“Who the hell is that?” asked Millner, holding his hand before his eyes to block the light.
“It’s Chief Stone, John. What are you doing here?”
Millner hemmed and hawed, thinking of any reasonable lie.
“Don’t bother,” Jesse said. “I’m not in the mood for your crap. Consider yourself lucky I don’t want to deal with you tonight. Now, get out of here and don’t let any of my people catch your ass up here again.”
Millner didn’t say a word, just got back into his van and drove away down toward town. Jesse watched the van’s taillights until they disappeared. Then he stepped to the edge of the bluff on which the Rutherford house stood. He looked out at the vast blackness of the Atlantic. He listened to the bones of the old house creak in the wind, listened to the wind whistling through the broken windows. He thought he heard the devil at work. He decided he really needed that drink.
2
He supposed they were all thinking the same thing: This can’t be happening. Not again. Not after all these years. But it was happening, only this time they weren’t a bunch of kids with too much Southern Comfort and Thai stick in them. That first time, it was some innocent fun gone sideways. Severely sideways, plunging them into a paralyzing hell with slick, jagged walls from which there would be no escape. None. Not ever. That they were here to kill their old friend proved as much.
They had been given a temporary reprieve, a cruel reprieve, lasting just long enough to fool them into believing they had put real distance between that old evil and the fragile lives they had built in the meantime. Lives that included wives and lovers, children, careers, small successes, and grander failures, but haunted lives just the same. Haunted because distance from evil is a myth of time, because they were never more than one restless night or, worse still, a tainted moment of joy away from it.
The wind rattled the windows and the loading bay door. The plinking of sleet was less urgent now that the snow was falling in sheets and collecting on the corrugated metal roof. Raw, cold air seeped into the maintenance shed like an accusation and made heaving clouds of their breath. Small plumes of breath came from the mouth of the nude man on the floor at their feet. His wrists and ankles were trussed behind him and his sun-streaked brown hair was caked with the drying blood that had leaked from the welt at the base of his skull. His broken lower jaw was unhinged, his mouth a wreck of splintered teeth and bone. After the pipe had been laid into him, the spray of blood had given the air a coppery tang that the two other men could almost taste. But the blood had settled out of the air like silt out of water. Now the place smelled only of burnt black motor oil, gasoline fumes, and antifreeze.
“What’d you do with his clothes?”
“The furnace in the church.”
“His duffel bag?”
“It’s a big furnace. Burnt that up, too. Nothing but old, smelly clothes and a Bible, anyways.”
“Okay, drag that canvas over here and wrap it around his head.”
“You really gonna do this?”
“We are.”
“But that’s Zevon, man. He was our friend once.”
“Friends don’t come back to town to fuck up everyone else’s lives. If he wanted to stay my friend, he should have stayed lost. You may not have anything to lose, but I do.”
“But—”
“But nothing. We talked this through. We all agreed. It’s too late now, anyway. He’s already more than half-dead. Now, get the canvas and do what I told you. The storm’s blowing in faster than we thought and he’s going to be here soon to get rid of the body. C’mon.”
The unconscious man moaned a little as the coarse, mildewed fabric was wrapped around his head.
“What’s the canvas for, anyways?”
“Think about it.”
“Oh.”
“Exactly. You got the tarp ready for him? The rope?”
“Yeah.”
Outside, there was already six inches on the ground and the roads were slick from the layer of sleet that had come before the snow. As he swung around to back up to the bay door, he checked his rearview mirror and saw two quick flashes of lightning and heard two muted claps of thunder. It was done. Zevon was dead. Now the time had come to play his part in keeping the past buried. Yet he understood that this particular episode of thunder and lightning, like their prior sins, was of their own doing and pushed them even further away from heaven than they already were. That the past was unrelenting and that no grave was deep enough to keep it buried forever.
3
Jesse hadn’t slept a wink after getting home. He hadn’t tried. He did manage to polish off two Black Labels. That’s why he’d headed home in the first place. Sleep hadn’t ever been a part of the plan, not really. It was always about the drinks. Drinkers are great rationalizers, spinning tales that only they will hear. Tales only they would believe. Jesse kept a bottle of something in his desk drawer at the station, but he didn’t generally prefer drink at work or when the sun was up. Coming home, having a drink before dinner, then one or two afterward, was sometimes how he got through the day. He knew his bottle of Johnnie Walker was home waiting for him like a faithful wife. He’d had a wife once, just not a faithful one.
His ritual entailed pouring the drink — sometimes on the rocks, sometimes in a tall glass with soda — stirring it with his finger, licking the scotch off his finger, raising a toast to his poster of Ozzie Smith, and taking that first sip. Sometimes he savored it. Sometimes, like that night, it was open wide and down the hatch. Any confirmed drinker knows that ritual is as integral to the addiction as the drinking itself. Dix was fond of saying that ritual was a secondary reinforcement. Jesse laughed at the notion of secondary reinforcement. He liked the drinking well enough all by itself. He enjoyed the ritual on its own merits. He’d gotten some food in him, taken a shower, and watched a half hour of weather reports before heading back to work.
Whatever sleep Jesse had managed came on the cot in his office. He was still on the cot, staring up at the ceiling, when the first dull rays of light filtered in through his window. He noticed the window was no longer being pelted and the howl of the wind had been reduced to a whisper. Morning had brought with it a soft hush. Then there was a knock at his office door.
“Come,” he said.
Luther “Suitcase” Simpson came into the office, a lack of sleep evident on his puffy, still-boyish face and in his bloodshot eyes. He was moving more slowly these days, and not from lack of sleep. It was painful for Jesse to watch. A big man, Suit had been quite the high school football player in his day. But he’d been gut-shot last spring and was only now getting back to work.
“Any coffee out there?” Jesse asked, swinging his legs off the cot.
“Sure, but I wouldn’t drink it. Better to save what’s left and use it to strip paint.”
Jesse stood, stretched the tension out of his muscles. His right shoulder aching from the damp air.
“Making a fresh pot of coffee against your religion?”
Suit reddened. “I’m not Molly, Jesse. You know I’m no good at this stuff. You got to get me back on the street.”
Simpson had been on light duty since his return and chafed at working the front desk. Worse, Molly Crane had taken Suit’s place in the patrol rotation.
“I know this is tough for you, Suit. I already stuck my neck out by bringing you back this soon.”