“Wow,” Raymer said, blinking up at him. “I was really out. This is kind of embarrassing.”
Earlier in the evening, Rub had told Sully about Raymer fainting into the judge’s grave, but sitting there on Sully’s commode, covered with dried mud, his eyes blackened and swollen, his hair matted, he looked like something far worse had befallen him. Such as being beaten senseless with a cudgel or dragged behind a car by his feet. “Kind of?” Sully said.
“Okay, very.”
“Did you find what you were looking for?” Because the only reason he could think of for Raymer to be in his trailer was that he was searching for the stolen wheel boots.
But Raymer just cocked his head at this. “Sorry?”
“What are you doing in my bathroom at three in the morning?” he said, pointing the flashlight at him for emphasis. “And don’t say taking a shit.”
Raymer shifted his weight on the commode, causing the trailer to groan. “I stopped by to ask a favor,” he said.
“Of me?” Sully replied.
Raymer seemed to understand that this explanation might be hard for Sully to credit, given their personal history. “I guess I didn’t know who else to ask,” he said, adding, “Would it be all right I finished up in here?”
This seemed a reasonable request. “Sometimes you have to flush twice,” Sully warned before closing the door on him.
He emerged thirty seconds later with wet hands. Sully, who’d retreated to the kitchen, tossed him a hand towel. He’d been meaning to put one in the bathroom but kept forgetting — the sort of oversight that made Ruth homicidal back when she was still paying him nocturnal visits.
“The front door wasn’t locked,” Raymer said, drying his hands, then handing the towel back.
“It never is.”
“We knocked.”
“We?”
“I meant ‘I.’ ”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“And I really, really needed to pee.”
“Most men can do that standing up.”
Raymer shook his head sadly, the picture of dejection. He’d begun absentmindedly scratching the palm of his right hand, Sully noticed. “Have you ever been so exhausted you just…” He let the thought trail off.
Sully pushed a dinette chair toward him with his foot. “Have a seat.”
Raymer did, the trailer again groaning and shifting under his weight. “This is like being on a boat,” Raymer observed.
The two men regarded each other, the air between them heavy with the strangeness of a middle-of-the-night moment that neither could ever have predicted.
“You know you talk in your sleep?” Sully said.
Raymer winced. “Really? Just now? What did I say?”
Lying seemed easiest, so Sully did. “I couldn’t make it out. You sounded like a parrot.”
Sully expected the other man to be surprised by this detail, but for some reason he wasn’t. Instead he just hung his head, utterly despondent. “Earlier tonight?” he said. “I may have been struck by lightning.”
“May have been?”
“I only mention it because there’s a real possibility that I’m fucked up.” Adding, when Sully raised an eyebrow, “More fucked up. Okay, insane.”
“I’m not sure that would occur to someone who really is,” Sully said, and Raymer looked grateful for his opinion but dubious as to its accuracy.
“Now I’ve got this voice in my head.”
Good God, Sully thought. The man really was off the rails. “What’s it say?”
“Mostly stuff I don’t want to hear. It suggested I come see you. It said you’d help.”
“Help what?”
The other man took a deep breath. “Do you know how to operate a backhoe?”
“It’s not difficult.”
Raymer nodded. “Where do you stand on unauthorized exhumations conducted under the cover of darkness?”
“It’s never come up,” Sully admitted. “Let me take a wild guess. Are we talking about Judge Flatt’s grave? The one you fell into this morning?”
Raymer sighed, clearly dismayed by how far and fast the news of all that had traveled. “I lost something down there.”
Sully frowned. “Your wallet?” Because, really.
To judge by the other man’s expression, this was the very question he had been hoping Sully wouldn’t ask. “Uh…something else, actually.” When Sully didn’t respond, he reluctantly continued. “Okay, a garage-door opener.”
“Those can be replaced, you know. You don’t have to dig up dead people.”
“My wife…,” Raymer began, then stalled.
Sully vaguely remembered the story. How the woman had fallen down the stairs and broken her neck. That Raymer had found her.
“Before she died…she was seeing somebody.” His eyes had filled. “She was about to run off with him.”
“Who?”
“I never found out,” he admitted. “I figured he left town, but apparently not. This weekend he put a dozen red roses on her grave.” He handed Sully the crumpled florist’s card.
Sully squinted at it. “Always, huh?”
Raymer nodded.
“Okay, but how do you know he didn’t call in the order and get the flowers delivered? He could be in California for all you know.”
“No,” Raymer said, far too confidently, it seemed to Sully, because how could he be so sure? “He’s here. I can feel him.”
All this time he’d been digging at the palm of his right hand with the thumbnail of his left. “What’s wrong with your hand?”
The question seemed to take him by surprise. He looked at the hand he’d been scratching as if it belonged to somebody else. “It’s nothing,” he said quickly, shoving it into his pocket.
“Okay, say you find out who the guy is. What then?”
He shrugged. “Probably nothing. I just want to know.”
“That’s what you say now. What if you change your mind?”
“I won’t,” he promised. “Look, I understand if you don’t want to help. No hard feelings. I know what I’m asking sounds kind of crazy.”
Kind of? Well, yeah. And teaming up with a lifelong adversary, who’d just confessed he was hearing voices? What kind of sense did that make? Still, the idea wasn’t without appeal. Just ten minutes earlier he’d been lamenting how long it had been since his last stupid streak. Was it possible that what Raymer was proposing might just jump-start a new one? Maybe he only needed to forget about two years, but probably closer to one and start acting like the man he’d been for his entire adult life, until good fortune — like Raymer’s lightning strike? — fucked up his circuitry. His grandson had already left, and by the end of the summer his son would be gone as well. What further use had he for model citizenship? “You’re thinking of doing this now? Tonight?”
“It’s not going to seem like a very good idea in the morning,” Raymer admitted.
Sully couldn’t remember ever seeing another human being look more utterly abject. And given his friendship with Rub Squeers, that was saying something.
Sully consulted his watch. Three forty-seven. He repocketed his keys and tested the flashlight to make sure the batteries weren’t dead. Taking a deep breath of his own, he was surprised to discover that it went right down to his stomach. The heaviness in his chest had miraculously vanished. Maybe the two years but probably closer to one was bullshit. These were VA doctors, after all. Not the sharpest knives in the drawer. He’d told Ruth he was just in a funk. A lie, he’d thought in the moment. But what if it was true?
“Well,” he said, getting to his feet, “we don’t have much time.”
Raymer looked stunned. “You’ll do it?”
Sully shrugged. “Hey, if anything goes wrong, I’m with the chief of police.”
“I’m resigning tomorrow.”