Ridley Barnes didn’t say a word, but he reached down to pick his knife up out of the snow. Mark let him do it, watching and feeling the old pulse, the sight of the knife exciting him rather than scaring him, a near-pleasant sensation of Oh, so that’s the way this is going to go.
Ridley snapped the blade shut and slipped the knife back into his pocket.
“It won’t be hard,” Mark said. “Finding her? It won’t be hard at all. Because she came from you, and my guess, Ridley, is that you don’t have too many friends.”
When Ridley took his sleeve away from his nose, his face was masked with blood. He spit into the snow, then touched his nose gingerly with two fingers of his left hand.
“What did you think of the file?” he said. The words were muffled and distorted by the blood leaking into his sinuses.
Mark stared at him. “You are truly insane.”
“That’s what you took from the file?”
“No. That’s what I take from you.”
Ridley breathed deep, blinked hard, and said, “I asked about the file.”
Mark thought about smashing his fist into that blood mask of a face, finding the nose again, adding pain to pain. He kept his hands flat at his sides with an effort and breathed, four-count in, four-count out.
“I don’t know the point of your game,” he said. “Maybe you got bored once the cops stopped coming by, I don’t know. I also don’t know how or why you selected me for your continued entertainment. But it was a mistake, Ridley. Sending that woman to me, asking her to impersonate the girl’s mother? In a lifetime of bad choices, that might have been your worst.”
Ridley stood and listened, blood working out of his nose and down his face.
“What I’d like to do,” Mark said, “is bounce you off that car a few more times, long enough for me to get tired of the effort, and then drop your ass on the ground and drive away and be done with it. I can’t do that, though, do you see? You took that option from me when you sent her. Now I’m going to find her and deal with her, and maybe you’ll be a part of that, maybe you won’t. I don’t give a shit. Not when it comes to you, Ridley. But tell her that I’m on my way.”
Ridley Barnes said, “What about Sarah Martin?”
Mark felt his hands curl into fists again and knew from experience that things wouldn’t go well from here if he stayed. He couldn’t afford to stay. Instead, he shook his head in disgust and got in the car. Ridley kept talking.
“You’re going to need to think about her at some point, Novak! You’re not going to be able to keep walking away from her. Too many people have for too many years!”
It was a relief to slam the door on the sound of that voice. Ridley was visible in the side-view mirror, standing there in the bloody snow, still babbling about Sarah Martin. Mark started the engine and pulled out of the yard.
He made it three miles before his hands started to tremble on the wheel. A mile beyond that and there was a shudder in his vision, and his head felt high and spacey. There was no shoulder to the road, just the fields, and he pulled off into one and put the car in park and got the door open and placed one hand on the snow-covered ground and gasped in air and waited for the rise of vomit in his throat.
It never came. The frigid air filled his lungs and cleared his head, and the feel of the earth brought the high dizziness swirling back down.
When it was done, he hung on the door frame and breathed in the cold air. There was blood on his shirtsleeve and the back of his hand. He wiped at his face, soaked in sweat despite the temperature, and then fell back into the seat, leaving the door open, and looked at himself in the mirror. His usually tan skin looked gray, waxen, the dark circles below his eyes standing out starkly.
Can’t have that, he thought, staring at his own face. Can’t go there again.
If Ridley wanted to make a call to the police right now, Mark would be in jail by the end of the night, and an already bad story would spiral into something far worse. He hadn’t wanted it to go that way. He’d wanted to confront him, yes, get something from him, and Ridley was the type who called for intimidation, but the rope had been enough, and things should have stopped there. It was that smile, the way Ridley Barnes had looked at him, like he was enjoying the game.
So much time had passed since he’d allowed a lapse like that. But then the old feeling had knocked, and he’d known what waited on the other side of the door and still he’d opened it and welcomed the familiar visitor in.
The first time he’d gone looking for blood — his own or someone else’s, it didn’t matter — was nine months after Lauren was killed, and Mark had just gotten off the phone with her father, just finished summarizing another week of no answers and no leads. He’d gone directly to the worst bar he could think of, the one where he could count on a chance. He hadn’t needed to wait long. All it took was the right kind of stare to the right kind of man, and things got started fast. The guy needed to be right, though; he couldn’t be just any guy. He had to look the part, had to come straight out of central casting.
He had to look like he might have killed a woman.
Jeff London had bailed Mark out of jail after talking with a prosecutor who’d said that he understood, who’d said that Mark was damn lucky the other guy had been a piece of shit with a bench warrant out for him or things would have gone different.
You’re shaming her, London had told Mark. His eyes held a sheen under the streetlights. Forget about yourself. Forget about me. You’re shaming her, Mark.
It was so close to those last words Mark had offered Lauren: Don’t embarrass me with this shit. Then came London: You’re shaming her, Mark.
People had their pride. Even the dead.
Or they should have it.
He used handfuls of snow to scrub the blood from his skin and shirt as best he could, and then, as the Midwestern wind picked up and whistled over the fields, he closed the door and got back on the road.
12
The snow had begun to fall again, fat, wet flakes, and Mark remembered the sheriff’s assertion that some forecasts were calling for as much as ten inches. He hadn’t seen a plow or a salt truck yet, but that wasn’t saying much, because he hadn’t seen any vehicle until a white Chevy Silverado rattled up behind him. The truck would have stood out even on an interstate, though — the muffler had been modified to enhance the growl of the engine. The driver was pushing it hard, rode right up on Mark’s ass, and Mark considered tapping the brakes to screw with him, but the last thing he needed right now was a fender bender that would roll out a deputy. He put the window down, letting snow blow into the car, and waved his hand, calling for the truck to pass him.
It didn’t pass. Just stayed planted. Mark could see that there was only one occupant and that he was wearing sunglasses, which was logical, of course, because the sky was the color of an old nickel.