A day's worth of surveillance revealed that in fact the dentist had moved in with Rose Fleurry; another day's investigation showed he'd moved in the day after the blast that had claimed the lives of, among others, his wife and three children.
C.D. had picked up Rose, interrogated her gently for an hour, and she had rolled over on her lover just that fast.
Turned out she didn't care for him much anymore by that time. He didn't put the toilet seat down. And the fifty thousand dollars in insurance money on the wife and three kids?
Strictly an afterthought, a little fun money for a fling in Mexico that he never got to take.
“Put him in the death house, proud to say, though goddammit, the sentence was later reduced to life. The funny thing is, when we arrested him—he had model airplanes everywhichgoddamnwhere. He loved airplanes. But it was that third piece of evidence that done the trick.”
This final observation fell on largely deaf ears, for by now the old man had begun to bore the younger crowd.
C.D. felt it happen all the time. They pretended to want to know, but somehow they just didn't have the patience, the concentration.
As they turned away to sleep for tomorrow, C.D. pretended to go back to the data, the OSBI file on Lamar.
But he reached into his coat pocket and slipped out the I. W. Harper bottle. The lid was loose; with deft fingers he removed it. He hunched, seemed to shift in his old man's dry-boned way, and managed to draw a large, fiery swig from the bottle. It tasted like charcoal, gun smoke, and old plums. It knocked him where he wanted to be, which was into a state of blur.
Bud rolled over, trying to get to sleep. On this job it was six on the damn block, peeking into cars, then twelve on the road for what was called "aggressive patrolling,” and then six off, and his six off was three gone and goddamned if old C.D. wasn't holding court with a bunch of Bureau boys a couple of bunks on down the goddamned way. There were dog teams outside, yowling, just in case. An OSBI helicopter made a buzz overhead every once in a while. The communications center, in one corner, crackled and yammered.
Men were cleaning guns that hadn't yet been fired. Sleep was a hard bargain tonight.
Yet Bud wasn't an unhappy man. He and Ted alternated on the driving, and after close to twenty-five years of driving himself. Bud hated it when someone drove him. And was it his imagination, or was Ted's ambivalence about his life somehow expressing itself in his driving? Made Bud pretty itchy to sit there while the boy diddled with the accelerator.
You go trooper, you got to love to drive a car, because that's 98 percent of the duty day: you'll see death in all the ways it can come to drivers and you'll give chase and maybe kill, but it all turned on the powerful automobile.
You had to love that bitch on wheels or get another line of work.
But in three hours it would be his day to drive again. A certain secret part of him responded to the pleasures of the wheel, and he hoped they wouldn't nab those goddamned boys until after he had his eighteen.
But that was only a surface thing. Truth was, Bud felt another deeper pleasure, though he could put no name on it.
For now, in the temporary suspension of normalcy that the statewide manhunt brought, he felt something singing and vibrant. It was freedom, or the illusion of freedom, from It.
That's how he thought of it: It. It was It, that was all It was.
It, being the thing, the mess, the situation. It, meaning Jen and the boys and the placid pleasures of duty versus the sweetness of renewal as experienced in young Holly, and all the pleasures it promised, all the places to go, all the ways to be.
Bud was no romantic. His idea of reading was the new Guns & Ammo or Car and Driver, and his idea of fun was to go to a high school baseball game and watch Jeff play or to zero in the .270 for deer season. He went to the movies once a year, which was one time too much. He didn't watch TV since they took Johnny off for that other goof, and it still pissed him that they went and did such a goddamned fool thing. Mainly, he just did his duty as he saw it, hard and fair, and expected otherwise to be left alone.
Then It happened and all craziness broke out. Three months ago he'd been cruising 44 near to shift's end and had pulled off at a favorite place, a diner called Mary's in the little town of Cement, where the coffee was hot and black and the hash browns crispy, the way he liked them.
He was sitting at the counter, taking his twenty, when he heard his name.
“Bud? Sergeant Bud Pewtie?”
He turned, and there she was. He remembered now.
When he'd been partnered up with Ted during Ted's six-month provisional, he'd met Holly off and on, and when Ted got his First Class stripe, he and Jen had the younger couple over to dinner to celebrate with a barbecue. But then as Ted changed, he'd drifted away, and he hardly ever talked to Bud anymore.
“Holly, how are you? Damn, what brings you up here?”
The part of Bud that he no longer thought he had reacted first. It wasn't that Holly was just pretty; some other secret thing under her surface just teased him in a strange way.
Her youth, her boyish body, those freckles, that bright smile, but most of all it was something behind her eyes, something secretly merry and conspiratorial. She was a plotter, all right.
“Well, Bud, truth is, I came looking for you.”
“Well, sit yourself down and I'll buy you a cup of coffee.
You ever hear of such a thing called a telephone? Real easy to operate. You just drop a dime in and push some buttons and, like magic, you're talking to the man you want.”
“Well, Bud, thanks for the tip, but it ain't so easy. I wanted it private.”
“You got it. But this isn't some sad song I heard on the radio a hundred times and still can't say Jack Jump about?
That damn fool Ted's found a new girl, or some such. I know I look like Ann Landers but I don't have her wisdom.
My idea would be: I'll loan you the gun and you go shoot him. I don't think Ann would ever tell you that.”
She giggled at old Bud.
“Oh, Bud, you love to flirt and make all the girls laugh, don't you? I'll bet you were a pistol back in high school.”
Not so; he'd been a fullback, big and awkward and a little smarter than people thought when they considered his bulk, but no showboat with the girls. He'd married the first pretty one that was nice to him.
“Sure I was.”
“Well, anyway,” she said, "you're not far wrong. But I don't think it's a girl. It's just a thing. He's just not there anymore. I was wondering if something's going on in the patrol or on the road I should know about.”
It was true. Ted had drifted off. He went his own way, put in his hours and disappeared. He was no longer a part of the elaborate Smokey culture—the gym, the shooting range, the optional SWAT exercises, the speed pursuit course-and when you took yourself out of that, you sort of guaranteed you'd stay at First Class for a long time.
“Oh, he's probably working some things out.”
“That's what he says, when he says anything.”
“It can be a hard life.”
“But Bud Pewtie didn't let it turn him sour.”
“Well, old Bud Pewtie, he went through his dog days, too. Holly, give him some room. Maybe he ain't made to be a policeman. That's okay. No shame in that. There's other things that he can do and make you and himself proud, I swear it. It's a hard life and more than once I've regretted the path I chose.”
“Well, you're so John Wayne I find that hard to believe, but I love the way you tried to make me feel good.”
She laughed and it suddenly occurred to Bud how easy it would be for him to like her. He wished sometimes he'd stopped it there and just frozen that moment in his heart forever: her laughter, his pleasure in it, her blinding beauty, his sense of having done the right thing.