by Jeremy Bates
Rex rounded the next corner so the road was in the trees to his right. Beyond it, the foothills rose steeply up the slopes of the Fraser Canyon to the largely unpopulated inland forests and mountain ranges that stretched for hundreds of miles between here and Alberta.
Anyone could live out there, off the grid, for years or decades, he thought. And Dad had loved the outdoors. Could he have taken Mom and Logan there? Were they still alive? Could his father have returned to Pavilion Lake now and then in the offseason to raid the cabins for supplies? Had the Petersons and Ryersons caught him red-handed? Had he killed them only to keep his secret?
But what of Daisy and Tony and the police officer?
How did their attacks fit?
Rex had been so absorbed in these musings he almost walked straight past the pistol lying on the muddy ground. He stared at it for a moment in shock, blinking rain from his eyes. Then he promptly swooped it up.
His heart sung at the sight and weight of it in his hand.
Rex didn’t know anything about guns, and it took him a few exploratory moments before he pulled back the slide and saw that the chamber was loaded—though in the process he pulled the slide back too far, engaging the ejector and expelling the round through the breech.
Stupid! he thought, fearful that might have been the last bullet. But to his relief, a second check revealed a new round from the magazine had been loaded in place of the first.
Rex picked up the ejected cartridge and stuffed it in his pocket. Then he searched the ground for the police officer’s radio. He discovered the man’s cylindrical flashlight, his gold-embroidered cap, and a few popped buttons. But no radio.
“Shit,” Rex said. “Shit, shit, shit. Where is it?”
Not here, that was all he knew.
Doesn’t matter anymore! a voice inside his head told him. You have the gun! Get inside. Protect the others.
He obeyed this sound advice.
***
Rex hung his bomber jacket on the wall-mounted rack, then dumped the three items he’d found outside on the coffee table.
Tabitha, still kneeling next to the supine police officer, applying pressure to his abdominal wound, said, “The gun!”
He nodded. “Have you fired one before?”
“Not for a long time.”
“But you have?”
She hesitated. “Yes.”
Rex wondered at the pause, but he didn’t press the matter. Sitting down next to her on the floor, doing his best to ignore the wet clothing chafing his skin, he said, “I didn’t find his radio. No idea where it went. It’s pretty clear he was attacked behind the cottage. That’s where he dropped his flashlight and gun. So what about his radio?”
“His name’s Paul,” Tabitha said. “Paul Harris.”
“Paul,” Rex repeated. Then, to the cop: “So help us out here, Paul. Where’s your radio? It would be really nice to know someone was coming out here to give us a hand.”
“Someone will come,” Tabitha insisted. “When he doesn’t return to the station, and no one can get in touch with him, other cops will come. And look, I think he’s important, like the chief or something.” She indicated the rank insignia that adorned his shoulders: a gold crown above three gold pips.
Rex studied Paul Harris. His craggy face was pale and waxy, his eyes closed, his mouth ajar, his cheeks sunken, almost corpse-like.
He probably is the chief, Rex thought. He had seniority on his side. In fact, a place as small as Lillooet probably only had a couple of cops on the payroll. A chief and a lieutenant, maybe. A part-time retiree who volunteered here and there, maybe. But that would likely be all.
So who was going to be missing him at this time of night? His wife? He wore a wedding band on his ring finger. Even so, couples who had been married for a long time often chose to sleep in separate bedrooms. His wife might very well be nestled snug in her bed, visions of sugar-plums dancing in her head, unaware that her husband had yet to return home from his last shift.
Moreover, given Paul’s age, it wasn’t inconceivable that his wife had prematurely passed on. He could be a widower wearing the wedding band out of obligation, or memory.
The only thing we know for certain, Rex decided gloomily, is that we know nothing for certain. Help could arrive in ten minutes from now, or ten hours, or longer.
Chin up, soldier.
Rex blinked. For a startled moment, he thought Tabitha had spoken those whispered words, but they had been inside his head.
Chin up, soldier.
This was an expression his ex-wife, Naomi, had often used, usually to cheer up Bobby when he was down. A particularly vivid memory struck Rex of the three of them sitting around the dinner table, Bobby in a funk because he knew he couldn’t leave the table until he finished the vegetables on his plate, and Naomi ruffling his hair as she carried dirty dishes to the sink, saying, “Chin up, soldier. There are worse things in this world than munching back a few of your mom’s delicious veggies.”
A not unfamiliar ache rose inside Rex’s chest. He had loved Naomi once, and although that love had faded, it had not disappeared altogether. Their divorce had not been poisonous as so many were. There had been no vulgar shouting or scandalous accusations or flying china or behind-the-back disparaging remarks to friends. They had been together for seven years, and despite having a son together, seven years had simply been enough.
Rex’s job was largely to blame for their falling out, he knew. His constant traveling had been tough on Naomi. She came to equate his downtime in other countries with mini-vacations while she remained stuck at home dealing with backed-up toilets, car problems, and the like. He tried to paint a more realistic narrative of what he did, along with the downsides to living out of a suitcase, but these efforts were constantly undermined when a co-worker uploaded a picture to social media of him enjoying a cocktail at a hotel bar, or of the sun setting over Athens or Rome or whichever exotic locale his work took him. Moreover, as Captain, he was responsible for every major decision on every flight, which was mentally exhausting. As a consequence, when he returned home he usually wanted to do only one thing: decompress. So when Naomi handed him a to-do list of chores that had accumulated in his absence, he’d often put off doing them. When she made breakfast in the hopes that he’d join her, he’d often opt to sleep in. When she asked him where he wanted to go for dinner, he’d most likely tell her he didn’t care (as long as it wasn’t McDonald’s, which was his go-to airport restaurant).
Although this tension between them over his work had been building for years, the final straw came when Rex got scheduled to fly to London during the family’s annual vacation to Hawaii, despite having bid for a different route and date far in advance.
“Maybe I’ll just go with Bobby, just the two of us,” Naomi said tartly after he explained the change of plans to her.
“Maybe you should,” he said sincerely. “Enjoy yourself. You don’t need me tagging along.”
“No, I don’t,” she replied in a cold voice. “In fact, I don’t think I need you at all anymore, Rex.” Her face flushed with anger. “I’m sick of going to Bobby’s school functions alone, Rex. I’m sick of falling asleep in front of the TV because it’s the only company I have, Rex. I’m sick of being lonely.” Her face softened. “You’re a good man, Rex, and I love you, but I think it might be best if we go our own ways from here on.”
Deep down Rex had known Naomi was right. The only solution to their marital woes would be for him to find a different job, and that would never happen. Like most pilots, he had a passion for what he did, it was in his blood, a part of his identity, and he couldn’t change that.
So they quietly and amicably filed for divorce, drafting a parental plan to detail the custody arrangement of Bobby. The boy took the news of their separation rather well, even showing excitement at the prospect of having two houses and thus two bedrooms of his own. But then a month and a half after the divorce was finalized, in October of the previous year, Naomi struck and
killed a sixty-five-year-old woman with her Toyota sedan. Too drunk to realize the extent of what she had done, she drove to a side street where she passed out. In the morning she called a body shop to fix her vehicle, telling the owner she had hit a telephone pole. Police, however, recovered a fog-light grill from the scene of the accident and matched it to her car. She was charged with the operation of a motor vehicle causing death, failure to stop at the scene of an accident causing death, and impaired driving causing death. She was released on $100,000 bail. During her court appearance, teary eyed and apologetic, she explained she had been drinking heavily at the time of the accident due to a trifecta of converging events: her mother’s death, her father’s refusal to continue taking chemotherapy for his cancer, and her divorce to her husband of seven years. The judge, in her ruling, said she took into account these mitigating factors, as well as the fact Naomi had entered a guilty plea and had no prior criminal record, before handing down a five-year prison sentence.
That night, Rex and Naomi explained to Bobby what his mother had done, and that she would be going away for a while. He took this news extremely well also, just as excited at the possibility of visiting his mom in prison as he had been at having two bedrooms. Nevertheless, his seemingly boundless optimism nosedived when Tabitha came into the picture. Her regular visits to the condo where Rex had been renting a unit, combined with Naomi’s abrupt departure from his life, caused him to begin viewing Tabitha with suspicion, hence the commencement of the silent treatment he gave her.
For his part, Rex hadn’t planned on dating someone so soon after the divorce, but he and Tabitha had immediately clicked upon meeting. As a flight attendant, she understood the rigors of working for an airline, and the baggage that came with the job, so to speak. He could talk to her without feeling defensive about his day, or guilty about providing her with a life she didn’t want. For the first time in years he felt young and vivacious and happy.
And now it was all at risk. The new life he was building with Tabitha, Bobby, and Ellie, it was now all at risk of not surviving until morning—
Rex banished these thoughts from his head. He would not dabble with despair.
Wanting a distraction, he retrieved the pistol from the coffee table and flipped it over in his hands, getting a feel for it. The frame was polymer, not steel. At the top of the hand grip was, G L O C K, and above that, MADE IN AUSTRIA. He pressed a button that ejected the magazine.
A series of holes at the back portion of the magazine revealed it currently held six out of a possible seventeen rounds. Rex fished the cartridge from his pocket he’d ejected earlier and inserted it into the top of the magazine, making sure the rounded tip was pointing forward. He reseated the magazine in the hand grip with a satisfying click.
Tabitha was watching him. “Better disengage the safety,” she said.
“Where is it?”
She pointed to a lever on the upper back portion of the firearm.
He pushed it down.
“A regular Dirty Harry,” she said.
“‘Do you feel lucky, punk?’”
“That’s not the quote.”
Rex returned the pistol to the coffee table. He wrapped an arm around Tabitha’s shoulders and kissed her on the top of the head. Then, seeing he was inhibiting her from properly applying pressure to the cop’s wound, he released her.
They waited.
***
Rain drummed on the roof of the cabin. Wind buffeted the sturdy log walls, moaning longingly as if to be let in out of the wet and cold. Thunder rolled across the sky, approaching ever closer.
Tabitha kept the pillow firmly pressed against Paul Harris’s abdomen. The slip had been white to begin with. Now it was stained bright crimson. Her hands were sticky with blood.
As the minutes dragged on, she kept her ears pricked for the sound of a car engine approaching in the dark, or distant klaxons, anything that would signal the arrival of help.
All she heard was the damnable rain and wind and thunder.
To keep from totally wigging out, she entertained herself with positive future scenarios. She and Rex and the kids in the toasty warm Mazda, cruising along Highway 99, some cheery pop song on the radio, leaving this little slice of nightmare behind. Or the four of them in a hotel room in Squamish, or Vancouver, sitting by the pool, or eating a buffet breakfast, surrounded by other people, parents and their children, everybody laughing and smiling and enjoying themselves. Or back in Seattle, downtown amidst the bustle of the city, or in her house, or Rex’s condo, or in a jet, in the sky.
Oh, what she wouldn’t give to be thirty-thousand feet in the air right now!
Black scenarios inevitably crept into this thinking as well, such as one of the cabin’s windows suddenly exploding inward, furniture toppling over, and the killer leaping into the room, brandishing a butcher’s knife or machete or whatever his weapon of choice might be.
Thank God they had the pistol, she thought. The killer likely didn’t know this. He would be surprised, caught off guard. Rex would fire off a volley of shots, and the bastard would be dead before he hit the floor.
And me? she wondered. Would I be able shoot the man if it came to that?
Although Tabitha’s father had been a Clark Griswold family man on the surface, who liked nothing more than embarking on road trips, barbequing steaks on the grill, and visiting wacky tourist destinations, he was also an avid firearms collector and champion marksman. As a consequence of this, guns had been an integral part of Tabitha’s childhood and adolescence. By the time she entered fifth grade, she knew how to field strip, clean, and reassemble several types of revolvers, semi-automatic pistols, and rifles. She knew wadcutters from hollow points. She could distinguish on sight a Browning from a Heckler & Koch from a Smith & Wesson.
One of her earliest memories was of the first time her father had taken her to a gun range. It was a big concrete place with strings of light bulbs lining the ceiling and brass shell casings littering the floor. She couldn’t see the shooters in the other booths, so each of their gunshots caught her by surprise, causing her to flinch instinctively, the cumulative effect an unrelenting jumpiness that kept her vividly alert.
After Beth and Ivy had their turns shooting, her father handed her his semi-automatic pistol. She assumed the proper stance, aimed at the paper target, eased her breathing, and relaxed her trigger finger. Then she fired, the gun leaping back up her hands. The spent shell, ejected from the chamber smoking hot, bounced off her bare forearm, shocking her with a quick sizzle. The not unpleasant tang of gunpowder wafted up into her nostrils.
When they got home later that morning, her dad immediately set out cloths, solvents, and oil, and Tabitha and her sisters dismantled the weapons they’d used, wiping the powder residue from the firing pins and the cylinders and pushing solvent-soaked cotton squares through the barrels until they could see the tiny spiral grooves inside. Then, like three little soldiers, they reassembled each gun with speed and precision that belied their young ages, each part joining with metallic clicks and ka-chaks.
Tabitha continued to visit the gun range with her father and sisters throughout elementary school, junior high, and high school. She went to gun shows and participated in shooting tournaments. She read each issue of the NRA’s magazine, The American Rifleman, cover to cover the day it was delivered to their doorstep each month. When she moved away from home to attend Seattle University, she bought her first gun, a Colt Cobra .38 Special. She kept it in the drawer of the nightstand next to her bed, loaded with five bullets, the firing pin resting on an empty chamber so it wouldn’t accidentally discharge. When she heard creaks or strange noises in the house she rented with a handful of roommates, she wasn’t afraid. Knowing her gun was within easy reach, she felt empowered and in control.
Then two years ago she had been in downtown Seattle celebrating her thirty-sixth birthday. She and one of her girlfriends were the last to leave the bar. While they were wandering the empty city streets, looking for a
taxi, a man in a hoodie brandished a 9mm snub-nose in their faces and demanded they hand over their purses. Instead of complying, Tabitha gripped the .38 in her handbag and fired three shots through the leather into his chest, killing him. She had not thought this action through. It had been an automatic response, as instinctual as looking both ways before crossing a street. She told herself she had acted in self-defense. The police told her this as well. Her father congratulated her, and her sisters praised her bravery.
But none of this changed the fact she had taken the life of another human being. The reality of this shook her to her soul. Rarely a day went by that she didn’t replay in her mind what she did and cringe in regret, or a night that she didn’t see the face of the man in the hoodie in her dreams.
She no longer had the Colt Cobra. She’d turned it into the police for them to dispose of.
And she’d sworn to herself she would never fire a gun again.
But this is different, she told herself. This maniac isn’t a two-bit mugger. He’s a murderer. He’s killed two people in cold blood.
So if he comes after Ellie or Rex or Bobby—hell, yes, I’ll shoot him.
I won’t hesitate to shoot him.
Rex stood up abruptly. Tabitha glanced at him. He started pacing, rubbing his hand over his five o’clock shadow. “We can’t just sit here all night,” he said. “He’s coming. He knows we’re here, and he’s coming.”
“But he can’t get inside. The doors are locked, and we’ve barricaded all the windows.”
“That won’t stop him.”
“But we’ll know he’s out there. We’ll be ready.”
“What if he sets the place on fire? Smokes us out? We’d run right into his waiting arms. If he has a gun, he could pick us off one by one before we knew where he was firing from.”
Tabitha tried not to picture that. “What can we do?” she asked. “Where can we go?”