11

OF COURSE, THERE’S the bag. The almost-new black wheel-along bag that Fisher packed for Brian’s trip into the great beyond and that Grisby refused to take. All the way home Fisher senses it in the back seat like one of those sullen fares who clamp their mouth shut and stare anywhere but at his eyes in the mirror, as though it’s his damn fault they have to pay him for a ride home.

First thing he does when he pulls up outside his trailer is wheel around in his seat and stare at the bag, like he’s trying to catch it out because this is a horror movie and the thing’s alive and out to get him. But there it sits like a stout black-coated torso, with its white label gleaming in its plastic pocket, and there’s a smugness about it, as though it knows he planned to get rid of it and was too chicken. There were dumpsters in town, but someone would spot a brand-new bag in a dumpster and haul it out. He could have tossed it outside one of the crackhouses where he’s dropped off fares—but in those streets someone’s sure to be watching, they always are. On a lonely stretch of road then—except a truck came hurtling up behind him just as he slowed on the highway home, and it occurred to him how many people take this route, and how soon the bag would be found. He thought of the pits at the bottom of his hill where gold was once dug out of the earth. Too close to home. Like leaving it on his own goddamn doorstep.

So here’s the bag still in the backseat with that stupid label where he wrote Brian’s name and the address of that made-up hotel in Denver. Christ, what was he thinking? He can’t remember. To throw it in after Brian? To leave it someplace where it’d be found in a few days? With his handwriting on the label?

Now he wonders what else he’s done that’s so freaking dumb. He lets his head tilt back against the headrest. One in the morning and he’s hollowed out. His thoughts freefall through the emptiness in his skull with nothing to run up against, no sense, no logic, nothing except exhaustion and—he feels it again now—a lurking anger. At Brian for being naked and dead in his daughter’s bathroom, at Grisby for being such a shithead and insisting on taking Brian’s stuff, at himself for not having thought it all through more clearly and somehow stopped it, all of it. Why didn’t he answer his phone when he could have? Then none of this would have happened. Something milder and quieter would have filled its place in the great sequence of events tipping through the universe, and by now he’d be asleep and untroubled by what he didn’t know, that by picking up his phone he’d saved himself from this mire of worry and fear.

Already the cold’s swamping the car. With each breath the air’s a little sharper until, in how long—two minutes? three?—the inside of his nose is smarting, and the aches in his head and his cheeks are pulsing like they’ve got a life of their own. The Vicodin wore off long ago. He could go inside and take more, but right now shouldn’t he be searching for Bree? Isn’t he the only one who can save her from what she’s done? But where the hell to look at this time of night? He has no idea.

That’s me all over, he thinks, and pulls his keys from the ignition. No fucking imagination. No fucking ideas.

He heaves Brian’s bag across the snow and up the steps to his door. He’s careful twisting the key in the lock because what could be worse than snapping it off on a night like this? A moment later the key turns and he steps into the warmth of his trailer. He unzips his parka and calls his dog, and when Pax comes limping across the carpet and sniffs at Brian’s bag, he pushes the dog’s head away and stares at the bag, saying over and over “Jesus fucking Christ” until Pax looks up at him with his tail mournfully beating the air.