Billy is there. He’s watching in silence, holding the chicken by the stump of its neck, the plump body rotating in his fist, steam rising from the hot dead animal. Billy’s taken off his apron and there is a slick of sweat on his neck and shoulder muscles, blood flecked on his bare chest, blood splattered along the hem of his underpants. He smells like charcoal and dirt.
“Billy,” I begin, and Sandy shivers slightly beside me, drunk or fearful, I don’t know. How absurd it’ll be if I just die here, right now, the end of the line, how ridiculous to die on day T-minus five from a shotgun blast in a lover’s triangle.
“Hang out another half an hour,” he says. “Eat more chicken.”
“No, thanks.”
“You sure?” he says. Sandy crosses the small space of the RV kitchen, hugs him around the waist, and he squeezes her back while he holds the chicken aloft. “I just gotta pluck him.”
I could stay, I really could. I think that they would have me. I could stake out a space in the dirt by the Highway Pirate, slump down low in it, and wait things out.
But no, that’s not—that’s not going to happen.
“Thank you. Really,” I say. New facts. New possibilities. “Thanks a lot.”
1.
The way I figure it, if Cortez’s take on the spatial mechanics of the police station garage is correct, and that’s a thick wedge of concrete wiggled into that floor like a cork in a bottle, then they can’t have done it themselves. Someone was there after Nico and her gang went down, and presuming that everyone in the group descended together, then it was someone else—someone who was hired and paid for the gig, contracted to roll the seal across the tomb.
Thus I am aware of a concrete job that was recently performed in this area, and I am aware of a group of men who were out offering themselves for odd jobs generally, but specializing in concrete.
That’s enough. Away I go, rolling south on State Road 4 in the middle of the night.
“Twenty or thirty miles,” says Billy, “that’s where the Amish farms start to crop up, the fruit stands and that. You can’t miss it.” Houdini’s in the wagon and my fat Eveready is duct-taped between the handlebars, sending a joggling uneven light down the highway ahead of us.
As I pedal I can picture Detective Culverson chuckling at me and my rookie logic. I can see him, across our booth at the Somerset Diner, looking at me with quiet amusement, rolling his cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. I can hear him poking at the holes in my theory like a loose tooth.
He asks his pointed questions in his mild voice, rolls his eyes at Ruth-Ann, the waitress, who joins him in teasing good old Hank Palace before bustling off for more coffee.
But the Somerset Diner finally closed, and Culverson and Ruth-Ann are back in Concord, and I have no other direction to point myself but forward, so here I go, State Road 4 due south toward “down county.” I let myself sleep in an empty rest stop, sleeping bag rolled out under a YOU ARE HERE map of the state of Ohio, alarm on the Casio set for five hours.
When Sandy asked for a name I said “Naomi” without thinking—even though Alison Koechner is the girl I loved the longest and Trish McConnell is the one I left behind, I said “Naomi” right away.
I think about her in the quiet moments, the moments created by the absence of television and radio and the bustle of normal human company, the moments not filled by investigatory reasoning or by the low churn of fear.
I met Naomi Eddes on a case and tried to protect her and couldn’t. One night together was what we got, that’s pretty much what it was: dinner at Mr. Chow’s, jasmine tea and lo mein noodles, and then my house, and then that was it.
Sometimes, when I can’t help it, I imagine how things might otherwise have ended up for us. Possible futures surface like fish from deep water; like memories of things that never got to happen. We might one day have been one of those happy sitcom households, cheerfully chaotic, with the colorful alphabet magnets making bright nonsense words on the refrigerator, with the chores and yard work, getting the kids out the door in the morning. Murmuring conversations late at night, just the two of us left awake.
Not worth dwelling on.
It’s not just a person’s present that dies when they die, when they are murdered or drowned or a giant rock falls on their head. It’s the past, too, all the memories that belonged only to them, the things they thought and never said. And all those possible futures, all the ways that life might have turned out. Past and future and present all burn up together like a bundle of sticks.
Most likely scenario, though, all things being equal, had Maia never darkened the sky: I would have just ended up alone. Like Dectective Russel, clean desk, no pictures, notebook bent open, putting in the hours. Dutiful detective at forty, wise old department hand at sixty, docile old codger at eighty-five, still turning over cases that he worked years ago.
*