“Doing his job,” he said.
“Right, yes.” Dr. Grail nodded. “You’ve phrased it that way before.”
“You know what else?”
Grail seemed genuinely interested.
“He wouldn’t have wanted a memorial anyway.”
Dr. Jerry Grail ran his finger around his watchband for the eleventh time. Worth had been counting.
They went on like that for the rest of the hour. At the end of the session, Worth snuck out the back of the building, hoping to slip past the television crew.
The bastards had posted rear sentries at the door.
Running the grinder, Vince hadn’t heard anybody behind him.
The thing made so much noise he couldn’t even hear himself think. Which was just how he liked it. He’d ground up enough goddamned limestone these past couple weeks to pave the road all the way out to the highway.
“I saw Matthew in the newspaper,” she said.
At the sound of her voice, he actually felt his heart jump in his chest. Vince turned.
Rita stood a few feet behind him, arms folded, hair blowing around her head in the breeze. She wore one of his coats from the back stairway at the house. It was about ten sizes too big for her. They stood there looking at each other until Vince finally cleared his throat.
“Hi.”
Rita looked off toward the burn shed. Then she pulled the coat a little closer around her.
“I saw pictures of that girl, too. On television. Gwen Mullen?” She shook her head slowly, like she’d heard a sad story somewhere. “They showed photos of what she looked like, after that boy hit her.”
On the word boy, her eyes flickered back toward the shed. Just for a second.
Vince let out a long whiskey sigh. He wanted to walk over there and scoop her up. He wanted to promise her anything. He stood there like a dumb animal.
“She was all bruised,” Rita said. “All up and down.”
“That’s what Matty said.”
Rita finally looked at him. “I want you to tell me something. I’ll know if you’re lying.”
“I won’t lie to you.”
“Did you do it for the money?” She took a step closer. “Vince? Or did you do it for your brother?”
If there was a way he could say it that erased every doubt, he would say it exactly that way. But he couldn’t think of one. He raised his hand, shielding the sun. So she could see his eyes.
“Didn’t know about the money until it was done,” he said. “Can’t tell you I didn’t do it, babe. But I didn’t do it for the money.”
He couldn’t tell if she believed him. If she didn’t, he couldn’t tell that, either. She just stood there, looking into the distance.
“Two things,” she said. “Two things I will not have in my life.”
“Anything.”
“That,” she said. She pointed to the bottle poking from the hip pocket of his coveralls. “And this money. Not one dollar of it. Do you understand?”
Without hesitating, Vince took the bottle, threw it in the grinder, and flipped the switch. The machine made a deafening racket for about four seconds as it chewed up the glass. Rita covered her ears.
When it was over, he left the machine running, raised his voice, and said, “Be right back.”
While Rita stood there, holding his old coat closed with her hands, Vince took the four-wheeler into the scrap yard. Way in, almost to the middle. Where he’d stashed two hundred and sixty-four grand in the trunk of a ’65 Ford.
Even at full throttle, he couldn’t get to it fast enough. It seemed to take a goddamned year to get back, the bag in his lap, grinder still running patiently.
She was still waiting when he got there.
Curtis Modell couldn’t take it anymore.
He knocked a case of green beans out of his brother’s hands, turned him around, and shoved him into the walkway between two half-unloaded pallets for Aisle 12.
The case hit the stockroom floor and broke open. Cans rolled all over.
“Jesus.” Ricky jerked his arm away. “What the hell?”
“Enough,” Curtis said. “You been acting like a goddamn spook for weeks. What’s your deal already?”
Ricky straightened his apron. He looked pissed.
Like Curtis really gave a rat’s ass. He folded his arms and waited. A couple of the other guys stopped working.
“Ooooh.”
“Cat fight.”
“Kick him in the nuts, Ricky!”
Laughs.
Curtis just stood there. His brother was a gonad, but something was eating him. One way or another, he was going to spit it out.
Ricky finally got that look on his face. It was the look he got whenever he’d done something stupid and didn’t want anybody to know about it.
He dropped his voice and said, “Dude, I gotta tell you something.”
“What?”
“Not here.”
“Why?”
“Meet me out by the Dumpsters in an hour. Don’t let these assholes see you, either.”
Jesus, what a goober. Curtis said, “Fine.”
An hour later, he slipped out the back and found his brother smoking a cigarette in the garbage area. Ricky didn’t smoke.
“Okay,” Curtis said. “Just tell me. What’d you do?”
“I didn’t do shit,” Ricky said.
“Then what’s your problem?”
Ricky took a deep breath. He flicked the cigarette away, turned to Curtis, exhaled like an air brake and said: “That night Gwen went to the hospital?”
“Yeah?”
“When I went over there?”
They’d both known something was wrong when she hadn’t shown up for work two nights in a row. Gwennie never missed a shift. No matter how bad the son of a bitch had tuned her.
So Curtis had covered with Sorensen while Ricky took the Blazer over to Gwen’s place. She’d walked into the store two minutes after he’d left.
“When I got there?”
“Just spit it out.”
“Door was standing wide open,” Ricky said. “She must’ve wandered out of there in a daze, man.”
“So?”
“So I went in.”
“And?”
Ricky looked all around. He dropped his voice, leaned in close. Curtis listened.
“Bullshit,” he said.
Ricky shook his head.
“Are you serious?” It wasn’t really a question. He knew by the way the guy was acting. “Holy shit.”
“Tell me about it.”
Curtis couldn’t believe it. He didn’t even know where to start.
“You mean all this time…”
Instead of finishing his sentence, he made a fist and slugged his brother in the shoulder. Hard as he could, points of his knuckles.
“Asshole,” Ricky said, stepping away. “What’s your problem?”
“What’s my problem?” Now it was his turn to check over his shoulder. His turn to whisper. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because you’re a dumbass.”
“Dude, you’re a dumbass.”
Curtis thought of that time, when they were little, Ricky had gone a week without telling anybody he’d found a dead kitten in the air-conditioning unit. He’d been convinced everybody would think he’d done something wrong. Nobody had ever been able to figure out why. Ricky was just that way. Always had been.
“I was going to,” he said. “Okay? I shut the door, hauled ass out of there, came right back here to find you. But you weren’t around, and Gwen was already up in Sorensen’s office with Supercop. So then I was like, okay. You know? Like, man, just leave me out of it.”
“You couldn’t tell me later?”
“I got weirded out.”
Unbelievable. Curtis thought about it.
“So that means…”
Ricky nodded his head. “Yeah.”
“And Supercop must have…”
“I know.”