Chapter 10 #2
Luckily, Jeremy Fisher’s bag is one of the first two down the chute. It’s black, rounded, and converts to a backpack. As he pulls it from the conveyor belt, I notice the tag. No name, just a telephone number.
New York City, I note. I repeat the number in my head to memorize it, but he makes a mockery of my efforts by fishing a card from his wallet.
Printed on cheap cardboard stock, no logos, no company name, just his name, title, phone number, and email address.
“If you change your mind,” he says. “I’d love to do a piece, or at least talk to you about it. And maybe you’d kill two birds with one stone.”
“How so?”
“If I run an article on you, you could confess in it, too.”
My jaw drops. The balls on the guy.
“I wish you luck,” he says, giving me one last bob of his head before he casually throws his big pack over his shoulder like it weighs nothing and walks away.
Confess?
My stuff?
Absolutely not. I refuse to drag it out into the daylight.
That cannot happen.
And really, would those confessions be the types of things that would inspire vigilante action anyway?
There’s the obvious guilt for convincing Sophie to come camping, but that’s nebulous.
And ridiculous. Wallace has never once insinuated he blames me for what happened to his sister.
Their mom and dad were in shock, but they also never suggested I coerced her into the trip or anything along those lines.
And it was eleven years ago.
But the Coleman thing, that was only nine months ago. But I’m certain no one knows about it except one other person, and I am positive he wouldn’t say a thing. Neither of us would squawk. It would be mutually assured destruction.
But the thought of confessing feels like a punch to my already aching gut and makes my cheeks heat up. Not just with shame but fear, too. Fear of the consequences. I could lose everything, wreck my reputation forever, lose what little career I’ve scraped back together, even go to jail.
I literally shudder at the thought of it all. The sourness in my stomach expands, intensifies.
I consider other smaller things, maybe because they’re less painful to think about, like the petty revenge stuff and the people I’ve pissed off.
Just the other day, in line at the grocery store while I was buying dinner, some guy tried to butt ahead of me because he was in a hurry.
It outraged me so much that I faced him down and invited everyone behind him to go ahead of me while he seethed.
I knew he wanted to bite my head off, but I didn’t care.
Later, when I thought about it, I felt bad I’d been such a jerk.
I’m not sure how this minor habit of taking revenge on people started.
I call it little punctures in the great big tire of injustice.
I could blame it on the stress of being a cop, and now a PI, but it really began after Jess descended into depression the first time after Mom died during my senior year of college, two and a half years after Sophie.
Jess was a freshman at the local community college in Kalispell.
She had pulled out of her classes and stayed home with our stepdad, Les, staying in her childhood room and sleeping all the time.
At first, I drove the two and a half hours up from Missoula to see her every weekend.
I didn’t have a class on Fridays, so I’d leave right after my last course on Thursday and spend four nights with her every weekend, returning early on Mondays before my first class.
It wasn’t easy, especially with my senior-year course load and an internship I had with the university’s office of public safety, but I couldn’t stand the thought of Jess spiraling into depression like Sophie had after the rape.
I couldn’t even think about what I would do if I somehow lost Jess, too.
Other than Les, who I wasn’t all that close to, there was no one left. We were essentially orphans.
So after a month of driving back and forth, I finally decided to take the semester off and move home to take care of her. I could push out graduation to the following year, stay an extra semester the following fall.
But at home with her, I had still felt useless, like there was nothing I could do to pull her out of it.
And one time on my way back to Missoula during that month before I pulled out of my classes and my internship, I stopped at a convenience store to get some gas and grab some snacks.
I watched a very impatient woman giving a young Native girl a hard time for taking too long to fill her tank.
She had yelled at her, called her squaw bitch.
Told her to grab her papoose and get moving.
I got out, went over to the woman in the car, and tapped on her window. When she looked at me, I told her to quit being such an asshole.
Of course, she didn’t like that much, so she began telling me to mind my own fucking business. Called me a bitch, too.
I walked away, finished filling my tank, but when I saw her park after she filled up and went inside, I dumped my sticky cola across the back of her windshield.
And there was another time, a year or so into my time on the force, when I was renting a little house in Kalispell. I threw away my neighbor’s mail because I didn’t like how he kept his dog chained up all day with no walks, even when it got bitterly cold and he stayed out late in the bars.
I’d already called animal control on him, but they said the dog was being fed and watered, and there was little they could do.
I decided tossing his mail wasn’t enough, so I fished it back out of the garbage, walked over to his house, and rang the doorbell.
When he answered, eyes widening a little to find a cop on his doorstep, I handed him a few envelopes covered with egg-white drippings and grease stains and told him that if he didn’t take better care of his dog, I’d make sure he’d never leave a bar again without me or another cop watching his every move.
My threat made no impact, so one evening, I waited outside the bar he frequented, and at closing, I tailed him, pulled him over, humiliated him with a Breathalyzer and a roadside sobriety test. I told him this was his second warning.
That three was not going to be a charm. After that, I saw him taking his dog for walks with at least some regularity.
Nobody wants to have to ride his bike around in the winter.
And all the other little things in my life, like the time I didn’t correct the automated teller at the grocery store when I accidentally punched in two nectarines instead of three, or the time I sneaked into a movie theater without paying when I was a teenager . . . Ridiculous stuff.
So, I have to face it. If it’s my face in the sketch making the national rounds, it’s all about the big one.
The thing I’ve been trying not to think about, the one I constantly shove back into a dark closet: the incident with Coleman.
Someone grabs my arm. I startle again, as if I’m the most easily spooked person on the planet.
Am I?
It’s Jess. “Jesus,” I say. “Don’t sneak up on me like that.”
“I didn’t.”
“There’s your bag.”
She grabs her suitcase, and we step out into the eighty-degree weather. I take a deep breath of fresh air and look to the northeast to see the gateway to Glacier gleaming under the azure sky, two ranges bowing to each other, beckoning more and more tourists every year.
And is it possible . . . a cold-blooded killer?