One Was a Soldier (17 page)

He had time to think,
This was a lot more fun with Clare in the car,
and then he reacquired Nichols, popping over a hillock and disappearing again. Illinois driver’s license. He remembered that from Nichols’s billfold. He figured that meant crowded urban streets or country roads so straight and flat they made billiard tables look bumpy by comparison. Here in Washington County, you couldn’t find a level stretch of road running more than a quarter mile.

He hit the same hill he had seen Nichols going over, up and then down, down, into another rolling valley, and there was Nichols, Christ on a crutch, overtaking a tractor and combine so fast it looked like the farmer behind the wheel was going backward.

Nichols shifted into the other lane and blew past the tractor. Ahead of him, an ancient Plymouth wagon crested the opposite hill and descended straight into his path.

“Shit,” Russ said. “Shit, shit, shit.”

Nichols jerked to the right, skidding half off the narrow blacktop, spraying dirt and grass before catching the road and straightening the Crown Vic out again.

Despite Russ’s lights and siren, the Plymouth still hadn’t pulled off the road. It continued to barrel toward the tractor, even as Nichols kicked his car into gear and began the climb up out of the valley. Russ was getting closer to the rear of the combine every second. “Get off of the road, you idiot,” he said to the Plymouth. He took his foot off the gas and feathered the brakes, slowing, slowing, watching helplessly as Nichols hurtled over the far rise and was gone again.

The Plymouth finally got the message and wobbled to the edge of the road, leaving just enough space for Russ to squeeze between it and the tractor without transferring the
JOHN DEERE
lettering onto his cruiser. The driver, who looked about ninety years old, eyed him disapprovingly as he inched by. As soon as he cleared the tractor’s grille, he hit the gas. His speedometer crept up. Forty. Fifty. Sixty. He remembered the stop sign at the T-intersection just as he crowned the hill.

He swore again. Hit the brakes, skidded down the road toward the stop. No sign of oncoming cars, thank God. Of course, no sign of Nichols, either. Russ had a half second to make his decision. West to the mountains? Or north toward town? He thought about Nichols at the resort. Scoping out his escape route as he was going up to his room. An old army maxim every grunt knew:
Know how you’re getting out before you get in.

Russ heeled his cruiser north. Too bad none of the brass ever thought like that. He was damn sure Nichols wouldn’t get stuck in Iraq with no clear exit strategy.

His radio cracked on. “Fifteen-fifty-seven, this is fifteen-thirty.”

He grabbed the mic. “Go, Lyle.”

“Where are you?”

“Heading northeast on River Road.” One car, then another, then another, pulled to the side of the road as he roared past. “Traffic’s picking up.” The Crown Vic would have to get past vehicles that moved out of the way for a cop car, slowing Nichols down. Unless Nichols didn’t give a shit about who got hurt. If that were the case—Russ’s shoulders twitched. He had no reading on Nichols. None. He didn’t know if he had come back to town on a stupid romantic impulse and was panicking, or if he was hell-bent on murder-suicide.

Over the next hill, he spotted the fleeing MP again, a quarter of the way down the long slope that bottomed out at the intersection with Route 57. The light facing him was red. Along 57, a rusty pickup, an SUV, and a station wagon rolled southbound toward Glens Falls or the Northway. Russ trod on the accelerator. The pickup rattled through the crossroads.

“Get out of the way,” Russ said between clenched teeth. The SUV crossed the intersection, its driver’s head swiveling, trying to spot the siren source. “Get out of the way, get out of the way, get the hell out of the way!”

Then he saw it, a monster eighteen-wheeler, probably straight off the Northway, the trucker’s mind already in Millers Kill, finding a place for lunch. Driving north at a comfortable, legal fifty-five miles an hour. Straight toward the intersection. Straight toward Nichols.

Russ’s mouth went cotton-dry. He was close now, close enough to see the terrified face of the woman in the station wagon, close enough to make out Nichols’s head, bent, intent, looking neither left nor right, close enough to hear the drum-popping squeal of the Mack’s brakes as the trucker made a futile attempt to stop forty tons of steel before he reached the green light.

Russ stood on his brakes. The station wagon spun to the right, plunging nose-first into a culvert. The Crown Vic shot across the intersection an inch ahead of the eighteen-wheeler, which screeched and groaned and rumbled to a dust-plumed stop with its tail quivering.

Russ sat for a second, his mind wiped clean.
Get out of the car. See if anybody’s hurt.
It took him three tries to unbuckle his seat belt, his hand was shaking so hard. He stepped out of the unit, and there was snow under his boots, he knew there was, and there was a different truck, its driver sobbing and apologizing, and there was a rental car crushed into a ball of flesh and metal and Linda was dead. She was dead.

“Holy shit!” the woman said from across the road. “Did you see that? Did you see that? Hey! Are you okay? Is he okay?”

Lyle found him bent over the ditch, puking his guts out. He waited until Russ had wrung himself dry and then handed him a fistful of tissues. “Sorry,” Russ said, his voice clotted and harsh.

“So’m I.” They both looked at the intersection, where the woman was now shouting into a cell phone and the truck driver squatted by his near tire, checking something underneath his rig. Lyle hadn’t been there that day, but he had seen the reports. He scrubbed one hand over his face. “So’m I.”

Russ coughed. Spat. “Nobody hurt?”

Lyle shook his head.

“You contact the staties?”

“They’ll be looking for him. You want me to pull everybody out on patrol?”

“No. I want you at Tally McNabb’s.” Russ wadded up the tissues, started to shove them in his pocket, then thought better of it. “We don’t have the manpower to dragnet him. Protecting McNabb is our priority. If he shows up, you and Kevin will have him. If he doesn’t, let the staties have the sonofabitch.”

He stayed behind to clear the intersection and write up the accident report. The routine task helped settle his spasming stomach and aching chest. He drove back to the station expecting to hear at any second that Nichols had been captured, but the radio remained stubbornly silent.

“Anything?” he asked Harlene as soon as he was within earshot of dispatch.

“Not from the state police. Kevin called in to say Lyle’s over to Tally McNabb’s and that her husband’s being a pain in the ass. Says they don’t need any protection.” Russ grunted. “You got a call from some lawyer representing the new resort, complaining about you scaring off the customers with your”—Harlene picked up her message pad and read from it—“‘unnecessarily violent and confrontational approach to removing a guest who had manifested no threatening behavior whatsoever.’” She put the pad down. “He wants to know who’s going to pay for damage to a flower bed.”

Russ tipped his head back. “Anything else?”

“Roxanne Lunt called. Said she’s been trying to track you down.” Harlene’s face was as bland as vanilla pudding. “I guess she didn’t try the St. Alban’s rectory.”

Russ narrowed his eyes.

“She says she’s got someone interested in that piece of land on Lick Springs Road you were looking at, and if you want it, you got to make an offer now.” She ripped off the messages and handed them to him, wrinkling her nose as he stepped next to her. “What in the Sam Hill did you get into? You smell awful.”

The only thing that improved during the rest of the day was his odor; he washed up and brushed his teeth in the men’s room before changing into his spare uniform. The state police turned up nothing; he had a long conversation with Sergeant Bob Mongue, who managed to imply that Russ had overreacted and overexaggerated and maybe the MKPD needed some training in suspect management? His attempt at getting intel about Nichols from Fort Leonard Wood was met with “I don’t know, sir,” and “I can’t release that information, sir,” from a series of brush-off artists who became wordier and less informative as he ascended the ranks. No one showed up at the McNabbs’ house; when he arrived to persuade Tally to relocate to somewhere more anonymous, Wyler McNabb accused him of carrying out a vendetta against them.

“Has the husband done anything? Gone anywhere?” Russ and Lyle were standing in the driveway of the small house, conferring between the McNabbs’ Escalade and Navigator. The two hulking SUVs effectively isolated them from anyone watching from the house or its neighbor.

“Nope. He spent the afternoon working on his ATV. Kevin said he was trying to boost the performance so’s he could drive it faster. Dumb-ass.”

“Nichols hasn’t shown up yet—”

“He hasn’t shown up anywhere,” Lyle said. “He could be laying low until we clear out.”

“Are we looking at this wrong? You think maybe she was going to meet Nichols and we stepped in it?”

Lyle shrugged. “Hard to imagine setting up a love nest in the hotel where you work as a bookkeeper, but stranger things have happened.” He and Russ exchanged a look that said,
To you and me both, brother.

Russ rubbed his lip. “They got guns?”

“Are you kidding?”

Russ kicked at the driveway paving. “Screw it. We’ll put the house on the patrol list and tell them to call nine-one-one if anything happens. It’s the best we can do.”

Lyle frowned. “I don’t like it.”

Russ didn’t like it, either. It gnawed at him while he drove back to the station, while he was filling out the remainder of his incident reports, while he watched Harlene close down her board and switch all incoming calls to the Glens Falls dispatcher. After he left, he drove back to Musket Way and cruised past the McNabbs’ house. They lived in one of the last of the 1960s neighborhoods put up by optimistic developers back when there were still a few good jobs to be had at the Allen mill or down the Northway at General Electric. Small houses with deep yards, the kind of neighborhood folks said was a good place to raise kids. He parked just up the street and watched the lights coming on in the small houses, a pair of boys running in and out banging screen doors, one guy trying to get the last of his lawn mowed before it was too dark to see. Two doors down from Tally McNabb’s house, a car pulled into a drive. A woman and a teenaged girl got out and went into the house. Five minutes later, a man came out, followed by the woman, who was twirling some long shawl-thing over her shoulders. They got in their car and drove off. Mom and Dad, out on one last date before school started up again.

God, he was lonely.

Lights were on at the McNabb house as he drove past again. The flicker from a wide-screen shone through a gap in the curtains. He shifted into gear and let himself roll away into the end-of-summer darkness of his hometown.

*   *   *

For Clare, dinner that night at the Ellises’ was surreal, like being in a play where one character had turned into a seagull and everyone else pretended not to notice. Dr. Anne told some amusing stories about the Glens Falls ER, and Chris described his latest furniture project, and Colin went on at great length about the odd tourists he encountered in his summer job at Great Escape, and the whole time Willem smiled and nodded and ate, a caricature of the cheerful, careless young man she had known.

Seeing him in the wheelchair made her heart ache. She knew prosthetics were highly advanced these days, she knew he would have every advantage his parents’ money and the VA doctors could give him, but dammit, he had been a tall, strong, athletic young man, and now he was cut down—literally—before he had even had a chance to flower. She wondered if any of the Ellises had given Will, or themselves, the space to grieve that loss.

She broached the subject when the rest of the family conveniently disappeared on assorted after-dinner chores, leaving her and Will alone in the dining room. “I haven’t seen you at church since I got back,” she said.

“Did my mom ask you to talk with me?”

“Yes.” She poured herself another glass of merlot.

“I don’t need a talking-to. I’m doing fine.”

Clare propped her chin on her hand. “Are you angry about losing your legs?”

He made a face. “At who? The Iraqi insurgents? My CO? The government?”

“For a start, yeah.”

“What’s the use?” He smoothed over his expression. “It’s done. I need to move on.”

“In the first place”—Clare ticked off a finger—“anger isn’t useful, or therapeutic, or rational. It just is, and when life hands you a shitty deal, you have the right to be angry.”

Will looked shocked. She almost smiled. Who would have thought she could scandalize a nineteen-year-old marine?

“Second”—she ticked off another finger—“we’re all so in love with the idea of moving on and growing through loss and making lemonade when life hands us lemons that we don’t take time to mourn. Before you can move on, you have to stand still and account for what’s been lost. Sometimes, you have to throw the damn lemon against the wall and yell,
I wanted chocolate chip cookies, not this bitter fruit.
”

Will hiccupped a laugh. “Yeah. Well.”

“You know, your mom is hoping I’m going to set you to rights over the dessert plates and biscuit crumbs.”

“’Cause you have the awesome power of God behind you. Like a double-magic throw in D and D.”

She smiled. That was the first thing he had said that sounded like the old Will. “She told me you don’t want to go to a psychiatrist.”

“No. No. Absolutely not. I’m not going to have somebody banging on about sibling rivalry and my parents’ expectations when what my problem is, is that I got royally fucked up in Iraq and I’m never going to walk normally again.”

He looked at her, challenging her to be offended by his vocabulary.

“You know what I think you could use? A veterans’ group.” She slid the black-and-white brochure out of her pocket and smoothed its crumpled edges on the tablecloth. “There’s one starting up at the community center the week after next. It’s not analysis. It’ll just be a few other guys who know what you’re talking about because they’ve been there, too.”