Blood Hunt

15

It rained again for his Monday shift. Maggie did not come over and the bed already felt empty without her.

Tuesday dawned with a clear blue sky, crisp autumn air, and leaves glowing incandescent yellow and red. Tuesday Baumen buried Diane and Jonah.

Garreth made himself wake up and attend the funerals. Not exactly ordered to, but the memo Danzig posted on Monday made his feelings clear.

I think it would be a mark of respect, and demonstration that this department’s regard for accident victims and their families goes beyond working those accidents, if as many officers as possible attend the Barnes and Wiltz services, in uniform. My family and I will be there.

So Garreth made sure he was, too…uniform crisp, gear belt polished. And went well fed to curb hunger amid all that blood scent. They held Jonah’s service in the morning. PD officers and their families sat in a block. Counting noses — Danzig, Lieutenant Kaufman, Nat, Maggie, Duncan — Garreth wondered who was minding the store besides Bill Pfannenstiel.

Reserve Officer Chuck George it appeared, who drove the patrol car leading the procession from the packed First Christian Church to Mount of Olives cemetery.

Diane’s service came in the afternoon, at the equally crowded St. Thomas More Catholic church…where a horse blanket covered with show ribbons, mostly blue or purple, draped the casket. Pfannenstiel replaced Duncan in the PD contingent, though Garreth spotted the woman and teenage girl who had attended Jonah’s funeral with Duncan — his sister and the niece who wanted to barrel race like Diane — elsewhere in the congregation. He sat next to Maggie. During the service, her hands and jaw clenched with the effort of keeping her composure. He put a hand over the near fist, and her hand turned to interlace fingers tightly with his. Beyond her, Garreth saw Martin Lebekov notice and smile.

Since the cemetery lay just across from the church, they had no vehicle procession. Everyone walked. Sterling-Weiss had a vintage buckboard waiting in front of the church, draped in black. It carried the casket, still covered by the horse blanket, across to the cemetery. Followed by a bay horse tacked in western saddle and bridle with cowboy boots turned backward in the stirrups like a military funeral, then the rest of the mourners. At the grave site, John and Anita Sterling folded the horse blanket and presented it to Diane’s parents like a flag.

Garreth did not see a dry eye in the house, including his.

Maggie had the bed unfolded when he reached home after his shift. Not for sex this time, but to cuddle against him and talk about the pain of losing her mother to breast cancer when Maggie was fifteen. Holding her, he thought of his father accusing him of burying himself here. There were, he reflected, far worse places to be buried.