whole thing does.’
‘How about your husband?’
‘He comes back tomorrow before lunch. Then he leaves again next week. He’s going hunting in New Hampshire.’
‘Then I’ll swing by again tonight.’
‘You can sleep here,’ she said. ‘We have extra rooms. I’ll pay you.’
‘You’ve paid me enough.’
On my way back to the city, I stopped at Lupido’s Auto Glass. Lupido looked at the broken-out passenger-side window, looked at the torn interior of the car, and said, ‘I’ll put in a new one, but it won’t make you any prettier.’
Then I drove to the Sheriff’s Office. If I could have split the bullet in two – dividing the part that, according to Andrew Skooner, would match the ballistic markings on the bullets that killed the Bronson brothers from the part that, also according to him, his brother Josh had fired at Higby – would I have done it? Would I exonerate myself but not Higby?
I had no answer when I asked the deskman to call Deborah Holt’s desk, and I had none when she came through security and said, ‘What did you say to Higby to piss him off this time? He’s been ranting about you all afternoon.’
‘Can we take a walk?’ I asked.
We went up the block to the Bay Street Café and got coffee. When we sat at a table, I said, ‘If I give you something that my life depends on, what will you do with it?’
‘What is it?’ she said.
‘Not just my life either,’ I said, and, with my head buzzing, I took the bullet from my wallet and set it on the table between us.
She picked it up, studied it. ‘Twenty-two caliber,’ she said. ‘Jacketed. I see them all the time. Go to a gun range, and you can sweep up a hundred pounds of them at the end of the day.’
‘Get it tested.’
She rubbed the roughness of the bullet with her thumb. ‘You say your life depends on it? And you’re putting your life in my hands?’
‘Yeah, I suppose so.’
‘Where did you get it?’
I shook my head.
She put the bullet on the table and stood up. ‘I don’t play games.’ She started toward the door.
‘It’ll clear Higby,’ I said.
She stopped.
I picked up the bullet and offered it to her. ‘When Higby arrested me,’ I said, ‘he ran tests on the gun I had in my trunk – my dad’s gun. He wanted it to match the bullets that shot Steven and Duane Bronson. Everyone else seemed to want it to match too. So at my trial the ballistics expert said the gun “could have” shot the bullets. I don’t know enough about ballistics to tell the difference between “could have” and “must have,” but I know that my dad’s gun didn’t shoot those bullets.’
‘So, what will a ballistics test tell me that I don’t already know?’ she asked.
‘Do the test and find out.’
She stared at me, then snatched the bullet from my hand. ‘I don’t play games,’ she said, and she walked out of the café.