“Hello,” I said.
“What?” Sally said.
“We got someone coming up behind us.”
“What do you mean? Following us?”
I couldn’t make out whether it was a car or a truck, but I could tell this much: The headlights in my mirror were getting bigger.
I took the truck up to seventy. Then seventy-five.
Sally had twisted around in her seat. “Is he falling back?”
“I don’t think so.” I was looking in my mirror every couple of seconds. I could feel my heart pounding in my chest. “Okay, let’s see what he does if I slow down.”
I took my foot off the gas and let the truck coast down back to something approaching the speed limit. The headlights started to loom large, and extremely bright, in my mirror. I could see now that they sat up high, so it was a truck or SUV of some kind.
And the son of a bitch was riding with his high beams on. I reached up and hit the mirror with my fist to shift the glare out of my eyes.
The vehicle was almost on my bumper now.
“Hang on,” I told Sally.
I hit the brakes, not hard enough that the driver behind would hit me, but enough to slow my truck so that when I turned in to the gas station I wouldn’t end up sending us ass over teakettle.
A horn started blaring the moment my brake lights flared. And the horn kept going as I swerved into the gas station lot. The truck steered briefly into the oncoming lane, but instead of slowing down, sped up even more. As I slammed harder on the brakes I glanced to my left.
It was a black Hummer, its horn blaring as it drove off into the night.
Sally and I were both panting as we sat there by the dimmed gas pumps.
“False alarm,” I said.
I got out my cell, punched in the three digits, and waited to talk to the emergency dispatcher.
Dawn was breaking when we got back to the scene. A police car had met us at the gas station. I had turned around and led the cop back to the end of Theo’s driveway. With the sun coming up, it was easier to lead the officer into the woods and find the body. When we got to within ten feet of it, I pointed and stood back with Sally.
It wasn’t long before another half a dozen state police cars had arrived and that stretch of road was closed off. A black cop by the name of Dillon did a preliminary interview with Sally and me, trying to get the sequence of events right. He said a detective would be wanting to talk to us all over again, which turned out to be right, but we had to wait an hour for that round of questioning.
We’d been told not to leave, so we spent a lot of our time sitting in my truck, listening to the radio. Sally seemed numb. For long stretches she just sat there, staring at the dashboard.
“You okay?” I asked every few minutes, and usually she’d just nod once.
I reached over one time to give her a comforting pat on the arm, and she pulled away.
“What?” I asked.
She turned and studied me. “You set all this into motion.”
“Excuse me?”
“Going around accusing Theo and Doug of things.”
“We don’t know what happened here, Sally.”
She looked back through the windshield, avoiding eye contact. “I’m just saying, you go see Theo, and then you go see Doug, and in the night they were talking to each other, and something happened.”
I wanted to defend myself, to tell Sally I acted on the information I had, and on the things I had discovered. That I never intended for anything like this to happen. But instead I said nothing.
I decided it was best to wait for the facts to come in. Maybe, when they did, it would turn out that everything Sally was saying was right.
And I’d have to deal with it then.
I told the lead detective, whose name was Julie Stryker, that we had found Doug Pinder’s number on Theo’s outgoing call list. I had to tell her where the police could find him, up at his mother-in-law’s place.
“But he’s a good guy,” I said. “He wouldn’t do anything like that.”
“No kind of bad blood between them?” Stryker asked.
I hesitated. “Not… really. But they might have had a few things to say to each other. There’d been some developments yesterday.”
Detective Stryker wanted to know what those were. I filled her in on the report I’d had from Alfie at the fire department and how that related to Theo. Then I explained about the stuff I’d found in Doug’s truck and how that tied in as well.
“So, these two, they might be wanting to blame each other for what happened at your job site,” Stryker reasoned.
“It’s possible,” I agreed. “I can call Doug, see if-”
“No, Mr. Garber. Do not make that call. We’ll have a word with Mr. Pinder ourselves.”
Ken Wang phoned me.
“Hey, boss, Stew and I are ready to get to it, but there’s nobody here,” he said in his Southern drawl. “Where’s Sally? She usually opens things up.”
“Sally’s with me.”
“What?”
I could picture the eyebrows going up. “She had some trouble in the night. And I don’t think Doug will be coming in, either. Listen, Ken, I’d rather have this conversation in person, but I’m going to have to ask you this now.”
“Sure. What’s on y’all’s mind?”
“I need you to step up. I need you to be Doug. My second in command.”
“Shee-it. What’s up with Doug?”
“Can you do it?”
“Sure. I get a raise?”
“When I see you, we’ll talk. It’s your show today. Figure out what needs to get done and do it.” Before he could say anything, I ended the call.
When Stryker returned, she wasn’t interested in answering our questions, but we did manage to learn that Theo had been shot. Three times, in the back.
Sally tried to hold it together, but wasn’t having much luck.
“Who shoots someone in the back?” she asked me.
I didn’t answer that question. Instead, I asked, “Has Theo got family around here?”
Sally managed to tell me he had a married brother in Boston, a sister in Utica who’d recently been divorced, and his father still lived in Greece. Theo’s mother had died three years ago. Sally figured, where notifying next of kin was concerned, police should start with Theo’s brother. He was someone who could get things done, who’d make the funeral arrangements, empty out the trailer, that kind of thing.
“Do you want me to call him for you?” I offered.
“Won’t the police do that?”
“I think so.”
“I can’t do it,” Sally said. “I can’t.”
“Listen,” I said, “if there’s anything else you need, tell me.”
She looked at me with wet eyes. “I’m sorry I freaked out on you.”
“It’s okay.”
“I know you did what you had to do. It’s just, I thought he was my one shot. I mean, he wasn’t Mr. Perfect, but I think he loved me.”
We didn’t talk for a few minutes. There was something on my mind. It had been there since before I’d fallen asleep, and even in the midst of the horrible events of the last few hours, it had never been far from the surface.
“I need to ask you something,” I said to her.
“Yes?”
“This is going to sound totally crazy, but I need to bounce it off you.”
“This is about Theo?”
“No, it’s about Sheila.”
“Yeah, sure, whatever, go ahead, Glen.”
“You know Sheila’s death, it’s never made sense to me.”
“I know,” she said quietly.
“Even though I’ve never been able to get my head around the fact that Sheila would get behind the wheel drunk, I’ve never been able to come up with any kind of rational explanation for what happened. But I have one now.”
She tilted her head, curious. “What is it?”
“It’s so simple, really. What if someone forced her to drink?”
“What?”
“Maybe the tests the forensic people did are right. Sheila was drunk. But what if someone made her drink a lot, against her will?”
“Glen, that’s crazy,” Sally protested. “Who would do such a horrible thing to Sheila?”
I squeezed the wheel. “Yeah, well, I don’t know exactly, but there’s been so much strange shit going on lately. It would take forever to tell you all of it but-”