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“I’m going to keep that in mind. Might give you a call.”
Trooper Calten pauses getting into his car and looks back with a grim little smile. “Get him, Inspector.”
“That’s the plan.”
32
At his hotel Jalbert stops at the front desk and asks if they have folding chairs. The clerk says he believes they do, in the hotel’s business center. Jalbert asks the clerk to send three up to 521.
“On second thought, I’ll get them myself,” Jalbert says, and does just that. There’s a dozen or more leaning against the wall, so he takes four. Four is a good number, better than three. Hard to say why, but even always beats the dickens out of odd. He takes two in each hand and carries them to the elevator, ignoring the clerk’s questioning look.
He unfolds two in the small sitting room and two in the bedroom. He now has eight chairs (the bed and the toilet seat count). One to eight inclusive makes thirty-six, one to twenty-four inclusive makes three hundred, one to forty inclusive makes eight hundred twenty. People wouldn’t understand (most people), but it’s really a beautiful thing, a kind of from-the-top-down pyramid scheme that pays dividends not in money but in clarity.
As he nears the end of his fifth round of chairs, he knows what his next step must be. He folds up the chairs he’s brought from the conference room and stacks them next to the little desk. They may come in handy. He takes his suitcase out from under the bed and opens it. From the elastic pouch he takes a pair of thin rubber gloves and puts them on. Time to grind. Then he calls Trooper Calten. Time to turn the screws a little more.
33
Early on Friday morning of the week from hell, Danny is awakened by a loud metallic thud followed by the rev of a car engine with either a bad muffler or no muffler at all. The clock on his nightstand says it’s 2:19 AM. He gets up, grabs the flashlight he keeps in case of power outages, and goes to the front window of his sitting room. Nothing is stirring out there except for a cloud of moths circling a pole light standing tall between the park’s office and laundry. Oak Grove (where there are no oaks) is fast asleep. That loud thud has awakened nobody but him, because it was meant for him.
Danny opens the door. He sometimes forgets to lock up at night, but he supposes that after Plains Truth and Jalbert’s little show in the IGA last night, that will have to change. He goes down the concrete steps and clicks on the flashlight, searching for the source of the thud. It doesn’t take long. There’s a divot in the trailer’s aluminum shell, just below the frosted bathroom window. Danny surmises it was the window his nighttime visitor was aiming for.
There’s a smear of red in the deepest part of the divot. Danny runs his light down the side of his trailer, and there on the gravel is a brick. Wrapped around it and secured with a twist of wire is a note. Danny knows what it’s going to say, but squats and pulls it free anyway. The message is short, written in either black crayon or a felt-tip pen.
GET OUT YOU FUCKING MURDERER. OR ELSE.
Danny’s first thought on reading this is Not on your life. His next is Oh really? Is this a movie? Are you Clint Eastwood?
Standing here at two in the morning with a threat in one hand and the brick that delivered it at his feet, getting out of Manitou seems not only reasonable but attractive. His friend Becky—a friend with benefits—is through with him, she’ll keep sweet little DJ away from him as if he has the bubonic plague, and he’s lost his job. Bonus attraction, it seems like half the town has Covid. He doesn’t much like the idea of being driven out like Cain after he murdered his brother, but this trailer park is nobody’s idea of Eden. It might be time to give Colorado a try. He thinks Stevie would like that.
He wonders if that noisy car he heard going away was Pat Grady’s Mustang. It might well have been, but what does it matter?
Danny goes inside and back to bed, but first he locks the trailer’s door.
34
On his last day as an employee of the Wilder County School Department, Danny is moving books from the storage room to the teacher’s lounge, which serves as the de facto History and English Departments. The books will be stacked there, ready to be passed out to students when school recommences in September… by which time Danny Coughlin hopes to be far away from Wilder County.
Jesse comes jogging up the hall from where he’s been scrubbing baseboards in the new wing. He meets Danny outside the library and says, “Just a heads-up, that cop from the other day is coming to see you. The one with the funny…?” Jesse rubs two fingers on his forehead, indicating Jalbert’s widow’s peak. “He parked around back.”
“Is the woman with him?”
“Nuh, by himself.”
“Thanks, Jesse.”
“Guy’s really got a hardon for you, doesn’t he?”
“I’ll come down and help you as soon as I get these books offloaded.”
Jesse persists. “He’s not going to arrest you, is he?”
Danny cracks a smile at that. “I don’t think he can, and it’s driving him crazy. Go on, now. Let’s make our last day a good one.”
Jesse goes. Jalbert is in the lobby, once more examining the trophy case. He has what appears to be a rolled-up newspaper in one hand.
Maybe he means to spank my nose with it, Danny thinks. That’s a welcome ray of amusement in the dread he feels at seeing Jalbert again. He knows dread is exactly what Jalbert wants him to feel. Danny would change it if he could, but he can’t. He starts down the hall just as Jalbert comes through the door. “Did you have a nice Fourth?” he asks.
Danny doesn’t bother with that. “What are you doing here on your own?”
