Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 133, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 805 & 806, September/October 2008

An Ill Wind by Amelia Symington

© 2008 by Amelia Symington

Amelia Symington is the pen name of a Canadian who came to “the States” to go to graduate school and fell in love with an American. With her husband and daughter, she lived in New England for a while, where she walked along the ocean for the first time, and experienced the climate and setting that provide the ambience for this first story.

The sands were drifting into the corpse’s eyes and falling into the open mouth. He was lying on his back and his belly made an unnatural mound on the flat beach, a slight hill that was skirted by the scurrying crabs and small birds. The tide was coming in, but he lay high above the tide line, most likely safe from the pull of the ocean. On the other hand, the wind was picking up, and with the storm offshore it was hard to be sure exactly where the high-tide line would be in the next twenty-four hours.

Wally stood at the corpse’s feet, holding his dog, B.D., on a short leash.

“Don’t you go messing up the scene of the crime.” he said.

B.D. obeyed the tone of voice and calmed down. Like his owner, he was a shaggy, thin old mutt without the energy to fuss for long.

Wally considered his options. The wind was coming on strong and the forecast was for the last real blow of the season, maybe a bad storm, maybe hurricane strong. The body could easily be buried before the afternoon was out. He walked here every day and he could find it again, if he had the time and brought the dog. But the new sheriff wouldn’t want to wait. In Wally’s opinion, the young man was way too eager to consolidate his newly elected position by doing, doing, doing.

That’s not going to impress people, he thought. What they want is loyalty and safety and someone they can call on when they really need a hand. That’s what Wally himself had done for twenty-five years. He was only mildly annoyed that he’d lost the election last year to the new guy. Another man would have fumed and maybe undermined the new guy’s authority, but not Wally. For example, he could wait and call the sheriff later, after he got home. All it would take was a small lie, that he’d forgotten his cell phone. Then, the sheriff would have to wait until the next day, which was the sensible thing with this storm coming up. But it was the sheriff’s call, not his.

Wally pulled his cell phone out of the pocket of his old jeans. First he took a picture of the corpse’s face. Anyone could see it was Gene Barnes. Then he took a couple of the body. There were no visible wounds, no pool of blood anywhere. A small flask was visible next to the right hand. Not surprising, since the body stank of alcohol. Then, Wally stood with his back to the ocean and took a quick picture of the few scraggly trees perched on the edge of the beach. They looked like outcasts stranded so far from the line of other small trees that stretched thick and scrubby on either side of this bare hundred yards or so of shoreline. Next he took a shot to the north and another to the south. It seemed unnecessary, but the new sheriff had posted this procedure on his personal Web site for citizens who came across just this sort of thing. Using “triangulation” was supposed to pinpoint the scene for the coroner or the judge or even the jury if it came to that. Wally punched in the sheriff’s e-mail address (Bradley@yoursherriff.org) and sent the photos off to him. Finally, Wally punched in his old work number. At least Bradley hadn’t changed that.

“Hello, Bradley? Gene Barnes is dead and stinking up the beach down here about a mile north of the Sparrow Beach stairs. I just sent you pictures.”

“Don’t touch a thing, I’ll be right there.” To Wally’s ears he sounded excited and ready to roll.

“I’ll wait for you down at the stairs,” Wally said, hanging up without waiting for Bradley’s advice and starting down the beach with B.D. in tow.

Some people hated the New England hurricane season, but not Wally. It got your juices flowing, brought neighbors out of their houses and away from their solitary TV sets. In his experience, people were better than generally given credit for, especially when they had an excuse for helping one another out. Now was the time to make a phone call to check on the young mother whose husband was on the road, a quick stop by a retired couple to be sure they had the windows nailed tight, a call to the cousins to assure them all was well. He and Terry were never busier than those days when the storms were threatening. She used to say that the wind sort of blew folks together. Now, the winds reminded him of her, his beloved wife, dead and gone for three long years.

Of course, there were some people who weren’t like that. There were folks who would rob you blind any day of the week, as soon as look at you. Guys like Gene Barnes, for example. As owner and sole worker at Gene’s Garage, he was a good mechanic, when he was feeling “born again,” usually around the end of the month. Now, if he’d simply been the town drunk, the ladies would have taken him under their wing, given him castoffs and free meals in exchange for a few hours of sober work hauling away junk or digging new flower beds. He’d have had enough to keep him in booze and they’d have kept him out of trouble, by and large. But Gene had the misfortune to straddle the worlds of respectable productivity and bleary-eyed senselessness. Maybe, Wally thought, it might have been better to lock Gene up from time to time. Instead he’d just taken Gene’s keys and driven him home after the heavy man stumbled out of the bar at closing time. Wally always hoped that Gene would sleep it off and be sober enough to work the next day, but Gene usually got up real early looking for a hair of the dog that bit him. No telling how many “repairs” that were never needed were done, or not done right. Gene was more of a menace under the hood of a car than behind the wheel of one.

Well, he was harmless now, and off to another world. Wally figured that Gene was finding out God’s considered judgment about the kind of life that he had lived. Maybe God’s good wrath was stirring up this storm and giving Gene the anonymous grave he deserved. Wally silently apologized to the man upstairs, because even if he wasn’t the sheriff anymore, Wally knew that he was doing the right thing by reporting this body, and he hoped that God would understand that he meant no disrespect, not leaving this in God’s good hands.

Wally made his way down the beach towards the stairs. The wind was picking up and B.D. was making things difficult by running first ahead and then behind him. The dog wasn’t happy that they kept going away from home, but he had faith in Wally, faith that any minute he’d change direction.

“I know, old fellow. We’ll be safe enough when Bradley gets here. We’ll get a ride in that nice new truck of his, you’ll see.”

Wally always drove an old truck. Never in his life had he bought a new one. The truth was that he’d fallen in love with his first old red Ford, the one he’d had when he was sixteen. It was about the same time that he’d fallen in love with Terry. In his heart he knew that there hadn’t been a single day in the last sixty years, not a half-hour even, that he hadn’t loved Terry full out.

The guys made fun of him for it. Lyle was the worst. He had married the banker’s daughter, who everyone knew was a trifle balmy, but Lyle didn’t seem to understand that he should be damned grateful to find any woman who would settle for a pipsqueak, a man who made the runt of the litter look like good pickings. It took Lyle fifteen years to give up his womanizing and decide to be content with his warm and, in Wally’s opinion, far too understanding wife. Wally’s best friend, Augie, didn’t have money to attract real women, but he was so cute there was always somebody’s daughter mooning over his “boyish good looks” and the ever-anticipated literary success that he’d enjoy just as soon as he got over being an accountant. The two men just didn’t understand the value of constancy or commitment where women were concerned.

Then there was Gene, laughing at the way some men were always falling all over themselves on account of one woman or another. Wally knew it was an act, because Terry had told him how Gene had been following her around all her freshman year, and how he asked Terry to marry him and go off with him to Boston when he was accepted to some no-name college there. When she declined, Gene offered to wait till she was through high school, but she told him she was in love with someone else. Gene never went to college, and he started drinking seriously about the time that Wally and Terry were married. For years Wally had worked at not feeling sorry for the guy, but if he’d been the one who lost Terry, he’d just have slipped into the nearest grave and pulled the sod up over his head.

Wally reached the stairs and sat down to get his breath back. There it was again, a soft pain that swamped his heart and took a short trip down his arm. These days it was his secret. At first he had told the doctor when it happened, but there had been lots of talk about sticking probes into his arteries or even bypass surgery if it came to that. Not for Wally, not after watching Terry fight to keep the pain from her face and waste her precious time being the perfect patient for a bunch of strangers. Not that he’d ever said an unkind word to them or done anything but support her in those last days. It was the hardest thing he ever did. He looked out at the ocean roaring before the wind, free and full of life. When his time came, it would be a short trip to join her and he wasn’t going to any hospital to make some doctor feel good about keeping the two of them apart longer.

Wally pulled out his cell phone again and checked the time. Over an hour since he had called Bradley. The young man should be here by now. Maybe he wasn’t interested in meeting up with Wally. Maybe he just looked at the pictures and figured out where the body was and headed straight for it.

No sense going back down the beach against this wind now. The warm wind was picking up bits of dry sand and using them to drill at his face and hands. He buttoned up his denim jacket so that he wouldn’t feel it plastering his Red Sox T-shirt to his chest, rolled up his cap and tucked it into his back pocket so it wouldn’t blow away on him.

There was a path that was pretty sheltered up near the parking lot, at the top of the stairs. It ran parallel to the beach without actually leaving the trees that separated the grassy mud from the sand for most of the length of the beach. From there, he’d be able to see if Bradley had arrived at the body by another route.

Wally scraped a hole in the sand to make a bed for B.D. under the stairs, mounded the sand to protect him from the wind, and tied his leash to a nearby support beam. “Stay. I’ll be back,” he said. The wind was getting awful strong for an old dog.

The stairs felt steeper than he remembered, and Wally had to rest halfway up. He decided to risk losing the cap and wear it for a while to keep his hair from blowing into his eyes so much. At the top he came to a complete stop when he saw the sheriff’s new truck parked on the far side of the otherwise empty lot.

Why park so far away from the stairs? Wally thought. Besides, if Bradley had left when Wally called and driven here and parked at the far end of the lot, he’d have found Wally at the bottom of the stairs before now and saved him the long climb. Something wasn’t right.

The parking lot was one of those created by the state for tourists, and no one local used it because it was faster to park on the side of the highway and take one of the barely visible dirt paths that led directly to the beach. With the storm pending, the parking lot was empty even of tourists.

Wally looked up at the sky; clouds, but no lightning to worry about. He rested against a tree out of sight of the truck. The truck looked empty, but there was no harm in keeping a low profile.

The truck was parked into the wind. Nobody parks their vehicle into the ocean wind knowing what the wet air does to your wiring, not if he wants to drive home later. So either Bradley was in such a hurry that he didn’t care, or he expected to get back in the truck pretty damn quick. So he wasn’t planning on going a mile up the beach to the body. So what exactly was the truck doing here?

Wally wished he had B.D. with him. Even an old dog is some comfort when you’re not sure what you’re getting into. Going back for B.D. meant another trip down and then up those stairs. No, he wasn’t going to do that more than he had to.

Wally unbuttoned his jacket and the holster he still wore under his right armpit as if he were still a working lawman. He’d never had to shoot it, but it was useful for putting the fear of God into anyone with a guilty conscience. He took a deep breath, ignored the effect of the adrenaline on his heart rate, and left the trees so that he was approaching the truck from the passenger side, moving into the blind spot. Then a final dash and he had the door handle in his hand and the door open. The truck looked empty.

The ringing of his cell phone rattled his teeth. Wally swung up into the truck’s cab and closed the door. He waited for his hand to stop shaking before he answered it.

“Wally, I can’t get there. My damn truck’s in for repairs. This loaner Gene gave me has crapped out. Get your butt back here before this storm catches you.”

“Bradley, you’ll never guess where I’m sitting right now,” Wally said, but the phone had gone dead. Silly new gadgets! To be reliable they had to be plugged into an outlet half the time. He didn’t understand how they’d ever gotten to be so popular.

As he replaced the gun in his holster, Wally couldn’t think why he hadn’t guessed that it was Gene who drove the truck here. Gene was always giving nice cars a little test drive when they were in the shop. When they were all kids in high school, the gang of them took every new car in town for a “joy ride,” as soon as anyone left one on the street unattended. Everyone joked about it and they didn’t do any harm. That stopped when old man Turner complained to the state police. Gene got a month in the detention center. The rest of them got off with a warning, but then, Gene was the unofficial leader and everyone knew that Gene’s mother wasn’t about to give him the hiding that was waiting for the boys with the great good luck to have fathers.

So it was Gene who parked here. He was the one expecting to be gone just a short time and he wasn’t coming back.

The first raindrops marked the windshield. It was high time he collected B.D. and got himself home. On the off-chance that the salt sea air hadn’t eaten anything important yet, Wally hot-wired the truck and was rewarded by a short sputtering sound before the battery died completely. “Ptwey to you, too,” he said, imitating the sound.

Behind the sprinkling rain, the sky was getting that green-mud look that comes before a serious storm. Better to make for the lighthouse now before the wind picked up any. Two miles to the lighthouse was quicker than the five miles home.

Wally had never been in the new sheriff’s red truck before. When he handed over the reins to the youngster, he’d given him all the advice he could think to give. He’d even given him the old “extra” revolver that he had kept in the glove compartment of his old truck.

“When you’re in a small department, you know there are going to be times when it’s just you and the bad guy, no one else around to help out. You’re the guy with the gun, but someday, some idiot’s going to be tempted to try and take it away from you. That’s bad because then odds are either he’s shot, or you’re shot, or he ends up being the guy with the gun. So what you do is, you leave another gun right there in the glove compartment and you let him see it. If he’s feeling lucky, he can go for that gun. By the time he finds out there isn’t any firing pin, you have the upper hand well and good.” That’s what he told Bradley. The question was, did Bradley listen to him?

Wally popped open the glove compartment. A bundle of money was crammed in so tightly that it didn’t even fall forward when the compartment opened. Wally pulled it out, then looked deeper, feeling over the driver’s manual and finding no gun. What he did find was a folded brown envelope.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw a great hairy face appear in the side window and snapped his head up. Looking closer, he recognized the nose brushing against the window and the tongue wagging under it. “Damn, B.D., you’ll give me a heart attack yet,” Wally said.

The dog was standing on his back legs, paws against the door, and Wally had to open the window a bit so B.D. would hear his commanding, “Down, boy, down.”

When he opened the door, Wally heard the ocean eating up new ground on the beach below. B.D. squeezed past him into the shelter of the cab. Wally held B.D. on his lap, stroking his neck and back until both their heart rates returned to normal, then made the dog move his long legs and sit in the driver’s seat.

At least B.D. was safe here with him. By the sound of the waves, he’d soon have been drowned by that rising tide if Wally hadn’t gotten down the stairs real quick. Lucky thing the clasp had broken on his collar. First time that had happened.

Wally patted B.D., his big hands checking for any sign that the dog had hurt himself pulling on the collar, and instead he found the collar was still there, intact. Someone had let him off the leash. Wally reached back into his holster for the gun, leaning on B.D. to hide the motion from anyone watching. Somewhere, someone was out there.

The skies ran out of patience and sent all the rain the clouds had been collecting from miles of ocean. The rain created a grey cocoon blocking Wally’s view out the windows. If anyone was lying in wait for him, they were getting good and soaked now.

B.D. jumped across Wally’s lap as the driver’s-side door opened. Rain water sprayed them both and someone wearing a rain slicker pushed his way into the cab. In a single motion, Wally grabbed the collar of the rain slicker and pressed the gun into the neck behind it.

“Jeez, Wally, it’s me. Lyle Simons.”

The voice confirmed the identity of the little man. For some reason, his voice had never “broken,” just remained the pure soprano of the twelve-year-old choirboy. That was weird enough back when he was a blond-haired and blue-eyed young man. Now that he was bald and bearded, new people looked around to see who else was in the room when he spoke.

Wally let go and busied himself putting his gun back in the holster. He managed it without letting Lyle see how much his hands were shaking. Then he corralled B.D. between his outstretched arms, pressing his hands hard against the dashboard and tightening every muscle in his arms, neck, and back. He concentrated on relaxing them one by one and his breathing settled down again.

“What are you doing sitting here in Bradley’s new truck?” Lyle asked. He brushed his small hand over his well-kept beard, drying it out by spraying water everywhere else.

“Trying to get it started. No luck.”

“Too late for that. Can’t see in this rain. You’d just run yourself off the road.” Lyle shook his head as if to say that Wally needed a keeper.

“What are you doing out in this weather?” Wally asked.

“Would you believe that I was sent by an angel of mercy? That would be my Pammie. These days, the sickness makes her almost as squirrelly as the menopause did. She was worried that you’d get caught in the storm, knowing that you walk this beach every morning early. She just went on and on about it until I said I’d come looking for you. So I got all dressed up in this silly yellow rain gear she bought for me and, sure enough, she changed her mind and said there wasn’t enough time for me to be any use but I came anyway. Women!”

Wally stopped listening after he heard “not enough time for me to be any use.” It reminded him of how useless he felt when Terry was dying. Now it was happening to Lyle. His wife was sick with some rare disease that hardly anyone knew how to pronounce. Terry and Pammie had been good friends and strong in so many ways. Wally always thought that they would end up widows, living together long after he and Lyle were dead and buried. Wasn’t that the way it was supposed to be, the men running on ahead and leaving the women at home to clean up a few things before they came along in the second car and caught the guys having one last beer instead of setting up the campsite for the night?

“I don’t think Pammie has much time left,” Lyle said.

“Sorry, Lyle.”

“They enrolled her in those clinical trials in Boston but I guess she didn’t get the good stuff.” The little man fumbled around under the rain slicker until he found a handkerchief and used it first on his bald head, then on his nose.

Wally tried to think of something to say. Lyle had the money to try everything under the sun to save Pammie. He didn’t have to wonder what more money might have bought. Not like Wally, a dumb public servant scraping by on a sheriff’s salary who hoped the local docs knew enough at least to make Terry comfortable at the end. Still, he felt sorry for Lyle. Sometimes it was hard to see the little bit of luck you did have.

“It was you unleashed B.D.?”

“Yep. I heard him howling and figured he’d find you for me.”

B.D. looked around at the sound of his name to see what was expected of him. Wally told him to lie down and he curled up around Wally’s feet.

“Last year the water came all the way up over the highway,” Wally said.

The two men looked back towards the highway, noticing again how much higher it was than the parking lot. It rose above the ground on both sides. Having driven it many times, they knew that you could see the ocean to the left and to the right. If the water washed over the highway, they would be at sea for sure. It was a good truck, but it wasn’t a boat and the water could pretty much cover it.

“We’d be better off at the lighthouse, if that happened,” Lyle said.

Again Wally thought that the lighthouse was two miles away. He felt the strength of the wind pounding on the windows. He remembered how hard it had been climbing up the stairs. For the first time in his life he wished Lyle was a bigger, stronger man. As it was, the odds of his making it two miles through the rising wind were not good, alone or with Lyle by his side.

“I found Gene’s body on the beach,” Wally said.

“Gene? He’s younger than I am. What do you suppose did him in?”

“No blood. Nothing on the outside I noticed.”

“Too much booze, I’d guess.”

“Another thing. Look at all this money.” Wally showed Lyle where the bills were stuffed in the glove compartment.

“You know Gene was a funny guy sometimes. Like about the election.”

“What do you mean? About the election?”

“I’ve been meaning to tell you about it. Gene paid a pile to fix that election so you’d lose. Sorry, Wally. If it wasn’t for Pammie being so sick, I’d have got wind of it in time to stop him. As it was, we were in Boston and...”

“Don’t see how his fixing the election fits into this,” Wally said.

“Well, it’s Bradley’s truck and he’s the guy who won the election. Maybe the money was a final payoff.”

Wally tried to get his head around it. Bradley winning the election by buying votes outright? Using Gene to hand out the payoffs? It sounded more like something Gene would make up than something Bradley would do. More than that, it meant a lot of people on the take, and he just didn’t want to believe that.

“So Bradley had the money to pay Gene.”

“Maybe he just left it in the glove compartment before he left the truck at Gene’s garage.”

Wally felt very tired. He hadn’t said anything to Lyle about Gene driving Bradley’s truck here. It was something Lyle could have guessed, but more likely something he knew from having seen Gene drive it here. That sure explained why Lyle hadn’t asked where Bradley was, even though they were sitting right here in Bradley’s truck.

“There was a brown envelope in the glove compartment, too,” Wally said. It wasn’t a very strong challenge to Lyle’s explanation, but rich men aren’t used to any challenge at all and Wally knew it didn’t take much to send them running down the very road they were trying to avoid.

“Gene was an awful bastard, Wally. I heard all about his run-in with you last Saturday. Everyone heard about his telling you that Terry ought never to have married you, that she’d be alive and kicking if she’d been his wife.”

“Yep, a lot of people heard about that,” Wally said, thinking that the story of Gene’s outburst had spread like wildfire because it was such an odd thing. In all these years, Gene hadn’t said a thing to anyone about Terry as far as Wally knew. If he was still angry about losing Terry he’d pretty much kept it to himself.

“What I’m saying is, maybe Gene just got what he deserved from someone who was fed up with him.”

“Fed up with his mouthing off in bars?” Wally asked. “If that’s enough to get a man killed, than half the men in town are in deep trouble.”

“No. Fed up with his being a dangerous drunk! You know he was. You knew it all the time and you did nothing. You were the sheriff and you did nothing. So he just went on and on making money off people while he messed up their cars. His life didn’t skip a beat even when he let people drive off in cars that had bad brakes that gave out on steep hills and crippled people for life.”

There it was then. Twenty years ago Lyle’s right-hand man was crushed in a car accident. The accident was caused by defective brakes.

“You mean like Darren’s accident. What makes you think it was Gene’s fault?”

“Look in the brown envelope, why don’t you?”

Wally pulled the envelope out of the glove compartment, pushing the money back in while he dealt with the envelope. It held only one page, a copy of a day’s repair log from Gene’s Garage. It was from the day before Darren’s accident. The top entry was a charge for brake repair for the only yellow Caddy in town and that had belonged to Darren.

“So Gene drove here for a short meeting with you, in a parking lot that was bound to be empty this time of year, in this weather?” Wally said. He watched Lyle thinking, chewing on his lip, realizing how far down this particular road he had gone.

The wind was shaking the cab and B.D. stuck his head up between Wally’s knees looking for a sign that they were going to get out of here.

At last Lyle said, “I didn’t intend to kill him. I sent him an anonymous e-mail, told him to bring all the money he could lay his hands on. Mailed him the copy of the log.”

“That does explain the money. He brought a lot of it. Still, he’s dead on the beach, Lyle. What happened?”

“I was an hour late showing up. It wasn’t dark or light, just grey, and he’d already been drinking, so I surprised him sitting on the top of the stairs. He had a gun in his hands, Wally. The bastard was looking to shoot someone!”

“So you were looking into the barrel of a gun?” Wally said.

“I just pretended he was joking. Showed him a flask and told him I’d snuck away for a little binge on my own, wink, wink. He never for a minute thought I was the one sent him that log page.”

“So you walked him down the beach to the break in the trees where you could keep an eye out in every direction, make sure no one saw you together?”

“No, that was his idea. He kept looking over his shoulder. Maybe he had some premonition, you know, that there was someone there who wanted to see him pay for all his sins.”

“How did he die, Lyle?”

“Drinking. Let’s face it. That’s how he’d want to go anyways.”

“Drinking what?”

“Homemade hooch. A new batch. Pretty high octane. It’d have to be to stop a heart that pickled. I didn’t make him drink it! I didn’t pour it down his throat!” Lyle said. There were tears in his eyes, but his lips were tight and his eyebrows were almost level.

“You brought the hooch with you, then?”

“Yes, but I’d already changed my mind about that. I decided that I’d settle for just taking the money and telling him he had to close up the garage. Then he pulled the gun and I had to pretend I was there to drink myself silly. So I pretended to take a swig or two and soon he was really belting it back like he couldn’t get enough of it.”

“There was no gun by the body.”

“No. It’s right here, Wally.” Lyle pulled a gun out of his pocket, holding it in his left hand, finger on the trigger, barrel towards Wally. If he pulled the trigger he’d likely break his wrist. Lyle knew less about guns than anyone in the county, except maybe Gene.

Wally felt the wave of determination that lifted Lyle’s chin. The look in his eye said he was thinking that he was a man who had done one hard thing and he was ready to do another.

“Why now? After all these years?”

“The IRS was auditing Gene. Augie was helping sort the more recent records from the old records. You know how messy Gene’s filing was. Anyway, Augie spotted the entry, got a copy to me.”

“You could have waited, until after Pammie...”

“No. I tried waiting but I was just sitting there day after day thinking about what to do about Gene instead of thinking what to do for Pammie. I wasn’t going to waste any more time that way.”

Wally sighed. He thought of Lyle at Pammie’s bedside, wanting to run away, wanting not to watch her die, wanting to watch anyone else die.

Wally reached over and took the gun. It came away easily, old friend that it was. Somehow, he felt better, knowing that Bradley had taken his advice and kept the “extra” gun in the glove compartment of his new truck. Gene must have found it there when he was trying to stuff all that cash in there. Gene wasn’t the kind of man to come up with a plan to kill someone, even a blackmailer, but given a gun right there in his hand on the morning he was going to meet a blackmailer, it must have been too tempting. Wally made a show of taking the bullets out of the gun. No need to point out the missing firing pin. He handed the empty gun back to Lyle.

“You go throw this into the ocean, so no one will be asking any questions about it. I’ll burn the log-book page. Then we’ll see if we can make it to that lighthouse.”

Lyle perked up and gave Wally a hopeful little smile, took the gun, and pushed the door open against the storm.

Wally looked over the page from the logbook. There were six entries besides the one for Darren’s midlife crisis on wheels. There, at the bottom of the page, was an entry that had a dozen slashes through it. That was the entry Gene thought he was being called to judgment about and it was for Terry’s Chevy, in for a routine oil change. If anyone looked at the records for that month, they’d find it was in for a routine this and a routine that every damn Thursday. Wally forgave Terry when she told him about it. What else could he do? She thought he was carrying on with some waitress in the next town and she was angry with him. It was Gene who told her about that waitress and he was lying as usual. Gene was playing on Terry’s insecurity but he forgot that she really loved Wally too much to let it go on long.

All these years Gene must have been waiting for Wally to punish him for that month. Wally tried to look at it from Gene’s point of view. Terry was gone. Wally wasn’t even sheriff anymore and so maybe he had nothing left to lose. Then there was the log with Terry’s appointment arriving in his mailbox, followed by an e-mail demanding a meeting in this out of the way place not far from where Wally walked every morning. That Wally was after him was certainly more likely than that Lyle had grown a backbone at this time of life.

Wally tore the log page into little pieces and burned them, one piece at a time, in the ashtray. Maybe if he had run Gene out of town Lyle would be sitting at home next to his wife, waiting for that final breath and hoping she couldn’t see how frightened he was of dying alone someday after she was gone.

When the page was gone, Wally closed the glove compartment on the bundle of money and waited for Lyle to come back. Of course, Lyle didn’t have to come back. He could just head out for the lighthouse on his own and leave Wally to the storm, if he had a mind to do that.

All in all there was not much chance that the storm would bring the ocean up over the truck. Wally’s own odds were better just staying where he was until it blew over. He thought it through, slowly. He and Lyle sitting in the truck until it was safe to leave, going back to town. Then what? Both of them knowing about the hooch, waiting for the other to tell. Lyle trying not to think about it and eventually unburdening his soul. The search through Gene’s records, the inevitable discovery of the odd pattern of Terry’s repairs that month. Bradley asking questions, secrets guessed at.

The wind was bending the trees in two. They were young and, like rubber, they folded easily. It was going to be a very big blow.

Wally patted his knee and B.D. climbed up on his lap.

“Sorry, old boy. We’re going to take our chances with the storm. Just as soon as Lyle gets back, we’ll head out for the lighthouse. Then we’ll all just leave this one in God’s good hands.”

They found two bodies the next day, when the storm had blown itself out. Wally and Lyle hadn’t made it to the lighthouse, but they had held on to each other somehow and together they were wedged into the branches of the only really big tree for miles around. B.D. fared better. He dragged himself into town two days later. There was no sign of Gene’s body, but the pictures that Wally had sent told the story well enough. There was even that flask, just visible, under his right hand. No surprises there.

A week later, they pulled Bradley’s red truck out of the ditch where the ocean had deposited it. It was full of silt and battered beyond repair, but still in one piece. More than one of the old-timers, who missed Wally and Lyle, shook their heads and thought, what if the two men had found and taken shelter in that truck? A wild ride, but any that had been through storms before figured the two of them would be alive to tell the tale.

Bradley sat in his truck for one last time, amazed at how well it had held together. He even reached over and pried open the glove compartment to retrieve that “extra” gun Wally had given him. It wasn’t there. Instead, he found the money. He just sat there and looked at it. The last time he saw that stack was about a week before the storm when he gave it to Gene as payment for the rigged election.

Bradley told them to haul the totaled truck to the salvage lot. He stood in the sunshine, the money safe in his pocket. It was as if he’d really won fair and square, and who knew, maybe he had. It was Gene who approached him, Gene with the plan to entice a few old-timers to vote for Bradley. In a way, it was more of a threat than an offer. If he hadn’t agreed, for sure Gene was going to sabotage him with those same old-timers.

Now, with the money back in his pocket, it felt like it had never really happened at all. As he thought about it, Bradley decided that Gene was just looking for a way to get some drinking money. After all, it was hard to imagine Gene paying out good money for votes. By the time the truck was out of sight, Bradley couldn’t even imagine why he’d bought Gene’s story in the first place.

Well, the money would go into a new truck. For the first time in a long time, Bradley felt confident that he’d be the man he once set out to be and a better sheriff than folks deserved. It was a nice feeling, like he’d been given another chance.

The new sheriff was not a religious man, so he contented himself with the observation that it’s an ill wind that blows no man good and he never thought back on that storm without feeling thankful for it.