Chapter 25
After they leave, I check my phone.
Three calls from Wallace.
Four from Jess.
No voicemails. I call Jess back.
“So, they’ve been there twice?” Jess asks. Her tone is laced with anxiety.
“Yes, but it doesn’t mean anything. They’re checking on others, too. There’s a woman in Texas who may be the target.”
Fiona told Jess I called in the middle of the night. I don’t have anything to say to make that part better. “Yes, it was bugging me. But still, that doesn’t mean you should worry.”
“There’s no way not to. Look, maybe I should come over.”
“Absolutely not. You stay put with Sam. Promise me, Jess—for Sam—that you’re not coming over.”
“You are worried, then?”
“It never hurts to take precautions, for Sam’s sake.” I’d like to go to her. But there’s zero chance of calming her down, especially given what I now know. “Look, Jess, I plan to stay away. Until this is over.”
She doesn’t answer.
“And I don’t want you to come here, either. Okay?”
She still doesn’t answer. I can hear her breathing rapidly, though.
“Okay?” I press. “For Sam’s sake?”
“Okay,” she says.
I pull up next to Deputy Zane and repeat what I told the agents, that I’m heading out and I think it’s best if he keeps an eye on my place. I also ask for his number.
He seems giddy to please me or perhaps happy we’re on the same page and he’s doing something valuable.
Suddenly, I want to protect him. Tell him to find another job. Something safer.
“One of those agents told me what you wanted,” he says.
Surprised Greene and Alderson have honored my request, I thank him, give him a thumbs-up, and drive away.
First, I hit my office. I don’t plan on staying, but I want to make sure everything is in order there and grab my file on Aaron Lasserio, who I still plan on surveilling before the day runs out.
I park in the lot and look across the street, where a cluster of old grain silos from a bygone era hover like sentries guarding my office complex.
The silos are slated to have a trendy new restaurant built on top of them now that the west side of town is beginning to gentrify like the east side did years ago.
I step outside and continue to look around.
Everything seems normal. Cars pass leisurely by.
A woman walks a small dog down a sidewalk.
Someone hammers something in the distance.
The sounds of traffic from Main Street several blocks east. But I sense something anyway, that strange feeling that someone’s watching.
The hairs on the back of my neck are on edge.
I chalk it up to the situation I’m in. Of course.
Of course I’m bound to feel like this. It’s only logical given my circumstances.
And I have less than seventy-two hours. Not even three full days anymore. Two and a quarter at this point.
But Alderson and Greene said the potential third victim, the Carssen drug rep, believes he was stalked out in the woods before his time was up. Is the killer that sneaky? That stealthy?
I go in. The sign on my door reads Mitchell Investigations LLC. Inside, the first thing that hits me is a framed poster Jess gave me when I opened the office. It’s a quote from Blaise Pascal:
Justice and power must be brought together so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful may be just.
Justice. Power. I wonder how anger fits into the equation. And sadness. Deep fucking sadness.
I lock the door behind me and look around the rest of my little space—at the dieffenbachia on the shelf below the poster, at the framed school pictures of little Sam on my desk, at the candle that’s supposed to smell like ocean mist.
Everything seems normal and in place.
I sit at my desk for only a minute to find Lasserio’s file before locking the place up again.
Next I hit the shooting range to sharpen my skills and get the added bonus of some stress relief from blasting away at targets.
I go to an old-fashioned facility west of town located in a large field at the base of the mountains.
I’d rather not use the newfangled digital training simulator the force uses.
It’s also open to the public since local tax dollars paid for it, and it was the only way to get the $900,000 facility approved, but I’d prefer not to run into any ex-coworkers.
Besides, last time I went to use the new one, about three weeks after the Coleman incident, the simulator served up a domestic dispute on the three-hundred-degree array of high-def surround-sound screens.
Lucky me, I walked in to find a man pointing a gun at a young woman’s head, screaming at her.
Her baby cried from a car seat propped on the counter, and a frightened toddler crouched, wailing in a corner.
I pleaded for the virtual man to put his gun down, suggested we could talk things over and not make things worse, but all I could do was think of Leon, Railes, and Coleman.
My palms went instantly wet, and my voice quavered.
I wasn’t forceful or nearly convincing enough.
The man shot and killed the woman and began firing at me.
My heart pounded in my throat as I froze.
He shot me twice in the stomach. By the time I walked out, I thought I was having a heart attack.
I was drenched in sweat and my legs barely worked.
Now, at this shooting range, I look around the parking lot and only see one man arriving in his car. He’s paying me no attention.
I enter the hut, sign the form, pay, and go outside to the range, where one familiar man looks like he’s packing up.
Are you kidding me? It’s Lieutenant Hartley, the one who lured me for drinks and slimed my face with his tongue. Could this week get any worse? I almost turn around.
“Mitchell.” He greets me like the whole ordeal never occurred. “Freshening up your skills?”
“Yep,” I say. “Don’t you use the new facility?” Or is that too high tech for you? I want to ask.
“I like it out here. Peaceful,” he says, pulling his lips in for a tight smile. The old acne scars on his face appear deeper and more purple in the sunlight. “Other than the pistols firing, that is. So, tell me, how is it?”
I don’t ask, How’s what? because I don’t sense an ounce of sincerity behind his ugly grin.
“Huh? How is it to be hunted instead of being the hunter?” His lips stay open like a fish’s when he stresses the er.
I shake my head, say nothing, move down the firing line to the very end of the range, as far away as possible. I feel his eyes on me.
I wonder if he’s referring to what happened with Railes and Coleman, as if we hunted those boys down on purpose. What does it matter?
Suddenly, I miss Allison. She was a welcome buffer among the guys, even during the worst of it.
When I’d mentioned Hartley’s name and she could tell I was frustrated, she’d said, “Try putting a picture of him on that bull’s-eye.
” I laughed, imagining Hartley’s fuming expression if he walked in to see his own face on a target frame.
I think of my friends in general. Wallace isn’t cutting it, and Fiona?
I’m not sure I trust her 100 percent. My words to Jess back in high school return again: You don’t have to try to fit in with people you don’t particularly like all the time to be popular, Jess. It’s okay to keep your distance.
Distance. That word. Again, my therapist’s question—When did this loner streak rear its head again?—rings in my ears.
Distance. It seems to have become my motto with everyone but Jess and Sam since the night with Railes.
Lately, I’ve separated myself so much that I’m not sure I trust anyone at all.
It strikes me how much of a loner I’ve become over the past year, even without the onset of this sketch business.
I think of my mom and how she became a hermit near the end, how she was choosing the bottle over her friends, over Les, over even her daughters.
I don my earmuffs and eyewear and wait for the range operator to give the green light.
There are only three others in the firing line, and all wait patiently. For some reason, my heart speeds up as if I haven’t done this a gazillion times before.
“Commence,” the operator orders. We all start blasting away at our targets, pistols and rifles cracking until we’re told to cease, and the silence falls among the pines.
The familiar scent of gunpowder swirls. My heartbeat slows, and already, I feel better.
I’ve been fairly accurate, with only a few shots more than five inches off my bull’s-eye.
I shoot three more rounds, falling into a bit of a transcendent headspace, more than a few times picturing Hartley’s face on the target. Or Railes’s. Or Coleman’s.
When I imagine my own face, I shudder and call it quits.
Not yours, Cros, I tell myself. The face of the killer, that’s the one to imagine.
And what the hell does it look like?