No Return

36

“Do you believe me now?”Lars asked.

They were parked in his truck next to Wes’s rented Escape outside Tommy T’s Sports Bar. Wes was staring out the window at nothing.

“It was a mistake,” Lars said. “Understandable, given the circumstances, but still a mistake.”

Wes reached for the door handle, but he stopped and turned to look at his high school friend. “You know, for a little bit there I was starting to think that maybe I had been wrong. Maybe the face I remembered wasn’t the one I really saw.”

“But you don’t believe it now? You just met his children, for God’s sakes.”

Wes let out a snort and shook his head. Perhaps if Lars had taken him home after seeing the body, he would have been convinced enough to drop it. But then Forman and the kids coupled with everything else? Lars had tried a little too hard to convince him. And that just pissed him off.

“Goodbye, Lars,” he said, then opened the door and climbed out.

“Wes, goddammit!”

Wes crossed over to the SUV and got in without answering.

Lars watched him for a moment, then pulled his truck out of its parking spot and sped off.

Wes started the Escape and pulled out of the lot. He ended up two cars behind Lars’s truck at the corner of Ridgecrest and China Lake Boulevard. Lars should have continued straight and not turned right until he got to Norma or Downs, but instead he turned onto China Lake, so he was still a few cars ahead as Wes drove toward the motel.

As they neared the Desert Rose, Wes considered turning into the parking lot, but instead he decided to stay on the road, suspicious about where his childhood friend might be headed. Soon they passed the hospital and most of the handful of businesses strung between there and Inyokern Road.

When Wes got in sight of the intersection, he made a quick left at the triangle cutoff in front of the movie theater and immediately pulled to the curb. Lars’s truck approached the stop. Then, as Wes already knew would happen, Lars turned right, toward the base.

Wes waited until he was sure Lars had gone through the gate, then he made a U-turn and headed back to the motel, certain now he was being conned.