Chapter 10
Rafferty
Cal Herrick called the clubhouse at six in the evening, which is a thing a man does exactly once in his life.
"There's a woman in my office," he said.
"What?"
"There's a small woman in my office and she has been here for two hours and she is going through my father's files," Herrick said, in the voice of a man watching a fire he set. "She hasn't raised her voice one time. Come get her. Please. I'm asking you."
I got there in thirty-one minutes.
Sunday was sitting in a folding chair in a salvage yard office with a banker's box open on her knees, and Herrick was standing in the corner by a filing cabinet like a man being held at gunpoint by paperwork.
"Hi," she said, without looking up.
"Sunday."
"I'm nearly done."
"Sunday."
"Rafferty, I'm going to say something and then you can be furious for as long as you want.
" She turned a page. "There's a name on the health permit.
It's Dawn Ellery Marsh. She's my aunt. She died at Mile 66 in 1994 and there's a second vehicle in her report that never got found, and five weeks after she went into that culvert somebody bought her diner and the parcel it sat on, and the somebody was Herrick Salvage and Recovery. "
I looked at Cal Herrick.
Herrick sat down on an overturned bucket.
"That was my father," he said.
"I know it was your father," Sunday said, "I have his signature about nine times in this box. Tell him the rest, Mr. Herrick, I've been waiting two hours to hear you say it to somebody who isn't me."
Herrick rubbed his face with both hands.
"The county contract," he said. "For the pulls.
On 9." He looked at the floor. "Dad had it since '86.
In '93 they put it out to bid again and she went for it — the Marsh woman, she had two wreckers behind the diner and a boy driving one, and she came in eleven percent under and she was going to get it, and I remember him at the kitchen table saying that word.
Eleven percent. Like it was a thing somebody did to him personally. "
"And?"
"And then she was dead, and there wasn't a bid, and he kept the contract, and in March he bought the building for forty-one thousand dollars.
" Herrick's voice was flat as a plate. "I was nineteen.
I have known since I was nineteen and I have never said it out loud in this county and I have pulled thirty-one cars off that road with my own hands. "
Nobody said anything for a bit.
"Who drove?" I said.
"A man named Roy Ballard did work for my father off the books."
"Where is he?"
"He died in 1996 in a house fire in Beatty," Herrick said. "Alone. Drunk. And there's a note in that box in my father's writing that says paid R.B. final and a date, and I have wanted to burn it since 1999, and I have never once been able to."
"Why'd you keep the contract?" I said.
Herrick looked up.
"What?"
"Thirty years. You knew at nineteen. You've pulled thirty-one cars off a road your father bought with a dead woman's building." I wasn't shouting. I want that noted, since it's the first time in this whole business I can say it. "You could've sold. You could've moved to Reno and sold pools."
"You think I haven't—" He stopped and started again. "Every time one comes in, I do the whole thing. I hose it out. I write the tag. I put it in the back and I look at it. And I've thought, every single time, this is the one where I call somebody."
"And?"
"And then it's Thursday," Herrick said, "and there's a truck payment, and who exactly do I call?
The county? My father is the county's paperwork on that road.
There is not one document in this state about those thirteen miles that didn't come off a hook of ours.
" He laughed, badly. "I stayed because I'm the only person alive who knows, and if I go, then nobody knows, and it'll just be a road again. "
Sunday had gone very still.
"That's not nothing," she said.
"Ma'am, it's close to nothing."
"It's not nothing," she said. "I've been doing the same thing for two years with a hammer and a bag of fence pine, and I have never once been able to explain it to anybody either."
Sunday closed the box.
"That's everything," she said. "That's all of it.
It's not a road and it's not a curse and it's nobody's sin but two men's, and one of them's ash and the other one's in a plot in Tonopah, and the thing that's left out there is a driver who was paid to run a woman off a road and has never been told he can stop. "
She stood up.
"Thank you," she said to Herrick. "You could have thrown me out."
"I've been waiting thirty years for somebody to come do this," Herrick said, "and I want you to know that when it happened I thought it'd feel worse."
She was gone by the time I got outside. Just gone — car out the gate while I was still standing in a salvage office with a man crying into his hands, which, in fairness, is the most on-brand event of my adult life.
I found her at three in the morning at the impound lot.
I'd been to her apartment, the clubhouse, Emmett's, and the diner, in that order, which tells you something about how badly I was thinking.
Marlowe called me at one while I was standing in the dark outside DAWN'S like a man visiting a grave.
"She's not there," Marlowe said.
"I know she's not here."
"I mean I'd know. If she were standing anywhere within a mile of that building I'd have a headache."
"Where is she?"
"Rafferty, I'm not a compass."
"You're a little bit a compass."
"I'm a smoke detector," Marlowe said, "and I want to talk to you about something and I want you to not interrupt, because I've been sitting on it for a day and a half and it's making me a bad person."
"Go."
"She lied to you in the lot and I let her."
I didn't say anything.
"I heard the whole thing at the county and I stood behind her and said nothing, and I've told myself it was because it was hers to tell.
" A lighter clicked. "That's not why. I did it because she looked at me like a woman about to run, and I've been that woman, and some stupid part of me thought if I didn't touch it she'd stop on her own. "
"Did she?"
"No," Marlowe said. "They never do. That's the thing I know and forgot." A long exhale. "So: I'm sorry. And here's the useful part, which is why I actually called. She isn't running from you."
"Feels like it."
"Of course it does. But think about what she found.
Her aunt. Her own family name on that road.
And she has spent her entire life being the person who knows and doesn't say, and she has never once — not one time, Rafferty — been the person who does something about it.
" The lighter again. "She's not running away from you.
She's running at the road. You're just standing in the doorway. "
I looked at a dark diner for a while.
"Where would you go," I said, "if you were about to do something stupid at night on a highway?"
"Somewhere with a truck," Marlowe said. Then I sat in the truck for a while and asked myself where a person goes when they're planning to do something stupid at night on a highway, and the answer was: the place with the trucks.
She was in the cab of a wrecker in the back row with the dome light on and a legal pad against the wheel.
I knocked on the glass.
She looked at me. Full in the face, right off, like it was nothing, like eighteen years hadn't happened.
She opened the door.
"I'm not going to argue," she said.
"I'm not here to argue."
"You're here to say something you rehearsed."
"I rehearsed four things," I said, "and I'd like to do all of them in order and then I'll go."
"Rafferty—"
"You're going out there," I said. "Tomorrow night, alone, in a tow truck, because you've worked out that you have to look him in the face and you've worked out what that costs you, and you've decided not to tell anybody, and the reason you haven't told anybody is that somebody might come."
Sunday stared at me.
"That's the first one," I said.
"...Okay."
"Second one. I'm sorry."
"You don't have to—"
"I do, and I'm going to do it badly, so brace up." I put my hands on the door frame. "I broke a kid's leg."
"You did not break—"
"I put a man against a fence because I couldn't ask you a question," I said.
"That's the whole shape of it, Sunday. You lied to me in a parking lot and it made me feel like a door was closing and I do not know one single thing to do about a closing door except go find something else to put my hands on.
I've been like that since I was fifteen.
Everybody in that club knows it and nobody says it out loud because I'm useful, and being useful is how I've gotten out of ever having to learn how to say — "
I stopped.
"How to say what," she said.
"This," I said. "Whatever this is. This is the fourth thing and I've gotten it out of order."
"What's the third?"
"The third's that I don't care that you didn't tell me about Nash."
"You should care—"
"I've thought about it for eighteen hours and I don't," I said.
"You know what I did with the same information?
I heard a man say thirty-two and I put him against a fence instead of asking a follow-up question, and a kid got hurt in the next ninety seconds.
You froze because your instrument broke.
I swung because mine works too well. Between the two of us there's about one functional adult and it's Emmett. "
Something happened at the corner of her mouth.
"That's not an apology," she said. "That's a defense."
"It's a defense of you. I'm the lawyer here. I'm doing great."
"You are doing so badly."
"I've been going for four minutes and you're still in the truck."
"That's not — " She put a hand over her face. "That's the worst possible metric."
"It's the only one I've got," I said, "and it's holding."
She laughed. It came out wrecked and wet and she pressed the back of her wrist against her eyes and laughed again anyway, and I stood there in the cold with my hands on the door frame of a tow truck and had never in my life wanted anything the way I wanted her to say the next thing.