“Where is it?”
“Where’s what?”
“You know what.”
He shook his head. “I swear I don’t.”
“The backscratcher, Radner. Where is it?”
Radner craned his neck to look at him. Fear and pain in those dark eyes.
“You’re crazy,” Radner said. “You’re just plain crazy. You better let me go before this gets any worse. I won’t say nothin. People make mistakes, I get that. I won’t go to the sheriff or nothin. You just go your way and I’ll go mine, how about that, huh? What’ve you got to lose?”
Sutter was silent. His breaths smoking. His heart slamming. He looked up at the sky. Slow tumble of flakes, landing cold on his face and melting. Faintly there was the fishy, muddy smell of a river… but any river would be frozen and you wouldn’t smell it, and then he understood that the smell came from Holly Burke—from her wet hair, from the air trapped in the white bag and escaping like breath when they unzipped it, and—
Tom, she said. Sutter…
Something buzzed at his side, and he heard the muted tune, and with his free hand he reached into his jacket pocket and fetched up the phone and along with it a louder rendition of the same tune that sounded in the emptiness of the lot like some tiny and maniacal bugler.
“Let me answer it,” Radner said. “Let me talk to someone.”
Sutter read the name on the screen, mary anne, and with his thumb ended the tune, and with another press of his thumb shut the phone down. He returned it to his pocket, then raised his watch and looked at it. Like a man of appointments and schedules. Like a man who needed to be somewhere else and had been here too long. He stared at the watchface and he saw the three hands and he saw the time markers, but however he moved the watch it seemed to float in a blind spot in his vision and he couldn’t read it, and this was somehow the most frightening thing, the thing that made him sick at heart.
He felt out the key in the clutter of his pocket and fitted it into the cuffs and pulled them away, and Radner pitched forward onto his palms in the snow and there he remained, like a man heaved up ashore.
Sutter stepped around him and stood where Radner could see his boots.
“Look up here.”
Radner looked up. Sutter standing against the flecks of snow, the gray sky. Radner got up on his knees, rubbing at his wrists. He’d not been told to stay on his knees but he stayed on them just the same.
“Do you believe in God?” Sutter said.
“What?”
“You heard me.”
Radner looked at him as if he’d never really seen him before.
“You ain’t no sheriff. What are you?”
“Answer my question.”
Radner hung his head and shook it. “God,” he said. “What’s he got to do with this?”
“That’s a good question, but it’s no answer.”
Radner looked up again. Sutter watched his eyes. He could see that the boy was seeing last things, wondering at the coldness, the meaninglessness of it all. The unfairness—in a parking lot, in the snow? As a young girl might’ve looked up at pine trees, at the cold moon, as she was carried, or dragged, toward the river.
“Yes, sir,” Radner said. “Yes sir I do believe in God. And Jesus too.”
“Is that the truth?”
“I swear to God it is, Sheriff.”
“Good,” said Sutter. “In about thirty seconds I’m driving away from here and this never happened and you never saw me.”
Sutter saw hope enter the young man’s eyes like some drug.
“I never saw you,” Radner said. “This never happened.”
“But on one condition.”
“Name it, Sheriff.”
“I want you to raise your right hand and swear to God you had nothing to do with what happened to those two girls that night. At the gas station and at the river.”
Radner raised his right hand, the palm clean and pink but the fingers stained with oil and grease—this stinking hand on his little girl’s face—and he said gravely, “I swear it, Sheriff. I swear it to God and Jesus. I swear it on my mother’s soul.” And as the young man said these words Sutter pulled the other gun, Radner’s .45, from his pocket and thumbed off the safety and took one step forward—
“Don’t,” said Radner.
—and put the barrel to the center of the raised hand and pulled the trigger and saw the hand whip away. Saw the pink cloud and thought he saw small bones from the center of the hand fly off into the snow and he knew that that hand would never again hold a wrench, or any other thing.
The gunshot rang off the back of the machine shop and flew from building to building until it became a volley of gunfire, a sudden shoot-out in the night. Radner’s howls and curses followed but Sutter didn’t hear them. He’d pulled a mechanic’s rag from the benchseat and he was wiping down the steering wheel, the gear lever, the handles inside and out and he even wiped down the keys. Lastly he wiped the empty .45 and set it on the benchseat and shut the door.
Radner remained on his knees in the snow, folded over his hand and still cursing but quieter now, like a man in argument with himself.
“Here,” said Sutter, and Radner looked up, white-faced, grimacing. He looked Sutter in the eye, then snatched the red rag from him and wrapped it around his hand. “I’m throwing your keys in the bed of the truck,” Sutter said. “You find them and you drive yourself to the urgent care clinic on Highland. You know where that is?”
“Gimme my phone so I can call an ambulance.”
“You don’t need an ambulance.”
Radner hung his head. A string of drool swinging from his lip. “Crazy motherfucker. Think they won’t find you and lock your ass up?”
“They might,” he said. “But I got a feeling after you think on it awhile you’ll come to remember that you shot yourself in the hand. Happens every day to people even smarter than you.” Then he walked to the sedan and got behind the wheel and turned over the engine and drove out the way he’d come, and the last thing he saw in the mirror before his view was blocked by the building was the dark figure rising from the snow and staggering toward the tailgate of the truck, and he did not hear the figure’s curses but only saw them, bursting from its mouth and following its head in clouds of rage.
ON HIS WAY back through town he pulled over and sat thumbing through the contacts on Radner’s phone. His heart was still pounding and would not let up. There was no Bud that he saw. He checked the texts but they only went back two days and no Bud there either. He checked the phone log—nothing. Bud as in “buddy.” Jesus Christ. He saw that hand again, that filthy hand, the bits of pink and bone flying.
He wiped down the phone and got out of the car and stepped up to the blue public mailbox at the corner; there was the dull bong of the phone on the floor of the box, and he returned to the car and drove on. Past the last stoplight. Past the Shell station out there on the county road—same blond head in the window as before, bent over its puzzles as ever, steady as a monk, or a lifer in her cell. Over the trestle bridge, over the river. North.
Silence in the car. Sutter waiting for her to say something, anything—A crazy man, I married a crazy man—but she would not. Saying everything with her silence.
The snow was falling heavier, shaping out the beams of his headlights before him like two great cones. He was five miles out of town, heading north again on the 52, before he took up his own phone and thumbed at the lighted menu. He’d not charged the phone, and the battery was in the red. A deputy answered and transferred the call and Sutter drummed the wheel as he waited. He looked at his hand, the pale, intact palm, and drummed the wheel again.