They saw it before they heard it — all at once it loomed up in front of them, a huge white emergency vehicle with red lights flashing, and Wade wrenched the wheel hard to the right and drove the truck off the road into the shallow ditch, up onto the bank, and into a stone wall, where the plow clanged against the rocks and the truck stalled.
The ambulance flashed past without slowing and was gone. Snow filtered down from the trees like flour onto the windshield and broad hood of the truck. Wade said, “Sorry,” and restarted the engine, shoved the truck into reverse and backed slowly onto the road.
“That must’ve been Twombley,” LaRiviere said in a low almost reverential voice, as if he were in church. “Jesus. I bet that was Twombley.” He sounded frightened and stared after the ambulance for a few seconds. “I hope you didn’t ding the fucking plow,” he said absently.
“You want me to follow them into Littleton, to the hospital?”
“No, not now. They probably won’t let us see him right off”
“Probably.”
“Let’s get to the top and talk to Jack first,” LaRiviere said, gathering himself together again. “Jack’ll know what happened,” he said. “He fucking better. Oh, if this could’ve been avoided, Wade, I’ll put that kid’s ass in a sling.”
Wade started driving again, more cautiously this time, as if he expected a second ambulance to charge out of the snow and appear suddenly in front of them. He was puzzled by LaRiviere: what was Twombley to him anyhow, except a now-and-then business buddy? Wade, like most people in town, knew that LaRiviere had been buying and occasionally selling patches of real estate for years, on his own or in partnership with others, and no doubt Twombley had been one of his sometime partners in the purchase of pieces of land, overgrown hilly farmland, mostly, some of it with enough timber to harvest, but most of it nearly useless and apparently unprofitable, except for where it adjoined a road, and a trailer park could be set up or a small house built on it and sold. Even so, despite any business connections they might have had, Twombley and LaRiviere were hardly what you would call asshole buddies. Besides, it was not like LaRiviere to show any feeling for another person, especially another man, unless it was anger or his usual impatience — except when he wanted something from the man, in which case he exuded charms more suited to a Moroccan rug bazaar than to the northern New Hampshire real estate market.
But this was not anger or impatience or phony affection he was expressing for Twombley; it was almost tenderness, protectiveness, concern. Wade liked it: he did not know why and maybe did not even know it was a fact, but he had loved crazy old Gordon LaRiviere since he was a kid, practically, when he first went to work for him right out of high school, and he always needed new reasons to explain his love of the man. LaRiviere’s love of someone else, even a man like Evan Twombley, might be one.
They were silent the rest of the way. By the time they arrived at the top, where there were two cruisers drawn in neatly at the right side of the road opposite Jack’s truck, it had stopped snowing altogether. Three troopers, one talking to Jack, a second with a German shepherd on a leash, the third with a Polaroid camera in his hand, stood at the front of Jack’s truck, and a fourth trooper walked through the snow toward them from LaRiviere’s cabin on the rise beyond.
To Wade, as he pulled in behind the cruisers, all the men looked oddly happy. They wore sly smiles on their faces, as if they had just won a bet with a fool. Jack had both fists placed against the hood of his truck and was shaking his head slowly back and forth, while two of the troopers, hands in pockets, watched and listened to the third talk to him. The talker glanced across the hood of the truck at Wade and LaRiviere as they came up to them, and went on talking.
"So I says to her, ’Lady, I don’t give a shit if you’re John F. Kennedy himself. I didn’t vote for him when he was alive and I ain’t voting for him now.’ “ The trooper was a tall wiry man in his late forties; his hair looked dyed with black shoe polish, and his high flat cheekbones gave his gray eyes a permanent squint. He had a low rumbling voice that stroked itself as he spoke. “Hello, Gordon,” he said to LaRiviere. “Wade.” Then he went on, “ ’I clocked you at a hundred and five between Lincoln and Woodstock,’ I says to her, and she reaches into this little leather bag she’s got on the seat there and pulls out this fucking hundred-dollar bill, so I says to her, ’Ma’am, unless you’re just trying to show me a picture of the late president, you better put that back, because up here bribing a police officer’s a criminal offense.’ “
Jack stood up straight and faced the man, smiling. “A hundred and five,” he said. “That’s wicked fast. What was she driving?” he asked. “Hey, Wade. Hello, Gordon,” he added, casting a quick look their way.
“Maserati. One of those hundred-thousand-dollar wop cars you can’t even get your feet into. Must be like driving in a condom.”
Jack laughed and folded his arms over his chest and turned to face LaRiviere. “Well, Gordon,” he said. Then, suddenly serious, he sighed. “You heard the news,” he said.
“Some. I heard some. I heard Twombley got shot.”
“He did,” Jack said somberly, but almost as if he were merely announcing the man’s departure, Wade thought. Though there was a slight note of regret in Jack’s voice, it was as if Twombley had left early for lunch or a meeting in town before they had a chance to get their deer this morning. It was a serious event they were discussing: men from this region, when something disastrous happens and the thing must be spoken of, talk aslant and sometimes even joke in order to talk about it at all.
“Fuck,” LaRiviere said. He exhaled loudly and looked off toward his cabin. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
Wade reached down and patted the German shepherd on its wide head. “How you been?” he asked the tall black-haired trooper, a captain, Asa Brown, whom Wade had dealt with before. Wade did not particularly like Brown, and he was sure that Brown did not much like him, either. Actually, Wade thought Brown a dishonest braggart, and he believed that Brown thought Wade incompetent.
“Not bad, Wade. Not bad. Had me a run-in the other day with one of them Kennedy types. I was just telling Jack here. Watch the dog, Wade. He takes a mind to, he’ll tear your fucking hand off.”
“Oh, he likes me,” Wade said, but he withdrew his hand and shoved it into his coat pocket. “Doncha?”
Still regarding the view, LaRiviere said, “Twombley shot bad?”
“I’d say so,” Jack said.
“Thirty-thirty at close range,” Brown said.
“Jesus.” LaRiviere whistled.
The men were silent for a few seconds. Then Wade said, “Will he make it?”
“Nope,” Brown answered. “DOA. Dead on arrival.”
The trooper with the dog, a burly blond kid in his early twenties wearing a pimply shaving rash on his throat like a pink ruff, said to Brown, “You want me to head on back now?”
“Yeah, might’s well. Get started on the paperwork. I got to talk to the next of kin, I suppose.”
LaRiviere looked at Jack. “You see it?”
“Nope. Heard it, though. We wasn’t very far apart. I’d spotted this big buck, and then I heard the gun go off and turned around, and Twombley was gone. Disappeared. Then I looked over the little cliff we was using for a stand, and there the fucker was, deader’n shit.”
“Blew the poor bastard wide open,” Brown said. “Thirty-thirty. Soft-nosed bullets. He had a bigger hole in back than in front, hole you could put your head in. And he had a pretty big hole in the front too. You could’ve put your fist in that one.”