“I called my sister!” Van burst out. “I’m sorry, Doc, but I wanted to do something good, something to make up for having to shoot Dempster! I told Bonnie not to go to sleep no matter how much she wanted to, because we might have an immune person in the prison, and that might mean there’s a cure! Or that it cures itself!”
Clint opened his eyes. “How long have you been up, Van?”
“Since four this morning! The goddam dog woke me up! She had to go out and p-p-pee!” Tough-as-nails Vanessa Lampley could hold back no longer. She began to cry.
“Just tell everyone on staff no more calls, got it?” It was almost certainly too late, but maybe they could slow the news. There might even be a way to put a pin in this. “Call your sister back and tell her you were mistaken. Tell her it was a false rumor and you bought into it. Tell the others who made calls to do the same.”
Silence.
“Van, are you still there?”
“I don’t want to, Dr. Norcross. And, all due respect, I don’t think that’s the right way to go. Bonnie will stay awake now, at least through the night, because she believes there’s a chance. I don’t want to take that away.”
“I understand how you feel, but it is the right call. Do you want a bunch of people from town coming up to the prison like . . . like torch-carrying peasants storming the castle in an old Frankenstein movie?”
“Go see your wife,” Van said. “You said she’s been up even longer than me. See if you can look her in the face and not tell her there might be a little light at the end of the tunnel.”
“Van, listen—”
But Van was gone. Clint stared at the CALL ENDED message in the window of his phone for a long time before he put it in his pocket and drove the rest of the way into town.
Dempster was dead. Cheerful Ree Dempster. He couldn’t believe it. And his heart ached for Van Lampley in spite of her insubordination. Although, really, how could she be insubordinate to him? He was just the jailhouse shrink, for God’s sake.
2
Clint pulled into one of the 15 MINUTES ONLY spaces in front of the sheriff’s station, and heard the last thing he would have expected: the sound of laughter spilling out through the open door.
There was quite a crew in the ready-room. Lila was sitting at the dispatch desk next to Linny. Ranged around them in a rough circle were five other deputies, all male—Terry Coombs, Reed Barrows, Pete Ordway, Elmore Pearl, and Vern Rangle. Sitting outside the circle of cops was Barry Holden, the public defender who had briefly handled Evie Black’s case, and a white-bearded elderly gent that Clint knew from around town, Willy Burke.
Lila was smoking. She had stopped eight years ago, when Jared had one day remarked that he hoped she wouldn’t die from lung cancer until he grew up. Linny Mars and two of the others present were also puffing away. The air was blue and fragrant.
“What’s going on, guys?” he asked.
Lila saw him, and her face brightened. She snuffed her cigarette out in a coffee cup, ran across the room to him, and jumped into his arms. Literally, with her ankles hooked together at the backs of his thighs. She kissed him hard. This occasioned more laughter, a hoot from Attorney Holden, and a spatter of applause.
“Oh, am I glad to see you!” she said, and kissed him again.
“I was on my way to see Jared,” Clint said. “I thought I’d stop and see if you were here, if you could get away.”
“Jared!” she cried. “Can you believe what a great kid we raised, Clint? Gosh, as good a job as we did, sometimes I think it was selfish of us not to have a second one.” His wife thumped him on the chest and detached herself. Above her smile, Lila’s pupils were pinpoints.
Terry Coombs came over. His eyes were red-rimmed and puffy. Terry shook Clint’s hand. “You know what happened to Roger, don’t you? Tried to unwrap his wife. Bad idea. Should have waited for Christmas.” Terry burst into a peal of laughter that turned into a sob. “My wife’s gone, too. Can’t get in touch with my kid.”
There was liquor on Terry’s breath, but there had been none on Lila’s; whatever she had ingested was a lot more up-tempo than booze. Clint thought of matching Terry by recounting what had just happened at the prison. He pushed the idea away. The death of Ree Dempster wasn’t a party story, and that was exactly what this gathering looked like.
“I’m sorry, Terry.”
Pete Ordway hooked an arm over Terry’s shoulder and drew him away.
Lila pointed to the bearded man. “Hon, you know Willy Burke, don’t you? He helped me transport Roger and Jessica to the morgue with his pickup truck. Except by morgue I actually mean the freezer at the Squeaky Wheel. Turns out the hospital is a no-go these days. Talk about low-rent, huh?” She giggled and clapped her hands to her face. “I’m sorry. I can’t help it.”
“Good to see you, sir,” Willy said. “Got a fine wife there. She’s well about her business, tired as she is.”
“Thanks.” And to his fine wife: “I take it you’ve been into the evidence locker.”
“Just Lila and me,” Linny said. “Terry had a little Scotch.”
Lila produced the Provigil scrip from her back pocket and gave it to Clint. “No luck with this, or anything else. Two of the pharmacies have been looted, and the Rite Aid is nothing but ashes and embers. You probably smelled it when you came into town.”
Clint shook his head.
“We’ve been having what I guess you’d call a wake,” Vern said. “Which is what I wish all the women would do.”
For a moment everyone looked puzzled. Then Barry started laughing, and the other deputies, and Willy and Lila and Linny joined in. The sound was jarringly merry.
“A wake,” Lila said. She punched Clint on the arm. “Awake. Get it?”
“Got it,” Clint said. He had stepped into the law enforcement version of Wonderland.
“Sober over here,” Willy Burke said, raising his hand. “I make a little from time to time—” He shot a wink at Lila: “You didn’t hear that, Sheriff—but I don’t touch the stuff. Been teetotal for going on forty years.”
“I must admit I appropriated Mr. Burke’s nip for myself,” said Barry Holden. “Seemed like the right thing to do, given all that’s going on.”
Deputies Barrows, Ordway, Pearl, and Rangle declared themselves sober, Vern Rangle raising his own hand as if he were testifying in court. Clint was beginning to be angry. It was the laughter. He understood it, certainly Lila was entitled to get a little wonky after thirty or more hours of sleeplessness, and getting into the evidence locker had been his own idea, but he still didn’t like it a bit. On the drive into town, he’d thought himself ready for just about anything, but he hadn’t been prepared to hear about Van shooting Ree, and he hadn’t been ready to walk in on an Irish wake at the sheriff’s station.
Lila was saying, “We were just talking about the time Roger rolled on a domestic and the lady of the house leaned out of an upstairs window and told him to fuck off and die. When he wouldn’t do either, she poured a bucket of paint on his head. He was still scrubbing it out of his hair a month later.”