“No,” Page said. “If it hadn’t been for me.”
“I couldn’t resist. They seemed to be calling me.”
He considered what she’d said, then gave her an extremely direct look.
“Let’s pack and get out of here. Not tomorrow. Right now. We can be at your mother’s house by morning. Are you ready to do that?”
Tori lowered her head and didn’t reply, in effect giving him an answer. He remembered what had happened in the field. After what she had said and done to him, he wasn’t about to try to force her to leave. He wasn’t even certain he could force her to leave. So he came to a decision.
“In that case, I need to be a cop a while longer. This has gone way past the point where I can just let things keep controlling us. I’m going to find out what’s going on.”
44
Page jerked awake, struck anew by the stark reality of what Tori had told him about her cancer and by what had happened the night before.
So much to adjust to.
Sunlight crept past the cheap drapes, but he didn’t feel at all rested, even though a glance at the bedside clock showed him that the time was 1:14 and that he’d slept another twelve hours.
This time Tori remained in her bed.
Groggy, he went into the bathroom, softly closed the door, and shaved, running the water as little as possible, trying not to make noise.
When he came out, Tori was putting on a pair of slacks.
“Sorry if I woke you,” he said.
“It wasn’t a good sleep.”
“The same with me.” He touched the shirt and jeans that he’d put on a hangar. “Still wet.” He glanced down at the clothes he’d slept in. Wrinkled, they continued to retain the odor of the fire two nights earlier.
“Looks like we need to do some shopping,” Tori concluded.
When they stepped from the room and faced the harsh sunlight, Page was troubled by the number of vehicles streaming past the motel-many more than on the previous day. It took even longer for Tori to find a break in the traffic and steer the Saturn onto the road.
In town, the streets were filled with cars. All the parking spaces were occupied. Tori let Page out in front of a store called the Out – fitter, where there were so many tourists that he had to wait fifteen minutes to pay for new clothes. It took another fifteen minutes to get into a dressing room. He put on a pair of pants, a T-shirt, and a shirt to wear over it-something that would conceal his handgun. When he came out with his old clothes in a shopping bag, he heard a customer talking to a female clerk.
“Do people really see lights around here?”
“Yes,” the clerk answered. “But it’s been years since I went looking for them.”
“Aren’t you curious what they are?” the customer asked.
“When I was a kid. But I got used to them.”
As Page walked toward the front of the store, he heard another customer telling a different clerk, “My wife has diabetes. We heard this place makes miracles happen, like at Lourdes. If she sees the lights, she’ll be cured.”
Page went out to the sidewalk, where Tori was waiting with two sandwiches and two bottles of water from a restaurant next door.
Cured? he thought. Wouldn’t that be nice?
They ate while they walked three blocks to the hospital. There Tori again paused nervously on the hot steps outside the entrance.
“Another day closer to the start of the rest of your life,” Page tried to reassure her.
She took a breath and forced herself to go in.
Upstairs, in the brightly lit hallway, the sharp odor of disinfectant seemed stronger as they walked toward Costigan’s room.
The chief ’s familiar raspy voice came from it, telling someone, “God help us if the next riot spreads to town. How many people were injured?”
“Twenty-three,” a different voice answered. “Twelve got gashed pretty bad on the barbed-wire fence.”
“And the others?”
“Six were almost trampled to death. The rest were hurt in fights.”
Page was uncomfortable eavesdropping. He motioned for Tori to follow him as he stepped into the doorway.
Their footsteps made a man turn in their direction. He was in his fifties, stocky, with a sunburned complexion. His sport coat had a Western cut and a zigzag design over the left and right breast. He wore a large belt buckle and held a cowboy hat.
“Sorry to interrupt,” Page said. “We just wanted to see how Chief Costigan was doing.”
“A lot better, thanks.” Propped up in bed, Costigan looked less gray. His mustache now had some contrast with his skin, and the heart and blood-pressure monitors were gone. The IV tube had been removed from his arm, although the thick bandage remained around his skull. “They say they’ll let me go home tomorrow as long as I remember not to bang my head against anything. This is Hank Wagner. He runs the drugstore in town. More to the point, he’s also our mayor, which, at the moment, he wishes he wasn’t.”
Page shook hands with Wagner.
“Dan Page. This is my wife, Tori.”
“The chief told me about you. You’re the couple who saved those people on the bus Thursday night. You’re the woman who…” Seeing her discomfort, the mayor said, “Well, we’re grateful for what you did. Without your help, the situation could have been even worse.”
He looked at his watch. “You’ll have to excuse me. I need to get to an emergency town council meeting.”
They watched him leave and then redirected their attention toward Costigan.
“Do you really feel better?” Tori asked.
“The headache’s not as bad. And I don’t have damned needles sticking into me. The doctor finally took me off a diet of broth and Jell-O.” Costigan pointed toward Page’s bruised mouth. “Looks like you’re one of the people who got hurt last night.”
“Things were a little crazy. Can I ask you a question?”
“You can ask.” Costigan’s voice hung in the air, suggesting, But I might not answer.
“The man who killed your father…”
For a moment, Costigan’s pained eyes focused on the past. “What about him?”
“You said he’d come to Rostov only a couple of months earlier.”
“He’d lost his job in Fort Worth when the factory he worked for moved to Mexico. He couldn’t find anything else. One of his relatives lived here and managed to get him a job at the stock pens.”
“You also said he was a drinker, that he got in arguments in bars. His wife buttoned her collars and wore long sleeves even on hot days-to hide her bruises.”
“That’s right.”
“In your place, given what happened to your father, I’d have looked into every aspect of the case. I’d have gone to Fort Worth and talked to people who knew the husband when the family lived there. Did you find out if his behavior changed after he came to Rostov?”
Costigan considered him for a moment. “Yeah, you’re a good police officer.”
“Well, you know as well as I do, it’s all about asking the right questions.”
Costigan nodded. “I did some digging. The husband’s behavior definitely got worse after he came here. He’d always had a short tem- per, especially when he drank, but here it became more extreme.
People who knew him in Fort Worth figured he got bitter about being forced to leave the big city and live in the middle of nowhere.”
“Did you buy that theory?”
“I had a different one.”
“And that’s the real reason you wanted me to keep my gun in my suitcase when I went to the observation area to find out what Tori was doing there, isn’t that correct?”
“Correct.”
“What am I missing?” Tori asked.
Costigan looked at her. “People either like it here right away, or else they hate it. You saw that on Thursday night. Some got out of their cars and were open to seeing the lights, while others couldn’t wait to get back on the road. A few were actually angry because they couldn’t see what others claimed to see. It’s like the way magnets can repel each other as much as attract.”