“Damn it, think for once!” DeWitt said. “We depend on the Torku for everything. What would you do if they were gone?”
Schoen had his answer ready, as though he had had it ready for years. “We’ll pull down the Line!”
“You can’t do that.”
“Heaven’s over there! “ Schoen’s voice rose beyond his usual evangelical control. “Don’t you understand? God is waiting!”
Bo put a hand on Schoen’s arm. The pastor pulled away. “You listen to reason, Pastor. You do anything tonight, you’ll all be cited. You don’t want that. You don’t want to break the law. I know you don’t.”
“I follow God’s law! And you’ll find out what God’s law is all about if you stay, Chief. Because I’m naming names. And two of the sinning names are DeWitt Dawson and Hattie Nichols.”
DeWitt felt anesthetized. He wondered if this was the first symptom of a stroke.
“Don’t y’all want some coffee?” Dee Dee said with hysterical cordiality. “I can get us all some coffee.”
Schoen flung open the door to the pulpit. “Your wife’s in her pew, Chief. The same place she sits every night. The children are with her. When I call the sinners to the altar to be forgiven, don’t you want to be cleansed? When I rebuke you as Satan’s messenger, don’t you want to hear? After the righteous strike you down, will you dare stand before the Throne unrepentant?”
Don’t, DeWitt thought. Don’t attack the Torku. Don‘t tell Janet.
“You’ve waltzed with the demons for six years, Chief,” Schoen said. “Stay. Have the last dance.”
Bo stepped forward, pushing the preacher aside to glance out the door. “Seresen’s getting the Torku together. Come on, Wittie. Let’s go.”
Bo dragged him, stumbling, outside. In the gravel parking lot Torku were climbing into their UPS vans, and Seresen was standing by the squad car, waiting.
DeWitt balked. “I’ll get Janet and the kids. I’ll bring them with us. She’ll never have to know.”
“He’s going to order those people to kill you! Don’t you get it?” Bo pulled him to the squad car, jerked open the passenger door, and shoved him inside. Seresen hopped into the back seat. Bo got behind the wheel and in a loud shower of gravel sent the car into wild reverse. At the road, he braked and spun. Floorboarding the accelerator, he sped toward town.
Through the rear window, the church receded until it was hidden behind a screen of winter-bare trees. DeWitt pictured Janet and his kids, hands folded in their laps, as they waited for service to begin.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“Seresen—what did Foster want?” DeWitt hung onto the door handle as Bo whipped around a curve. “What are you two cooking up?”
Seresen stared out his side window. “We talked of nothing.”
“I was listening! I stood there and heard. Foster wanted you to take him across the Line.”
“You misunderstood.”
DeWitt’s juggling act was in trouble, his concentration lost—Seresen, Janet, and her lover suspended in mid-air. DeWitt had always known he would have to choose. Without a pang of regret, he let Foster fall.
“I have reason to believe Hubert Foster is guilty of the murder of Loretta Harper and the disappearance of Billy Junior and Jason Harper. Are you protecting him, Seresen?”
“Foster isn’t guilty,” Bo said.
“Oh yes, he is. He plans to start his own little empire on the other side of the Line. Then Loretta finds out. She must have threatened to expose him.”
“Foster couldn’t have killed her, DeWitt. He was at my house Sunday night.” But a muscle twitched in Bo’s jaw.
“Oh? How long was he there?”
A pause: Bo was thinking. “He came early afternoon and didn’t leave until eleven that night.”
“Why did Foster tell me he was home? Was he lying?”
“I guess so.”
“Why would he lie about that? What were you doing?”
“We talked.” His upper lip beaded with perspiration.
“You talked, from early afternoon until eleven at night.”
From the back seat Seresen piped up. “The Hubert talks a great deal.”
DeWitt turned around. The car was ripe with the smell of nervous sweat, and a faint Elmer’s Glue smell that must have been Seresen. “What does he talk about?”
“The Hubert is fond of two dimensions. He tries to explain things with flat graphs and charts. I find it illogical and confusing. It is also confusing why the townspeople are so angry.”
“They’re scared. When people are scared, they do stupid things.”
Bo slowed as he entered the center’s parking lot. When the headlights picked out a pink Buick Regal among the delivery trucks, he hit the brakes so hard that Seresen was flung against the rear of DeWitt’s seat.
“Jesus,” Bo said. “It’s Loretta’s car.”
DeWitt jumped out as Bo sprinted to the Regal. The officer was wrapping his fingers in a handkerchief, pulling the door open, taking the ‘keys from the ignition, and going to the trunk.
If the boys were there, the smell would hit first: the heavy green stench of a dead rat in a wall, only a hundred times worse.
Across the lot Seresen was calmly getting out of the squad car. And at the door of the center, five other Torku stood, having appeared as if by magic. They held black sticks in their hands.
Bo was breathing hard. He couldn’t slot the key. A bead of sweat dislodged from his hairline and rolled down the side of his face.
The Torku were closer, only a few feet away.
“They’re the murderers,” Bo said in a rush. “They did it, don’t you see? Maybe Loretta did have that meeting with Seresen. Maybe she told him something he didn’t want to hear. Loretta left her house in her car that evening. Miz Wilson said so. Tore off in a hurry, she said. Wherever Loretta was headed, she didn’t make it. Whoever killed her had this Regal.”
‘You don’t have any evidence. Bo, listen to me.”
The key slid home; the trunk popped open. There was a blanket-wrapped bundle over the spare tire.
“You will go now,” Seresen said from the shadows at the front fender of the Regal.
Bo took the handcuffs from his belt. “Kol Seresen, I’m arresting you for the murder of Loretta Harper.”
DeWitt pushed Bo aside and flipped the blankets down, exposing a pile of boxes. Loretta had never made her Mary Kay deliveries. “Seresen!” DeWitt shouted. “Hide the car.”
Bo swiveled, his eyes full of rage,
DeWitt grabbed for the keys. Bo shoved him away. DeWitt shoved back with all the strength of desperation. Bo fell. The handcuffs and keys flew out of his fingers; they clinked across the asphalt.
Seresen picked up the keys and closed the trunk. Slipping into the Regal, he drove it toward the center. The garage door opened; Seresen parked Loretta’s car over a hydraulic lift; and the wall rolled back in place.
Bo knocked DeWitt’s offered hand away. He got to his feet and swayed, clasping the back of his head.
Seresen rushed outside. “It will be best if you come in now.”
“Go on, DeWitt.” Bo gestured. “Follow Seresen. Go plant a wet one on his fat, spotted ass.”
“Stop it, Bo.”
“You’re a whore just like your daddy. You cover for Seresen just like your daddy covered for the Klan.”
With an inarticulate moan, DeWitt grabbed for Bo’s jacket. “You draggle-tail peckerwood white trash! Your mama was nothing but a goddamned drunk!”
Bo pushed him away.
“She crawled under the sheets with every man in town! No wonder your daddy left! And who was there to take her home when she passed out? Who made sure her kids had enough to eat? Had coats in the winter? Don’t you remember? My daddy! So who was the whore?”
He charged. Bo jum
ped out of the way. DeWitt’s momentum sent him into a postal truck. He heard a whistle behind him and knew what it meant. Before he could duck, Bo’s night stick hit the back of his head.
Sharp, hot pain. DeWitt staggered away, snatching at his belt for any protection: his flashlight, night stick. His mind struggled to think, his eyes to focus. Too slow. A whistle of metal through air, and the night stick smacked his cheek.
He was on his knees now. Bo had him in a choke hold. DeWitt tried to get up. He couldn’t breathe. His own baton was lying inches away, just out of reach.
DeWitt tore at Bo’s arm, fingers sliding on the officer’s jacket. His vision contracted, telescoped, darkened at the edges. The world lost color.
The struggle was eerily silent except for the scrape of Bo’s boot soles and his rapid, grunting breaths.
The gay boy in Dallas had twitched his life out on the sidewalk, hyoid bone crushed. A prolonged death. A crowd-pleaser. The boy flailed while the drunken mob watched.
DeWitt forced himself to go limp. Instantly, Bo released him. DeWitt fell, hands outspread. He caught his night stick, and twisting onto his back, punched the end of it between Bo’s legs.
Only as the stick hit did DeWitt see Bo’s expression. DeWitt, who had never killed anyone, nearly didn’t recognize the emotion for what it was: fear and tremendous regret.
Bo groaned and toppled, curling into a fetal ball, cupping himself.
DeWitt scrabbled to his feet.
“Get . . . “ Bo said, then ran out of air.
“I didn’t mean what I said about your mama. I didn’t mean it.“
“Get . . . out.”
“But my daddy wasn’t like that.”
Bo didn’t reply.
With the weary expediency of his father, DeWitt walked away.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Inside the rec center a battalion of Torku stood guard. Seresen ordered DeWitt to a rear meeting room. Hubert Foster was sitting there.
As DeWitt entered, the banker’s eyes widened. He popped up from his seat. “What happened to you? Is this the trouble you were talking about? Who hit you?” Foster sounded not only upset but angry. He took hold of DeWitt’s chin and examined his bleeding head. “Don’t move, Wittie. Let me check the dilation of your pupils.”
DeWitt pulled away.
“Any dizziness? Double vision?”
“Cut it out.” Exhausted, DeWitt collapsed into one of the half-dozen raspberry plush chairs.
“That’s right,” Foster said encouragingly. “You just relax and I’ll get something for that bleeding.” He dashed out the door. A few moments later he was back with a Styrofoam cup of water and a handful of paper towels.
“I can’t believe they’d do this to you.” Foster daubed at DeWitt’s wound, wincing in sympathy as he worked. “I mean, you grew up with these people. Jimmy’s only lived here–what?–ten years?”
Foster’s attentions were so tentative as to be ineffectual. DeWitt snatched the wet towel away and with harsh, painful strokes wiped at the blood himself. “I had a little accident, Hubert, that’s all. Will you stop?”
Foster sat back like a retriever anxiously awaiting the hunter’s signal. When the paper towel was in tatters, Foster wordlessly gave him another. And when the towels stopped turning red, he brought him a plastic bag of ice.
“You got a joint?” Foster asked.
Baggie pressed to his aching head, DeWitt looked up, surprised at the banker’s presumption. Foster’s makeup had caked. Brown shadow made arcs over his lids.
“I get mine from Curtis. He told me you toke up sometimes. “
DeWitt glanced at the partially open door and the Torku outside on guard. “Smoking in here might not be a good idea.”
Foster laughed. “The Torku like marijuana. They think it makes us less linear. The only reason they confiscated booze and cigarettes was that Pastor Jimmy told them to. You didn’t know that? Doesn’t Seresen ever talk to you about things?”
DeWitt sat up straight. “Yeah, we talk.”
“Aliens as cosmic Jehovah’s Witnesses. And isn’t their religion weird? You notice how for the Torku time isn’t really time? You know how you look at a room over on their side and it’s one way? And then you look at it again and it’s changed? I think the Torku are universe-challenged.”
A chill droplet rolled down DeWitt’s forehead and into his eye. He swiped at it in exasperation. Seresen had never invited him to the Torku side of the center. He didn’t know what Foster was talking about.
“Wittie, I need a joint.”
“All my dope’s in the squad car.”
Foster’s guffaw was so loud that a Torku poked his head in the doorway. “In the squad car. God, that’s priceless.”
“What’s funny is you and Seresen. You talk, but I bet you never told him about con artists.”
Foster looked hurt. From the kitchen came a quiet rumble as the center’s ice maker engaged. There was a whine of a servo-motor then the crystalline clatter of the machine upchucking ice into its bin.
“Look, Wittie. I used to be a jerk. No wonder when we were kids you thought you were better than me. For you, goodness always came easy. But there’s a whole lot of people just like me across the Line. Their beamers and condos are gone. I want to tell those people what I’ve learned. What Seresen’s taught me about life. I want a chance to clear my karma.”
“Oh, karma? So tell me, Mr. Morality, how can your karma get clear if you’re screwing someone else’s wife? Unless, now that you’re a lapsed Catholic, you don’t think fornication is immoral.”
DeWitt could see, by the flush in Foster’s face, that he had hit home. “You mean . . . oh, the gossip. Okay, so I know some women. What’s wrong with that? Mostly we talk. Guys, you know, we really don’t say what’s on our minds. Women talk about their feelings. It’s a whole new way of seeing the world.”
DeWitt’s conversations with Janet were dust on a sideboard: transitory, easily wiped away. “I know about your affair with my wife.”
Foster could not have looked more surprised if during Holy Communion the celebrating priest had slapped him. “Wait. What makes you think she’s having an affair?”
“Cut the crap, Hubert. I’ve known for some time.”
“It’s not—” He stopped mid-sentence and swallowed hard. “I see. Did you confront her? What did she say? I just can’t believe she’d . . . that she actually—”
“I figure you killed Loretta. I assume you killed her boys. And Janet helped you. The tire tracks out at Sparrow Point were left by the Suburban’s Dunlops. There was caliche in the treads. Mud on her sneakers. But she couldn’t have disposed of the body alone. And you had the strongest motive. Whatever happens from this point on, I don’t want her implicated. And I want you to tell me why Bo’s covering for you. Does he know you did it? Is he trying to shift the blame to Seresen?”
“Bo’s not covering . . . God.” Foster’s voice shook so that DeWitt could barely understand him. “Jesus, DeWitt. You can’t think your own wife murdered Loretta. That I . . . this is crazy.”
“Here’s your story. I want you to memorize it so no one can trip you up. You killed Loretta, but couldn’t fit her in the Corvette’s trunk. You said you wanted to haul firewood when you borrowed the Suburban from me. You understand? You got the Suburban from me.”
DeWitt wondered how Foster made people love him. How tiny Janet could murder; how gentle Seresen could protect them both; and how the honest Bo could lie.
“Bo knows I didn’t kill her. And Janet would never . . . oh, shit. What a mess.”
“Be a man about it, Hubert. Don’t start pointing fingers. I promise, if you shield Janet, I’ll help you. We’ll go for manslaughter, if possible. Or self-defense.”
It baffled DeWitt why Foster thought he was a good man. He lied to suspects just as he was
lying now, because if the kids were dead, Foster would be facing capital murder. And DeWitt would try his best to hurry him to execution before he had a chance to talk.
“Stop staring at me, DeWitt. I hate when you do that. You’ve got your cop face on. You look at me like you’d never known me; like you don’t believe a word I’m saying.”
“The thing I don’t understand is how you did it, Hubert. I wish you’d tell me. How did you make that wound?”
Foster didn’t reply. He looked at his watch and then looked again. “It’s eight-thirty already. Christ, I need a joint.” His smile was off-kilter. “You want to let me in your squad car?”
DeWitt handed him the keys.
Foster came back with a handful of weed, and they smoked. DeWitt checked the time. Eight-thirty became nine, nine crawled its way to nine-thirty. At ten-thirty Foster got up and went into an unlit room, DeWitt at his heels. In the glow from the doorway, Foster walked to an L-shaped pit group and collapsed. DeWitt lay down on the other leg of the overstuffed sofa without bothering to remove his boots.
In the darkness DeWitt felt time slip. He might have been a teenager again on a high school camp-out. They’d be sharing a can of beer Foster had filched from his daddy. Curtis would be talking about girls. Simpler times, smaller worries, even though Janet would be at school the next day, Foster’s letter jacket around her shoulders, his class ring around her neck.
From the dark sofa, Foster whispered, “Listen, Wittie. I’m not having an affair with Janet and I didn’t kill Loretta.”
DeWitt lifted his wrist. According to the glowing face of his digital, it was five till eleven. The rec center was silent. A Torku stood at the doorway as though asleep on his feet. “Don’t be scared to confess, Hubert. I’ll take care of everything.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
God’s grace comes to those who wait, and Schoen had become an expert at waiting.
He checked his watch. Eleven-thirty. Around him, on Main Street, the townspeople were climbing ladders, hurriedly painting the Sign above their doors. Schoen imagined the quiet tread of the Angel, pictured scythed Death searching doorposts for God’s mark.
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