“What’s the word, Tom?” said his former deputy.
“I’ve got a couple of pieces of information for you, Ed, but I gotta be quick before my phone dies.”
“Hold on a second.” Sutter heard the TV in the background before it went mute and he heard Moran tell his complaining boys to go watch it downstairs.
“I’m listening, Tom.”
Sutter told him he might have his deputies check the urgent care clinic for a young man name of Radner with a gunshot wound to the hand, self-inflicted, and that he might get the postmaster to let him into the mailbox on the corner of Main and Park Street before morning.
There was silence on the line. Then Moran said, “Tom, what have you done?”
“Just calling you with some fresh intel, Ed.” He heard Moran draw a deep breath through his nose and release it the same way.
“You couldn’t just let me do my job. You couldn’t just be patient.”
“Patience has kind of lost its meaning for me, Ed.”
“I know that, Tom. I know all about that.”
“I doubt you do.”
“All right. But I know one thing. I know it doesn’t give you the right to fuck with my investigation.”
Something in Sutter darkened. This man, this former deputy of his… the total lack of respect in his voice. Of memory. Of gratitude.
Into the silence, into Sutter’s rising blood, Moran said, “I mean, Christ, Tom—what if the tables were turned? What if it was your case and I’d done the same?”
Sutter thought about that. Watching the road, the diving snow.
“Tom—?”
“I’m here.”
Moran said nothing. Breathing through his nose again. Finally he said, “Is that it?” and Sutter said no, it wasn’t, and told him about the backscratcher, the scratches on the boy’s face. The hard evidence that would place the boy at the scene.
Silence again—not even the breathing, and Sutter glanced at the phone.
“Funny she never mentioned a backscratcher when I interviewed her, Tom.”
“She didn’t remember till later.”
“Ah.”
“I know he took it with him, Ed, this son of a bitch.”
“Yeah? You reckon we’ll find it under his pillow?”
Now Sutter was silent. He could see his deputy’s hardened jaw, the thin lips pressed to a single hard line in his face. But when Moran spoke again he did not sound so angry. He sounded tired, sounded discouraged.
“Tom,” he said, “it won’t change a thing, going after this boy down here like this.”
“The hell it won’t.”
“I mean it won’t change what happened before, up there. That boy up there—well, he’s no boy anymore. He, or some other man, is walking free today and he’ll be walking free tomorrow.”
The mention of the boy dropped Sutter back in time—ten years. Holly Burke in the river. The boy himself, Danny Young, sitting across from him in the interview room, scared but not stupid. Careful. Not under arrest but knowing his life was on the line, right there, right then… And you let him go.
“We were the law, Tom,” Moran was saying. “We followed the book. And we’d have thrown his ass in jail if we could have. But there was one problem—remember?”
Sutter said he did but Moran reminded him anyway: No witness, no evidence, no case.
There was another silence. Sutter realized he was nodding and stopped it. He said, “How’re your boys, Ed? Little Ed and the other one—Eli?”
“What? They’re fine. Jesus, Tom—are you gonna tell me you’re just doing what any father would do?”
“Not any father, Ed. I wouldn’t say that. Just the father of a daughter.”
Moran said nothing. Sutter watching the snow in his beams, thick and constant.
“A man doesn’t really ever know himself, Ed,” he said. “He thinks he does, but he doesn’t. There’s something in him that goes deeper than anything in his raising or his beliefs or his badge or whatever the hell he lives by. And once he reaches that place, well. Right and wrong are just words.”
Moran did not respond, and Sutter moved the phone from his ear to look at it again and nearly drifted off the road—corrected, and shook his head at his stupidity. How many times had he warned his own daughter? The dead kids he’d seen, their mothers or girlfriends or boyfriends still on the line saying, Hello, hello—?
“Shit, Tom,” his deputy said. “This is all just words.”
“I know it, Ed. But listen, my phone is dying here and I gotta let you go. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
He hung up and set the phone on the seat and drove awhile with both hands on the wheel. The snow diving into the headlights. The click and squeak of the wipers. His heart was going and he got a cigarette into his lips and cracked the window and lit the cigarette and blew the smoke into the draft.
She was silent. Then she said, He’s right, you know.
“About what.”
You know what.
Sutter smoked. He drove. He crossed the state line into Minnesota and continued north into the town of Charlotte, and he could not drive through that town without thinking of the morgue there, of the bodies that had waited in those cabinets to be seen by parents, by wives or husbands, by grown children. Gordon Burke looking down on his daughter and putting his hand to her forehead, a father taking his child’s temperature. And he saw his own daughter looking up at him from her bed, red-faced, and he saw his own hand pushing her hair from her forehead—and his heart abruptly plunged, and then began to pound, and “Jesus Christ,” he said, and reached for the phone once again, thumbed it on and stared at the screen: the two smiling faces in those black caps.
Tom—the road!
He corrected again, and thumbed at the phone again, but the screen went dark.
“You son of a bitch,” he said. “You dumb son of a bitch.”
He sped up, and when he flew by the turn for home she said, What are you doing?
“I’m going up there. To the hospital.”
Why?
“I need to see her. I need to talk to her.”
It’s late, Tom. She’s sleeping.
He drove on. He felt a great panic in his heart. Like the car would not make it. Like it would blow a tire or throw a rod before he got there, before he could see her again.
Tom… she said. Sutter, she said, and he glanced over. You can’t do this now. You need to come home.
“I have to do this, Annie. Just—please…”
He gripped the wheel and drove on, into the diving snow, and she did not speak to him again until he’d pulled over and put the car in park. The motor running. The lights on, the wipers sweeping.
It’s all right, she said. Just get your breath.
He thumbed at the phone—no light, no nothing—and he popped open the glovebox and pawed everything out of there but there was no cord, no charger—what kind of an idiot, Jesus Christ—and it was then she caught up his hand in hers, held it in both of hers until it was still, until it was quiet.
She rested her head on his shoulder and after a while he put his head to her head and like that they rested. They breathed, looking out the windshield at the endless snow, how it dove into the lights and dashed itself soundlessly on the glass, how the wipers in their quiet rhythm swept it away and yet the snow kept coming… a million flakes, a billion, just diving and diving into the lights and no end to it that they could see.
26
HE WASN’T SUPPOSED to come before eight a.m. but she’d been sitting in the wheelchair since seven, face washed, teeth brushed, dressed and ready to go, glancing back at the clock—the plain round clockface strategically placed so that you could know exactly how slowly time moved when you were stuck in a mechanical bed with your broken arm that itched and itched under its cast—glancing at the clock every minute, until at last eight o’clock came. And went. And he was late. Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. Well, wasn’t he always? People called, they needed him—car accidents, fights. Law and order. Weekends included. That was his job, or had been, and so she’d waited: after band practice after school, after the movies with Jenny White, who was her best friend for one year of middle school, after her shift at Portman’s Dairy the summer before she left for college and she had her license but no car because he couldn’t afford even a used one, he said, but really it was because of all the teenagers and pieces of teenagers he’d seen strewn all over the roads. She waited for him on street corners and in the shade of trees and on Mrs. Aberdeen’s porchsteps as the old woman’s next student pounded out her scales inside the house; she waited for him as he went into her mother’s hospital room alone, and now she waited for him in her own hospital room, in the wheelchair, facing the open door, watching the open door, watching the clock behind her, waiting.