“I fixed things.”
“How?”
“I just explained how it was all a bad mistake and you didn’t mean to do it. He understood.”
Stan looked at me for a long moment. “You promise, Johnny?”
“I promise.”
He glanced at Rosie and let out a heavy breath.
Gareth and I met at the Black Cat café in Back Town. It was the middle of the afternoon and the place was empty. We took a booth on the other side of the room from the counter. Gareth looked across the table at me measuringly.
“I’d like to think this means we’re going to be friends. You asking me out for coffee and all. But I wonder if there isn’t a little more to it.”
“How are things going with the road to the lake?”
“Oh, I think me first, Johnny. I saw a thing this morning that for some reason made me think immediately of you. Swinging by the Plantagion warehouse on my usual paranoid route to get a glimpse of Viv, I happened to notice there’d been a fire. I bet Jeremy Tripp isn’t too happy with you.”
“What would that have to do with me?”
“Fires don’t start themselves.”
“He’s not very happy with you, either. Marla was at a meeting at the town hall where he and Vivian petitioned the council against building the road. They said they weren’t going to stop until they had enough signatures to shut it down.”
“That cunt. Why doesn’t it surprise me?”
“Do you have any idea who Jeremy Tripp is?”
“A rich asshole who stole my woman and who’s busy fucking up what’s left of my life.”
“He’s Patricia Prentice’s brother.”
Gareth blinked and looked blankly at me as though he hadn’t understood.
“He’s Patricia Prentice’s brother. He’s seen the video and he knows you shot it. He thinks all three of us are responsible for her death and he’s not going to let up on any of us till he gets his revenge. The way he’s going after me is by attacking Plantasaurus. He bought Marla’s house and kicked her out of it. And he’s working against the road to get at you.
And he took Vivian, of course.”
“And there’s the fire, of course.”
“What about the fire?”
“Johnny, if we’re leading up to what I think we’re leading up to, there’s no room for bullshitting each other. You’ve got him on your ass about that fire. It’s too fucking coincidental that we’re here the morning after it happened.”
“Okay, the fire.”
“And he’s right?”
I didn’t want to tell Gareth any more than I had to, but I needed his help to do something I wasn’t capable of doing alone. “Stan made an error of judgment.”
“There you go, wasn’t too hard. Now we can move forward. How do you know he’s her brother?”
“I heard it from one of our clients. And later he told me himself.”
“You talked to him?”
“I was trying to get him to leave us alone.”
“Johnny, it’s just you and Marla on that tape. Why does he think I made it?”
I’d known I was going to have to cover this unfortunate detail and I tried now to make it sound as matter of fact and unavoidable as possible.
“I told him. It was all I had, man. He was destroying our business. I mean, you set up the video, it didn’t have anything to do with us. If anyone should have been taking the heat it was you.”
“Ah…” Gareth smiled tightly to himself. “That explains something. I had Bill on the phone yesterday screaming all kinds of insanity. I do believe he mentioned the video. I denied all knowledge, of course. Not very nice using me like that, Johnboy.”
“Like I said, it was all I had. Anyway, it didn’t work. Tripp just added you to the list and kept right on attacking us. Now, because of the fire, he’s demanding that I give him Empty Mile. If I don’t he’s going to send Stan to prison.”
I watched Gareth carefully as I said this. His face went hard and he shook his head violently. “Your land? No fucking way. That is not happening.”
I shook my own head and sighed. “I don’t see much of a way around it.”
“Yes you do, Johnny. That’s why we’re here. You want me to kill him for you.”
“You said before that you wanted to do it.”
“What I said was that we should do it. Together.”
“I don’t have it in me.”
“But you think I do.”
I shrugged. Gareth looked at me for a long time without speaking, tapping his forefinger on the table beside his coffee cup.
“Okay, I’ll do it, but you have to help. I’ll take care of the nasty stuff, don’t worry. But you have to be there.”
“Okay.”
“And I want a third of Empty Mile. I told you I was interested in it and it seems like fair payment for what you want done. Especially as Tripp wants all of it.”
The thought of being connected to Gareth through the land made my blood run cold, but we were going to be connected anyway if we killed Jeremy Tripp, so I said yes. I didn’t really have a choice.
“Okay, a third.”
“And we’re talking a full one-third share, right?”
“What do you mean?”
“Water rights, a share in the timber if we cut any trees down, mineral rights… that sort of thing.”
“If you want.”
“Cool. We’re going to be partners, Johnny!”
“Tripp is only going to hold off a day or two before he goes to the police on the fire thing.”
“That won’t be a problem. I’ve been thinking about this for a while now.”
“It’ll take me a week or so to get the ownership papers for the land changed.”
“We’ve got a deal, dude. I trust you. Shake my hand and it’s done. Just do the papers when you can.”
He held out his hand and as I shook it I felt like I was being pulled into a long dark tunnel from which there was no exit except some dreadful future where everything was dangerous and irrevocably changed from the way it was now.
“This partnership could really benefit you, Johnny. If we ever need to put any money into the place I could leverage the cabins.”
A little while later Gareth left, saying he’d call me the next day when things were set. I deliberately didn’t ask him how he planned to do it. I didn’t want to know any sooner than I had to.
I sat by myself in the Black Cat for another half hour, thinking about how easy it was for humans to do things that changed them forever. One decision. One action. That was all it took. I was poised between two versions of myself-innocent and killer. In moving from one to the other I knew I would lose part of who I was, and I wondered, that afternoon, if there would be enough of me left to recognize when it was all over.
Back at the cabin, when I told Marla things were in motion, she seemed to accept it until I came to the part about the price Gareth had exacted.
“Are you fucking joking?”
“What was I going to say? I can’t do it by myself. And he wants to do it. It’s only a third, we’ll still have the rest.”
“It means he’ll be here all the time. Don’t you understand that? It gives him an excuse. Are you blind? Have you just kind of missed that I can’t stand him anywhere near me? He hates you, Johnny. And he hates me. And he’s not going to waste a fucking minute of this.”
“What was I supposed to do?”
Marla looked at me and shook her head. For a moment her mouth worked, but whatever it was she wanted to say was strangled by her despair and in the end all she could do was lift her eyes to the ceiling and shriek.
CHAPTER 30
The morning of the next day started with Gareth calling and asking about the garden at the back of Jeremy Tripp’s house.
“Can other houses see into it?”
“No, it’s cut straight into the forest.”
“Does it have a fence?”
“No.”
Gareth seemed pleased with this and told me to keep my phone on me and to be ready to go sometime in the afternoon. He called again around three and told me to get over to Old Town as fast as I could. I met him on the main street there. He was parked a hundred yards back from Oakridge’s only movie theater. I pulled up behind him and got into his Jeep. As I slid into the seat he reached across and I was forced to clasp hands with him.