Had Officer Russo deliberately tried to bully me away from Widowmaker—or was he just another ham-fisted rent-a-cop? Did the Night Watchmen really suspect I had a secret relationship with the Langstroms that threatened them somehow—or were they just the drunken old busybodies they admitted themselves to be?
The phone buzzed in my pocket. When I saw that it was Stacey’s number, I felt my pulse begin to ease. The calmness lasted all of two seconds.
“You asshole!” she said. “You lying son of a bitch! Did you think I wouldn’t hear what really happened, Mike? You had a ‘scuffle with a tweaker’? Is that warden code for being stabbed in the back?”
“I’m sorry, Stacey. I didn’t want to worry you.”
“You lied to me.”
“I lied by omission.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Her nose still sounded plugged up. “My dad told me you could have died. He said every cop in the county came to the scene because they thought you were bleeding out.”
Of course I should have anticipated that her father would have heard the news of my stabbing. Charley Stevens had been the worst gossip in the Warden Service before he retired, and he was even worse now that he was uninhibited by department politics. The old pilot had sold me out to my girlfriend—not that I could blame him.
“It wasn’t that bad,” I said.
“That’s not the point.” She began to suffer a coughing fit. “You need to tell me what happened, Mike, or I swear to God, I’m going to come down there tonight and kick your lying ass.”
“I let a woman named Carrie Michaud get the drop on me. She’s this little ninety-pound drug addict, and I didn’t take her seriously enough. She stabbed me in the back, but the blade didn’t puncture my vest. She did manage to cut me in the arm before I subdued her. I only needed ten stitches.”
“You only needed ten stitches? And what do you mean, you subdued her? You didn’t shoot her?”
“I didn’t need to. I knocked her out.”
“If it had been me, I would have shot her!”
“Where are you?” The question slipped out before I realized how it might sound.
“Ashland. We got grounded by the snow. Where are you?”
“I’m not sure you want to know.”
“I am so going to kick your ass.”
“I’m at Widowmaker.”
She coughed some more. “What?”
“DeFord said I should take some sick days, but since I felt all right, I thought I would drive up to ask around about Adam. I told you I was coming here in my e-mail this morning.”
She fell silent for a moment before launching her second offensive. “Ever since that woman showed up at your house and told you about your brother, you’ve been on this downward spiral.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” I argued, despite the black thoughts that had been plaguing me only minutes earlier.
“It’s your dad, isn’t it? You’ve let him back into your head again. Jesus, Mike, get a grip!”
“I can explain everything if you just calm down.”
“Don’t talk to me like that. You should have called me from the hospital. If you don’t understand how much that breaks my heart, there’s nothing more to say. I’m not interested in being with someone who’d rather be lonely than be loved.”
Then the line went dead.
A moment later, the phone buzzed again.
This time it was a message. Just one word: Asshole!
*
Before I had become a warden, and during my first years on the job, my thoughts had been so clouded with guilt and anger that I couldn’t see anything clearly. At the time, I had believed my mind was perfectly sound. It was only later—after I had participated in my fourth or fifth critical incident stress debriefing—that I had realized I couldn’t necessarily trust my own mental process; a sick psyche is, by its very nature, incapable of understanding it is sick. I remembered a question I had asked a counselor after she had diagnosed me with post-traumatic stress syndrome: “How can you think through your problems when your problems are your thoughts?”
If Stacey was right, I might be suffering some sort of psychological relapse brought on by that knife in my back. I needed to take a step back and make an attempt to assess my present difficulties with some objectivity.
I was miles from home—and my distance from Stacey at the moment couldn’t be measured in mathematical units.
My superiors at the Warden Service had forbidden me to return to work until my wounds healed, but they would hardly have been pleased to learn how I had spent my so-called sick day.
Not to mention that Amber had taken off without so much as a note about where she was going.
And then there was the matter of the snow. Another inch had accumulated on my windshield since I had returned to the Scout, with only more to come. I flipped the switch and watched the hard rubber blades clear half-moons in the powder.
The easiest problem to deal with was Amber.