Sheriff Bob Nichols rambled his cruiser over the dirt service road, one hand on the wheel and the other between his legs. He couldn’t help playing with it, teasing himself. It was bad, he knew, but he was granting himself a lot of leeway these days, treating himself with kid gloves, and the flask wedged between his thighs served as a kind of security blanket.
Knowing it was there calmed him down—presented a challenge he knew he could meet at a time when Nichols was sure of very little, trusted the world about as far as he could throw it. The flask was a sober man’s dumb-ass attempt to dramatize a state of utter, brain-melting confusion.
The discipline not to get shithoused.
You’re a real winner, huh, Nichols?
On paper, everything should have been fine. Better than fine. For the first time since the ink had dried on his divorce, he was in a solid and loving relationship, something that might conceivably come equipped with a future. He’d met Ruth Cantwell less than three months back, when he’d been called out to investigate the kidnapping of a local girl named Sherry Richards. Ruth was the family’s therapist, had helped pry them free of a cult leader to whom the mother had been in thrall.
One Aaron Seth, currently deceased.
Courtesy Jess Galvan, father of the girl in question.
Sherry’s mother was dead now too. Murdered that very same day by Marshall Buchanan, a massive, fire-scarred thug in Seth’s employ. It was Sherry who’d discovered the body—and Sherry who’d pushed a knife into the belly of the killer a few hours later.
She was living with Nichols and Cantwell now, since her mother was too dead to take care of her and her father too fucked up. A real sweet kid, even if traumatized beyond belief. They all were on some level, he supposed. Made for an interesting household dynamic. Hell of a way to kick-start a romance, too.
Nichols thrummed his fingers against the flask again and reminded himself that everything was fine. Hell, even the traditionally underfunded, overworked Del Verde County Sheriff’s Department was less fucked up than usual. Nichols had managed to flip a modest surplus and a pair of useless, overpaid, verge-of-retirement ass-clowns into one promising rookie cop.
Sometimes he could get through half a day on all that, blot the rest out of his mind, feel like the guy he’d always been. The sure-handed, eagle-eyed kid who’d led the Del Verde Vipers back from a three-touchdown deficit in the state semis twenty-five years back and rode the long local memory of his teenage heroism to the unbelievable glamour of his current station.
Methodical and unflappable, that had been Nichols. Keep everybody locked in, move the ball down the field one play at a time. It had been the same drill in Iraq, give or take a few improvised explosive devices. You either lost your cool, or you didn’t. The guys who didn’t were the ones everybody else wanted to be around, in case it was contagious.
Sometimes it was.
If only Nichols could find a guy like that now. Instead, he had a head full of memories that called into question everything he’d ever believed.
And everything he’d refused to.
Sure, at election time he’d bullshitted the Bible-humping voters of Del Verde County into thinking he was down with Team JC, but until ten weeks ago? Nichols had been agnostic to the core, a firm believer that what you saw was all there was. That anybody who claimed otherwise was fooling himself, building castles in the air.
Then he’d watched physics take a holiday.
Though maybe holiday was the wrong word. It was more like Nichols had watched physics huff a gallon of paint, take a dump in a urinal, make out with its own sister, black out behind the wheel of a big rig, and broadside a fireworks factory.
The images were seared indelibly into his mind. When he tried to sleep, there they were, playing in lurid Technicolor.
Jess Galvan’s hacked-off forearm regenerating right before his eyes, tendrils of sinew and muscle wrapping themselves around pure-white bone, skin pouring itself over the form, tiny hairs sprouting like spring shoots from new-made pores.
A soft red lump of muscle twitching in a box, miles from the body it had once animated—miles Galvan had been forced to carry it, across a desert pocked with creatures who had once been girls. Who sensed its presence, climbed out of the ground, and tried to take it for themselves.
White-robed men standing still as cacti, waiting for a new world to be born, an old god to return.
An involuntary shudder passed through Nichols despite the autumn heat, the dun-brown uniform shirt sweat-pasted to his back. The fact was, the visuals were the least of it. He’d felt the presence of something ancient and monstrous that night, and it had hit him with the force of revelation. He’d fully believed that a banished deity might be sprung from cosmic jail and reclaim the earth as his domain.
And then bam, it was as if the house lights had come back up, and life just as he’d always known it had resumed. Coffee and pay stubs, cheeseburgers and TV shows and trying to keep a woman happy.
To call it a mindfuck didn’t even come close.
And then there was Jess Galvan, who had eaten that heart himself instead of handing it over to Aaron Seth, killed everybody who needed killing, and promptly exiled himself to the fringes of society.
Whose beat-to-shit trailer half a mile from the end of the service road was just coming into sight.
Nichols checked his Timex. It was seven on the dot; the sun nearly kissed the horizon, the mountaintops outlined in orange. He pulled into the patch of dirt that passed for a front yard, gratified to see Galvan’s wood-paneled station wagon, the pride of 1982 Detroit, parked a few feet off. That had to mean he was home—there was nowhere to walk from here, that was for sure—and Nichols’s trek hadn’t been in vain. Galvan’s cell had been going straight to voice mail for a day and a half, so this little visit was both overdue and unexpected.
Nichols unfolded himself from the squad car, knees unlocking with a satisfying pop, ambled up three rusted-out front steps, and rapped on the trailer’s busted-and-duct-taped screen door.
Nothing.
“Galvan? It’s me, Bob. You in there?”
He peered inside, took stock. A jumble of sheets on the narrow bed, a stack of dirty dishes piled next to the sink. A flannel shirt and a cowboy-style one on plastic hangers in the tiny, jacked-open closet. A bedside minifridge doubling as a night table, strewn with newspapers. Nichols recognized a Sunday section three or four weeks old.
No Galvan.
But no heads on stakes, either.
That was a plus.
Nichols stepped outside and eased himself onto the top stair, figured he might as well watch the sunset, maybe rehearse what he would say. Jess couldn’t have gone far.
As soon as he thought it, Nichols winced in self-censure. What Jess could and couldn’t do was not something he oughta make assumptions about. For all he knew, the dude had taken a nice long running start and jumped onto the goddamn moon.
A few minutes passed, and then a large-animal rustle someplace nearby brought Nichols to his feet, hand dropping instinctively to the butt of his service revolver. There were mountain lions out here, and those things didn’t play. He peered into the twilit underbrush, but the rustling was coming from someplace else—from behind the trailer, it seemed, though pinning down directionality in all this open space was surprisingly tricky. Nichols took a tentative step down and cocked his ears.
Something was definitely coming closer—heavily and steadily—and Nichols didn’t like what that might imply. A jag of movement swept across his left periphery; the sheriff spun toward it and found himself face-to-face with Jess Galvan.
He was shirtless from the waist up.
Unless the dead mountain lion slung across his shoulders counted as clothing.
“Sheriff,” he said, with a crisp, weirdly formal nod.
“Hercules.”
Nichols returned the nod. “Whatchu, uh, got there?”
“Action kinda keeps me sane,” Galvan said, and turned sideways to give Nichols a look at the lion. It was a full-grown male, a hundred and forty pounds of coiled muscle; front incisors protruded from the mouth like daggers. The massive head lolled backward, the animal’s neck broken.
Nichols pretended to examine the beast and instead took stock of Jess. An inch-long gash on his right forearm oozed blood, and a broad smear of red painted his chest. He was clad in cutoffs and cross-trainers; there was no possible place he might have been carrying a gun, or even a knife.
“You killed this thing bare-handed?”
Galvan shrugged. “I’ve got a good fifty pounds on him.”
“Yeah, but you chased him down.” A beat of silence, the heat coming off Galvan in waves, Nichols wondering just how far to push this.
Fuck it, he decided.
As he often did.
“Look, I’ll pretend that’s normal if you want me to. But, I mean, come on.” Nichols spread his arms, tilted his head to the side. “I’m guessing you weren’t doing shit like this say, oh, three months ago.”
Jess’s eyes flickered up to meet his, and Nichols could feel his friend straining within himself; the sheriff had the uncanny feeling that if only he could figure out the secret knock, Galvan would open up.
The moment passed. Galvan sloughed his bounty to the ground with a small grunt, dropped his hands to his hips as the dust kicked up around them.
“I’ll get us a couple beers,” he said and disappeared into the trailer.
He reemerged with two generic supermarket cans, tossed one at Nichols, and shrugged on the flannel from the closet.
“Oughta be a lawn chair over there,” he said, pointing. Nichols unfolded it, metal grinding against the grit worked into the joints, and made himself semicomfortable.
Galvan popped the tab and knocked back half the beer in two swallows. Nichols waited for him to take a seat on the stairs, but he stayed put, legs spread shoulders’ width apart, staring into the desert and the darkness like he didn’t want to miss what happened next out there.
Nichols felt strange sitting, so he stood too.
It didn’t help much.
“Your phone’s been off,” he said after a while. Galvan didn’t respond, so Nichols pressed.
“Is everything . . . okay?”
Galvan finally looked over. “You fuckin’ kidding me? Yeah. Sure, Bob. Everything’s just hunky-dory.”
“Well, do you wanna talk ab—”
Galvan turned, heaved open the screen door. It slammed against the trailer’s exterior and stayed that way.
Nice going, Nichols. You’re off to a great start.
An instant later Galvan was back, a second round of brews in his hand. Nichols was only two sips into the first. It was the shittiest beer he’d ever tasted. He turned the can in his hand, looking for the ingredient list, wondered if weasel piss was on it.
Galvan threw his empty can at the sky. Try as he might, Nichols couldn’t hear it land. Imagined it attaining escape velocity, rocketing into the next solar system.
“I moved in with Ruth,” he heard himself say. “We’re gonna try and make a go of it.”
“Congratulations.”
Nichols grimaced. “We’ll see what happens. They say when you’ve been through a traumatic experience with someone, it either bonds you, or tears you apart, so . . .” He flashed on his marriage to Kat, the prolonged struggle to conceive. It had certainly seemed traumatic then, but the goddamn bar on trauma had come up a ways since.
The velvet blackness had engulfed them now, the moon late to rise.
“That’s good,” Galvan said at long last. “For Sherry too. Having a man in the house.”
“She misses you,” Nichols said quickly. “Last thing I wanna do here’s step on your toes.”
“And I miss her.” Galvan said it without inflection or conviction. “But I can’t do it right now. I mean, look at me, Nichols. I can barely . . .”
He sighed and tipped the new can to his mouth. Nichols waited. There was only so much beer in there.
Galvan crushed this one before he pitched it. Not much of an environmentalist, thought Nichols. Though the farmers would certainly applaud his dedication to wildlife control.
“You know why I live like this, Nichols?”
“Because you’re broke.”
“Because I’m broken.”
He finally sat down.
“I don’t trust myself around people, man. That shit took too much out of me.”
That shit. That night. What happened. Nichols wished he could cut through all the euphemisms, get to what was real: You ate that goddamn heart and grew an arm and threw Seth thirty feet as if he were a fucking Beanie Baby. You wrestle mountain lions. You’re a goddamn superhero, and you’re paying the price—I don’t know what that price is, but I know there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
“It took a lot out of us all, Jess. Including your daughter. I’m just gonna come right out and say it, man—you’re breaking her heart. She’s in a bad way, and she needs you. Whatever you’ve got to give, even if it’s not a lot.”
Galvan furrowed his brow, stared down at the ground like he was trying to burn a hole through it.
Hell, maybe he could.
“I went by the ice cream shop a couple days ago,” he said. “She seemed okay.”
“Because she doesn’t want to worry you. And that wasn’t a couple days ago, Jess. Sherry told me this morning she hasn’t seen you in two weeks. Going on three.”
Galvan pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. “I lose track,” he said quietly.
“You can talk to me, you know,” Nichols blurted. “Shit, Jess, I was there. Whatever you’re dealing with, maybe I can help.”
Galvan dropped his hands. Blinked, shook his head, blinked again. Finally, he looked over at Nichols, and the sheriff felt his face redden beneath the heat of Galvan’s scrutiny, his heart race in anticipation.
Here it came.
The Unburdening.
“You’re already helping me. With Sherry. The rest of this shit, I gotta figure out myself.” He raised up, brushed his palms against his shorts. “I should grab myself a shower.”
Don’t quit your day job, Nichols.
Galvan extended a hand.
“I’ll see you soon.”
“There’s something else.”
Galvan crossed his arms, and Nichols noticed that the cut had stopped bleeding.
“Kurt Knowles got picked up a few days ago in Ardmore, Oklahoma.”
“Who’s he again?”
“The biker? President of the True Natives? If I’m not mistaken, he and his gang held you down while that corrupt Mexican Federale took a machete to your arm.”
“Oh yeah. Him.”
Galvan twisted at the waist, peered into the trailer. For a second, Nichols half expected him to pretend he’d heard his mother calling him home for dinner.
“I just got word today,” Nichols went on. “But I’m gonna do everything I can to make sure they throw his ass underneath the fuckin’ jail until the end of time. I don’t know what he’s been charged with so far, but with my testimony plus yours—”
Galvan shook his head. “Forget it. I’m keeping my head down. Supposed to be in a Mexican prison right now, in case you forgot.”
It was Nichols’s turn to shake his head. “Nah, I looked into it. Your record’s clean. Nobody ever filed anything with Texas. Hell, you could probably apply for food stamps if you wanted to.”
Galvan’s voice darkened. “I’m off the grid, Nichols.” And then, for no apparent reason, his whole face squeezed tight—contorted into a mask of agony or anticipated agony, like a little kid bracing for a flu shot.
“You okay there, Jess?”
Galvan exhaled—a short sharp breath, like he was fighting it off. Gradually, his face relaxed.
“Been getting these migraines,” he muttered.
“You oughta see a doctor. I’m sure Ruth can—”
Galvan spun toward him, all the pain replaced with rage, and a bolt of fear shot through Nichols, adrenaline overruling intellect, fight-or-flight synapses decussating wildly.
As if this weren’t a disagreement with a friend, but a wild animal about to pounce.
It was all he could do to stand his ground.
“No fucking doctors!” Galvan roared, jabbing a finger in his chest. “No courtrooms, no shrinks—and if I gave a shit about that Knowles cocksucker, I’d have killed him already. You got it?”
“Sure, Jess. Sure.”
Galvan seemed to deflate then, to pull back into himself.
“Sorry,” he mumbled, eventually.
“Yeah,” Nichols replied. “I’ll see you later.”
He dropped his half-empty beer, watched it topple sideways. A weak stream of amber pisswater leaked out, and the parched earth swallowed it greedily.
He strolled back to the cruiser, threw his arm out the window, revved the engine. Jess was still watching him. Perhaps it was a trick of the light, or perhaps the helplessness, the misery on his face was real.
“Maybe you’re right,” Nichols heard himself say. “Maybe it is best if you keep away from Sherry for the time being.”
Galvan’s head dropped to his chest. Nichols couldn’t be sure if it was a response or not. For all he knew, Galvan’s mind was drifting again, and he hadn’t even heard.
Nichols wedged the flask between his thighs and drove into the night.