Her husband’s name was Dave Fletcher. He’d dropped out of the local community college — he’d planned to have his own landscaping business — after a friend of his convinced him to join the army and head to the Middle East. She said that she’d always resented the influence his best friends had on him. She’d been so angry about his dropping out of community college and willingly putting himself in war that she’d packed up and left two weeks before he was shipped overseas. He’d called or emailed every chance he got from boot camp. She’d answer him but didn’t forgive him.
During his second tour she’d divorced him and lived with a young doctor from the hospital where she worked. She’d never agree to marry him and so he finally started dating another nurse. It was in the first month of Dave’s third tour that he was shot in the head in a firefight. He was in a coma for months and not expected to live. But he did live and returned — against all odds — to reasonably good physical health. His mental health was another matter.
He’d lived with his folks; depression and suicidal impulses kept him seeing his VA shrink three times a month. Eventually she called him and they’d ended up talking for almost two hours. She’d realized that she still loved him and probably always would. They had remarried less than two months after their long phone call.
Despite some incidents with Dave’s former psychological problems, she’d loved being with him again. And for the first time they’d begun talking about having a kid or two.
Dave had a friend on the Danton police force. He’d introduced him to Police Chief Showalter and Showalter liked Dave enough that he waived Dave’s psychological problems and put him in uniform and on the street. Cindy said that while there were some good cops in a river town where the casino was a major employer you got the kind of cops you might expect.
Unfortunately, Dave had gotten involved with three or four cops who shared the racist and anti-government opinions he’d picked up in the military. The only thing she could compare it to was a religious conversion. He’d fixed up their basement as a kind of headquarters, the walls covered with ugly racist and anti-government posters. He’d started buying expensive guns.
Not even her announcement that she was pregnant had excited him the way group meetings did.
The ones who came to the house were always talking about ‘the revolution’ and ‘when we start shooting.’ At first she’d thought they were just living out a fantasy. All dressed up in military gear sometimes, always ready with violent threats against the government. Almost as bad, she said, was the cop bar where Dave spent way too much time. ‘Batter Up,’ it was called.
She’d lost the baby five months in. She’d been having vaginal bleeding and abdominal cramping and then suddenly she hadn’t been able to feel the baby moving inside her anymore. Following the loss of the child, Dave had surprised her by being the man she’d married. He’d been tender, attentive, even lying on the bed one night and holding her. Even crying himself as they’d talked about what might have been.
But their closeness had faded as he’d drifted back into the group again. He’d told her that wives and girlfriends also participated, but she’d liked nothing about his friends.
She noted that he’d been having stress headaches and fits of anger and depression in the last three weeks. Obviously something was going on but he wouldn’t talk about it.
And then, the night before last, he’d called and said he had to leave town. He’d sounded clinically insane to her. Agitated and fearful. He’d started crying.
‘He said he’d done something he shouldn’t have. Something big. And then he said that he’d made a recording on this little digital recorder he always carried. It fits right in his pocket.’
‘What kind of recording?’
‘Something that would expose everything about the things his group had done. I tried to keep him on the phone because I was so worried about him. But he hung up and I couldn’t stop him. I was terrified.’
After she learned about Jess being fired on she wondered if Dave had had anything to do with it. As did her granddad. She’d seen me interviewed on TV as Jess’s campaign manager. She called all the hotels to find out where I was staying. She went to my hotel but then got scared and ran off. She wondered if she’d find Dave at the Skylight, a local hangout, which is why she went there. She set up the meeting with me at the boat dock but when her granddad heard about it he’d insisted on checking me out.
‘So who do you think hit him tonight?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘It could’ve been Dave.’
‘He wouldn’t hurt my granddad. He knows how much I love him.’
‘You said yourself that Dave sounded insane.’
‘No, no it couldn’t have been him.’ Then, ‘Granddad’s so lonely. He never got over my grandmother’s death. He’s got all those photos of her all over the house and now he’s a big-time Catholic again. He goes to Mass three times a week.’
A nurse brought Grimes over to us. He had a long, narrow piece of white plastic over the wound.
‘We checked him carefully. We don’t see any problem except for the wound. And that will heal itself. But if you notice anything else, Cindy—’ The nurse smiled. ‘Well, you know the drill.’
‘Thanks, Louise.’
Louise turned around and headed back to the examination rooms.
‘You have any idea how long I was back there?’ Grimes was back to his squawking again.
‘Long enough for me to tell Dev a story he probably found very dull.’
‘It was very helpful, Cindy.’
‘So you told him everything, huh?’ He said this loudly and bitterly enough to attract the attention of half the ER people.
She slid her arm through his. ‘C’mon now, Granddad. Let’s get you home.’
Nineteen
I can’t say they were happy to see me walk into Batter Up.
Some of them were too deep in conversation, too deep in bumper pool and too deep in a ball game on TV to pay any attention. They would have been just as unhappy as the others if they’d noticed me.
Outwardly I was like a good number of them. White, fortyish, clean-cut. But in places like this that wasn’t enough. No, it certainly was not.
This was Danton’s one and only police bar.
Housed in an elderly brick building, windows painted black, the interior narrow with a long bar running half the length of the west wall and the rest of the space divided up into six red leathered booths and four tiny tables, the place was worn but scrupulously clean. The east walls were covered with a large American flag and posters for the Chicago Bears and the University of Illinois football and basketball teams. Set off on their own were large framed photos of officers who’d died in the line of duty, and as a final touch, as if to annoy me especially, a huge campaign poster of Dorsey.
There were three or four couples here and they all sat at tables. The women were young and sexual and looked to be having a good time, at least if their high, happy laughter was any indication. They were girlfriends and maybe cop groupies. The exception was an older couple, who sat in silence and stared at each other. He looked angry and she looked sunk in gray despair. Maybe they were splitting up after years of marriage; maybe one of their kids had become a problem. Given the merry human noise and the country-western noise on the jukebox, they didn’t belong here.
The bartender was short and wide, maybe fifty, and muscular in a way his short-sleeved red shirt only emphasized. A convict who worked out every day for three years would have envied him. He also had a pair of eyes that could spit their contempt at you.