Blue Heaven (38 page)

Jim Hearne knew his culpability. He knew that by looking the other way he had opened the door to all of this, that his small transgression had begun a cascade of trouble and misunderstanding.

He had to warn Jess Rawlins. The ranch was just a few miles away. He would go there first.

S
INCE JESS and Monica had cleared Kootenai Bay and headed north, the rain had been sporadic. She had brought nothing with her except a jacket from the closet because he had told her to leave quickly. The Winchester was between them on the bench seat, muzzle down, a smear of Swann’s blood on its butt plate.

In spare, halting language, he had filled her in. How her children had shown up in his barn, defended themselves, told him their story. Where things stood now.

“What are we going to do?” she had asked. “How will we keep my children safe?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

She was calm, he thought, not skeptical of him from the minute he had appeared in her door. She seemed to trust him immediately. He wondered to what he owed this pleasure, since they had never met. It was almost as if she knew him somehow. He had stolen glances at her as he drove, looked at her profile. She was attractive but obviously exhausted. Her skin reflected light blue in the passing cones of pole lights, the hollows of her eyes and cheeks were shadowed. Her voice was soft when she said, “I knew they were alive. I don’t know how, but I knew it.”

It made him feel good to know he was bringing her together with her children. She seemed to want nothing more than to be with them.

He thought of what Karen had said about her, that she had a bad reputation. How Fiona Pritzle had denigrated her ability as a mother by saying in the newspaper, “…But I just figured that there was no way those kids would have just taken off like that without their mother’s permission and approval.”

Consider the source
, Jess thought. He knew nothing about the woman in the seat next to him except that she wanted to be with her kids. The rest didn’t matter.

“You’re familiar to me,” she said, “even though we’ve barely met. I’ve always thought of you as what was old, tough, and good about this valley, before everything changed.”

He looked at her, puzzled, said, “You’ve got the ‘old’ part right, anyway.”

AS HE PULLED in front of his house, he told Monica to wait for a minute in the truck.

She started to protest.

“Look,” he said, “Annie is sitting in there holding a shotgun. I told her not to open the door unless she was sure it was me. If she panics and something goes wrong, I don’t want her to shoot her own mother.”

“Annie has a gun?” Monica said, her jaw dropping.

Jess suddenly smiled.

“What’s so funny?” she asked.

“I don’t even want to say it,” he mumbled.

“What?”

“When you asked me that I thought of
Annie Get Your Gun
. I don’t know why I thought that was funny.”

“I don’t think it’s very funny now,” Monica said, but in a self-mocking way he liked.

Jess walked up to his door and knocked hard on it. “Annie and William,” he said, “it’s Jess Rawlins. I’ve got your mom with me.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Jess saw the living room curtain pull back and William’s face, cautious at first, break into a grin when he saw his mother in the cab of the pickup.

JESS STAYED out of the middle of the reunion and went into the kitchen to make coffee after he saw Monica sink to her knees, crying, and take both of her children into her arms. He heard William and Annie talking over each other, retelling the story about the murder they had witnessed and Mr. Swann, about the dark man who had come to the house that afternoon. How Jess Rawlins had taken care of them.

Halfway into measuring coffee for the pot, he remembered the shotgun in the living room and went to get it. He tried not to stare at the Taylors, who had now settled on the couch, with William clinging to his mother, his head in her lap, Annie next to her, talking a mile a minute. Boy, that girl could talk. Monica looked different, as if she were glowing from within. William looked more like a little boy, her child, and he didn’t seem to care if Jess saw him hugging his mother like he’d never let go. This scene, this snapshot, Jess thought, made what he had done to Swann worth it.

Jess put the shotgun next to the Winchester on the kitchen table, wondering if Monica took her coffee with cream or sugar, lamenting that even if she did, there hadn’t been any cream in the house in four years.

As their talking subsided in the living room, he noticed the silence from the roof. The rain had stopped. He parted the curtain over the sink and looked out. There were pools of rainwater in the ranch yard reflecting stars as the sky cleared. Beyond the ranch yard was the muddy ribbon of road that led into the wooded hills and the locked gate. He recalled Gonzalez standing on the porch, and Swann bloodied and stunned behind the couch in Monica Taylor’s house. And there were two others involved in the shooting Annie and William had witnessed, making four in all.

That chain and lock on the front gate would mean nothing to four armed ex-cops who had already murdered and had conspired to manipulate every event since the children had seen the execution. These were men who had not only infiltrated but literally taken over local law enforcement.

Then he felt a presence next to him, his waist being squeezed, and he looked down and saw Annie, her wide-open face turned up to him.

He couldn’t speak, so he didn’t. Instead, he reached down and mussed her hair gently, then cupped her chin in his palm.

“I’m so glad she’s here,” Annie said. “Thank you for bringing her. I’m so happy it’s all over.”

Jess, feeling his lips purse, his own eyes sting from holding back tears, thought,
It’s not over, Annie. Not even close.

T
HE SMELL inside the car was of bourbon, rain, and burning dust from the heater/defroster that hadn’t been used in a while. Villatoro tried to adjust the level of the fan to keep the glass from fogging up inside. Newkirk, damp, drunk, and agitated, had fogged the glass.

After leaving Rodale’s driveway, Newkirk said, “Go that way,” pointing to Villatoro’s left with the mouth of the open pint of Wild Turkey he’d produced from his jacket. Villatoro turned the wheel, heard the hiss of water spraying from beneath his tires on the undercarriage of the little car. He wasn’t sure what road they were on, or which direction they were going. Everything looked the same to him; dark wet trees bordering the road like walls, wet asphalt, no lights. It wasn’t until Villatoro recognized the same sharp corner and turnout for the second time that he realized they’d been going in circles for over two hours. It alarmed him, and he said, “Where exactly are we headed?”

“Want some?” Newkirk asked, handing over the bottle.

“No thank you.”

“Better take some. You’ll need it.”

“You’ve kept me driving for half the night.”

“I’m thinking.”

Because the retired detective wanted Newkirk to talk, he took the bottle and sipped from it. The bourbon was sweet and fiery at the same time. It burned his lips, which were chapped from the altitude, the intense sun, and the thin air.

“Pull over here,” Newkirk said.

“Here? Why?”

“Just do it and get out.”

Villatoro did as he was told. Newkirk got out of the car at the same time. Both men left their doors open.
What?
Villatoro wondered.
Does he want to drive?

“Put your hands on the hood, feet back and spread ’em,” Newkirk said. “You know the drill.”

“This isn’t necessary….”

“Do it,” Newkirk said. “What I’m going to tell you is for your ears only. I’ve got to make sure you’re unarmed, and that you’re not wearing a wire.”

“I’m retired.”

“So you say.”

Villatoro complied, placing his palms on wet sheet metal. Newkirk stepped behind him, expertly frisked him from his collar and shoulders to his shoes. Villatoro felt Newkirk roll his socks down.

“What are you doing down there?”

“Making sure you don’t have a throw-down,” Newkirk said, standing up, satisfied that he was clean.

A throw-down? Villatoro thought. The fact that Newkirk had even thought of that said a lot about where Newkirk was coming from. Villatoro had never considered carrying an illegal weapon in all of his years in the department. There had been no need. Obviously, Newkirk came from a different world, where throw-downs were common.

“Sorry,” Newkirk said, “I needed to be sure.”

Villatoro climbed back in the car and glanced at the digital clock on the dashboard. He thought of the desk clerk at the motel. She was waiting for him, and he felt bad about that.

Newkirk raised the bottle and drank from it. “Harsh shit, man,” he said, and wiped his mouth with his sleeve.

Villatoro said, “So, you want to talk?”

He could feel Newkirk looking at him, staring at the side of his head.

“No. I just didn’t want to drink alone. Don’t be a dumb fuck.”

Villatoro clamped his jaws.
Just let the man talk. Don’t screw it up by prompting him.

Moments passed as they drove. Newkirk drank again, then settled back into his seat. Villatoro kept his eyes on the road.

“I wanted to be the best cop on the force,” Newkirk said. “I didn’t have notions like I was gonna change the world or anything, but I wanted to do my job the best I could, and take care of my family. But mainly I wanted to be a great cop. I wanted to look in the mirror every night when I got home and say, ‘Man, you are a
good
fucking policeman.’ ”

Villatoro nodded as he scaled back the fan of the defroster.

“I was like everybody, I tried too hard at first. When I saw a crack baby or human beings who treated other human beings like pieces of shit, I let it get to me. I thought I could reason with those people, show ’em somebody cared. But you know what I learned? I learned that the best thing you could do, overall, was arrest as many of ’em as you could and follow through, make sure they went to prison. I learned that maybe, maybe, ten percent of ’em might go straight, and ten percent was all I could hope for. I didn’t even care what ten percent it was, or if it was five percent, as long as I was doing my job. Just fill the prisons, keep those scumbags away from the good people, that’s what I wanted to do. And I did a damned good job of it, even though it was a war zone out on the streets. You have no idea what it was like.”

“No, I don’t.”

“But you can’t talk about this stuff with anybody except other cops,” Newkirk said, talking over Villatoro. “You can’t come home for dinner, and say, ‘Gee, Maggie dear, how was your day? Did you go shopping? How was first grade, Josh? Dad had an interesting day today. I found the corpse of an eleven-month-old baby in a Dumpster with cigarette burns all over her body.’ ”

Villatoro shot him a look. Newkirk’s eyes reflected green from the dashboard lights. He was staring straight ahead, talking as much to himself as to Villatoro.

“You know what it’s like trying to raise a family with kids on a cop’s salary. The wife had to work, and my kids were babies. Day care, the whole stupid thing. Day-care workers who were not much better than the assholes I was arresting out on the streets. In fact, some of them I
saw
on
the street. I started thinking I needed to get my little boys and my daughter away from a place like that. So I started applying for jobs in places I thought I’d like to live—you know, Montana, Wyoming, places with space. But the cop jobs out here paid less than what I was making. I started thinking I’d never get out of there, you know? That I’d turn into one of those lifers, one of those guys who can tell you how much pension they’ve got built up to the penny if you wake ’em up in the middle of the night.”

Villatoro didn’t say,
You knew what the job paid when you applied for it.
He wanted Newkirk to keep talking.

“So that’s when I discovered the world of off-duty security work.” Newkirk smiled. “I found out I could just about double my income if I was willing to wear the uniform and be a rent-a-cop. It was a lot of extra hours, but damn, we started to swim out from under it. The debts, I mean. See, my wife likes to live beyond our means, and I can’t say no when it comes to the kids. So I worked security a lot.”