Then he saw it, a monster eighteen-wheeler, probably straight off the Northway, the trucker’s mind already in Millers Kill, finding a place for lunch. Driving north at a comfortable, legal fifty-five miles an hour. Straight toward the intersection. Straight toward Nichols.
Russ’s mouth went cotton-dry. He was close now, close enough to see the terrified face of the woman in the station wagon, close enough to make out Nichols’s head, bent, intent, looking neither left nor right, close enough to hear the drum-popping squeal of the Mack’s brakes as the trucker made a futile attempt to stop forty tons of steel before he reached the green light.
Russ stood on his brakes. The station wagon spun to the right, plunging nose-first into a culvert. The Crown Vic shot across the intersection an inch ahead of the eighteen-wheeler, which screeched and groaned and rumbled to a dust-plumed stop with its tail quivering.
Russ sat for a second, his mind wiped clean. Get out of the car. See if anybody’s hurt. It took him three tries to unbuckle his seat belt, his hand was shaking so hard. He stepped out of the unit, and there was snow under his boots, he knew there was, and there was a different truck, its driver sobbing and apologizing, and there was a rental car crushed into a ball of flesh and metal and Linda was dead. She was dead.
“Holy shit!” the woman said from across the road. “Did you see that? Did you see that? Hey! Are you okay? Is he okay?”
Lyle found him bent over the ditch, puking his guts out. He waited until Russ had wrung himself dry and then handed him a fistful of tissues. “Sorry,” Russ said, his voice clotted and harsh.
“So’m I.” They both looked at the intersection, where the woman was now shouting into a cell phone and the truck driver squatted by his near tire, checking something underneath his rig. Lyle hadn’t been there that day, but he had seen the reports. He scrubbed one hand over his face. “So’m I.”
Russ coughed. Spat. “Nobody hurt?”
Lyle shook his head.
“You contact the staties?”
“They’ll be looking for him. You want me to pull everybody out on patrol?”
“No. I want you at Tally McNabb’s.” Russ wadded up the tissues, started to shove them in his pocket, then thought better of it. “We don’t have the manpower to dragnet him. Protecting McNabb is our priority. If he shows up, you and Kevin will have him. If he doesn’t, let the staties have the sonofabitch.”
He stayed behind to clear the intersection and write up the accident report. The routine task helped settle his spasming stomach and aching chest. He drove back to the station expecting to hear at any second that Nichols had been captured, but the radio remained stubbornly silent.
“Anything?” he asked Harlene as soon as he was within earshot of dispatch.
“Not from the state police. Kevin called in to say Lyle’s over to Tally McNabb’s and that her husband’s being a pain in the ass. Says they don’t need any protection.” Russ grunted. “You got a call from some lawyer representing the new resort, complaining about you scaring off the customers with your”-Harlene picked up her message pad and read from it-“‘unnecessarily violent and confrontational approach to removing a guest who had manifested no threatening behavior whatsoever.’” She put the pad down. “He wants to know who’s going to pay for damage to a flower bed.”
Russ tipped his head back. “Anything else?”
“Roxanne Lunt called. Said she’s been trying to track you down.” Harlene’s face was as bland as vanilla pudding. “I guess she didn’t try the St. Alban’s rectory.”
Russ narrowed his eyes.
“She says she’s got someone interested in that piece of land on Lick Springs Road you were looking at, and if you want it, you got to make an offer now.” She ripped off the messages and handed them to him, wrinkling her nose as he stepped next to her. “What in the Sam Hill did you get into? You smell awful.”
The only thing that improved during the rest of the day was his odor; he washed up and brushed his teeth in the men’s room before changing into his spare uniform. The state police turned up nothing; he had a long conversation with Sergeant Bob Mongue, who managed to imply that Russ had overreacted and overexaggerated and maybe the MKPD needed some training in suspect management? His attempt at getting intel about Nichols from Fort Leonard Wood was met with “I don’t know, sir,” and “I can’t release that information, sir,” from a series of brush-off artists who became wordier and less informative as he ascended the ranks. No one showed up at the McNabbs’ house; when he arrived to persuade Tally to relocate to somewhere more anonymous, Wyler McNabb accused him of carrying out a vendetta against them.
“Has the husband done anything? Gone anywhere?” Russ and Lyle were standing in the driveway of the small house, conferring between the McNabbs’ Escalade and Navigator. The two hulking SUVs effectively isolated them from anyone watching from the house or its neighbor.
“Nope. He spent the afternoon working on his ATV. Kevin said he was trying to boost the performance so’s he could drive it faster. Dumb-ass.”
“Nichols hasn’t shown up yet-”
“He hasn’t shown up anywhere,” Lyle said. “He could be laying low until we clear out.”
“Are we looking at this wrong? You think maybe she was going to meet Nichols and we stepped in it?”
Lyle shrugged. “Hard to imagine setting up a love nest in the hotel where you work as a bookkeeper, but stranger things have happened.” He and Russ exchanged a look that said, To you and me both, brother.
Russ rubbed his lip. “They got guns?”
“Are you kidding?”
Russ kicked at the driveway paving. “Screw it. We’ll put the house on the patrol list and tell them to call nine-one-one if anything happens. It’s the best we can do.”
Lyle frowned. “I don’t like it.”
Russ didn’t like it, either. It gnawed at him while he drove back to the station, while he was filling out the remainder of his incident reports, while he watched Harlene close down her board and switch all incoming calls to the Glens Falls dispatcher. After he left, he drove back to Musket Way and cruised past the McNabbs’ house. They lived in one of the last of the 1960s neighborhoods put up by optimistic developers back when there were still a few good jobs to be had at the Allen mill or down the Northway at General Electric. Small houses with deep yards, the kind of neighborhood folks said was a good place to raise kids. He parked just up the street and watched the lights coming on in the small houses, a pair of boys running in and out banging screen doors, one guy trying to get the last of his lawn mowed before it was too dark to see. Two doors down from Tally McNabb’s house, a car pulled into a drive. A woman and a teenaged girl got out and went into the house. Five minutes later, a man came out, followed by the woman, who was twirling some long shawl-thing over her shoulders. They got in their car and drove off. Mom and Dad, out on one last date before school started up again.
God, he was lonely.
Lights were on at the McNabb house as he drove past again. The flicker from a wide-screen shone through a gap in the curtains. He shifted into gear and let himself roll away into the end-of-summer darkness of his hometown.
For Clare, dinner that night at the Ellises’ was surreal, like being in a play where one character had turned into a seagull and everyone else pretended not to notice. Dr. Anne told some amusing stories about the Glens Falls ER, and Chris described his latest furniture project, and Colin went on at great length about the odd tourists he encountered in his summer job at Great Escape, and the whole time Willem smiled and nodded and ate, a caricature of the cheerful, careless young man she had known.