‘It’s the truth.’
‘And you don’t know where he might be headed?’
‘I already told you like an hour ago.’
‘And if you told the truth you should be able to remember what you said.’
‘I said I didn’t know but if I had to guess, Juarez by way of El Paso.’
‘Is your brother that fucking stupid?’
‘Well, he ain’t a Mensa member.’
‘But you think he’s dumb enough to try to cross a border with every cop in the state looking for him?’
‘I don’t know. It was just a guess.’
‘A pretty shit one. Your brother’s not that stupid and you know it.’
A knock at the door, and then it squeaks open.
Diego looks over his shoulder. Sheriff Sizemore pokes his Stetson-topped head into the room. He wipes at his mouth with his palm.
‘Officer Diego.’
‘It’s Officer Peña.’
‘Let’s talk.’
Diego nods, then gets to his feet and follows the sheriff out into the empty front room of the police station, making sure the door is locked on the younger Dean brother.
‘What is it, sheriff?’
‘You’ve been going in circles for over an hour.’
‘I know, but he’ll slip. I’m wearing him down.’
‘Look, this is our case. A county case. You don’t have the resources. I agreed to the hour outta courtesy for what happened to Officer Hunt’s daughter. For what happened to the chief. I know it means something to you guys. And, yeah, I thought maybe you’d be able to get something we could use. But one of ours got shot too, died, and the fucking hour is up, Officer Diego.’
‘Officer Peña. And I just need another thirty minutes.’
‘You can’t have it.’
‘I can’t have it?’
‘Nope.’
‘Well, what the fuck?’
The sheriff shrugs, seeming suddenly bored by the conversation. ‘That’s just the way it is,’ he says. ‘I got a manhunt going on and I’m done letting you dance in circles with our only possible source of information.’
Diego watches Sheriff Sizemore lead the younger Dean to the back of his car and put him into it. Then Sizemore looks back at Diego and nods. Diego does not nod back. Sizemore gets into his vehicle and drives way, taking Donald to the sheriff’s office down the street.
Diego tries to roll a cigarette, but his hands are shaky. He cannot seem to keep the tobacco in his paper. It shakes from the paper and falls to the asphalt. Finally, after his third try, he balls the rolling paper in his fist and throws it to the ground. He turns around and heads inside.
Didn’t really want a cigarette, anyway.
Picture a calm sea of oily black. Horizon to horizon: only this sea, flat and featureless. An entire planet covered in liquid midnight. A moon overhead like a silver dollar, and a few stars, but nothing more. There are no islands or trees. No fish or whales. Just a dead calm. Nothing other than one man floating on his back in the middle of it: Ian. Ian, floating in darkness. Arms and legs spread like the Vitruvian Man. Eyes open. He looks toward the heavens expecting God, but all he gets is the voice of the darkness between the stars: a hollow call like a desert wind.
Then something touches his left hand. Someone touches his left hand. It is human. He is not alone. He tries to turn his head to the left but he cannot. Someone is stroking the web between thumb and index finger.
He doesn’t understand why he can’t turn his head to the left.
Open your eyes.
They are open: the moon like a silver dollar and the points of stars.
Open your eyes.
He does and the night sky gives way to a white ceiling, first out of focus and soft, then gaining sharpness. He blinks several times and turns his head to the left.
Debbie looks up from her lap. Her face is thin. She looks old, somehow, and tired. He has never thought that of her before, but he thinks it now. She is not wearing makeup and her eyes are red and the skin beneath them is blotchy and dark gray and the corners of her mouth are turned down.
‘Hi,’ he says, but it is little more than a whisper.
She says nothing at first, just looks at him. She wipes her nose, her red-rimmed nostrils, with the back of her wrist. Finally: ‘Bill’s dead.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Then he coughs, and there is that strange feeling like trying to breathe underwater. He coughs and coughs, and feels like phlegm or something should come up, but nothing does. His muscles tighten as he coughs and pain ripples through his body from the dropped-pebble point where the bullet said hello. He hears a strange liquid sucking sound from beneath a thin blanket which covers his torso. He lifts the blanket. A clear tube, a catheter about as big around as a woman’s pinky finger, sutured into his chest just under his armpit. Thread stitched through his flesh and then wrapped around the catheter to hold it into place. The skin pursed around it like lips around a straw, like some strange alien tulip. In the tube, blood and pus combined to form a thick pink liquid. A knot of it flows down the catheter to a small box on the floor with PLEUR-EVAC written on it.
He coughs again, and more liquid flows from his chest and into the tube. It hurts to cough. It hurts even to breathe.
‘Jesus,’ he says when he gets his breath back.
‘You were shot.’
After a moment, after he manages to get his breath back, he says, ‘I know.’
‘You had a collapsed lung.’
Ian nods.
Debbie frowns and looks down at her lap once more.
‘The twins are too young to remember Bill. They’ll grow up without any memories of their father to look back on.’
Ian is silent for a long time, lost on a strange raft of wooziness. Then what Deb said registers and he says, ‘Maybe-maybe that’s for the best. If it had to happen. Maybe you can’t miss something you don’t remember.’
Debbie shakes her head. ‘I don’t think it works that way.’
He squeezes Debbie’s hand. ‘I’m sorry about Bill. He made you happy. You deserve happiness.’
Debbie nods but says nothing. Instead she turns to look at an empty chair in the corner. She looks at it for a long time.
‘Did they get him at least? Is Maggie safe?’
Debbie shakes her head.
‘Bill’s dead, Chief Davis is in critical condition, he has no face, he’ll have to eat through a tube for the rest of his life, if he lives, and you’re here-yet that son of a bitch still has Maggie. It’s not right. It’s not fucking-’ Her voice chokes off and she looks down at her lap, and her shoulders shake.
‘We’ll get her back, Deb.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know, but we will. I’ll think of something.’
He squeezes her hand again, but then another coughing fit overwhelms him, sending pain through his body like poison, and more blood and pus drain from his lung and into the catheter flowing from his chest.
‘Oh, fuck,’ he says. Then, once he’s caught his breath, ‘I’ll think of something. I’ll think of something and I’ll get her back.’
‘Do you really believe that?’
‘Yes.’
Debbie nods. ‘Then I’ll believe it too.’
The sun, partially hidden behind the western horizon (looking to Maggie like a grapefruit-half laid face-down on a table), spills pink light into the evening sky. The Ford Ranger rolls along the road toward it though Maggie knows if that’s their destination they’ll never make it. This thought reminds her of a conversation she once had with her daddy. She asked him why moths like light bulbs so much and Daddy said they thought light bulbs were the moon, that moths at night used the moon for guidance and flew toward it constantly, though they never reached it, and that they did the same with light bulbs, but once they’d reached the light they had no idea what to do with it. The moon had taught them that they would never have to worry about actually reaching their destination.
‘That’s kind of sad,’ Maggie said.