The Last Good Day (57 page)

“Somebody got shot, Lynn,” he said finally.

“What are you talking about?”

Even the crows fell silent now.

“Jeff Lanier got shot in the head. He’s not going to make it.”

“How do you know?” A band tightened around her chest.

“I was the one who shot him.”

He opened the front gate and started walking toward her, the butt of a handgun riding casually in the front of his waistband. Just a friend stopping by to say hello.

A third siren screamed past Grace Hill Road, entering and then leaving their zone of quiet. An acorn hit the ground behind his pickup like a spent shell casing.

“Okay,” she said, stepping back, “let’s take it easy.”

She cast a quick look toward the wooded area down the slope, wondering where Barry had gone. The red wheelbarrow stood alone in the shade of the elms and dogwoods.

He’d been in the house, getting a glass of water, when Fallon’s truck pulled up. The gun was back in the Nike box on the bed, where he’d left it not ten minutes ago after showing it to Lynn. He went upstairs and got it and made a quick call to 911, knowing that most of the squad cars were busy up the hill and probably a good five minutes away.
We’re on our own.
He went to the window and saw Fallon cross the yard toward Lynn with a gun plainly visible in his waistband. He thought of throwing open the window and taking aim, but the Tree Guy had never come to trim the maple, and its branches were in the way.

“Know what your problem is, Lynn?” Mike was close enough to put his arms around her neck. “You’re blind. You’ve got all these expensive lenses and foreign cameras, and you’re still blind as fucking Stevie Wonder. You don’t see what’s right in front of your face.”

From the corner of her eye, she finally spotted Barry about sixty feet to the left of them, crouched down and creeping slowly along the fence behind the column of trees. He must have come out of the back door of the house and taken the long way around, to try to sneak up on them. She registered the black gun in his hand against the background of his white T-shirt. Mike needed only to turn his head a quarter-inch to see the same.

“I know how hard these last few weeks have been,” she said.

“You don’t
know
anything. Okay? Not a single thing. Because you don’t see anything. You don’t see things that go on every day. I mean, you think you’re up on top of this great big hill, but you’re just another ant in the fucking ant farm. You don’t see the ants who built the tunnels you’re living on top of. You don’t even know there
are
tunnels.”

“Michael, what is it that you want from me?”

“I want you to open your eyes. Is that asking too much? I want you to see the people that give a shit about this town and gave their whole lives to it. I want you to see
me.
I want you to take that great eye you’re supposed to have and see what’s right in front of you. I want you to take a picture of me and keep it in your head the rest of your life.”

Another breeze blew the yellow tape around the lawn, snagging weeds and blades of grass on its way.

“I’m not the bad guy here,” he said quietly.

“Michael, I want you to slow down a little. Why did you shoot Jeffrey?”

“Because he comes into
my
town, marries a girl I know, and then kills her and dumps her in
my river.
On
my watch.
While she’s carrying
my baby.
”

His face seemed to blur and then come back into focus as she tried to make sense of this.

“I may not have been a lot of things,” he said. “I wasn’t the world’s greatest husband. I wasn’t the world’s greatest father. And I had more than my share of trouble with women. But I was always a servant of this community.”

The word
was
buzzed and sizzled in the back of her brain. She realized she had no idea whether he was about to kill himself, kill her, or both.

“Michael, I think we need to call Harold,” she said calmly. “Where’s your wife? Where are your children?”

“They’re gone. It’s all gone. It wasn’t meant to last. You do your job for a little while and you’re either good or bad and then they throw the dirt over you and somebody else builds another anthill on top of that. That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?”

“I think you need to talk to somebody.”

“I thought I was talking to YOU, Lynn.”

Barry kept ducking and crawling among the tree stumps and sumac, trying to get a clear shot at Fallon from about fifteen yards. All these branches and shadows kept getting in the way. And the two of them were standing so close together, there was a chance he’d hit Lynn.

“It’s all your fault,” he heard Fallon say. “Because you made me feel like there was more to it.”

“I’m sorry,” Lynn answered.

Sorry? About what?
He knelt down behind an elm trunk, trying to get a better angle.

“Hey, you remember that one time we went swimming in the river?” Fallon was saying, his voice resonating down the slope. “Senior year. Right after they started to clean it up a little so it didn’t turn red every time they painted cars at the auto plant upstream?”

Barry peeked out from behind the tree and saw Lynn listening with her shoulders tilted and her head hanging to the side, somehow looking smaller and more tentative than he was used to seeing her.

“You remember how we got drunk and left our clothes on the rocks? Must’ve been October. Last good day of the year.”

He watched his wife nod and touch the ends of her hair self-consciously. It was like seeing an old picture of her come to life.

“You remember how cold the water was that day?” Fallon said. “Man, my nuts were up around my hips. It’s a miracle they still worked afterward. I couldn’t believe the current was so strong. You were like this little chick about half my size, but you were always twelve lengths ahead of me. I could never figure that out.”

“I guess maybe I was just showing off.”

There was a dip, a kind of concession in her voice. He saw them move a little closer together, and for a moment they looked like they were the real couple that belonged here, enjoying a sunny morning in front of their house, while he’d been turned into a trespasser. Everything seemed to get sucked down toward a draining funnel in the pit of Barry’s stomach. He started to stand up behind the tree. A shadow moved, giving him perhaps a foot or two of cover in the clearing.

“I kept calling for you to come back, but you weren’t listening,” Fallon was saying. “You just kept going and going until I could hardly see you. But you know what I never told you?”

“What?”

Barry took a step out into the open and then crouched down against a rock, getting ready to fire.

“That there was one second when I looked back over my shoulder and I saw the town. We must’ve been like two hundred yards out. And I realized I’d never seen it that way before, from that distance. And you know what? I didn’t like it. I don’t even know why, but I couldn’t stand to get that far away. I had to turn around and start swimming back right away. But you just kept going.”

“I know,” said Lynn.

“Lemme ask you something, Lynn.” Fallon started to reach for her arm. “Did you ever once think of looking back? Did you ever think of coming back for me?”

As Barry stood up with the gun, Lynn forced herself not to look over at him, but something in the movement of her eyes alerted Mike. He whirled around, as if he’d been aware of Barry being there the whole time. He pulled the gun from his waistband and fired.

Barry’s left side exploded in an angry red pop-spray. Lynn cried out as she saw him collapse against a sagging part of the fence. She heard mesh ripping, and then he was falling away from her, tumbling down the side of the hill and out of view.

He felt stinging and air seeping through a hole in his chest. And then he was rolling down the side of the embankment, picking up speed, spinning in the wrong direction from the rest of the world, on his way to becoming just a body in the woods. He saw sky and then ground and then sky and then ground, as little pebbles and twigs stuck to his skin and tore at his clothes.

He lost the gun and crashed sideways into a rotting tree stump some twenty yards down the incline, and found himself surrounded by discolored old fence posts and pickets with huge rusty nails sticking out of them. That idiot Anthony who’d replaced their old fence a few months ago must have just tossed the wood down over the side instead of tying it all up and taking it over to the town transfer station as he promised he would.

Barry’s body took a pause and then screamed in agony. He wondered how long he’d be here before anyone found him. His thigh was ripped by rose thorns, the cap of his bad knee felt like it was on backward. His ankle was twisted at an impossible angle, and a warm ooze of blood had soaked the front of his shirt.
So this is what it’s like.
This is what it’s like to die within shouting distance of your home. He tried to pull himself up on the stump and call out to Lynn, but the rising wail of a siren coming down Prospect Road below drowned him out. Forty-eight years. That’s it. That’s all you get. He smelled pine and saw little white shreds of milkweed floating past his face, like pieces of a dream coming apart, and then he heard more sirens and the scampering of hooves somewhere high above him.

As the police cars came tearing up the driveway, Mike grabbed Lynn by the throat, moved behind her, and jammed the barrel of the gun into her ear. Whatever fragile connection they’d made a few minutes ago was gone. He’d shot her husband. He smelled like emergency rooms and bad coffee, like stale sweat and the air after fireworks.

A navy Buick pulled up in the shade of a great oak. Harold got out on the driver’s side, and Paco Ortiz climbed from the passenger seat.

Two more Riverside Police patrol cars screeched to a noisy halt behind them, and a pair of officers jumped out of each one, assuming amateurish-looking shooter stances behind the open car doors, as if they’d never actually done this in real life. But to Lynn, it all seemed to be happening on a television playing in another room. She was dazed, seeing her husband falling off the edge of the world over and over again.

“Hey, big man.” Harold put his hands up as he stepped out from under the oak branches. “What’s the story?”

“I was about to ask you the same thing.”

She could feel Mike’s heart beating against the top of her spine. The stench of infection from his thumb turned her stomach.
Where’s Barry?
The shock was just starting to set in.
Did I really just see the father of my children get shot?

“I guess you didn’t get any of my messages,” said Harold, taking a cautious step forward.

“I guess you didn’t get any of
mine,
” said Mike. “Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here, would we?”

“You have me there, don’t you?” Harold gave a quiet chuckle, the undertaker trying to impose grace on squalid confusion.

“Keep it where you got it, Chief.” The muzzle forced its way deeper into Lynn’s ear. “This is turning out to be one shitty day so far.”

“I know that.”

What if he is dead? What am I going to do?
Her thoughts were tumbling wildly.

“He had it coming, Harold. He dumped her in the river like she was trash. And you were going to try and put it all on me.”

“I know that too.”

“So now what do we do?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Mike. I’m looking in for the signal.”

A drop of greasy sweat on the back of her neck caused her to turn her head slightly and see some of Barry’s blood drying on the fence post.
People get shot all the time and live. Sure, they do.

“I’m not going to lie to you, man.” Harold shook his head. “It’s still a murder. Even with extenuating circumstances, we’re talking mandatory state time.”

A few feet behind him, Paco Ortiz had his gun drawn and his arms extended in the shade of the oak.

“That’s all right,” Mike said. “You don’t have to tell me what’s on the books.”

“I’m just saying there’s time and there’s
time.
All right? I was thinking you’d maybe like to see the kids again before they get to be our age.”

“You’re a little late on that one too, Chief. I got thrown out at home. Game’s over.”

Baseball.
My husband may be lying there bleeding to death, and they’re talking about baseball.
Lynn tried to keep looking at the place where Barry had fallen, praying somehow he’d reappear, but Mike wrenched her face forward again, the mouth of the gun grinding a deep metal circle into the side of her head.

“Let it go,” she said, her legs starting to tremble with cold marble knowledge that she could die here as well.

“What?”

The trembling started to work its way up her body.
Where is Barry? Why isn’t he calling for me? Why don’t I hear his voice?
Her nervous system was beginning to break down.
You’re not outside the frame anymore. You’re the picture.
Her eye began twitching. The sky became unnaturally bright.
Stop it,
she told herself. His forearm choked her, trying to get her to keep still.

“You can’t keep holding on,” she said.

She saw Harold give a tiny imperceptible nod, as if to say,
Listen to the lady.
Standing next to him, Paco closed one eye and looked down the sight of his Glock, focusing on Mike’s head just over her shoulder.

“Just let it go,” she said. “I heard what you were telling me.”

With that, she felt Mike’s lungs expand and compress against her back. The grip on her throat began to slip. The unibrowed sergeant who’d been ducking behind one of the patrol car doors started to rise with his gun. The slant of light Harold had been standing in widened, as if a door had opened in front of the sun.

But then an acorn from the overhanging oak hit the hood of his Buick. Lynn saw it happen. A little breeze stirring the branches. A tiny nub falling and ricocheting off metal. Just a sign of the changing season. But the men, already on edge, panicked, thinking they’d been shot at. The sergeant with the monobrow ducked halfway into his car and fired wildly over the door, a bullet sizzling over Lynn’s head and splintering tree bark behind her.