“Not this time. Stay away from my wife and my boy.”
“Mom?” asked the little girl sitting on the Passat, her voice querulous and uneasy.
Lanternglass darted a look back at her, waved. “Just another minute, Dorothy.” She regarded Kellaway again, smiling in a puzzled sort of way, and said softly, “Hey. We’re all pals here. Let’s not upset my kid with a lot of shouting.”
“Did you worry you might upset my kid when you smeared my military record in your article this morning? Did that thought ever cross your mind?”
Rickles wasn’t smiling anymore. He patted Kellaway’s shoulder again and said, “All right, now. All right. Rand has been under a lot of strain. Aisha, I’m going to ask you to show some consideration and go easy on him."
She nodded, took a step back. She wasn’t smiling anymore either. “Okay. Sorry. I know it’s been an exhausting week. Jay, have your office call me. We’ll make an appointment to talk about the police response.”
“Will do,” Rickles said. He had Kellaway by the arm now, gripping him just above the elbow, and began to steer him toward the truck.
“Oh, hey,” Lanternglass said. “One more thing, while I’ve got you. The security department at Miracle Falls Mall isn’t supplied with guns. Was your firearm your own personal weapon?”
Kellaway knew a trap when he heard it, knew she wanted him on record admitting he owned a firearm in defiance of the restraining order.
“Wouldn’t you like it if it was?”
His stomach hurt like cancer.
As the two men drove out of the parking lot, they passed Lanternglass, sitting on the hood of her Passat, rubbing her daughter’s back and staring at the truck. Eyes narrowed in speculation. Rickles pulled out so fast the rear tires spit pebbles. He accelerated north up the highway, toward St. Possenti.
“The hell was all that about, partner?” Rickles said. For the first time ever, he sounded clipped and a little cross.
“My kid watches the news morning, noon, and night to hear the latest about his old man. She made it sound like I left the army in disgrace, and he’s going to hear that.”
“He’s also going to hear about you getting made special deputy soon enough. Lanternglass is a rinky-dink reporter for a rinky-dink local paper. Most of what she writes is there to fill space between ads and wedding announcements. But you go making a lot of smoke, she’s going to think there’s fire. Speaking of,” he said, scowling. They drove into a thick, fluffy cloud of it. The smoke burned Kellaway’s eyes.
They drove another half a mile, and then Rickles said, “Is there anything I need to know about that gun?”
“Yeah,” Kellaway said. “If I didn’t have it, there’d be a whole lot more people dead.”
Rickles didn’t reply. They went on in an uncomfortable silence for one minute, and then two, and finally Rickles said something obscene under his breath and turned on the radio. They listened to news the rest of the way back, didn’t say a word to each other. Bombs in Iraq. Sanctions against Iran. And in bad news for the firefighters trying to tamp down the Ocala blaze, the wind was shifting toward the east. With moderate gales expected, the fire now endangered homes and businesses on the western edge of St. Possenti.
More on that story, the anchor promised, as it developed.
6:27 P.M.
“Are we going?” Dorothy asked. “Or are we just going to sit here?”
“Just sit here for a minute,” Lanternglass said. “Mama might need to make a call.”
They idled in the car in front of the TV station with the windows down and the music low. Lanternglass went over it again in her mind, playing back what Kellaway had said and how he’d said it.
Kellaway hadn’t wanted to look at her, but when he did—when he met her eyes—she’d felt him hating her. She had wanted to fuck with him, wanted to see how he’d respond. Now she knew.
What he made her think of was a gun: a big cocked pistol, the kind of thing Wyatt Earp carried around. In her mind Lanternglass pictured this enormous cannon with the hammer pulled back, resting on the passenger seat of a car as the vehicle sped along a bumpy, rutted dirt road. When the car jolted, the gun shimmied and slid a little farther across the seat, toward the edge. Any fool could see what would happen if it was knocked down. It would go off. She had the nasty idea that if Kellaway were knocked down, he would go off, too.
She’d asked if it was his gun, and he’d said, Wouldn’t you like it if it was? Why would she like it?
“Mom! I have to pee!”
“You always have to pee. You got a bladder about the size of a wal nut,” Lanternglass said, and she picked up her phone and dialed Richard Watkins at the state police.
Watkins answered on the second ring, “Flagler County Sheriff’s Department, this is Richard Watkins, Victim Services, how can I help you?”
“Richard Watkins! It’s Aisha Lanternglass, St. Possenti Digest.”
She had done a piece on Watkins the year before, after he started a trauma support group for children, busing the kids to Orlando so they could swim with dolphins. Aisha thought it was sweet (and big-time clickbait), but Dorothy disapproved, said the dolphins probably needed a trauma support group of their own, since they were prisoners who had to entertain tourists if they wanted to eat.
“Hey,” Watkins said. “If you’re calling about the mall shooting, you wanna stick to St. Possenti PD. That one is theirs, not ours. And if you’re calling about the fire, hang up, drive to your office, and pack all your junk before that place goes up in smoke. The blaze is turning your way. There might be an evacuation order issued tomorrow morning.”
“No shit?” she asked.
“No shit.”
“Ugh.”
Dorothy kicked the back of her seat. “Mom!”
Lanternglass said, “Hey, Watkins, I’m actually calling to see if you know who at the sheriff’s department serves papers. Divorce, subpoenas, that kind of thing.”
“We got a few people do that, but Lauren Acosta is our head process server. If you want to find out about someone who had papers served on them, either she did it herself or she can tell you who did.”
“That’s great. Can I talk to her?”
“I can give you her cell. I don’t know if she’ll answer. She’s in Alaska. She’s doing a cruise with her sisters. They’re taking pictures of icebergs and reindeer and other shit you could get frostbite from just thinking about. She’s got a North Pole fetish. In December she goes out to deliver subpoenas wearing a Santa cap.”
“Wow,” Lanternglass said. “Nothing gets a guy into the Christmas spirit like a woman in a Santa cap handing him divorce papers. Yeah, please, let me have her number. I just want to have a quick word if she has a minute.”
Dorothy kicked the back of her mother’s seat again just as she thanked Watkins and hung up.
“You want to cut it out?” Lanternglass said.
“You want me to pee all over the backseat?”