by Tim Johnston
“Get on your knees.”
Radner did not. He said, “Sheriff, I’m not putting up any kind of resistance here.”
Sutter stepped behind him and put his boot to the backs of Radner’s knees, and down he went. He swatted the billcap from Radner’s head and took the cuffs in his hands and jerked up on them and leaned over until his face was near Radner’s right ear.
“Do you remember where you were three nights ago?”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“Three nights ago—?”
“Tuesday night.”
Radner shook his head. “I got no idea. I swear. I coulda been anywhere.”
“You weren’t anywhere, you were at the Shell station on County Road F24 and you were assaulting two young women with your buddy.”
“Hell I was.”
“How’d you get those scratches on your face?”
“At work. A tire blew up in my face.”
“You are full of shit.”
Radner shook his head again. “Swear to God, Sheriff. Ask any of them at work. Ask Toby, he was standing right there.”
Sutter’s heart was banging. He saw his own ragged breaths bursting white into the air. The empty lot, the old machine shop, the falling snow, all seemed to be turning in some sickly way. You can still drop this. Right now. You can get into that sedan and just drive away. Go talk to Toby . . .
“You watch the news?” he said.
“What?”
“Do you watch the news.”
“Yeah, sometimes.” Radner groaned. “Please, Sheriff, you are breakin my arms.”
“Do you know what happened to those two girls, after you ran them off the road down the riverbank?”
“I never did. I never ran nobody down no riverbank.”
“One died, Ryan, and the other one almost did. So guess where that leaves you and your buddy.”
“You got the wrong man, Sheriff. You got the wrong man.”
“Assault, attempted rape, attempted murder on two counts, murder on one count.”
“All right,” Radner said, “so take me in. Haul me in, man. Let me talk to a real sheriff. Let me talk to a—” He howled. Sutter had raised the cuffs.
“Where is it?”
“Where’s what?”
“You know what.”
He shook his head. “I swear I don’t.”
“The backscratcher, Radner. Where is it?”
Radner craned his neck to look at him. Fear and pain in those dark eyes.
“You’re crazy,” Radner said. “You’re just plain crazy. You better let me go before this gets any worse. I won’t say nothin. People make mistakes, I get that. I won’t go to the sheriff or nothin. You just go your way and I’ll go mine, how about that, huh? What’ve you got to lose?”
Sutter was silent. His breaths smoking. His heart slamming. He looked up at the sky. Slow tumble of flakes, landing cold on his face and melting. Faintly there was the fishy, muddy smell of a river . . . but any river would be frozen and you wouldn’t smell it, and then he understood that the smell came from Holly Burke—from her wet hair, from the air trapped in the white bag and escaping like breath when they unzipped it, and—
Tom, she said. Sutter . . .
Something buzzed at his side, and he heard the muted tune, and with his free hand he reached into his jacket pocket and fetched up the phone and along with it a louder rendition of the same tune that sounded in the emptiness of the lot like some tiny and maniacal bugler.
“Let me answer it,” Radner said. “Let me talk to someone.”
Sutter read the name on the screen, mary anne, and with his thumb ended the tune, and with another press of his thumb shut the phone down. He returned it to his pocket, then raised his watch and looked at it. Like a man of appointments and schedules. Like a man who needed to be somewhere else and had been here too long. He stared at the watchface and he saw the three hands and he saw the time markers, but however he moved the watch it seemed to float in a blind spot in his vision and he couldn’t read it, and this was somehow the most frightening thing, the thing that made him sick at heart.
He felt out the key in the clutter of his pocket and fitted it into the cuffs and pulled them away, and Radner pitched forward onto his palms in the snow and there he remained, like a man heaved up ashore.
Sutter stepped around him and stood where Radner could see his boots.
“Look up here.”
Radner looked up. Sutter standing against the flecks of snow, the gray sky. Radner got up on his knees, rubbing at his wrists. He’d not been told to stay on his knees but he stayed on them just the same.
“Do you believe in God?” Sutter said.
“What?”
“You heard me.”
Radner looked at him as if he’d never really seen him before.
“You ain’t no sheriff. What are you?”
“Answer my question.”
Radner hung his head and shook it. “God,” he said. “What’s he got to do with this?”
“That’s a good question, but it’s no answer.”
Radner looked up again. Sutter watched his eyes. He could see that the boy was seeing last things, wondering at the coldness, the meaninglessness of it all. The unfairness—in a parking lot, in the snow? As a young girl might’ve looked up at pine trees, at the cold moon, as she was carried, or dragged, toward the river.
“Yes, sir,” Radner said. “Yes sir I do believe in God. And Jesus too.”
“Is that the truth?”
“I swear to God it is, Sheriff.”
“Good,” said Sutter. “In about thirty seconds I’m driving away from here and this never happened and you never saw me.”
Sutter saw hope enter the young man’s eyes like some drug.
“I never saw you,” Radner said. “This never happened.”
“But on one condition.”
“Name it, Sheriff.”
“I want you to raise your right hand and swear to God you had nothing to do with what happened to those two girls that night. At the gas station and at the river.”
Radner raised his right hand, the palm clean and pink but the fingers stained with oil and grease—this stinking hand on his little girl’s face—and he said gravely, “I swear it, Sheriff. I swear it to God and Jesus. I swear it on my mother’s soul.” And as the young man said these words Sutter pulled the other gun, Radner’s .45, from his pocket and thumbed off the safety and took one step forward—
“Don’t,” said Radner.
—and put the barrel to the center of the raised hand and pulled the trigger and saw the hand whip away. Saw the pink cloud and thought he saw small bones from the center of the hand fly off into the snow and he knew that that hand would never again hold a wrench, or any other thing.
The gunshot rang off the back of the machine shop and flew from building to building until it became a volley of gunfire, a sudden shoot-out in the night. Radner’s howls and curses followed but Sutter didn’t hear them. He’d pulled a mechanic’s rag from the benchseat and he was wiping down the steering wheel, the gear lever, the handles inside and out and he even wiped down the keys. Lastly he wiped the empty .45 and set it on the benchseat and shut the door.
Radner remained on his knees in the snow, folded over his hand and still cursing but quieter now, like a man in argument with himself.
“Here,” said Sutter, and Radner looked up, white-faced, grimacing. He looked Sutter in the eye, then snatched the red rag from him and wrapped it around his hand. “I’m throwing your keys in the bed of the truck,” Sutter said. “You find them and you drive yourself to the urgent care clinic on Highland. You know where that is?”
“Gimme my phone so I can call an ambulance.”
“You don’t need an ambulance.”
Radner hung his head. A string of drool swinging from his lip. “Crazy motherfucker. Think they won’t find you and lock your ass up?”
“They might,” he said. “But I got a feeling after
you think on it awhile you’ll come to remember that you shot yourself in the hand. Happens every day to people even smarter than you.” Then he walked to the sedan and got behind the wheel and turned over the engine and drove out the way he’d come, and the last thing he saw in the mirror before his view was blocked by the building was the dark figure rising from the snow and staggering toward the tailgate of the truck, and he did not hear the figure’s curses but only saw them, bursting from its mouth and following its head in clouds of rage.
On his way back through town he pulled over and sat thumbing through the contacts on Radner’s phone. His heart was still pounding and would not let up. There was no Bud that he saw. He checked the texts but they only went back two days and no Bud there either. He checked the phone log—nothing. Bud as in “buddy.” Jesus Christ. He saw that hand again, that filthy hand, the bits of pink and bone flying.
He wiped down the phone and got out of the car and stepped up to the blue public mailbox at the corner; there was the dull bong of the phone on the floor of the box, and he returned to the car and drove on. Past the last stoplight. Past the Shell station out there on the county road—same blond head in the window as before, bent over its puzzles as ever, steady as a monk, or a lifer in her cell. Over the trestle bridge, over the river. North.
Silence in the car. Sutter waiting for her to say something, anything—A crazy man, I married a crazy man—but she would not. Saying everything with her silence.
The snow was falling heavier, shaping out the beams of his headlights before him like two great cones. He was five miles out of town, heading north again on the 52, before he took up his own phone and thumbed at the lighted menu. He’d not charged the phone, and the battery was in the red. A deputy answered and transferred the call and Sutter drummed the wheel as he waited. He looked at his hand, the pale, intact palm, and drummed the wheel again.
“What’s the word, Tom?” said his former deputy.
“I’ve got a couple of pieces of information for you, Ed, but I gotta be quick before my phone dies.”
“Hold on a second.” Sutter heard the TV in the background before it went mute and he heard Moran tell his complaining boys to go watch it downstairs.
“I’m listening, Tom.”
Sutter told him he might have his deputies check the urgent care clinic for a young man name of Radner with a gunshot wound to the hand, self-inflicted, and that he might get the postmaster to let him into the mailbox on the corner of Main and Park Street before morning.
There was silence on the line. Then Moran said, “Tom, what have you done?”
“Just calling you with some fresh intel, Ed.” He heard Moran draw a deep breath through his nose and release it the same way.
“You couldn’t just let me do my job. You couldn’t just be patient.”
“Patience has kind of lost its meaning for me, Ed.”
“I know that, Tom. I know all about that.”
“I doubt you do.”
“All right. But I know one thing. I know it doesn’t give you the right to fuck with my investigation.”
Something in Sutter darkened. This man, this former deputy of his . . . the total lack of respect in his voice. Of memory. Of gratitude.
Into the silence, into Sutter’s rising blood, Moran said, “I mean, Christ, Tom—what if the tables were turned? What if it was your case and I’d done the same?”
Sutter thought about that. Watching the road, the diving snow.
“Tom—?”
“I’m here.”
Moran said nothing. Breathing through his nose again. Finally he said, “Is that it?” and Sutter said no, it wasn’t, and told him about the backscratcher, the scratches on the boy’s face. The hard evidence that would place the boy at the scene.
Silence again—not even the breathing, and Sutter glanced at the phone.
“Funny she never mentioned a backscratcher when I interviewed her, Tom.”
“She didn’t remember till later.”
“Ah.”
“I know he took it with him, Ed, this son of a bitch.”
“Yeah? You reckon we’ll find it under his pillow?”
Now Sutter was silent. He could see his deputy’s hardened jaw, the thin lips pressed to a single hard line in his face. But when Moran spoke again he did not sound so angry. He sounded tired, sounded discouraged.
“Tom,” he said, “it won’t change a thing, going after this boy down here like this.”
“The hell it won’t.”
“I mean it won’t change what happened before, up there. That boy up there—well, he’s no boy anymore. He, or some other man, is walking free today and he’ll be walking free tomorrow.”
The mention of the boy dropped Sutter back in time—ten years. Holly Burke in the river. The boy himself, Danny Young, sitting across from him in the interview room, scared but not stupid. Careful. Not under arrest but knowing his life was on the line, right there, right then . . . And you let him go.
“We were the law, Tom,” Moran was saying. “We followed the book. And we’d have thrown his ass in jail if we could have. But there was one problem—remember?”
Sutter said he did but Moran reminded him anyway: No witness, no evidence, no case.
There was another silence. Sutter realized he was nodding and stopped it. He said, “How’re your boys, Ed? Little Ed and the other one—Eli?”
“What? They’re fine. Jesus, Tom—are you gonna tell me you’re just doing what any father would do?”
“Not any father, Ed. I wouldn’t say that. Just the father of a daughter.”
Moran said nothing. Sutter watching the snow in his beams, thick and constant.
“A man doesn’t really ever know himself, Ed,” he said. “He thinks he does, but he doesn’t. There’s something in him that goes deeper than anything in his raising or his beliefs or his badge or whatever the hell he lives by. And once he reaches that place, well. Right and wrong are just words.”
Moran did not respond, and Sutter moved the phone from his ear to look at it again and nearly drifted off the road—corrected, and shook his head at his stupidity. How many times had he warned his own daughter? The dead kids he’d seen, their mothers or girlfriends or boyfriends still on the line saying, Hello, hello—?
“Shit, Tom,” his deputy said. “This is all just words.”
“I know it, Ed. But listen, my phone is dying here and I gotta let you go. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
He hung up and set the phone on the seat and drove awhile with both hands on the wheel. The snow diving into the headlights. The click and squeak of the wipers. His heart was going and he got a cigarette into his lips and cracked the window and lit the cigarette and blew the smoke into the draft.
She was silent. Then she said, He’s right, you know.
“About what.”
You know what.
Sutter smoked. He drove. He crossed the state line into Minnesota and continued north into the town of Charlotte, and he could not drive through that town without thinking of the morgue there, of the bodies that had waited in those cabinets to be seen by parents, by wives or husbands, by grown children. Gordon Burke looking down on his daughter and putting his hand to her forehead, a father taking his child’s temperature. And he saw his own daughter looking up at him from her bed, red-faced, and he saw his own hand pushing her hair from her forehead—and his heart abruptly plunged, and then began to pound, and “Jesus Christ,” he said, and reached for the phone once again, thumbed it on and stared at the screen: the two smiling faces in those black caps.
Tom—the road!
He corrected again, and thumbed at the phone again, but the screen went dark.
“You son of a bitch,” he said. “You dumb son of a bitch.”
He sped up, and when he flew by the turn for home she said, What are you doing?
“I’m going up there. To the hospital.”
Why?
“I need to see her. I need to talk to her.”
&nb
sp; It’s late, Tom. She’s sleeping.
He drove on. He felt a great panic in his heart. Like the car would not make it. Like it would blow a tire or throw a rod before he got there, before he could see her again.
Tom . . . she said. Sutter, she said, and he glanced over. You can’t do this now. You need to come home.
“I have to do this, Annie. Just—please . . .”
He gripped the wheel and drove on, into the diving snow, and she did not speak to him again until he’d pulled over and put the car in park. The motor running. The lights on, the wipers sweeping.
It’s all right, she said. Just get your breath.
He thumbed at the phone—no light, no nothing—and he popped open the glovebox and pawed everything out of there but there was no cord, no charger—what kind of an idiot, Jesus Christ—and it was then she caught up his hand in hers, held it in both of hers until it was still, until it was quiet.
She rested her head on his shoulder and after a while he put his head to her head and like that they rested. They breathed, looking out the windshield at the endless snow, how it dove into the lights and dashed itself soundlessly on the glass, how the wipers in their quiet rhythm swept it away and yet the snow kept coming . . . a million flakes, a billion, just diving and diving into the lights and no end to it that they could see.
26
He wasn’t supposed to come before eight a.m. but she’d been sitting in the wheelchair since seven, face washed, teeth brushed, dressed and ready to go, glancing back at the clock—the plain round clockface strategically placed so that you could know exactly how slowly time moved when you were stuck in a mechanical bed with your broken arm that itched and itched under its cast—glancing at the clock every minute, until at last eight o’clock came. And went. And he was late. Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. Well, wasn’t he always? People called, they needed him—car accidents, fights. Law and order. Weekends included. That was his job, or had been, and so she’d waited: after band practice after school, after the movies with Jenny White, who was her best friend for one year of middle school, after her shift at Portman’s Dairy the summer before she left for college and she had her license but no car because he couldn’t afford even a used one, he said, but really it was because of all the teenagers and pieces of teenagers he’d seen strewn all over the roads. She waited for him on street corners and in the shade of trees and on Mrs. Aberdeen’s porchsteps as the old woman’s next student pounded out her scales inside the house; she waited for him as he went into her mother’s hospital room alone, and now she waited for him in her own hospital room, in the wheelchair, facing the open door, watching the open door, watching the clock behind her, waiting.