And there it was, Adam’s face staring out of the phone, Adam’s face everywhere, on every site, proof run wild. He’d shot and killed two men, and here were their faces, their names and biographies, and she realized with a jolt that she knew one of them from the high school, and how strange it was to think he was dead—slain—and would never walk those corridors again or stand before a class of kids who might have loved him or hated him but had the same festering hormones and the same issues the class before them had had and the class after them would have and all the classes before and since. He was dead. Art Tolleson. He was dead and Adam had killed him.
She went into the living room and flicked on the TV and it was on every channel. The sheriff—and it was his face on the screen now, the poser with the grappling-hook eyes who’d sat right there in her own house and harassed her for the better part of an hour—was giving a press conference and telling everybody to stay calm even though he was cordoning off the entire forest range, from the middle fork of the Ten Mile in the north to Big River in the south, coast to mountains, and that no one was to be allowed in for any purpose whatever until the threat had been neutralized. And what about Route 20? Route 20 was a major artery, as was the Coast Highway, and they would remain open to traffic, but he cautioned people not to linger or get out of their cars—the suspect was armed and dangerous and if anyone encountered him or knew anything of his whereabouts they should call 911. Then up came the picture of Adam, full-screen—a picture, she realized, that must have been a mug shot from one of his past brushes with the system, but the thing was, he didn’t look anything like Adam, not the Adam she knew. He looked like a thug, with his shaved head and one eye half-closed as a result of whatever struggle he must have put up when they were trying to take him into custody—and they must have gang-piled him because he was a rock and he could have taken on any three of them all by himself . . .
But then that was no way to think. The way to think was of how to cut him loose, all knowledge and memory of him, to forget him and move on. To Nevada. The sooner the better. “Okay,” she said, nodding at Christabel, who’d joined her in front of the TV, “you were right, I admit it, and I should never have even thought about dating him—”
Christabel made a little noise of disapproval in her throat. “I’ve said it before”—she gave her a sharp glance out of those mud brown eyes with their dead eyeliner and faded mascara, Christabel the righteous, Christabel in the aftermath, picking through the wreckage—“I never could tell what you saw in him, anyway.”
A week went by, then another. Her court date came up, and if she thought anything about it at all, it was just that she regretted the waste of ink it took to mark her calendar when she had no intention of going anywhere near the courthouse or the police station or anyplace else the pretenders pretended to conduct their so-called business. Still, though—and this nagged at her—she hadn’t even taken step one as to getting herself out of Dodge and you had to chalk that up to inertia. That, and grief. She was grieving over Adam, over how she’d fallen so hard for him when clearly he was trouble—worse than trouble, a psychopath, a murderer, a cannon so loose he’d rolled right off the deck. But that was the problem: she had fallen for him and nothing could change that.