by D. J. Butler
I opened the door, stood in it, and waved to Gladys. “Hey, Gladys!” I yelled. “Got a minute?”
The kids who had been bowling were on their way out the door, which was lucky timing. Or unlucky, maybe.
“Hit the front door as you pass, will you?” I called as Gladys marched past the lanes.
I stood in the doorway. It was little unnatural, but it meant Indra would see me and hear me, and Gladys couldn’t see into the office.
“You thinking of closing up early?” she said. Then she chuckled, seeing how wet I was. “It’s raining, I guess?”
“Yeah,” I said, answering both questions. “Dad wants me to get some sleep.”
“He’s right. Go home, and I’ll close up.”
Oops. “No, I’ve got a few minutes of paperwork and then I’ll get the till and lock up. I’ll come in and hit the urinals and wipe spilled pop off the tables in the morning. You’ve had long days, too.”
“Well, not like you have. But I admit I’ve been worried.”
“Lock the bar door on the way out, would you?”
“You sure about this?”
Part of me wanted to scream for help and run. If mine had been the only life at risk, I might have done it. But I had Gladys to think about too, and Evil lay helpless on the floor. If I ran, either or both of them might get shot.
I nodded. “Good night!”
Gladys was efficient when she wanted to be. Three minutes later, the doors were all locked and she was gone.
“Good.” Indra relaxed, pointed his gun at the floor again. “Now we turn off the lights and wait.”
“In the dark?” But I knew what he was thinking; lights could only attract attention. So I shut off the lights, opened the door connecting the office to the Fun Lanes, and sat down next to Evil. He was still breathing.
“I’ll help you on one condition,” I said.
I couldn’t see Indra in the dark; he sat in a shadowed corner. But I heard him laugh. “Oh?”
“We get Evil to Urgent Care.”
“Which one of us is going to carry him all that way…you or me?”
My heart sank. “Then we leave him here and call 911.”
“After we’re done at the court,” Indra countered.
It was the best I could do. I nodded, and tucked Evil’s blankets around him tighter. I felt his forehead; he was feverish. I bit my lip.
There was a bright side in what he was saying. It implied we’d be walking to the court, and Evil would have to stay here at the Fun Lanes.
Which meant that Indra Wilding, for once, wouldn’t have a hostage to use against me. He wouldn’t have any leverage over me other than the possibility that he might shoot me. I steeled myself to the likelihood that I would have to run that risk. He’d miss, I told myself. It’s dark outside, and he’s still injured, and he has to be sleep deprived, too. Where had he slept the night before…a tree?
But I couldn’t quite bring myself to feel optimistic about my chances.
I dozed a little, leaning against the wall. It was a shallow sleep, and I didn’t dream, but I did wake up with confused thoughts of trailers and breaking and entering. I shook my head to clear it.
“You ready to go?” Indra asked.
I stood up and stretched. I hurt, and I was overdue to take my antibiotic. Evil and I both were, and I thought again how much I wanted to get him to the doctor.
“Let’s get this over with,” I said.
I walked out the door first, stretching my imagination. I needed a solution here, some kind of practical but surprising tool or remedy that would stun Indra Wilding, or hide me from him, or notify Sheriff Sutherland. Something weird, I thought, like Evil’s condoms that could hold water or be used as a flotation device.
That’s it, I thought. That’s what I needed to figure out.
In this situation, what would Evil do?
We dropped down into the river and followed it. The rain had stopped, and the gathering darkness suggested that the sun was going down; this far north, in the summer, that makes it late. I walked first, pushing through the gnarled and poking pine branches, and Indra Wilding followed.
“I didn’t want to kill anybody,” he said, as we cut through a ragged stand of pine. “Especially not a clever person like you. I respect the trick with the balloon.”
“It was a condom,” I said.
“What?”
“Surprised me, too. And before you get to thinking I’m that kind of girl, the guy whose condom and whose trick it was is lying unconscious on the floor back there.”
“You should give yourself more credit.”
“Believe me, I take all the credit I’m due and then some. Look, Mr. Fellows—”
“Don’t jerk me around.”
“What?” I stopped and looked back at him. He was a thin shadow in the darkness.
“You know who I am.”
Nuts. There went one advantage; knowing more than my captor realized I knew.
“You’re Indra Wilding,” I said. “See? Taking credit.”
“Keep walking.”
I kept walking.
“And I didn’t kill Charlie,” he added. “Not that you’ll believe me. Not that it matters.”
“The room,” I said. I wasn’t quite sure how to bring this up. “I saw the room.”
“Which one?”
“Bears. Bears with swimming suits.”
Indra said nothing.
“I hope all the killing is done,” I said. “Whatever it is you want, I hope you get it and get out of here.”
“What I want is justice.”
I had a lot of snappy comebacks to that one. I bit down hard and held them all in. No point getting myself shot by pointing out that his justice seemed to have amounted to little more than murder.
“You don’t like Marilyn.” I chose my words carefully—if I was right, and he had it in for his stepmother, then calling her Marilyn Wilding or Mrs. Wilding might only aggravate him.
“You are clever. What gave me away?” His voice was acid, and his question was totally rhetorical.
“So who’s the other woman?” I asked. “The one in the fancy suit, with the bodyguards?”
“I’m disappointed. I’d have thought you could guess by now.”
“So she has to be Rainbow.” I laughed a little. “She doesn’t really look like a Rainbow. A Rainbow ought to be, I don’t know, finger painting, or teaching yoga classes.”
“Or growing pot?”
“I guess. Yeah.” I stopped and looked at him again. “Is this all about the pot? ’Cause this seems like a lot of mayhem over a little weed.”
He punched me in the face.
I wasn’t expecting it. The sudden blow hit me square in the jaw and I dropped to the ground. I held up my good arm to protect my face, and though I don’t like to admit it, I whimpered.
“We’re not friends, Bucky McCrae.” Indra stood over me, the moonlight glinting off his pistol so it looked like a single silver talon, projecting from his hand. “You’re bright, but you’re also my prisoner. When the time comes, you may be my hostage, to keep the sheriff and his boys on their best behavior. Understand this: if necessary, I will kill you.”
So much for my attempts to disarm him by being friendly.
I nodded, he stepped back, and I climbed to my feet. I was off-balance physically because of the cast, and now Indra’s punch had put me off-balance mentally, too. I couldn’t think of anything useful to say, so I turned and plodded on.
The eastward curve of the river was opening more space on our right, and that space was filling up with Howard. We couldn’t see it from the river bottom, except for occasional glances, but those glances were enough to tell me where we were: the brick back of Tuck’s Bullets and Blades; the tall wood-slat fencing that enclosed Matteson’s, the butcher; the bright green shingles of ImagiNation, where Magic: the Gathering players from four states convened on a monthly basis to hit each other with fireballs and transformation potions.
&n
bsp; Boy, I could really have used a fireball or a metamorphosis myself. My jaw hurt. My broken arm hurt. The night chill was setting in, and I felt it in my bones. Also, I was getting angrier with each step, and by the time we reached downtown I was spitting mad.
Judge Ybarra’s court isn’t a trailer like you’d pull around on the back of a truck, it’s more a cheap, temporary, smallish building. Its exterior is covered with a kind of fake pebbling that somebody thought looked really great in the 1970s, but has been universally hated since, and its brown-painted wood frame shines out at the edges. It’s got stairs up the front and a ramp next to the stairs, to accommodate anybody who might find stairs tricky.
The lights were off. This was by no means a given, since sometimes Judge Ybarra runs her hearings late, or works with her clerks hammering out a legal opinion into the wee hours. But not tonight. Lucky me.
Indra looked around. The Judge’s court sat between McAllister’s, a cheap burger bar catering to locals and fishermen from out of state, and Veterans’ Park, which is a handful of tall trees, a curly slide two stories tall, and an acre of grass. The park was quiet. McAllister’s was loud, but it was minding its own business and starting to get a bit of a buzz, so nobody looked our way.
“Is there a back door?” Indra asked me.
I nodded. Inside, the trailer is divided into a waiting and processing room, a courtroom, and the Judge’s chambers. I knew the chambers had their own door, because I’d delivered memoranda there more than once, when the Judge wanted something directly from Dad, or the clerks and the office staff were out to lunch. I pointed around the side.
“You first.”
I made my way to the Judge’s door. This faced a small reserved-spaces-only parking lot behind the building, lit only by the yellowish glow thrown by the windows of McAllister’s. The door was at the top of three concrete steps.
I stopped at the bottom of the steps. “It’ll be locked.” This was not someone’s house out in the sticks, this was a government building.
“Step aside,” Indra said. When I had done so, he waggled his pistol at me by way of admonition. “Don’t move.”
He tucked his pistol into the back of his pants. From his pocket he then produced a big folding knife, single blade. He grinned at me as he opened it with one hand; all I could see of his face were his white teeth. “This is not the manufacturer’s recommended use,” he whispered, and he jammed the blade deep into the wood of the door frame near the knob.
He dug for nearly a minute. I considered running away, but every few seconds he turned to glare at me. I was standing in an open parking lot, and I’d get nowhere. I stood still and shivered.
“You went to military school, didn’t you?”
“You know who I am, it’s no secret. Yes.” Indra kept digging. “Spent a few years in the Army. Army got me through college. Was looking at the JAG Corps—Army lawyers—but lost interest. The practice of law just isn’t really my thing.”
“Your thing is revenge.”
He didn’t answer.
When Indra had finished, a pile of wood splinters lay heaped on the top step, nearly invisible from five feet away. The bolt of the door’s lock gleamed, newly exposed. He put away his knife, opened the door, and then pulled out the gun again.
“Go find the will,” Indra told me, nudging the door further open with his toes.
I entered the Judge’s chambers. My feet were heavy. “I can’t see. Leave the door open.”
Indra stayed by the door, but he shifted to one side to stop blocking the light. “Don’t get any ideas about running. I still have the gun.”
“And the knife. And I have a broken arm.” And a big bruise on my jaw, I didn’t add. At least it wasn’t broken.
He didn’t say anything.
Boldness would win, or nothing would. I stepped inside and walked to the Judge’s desk. I walked fast, counting on my memories of the room. Those were none too specific—I remembered the big desk, and the potted plant on the floor next to it reasonably clearly, but there was a refrigerator in here somewhere too, and I couldn’t quite see in my mind’s eye where that was.
But I needed to act before my eyes adjusted to the darkness, because if my eyes hadn’t adjusted, then Indra’s probably hadn’t, either.
“Maybe the desk.” I worried I’d said it too loud. He might think I was telegraphing to hide my movements.
I slammed into the edge of the desk. “Oomph!”
Indra laughed, but the move had been on purpose. In banging into the desk, I knocked the desktop phone to the floor.
In Howard, the cell reception can sometimes be spotty. And when one of the cell towers goes down, it can take the big cell providers a couple of days to get a repair crew up from Boise or over from Yakima to fix it. So we still have landlines here, and not fancy Voice Over IP landlines either, I’m talking copper. And especially we still have landlines in our government buildings.
“Aw, crap,” I said.
The dial tone was loud in the darkness. With the phone on the floor between the plant—it was a ficus, a little miniature tree—and the desk, I grabbed the handset and jammed the top half of it, the part that cradles up against a caller’s ear, deep down into the dirt in the ficus’s pot.
I was counting on the dirt to muffle the dial tone, and then the beeping as I pressed numbers, and it worked. The phone went silent, then I dialed nine-one-one by feel alone and stood up. To Indra it must have looked and sounded as if I’d knocked the phone off the hook, and then hung it back up again.
But meanwhile, a call was going through to the emergency switchboard. And since the part of the handset that cradles against the caller’s mouth was exposed, the switchboard operator should be able to hear what Indra and I said.
The switchboard would transfer the call to Sheriff Sutherland’s office, but only if I gave them a reason not to simply hang up. They might try to talk to me, but hopefully the dirt would mute the operator’s voice.
“You think you can get out of town without being caught?” I said. “There aren’t that many roads.”
“Shut up and find the will.”
“I’m looking.” I actually did look. My eyes were adjusting, and I dug through the papers on top of the Judge’s desk. It was slow going, because in the darkness it took longer to read everything, but if I turned the pages toward the door and focused I could make out the text. The papers were filings of various kinds, motions, and other court papers, but none of them had Dad’s name on them.
“Look faster.”
“Judge Ybarra has a lot going on,” I said. “But I don’t see the will here. Can we call Urgent Care now, and ask them to send an ambulance to the Fun Lanes?”
“Shut up,” Indra growled. “Not yet.”
“Evil’s alone in my dad’s office,” I said. “He’s hurt, he may be in shock, and if he does wake up all alone there in the dark, he’ll be disoriented and scared.” I didn’t mean to, but I teared up a little as I talked about Evil. That was good, though. That probably helped hide how on-the-nose my words were.
“Shut up about your boyfriend!” Indra snapped. “Now where else can we look?”
I could see Indra looking around the outside of the trailer. It occurred to me, too late, that if I took too long he might turn the lights on to help me…at which point, he’d see what I’d done with the phone.
And then probably shoot me.
“New filings aren’t given directly to Judge Ybarra, anyway. They’re put into an inbox in the front office,” I said. He didn’t really care about the detail, and I didn’t really care whether he knew or not. I was explaining these things in the hope that the switchboard operator or a deputy sheriff would hear what I was saying and realize where I was. “And they’re entered into a log, and date-stamped.”
“I guess you better go look at that log, then.” Indra Wilding stalked my direction, herding me like a sheep into the front half of the trailer.
I crossed the actual courtroom, which wasn’t al
l that big. You know how in the movies, the courtrooms are always huge marble chambers like a bank or a Greek temple, with columns and a mezzanine from which the common folk watch, waiting for a great victory for justice? Well, Judge Ybarra’s courtroom looked more like the nursery in a low-rent church. It had flat industrial carpet, a desk, two tables, and a few rows of folding chairs. Without Judge Ybarra in the room, it felt like you could push the chairs aside, chalk a hopscotch grid on the carpet, and start skipping for nickels.
With Judge Ybarra in the room, it could feel like the lion’s den.
The waiting and processing room had a counter with two chairs for court employees to work at, and benches for people waiting their turn. On the counter was the logbook, and beside it a stack of filings.
“Here’s the log.” I picked it up and scooted closer to the window, where light from McAllister’s filtered through the slats of Venetian blinds. My finger found the entry. “Yeah, this filing has to be it.” I started reading the file number, but Indra Wilding didn’t wait. Diving into the stack of court papers on the counter, he shoved each into the thin light coming through the blinds until the sight of one made him cackle victoriously.
He waved the paper at me, crumpling it in his fist. “Done!”
I wasn’t sure about that. There was a record that something had been filed. And we probably had a scanned copy of the will on a hard drive somewhere, and Marilyn Wilding might have a copy…but I wasn’t going to argue.
I was just glad that in the darkness, he hadn’t noticed that he was joyfully destroying a copy, and not the original will.
Also, improbably, I remembered at that moment Sheriff Sutherland’s account of the world being full of dipshits, and every once in a while someone following the logic of morons, breaking into a bank thinking he could burn his mortgage and be debt-free. That was Indra Wilding. He was deadly and he might even be cunning, but on a pretty basic level he was a complete dipshit.
That heartened me, a little.
He was still hooting and crowing about his success when something outside the window caught Indra Wilding’s eye.