Red sat in his little office with the breeze of an oscillating fan blowing across his face and ruffling the pages on his desk. After leaving the gas station, he drove over to PJ’s parents’ place. The local minister had gone over as a favor to Red and broke the news. He didn’t know how to do it, but in the daylight he felt it was not only his duty but a need to go. A way to grieve openly with those who would grieve too. It had worked. They all cried like babies in each other’s arms.
Now he sat in the dark. The fading light of sunset breaking through the slats in the venetian blinds. A bottle of bourbon sat close by with a full, unsipped tumbler close at hand. He hadn’t drunk since his wife died ten years ago from a heart attack while walking their dog. Another inexplicable, unnecessary death. It took him a couple years to come to terms and lose the booze. But now he just wanted some easy comfort.
He could see Officer Morey coming in through the front door of the station for her first day of work. She was overly excited for such a dull assignment, as if anything exciting ever happened out this way. But she brought with her a breath of fresh air. Before, it had just been him and James, and the occasional local posse that formed when someone’s kid had wandered off. Now she was gone, and it would be back to just him and James wasting the hours for the next twenty years.
Red did his best to rationalize, to reason. But he fell short. He remembered sitting with his mother when bad things happened as a child, and she would say, “All things happen for a reason.” The same woman sat with him at the funeral of his wife, looked at him, and said the same stupid thing. He wanted to slap the words out of her mouth. Sitting now in the twilight, staring down a bottle of whiskey, he could hear those words as if they were on a recorded loop in his head.
What reason could there be for a young vibrant cop to get smashed to bits on a road, left to die alone in such a barbaric way? If there was a reason, a great plan mapped out, then the writer of the script was simply a sick, twisted sadist.
The front door of the station opened and James walked in. He took off his cowboy hat and wiped his head off, showing the sweat stains in his pits that had soaked through his shirt. It had been a long day.
“Hey, Red.”
“James.”
James looked at his boss and the bottle. He didn’t attempt to say anything. Every man has to wrestle with his own demons. Hat in hand, he let Red know what he found out.
“I think I got something, Red. Not too many people in town know too much, ’cept that Cole runs the gas station. But I ran into Mrs. Kennedy over at Gladys’s, and she said she remembered seeing Cole up beyond Mule Deer just last week. Said she tried to wave to him, but he just sped on past. Don’t remember much else after that though.”
“Mule Deer?”
“Ain’t much up there.”
Red sat back in his chair thinking it over. “All right. Why don’t you go home and get some sleep. You look whipped.”
James turned to head out, but then stopped. He looked as if he had just broken his mother’s china and was attempting to confess. “Don’t know if I’ll be able to though. I just keep seeing her . . . I can’t get it out my mind.”
“Yeah . . . I think so, Red. It’s just . . . I don’t know . . .”
“I know, son, just go home and try to clear your mind.”
James glanced back at Red, the bottle of bourbon, and then back to the floor.
“All right, boss,” he said as he left.
The emptiness of the station suddenly became apparent to Red and he got up out of his chair. He grabbed the glass of whiskey and slowly poured it back in the bottle. He wouldn’t drink tonight; he didn’t want to start down that road. He tucked the bottle into the bottom drawer of the desk for the time he knew he would change his mind.
He left the station and started to drive north, the headlights still not competing with what sun was left. He looked out the open driver’s window to the mountains now stripped of their color by shadows. Maybe Cole was up there, hiding from the awful thing he did. Or maybe he was on his way to Mexico. Who knew?
Why couldn’t it have been Cole who killed PJ? Sure, he had seen him every couple days when he stopped in to the store to grab a drink. They had made small talk each time. Weather . . . mostly just weather.
“You can’t much know someone when that’s all you talk about,” Red said to himself as he recalled his stops there, trying to find a clue. The majority of the people in Goodwell didn’t know Colten either. Most knew him like Red did, as the guy who would take their money after they had pumped their gas. A simple “thanks” would be the extent of what many ever said to the man. The few who thought they knew Cole steered clear of him, something in their gut telling them that he was no good.
Red drove, aimless. He didn’t want to go home and sit in front of the TV set and mindlessly burn away the hours.
He found himself coming up to the road, and eventually the spot where he was last night. He parked the car and stepped out. The wreckage was gone, towed back to Goodwell. The ambulance had taken what was left of Officer PJ away quietly, its lights off and silent.
Red squatted down and looked at the darker shade of asphalt where she had bled out her life. It would take a good rain to wipe the slate, to erase the physical memory from the road. He wished he would have brought some water to scrub the pavement, a small symbolic act of kindness. A washing away of brutality.
A light westerly wind blew across his face, bringing with it the faint scent of moisture. He looked up and could see the early signs of thunderheads forming over the mountain peaks. Somewhere up on top of the world, a storm was brewing.