“Look,” I said. “I understand why you did what you did, and I can see now how things went wrong. And you might be right – the police might never make an arrest at all. They might never solve this. But I know, and I can’t live with the possibility of some innocent person being arrested for this.”
I stepped forward and touched his arm. “Marky, I know you cared for CJ. I know it was an accident. You need to tell the truth. You’re not going to have any peace in your life until you do. I’ll go with you if you want. You don’t have to be alone. If you turn yourself in and tell the truth, you’ll get off a lot easier. And who knows? When the entire story comes out, this might just make things even better for Friends of Joshua. People can be more sympathetic than you might imagine.”
Marky nodded slowly, then leaned back against the counter as if all the fight had gone out of him. “You’re right. That is the right thing to do.”
“Do you want me to go with you? I know the detective on the case. I can talk to him first, let him know you’re coming in. Keep everything low-key.”
He shook his head. “No, that’s not necessary.”
The stricken look on his face was hard to take. I couldn’t help thinking of the message board, of all that he’d been through in his short life. Even though I knew I was right, and he needed to do the responsible thing, I felt overwhelming compassion for him. He was going to prison – of that I had little doubt. I was hopeful that his willingness to cooperate, along with the fact that it was an accident and he was obviously remorseful would convince everyone to go easy on him. But even so, there were some very difficult days ahead for Marky. Maybe, by showing him some kindness, I could provide some comfort.
“I’m sorry,” I said, knowing the words were inadequate but still meaning them with everything I had. “I’m sorry it’s working out this way. I know you had the very best of intentions.”
He nodded, but didn’t answer. I picked up my purse and turned to look for Stump so we could go.
“I’m sorry, too,” he said softly behind me. “I can’t believe I have to frigging kill you, too.” The last words came out with a grunt of exertion.
Eleven
I cried out and ducked, my shoulders around my ears, catching on way too late how many stupid mistakes I’d made in the last few minutes. Coming to an abandoned house with a killer. Turning my back on him. The whole frigging compassion thing. Big mistakes. Big.
The blow that was meant for the top of my head actually grazed the side of my skull and slammed into my shoulder. I gasped with the pain of it. Then I got mad.
My entire right arm was numb from the blow, so I grabbed my purse with my left hand and spun. The water bottles in the bottom gave it enough heft to cause Marky to stumble a half step when it hit him in the arm, but unfortunately that was the extent of the damage.
He came at me again with the crowbar. “Stop it, Salem!” he yelled. “I’m not going to let you ruin everything I’ve worked for. I’m not.”
“Well, you’re sure as heck not going to kill me,” I said. Although I think I was trying to convince myself as much as him. The look in his eyes was pretty crazy.
Then it hit me. I probably outweighed him by twenty pounds. I could use that.
As he brought the bar down again, I ducked my head and charged him. The crowbar came down hard on the middle of my back, and I cried out again. We stumbled back together, and he pushed back against me. I realized with dismay that even if I did outweigh him, he was stronger. I pushed him with all I had, but he was pushing back and gaining traction.
I heard a little huff and looked down just in time to see Stump, directly behind Marky’s feet. I put fresh energy into one more shove, and he stumbled over Stump, landing hard on his backside.
I grabbed the first thing I could find, which was a two-by-four, and stood over him. “Stay down!” I roared. “If I even think you’re going to move I’ll brain you with this.”
He was breathing as hard as I was, and he eyed me and the board. Then he started to rise.
“Hey!” I shouted. “I mean it. Stay down. I’m not one bit afraid of hitting you.” Although the truth was, I wasn’t sure I could do it. I think he could see it in my eyes. I wasn’t quite as committed to my cause as he was to his.
“Your phone is dead,” he said calmly. “No one knows you’re here. You aren’t going to hit me and you know it.” He rose on one elbow.
Stump, apparently thinking he was down there to play with her, jumped on his chest and started sniffing.
Marky shoved her aside. “Get the freak off me!”
Stump slide across the floor, looking stunned.
I brought the board down, hard, on his head.
It didn’t knock him out, but it did convince him I was serious. He blinked a couple of times and groaned.
I raised the board high again and spoke through gritted teeth. “You. Shoved. My. Dog!” I narrowed my eyes. “I can stand right here until this time tomorrow if I need to,” I said. And this time I knew I meant it. Shoved my dog. Freak.
I heard footsteps on the porch and looked up to see Viv standing in the doorway. She looked from me to Marky, then started. “Oh! Oh! Is he the one?”
“Yes!” I said. “I caught him!” I was a little wound up.
“Oh!” She fumbled in her purse for a few endless seconds, then pulled out a gun. She stood with a wide stance and pointed the gun at Marky. “We should call the cops!”
“I know!” I shouted back. “You do it.” I had had my share of calling 911 for a while.
“No, I’ve got the gun,” she said. “Come here, get my phone out of my purse.”
I walked a wide berth around her. Viv had, after all, experienced her share of accidental discharges and I didn’t want to be on the receiving end of one. I fished in her handbag until I found her phone.
I dropped to my knees and patted my leg for Stump to come to me while I talked to the dispatcher. Stump came up and let me love on her, tossing betrayed looks at Marky over her shoulder.
“We’re holding Marky Petrelli at gunpoint until the police get here,” I said calmly. “He attacked me and he confessed to the accidental killing of CJ Hardin. Please tell Bobby Sloan that I have his suspect in custody.”
“Oh, good Lord,” the operator said. I heard a muffled sound, then laughter in the background. I think the operator had her hand over the mouthpiece. I heard some more muffled words I couldn’t understand, then a barely intelligible, “Nuh-uh. You tell him.” She came back. “Okay, ma’am, the police are on their way.”
“The police are on their way,” I said to Viv and Marky.
Marky chewed his lip, and then apparently decided he would rather take his chances with Viv. He sprang to his feet.
The gun roared and dust flew up at his feet. Viv looked stunned but determined.
“I would advise you to be still,” she said, although even I could tell she was fighting to keep her voice from shaking.
Marky looked warily at her, then at the door.
“Was that a gunshot?” the operator asked.
“Sure was,” I said. “You might want to tell them to hurry,” I said.
The next few minutes were spent with me relaying the operator’s fruitless advice that Viv put the gun down and let the police handle it, but as I’ve known for a long time, Viv lives her life as if she didn’t have much to lose. She could face the threat of a misdemeanor gun charge and sleep just fine at night.
But the gunfire did help get the police there faster, because it wasn’t too long before I saw the flash of red and blue lights. Bobby wasn’t far behind them.
He took Viv’s gun away from her and made us wait in the back seat of a squad car while he took statements, which didn’t sit well with Viv. She huffed and complained, but I didn’t think her heart was into it.
“He should be glad I had a gun,” she said. “What if I’d come in and there you were, at the mercy of a killer with nothing but a two-by-four to defend yourself?”
&n
bsp; “I know,” I said. “And thank you. You showed up just in time to keep really bad things from happening to my petard.”
Viv blinked. “Yes, well...what were you thinking, anyway? Coming here alone? If you knew he was the one, why didn’t you call me to come with you?”
I shrugged. “I figured you were busy with Dale. You guys are such chums now.”
“Are you kidding me? That doofus? He’s making me crazy. How much longer do you think we’re going to have to be friends with him, anyway?”
I drew my head back. “I thought you really liked him.”
“Good grief, no. I’m trying to be nice to him because you said you wanted to help him. So I’m helping. But you’re the one who brought him around, not me.”
“Yeah, well...you certainly seemed to get on board quickly. Before I knew it you two were besties and I was sitting in the back seat.”
“You said we had to be nice to him!” She poked me in the chest. “You. You said that.”
I remembered exactly one week ago when I had, in fact, ordered Viv to be nice. “Yes, well...”
“This is your fault.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “Plus Flo says he’s driving everyone there crazy, so I tried to get him out of her hair as much as I could.”
“Seriously? That’s why you kept picking him up?”
She jutted a slightly whiskery chin out. “And what thanks do I get?”
I sat, stunned into silence, for a long time. I felt very silly for being half-mad with jealousy when Viv had been trying to do what I told her to do. Then, I remembered something that might lighten the mood a bit. “Both Trisha and Les expressed a great deal of incredulity that you were ninety years old,” I said.
She harrumphed, but I thought her shoulders eased a little. “Of course they did.”
“Seriously, a great deal. Both of them.” I swallowed. “I would have, too, if I hadn’t been so focused on how jealous I was of you and Dale becoming friends, and how clueless I felt when I thought I’d missed your birthday. I was just...focused on myself.” My voiced cracked a little, and to my horror I was suddenly crying. All of it, the feeling of abandonment that had plagued me all week, the trauma of fighting for my life, and the relief that in the span of a few minutes, I’d regained both my life and my best friend. Within thirty seconds I was a snotty, sniveling mess.
Viv cocked her head and gave me a tender look. Then she straightened and said, “Get it together, you melodramatic train wreck. PIs do not cry at the crime scene.”
I sniffed hard and nodded, doing as she ordered. What choice did I have?
After another exhausting interrogation with Bobby (who admitted, with very bad grace, that I’d caught another one of his bad guys) I drove over to the west side of town and parked by the split rail fence. I stood at the fence and watched as hundreds of prairie dogs climbed with their fat little bodies out of their holes and faced the setting sun. They were perfectly still, and some did put their little paws together like the one in the picture.
I heard the crunch of tires on the gravel and turned to see Les get out of his car.
He joined me at the fence and we stood silent for a while. The sun began its sink below the horizon and the prairie dogs began slowly to move around their mounds again.
“How did you know I’d be here?” I asked Les. “I didn’t plan to come out here.”
He shrugged. “I just had a feeling. You were talking about these guys the other day.”
“Did God tell you I was out here?”
“Could be,” was all he said.
I motioned with my head toward the prairie dogs. “Pretty cool, huh?”
“Very.”
“Trisha showed me the original video of your interview the other night.”
He nodded, but didn’t say anything.
“You had a lot more to say than they showed on TV.”
“Yes, well. You know. Edited to run in the time allotted...”
“She’s not there anymore. Tri-Patrice told me.”
He looked physically pained. “What? No. That’s not right.”
“It’s okay, she decided she had better opportunities elsewhere. Les, she deliberately twisted your words and manipulated the video to make you look like a fool.”
“She didn’t run a word I didn’t say.”
“She did a hatchet job and you know it.”
“She was doing her job.”
“Yes, well, now she’ll be doing a different job.” I leaned back on my car and folded my arms over my chest. “I am going to ask Tri-Patrice if she’ll run a correction – run the full interview and let everyone know what you really said.”
“What good will that do?”
“Les, it changes everything. Everyone who is laughing at you right now will have to shut it. She completely twisted the meaning of your words.”
He took a breath, and I recognized the look. This one wasn’t exactly praying for patience, but close. Like praying for me not to be so dense.
“Salem, I said exactly what she ran. The only difference is, I said it in a nicer way. If the full interview was to run, it wouldn’t change a thing. As long as I won’t go on record as saying God condones homosexuality – and I won’t, Salem.” The look he gave me was kind, but firm. “I won’t, because I honestly don’t believe He does – then I will be considered intolerant and hateful.”
“But you’re not, Les!”
“But so what, Salem?” He echoed my frustrated tone. “It doesn’t matter. Sweetie, I don’t care what anyone thinks of me. It doesn’t matter. So I’m a joke for a few days. It doesn’t matter to me. It doesn’t change my life one bit.”
“Well, I care what people think of you.”
“Then you should stop.”
I chewed my lip, annoyed with him. “Anyone? You don’t care what anyone thinks of you?”
He shrugged. “Maybe a couple of people. Bonnie. My boys.” He nudged my toe with his. “You, a little.”
That mollified me some, but not enough. We stood silently as the prairie dogs moved, slowly and steadily, into their holes.
I finally said, “One time, when I was a kid, my friend Jessica and I were sitting on the trunk of her dad’s car in their driveway, and this man walked by that she knew. He came over and started talking to us, and I was freaked out, because it was very clear to me that he was a bad guy.”
“How?”
“He had a mustache.”
Les chuckled.
“Seriously, I couldn’t believe she was talking to him. I just sat there, stunned, and they were asking me questions, trying to get me to talk, and I was just glaring at him because I was on to him. At one point, Jessica leaned over and whispered, “What is the matter with you?” because I wouldn’t talk. I whispered back, “He has a mustache!” Like, the way you would say, “He’s carrying an ax and a severed head. Could it be any more apparent?”
“Somewhere along the way, you’d learned to equate mustaches with an evil character.”
“Right. I don’t even know where. A movie or maybe even a real life bad guy I knew had a mustache.” Growing up, my mom had had lots of friends, and very few of them had been morally upstanding citizens. It wasn’t hard to imagine that I’d started to equate evil and mustaches from personal experience. “The point is, as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I realized how silly that was. It was just facial hair. But up to that point, that had been one of my subconscious barometers of good and evil.”
“This isn’t like that, Salem. There’s perception and then there’s truth. Truth isn’t subjective.”
“I know that, but do you think, on a – a –” I stretched my arms wide, looking for the word. “Like, on a grand, global scale, we could do the same thing? Like, have it in our heads that something is wrong when really, we just don’t understand it? It’s unfamiliar to us, we can’t relate? So it must be wrong? And then, we operate under that assumption, and pass down from generation to generation that this is good and this is bad, and so we just – ju
st keep it going?”
Les nodded. “Sure. That’s a perception that actually develops some truth in it. Because we act on what we believe to be true, so all those acts join together to make things true, or at least to appear true.”
I smiled. I felt like I was really onto a breakthrough here.
“This isn’t one of those things.”
There went my smile. “Why not?”
“You know why not. You saw the entire interview.”
“Okay, but listen. You talked yourself about the Old Testament laws that we don’t live by anymore.”
“Right.” He nodded.
“Like, not eating pork. And not planting two crops in one field.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And those rules were there for a reason. God was protecting the people from something real, a physical threat.”
“Yes.”
“So Les, what if this is something like that? I mean, people were supposed to be populating the earth. We needed all the procreating we could get, right? Everyone needed to do their part if they were able – the survival of our species depended on lots of babies. But now...now we’re at – what – seven billion? Seven billion people, and populating the earth isn’t quite the priority it used to be. So maybe...you know, maybe this is like that. One of the rules God made to help ensure the survival of the species, but we can let go of now.”
Les gave me a tender smile. “I love your heart, Salem. I love you for wanting to make this okay.”
“Seriously, Les? Can’t you for a minute consider the possibility that it might actually be okay?”
“Times change, that’s true. And our needs do change. But God doesn’t. The Bible said that homosexuals will not inherit the Kingdom of God. And I want everyone to inherit the Kingdom of God.”
When I first started hanging around Les, I thought when he said, “inherit the Kingdom of God,” he meant “Go to Heaven when you die.” But after a while I learned he meant here and now, living this life. God went to all the trouble of creating this amazing world, of breathing life into us. Why would he have done that if this life doesn’t matter? If it’s only a dress rehearsal for the next one? He said he experienced Kingdom living in this life, and once you had that, you had a hard time not wanting that for every person on earth.
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