A Welcome Grave

42

There was an old van parked behind the trailer, set back on a dirt access path cut into the trees, screened from sight. Doran had keys for it. I drove down the gravel road, Doran in the seat beside me with a gun, everything just as it had been on our trip to the lake except for the addition of Gaglionci bleeding all over the backseat of the van. Doran sat with his back pressed against the door and the gun aimed at my head. We drove past the trailer down the rutted gravel road and came to a stop where Joe’s car was parked sideways, blocking the exit. Joe was not inside.

“Step forward and put your gun down,” Doran called loudly. He had both windows down, the gun pressed in the soft tissue under my chin. “I’ll count to five, and then your partner dies.”

There was a movement in the trees to the left, and Joe stepped forward. He hadn’t lowered his gun, but I was a hell of a lot more confident that he wouldn’t take the shot than I had been with Thor.

“Go on and holster it, Joe,” I said. The pressure from Doran’s gun under my jaw made it difficult to talk loud enough. “Amy’s safe. She’s in the trailer with Thor. Let us pass and then get her out of here. That’s what matters.”

Joe holstered his gun. His face was pale in the glow from the headlights, his thin gray hair damp and windblown.

“Get her out of here,” I repeated.

“I will.”

“Move the car,” Doran said. “Then go somewhere and wait. We’re almost done here, but don’t get stupid. Any cops show up behind us, your partner will die. That’s not just talk, Pritchard.”

Joe walked back to the Taurus and started the engine, backed it out of the way, and sat with the motor running while I drove us past. I looked in the rearview mirror as we pulled away and saw the taillights of the car moving toward the trailer where Thor and Amy waited. She was safe.

“Brooks still in the winery?” Doran said.

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t lie. He lives out there. I remember there was a house. Big, fancy-ass house. That’s where he lives, isn’t it?”

I didn’t answer.

“Your woman is fine,” Doran said. “You got that? You saw her, Perry. She’s fine, and you can thank me for that.”

“Thank you,” I said, and I was serious. Regardless of whether he held a gun on me now, he’d been ready for Gaglionci in a moment when I had not.

“Shooting Gaglionci was my pleasure, Perry. My absolute pleasure. I may well do it again before the end of the night.”

Behind us, Gaglionci was quiet. I could see his face when I looked in the mirror, though, the shine that showed his eyes were open and watching us. Even unarmed and injured, with handcuffs on, he still seemed like a threat.

“When you took off, I thought you were gone,” I told Doran. “Headed for the highway or something.”

He shook his head. “Only two buildings in that entire camp are still solid. The third cabin and the trailer. Once I figured out he wasn’t in the cabin, I knew they had to have moved to the trailer. It made more sense, being closest to the road and I knew he wouldn’t have left her alone.”

“Where’d you get the gun?”

“Inside the trailer. That’s where I’d been staying for the last few weeks. I knew where the gun was, but he didn’t.” Doran shifted in the seat and lowered the revolver. “Point is, your girl is safe now, so you can just relax, all right? Shit’s done, as far as you’re concerned. Me, I got a little left to handle. You just got lucky enough to go along for the show.” He cocked his head at me. “Jefferson’s kid—why’d he kill himself? If he wasn’t responsible, why’d he do that?”

There was regret in his voice, and it surprised me. I looked back at him for a moment, then away.

“You told him you were going to kill him, Doran. Torture him and kill him. I think he believed you.”

“Why let it come to that, though? Why not go to the cops, give Brooks up? If he’d done that . . .”

“Giving Brooks up would mean giving himself up, too. And his father. His father would have gone to jail. They might have been estranged, but I don’t think he was ready to do that. By the time he guessed that his father was already dead, I was standing in front of him, and he assumed you weren’t far away.”

“I wish he’d gone to the cops,” Doran said. “Could’ve changed some things.”

I looked at him, saw his face lined with shadows. “Let me out of the van, and you take over. Only don’t go to see Brooks. Go north, south, west, wherever. But don’t go there, Doran. It won’t end well.”

“Just shut up, Perry.”

For a while neither of us spoke. We were the only car on the road, nobody coming in the opposite direction, just us in that musty old van listening to the wind and the tires on the pavement.

“There was a time,” Doran said, “right before Monica got killed and I got arrested, that I about had my shit together. Be the first to admit it had been a long time coming, but, man, I was getting it together. Cutting back on the booze, cutting back on the pot, working steady hours, honest hours. It was that place in Geneva that did it, you know? Out there with the trees. Not even an hour from where I grew up, but, damn, it was good to be out of the city. I liked those trees. I was happy out there. Had a savings account, even. Putting some dollars in there when I could, thinking about upgrading to a better place after winter.”

I saw it in my mind: a trailer in the woods, tall trees surrounding it. I saw that, and then I saw Alex Jefferson’s sprawling house by the country club, Paul Brooks’s winery and estate just off the lake.

“I was doing all right,” Doran continued, “and Monica, she was good for me. Knew it wouldn’t last, she and I both knew that, but she was good for me. Her friends and her parents didn’t like me, but they didn’t know me, either. All kinds of rumors going around about me being violent and shit, but that was done. That was in the past, and Monica got it. Nobody else did, maybe, but she got it. When we split up, I remember sitting outside that night and smoking a cigarette and thinking that I was going to be clean by spring. I mean, really living solid. I’d have a new place by then, be done with the drugs and the drinking and the rest of it. I was close. All I had to do was make it through winter.”

His voice changed, went soft and almost musical. “Just make it through winter.”

We reached a four-way stop, and Doran motioned for me to go right, toward the winery. The wind picked up and shook water from the trees.

“You had to know somebody was setting you up,” I said. “Why take the plea?”

“Because someone had set me up, Perry. They’d done it well, too. It’s one thing to fight a charge when you’re sure of the facts, but I wasn’t anymore. I didn’t know what the hell they’d find, and that attorney, that paid-off prick, he was in my ear every damn day telling me I’d better think about the plea. Said I could always appeal, get out early, but that I was done if we did a trial in that county. Case was too big, my reputation too bad, I had no chance. Told me he couldn’t get a new venue, either. So take the plea and then think about an appeal, he said. The safe bet.”

“Did you have any ideas about who set you up?” I said. “Just blame the cops?”

“Had a million ideas, and none of them were close. I thought the cops were a part of it, but who killed her? At first I wondered about her father. He never liked me. But he never seemed like a psychotic, either. So why me? Who picked Andy Doran for the fall? I thought about that every day and every night and never got close. You know I honestly considered the Army? Can you believe that shit? I’d been kicked out, and I thought, hell, maybe those boys take things more personally than you realized. That’s how far off I was.”

“You didn’t know Paul Brooks?”

“Never seen the man. Still haven’t. We’re about to fix that.”

“I’ll get you some money, Doran. Somehow. Get you a nice amount of cash, and then you take off. Go wherever you can go and just fade out. Forget Brooks. Joe and I will see that he goes down. You can watch it on TV, read about it in the papers, from someplace safe and far away.”

Doran’s face was turned away from me, staring out at the dark countryside. “You were a cop. You’ve been in some prisons.”

“Yeah. Several times.”

He nodded. “Then you know what they feel like.”

I thought of the hollow sound the door had made banging shut and locked behind me in the jail in Indiana, the way it had reminded me of a submarine hatch, that sense of finality.

“Yes,” I said. “I’ve got an idea.”

“And you know what goes on in there, when those doors close.”

I didn’t answer that one.

He turned back to face me. “I did five years inside, Perry. Something like that? You don’t forgive it, you don’t forget it, you don’t walk away from it. You take it back in blood.”