She gave a rueful laugh. “Ninety-five percent success rate, remember? I’m married to my work.” She pushed free of the booth and stood. “Speaking of which, I’m heading back to the command center. You?”
“Five minutes behind you,” I said. “Clyde’s got a burger coming.”
She pulled on her suit jacket, threw a five-dollar bill on the table. “Stop beating yourself up.”
“Because you have.”
“Don’t think of me as a role model. Think of me as someone who’s made mistakes so you don’t have to.”
I watched her head out the door. I could have gotten Clyde’s food to go. But something was niggling at me and I decided to wait a little bit, see if it went anywhere. I’d done some of my best thinking in this place.
Ralph appeared with Clyde’s burger on a paper plate. He set it on the floor, and Clyde woke and all but inhaled it. At least the wolf dog hadn’t ruined his appetite.
“Dang, should I bring him another one?” Ralph asked.
I shook my head. “He needs to pace himself.”
Ralph slid into the booth across the table from me where Mac had just been and set a bottle of brown liquid and two shot glasses on the table.
The bar was almost empty. A couple did a slow, drunk dance to Johnny Lee’s “Lookin’ for Love” playing on the corner jukebox. Two men sat at the bar, their gaze riveted to the muted television set as if they were lip readers. And an older woman was hunkered down in a back booth, nursing a glass of something clear. I’d bet my uniform it wasn’t water. In the back kitchen, someone was banging pans around.
“You look like you could use some company,” Ralph said. “And a drink.”
“You ever get depressed working here?”
“All the time. That’s what the whiskey is for.”
The niggling continued. Whiskey. Bourbon. Something to do with bourbon.
“Actually, I love my job,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe the stories I hear.”
He hoisted the bottle, but I shook my head. “None for me.”
He raised an eyebrow, shrugged, then poured himself a glass and held it up to the light. “Nectar of the gods.” He drank it down. “The gods sure know how to live.”
There had been a bottle of Rebel Yell in Raya Quinn’s car. My dad had drunk Rebel Yell. Called it the best of the bottom shelf.
Hiram had offered me bourbon when we talked.
“What do you know about Rebel Yell?” I asked Ralph.
He poured a second shot and cocked his head. “It’s bourbon. Used to be cheap, but then they fancied up the bottle and the price. It looks different now, but it’s the same stuff.” He pulled his phone from his pocket and tapped on the screen. “It was introduced in Kentucky in 1936. Stayed in the South. Wasn’t distributed nationally until 1984.” He looked up at me and grinned. “So there you go. You want to try some?”
“No,” I said, barely hearing him. The niggling became an itch I had to scratch. If only I could locate it.
I stood. “I’d better get going.”
“Something I said?”
“I’m just restless.” I pulled out my wallet. “What do I owe you?”
Ralph raised his hands, palms out. “It’s on the house. I know you’re working that case.”
I thanked him and said goodnight, and Clyde and I pushed out the door, letting it fall closed behind us.
Outside, the night was mild, the air humid, and for once the sky was clear. I let Clyde off his lead, and while he explored whatever interesting scents he found nearby, I leaned against my truck and lit the last of Engel’s cigarettes. The headache backed off a little; I no longer felt like someone had clamped my head in a vise.
I sucked in the deep, sweet burn and tilted my head back, looking for shapes in the stars. The North Star. Hercules, the hero. Another hero, Perseus. There was Cygnus the swan, the form Zeus had taken when he seduced Leda. After that seduction, Leda bore Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in the world. The woman whose face launched a thousand ships, whose kidnapping started a war.
I brought the cigarette to my lips. Watched the flare and fade of the ember. A car pulled in and parked nearby, a couple exited, and the door to Joe’s opened. A spill of light and laughter fell into the night like a glimpse into another universe, then disappeared again when the door fell shut.
My eyes followed Clyde sniffing along the edge of the property in the faint moonlight. I would never regret my decision to stay with him instead of pursuing Roman. But I’d also never forgive myself for letting Roman get away.
A chill rose on my skin. The Six were here. I could sense them nearby in the dark, a palpable evil created out of my own scrambled brain. A moral injury, like the chaplain had said. Guilt as a harsh companion.
I tapped ash loose.
On the other side of town, Ben Davenport lay on the edge of death. Someday, maybe, he would wake up and learn anew what he’d lost, if that loss wasn’t already with him on whatever silent paths he wandered. Maybe when he woke and found himself alone, he’d think about what he’d done and seen in Iraq, about whatever moral injury he’d suffered there. He’d consider the terrors he’d brought back with him and see the wreckage of his life here.
Then his thoughts would wander to the whiskey. And the gun.
Those who are the least guilty are the ones who feel most at fault, Hiram had said.
My mind was a tumble of contradictory thoughts. Raya’s clothing had been covered with what was probably dog hair, even though her mother owned cats. Lancing grew up with dogs; maybe Hiram had kept dogs as well. There had been bourbon in her car, and Hiram drank bourbon. But maybe Alfred Tate did, too.
In his journal, Tate had written that he thought Hiram had killed Raya. But as Mac and I had speculated, maybe he’d lied. Or been confused about what he saw.
Bull had been there that night. He had to know something, if only I could find him. Was he missing of his own volition? Or had Roman killed him, too?
I watched the stars again, wondering what Bull lived for with his rundown house, his gambling, the stacks of empty beer cans, and a truck that he was afraid to use. What had sent him to Gillette, Wyoming? What was there, other than a shitload of pronghorn antelope and a giant rock formation that had once been the setting for a movie about extraterrestrials? For all I knew, Bull had gone there to commune with the aliens. Maybe he’d ascended from his truck into the mothership, never to be heard from again.
And never to be missed, presumably, by anyone other than Delia, his employer at the Royal. He didn’t have a wife or children—I wondered if he had any family at all. Brothers or sisters, nieces or nephews. I remembered his southern accent, a softness that hadn’t matched his brutality or the cold gaze of his good eye.
Rebel Yell. Raya had died in 1982. How had Raya—or her killer—gotten a bottle of liquor that wasn’t sold in Colorado before 1984? How, unless someone who’d recently been to the southern United States brought it to her?
I thought about the blood money Hiram had paid to Esta all these years. And then I considered the money regularly paid into Bull’s bank account from an unknown source.