The 37th Hour

by Jodi Compton

  “Leave,” I said succinctly.

  They got up, carrying their steins, and went to a booth. The show of authority took the edge off Shorty’s good mood; his expression was moving toward being a scowl. I slid onto a stool one of his drinking buddies had vacated.

  “So what do you want?” he said.

  “Tell me about Mike Shiloh.”

  Unease wiped the last of the smirk away. “I don’t know who that is,” he lied. Then he took a sip of his beer, the mug a symbolic foxhole for him to dive into.

  “Yeah you do. You can tell me about it now, or I can get a warrant for your arrest.” It was my turn to lie. I didn’t have anything near probable cause.

  “You’re harassing me,” Shorty said. “Everyone will know it’s because of that stuff in the Cities. They won’t listen to you.”

  That rape and murder, you mean, is that what you mean by “stuff”? No, don’t antagonize him or you’ll never get what you need. Easy.

  “Tell me what happened now, before this gets any deeper,” I persisted. “It’ll be easier that way.”

  “Easier than what? I beat you last time. It couldn’t get any easier than that.”

  Then Shorty realized that what he had said was dangerously close to an admission. The case against him was dismissed for insufficient evidence, but double jeopardy didn’t apply because he hadn’t actually been found not guilty in a trial. Shorty didn’t know, in light of that, what was safe to say and what wasn’t.

  “Do you really want me on your case, Shorty?” I demanded. “If you do, keep on like you’re doing. Keep your mouth shut and don’t tell me what you know.”

  “I already told you what I know,” he said sullenly. “Jack shit.”

  I got off my bar stool and walked to the door, not looking back to see if he was watching me or not.

  Outside the bar I made an illegal U-turn and headed out of town. It wasn’t long before I pulled over on the side of the road. I was there so long, trying to think, that I finally switched off the Nova’s idling engine.

  Shorty would not tell me what I wanted to know. There was no reason for it. Neither would he let me look inside his home, which was what I wanted to do next.

  While I thought, I was trying to chew on the nail of my middle finger; biting my nails was a bad habit I fell back on at difficult times. I also realized that I couldn’t really get any purchase under the edge of the nail, because they’d still been too recently clipped. Not by me, but by Shiloh, who’d sat on the edge of our bed and held my hands in his and pared my nails for me.

  Prewitt had cautioned me that he expected me, in the course of my investigation of Shiloh’s disappearance, to consider myself a representative of the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Department. By that he certainly did not mean breaking and entering.

  All my thinking on the roadside wasn’t really thinking. I was justifying a decision I’d already made.

  The darkened road that the Nova ate up so greedily was the same highway that Shorty walked to get home from the bar. It wasn’t terribly far from town to his house, but it wasn’t what most people meant by “walking distance.” Surely it wasn’t just the alcohol that led Shorty to walk it late at night, even in wintertime and early spring. He could have drunk more cheaply and conveniently at home. But it wouldn’t have been the same. Shorty would probably have gone without groceries before giving up the cost of tap-drawn Budweiser with his buddies.

  Shorty’s “house” was nothing more than a garden shed behind a two-story farmhouse. I cut off my headlights, gliding past with only parking lights on. The lights in the front house were off, the windows dark as sightless eyes. Even so, I rolled gently into the yard as though my Nova could tiptoe if I were light enough on the gas.

  Following the rutted dirt, I drove all the way around the back of the shed, where my car wouldn’t be visible from the road. I killed the lights, then the ignition. When I got out, I left the door cracked so it would make no sound in closing, switching off the dome light first so it wouldn’t drain the battery.

  I held the flashlight under my armpit while I laid out the tools I’d need for the lock. The door actually looked flimsy enough that it would have come down under a couple of kicks, if I had the luxury of being so obvious.

  As soon as I touched the knob, I knew I wasn’t going to have to pick the lock. The door was already unlocked.

  Something about that struck me as wrong. But I told myself, Come on, relax. What does a guy like Shorty have that’s worth stealing anyway? Everything’s fine. What are you waiting for?

  Then I stepped inside and switched on the flashlight.

  A figure rose up in the beam, close and fast. I went for my.40.

  “Sarah, wait, it’s me!” The shadow before me was already dropping to the ground.

  “Gen?” I pointed the flashlight down. She squinted up against its glare, one hand coming up against the flashlight’s beam. “What are you doing here?”

  “Waiting for you,” she said. “I had a head start. Don’t shine that thing in my eyes.”

  Later I would realize how changed she was at that moment, how revived in comparison to the zombie of weeks past.

  My heart started slamming belatedly. “Are you crazy? I almost shot you!”

  “Could you get the light off me?” she said again. “There’s something you should see.”

  As she got to her feet, my light played over her hand. She was holding something.

  “What is that in your hand?” I asked.

  Wordlessly she held it into the light and tilted it. Something flashed: the holographic seal of the State of Minnesota. It was a driver’s license. Michael David Shiloh’s driver’s license.

  I’d been sure, but I hadn’t been ready to face it, not really. I don’t know how long I would have stared at his license if she hadn’t spoken again.

  “What the hell is going on?” she demanded.

  “Where’d you find this?”

  Genevieve pointed. I followed her hand with the flashlight’s beam.

  There was a backpack on the floor. Also Shiloh’s. He’d used it sometimes when he’d had to go to the library for research and bring home a lot of books. He’d taken it out infrequently enough that I hadn’t even missed it in my search of the closet.

  I walked over to it and knelt. Inside was a railroad atlas and a bruised, cidery apple. And the billfold, empty of money.

  “Shorty,” I whispered. “That son of a bitch.”

  “Yeah,” Genevieve agreed. “But what happened? How’d you know to look here?”

  I pointed the flashlight up at the white ceiling, so we’d both have ambient light to see each other in.

  “You were wrong,” I said quietly, and my voice was steady enough. “Shorty didn’t steal that truck. Shiloh did.”

  “Shiloh?” She was incredulous.

  “He came down last week, while I was visiting you. As soon as I was out of town, he jumped a freight.”

  “A train?”

  “He and his brothers used to ride freights over short distances, for kicks. He knew how. And that’s why he didn’t leave a trail: Greyhound, Amtrak, nothing. Nobody saw him, nobody picked him up hitchhiking. The train took him right to the Amtrak station, where he could steal a vehicle that no one would miss for a while. Afterward he could ditch it and get a freight back home.”

  “But why?”

  “Kamareia,” I said, and was about to go on when noises from outside distracted me, the creak and slam of a gate very like the one between this property and the road. Genevieve heard it, too, and went to the dirty, unshuttered window, pressing her face close to the glass to see what could be made out in the dim night.

  “Looks like Shorty’s done drinking for the night,” she said rather mildly.

  I got to my feet. “We can’t be here,” I said. “Legally.”

  “I’m not going to run from that murdering prick. Are you?” she challenged me.

  “No,” I said. “Hold the flashlight. Point it down low.
”

  Genevieve did, sitting on her heels to get it close to the ground. I moved to the door. Gravel crunched underneath footsteps, and we both watched as the doorknob turned counterclockwise.

  As soon as Shorty was through the door, I sent my fist as hard as I could into his solar plexus. As he doubled over, I grabbed his hair and pulled his face down into my rising knee. He hit the floor with a hiss of painful breath.

  “How they hanging, Shorty?” I said. “I felt a little unsatisfied with where we left things at the bar.”

  Genevieve was still holding the flashlight down. “Why don’t you turn on the overhead light?” I suggested.

  She pulled the string and we had light.

  It was a shitty little place. A bare bulb overhead, a narrow cot. A card table, a folding chair, a cheap dresser. A bathroom through the doorway; I caught a glimpse of an old freestanding tub, an ancient sink on one porcelain leg. The kitchen was a sink and a hot plate.

  But Shorty had his skills. He was obviously converting the place into a residence. I saw plumber’s tools on the bathroom floor, a wrench and some pipes. In the main room were things he most likely used in his day job: housepainter’s things, coveralls, a wallpaper shaver with a foot-long handle and a sharp, asymmetrical blade.

  Shorty rolled onto his side to look at Genevieve. When he saw her, he looked like a man getting a visit from the harpies.

  “Tell me about Mike Shiloh,” I said, as if we’d never left the bar.

  “Fuck you,” he muttered. He’d been afraid to say that to a cop earlier, but clearly he saw that things had changed.

  “You’ve got his backpack, his very empty billfold, and his driver’s license. That looks bad,” I said.

  Shorty sat up. “I found them. In a ditch.”

  “A ditch where?”

  “On the county road.”

  “Pretty near where you put your fingerprints all over that pickup?”

  “This is illegal,” he said. “You broke into my place. What do you think a judge is gonna do with anything you find here? This is a fucking illegal search.”

  Shorty knew a little about the system, like a guy with his rap sheet should have. And in his face I saw cunning that can, for a while, substitute for true brains.

  I pulled out my gun again and pointed it at him. “Nobody in this room is thinking about the courts,” I told him. “Except you.”

  Shorty stood up and faced me. He looked pretty tough for a guy with blood all over the lower half of his face. He said nothing. Somehow he’d seen the truth in my face: that even after everything he’d done, I wouldn’t pull the trigger. Just a little bit of the bar smirk came up to his lips.

  Then he turned to Genevieve and said, “Your daughter loved fucking me.”

  His eyes went back to me, to see how I was taking his little joke. That was his mistake. He was mostly paying attention to me. He hadn’t searched Genevieve’s face to see what could be read there.

  “Gen, don’t!” I yelled, but I was too late. Her arm was a blur as she embedded Shorty’s own wallpaper shaver deep into the arteries of his neck.

  Shorty made a sound like a cough, and I couldn’t jump back in time to keep his blood from splashing me. He stumbled backward, eyes rolling toward Genevieve. She lunged again, digging the blade yet deeper into his neck.

  “Gen!” I caught her arm. Shorty fell away from both of us, his hands on his throat. They were already red, arterial blood coursing from underneath them.

  “Call 911,” I said.

  Genevieve looked at me and I knew what she was thinking. If Shorty died and we covered our tracks, we were all right. If not, both our careers were over. Our freedom as well. All for a rapist and murderer. I didn’t expect her to do it.

  She said, “There doesn’t seem to be a phone in here.”

  Shorty, on the floor, made a gurgle that didn’t seem promising.

  “The front house, then. Wake them up,” I said.

  Genevieve looked at Shorty, looked at me, and then she turned and went out the door.

  The blood on the floor of Shorty’s sad home was truly amazing. There was a lake of it. From the floor, Shorty’s eyes met mine.

  “Keep pressure on your neck,” I said.

  “There’s nobody home,” he said, his voice raspy.

  “In the front house?” I asked.

  He couldn’t nod, afraid of opening the wound in his throat any more than he already had. But assent was in his eyes.

  I knelt, despite the blood that soaked my legs from knees to feet.

  “Then this is probably the ball game for you,” I said. “You know that, right?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “I just want to know how it happened,” I said. The blood was soaking through to the skin of my legs, unpleasantly warm. “If I can, I want to bring him home and bury him. But even if I can’t, I need to know what really happened.”

  A bubble of blood appeared at the corner of Royce Stewart’s mouth. He coughed.

  “Please,” I said.

  He was silent so long I thought his heart was hardened against me. Then he spoke.

  “I was walking home, it was late,” he said with effort. “This truck drove by me. A big Ford. A lot of the guys I work with drive trucks just like it.”

  I nodded. A big pickup, with a strong engine, a solid body, and a high grille. The kind of vehicle in which you could-if you were angry enough, and fearless enough-run down another human being and not be seriously injured yourself.

  Royce took a shuddery breath. “Maybe five minutes later I heard the engine again, getting louder, like the truck’s coming back. But I couldn’t see it anywhere. Then the lights came on, out of nowhere. He’d been driving with the lights off and he was goin’ real fuckin’ fast on the wrong side of the road. My side.

  “I di’n know who it was but I knew he was coming for me. I started to run and fell. It’d been raining and then froze over. There was ice on the road. I sat there looking up at the headlights coming. I thought I was dead.” His hands tightened on his throat.

  I remembered seeing the black truck on the news. Undamaged, on the road, headlights like cold white fire… it would have looked to Shorty like Death had come.

  “Then the guy pulled out,” Shorty went on, “back to the center of the road. He went by, and then that truck hit some black ice and skidded out. I don’ think he even got a chance to hit the brakes before he was off the road and into that tree.

  “For a couple minutes I waited for someone to get out, or another car to come along. But nothing was happening, so I went to see what was up.” He drew in an unsteady breath. “There was only one guy in the pickup. His eyes were kinda open, but he wasn’t seeing me. He was messed up. So I took his shit and left.”

  “When you left, he was still in the car.”

  “Yeah. He was bleedin’ pretty bad, but he was breathing and all. But I wasn’t going to call anyone to help him.” Shorty’s eyes searched my face. He was watching to see how I’d react to this part of his story. “He’d been laying for me. It was his fault he was that messed up.”

  “When you say he pulled away and went past you, are you sure that wasn’t when he lost control of the truck?” I needed to be sure. I held Shorty’s eyes, the better to watch for truth. But I believed what Kilander had explained: the dying were past needing to lie.

  “It was on purpose,” Royce said. His voice was getting fainter, thinner. “He lost control because he pulled out at the last minute. It was two different things.”

  I had nothing to add; Genevieve failed to reappear. Shorty coughed again. “I wanted,” he whispered, “I wanted to…”

  He never did finish that thought. He started it five or six times, then his eyes glazed over, and I got up and went outside and lost track of time.

  When Genevieve returned, I was sitting under the willow tree, looking up at a waning moon that had appeared over the trees. I was finally distracted from the night sky by Genevieve waving her hand in front of my ey
es. She was saying something, but I couldn’t make it out. Then her hand was a black blur on the periphery of my vision and she slapped me.

  “What?” I said, and rubbed the stinging spot on my cheek.

  “That’s better,” Genevieve said. “Shorty’s place has got to burn,” she explained. “You were smart enough to wear gloves, but I wasn’t.” Moonlight glinted off the metal can in her hand. “You can stay there if you want, for now. Do you want any of Shiloh’s things?”

  “His things?” I echoed.

  “The stuff we found in there. Try and stay with me, Sarah. I can do most of this myself, but I can’t drive your car and mine both when we leave.”

  “Your car? Where-?”

  “My car’s right there.” She pointed. “You didn’t see it when you first got here, and neither did Shorty, because I parked around the side of the main house. I didn’t know why exactly you were coming to Shorty’s place, but it didn’t seem smart to advertise that we were here.”

  She walked to the shack and went inside. Her step was light and energetic. A moment later she came out again. “I’m going to light it up in a minute. We should get out of here pretty quick after that, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said dully.

  “You’ll follow me back to my sister’s place, all right?” she prompted.

  “Yeah.” I couldn’t bear to ask her if she’d made any attempt to find a phone and call 911 before committing to her plan. I was already sure I knew the answer.

  We stayed to make sure Shorty’s place was truly going to go up in flames. Maybe we stayed a little longer than we needed to, watching the spectacle of it. We were drawn to destruction, just like it seemed it was drawn to us.

  Genevieve was in the lead as we drove back toward Blue Earth, but she stopped when she saw my car pull off the road at the tree that loomed in the dark.

  In the headlights of my car, I looked down into the wet and matted grass until I saw what I was looking for: a small piece of broken glass.

  Sitting on my heels, I picked it out of the dirt.

  Genevieve came to stand behind me.