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She walks to the door. It’s one of the longest walks of her life because she keeps expecting him to come after her. He doesn’t. In the hallway, with the door closed, she lets out a breath she didn’t know she was holding. She starts to zip her purse closed when from behind her comes a crash. Something just broke. Does she want to know what? She doesn’t. Ella walks slowly and steadily down the hall.
In her car, she lowers her head and cries. There was a moment there, just a moment, when she really thought he might kill her.
52
Franklin Jalbert has stayed in hundreds of motel rooms during his career as an investigator, crisscrossing Kansas from north to south and east to west. Almost all of those rooms come with plastic glasses in little baggies, mostly printed with slogans like SANITIZED FOR YOUR SAFETY. The glasses on top of the minibar of his little suite in the Celebration Centre just happen to be real glass. He registers the weight of the one he’s picked up before it’s too late to stop—and he probably wouldn’t have stopped, anyway. He hurls it against the door Davis has just left, and it shatters.
Better the glass than her, he thinks. Not that I would ever hurt her.
Of course not. She may be a traitor, but they put in some good time together. Caught some bad boys and bad girls. He taught Ella, and she was eager to learn. Only she hasn’t learned enough, it seems. She doesn’t understand how dangerous Coughlin is. He wonders if perhaps after their traitorous meeting at the coffee shop, they might have gone somewhere else. Maybe to a motel?
No, no, she’d never. Not with the prime suspect in a murder case.
Never? Really? Never?
Coughlin’s not a bad-looking man, and he has a wide-eyed I’m telling the truth look about him. Some might find that appealing. Is it really beyond the realm of possibility that she… and he… maybe kind of a weird twist on the Stockholm Syndrome…?
In spite of her backstabbing, he can’t believe it of her. And never mind Ella. She’s out of the picture. The question is what he’s going to do about Coughlin.
The answer seems to be… nothing. She’s put him in a box. That damned spineless trooper had to spill his guts, didn’t he?
The idea of retiring, as she suggested, is awful. Like being marched toward the edge of a cliff. He can’t imagine stepping off into the void. He has no hobbies except for the daily newspaper crossword and the occasional jigsaw puzzle. His vacations have consisted of aimless wanderings in a rented camper, seeing sights he doesn’t care about and snapping pictures he rarely looks at later. Each hour feels three hours long. Retirement would multiply those long hours by a thousand, then two thousand, then ten thousand. Each hour haunted by thoughts of Danny Coughlin looking at him across the table with that wide-eyed wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly gaze, saying Arrest me. You can’t, can you? Thoughts of Danny Coughlin stopping in some other state for another young girl with her thumb out and a pack on her back.
And what can I do?
Well, he can do one thing; pick up the broken glass. He brings over a wastebasket, kneels down, and starts doing that. Pretty soon he’s up to 57 shards, 1,653 when added in progression.
I wouldn’t have hurt her, absolutely not. But there was one second—
Sharp pain needles the ball of his thumb. A bead of blood appears. Jalbert realizes he’s lost count. He debates starting again from one.
53
Danny Coughlin’s last week in Manitou, Kansas, is both sad and a relief.
On Tuesday he finds a big pile of dogshit in his mailbox. He dons a pair of his rubber work gloves, removes it, and washes the inner surface clean. Someone will want to use that mailbox after he’s gone.
On Wednesday he goes to Food Town to pick up a few final supplies, including a steak he plans to eat on Friday night as a goodbye dinner. He’s not in the market for long, but when he comes out the two back tires of his truck are flat.
At least they’re not punctured, he thinks, but probably just because whoever did it wasn’t carrying a knife. He calls Jesse because Jesse’s number is in his contacts and he can’t think of anyone else who might give him a help. Jesse says his dad left a lot of stuff when he ran out on his family, and one of those things was a Hausbell tire inflator. “Give me twenty minutes,” he says.
While Danny waits, he stands beside his truck and collects dirty looks. Jesse arrives in his beat-up Caprice and the Tundra’s back tires are good to go in no time. Danny thanks him, alarmed to feel tears threatening.
“No problem,” Jesse says, and holds out his hand. “Listen, man, I gotta say it again. I know you didn’t kill that girl.”
“Thanks for that, too. How’s the sawmill? I was driving by and saw you hauling lumber in a shortbox.”
Jesse shrugs. “It’s a paycheck. What’s up with you, Danny? What’s next?”
“Getting out of town this weekend. I’m thinking Nederland to start with. I’ll camp out, I’ve got some gear, and look for a job. And a place.”
Jesse sighs. “Probably for the best, the way things are. Shoot me a text when you get someplace.” He gives Danny a shy look that’s all seventeen. “You know, stay in touch.”
“I’ll do that,” Danny says. “Don’t cut off any fingers at that mill.”
Jesse flashes a grin. “Got the same advice from my moms. She says I’m the man of the house now.”
On Thursday, most of his stuff packed and ready to go, the trailer looking nude somehow, he gets a call from Edgar Ball while he’s drinking his first cup of coffee. Ball says, “I have bad news, good news, and really good news. At least I think it is. Which do you want first?”
