“You have no idea the world of hurt that’s about to crash down on me,” Beau said. He drained the last of the Dr Pepper. “There’s no way you could know.”
Beau had been one of the United States Marshals Service’s easiest Witness Security Program relocations, a man without baggage. He had no family and no desire to drag any of several random female companions with him into a new life. The San Antonio office had recommended Quarryville, a dried-out scab of a town in West Texas that had once shipped granite east to Dallas. After the quarry closed in the early 1950s, the town began a long, slow slide into oblivion, and few people lived there by choice. With the U.S. Marshals Service’s assistance and money from the Harley-Davidson he’d sold before disappearing into his new identity, Beau purchased and renovated a foreclosed home. On his own he later purchased the abandoned Conoco station he could see from his front window and turned it into Quarryville Smokehouse.
He mentioned none of this to Tommy as they sat in the afternoon heat watching traffic pass the smokehouse on the two-lane state highway. When they finished their drinks, Tommy excused himself to use the men’s room around the back, leaving behind the magazine he’d been reading all morning.
Beau spun the magazine around, thumbed through the pages until he found the article about his smokehouse, and read it again. Had it not been for the accompanying photo capturing his face in three-quarter profile, nothing about the article would have bothered him. In fact, everything the author wrote was quite complimentary.
Beau lived on the other side of the railroad tracks that paralleled the state highway bisecting Quarryville, on a street that also paralleled the tracks, at the leading edge of a neighborhood of single-family homes constructed for quarry employees during the town’s heyday. He waited until he was safely inside the living room of his two-bedroom bungalow before using his cell phone to call a phone number he had memorized years earlier.
A no-nonsense female voice answered. “United States Marshals Service.”
“I want to talk to William Secrist.”
“He retired nine months ago,” said the voice. “May I help you?”
Beau paced in front of the gun cabinet containing his and Bethany’s deer rifles. “This is Beau James. Secrist was my case officer.”
“I’m his replacement, Deputy Marshal Sara Arquette. How may I help?”
“I’ve been outted,” Beau said. He told her about the magazine article and accompanying photo.
“I should visit someday to see if your ’cue is as good as the writer says.”
“You read the article?”
“I picked up a copy of the magazine yesterday.”
“So everybody’s seen it?”
“Not everybody,” she said. “They don’t read Texas magazines in Ohio.”
Beau stopped pacing and stood at the front window, staring at his smokehouse and the other businesses on the far side of the railroad tracks and state highway. The storefronts along Main Street that weren’t boarded up might as well have been. Only a pawnshop, the ubiquitous Dairy Queen, and a Texaco that still offered full service showed signs of life. “All it takes is one.”
“What do you expect us to do?”
“Your job,” Beau yelled into the phone. “Protect me. Relocate me. Express some concern for my health and well-being!”
“I’ll reach out to the Columbus office and see if there’s been any chatter about you,” she said. “I’ll let you know.”
“You do that!” He could have slammed the receiver down if he’d phoned from the landline at the smokehouse. Instead he jabbed his finger against the disconnect button of his cell phone so hard he almost knocked it from his hand.
Beau ate barbecue for lunch every day and relied on his girlfriend to prepare dinner. That evening Bethany made deer stew, using meat from a white-tailed buck she’d killed the previous season. Beau had never hunted until he dated Bethany, and after many meals prepared using the game she brought home, he had learned to appreciate her marksmanship.
Bethany’s teenage daughter, Amanda, had plans with one of her friends, so Beau and Bethany dined without her. They were nearly finished when Bethany said, “You’ve been quiet all evening. Is something wrong?”
Beau looked up from his last spoonful of stew. Bethany had not changed when she’d returned home from the veterinary clinic and still wore her blue scrubs. Six years his junior, she had the figure of a younger woman, but a lifetime in the Texas sun had weathered her. She wore her highlighted golden-brown hair cut in a stacked bob—short in the back but almost shoulder length in the front—and her pale blue eyes searched his for an answer to her question.
“I got some bad news today,” Beau said. “I may have to leave you.”
Stunned, Bethany asked, “Why?”
“Some people never forget the past, the rest of us try not to remember it,” Beau explained, “and something I did a long time ago caught up to me today.”
“You can’t do this to me.” Bethany dropped her spoon and leaned forward. Her hair had been tucked behind her ears as she ate and one lock fell free to swing against her cheek. “You can’t do this to Amanda. Her father walked out on us when she was three. You promised us you would never—”
“It’s for your own good.”
“I don’t believe you,” Bethany said. “Where will you go?”
“I don’t know.”
“When are you leaving?”
“I don’t know. It could be soon.”
“What about the smokehouse?”
He shrugged.
“Don’t you care about anything?”
“You,” he said, “and Amanda.”
“You can’t care all that much if you’re willing to walk away from us.”
“It’s because I care about you that I have to leave.”
Bethany snorted with disgust, folded her arms under her breasts, and glared at Beau. “That’s the worst line of crap I’ve ever heard. You don’t know where you’re going or when you’re leaving, but you’re doing it because you care about us?”
“I’ve done some bad things,” Beau said. “The people I did them with might be coming for me.”
“I thought we didn’t have any secrets,” Bethany said with equal parts anger and dismay. “Apparently I was wrong.”
Beau did not know when—or even if—the U.S. Marshals Service would relocate him. “I’ll say goodbye before I leave. If anything happens before I do, you call this number and ask for Sara Arquette.”
As Beau recited the number, Bethany grabbed her smartphone to enter it into her contact list. He snatched the phone from her hands. “Don’t put it in your phone. Don’t write it down. Memorize it.”
At 2 a.m. Wednesday morning, as he was dressing for the day and Bethany lightly snored on her side of the bed with her back to him, Beau heard the distinctive potato-potato-potato rumble of a lone Harley-Davidson motorcycle cruising along the state highway that bisected Quarryville. He kept a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun under the smokehouse’s front counter, but he had grown complacent over the years and had long ago stopped carrying personal protection. The fading sound of the motorcycle haunted Beau until he unlocked the gun cabinet in the living room, removed and loaded his 9mm Glock, and tucked it into a worn leather holster at the small of his back. Then he relocked the gun cabinet and walked across the street, the train tracks, and the highway to the smokehouse, where he fired up the indirect-heat pit and prepped the brisket and ribs he would serve for lunch later that day.
Alone in the dark, in the fenced area beside the converted Conoco station where Beau smoked his meat away from the prying eyes of customers and competitors—though until the magazine article had appeared, he had never considered the possibility of competitors—Beau contemplated his actions during the coming days. He had more baggage than the first time he had been relocated, and he wondered how easy it would be to walk away this time.