Glancing at Randy, shouting No! I see what is about to happen and I don’t think about it, I react, just as trained.
“What-” Randy says, as I draw and fire. I intend only to stop him, take out the shoulder or arm, but you’re taught to go for the trunk, the larger target, and I’m not in the driver’s seat this time out, I’m on auto.
Randy goes down.
At first he’s conscious, though rapidly heading into shock. I kick the S amp;W away from his hand, kneel beside him to check pulse and respiration. I’m sorry, I tell him. I go back out to the squad and call in an Officer Down, request a second response unit for the woman. When I get inside again, something’s happened, something’s gone even more wrong. Blood is pooling all around Randy and his breath comes in jagged bursts, like rags torn from a sheet. I slip out of my sportcoat, take off my shirt and fold it into a compress, hold it against the wound. Almost at once the shirt is saturated with blood. I push harder, hold on harder. My arms quiver and begin to cramp. The shirt darkens. His breathing quietens. Lots less blood now. I tell him again that I’m sorry.
Two or three minutes before the paramedics arrive, Randy dies.
As I said, it took me a long time to understand what had happened here. Turned out Randy knew the place. That’s why he reacted the way he did when we first pulled up curbside. Doreen had worked with the guy who lived here, stayed with him for a while after she left Randy, had a brief affair. She’d long since moved on, but Randy was never convinced of that. All these months when I’d been thinking he was getting past Doreen, getting his life back together, he’d been spending much of his off time parked down the street.
The woman in the chair wasn’t Doreen, of course. But she looked a lot like her. And to Randy’s overloaded mind in that moment of crisis, I guess, in those final moments of his life, somehow she became Doreen. Lying there, looking up, it wasn’t me but Doreen that he saw. He lifted a hand as though to caress her face. Then the hand fell.
I saw her, the actual Doreen, looking not much better than I felt, five days later at the funeral. She wore a blue dress. Bracelets jangled as she raised her arm to brush hair back from her face. We told each other how sorry we were, how much we missed him. We said we should keep in touch.
For her it was a promise. Twice a week in prison I’d receive chatty letters from her. They were penned in violet ink on four-by-six-inch lavender pages folded in half and filled with news of new neighbors, newborn children, new stores and malls. She persisted in this for almost a year, heroically, before giving up.
Chapter Thirty-one
The office was empty, though unlocked. Remembering all those hollow, echoing buildings and streets in On the Beach, which I’d seen at the impressionable age of fourteen (after which I’d read everything of Nevil Shute’s the local library had), I found Lonnie and Don Lee at the diner.
“Out to lunch, huh? Maybe you should just move the sign over here. Sheriff’s Office. Hang it up by the daily specials.”
“More like breakfast for you, way it looks,” Don Lee said. “Just get up?”
“Yeah. Nightlife around here’s a killer.”
“You get used to the pace.”
Thelma materialized beside the booth. “What’ll it be?”
I asked for coffee.
“You people come in at the same time, sure would make my life easier.” She shrugged. “Lot you care.” She slapped a check down by me. “And why the hell should you, for that matter? Rest of you want anything? Or you gonna wait, so’s I have to make three trips instead of one?”
“We’re fine,” Lonnie said.
“For now.”
Thelma walked off shaking her head.
“You’re both on duty? Where’s June?”
“We are,” Don Lee said.
“And June’s on her way down to Tupelo, best we know.” Lonnie glanced out the window, voice like his gaze directed over my shoulder. “Looks like that’s where he went once he cut out of here.”
“Shit.”
“Pretty much the way we feel about it, too,” Don Lee said.
Thelma set a cup of coffee by the ticket she’d slapped down moments before. When I thanked her, she might as well have been stuck by a pin.
“I know I have to leave her alone, let her work this out on her own,” Lonnie said. “We talked about that. Best I could do is make it worse.”
Right.
“You get your message?”
I hadn’t.
“Val Bjorn. Says for you to call her.”
“Results of the forensics must be in.”
“Probably not that. We got those late yesterday.”
“And?”
“Not much there.”
“There’s a copy for you at the office.”
I drank my coffee, called Val only to learn from her assistant Jamie (male? female? impossible to say) that she was in court. She bounced my call back around six P.M.
“Hungry?” Val said.
“I could be.”
“Think you can find your way to my house?”
“I’ll strap on bow and arrow now. Call for a mule.”
“Thank God it’s not prom night or they’d all be taken.”
“Mostly surfing the Internet,” I told her not long after, leaning against the kitchen table, nursing a glass of white wine so dry I might as well have bitten into a persimmon. She’d asked how I spent my afternoon. “You wouldn’t believe how many Web sites are devoted to movies. Horror films, noir, science fiction. Someone made a movie about garbagemen who are really aliens and live off eating what they collect, which they consider a delicacy. There’s a whole Web site about it.”
Val tossed ears of corn into boiling water.
“This isn’t cooking, mind you,” she said.
“Okay.”
“I’m not cooking for you.”
“Your intentions are pure.”
“I didn’t cook the salad either.”
“Wow. Tough crowd.”
“You think I’m a crowd?”
“Aren’t we all?”
“I guess.”
“How’d court go?”
“Like a glacier.” She bent to lower the flame under the corn and cover the pot. “I’m representing a sixteen-year-old boy who’s petitioning the court for emancipation. He’s Mormon-parents are, anyway. The defense attorney has put every single member of his family and the local Mormon community, all two dozen of them, on the stand so far. And the judge goes on allowing it, in the face of all my objections of irrelevance. Courthouse looks like a bus stand.”
“They love him.”
“Damn right they do. You know anything at all about LDS, you know how important family is to them. They don’t want to lose the boy-personally or spiritually.”
“He has some way to support himself?”
“An Internet mail-order business he created. All Your Spiritual Needs-everything from menorahs to Islam prayer rugs. Netted a quarter million last year.”
“Has different ideas, obviously.”
“He’s not a believer. Even in capitalism, as far as I can tell. It’s all about pragmatism, I think. He wanted a way out, independence, and that looked good for it. Much of the profit from the company goes back to the very family he’s trying to escape.”
“Interesting contradiction.’’
“Is it? Contradictions imply we’ve embraced some overarching generality. They’re the ash left over once those generalities burn down. Particular, individual lives are another thing entirely.”
She was right, of course.
“He have much chance of getting the emancipation?”
Val shrugged. “I don’t seem to have much idea how anything’s going to go these days. This dinner, for instance.”
“The one you’re not cooking.”
“Right.”
Later, having smeared ears of corn with butter, salt and pepper and chins unintentionally with same, having stoked away, as well, quantities of iceberg lettuce, radish, fresh tomato and red onion dribbled upon by vinegar and olive oil, we sat on Val’s porch in darkness relieved only by the wickerwork of light falling through trees from a high, pale moon.
“Back when you were on the streets, you thought you were doing good, right?”