The 37th Hour (32 page)

“Looks like Shorty’s done drinking for the night,” she said rather mildly.

I got to my feet. “We can’t be here,” I said. “Legally.”

“I’m not going to run from that murdering prick. Are you?” she challenged me.

“No,” I said. “Hold the flashlight. Point it down low.”

Genevieve did, sitting on her heels to get it close to the ground. I moved to the door. Gravel crunched underneath footsteps, and we both watched as the doorknob turned counterclockwise.

As soon as Shorty was through the door, I sent my fist as hard as I could into his solar plexus. As he doubled over, I grabbed his hair and pulled his face down into my rising knee. He hit the floor with a hiss of painful breath.

“How they hanging, Shorty?” I said. “I felt a little unsatisfied with where we left things at the bar.”

Genevieve was still holding the flashlight down. “Why don’t you turn on the overhead light?” I suggested.

She pulled the string and we had light.

It was a shitty little place. A bare bulb overhead, a narrow cot. A card table, a folding chair, a cheap dresser. A bathroom through the doorway; I caught a glimpse of an old freestanding tub, an ancient sink on one porcelain leg. The kitchen was a sink and a hot plate.

But Shorty had his skills. He was obviously converting the place into a residence. I saw plumber’s tools on the bathroom floor, a wrench and some pipes. In the main room were things he most likely used in his day job: housepainter’s things, coveralls, a wallpaper shaver with a foot-long handle and a sharp, asymmetrical blade.

Shorty rolled onto his side to look at Genevieve. When he saw her, he looked like a man getting a visit from the harpies.

“Tell me about Mike Shiloh,” I said, as if we’d never left the bar.

“Fuck you,” he muttered. He’d been afraid to say that to a cop earlier, but clearly he saw that things had changed.

“You’ve got his backpack, his very empty billfold, and his driver’s license. That looks bad,” I said.

Shorty sat up. “I found them. In a ditch.”

“A ditch where?”

“On the county road.”

“Pretty near where you put your fingerprints all over that pickup?”

“This is illegal,” he said. “You broke into my place. What do you think a judge is gonna do with anything you find here? This is a fucking illegal search.”

Shorty knew a little about the system, like a guy with his rap sheet should have. And in his face I saw cunning that can, for a while, substitute for true brains.

I pulled out my gun again and pointed it at him. “Nobody in this room is thinking about the courts,” I told him. “Except you.”

Shorty stood up and faced me. He looked pretty tough for a guy with blood all over the lower half of his face. He said nothing. Somehow he’d seen the truth in my face: that even after everything he’d done, I wouldn’t pull the trigger. Just a little bit of the bar smirk came up to his lips.

Then he turned to Genevieve and said, “Your daughter
loved
fucking me.”

His eyes went back to me, to see how I was taking his little joke. That was his mistake. He was mostly paying attention to me. He hadn’t searched Genevieve’s face to see what could be read there.

“Gen, don’t!” I yelled, but I was too late. Her arm was a blur as she embedded Shorty’s own wallpaper shaver deep into the arteries of his neck.

Shorty made a sound like a cough, and I couldn’t jump back in time to keep his blood from splashing me. He stumbled backward, eyes rolling toward Genevieve. She lunged again, digging the blade yet deeper into his neck.

“Gen!” I caught her arm. Shorty fell away from both of us, his hands on his throat. They were already red, arterial blood coursing from underneath them.

“Call 911,” I said.

Genevieve looked at me and I knew what she was thinking. If Shorty died and we covered our tracks, we were all right. If not, both our careers were over. Our freedom as well. All for a rapist and murderer. I didn’t expect her to do it.

She said, “There doesn’t seem to be a phone in here.”

Shorty, on the floor, made a gurgle that didn’t seem promising.

“The front house, then. Wake them up,” I said.

Genevieve looked at Shorty, looked at me, and then she turned and went out the door.

The blood on the floor of Shorty’s sad home was truly amazing. There was a lake of it. From the floor, Shorty’s eyes met mine.

“Keep pressure on your neck,” I said.

“There’s nobody home,” he said, his voice raspy.

“In the front house?” I asked.

He couldn’t nod, afraid of opening the wound in his throat any more than he already had. But assent was in his eyes.

I knelt, despite the blood that soaked my legs from knees to feet.

“Then this is probably the ball game for you,” I said. “You know that, right?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“I just want to know how it happened,” I said. The blood was soaking through to the skin of my legs, unpleasantly warm. “If I can, I want to bring him home and bury him. But even if I can’t, I need to know what really happened.”

A bubble of blood appeared at the corner of Royce Stewart’s mouth. He coughed.

“Please,” I said.

He was silent so long I thought his heart was hardened against me. Then he spoke.

“I was walking home, it was late,” he said with effort. “This truck drove by me. A big Ford. A lot of the guys I work with drive trucks just like it.”

I nodded. A big pickup, with a strong engine, a solid body, and a high grille. The kind of vehicle in which you could—if you were angry enough, and fearless enough—run down another human being and not be seriously injured yourself.

Royce took a shuddery breath. “Maybe five minutes later I heard the engine again, getting louder, like the truck’s coming back. But I couldn’t see it anywhere. Then the lights came on, out of nowhere. He’d been driving with the lights off and he was goin’ real fuckin’ fast on the wrong side of the road. My side.

“I di’n know who it was but I knew he was coming for me. I started to run and fell. It’d been raining and then froze over. There was ice on the road. I sat there looking up at the headlights coming. I thought I was dead.” His hands tightened on his throat.

I remembered seeing the black truck on the news. Undamaged, on the road, headlights like cold white fire . . . it would have looked to Shorty like Death had come.

“Then the guy pulled out,” Shorty went on, “back to the center of the road. He went by, and then that truck hit some black ice and skidded out. I don’ think he even got a chance to hit the brakes before he was off the road and into that tree.

“For a couple minutes I waited for someone to get out, or another car to come along. But nothing was happening, so I went to see what was up.” He drew in an unsteady breath. “There was only one guy in the pickup. His eyes were kinda open, but he wasn’t seeing me. He was messed up. So I took his shit and left.”

“When you left, he was still in the car.”

“Yeah. He was bleedin’ pretty bad, but he was breathing and all. But I wasn’t going to call anyone to help him.” Shorty’s eyes searched my face. He was watching to see how I’d react to this part of his story. “He’d been laying for me. It was his fault he was that messed up.”

“When you say he pulled away and went past you, are you sure that wasn’t when he lost control of the truck?” I needed to be sure. I held Shorty’s eyes, the better to watch for truth. But I believed what Kilander had explained: the dying were past needing to lie.

“It was on purpose,” Royce said. His voice was getting fainter, thinner. “He lost control because he pulled out at the last minute. It was two different things.”

I had nothing to add; Genevieve failed to reappear. Shorty coughed again. “I wanted,” he whispered, “I wanted to . . .”

He never did finish that thought. He started it five or six times, then his eyes glazed over, and I got up and went outside and lost track of time.

When Genevieve returned, I was sitting under the willow tree, looking up at a waning moon that had appeared over the trees. I was finally distracted from the night sky by Genevieve waving her hand in front of my eyes. She was saying something, but I couldn’t make it out. Then her hand was a black blur on the periphery of my vision and she slapped me.

“What?” I said, and rubbed the stinging spot on my cheek.

“That’s better,” Genevieve said. “Shorty’s place has got to burn,” she explained. “You were smart enough to wear gloves, but I wasn’t.” Moonlight glinted off the metal can in her hand. “You can stay there if you want, for now. Do you want any of Shiloh’s things?”

“His things?” I echoed.

“The stuff we found in there. Try and stay with me, Sarah. I can do most of this myself, but I can’t drive your car and mine both when we leave.”

“Your car? Where—?”

“My car’s right there.” She pointed. “You didn’t see it when you first got here, and neither did Shorty, because I parked around the side of the main house. I didn’t know why exactly you were coming to Shorty’s place, but it didn’t seem smart to advertise that we were here.”

She walked to the shack and went inside. Her step was light and energetic. A moment later she came out again. “I’m going to light it up in a minute. We should get out of here pretty quick after that, okay?”

“Okay,” I said dully.

“You’ll follow me back to my sister’s place, all right?” she prompted.

“Yeah.” I couldn’t bear to ask her if she’d made any attempt to find a phone and call 911 before committing to her plan. I was already sure I knew the answer.

We stayed to make sure Shorty’s place was truly going to go up in flames. Maybe we stayed a little longer than we needed to, watching the spectacle of it. We were drawn to destruction, just like it seemed it was drawn to us.

Genevieve was in the lead as we drove back toward Blue Earth, but she stopped when she saw my car pull off the road at the tree that loomed in the dark.

In the headlights of my car, I looked down into the wet and matted grass until I saw what I was looking for: a small piece of broken glass.

Sitting on my heels, I picked it out of the dirt.

Genevieve came to stand behind me.

“You were right all along, Genevieve,” I said. “He’s in the river. He probably made it as far as the Blue Earth River; if not, they would’ve found the body already when they were looking for the old guy who owned the truck.”

“It’s best if someone doesn’t drive by and see the two of us here. Or our cars,” she said gently. “We don’t need to be placed in Blue Earth late at night.”

“His body is probably in the Minnesota River by now. Nobody will ever find it.”

“Sarah, come on. I’m not kidding,” she said. But my feet seemed to be frozen.

Genevieve took me by the hand and led me back to the Nova.

She pulled back onto the highway first, and I followed her red taillights on the road back to Mankato.

Could I know for certain that Shiloh was dead? Not yet, maybe never, if his body had been borne away in the river as I’d suggested to Genevieve. He’d walked away from the wreck; what Shorty had said made that clear. But Shiloh had been missing now for seven days, and now that I understood what had happened to him, I knew that seven days were about six days too long. The area around Blue Earth was rural, but it was no vast wilderness for a person to lose himself in, even someone with a head injury. If he hadn’t found his way to help, or at least been seen by the people searching for the presumed-missing Thomas Hall, he was dead.

From counseling the families of the missing, I knew that it took a long, complex legal process before the system would accept a missing person as a dead one. A more important turning point, totally unwitnessed by the world, was the silent, awful recognition of the missing person’s husband or wife, lover, parent, or child; that moment when the still, small voice said,
He’s dead.

Genevieve killed her headlights as she pulled into the yard of the Lowes’ farmhouse, and I did the same, creeping to a stop nearby.

As I put my keys into the pocket of my black leather jacket, I felt the stiffness of paper and drew out the three-quarter-size envelope that Sinclair had given me. It had ridden in my jacket since early this morning, when I’d opened Sinclair’s letter on the plane.

Instead of getting out of the car, I looked out at Genevieve, now on the steps of her sister’s home. I was expecting her to be impatient again, to hurry me along as she had by the tree at the side of the highway. But now that we were safely away from Blue Earth, on private property and unseen, she seemed relaxed. In the dark she was only a silhouette, but I could see ease in the way she lounged against the porch railing, studying the night sky.

I opened the car door a fraction so that the dome light illuminated the front seat, slipped a fingernail under the flap of the cream-colored envelope, and slit it open.

Sinclair had sealed this envelope believing Shiloh would open it. It was her gesture of faith. And I’d left it sealed, not yet ready to hear the still, small voice inside myself.

Sinclair’s message was brief enough to make the small slip of paper she’d written on look expansive by comparison.

Michael,

I’m so glad for you and Sarah.

Please be happy.

S.

Genevieve and I stayed awake for more than an hour after we’d crept into the house like thieves. Deb and her husband, quite fortunately, had not awakened.

While the washing machine in the basement removed the stain of Royce Stewart’s death from our clothes, if not our hands, Gen and I got our story straight. I had called Genevieve from the Cities, asking if I could come down. Phone records would bear that out, if it came to the point that anyone checked. I’d gone to Blue Earth first, to talk with Shorty, who refused to talk about the car theft and wreck Gen and I both still found suspicious. When he wouldn’t talk to me, I drove back up to Mankato. Genevieve had stayed up to meet me and let me in, which explained why I hadn’t rung the doorbell and woken anyone else in the house.

Later, we talked in low voices, like college roommates, in the twin beds of the Lowes’ guest room. There I recounted for Genevieve the story that Royce Stewart had told me, how Shiloh had turned away from his murderous course at the last minute.