A Living Grave (20 page)

The breath in his chest came out in a long wind. I started talking and I didn't stop until I had told him all the events of the last couple of days.

“You really broke his nose?” he asked when I got quiet.

“I almost did a lot worse.”

“But you didn't.”

“Next time I might. I almost used him for revenge against the whole Army.”

“I know you know it,” he said. “But you really need to understand it—feel it. The Army's not your enemy. Just a few assholes in it.”

“I know.”

“That's pretty much life, isn't it? Something wonderful except for a few assholes.”

I smiled. Nelson's arm wrapped around my shoulder, pulling me back against him. I put my head against his chest. Then his hand cupped my breast. It felt good.

“I have a proposal,” he said.

“I bet you do,” I told him and I was laughing a little. “But we're both too tired.”

He pulled his arm away then brought it back. In his hand was a small box. “No. I have a proposal.” Quicker than I would have thought possible Nelson sat up, then dropped to the floor beside me. At first I thought he had fallen but he was getting on one knee. Naked and wrapped up in a red, white, and blue basket-weave afghan, he asked me to marry him.

“I know it's quick. And it seems impulsive, maybe even foolish, but I have never been more sure of anything in my life.”

I didn't answer. He opened the box and revealed a ring with a stone as large as my badge. When I continued not to answer, Nelson said, “But you're obviously not so sure . . .” There was a touch of humor in his voice as if he was not surprised at my silence. He put the box, still open, on the coffee table. “I'll just set this here and let you think.” Then he stood and pulled the cover around himself, watching me.

Finally he stepped back and said, “You have a lot of thinking to do, I can see.” The humor had gone from his voice. “It's late and we're both tired.” He stepped farther back. “I'll be in bed if you want to come up and talk.”

To my shame I let him go without a word. Everything felt so heavy.

O
nce again I was driving deserted roads in the smallest hours of the morning. I told myself I didn't know what I was looking for. That might have been half true. I didn't know specifically but I knew I was looking for some place to put my fear and anger. That was the surprising part. I was angry. Nelson had asked me to marry him and I was angry. The confusion I felt at that added more fuel until my spine felt like a column of steam ready to burst from my ears.

After several silent miles, fire caught my attention. Big yellow flames that danced like gypsies in the darkness. Color. Life. Rage. I could almost hear the clattering spin of
fortunada
's wheel.

The flames I saw were coming from a familiar bit of woods. Only a couple of days before I had been there talking to Clare. It was his camp on fire.

Hitting the gas and my emergency lights at the same time, I rushed to the break in the trees and fencing that I knew would open onto a rutted dirt track. As I drove I tried to call in for support but I couldn't keep control and dial at the same time, so the phone got tossed. Off the main road and onto the rough trail I pushed my truck faster than I should have. Rocks heaved up from the annual freeze-and-thaw cycles filled each rut. Some were big enough to crack open an oil pan. Many were sharp enough to cut through the sidewall of a tire.

As I got closer the road became visible, twin depressions of clay and stone meandering in a long arc around a copse of old trees. The fire ahead backlit the oaks and scrub brush. Before I got to the final turn, other lights, headlights, came on. Their beams were blue and white straight-edge beacons both cutting through and made crisply visible by the smoke. Light was followed by noise as motorcycles, many with open pipes, howled into life. As I passed around the last screen of trees the bikes were screaming right at me.

Law-enforcement personnel are discouraged from using our vehicles as a weapon except in cases of stopping another fleeing vehicle. That's to say car-on-car. In no case would it be considered proper to use my truck as a battering ram against a motorcycle. In these instances, where it is a cop's word versus a running arsonist wanted for questioning in a shooting—well, they'll take my word that he hit me.

I twisted my wheel and darted the truck headlong into the two lead bikes. One of them was clipped and shot spinning into the grass. The other hit slightly inboard of my driver's-side headlight and was flung up into the windshield. It was Cotton Lambert.

He rolled off the hood of the truck and into the dark grass before I could get stopped. By the time I did stop and get out, he was back on his feet.

I'd like to say I was worried that they had harmed Clare. I'd like to say I believed that the Ozarks Nightriders and Cotton Lambert in particular had done more than property damage to an illegal moonshine operation to which I had turned a blind eye. I'd like to—I can't. I wasn't thinking about any of that. I was thinking of dust and brown wind that crawls over your skin and embeds itself in open wounds.

Cotton took a swing at me. That was all I wanted and less than I needed. I had come out of my truck with my automatic holstered and my baton in my hand. That was the same as saying, “Let's dance.”

Cotton's punch was a rocket aimed right at the left side of my face. To meet it I raised my left fist and caught my wrist at his elbow and pressed out at the same time as I stepped in with my left foot at 45 degrees. By the book. As I turned his arm out I opened my hand and let it slide down until I closed my fingers on his wrist. That's when I brought my baton down from my right shoulder onto his bicep. He was lucky. I had a choice of his bicep or his elbow. Following through, I released his arm and held the baton with two hands sliding my right in a little to allow the butt to protrude. I pulled back, twisting with my hips to add power and drove the butt up into his abdomen.

In my head the blood was rushing like rivers of anger. I heard every rapid beat of my heart thrumming like a dynamo and I felt good. Honestly, I wanted more. If Cotton had had any sense he would have gone down and stayed there. He didn't. Bent double, he charged, lifting me off my feet and slamming my back against the truck. I brought the baton down on his back, butt first, a small steel fist going hard into the meat between the spine and the shoulder blade.

When he let me go I raised up for another strike, this one falling on the left trapezius as hard as I could bring it. He screamed, clutching at the impact point. His body was shocked by the pain, his back arched and his legs locked straight. I took advantage and kicked my heel into the inside of his right leg. He was down, screaming through his pain, and no more threat to me. But he still managed to call me a name. It was one short, ugly, hateful word that I won't tolerate. And I've been called a bitch more times than can be counted.

I broke his jaw.

Everyone else was gone. It was just me and Cotton out there: Him under the headlights and me under the stars. The other bike that I had hit had been able to get away. At least I couldn't find it. I couldn't find Clare, either. It was just the still that had been hurt. The flames were from a mixture of gasoline and alcohol. I wondered what Clare would think of the awful liquids that were running into the small stream beside his camp.

I was shaking and light-headed when I dug the phone out of the seat to call in. It was the effect of so much adrenaline draining from the blood, but I suddenly felt as weak as moth's breath.

While I waited for the other units, the EMTs, and fire department, I had a lot of time to simply be with what I had done. Cotton was silent on the ground. I had done that. I was justified. I felt justified—at first. Standing there as a witness after the fact, I wasn't so sure. The darkness was a black, silky depth pushed out by flames on the ground and embraced by stars overhead. There was no dust. The blood wasn't mine.

When Cotton stirred, I stood over him and said, “Now, maybe we can have a conversation.”

His answer was a hateful glare.

I tried again. Because I'm a calm and patient professional, I spoke slow and clear, trying to keep the situation calm. “You kept Middleton from being shot, Cotton. Who did the shooting?”

He said something I couldn't understand. It had slipped my mind that he'd taken a baton to the jaw.

“Say it again,” I told him. “Slowly.”

He said it with his middle finger.

I pinched the bridge of my nose. Criminals are exasperating. I thought about cuffing him and just going back to sit in my car to wait. Instead, I asked another question.

“Did you do anything to the girl?”

There was no mistaking the confusion in his eyes.

“The still you busted up tonight. It used to be over by Bear Creek. There was a girl killed there.”

He nodded. He knew about Angela.

“Was she part of this?”

Cotton shook his head.

“Did Riley Pruitt have anything to do with it?”

His answer that time was to try to get up and, I assume, somehow get away. I kicked his legs out from under him. I was cinching the cuffs down when the first units began arriving.

* * *

Work, both the routine of it and the puzzle, would provide a distance from Nelson that I needed. Not all that I
needed
, but at least I could think about what he was asking. Forget the fact that the sun was not yet up and I hadn't slept. The previous night I had not really slept, either. Passed out drunk in your truck is not exactly beauty sleep. As my tires bumped up from grass back onto asphalt I decided to turn toward home rather than back to Nelson's place.

The question—proposal—was hanging there in front of me demanding the kind of attention that I wasn't sure I had to give. I tried to ignore the thought that after I had run out like that he might no longer be asking. Discussion always helped me think things through. Uncle Orson was usually my go-to guy but there were some subtleties of emotion for which he was not the best sounding board. So, as I drove unlighted roads that snaked through dark woods between sheer rock walls and equally sheer drops, I called Dad. The fact that the landscape I was threading my truck through was not unlike the emotional world I needed to navigate was sticking in my mind as the phone rang.

“I wondered when you would call,” Dad said instead of
hello
. He was wide awake.

“He talked to you?”

“For a long time. I helped him pick out the ring.”

I said something to that, a word I rarely use and never to my father.

“What was that?” he asked and the smile in his voice suggested to me that he knew exactly what I had said. For just a moment I thought that my ideal father would have pretended not to hear that, but we never get the ideal, do we? He didn't wait for me to say. He asked, “Did you accept it?”

When I didn't answer with words he said, “I told him you might not right away.”

“What? Why?”

“You tell me. You didn't take it, did you? You didn't call to give me good news; you called to be coaxed.”

“No. I didn't,” I said. “I called to talk. I wanted your opinion and your thoughts and . . . Why would you say to Nelson that I might not marry him?”

“For the same reason that you didn't tell him you would. Doubts.”

“You doubt my feelings? You're the one that told me—”

“I don't doubt your feelings at all. You do that. But this isn't exactly about honest feeling, is it? How long have you known him? How much is feeling and how much is time? I told him too; I wasn't sure there was time for your feelings to catch up to his needs. My doubt is that you could make the decision before it was too late.”

I had to swerve to miss an opossum that was standing his ground in the middle of the road and hissing at the headlights of my truck. Once around the angry creature I told my father, “I can't believe you would say that to me, or to him. I know my own mind.” My voice was a bit shriller than I wanted it to be.

It was quiet on his end of the line for a long time before he said, “We're not talking about your mind, sweetheart.” His voice remained calm and steady. “We're talking about your heart. And I think you've been afraid for so long you hate the thought of giving it up. The fear you're comfortable with is a shield you hold up between you and your own life.”

“You don't know anything about my fear.” When I said it I didn't recognize the voice. I thought I was angry but it sounded quiet and like I was about to cry. For some reason I wondered if it was how Angela Briscoe's voice sounded at the end.

“I know all about the pain you live with,” he said, “and the fear.”

“Orson promised—”

“He didn't tell me. He didn't have to. Respect for a loved one's privacy only goes so far. It goes until it's more important to know the secrets than it is to keep them. You learned that when you looked in that box and found Nelson's gun.”

“Dad, I don't understand . . . I'm confused by all of this . . .”

“Katrina, do you want to marry him?”

“I don't know. We're just getting to know each other. I know it's too soon, but I'm afraid of losing him.”

“Everyone loses. Life is full of losing. Your problem is that you've convinced yourself that you can't lose what you didn't have. Today you're finding out how wrong you were.”

“I don't know what that means.”

“You've spent ten years with a hole in your life. If you don't put someone in it, you're going to fall in and never get out.”

“Daddy?” I was crying then. I was confused and kind of angry. I wanted to talk to Nelson but I didn't know how.

“Trying not to get hurt is no way to live.”

“You sound like the therapist,” I said. It was supposed to be a thumbed nose at both of them. The gesture didn't really come through in the words, so I hung up.

* * *

After the sun was well up I came out of my place cleaner, if not rested. Coffee was on my mind. There was a boring sedan parked in the drive and Major Reach leaning against my truck.

Checking out the bandages, I said, “Nice face.”

“Fuck you,” he shot right back.

“You tell your buddies a girl did that to you?”

“No. I told
your
buddies. Cops stick together, don't they? Just like you complain about soldiers.”

“In case you missed it, I was a soldier too.”

“Not in my book,” he said, trying to put a sneer into it. It didn't work with the nose.

“What do you want, Reach?”

“Just wanted to let you know that the messages got through,” he answered. “All of them.”

“What messages?”

“
What messages
, she asks.” He rolled his eyes. “You're good. But I think you got into a hurry.”

“I don't know what you're talking about. Now do you mind? I have a real job to do.”

“I know all about the way you do your job. Seen it firsthand. Do you bring anyone in without busting them up first?”

That brought a burn to my cheeks.

“Do you see me up on charges?” That sounded weak even to me.

“I know you're in therapy. Mandated by your department.” He arched his eyebrows in mock surprise. “What's that tell us?”

“It tells us you had better be careful whose truck you choose to lean on. Now get out of my way.”

“Two messages yesterday. One telling me that Bayoumi died in custody. Just like that—died. Homeland is closing its investigation. It could have been a weird coincidence; people die sometimes. I could have bought it. Until I got another message, an official message from my CO, telling me to halt any investigations involving you. Unless I have new,
specific
evidence of a crime or conspiracy. Suddenly it's not a coincidence anymore, is it?”