Patterson doesn’t even bother thinking about cover. There’s nowhere in the cabin the biker can’t shoot him as easy as if he were standing a foot in front him. He knows that as well as Patterson does, which is why he isn’t bothering to put his sights on him. “Jesus, you’re a badass,” Patterson says. “You do remember that I untied you out of that bathtub?”
Her eyes don’t waver.
“He didn’t mean you any good,” Patterson says. “In case you hadn’t figured that out.”
“Where is he?” she says.
Patterson knows there isn’t a lie in the world he can come up with that would satisfy her. So he does what he seems to do best. Plays stupid. “What makes you think I know?”
“He came down here looking for you,” she says.
“He did,” Patterson says. “And I told him I didn’t have you. Nor his dope, which is what he was really after.”
“Shut your mouth,” she says.
“This make a goddamn bit of sense to you?” Patterson asks the biker.
The man doesn’t answer and his gun hand doesn’t move, but Patterson thinks he sees something happen around his eyes.
Patterson tries a different tack. “I’ve got people who’ll be back any minute,” he says.
“We brought rope,” she says. “We’re not staying.”
“They’ll figure it out,” Patterson says. “Everybody knows everybody up here on the mesa, somebody’ll see your car.”
“Get your shoes on,” she says. “And we’ll give it a try.”
“Jesus,” Patterson says. “Over a fuckup like Chase.”
“Put your shoes on.”
“Okay,” Patterson says. “Okay. Close the door.”
This time the command seems to click in the biker’s head. Without even thinking, he reaches out with his gun hand and slaps the door shut.
As soon as his hand hits the door, Patterson sweeps back, pulls his .45 one-handed, and punches the pistol at the man’s chest, squeezing the trigger twice. The two-shot string is one solid boom like somebody set off a stick of dynamite between his eyes. It’s point shooting at that range, and Patterson’s scared he missed at first. Until the biker looks down at his chest, startled, and slumps to the floor.
Mel’s moving. “Don’t,” Patterson yells to her. He can’t hear himself over the sound of his eardrums splintering. He doubts she can either. She’s squatted down by the man, tugging at the AR-15. She probably thinks she’s moving quickly, and maybe she is, but to Patterson it’s all comically slow. She struggles with the sling, looking for a way to unfasten it.
“Don’t,” Patterson tries again, louder.
She gets the AR-15 loose, and that’s all the time Patterson can give her. He jerks the trigger and the bullet goes through her arm, blows into her chest cavity. Her eyes widen and the breath goes out of her as her legs give. She very slowly, almost graciously, collapses forward across the biker.
Patterson breathes out. “You bitch,” he says. And he sits down at the table and stares at the two bodies.
48
dirt
Patterson doesn’t know how long he sits at the kitchen table. This is as close as he’s ever come to being killed, and he knows it. Mel’s face had made that clear, and the biker had been as smooth a professional as Patterson’s ever seen. Patterson knows he only survived by dumb luck. Dumb luck and spending way too much time working on his draw.
It probably isn’t five minutes he sits there, but it feels like hours. And he’s not sure what he’s waiting for. Maybe somebody to show up, maybe a police siren. But then he starts to realize that nobody’s coming. That unless somebody happened to be walking along the road right then, nobody could’ve heard the shots. And he also realizes that the last thing he wants to do is explain any of this to Laney, Gabe, and Henry. Let alone the police. So he bubbles his bottle of Evan Williams and chases the whiskey with Vicodin. He needs all the nerve he can get.
Moving fast, holding his breath that they don’t come through the door, he has the bodies wrapped in tarps and bound with duct tape within fifteen minutes. There isn’t much blood. A trickling, most of it absorbed by their clothes. As advertised, none of the hollow point rounds exited their bodies. In fifteen minutes more, he has his floor scrubbed down and rescuffed with San Luis Valley dirt.
Then he steps outside and sees their car around the corner. It’s a Corvette ZR1. Atomic orange, spotless down to its slick black tires, no more than a year old. Patterson’s never seen a ZR1 except in pictures in car magazines, and even with two bodies in his living room he can’t help but gawk a little as he realizes it’s his, at least for the night.
But he doesn’t gawk long before he’s back inside to get the bodies. Somehow he gets Mel’s folded into the trunk. The biker he has to kick into place in the passenger’s seat. He tosses a shovel and a bag of lime after them, and peels out down the mesa, toward Questa on CO-159.
It’s the opposite of how he felt when he found Chase’s body. He doesn’t feel bad at all. He feels better than he has in years. To have somebody show up at your house with a gun, to try to kill you, and then win out. Patterson doesn’t feel guilty or complicated or even sad. For the first time in a long time, he feels like he’s done exactly the right and necessary thing.
He turns on the radio and spins the dial slowly, leaning into it like a sonar operator plumbing the deep, short bursts of static flickering across the airwaves in the big radio-dead valley. Then he comes across Brother Joe. Knowing better, he keeps spinning the dial. Lucks on Willie Nelson singing “He Was a Friend of Mine” and leaves it right there. Which is probably a mistake, the way country music seeps into everything. But he does it anyway.
He crosses the New Mexico line and makes random turns toward the mountains. Off the blacktop and onto the dirt roads, anything he figures the undercarriage can handle, right up to an overgrown four-wheeling trail. Patterson drives it as far as he can with the lights off, and when it gets rough enough he can’t drive any farther, he parks and checks the time on his cell phone. Eleven fifteen.
He digs a four-foot-deep hole and rolls the bodies into it. And it breaks his heart, but he tosses the AR-15 in with them. Then he climbs down, slices the tarps with his clip knife, and empties the bag of lime over them. He’s a lot smarter this second time around.
49
pop
Two o’clock in the morning, and Junior has no idea why he’s sitting in his car parked down the street from Jenny’s house. Especially since his own house is right there. But it is what he’s doing. And he’s been resisting the urge to go over and tap on her window. To sneak inside and crawl into her bed. To look in on Casey, to just sit and watch her, to put his hand on her forehead, on her cheek.
Junior remembers his own mother waking him with that gesture when he was a boy, and at about the same time in the morning. A hand on the forehead, then on the cheek, as if checking him for a fever. Which she may have been, given that he’d been with Henry while she was working second shift, waiting tables at an all-you-can-eat pancake house.
They’d lived in a double-wide outside of Longmont, Colorado, with room for a horse, though Junior doesn’t remember Henry ever actually being able to afford a horse. Most nights when Junior’s mother was at work, he and Henry would go down to the only bar in walking distance.
There was barely room for fifty people in that bar, but that was never a problem. There were seldom more than ten at any one time, and most of them broken-down rodeo bums. There was a bartender, though, a redheaded girl in her early twenties, who would spend her nights standing at the end of the bar with Henry. Or, when she got a chance, and there was no one else in the place but she and Henry and Junior, would lock the front door and sneak back to the stockroom with him.
Junior tried not to notice it when they snuck off together. That was one of many betrayals of his mother. He loved that place, and he wasn’t about to fuck that up. There was a television, which they didn’t have the money for at their trailer,
and when business was slow, the redhead would open up the pinball machine and let him play for free. And when the boy was tired, Henry’d make him a bed along the seat of one of the three booths that were used for weekly euchre games by a gang of half-crippled rough-stock riders.
Then there was Henry himself. The broken places hadn’t yet hardened, and he moved with a loose, looping grace that he wore as easily as his friendship. He was almost impossible not to love when he wasn’t at home, and here, in the bar, he was at his best. He let the boy steer the conversation, let him wander as far off topic as he wanted. Never pushing him in any direction, just rolling along on Junior’s trip. Joking and laughing, doing what he did that made him popular in every bar he’d ever set foot in, and bringing Junior into his world.
Most nights, after the smoke and the boozy talk and the television, the last thing Junior remembered was curling up exhausted in the booth, letting himself drift away on the warm tones of Henry’s voice. And then partially wakening as Henry picked him up and carried him all the way back to their trailer, where he tucked him into bed. And, later, waking again, for just a minute, as his mother put her hand on his forehead, on his cheek.
Only to come awake one more time to the sound of yelling, Henry and Connie hard after each other again.
And then, and Junior’s never quite sure of this memory, he was standing against the fence out back of their trailer, not much more than eight years old. One of Henry’s rodeo buddies was standing next to him, a sharp-faced man with a long, scraggly mustache. Neither of them talking, just watching what was happening on the other side of the fence about fifty feet away, watching as Henry dragged Connie backward by the hair. She was screaming and scratching over her head at his hands and arms, her legs scrabbling to keep up.
“Don’t you think we ought to do something?” Junior remembers asking. He looked at his father’s friend, who was smoking a lumpy hand-rolled cigarette.
“I ain’t getting in the middle of that,” the man said. He looked at the boy. “I got some pop in my truck. How’s about you and me go get one?”
Henry let go of Connie’s hair, and she fell flat on her back. He stood over her, looking down, his chin jutted out like a rooster’s. Then he turned and strutted toward the fence. He only made it four or five paces before she rose behind him and charged in a low, crablike run, her mane of dirty blond hair tangled with dry grass and clumps of dirt. She was fully airborne when she hit his back, and they dropped together, rolling through the tall grass in a flurry of blows and dust, screaming and hissing. And then the motion quieted, and there were only Henry’s grunts, and the solid smack of blows landing on undefended flesh.
“I think we’d better go get that pop,” Henry’s friend said.
Connie was in the hospital for two days, and it was another week before she could work again. She and Henry spent her time off in the kitchen, drinking black coffee and talking. They kept the shades drawn and the trailer was heavy and dark. They were pounding out some kind of deadly agreement that Junior neither understood nor cared to. Junior, out of school for the summer, listened to the radio and read comic books in his room. He hated both of them desperately. And when she finally did go back to work, Junior no longer went with Henry to the bar.
Most of the memories that gnaw at the edges of Junior’s brain are like that. They come in fragments. A conspiracy of whispered voices, crashes in the bedroom, pus and blood draining from his mother’s swollen eye the next morning. Henry sitting on the front step of the trailer, waiting for Junior to walk down the lane from school. Grabbing the boy into his arms, crying drunk into his neck.
And then there was when she died. And that, too, was the old man’s doing somehow, if for no other reason than it was her dying that stopped him from drinking. Junior knows that Henry’s sobriety was an acknowledgment of his complicity in her death, just as he knows that the minute Henry got sober, his mother’s death became just one more point in Henry’s story of Henry.
And Junior knows himself for what he is in Henry’s life. A terrorist, forcing himself into Henry’s story of himself, making himself relevant in something in which he has always been irrelevant. Henry’s story of himself is total, self-configuring, and self-healing. There is nothing that cannot be assimilated by it. Nothing except sudden force.
Still watching Jenny’s house, Junior lights a cigarette, sucking smoke past the hollow spot growing just behind his Adam’s apple. He doesn’t think about that quiet boy who’d sit in a chair all day with his mother, nursing her hangovers and wounds. Nor of his mother, who tried with all her heart to give as good as she got, but was never quite able to. Junior rolls the window down, hacks up a chunk of nicotine-fused phlegm, and spits it out the window.
And then he freezes.
The front door of Jenny’s house cracks open and a man steps out. A young man with a goatee, wearing what looks like a mechanic’s shop pants.
Junior starts his car, and the man jumps a little, and then starts walking quicker down the sidewalk to a beat-up Honda Accord that Junior hadn’t even seen sitting there.
Then Junior’s cell phone rings.
50
joy
Once Patterson has the bodies out of the trunk he can’t stop grinning. He hits the highway and lets the Corvette open up, still shot through with Vicodin and adrenaline. He doesn’t even try not to speed. He’s pretty sure he can outrun any cop stupid enough to try to pull him over in the thing, anyway. The thought that he’ll probably end up facing a murder charge if he is pulled over does occur to him, but there’s no stopping it. Turns out there’s no better medicine for heartache than surviving a murder attempt and stealing a car.
He makes Fort Garland before pulling out his cell phone and dialing Junior. “What the fuck do you want?” Junior answers in a rough whisper.
“I’m on my way to see you.”
“I’m busy.”
“Get unbusy.”
“Does it really fucking need to be right now?”
“Yeah. It kind of does.”
There’s a long pause. “All right.” Junior’s voice sounds like chipped Sheetrock. “You coming by my house?”
Patterson hasn’t thought that far ahead. “I don’t think so. Anywhere else you can think of?”
“How far are you out?”
“At least three hours. Maybe four.”
“You know where the Bar Bar is?” Junior asks.
“Downtown’s probably not a good idea, either.”
“Whatever your problem is, it’s better in plain sight. You can trust me on that.”
“If you say so.” Patterson hangs up.
The Bar Bar is the one bar in Denver that opens at six o’clock in the morning, which is just about the time Patterson pulls up. It’s a stucco box, right on the edge of downtown where the abandoned warehouses and gearhead mechanics take over. It’s never had any name that anyone knows of, but there’s a neon sign out front that says Bar, which is where people get Bar Bar from. From noon to close it’s populated by homeless cart pushers and bitter Indians, but at six o’clock in the morning you’re liable to see anybody. A high-end stripper killing the smell of baby oil and perfume with gin, a television lawyer blowing his last line of cocaine in the men’s room, an overtime cop pounding bourbon before heading home to his impending divorce. Anybody.
Patterson takes a stool next to Junior, who is sitting by a homeless man with a beardful of coagulated blood. Junior looks at Patterson and shakes his head. “You’re gonna need to tone it down some,” he says. “I don’t think I can take you glowing.”
“It’s love of life,” Patterson says. “It’s joy.” He knocks back the shot of bourbon Junior has waiting for him. “Sorry to get you up in the middle of the night.”
“I wasn’t sleeping anyway.” Junior slaps his pockets for his cigarettes. He finds them and pulls out the pack.
“You can’t smoke in here,” Patterson says. “Can’t smoke in any of the bars in Denver. You’re the one who told m
e that.”
“True,” Junior says, lighting his cigarette. “I don’t give a shit.”
“Hey,” the bartender says. “Hey.”
Junior ignores him.
“I’m talking to you, motherfucker,” the bartender says. He’s in his early thirties, with a mustache and a Hawaiian shirt. He doesn’t look particularly tough, but he carries himself like someone who’s taken more than his fair share of shit in his chosen occupation, and knows how to handle it. “No smoking at the bar, motherfucker. If you want to smoke, move outside.”
“Call me motherfucker again and I’ll put it out in your ear,” Junior says.
“It’s a term of endearment,” the bartender says. “Put it out or go outside. I’m the one who gets the ticket, not you.”
Junior lets the cigarette fall out of his fingers and scuffs it out on the floor with the toe of his cowboy boot. Patterson almost falls off his stool seeing him comply. Then he looks at Junior hard for the first time since walking into the bar. Junior looks like Patterson imagines he did just about thirty seconds after he survived Mel and the biker. Shell-shocked.
“All right,” the bartender says. “You can get the hell out of here. I don’t need your shit.”
Patterson finds a twenty-dollar bill in his wallet. “How’s that?” He offers it to the bartender.
The bartender studies the bill and slides it in his pocket. “No more of that shit,” he says, pointing at Junior.
“No more of that shit,” Patterson agrees.
“All right.” The bartender walks away down the bar.
Patterson shakes his head and starts to say something to Junior. Then he starts to say something else. Then he decides on “Something wrong with you?”
“There ain’t a fucking thing wrong with me, partner. You’re the one who called me.”
So Patterson tells him. Tells him all about it, from the minute Chase’s woman and the biker show up at the cabin right to the hole he buried them in.
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