I thought that maybe after I'd been to Bobby's house he wouldn't be with me any more, that he'd wanted to be taken home and would stay there when I left. But it wasn't like that. He followed me north to Montana, coming to Dyersburg when I decided to take the risk and visit the remains of my parents' house. By then it was a month after their death and the explosion up in the mountains, and I hoped life had moved on or at least that no one realized I was stupid enough to do such a thing. I passed the Best Western, where I'd stayed in the days before and after my parents' funeral and first watched a videotape which entirely dismantled what I thought I'd known about my childhood. Finally I doubled back and drove up to the mountainside residential streets where their house had been. I parked a hundred yards down the street and walked the rest of the way. On the first pass I walked right by, doing nothing but noting little had been done to protect the interior from the damage that a pipe bomb had done. On the way back I pushed the gate open and walked confidently up to the house. I was ready to be a loss adjuster, cop, or extremely optimistic Jehovah's Witness, whichever seemed most likely to make someone back off. None proved necessary. I looked around the house for a little while, picking up a few small items that reminded me of them, and then left. It was not their real house. That was in Hunter's Rock, the town where I grew up and thought I had been born. Walking around this shell brought little but out-of-kilter sadness, as if I had missed a train which wasn't even the one I'd planned on taking.
John Zandt called me one night and we went out to Yakima. Our friend Nina pulled the original tip out of the slush pile and re-forwarded it to the Yakima bureau, but it seemed to die the moment it left her desk. That was when we knew we were alone in the wilds, that the conspiracy we had uncovered had longer fingers than we'd realized. Not only did they kill people, both individually and en masse, they evidently did so with little fear of retribution.
After that I ran out of steam. My progress, such as it was, grew slower and slower until I washed up in Relent. I had a cell phone registered in a false name. I had a dead man's laptop and a dwindling supply of bad money. My ribs still hurt from where I'd been knifed by a drug dealer.
My parents would have been so proud.
— «» — «» — «»—
In the end I left the abandoned restaurant and walked into what passed for Relent's main drag. The menu's promises had made me hungry, and all I had in my pockets were some geriatric Teriyaki beef sticks I didn't even remember buying. I found a bar called The Cambridge, run by a middle-aged couple called Bob and Sue, him bearded and affable, her whip-thin and scarily efficient. They were nice but their menu was less enticing than the one in the dead restaurant, and I wound up concentrating on scotch and some local brew that looked like it had been squeezed out of the walls of old buildings but tasted okay after the first three or four. I kept meaning to leave but it started raining outside, a concerted downpour that gusted against the bar's glass frontage like someone throwing handfuls of gravel. So I stayed put, slumped over a seat at the bar and eating snack olives at a slow but consistent rate until I began to feel bilious and my fingers had turned faintly green.
By nine o'clock I was pretty drunk. An hour later nothing had improved. The room was sparsely occupied by knots of locals drinking with steady dedication. An intense young woman with frizzy hair sat on a small stage singing songs whose meaning I could no longer follow. I sensed the world had done her wrong and I sympathized up to a point but her voice was making my head ache. It was time to go somewhere else but there was nowhere in particular to go and it was still raining outside. Every now and then someone would come into the bar looking as if they'd just stepped fully clothed out of the ocean.
After a while one of these people caught my eye. He was tall and thin and went to sit by himself at a table in the back. I found I was keeping an eye on the table's reflection in the glass behind the bar. The Cambridge's lighting was subdued to the point of murky and I couldn't see the guy's face clearly, but a tickling in my scalp told me he was looking my way more often than randomly. I got up and took an unnecessary trip to the john but when I passed near that end of the room his head was turned away, ostensibly to look out into the night.
In the john I ran water until it was cold and splashed it over my face. I knew something was wrong about the man, but I wasn't sure what to do about it. Could be he was just noticing a stranger. But I thought it was more than that. There was a window high up on one side but nothing to stand on except a sink that didn't look like it would take the weight, and little chance my shoulders would make it through.
I decided I was just going to have to confront him. If it was going to happen, then a public place would be best.
When I went back out the table was empty.
Cursing myself for paranoia, I returned to the bar and took a swallow from a beer that was getting warm. The singing woman had been joined by a friend whose hair was even worse. Their combined voices made the veins in my legs vibrate. I signalled at the barman and the owner brought me a bill that didn't seem anywhere near big enough. I chatted with him for another few minutes, and tipped high. My father brought me up well.
It was even colder than I expected when I stepped outside. I was tempted to turn straight around again, see if they'd maybe adopt me or let me sleep at the bar, but once a door is shut behind me it never feels like I can go back. I headed along the street, staying close to the store fronts, trying to keep out of the rain. The street was deserted. I could have driven back with my eyes shut and endangered no one other than myself.
It took a minute or two before I realized a tightness across my back was trying to tell me something.
I stopped. Turned. It wasn't easy to see back down the street, but I could see someone was standing in a doorway about halfway back to the bar. I still couldn't see his face, and he wasn't moving, but no one was out in a night like this for the view.
'Can I help you?'
There was no answer. I put my hand inside my coat. I had left my gun in the car, of course. Who's going to need a gun in Relent, Idaho?'
'Who sent you?'
The guy stepped out. Stood on the pavement. He said something but the rain took it away.
I was tired and drunk and scared. Everything told me to turn around and take off. But I didn't. If they'd caught me here they could catch me anywhere. This was what my life was now. This was going to happen, somewhere or other, sooner or later. Suddenly everything I didn't have and didn't know was in front of me, and I felt light-headed and cold inside.
I started running towards him.
He took a couple of hurried steps backwards but not fast or directed enough. I was on top of him before he knew what was happening and I just started hitting him. I knew I ought to stop, that he might know things that I should know, but I didn't care. I used both hands and my head and we fell together out onto the street. I pushed him away to stand and kick and then bent back down to grab his head, hauling it up ready to hammer it down and up and down until this was over. I was dimly aware of noise in the background but didn't connect with it until I was being pulled back and I realized how stupid I'd been to assume they'd send someone on their own, that there wouldn't be a bunch of them and the only thing I had left to be surprised about was that one of them didn't just shoot and get it over with.
Someone grabbed me. I was held back, locked around each arm. Someone was knelt down next to the guy I'd been hitting, trying to keep his head off the wet street. His face was covered with blood but I saw he was a lot younger than I'd thought, mid-twenties at the most. I realized the person with him was a woman. She looked up at me, and I saw it was Sue, the woman from The Cambridge.