20. Rowe
ROWE
The carnival takes forever to die down tonight.
I stand at Caesar's enclosure and watch the midway lights blink out section by section—the Ferris wheel first, then the game booths, then the strings of bulbs over the food stalls—and each one feels like it takes an hour, but the clock insists it’s only ten minutes.
Caesar watches me pace. He's sprawled in his straw with his tail flicking, and every third pass, he chuffs at me.
“I know,” I tell him.
He yawns.
Wren is in a trailer forty feet away, wrapped in one of my shirts, and I want this done.
Ben kills the last of the midway. The lot goes dark except for the trailer windows and the moon.
Cole appears out of that dark with a duffel over one shoulder. “You're wearing a path, brother. Brutus is going to file a noise complaint.”
“Are we going?” I ask through clenched teeth.
“We're going.” He tips his head toward the access road, where the van sits with its lights off and Logan already behind the wheel. “Silas is loading. Try to look less like a man about to commit a felony. It's unprofessional.”
Logan drives us into town. Nobody talks. Silas sits in the back with his laptop, watching a screen full of camera loops. My knee bounces until Logan reaches over without looking and puts his hand on it.
“Almost there,” he says.
The practice is a low brick building with a plastic sign that says VANCE VETERINARY SERVICES and, under it, smaller: COMPASSIONATE CARE FOR ALL CREATURES.
Cole reads it out loud and laughs without any humor in it.
The front door isn't locked. It swings open into the dark reception area, and the smell of antiseptic rolls out at us.
“He left it open,” Silas murmurs. “Sloppy.”
“He left in a hurry,” Logan counters. “Leaking.”
No lights. We move through the practice using flashlights. I know this building from Wren’s descriptions—the coffee maker Paige runs, the radio on the counter, still on, playing static-laced country to an empty room. Silas clicks it off with a gloved knuckle.
Exam one is where it happened—I can tell instantly. There's gauze scattered across the floor. A stainless tray knocked askew on the counter. A button on the tiles next to a table leg.
And the scalpel.
It's lying three feet from the exam table. The blade is dark all the way to the handle, and there's a spatter trail leading away from it toward the hall.
My hand closes into a fist. The flashlight beam shakes against the floor, and I make it stop. She stood here. Backed against that steel table with nowhere to go.
“He didn't even clean up,” Cole says from the doorway, his voice empty of all amusement now. “Bled all over his own practice and just left it.”
“He's not thinking about evidence.” Silas crouches over the spatter without touching it, reading the trail. “Let's clean it up. I'll take care of the camera feeds.”
I stand over the scalpel a moment longer. Then I get to work erasing all signs of Wren's involvement with Vance's upcoming demise.
Vance's house is four miles out of town, a ranch-style with a machine shed and a barn behind it, paddocks gone to weed. No dog. No livestock anymore—Silas says he sold the horses two years back when the money started going. The wife's car is gone from the carport.
“She's in Ohio,” he says now, thumbing his phone. “Sister's place. Posted a photo of a wine glass and a sunset four hours ago, caption about new beginnings. She's not coming back tonight or maybe any night.”
“So he's alone in there,” I say with grim satisfaction.
“He's alone in there,” Silas confirms.
The back door is locked, which is almost funny after the practice. Cole opens it in under a minute, and we come in through the kitchen. We don't need the flashlights for long because the television is on in the living room, muted, throwing blue light over the room.
Howard Vance is on the couch.
Not the bedroom. The couch, with a bed pillow jammed under his head and a crocheted throw half-kicked onto the floor, like even drunk blind, he couldn't make himself climb into the bed his wife left.
Empty bottles stand on the coffee table in a little congregation—bourbon, a second bourbon, something clear tipped on its side.
There's a wad of gauze duct-taped over his ribs, brown at the center.
His shirt is off. His mouth is open. He's snoring.
Logan looks down at him for a long moment.
“This is going to be too easy,” he says. “I mean it. I've had harder fights with the carousel.”
“Easy is good,” Silas says. “Easy is the whole design.”
“Easy is boring,” Cole grumbles.
I almost want to roll my eyes. “You can find ways to entertain yourself later.”
I look at the man on the couch. Gray stubble, soft belly, the hands that grabbed Wren’s wrist folded on his chest like he's already rehearsing to be a corpse.
This isn't Harlan. This isn't years of scars carved into me. But this is a man who put his hands on the only person who ever built a door for me, and now the bill's come due.
“Where are the guns?” I ask.
“Cabinet over here,” Silas answers. “Got a little collection.”
He's right. The cabinet is oak with a glass front and a lock a child could open, and Cole doesn't even use a pick—the key is on top of the cabinet, because of course it is. Silas lifts out a pump shotgun, checks it with gloved hands, finds shells in the drawer beneath.
“His father's, probably. It's older than we are.” He feeds one shell in and racks it. “One is all the story needs.”
We take Vance under the arms.
He doesn't wake. We lift a grown man off his couch and walk him out his own back door across his own dark yard, his bare feet dragging twin lines through the dew, and all he does is groan and turn his face into Logan's shoulder like a child being carried to bed.
“Don't get comfortable,” Logan mutters at him.
The barn smells of old hay and machine oil and mouse. There's a water trough along the near wall, half full of black rainwater, and a five-gallon bucket hanging off a nail beside it. We set Vance down against a support post, and he slumps there, chin on his chest.
Cole drags a hay bale over because he likes to sit during the talking parts. Silas leans the shotgun against the far wall. Then he looks at me.
“Your show, brother.”
I take the bucket off its nail and dip it into the stale water. Then I throw it in Vance’s face.
The good doc wakes up with a strangled shout, arms flailing, and cracks the back of his head on the post. His eyes roll, focus, roll again.
He blinks water out of them and finds four men standing in his barn in the moonlight coming through the loft door, and I watch him try to make sense of the situation.
“What—” His voice cracks. “What is this. Who—”
“You know who,” I say coldly.
He squints at me and his lip curls with disgust.
“The carnival trash,” he says. “You're here about her.”
“Careful,” Logan says softly.
“She stabbed me. You know that?” Vance presses a hand to the taped gauze and hisses. “I've got a wound. I'll have her license, I'll have her arrested, assault with a—”
“You tore her blouse,” I say.
He stops talking.
“You crushed her wrist against a table she's worked at for six years. You put your mouth on her while she screamed in an empty building.” My voice stays surprisingly level.
“That's not—she wanted—girls like that, they—” Vance sputters.
“Say it,” I tell him. “Finish the sentence. I want to hear you say it out loud one more time.”
He looks at my face and doesn't finish it.
“You want money,” he tries instead. His eyes skip from me to Cole on the hay bale to Silas by the wall and then to Logan, who has that familiar madness in his eyes. “We can be reasonable men here—”
“You're not going to buy your way out of this, Howard,” Cole says, almost kindly.
“Then what. What.” His voice goes up an octave. “You're going to beat me up? Over her? She's nothing, she's a fat little nobody who—”
I cross the space between us and crouch to his level, close enough to smell the bourbon coming off him in waves, and whatever is on my face shuts his mouth.
“She's the reason this is fast,” I say quietly.
“You should thank her. The man I was raised by taught me how to make it slow, and every part of me wants to show you what I learned.
But she has to live in this town after tonight, and the story needs you sad and drunk and alone.
So you get mercy you didn't earn. From her. Not from me.”
His face changes then, like it finally sinks in.
“Please,” he whispers.
“She said that too, I'd bet.”
I stand and nod to Cole.
He does it carefully—the knife going in at just the right angle. Vance thrashes for three seconds and then goes limp. No new bruises where bruises shouldn't be. Silas checks his pulse and nods.
Then we stage the scene. Vance is seated against the post, legs out.
The shotgun is set butt-down between his knees, barrel angled up under the sternum so that the blast will take the knife and scalpel wounds with it.
We place his hands on the barrel, his thumb guided through the trigger guard.
Silas leaves the note on the kitchen table, printed from Vance's own machine.
I'm sorry. I can't watch it all come apart.
“It's done,” Silas says when he comes back.
Logan and Cole step back. I look down at Howard Vance one last time, and I think about a button on a tile floor.
I press on his thumb.
The shotgun blast is deafening, and then there's a long ringing silence, and it's done.
We stand in the settling dust. Cole exhales through pursed lips. Logan rolls his neck until it cracks.
“Barn cats will find him by morning,” Silas says, already moving, placing the bucket back on the nail. “Mail carrier by Tuesday at the latest. Nobody will look for anything, because everybody already knows this story. They've been telling it at the diner for months.”
We leave the way we came, and Logan drives us home. Nobody talks for the first few miles. Then Cole leans forward from the back seat.
“For the record,” he says, “I still like her. The scalpel was good instincts. Center mass next time, but good instincts.”
“There won't be a next time,” I say.
“No,” Logan agrees, eyes on the dark road, and there's nothing light in his voice at all. “There won't.”
The carnival rises out of the fields, unlit, sleeping. I'm out of the van before it even stops moving, my eyes on the light in the trailer Silas shares with Nova and Teddy.
Wren is there, waiting for me.
And we need to talk.