Matt’s shoulder hurt.
That’s where the bullet went through. A clean shot, the doctors said. In one side, out the other. Like a hot knife through butter. It’ll heal right up, might not even scar. Be like it never happened at all. The docs here said all kinds of things like that. Friendly, comforting words—but Matt got a good look at their eyes while they looked him over, when they poked and prodded and made notes on their charts, and he might as well have been a pig heading to the slaughterhouse. Cold, that’s how the docs looked. Unfeeling. But what could he expect? He was just another patient in a long line waiting to be treated, and they moved on to the next. Maybe doctors have a quota they have to meet and that’s why they hurry from one room to the next, asking questions and not really listening to the answers. Janice had been premed and she’d told him it wasn’t true, that doctors cared about every person they saw. But he wasn’t so sure. Maybe it was the truth, or maybe it was a lie doctors told to keep themselves from going crazy.
Or maybe, he thought, they looked at him that way because they thought he was a killer.
He’d asked for something stronger than the pills that got delivered to his room in a tiny paper cup every few hours, but the nurse only smiled blandly when he spoke and had backed quickly out of the room. They’d mostly left him alone for the last day, with only the television to keep him company. The TV, and the muted sounds of conversation from the nurse’s station down the hall. But it was nothing but garbled, muffled voices that made it through the walls—unless a nurse accidentally left the door open, which had only happened once.
“—poured gasoline all over the body and lit a match. I’ve got a buddy who works for the fire station, said the whole house came down in less than five minutes—”
“Jesus—”
“What a sick bastard.”
His nurse stuck her head into the room then, looking startled and more than a little guilty, and pulled the door shut. She even gave it an extra tug to make sure the latch clicked and it wouldn’t ease back open, so all the hospital staff could safely gossip without him eavesdropping. He was on trial out there, the jury was a bunch of medical staff in their squeaky white shoes and wrinkled scrubs, and they’d found him guilty of murdering his wife, without a shadow of a doubt. They’d have him strung up if they got the chance. Guilty until proven innocent.
He’d fucked up this time. Bad.
“Did you kill your wife, Mr. Evans?” Detective Reid asked. The cop had come in not long after the nurse had shut the door, wordlessly dragged a chair out of the corner and pulled it up to the side of the bed. He was sucking on a menthol cough drop, the smell of it surrounding him like a cloud. He was ancient, old enough that he might’ve started his career with law enforcement back when booze was illegal and women couldn’t vote.
“No.”
“Then maybe you’d like to explain how your wife ended up in her current—situation?” Reid asked. He was sitting with his legs crossed, in the graceful way only young women and very old men can manage, with a notepad propped up on one bony knee. This cop was droopy eyed, spoke slowly and moved even slower, but Matt had a feeling his brain zipped around like greased lightning. He’d have to be careful around this old man. There was something almost Southern about Reid, even though he didn’t have an accent. Or maybe gentlemanly was a better way to describe him.
“Situation?” Matt had repeated wearily.
“Yessir,” Reid said, nodding sleepily. “Early yesterday morning we got a call about a house fire over on Maple Avenue—8220 Maple. That’s where you live, isn’t it? Or lived? White house with green shutters?”
“Yes.”
“I wouldn’t call our fire department the fastest around, but they’re pretty damn quick, and by the time they got to that house with their hoses and whatnot it was too late. I’m exaggerating a bit here, but just about all that was left of that nice little place you’re renting was ashes.” Reid cleared his throat and hacked into a handkerchief he’d pulled from his pocket, then wiped his lips impatiently. “Ashes, and your wife. Well, what was left of her, anyway.”
Matt closed his eyes. The spots behind his eyes throbbed. Morphine, that’s what he needed. An IV threaded into his arm and a handy little button he could push to shoot some dope into his system, so he’d be nice and buzzed. But maybe that was why the nurses wouldn’t give him anything—they wanted him sober to talk to this cop.
“That fire sprung up quick, burned hot and fast,” Reid said. “But that’s what happens when there’s a couple gallons of gasoline dumped on everything. The first spark of a match and everything’s gone.” Reid held up a gnarled hand and snapped so loudly, Matt twitched in surprise and opened his eyes. “Like that. You ever light your own farts, Mr. Evans?”
“What?”
Reid’s liver-spotted lips spread in a smile.
“You know the old rhyme? Beans, beans, the musical fruit, the more you eat, the more you toot? Did your mama ever cook beans or chili and the next day your rear end wouldn’t keep quiet?”
“I guess so,” Matt said.
“I can imagine you as a little boy stealing his father’s lighter out of his pants pocket and sneaking outside to see if your farts would catch fire,” Reid said. He snorted in amusement. “I can imagine that, clear as day.”
“My father is dead,” Matt said.
“I’m sorry. How’d he go?”
“Heart attack,” Matt said, balling up a fistful of bedding. “It was a long time ago. When I was a teenager.”
“So your mother raised you alone?”
“Yes. She’s dead now, too.”
Reid made a mark on his notepad.
“So you never lit your farts?”
“Is this question part of your investigation?”
Reid shrugged and smiled again.
“Just curiosity.”
Matt sighed, turned his head on the pillow.
“Of course I did,” he said. “I was a kid once.”
Reid laughed, a throaty, whistling sound that came from deep in his skinny chest, and gleefully slapped a hand against his thigh.
“I knew it,” he said. “Then I don’t have to tell you how quickly a fart lights up. Surprises you, doesn’t it? You don’t expect it to catch, even if you’ve done it before. It’s like a miracle every time. A smelly, god-awful miracle, but a miracle just the same.”
Reid laughed again, and Matt did, too. He couldn’t help it—the old man’s laugh was funny enough on its own. It was a good one, loud and clear as a bell, chortling and contagious. A man with a laugh like that could get an entire crowd laughing on his very own. He was a comedian’s dream.
“Was it like that with Janice?” Reid asked, still smiling, and for the first time Matt noticed the smile didn’t reach all the way to Reid’s eyes. His gaze was watery and red rimmed but also coldly calculating, watching for Matt’s reaction. “Were you surprised at how fast the fire lit once you poured that gasoline all over her? I saw her remains, you know. She looks like a charcoal briquette more than a person.”
The laughter dried up so fast it might have been a figment of his imagination, and his throat clenched unpleasantly. A charcoal briquette. Reid was spot-on, Matt had been surprised by how quickly the flames moved, how fast they ate up everything in their path. He’d seen how her skin had broken and peeled back like old, dry paper, and how the flesh underneath had blackened from the heat. The sight of this had been bad enough, but it was the smell that’d finally driven him out of the house and down the street, the scent of cooking human flesh that even overpowered the stench of the gasoline. It hadn’t been a bad smell, that was the worst of it. The cooking flesh had made him think of barbecues on long summer nights, of beef roasting on a grill, of the gristly bits of meat that would get caught between his teeth whenever he took a bite. Those were good times and memories, and he’d run from the house and those smells then, even as the walls were collapsing around him and the hot bile was bubbling up in his throat.
“I didn’t kill my wife.”
“Then what happened, Mr. Evans?”
“We were asleep. I woke up because Janice was moving around, and it took me a minute to realize that there was someone in the house with us. A man.”
“What did he look like?”
“I don’t know. It was dark, and I never got a chance to get a good look at him.”
“That’s fair. Go on.”
“He had a gun, put it in my face and told me to turn over. He already had Janice tied up, and then he did the same to me.”
“He used rope?”
“Yeah.”
“He must not have tied you up too tightly.”
“Why do you say that?”
“No rope burns on you,” Reid said. One of his red, veiny eyelids trembled in what might have been the start of a wink, then stilled. “Keep going, Mr. Evans.”
“This guy, he was hurting Janice. I didn’t know what was going on, my back was to them, but I could hear she was in pain. While he was busy with her, I managed to get free of the ropes.”
“And you ran?”
“Yeah.”
“How chivalrous of you,” Reid said drily. “And when, exactly, did you get shot?”
“I was trying to get out of the house,” Matt said. “He shot me from behind, but I still managed to get out.”
Reid nodded, made another note on his pad.
“You got out of the house and went looking for help,” the cop said.
“Yes.”
Reid leaned over, put his pen and pad down on the bedside table. Rubbed his eyes for a minute, the way a kid would, with both hands balled into fists and jammed right into the sockets.
“You know, I made a few calls before I came in here,” Reid said once he was done. “Found out that in the event of your wife’s death, you cash in a life insurance policy worth about thirty thousand dollars. It’s not a huge amount, but it’s quite a pretty penny for a jobless college student such as yourself. Especially a young man with no parents to help him with the bills. And no wife, either. Because Janice was supporting you, wasn’t she? Mr. Evans?”
Matt’s throat was clenching and loosening, over and over again. He took a careful sip of water from the plastic cup the nurse had left him. There was a straw sticking out of the top, and his hand was shaking badly enough that it took several tries before he managed to steer it into his mouth. Reid watched with interest. The old codger didn’t miss much, that was for sure.
“What’re you getting at?”
“Tell me what happened to your wife.”
“I just did.”
“No, what you told me was a very sweet, practiced lie,” Reid said. “Quite a few things wrong with it. Inconsistencies, that’s what cops call them. That’s shop talk. Pieces that don’t quite line up right.”
“What do you mean?” There was panic rising in Matt’s throat, thick and choking. Bitter, as if he’d let an aspirin dissolve on his tongue.
“You don’t have any rope burns, even though you say you were tied up and had to struggle free,” Reid said. “And that bullet wound—you say you were shot from behind, while you were trying to get out?”
“Yes,” Matt said softly. Fuck. Fuckity-fuck.
“No, sir, that bullet came from your front side,” Reid said, picking up his notes again and squinting at them. “Docs told me the bullet pierced your front right shoulder and exited cleanly through the back. And whoever pulled that trigger was standing awfully close to you, too. I asked if you might’ve shot yourself, and they didn’t rule it out.”
God.
“That’s not what happened.”
“Then tell me what happened.”
“I did.”
“Well, tell it again,” Reid said. He grimaced, baring all his teeth like a dog. They were fake, Matt thought. Too perfect and white to be real. Dentures. Roebuckers, he’d heard them called before. “And this time, try a little harder.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you could just tell me the truth. Or, if you want to keep lying, at least try to make it believable. And if that’s not possible, at least make it entertaining,” Reid said, uncrossing his legs and crossing them again the other way. Really mashing his bony ass down into his seat, settling in for a good bit. “Let it rip, Mr. Evans. Tell me what happened to your wife that night.”