No way out

Chapter Six

I had lived by the book most of my life, in the FBI and in my marriage, and had been kicked out of both. The FBI let me go because of my movement disorder. My ex-wife, Joy, let me go because we had caused each other too much pain to stay together. She’d had the insight to understand that at a time when I was still making excuses.

The FBI didn’t look back, but Joy and I did. After we divorced, we found a slender thread to keep us connected. Our dogs, cockapoos named Roxy and Ruby, needed playmates and a place to stay if one of us was out of town. Taking care of them gave us time and space to reflect on our past without walking barefoot on the broken glass left by the deaths of our son Kevin and daughter Wendy, Joy’s alcoholism, and my inability to come to grips with any of that.

When she was diagnosed with breast cancer a little over a year ago, I asked her to move in with me. She said yes, and we learned to take care of each other all over again. Her disease and my disorder became bridges instead of roadblocks.

Chemo, radiation, and surgery had subdued but not defeated her cancer. The disease had metastasized to her lungs. She was sober and alive. Neither condition, she reminded me, were guaranteed more than one a day at a time. Her oncologist was more precise. She’d die sober sometime in the next one to two years, later if she were lucky, sooner if she wasn’t.

There was no getting used to her dying, no clever phrases to buck each other up. We climbed up and down the seven stages of grief, landing in a different place each day. So we fell back on the only one that we could make work, taking it one day at a time. We threw out the calendar our insurance agent sent us as a Christmas gift and did as much as we could as often as we could, lucky that Joy had more good days than bad.

My movement disorder was manageable as long as I said no to Lucy and Simon more often than I said yes. Joy understood how hard it was for me to tell them no, holding me up when I stumbled.

We skirted whether we’d fallen in love again, uncertain what that meant at this point in our lives, at ease living in the same house, our children’s ghosts forever hovering in the near distance. It was an odd, ill-defined, and still-evolving relationship that worked because we didn’t expect more from it. Ours was a hard-earned wisdom born from losses we thought we couldn’t survive but did. We understood that second chances were precious and rare, even more when they came with a premature expiration date.

Through it all, I had learned to leave the book behind, the list of expectations, requirements, and metrics that forced square people into round holes. It helped that I wasn’t accountable to anyone and that no one was filing quarterly reports assessing my fitness and performance and that the government sent me a disability check every month that was enough to make my mortgage payment, buy twenty-dollar Dockers at Costco, drive a six-year old Camry, and let the phone ring without answering it. I was fifty-three and aboveground. Life was good.

The one thing I couldn’t let go of, and didn’t try to, was the debt I owed to my kids. We’d lost Kevin to a child predator when he was eight and Wendy to a drug overdose when she was twenty-five. Grief and guilt, I’d learned, simmer forever. They can eat you alive or boot you in the ass, reminding you not to let it happen to someone else’s kid. So, I signed on to help Lucy find Evan and Cara Martin, and I prepped Roni Chase for what lay ahead for her, and I lied to Quincy Carter when he asked me if he was going to have to put up with me again.

“I’m just an accidental witness. That’s it,” I told him.

“For today, maybe,” Carter said. “But I know you. It’s tomorrow I’m talking about. Tell me what went down here.”

He’d already talked to Roni, Lucy, and LC. I talked, and he nodded, asking occasional questions.

“Matches what the others told me,” Carter said when I finished.

A uniformed cop approached and waited for Carter to notice him.

“We’ve got nothing on the female shooter,” the cop said when Carter finally nodded at him and cupped his elbow, turning both their backs to me. I stood, stretched, and eavesdropped.

“What about the other two?” Carter asked.

“Frank Crenshaw, age forty-one. Did six months for stealing a car when he was nineteen, clean ever since, but he’s a convicted felon. Can’t legally possess a gun. The victim is his wife, Marie, age thirty-nine. We’ve got nothing on her.”

“Any history of domestic violence complaints?”

“No, sir. If they were having problems, she didn’t call 911.”

“What were they talking about?” I asked.

Carter pivoted and cocked his head at me. “Who?”

“Frank, Marie, and Roni.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Why do you care?”

“Lucy and I were having a nice lunch. Then they started shouting and shooting at one another. Ruined our meal. I’d like to know why.”

Carter shook his head. “Un-uh. No way, no sir. Not today. You told me you were just an accidental witness. That’s it. You’ve got no dogs in this fight, and I’m not going to give you one. You and Lucy get your butts downtown and write out your statements, then go home.”

“What about Roni’s gun? Did she have a permit?”

Carter sucked in a breath, glared at me, and turned away.

“C’mon, Carter. That’s not classified information. Don’t make me work for it.”

He stopped, took another deep breath, and did a slow half spin.

“Do me a favor,” he said. “Don’t work for any of it.”

“You’ve got three eyewitnesses that say it was self-defense. The media will make her an overnight sensation. The prosecutor isn’t going to charge her. The chief will probably give her a medal. So throw me a bone.”

He held up his index finger. “One bone. She had a permit.”

“What about Frank?”

He wagged his finger at me. “Are you blind and deaf? One bone. Go downtown and then go home.”

Another detective, a young guy with short, mousse-spiked hair and teeth bleached iridescent white, cut through the crowd, holding up his phone and pointing to the e-mail on his tiny screen.

“We got a match on the serial number on Frank Crenshaw’s gun,” he said to Carter. “It was one of the guns stolen last month from that dealer who lived at Lake Perry.”

Carter closed his eyes and shook his head. “Yardley,” he said to the detective, “go away so I don’t shoot you.”

“What’d I do?” Yardley asked.

I stood and clapped Yardley on the shoulder. “You threw me a bone, son. And that’s Carter’s job, not yours, and he still owes me another one.”

I left them and found Lucy outside. The rain had eased to a thin mist. We watched as Roni was ushered into the backseat of a squad car. She gave me a thumb’s-up, the gesture more important to me than her optimism because it meant that she wasn’t handcuffed.

“You know anything about a gun dealer up at Lake Perry who was robbed last month?” I asked Lucy.

She thought for a minute, scrunching her brow, the brown curly hair that billowed out from her face hanging damp against her cheeks, topping off a lean and lanky frame. She was another testament to second chances, having served a sentence for felony theft after pocketing loose diamonds she found at a murder scene. She lost her sheriff’s deputy badge, but built a new life when she got out.

“Yeah, don’t you read the papers?”

“Sports and comics. What happened?”

“The guy was driving home from a gun show in Topeka. There was something weird about the way it happened, out in the woods or something like that. He hit a deer and had a heart attack. I don’t remember the details. Why?”

“Frank shot Marie with one of the handguns.”

“No kidding! What’s Frank do for a living?”

“Roni says he’s in the scrap business.”

“Much scrap value in stolen guns?”

“Depends on whether you want to melt them down or sell them,” I said.

“What’s Roni’s connection?”

“She kept his books.”

“You think she’s out of the woods on this?”

“Not so much. Guess where they live?”

She looked at me, blinking the mist from her eyes. “Don’t make me beg.”

“Northeast.”

She hugged herself. “Small worlds are too crowded. I hate them.”