5. Cassette
Cassette
Vedder
I parked on a small trail with the windshield facing the highway and left the windows down, waiting to see the police car pull out of her potholed, concrete driveway.
I couldn’t see her house through the arching alpine trees.
The rain had let up a little today. What was a fucking downpour had dispersed into the slightest drizzle that often gave way to mist and fog when the sun heated the soaked ground.
I found it quite romantic. Mist blanketing a river, crawling over the earth.
There was something about how it looked—or maybe it was the thought of a day reading indoors by a yellow fire as the gray clouds cast the rest of the world in darkness, making everything outside the house seem like a distant, different place.
I ashed my lit cigarette out of the window. My other hand tapped nervously on the steering wheel.
I didn’t have to do this. I didn’t have to stalk her. Braun hadn’t told me to. But I wanted to see her.
I wanted to see how she would take the news. Was she hurt? Was she angry? Would she let me hold her as she worked through whatever she’d go through? Wouldn’t that be a right peachy thing if she did? Two birds with one stone. I’d get the girl, solve the case, and be a big small-town hero.
Whitlaw already said the body had to be identified, and as his eldest kin, his next of kin, in fact, the gruesome task would fall on her.
Meditation after meditation blasted through my staticky speakers.
I had a cassette player hooked to an iPhone, because this vehicle was too old to have any kind of USB or cable port.
There was something nice about the way the cassette squeaked in the tape player.
Like listening to something in vinyl. There was a texture to it.
As if the sound itself could be touched and felt like a wrinkled fabric.
The Vipassana meditation was interrupted by the standard ringtone. I looked down and saw Trinity’s name and face flash across my screen.
“Yeah?” I said when I picked up.
“Yeah? Not hello? How are you doing?” Her voice always had an edge to it. Sharp like a razor blade. Which was not that different from her personality. “No, hi Taz, my dearest, bestest, and awesomest friend ever?”
“Nope.” I obnoxiously popped the p.
Jury was out on who my best friend was…if I had one at all.
We’d gotten close over the last year, since she lived in the guest cabin while I lived in the barn just a stone’s throw across the drive. Both of us were squatting on First Sergeant McClanahan’s—who we sometimes called Top—retirement farm.
“Mamma Mack wants to know if you’re coming for dinner tonight?”
This was a trap. They wanted something, and they were going around the elbow to get to the asshole on this.
“Is Griff going to be there?” Her new husband was staying with her in the guest cabin on Mack’s farm. I’d put distance between us by bunking in the barn and staying in a dirty loft in my old Gore-Tex sleeping bag.
The barn was a fucking wreck. The red thing tilted to one side and was one light breeze from toppling over.
For two years now, it had been my mission to fix the 150-year-old farm and turn it into something liveable.
It didn’t make up for what I’d done to my team, to my friend, to everyone who’d ever relied on me. But it was a start.
I’d learned not to believe in apologies.
I believed in making amends through action.
Like helping Mack renovate the farm he’d bought to forget the love of his life.
Then she came back, and he still had an old ass house in need of repairs, but had less of a fire in his gut to finish them.
And God bless him, but Mack wasn’t a contractor or carpenter despite having spent a ton of time on “the YouTube” seeing how to work a table saw.
So that’s where I stepped in.
“He is, but—”
“I’ll make myself scarce,” I interrupted her.
Griff and I were three seconds from coming to blows in the best of times. I didn’t feel like brawling in the middle of Top’s kitchen.
“VD, you two need to kiss and make up.”
I tensed hearing that name. VD.
Ol’ Greg “VD” Vedder. Aptly named for how I drunkenly tumbled from one bed to another, finding comfort and touch in the arms of faceless women who used me as I used them. I was good for something. I was appreciated for something. And I needed it like a drug.
Even now. Even after five fucking years of self-induced celibacy, I craved it. The look of gratitude in a woman’s eyes, the momentary adoration of a post-orgasmic bliss. I thought I was over it. I had been over it.
Then I saw Melody walking up the mile-long drive on a snowy Christmas day and everything slammed into me like the best kind of tsunami. Kissable lips, a face full of worry and pain that I wanted to hold, to soothe, and those damn phoenix eyes.
“Tell that to your husband.” I groaned, because my tone was a little too clipped, and much too defensive.
I took a puff of the cigarette, then used my little finger to clear the last of the nicotine from the filter. I opened the ash tray on the center console, and stuck this filter with the rest, wincing at how many there were.
“Vedder…” she said on a sigh.
I’d quit smoking for a while. Then took it back up when I moved into the barn, stress smoking more and more as I kept hearing that fucking nickname again and again. VD. VD. VD! The name I’d shed when I was medically discharged but now couldn’t fucking escape.
“Guerro…” I said, mocking her tone.
She was likely a Griffith now, but I wasn’t certain she’d changed her name.
“You can’t keep running from the team. You live here. Same as me. Same as Mack and Lottie. Goose and Griff…Well…”
It hurt her. We all knew it did. That he was still fighting over his ex-wife.
The ex-wife I’d blindly fucked when I was too drunk to know my own name. I was barely sober enough when I snuck out in the morning. But I saw it. His photo on the mantle. Their wedding photos.
“Griff has every right to hate me.” The words felt like stabbing myself in the chest.
“Does he?” Christ, she sounded hurt as hell.
“Taz.” I pinched the bridge of my nose. God love her, but she was as insecure as a wobbly teeter-totter. “It doesn’t mean he’s not happy with you, or that he wants Kristin back.”
Here I was, trying to stick up for a man who wouldn’t piss on me if I were on fire.
“He loves you. He’s always loved you. This shit between us…
it’s because he feels betrayed. You know that.
” I knew that, too. I said it to myself over and over and over again.
He was entitled to his feelings. He was allowed to feel hurt.
He did not deserve of a punch to the throat every time he picked a fight with me—over a woman he didn’t even give two shits about—and ended up hurting the one woman that he did want.
“Do I? Do I know it?”
I hated how genuine her question was. The sound of inadequacy in her voice shot right through me because I knew that feeling all too well. The bone-deep constraint of being small. Of being not enough.
“I dunno if you do. But I do.” He loved her. She loved him. Happy ending. “It’s as certain as getting wet in rain, Taz.”
They were always meant for each other. I knew it back then, too. It just took them a while to come around.
“It’d make me feel better if the two of you talked it out.” And now she was making their marital discord my problem. Well played, Trinity “Taz” Guerro. Well fucking played. “This separation between you is like a crack in the foundation, you know? We all feel it, Greg.”
I sighed and slammed my head back against the headrest. She’d never called me Greg before. Vedder, VD, asshole…sure. But never by my name.
“I know.” The hollowness in my gut—the one I always felt when I thought about all the shit I’d done wrong, and all the things I’d never be able to fix—burned me from the inside out. “Listen, I’ll try. But no promises. And…maybe not tonight. Okay?”
I heard a car going down the loud driveway, the crunch of gravel the only thing on the otherwise abandoned hardball road.
“Alright,” she said, resigned. “You guys were good friends once.”
I straightened, reaching to turn the key in the ignition.
“Yeah. You and I were, too.”
My engine rumbled to life as I watched the sheriff’s taillights fade into the distance.
“We’re still friends, VD. Don’t be a cunt.”
“Backatcha!” I put the car in drive and hovered my thumb over the disconnect button. “I gotta go, T. Stay out of trouble.”
“No.” Then she hung up first. No goodbye. Just a go-fuck-yourself click.
That was what friendships were made of.