The Outsider

1

Detective Jack Hoskins of the Flint City PD woke up at two AM on that Wednesday morning in triple misery: he had a hangover, he had a sunburn, and he needed to take a shit. It’s what I get for eating at Los Tres Molinos, he thought… but had he eaten there? He was pretty sure he had—enchiladas stuffed with pork and that spicy cheese—but wasn’t positive. It might have been Hacienda. Last night was hazy.

Have to cut back on the vodka. Vacation is over.

Yes, and over early. Because their shitty little department currently had just one working detective. Sometimes life was a bitch. Often, even.

He got out of bed, wincing at the single hard thud in his head when his feet hit the floor and rubbing at the burn on the back of his neck. He shucked his shorts, grabbed the newspaper off the nightstand, and plodded to the bathroom to take care of his business. Ensconced on the toilet, waiting for the semi-liquid gush that always came six hours or so after he ate Mexican food (would he never learn?), he opened the Call and rattled his way to the comics, the only part of the local paper that was worth a damn.

He was squinting at the tiny dialogue balloons in Get Fuzzy when he heard the shower curtain rattle. He looked up and saw a shadow behind the printed daisies. His heart leaped into his throat, walloping. Someone was standing in his tub. An intruder, and not just some stoned junkie thief who’d wriggled through the bathroom window and taken refuge in the only place available when he saw the bedroom light come on. No. This was the same someone who had been standing behind him at that fucking abandoned barn out in Canning Township. He knew it as surely as he knew his own name. That encounter (if it had been an encounter) refused to leave his mind, and it was almost as if he had been expecting this… return.

You know that’s bullshit. You thought you saw a man in the barn, but when you put the light on the guy, he turned out to be nothing but a piece of busted farm equipment. Now you think there’s a man in your tub, but what looks like his head is just the shower head and what looks like his arm is nothing but your long-handled back-scrubber stuck through the grab handle on the wall. The rattling sound you heard was either a draft or just in your head.

He closed his eyes. Opened them again and stared at the shower curtain with its stupid plastic flowers, the kind of shower curtain only an ex-wife could love. Now that he was fully awake, reality reasserted itself. Just the shower head, just the grab handle with the back-scrubber stuck through it. He was an idiot. A hungover idiot, the worst kind. He—

The shower curtain rattled again. It rattled because what he had wanted to believe was his back-scrubber now grew shadowy fingers and reached out to touch the plastic. The shower head turned and seemed to stare at him through the translucent curtain. The newspaper fell from Hoskins’s relaxing fingers and landed on the tiles with a soft flap. His head was thudding and thudding. The back of his neck was burning and burning. His bowels relaxed, and the small bathroom was filled with the smell of what Jack was suddenly sure had been his last meal. The hand was reaching for the edge of the curtain. In a second—two, at the most—it would be pulled back and he would be looking at something so horrible it would make his worst nightmare seem like a sweet daydream.

“No,” he whispered. “No.” He tried to get up from the toilet, but his legs wouldn’t support him and his considerable bottom thumped back onto the ring. “Please, no. Don’t.”

A hand crept around the edge of the curtain, but instead of pulling it back, the fingers only folded around it. Tattooed on those fingers was a word: CANT.

“Jack.”

He couldn’t reply. He sat naked on the toilet with the last of his shit still dripping and plopping into the bowl, his heart a runaway engine in his chest. He felt that soon it would rip right out of him, and his last sight on earth would be of it lying on the tiles, splattering blood on his ankles and the comics section of the Flint City Call with its final twitching beats.

“That’s not a sunburn, Jack.”

He wanted to faint. To just collapse off the toilet, and if he gave himself a concussion on the tile floor, even fractured his skull, so what? At least he would be out of this. But consciousness stubbornly remained. The shadowy figure in the tub remained. The fingers on the curtain remained: CANT, in fading blue letters.

“Touch the back of your neck, Jack. If you don’t want me to pull back this curtain and show myself, do it now.”

Hoskins raised a hand and pressed it to the nape of his neck. His body’s reaction was immediate: terrifying bolts of pain which ran up to his temples and down to his shoulders. He looked at his hand and saw it was smeared with blood.

“You’ve got cancer,” the figure behind the curtain informed him. “It’s in your lymph glands, and your throat, and your sinuses. It’s in your eyes, Jack. It’s eating into your eyes. Soon you’ll be able to see it, little gray knobs of malignant cancer cells swimming around in your vision. Do you know when you got it?”

Of course he knew. When this creature had touched him out there in Canning Township. When it had caressed him.

“I gave it to you, but I can take it back. Would you like me to take it back?”

“Yes,” Jack whispered. He began to cry. “Take it back. Please take it back.”

“Will you do something if I ask you?”

“Yes.”

“You won’t hesitate?”

“No!”

“I believe you. And you won’t give me any reason not to believe you, will you?”

“No! No!”

“Good. Now clean yourself up. You stink.”

The CANT hand withdrew, but the shape behind the shower curtain was still staring at him. Not a man, after all. Something far worse than the worst man who had ever lived. Hoskins reached for the toilet paper, aware as he did so that he was tilting sideways off the seat and that the world was simultaneously dimming and dwindling. And that was good. He fell, but there was no pain. He was unconscious before he hit the floor.

2

Jeannie Anderson woke at four that morning, with her usual wee-hours full bladder. Ordinarily she would have used their bathroom, but Ralph had been sleeping badly ever since Terry Maitland had been shot, and tonight he had been particularly restless. She got out of bed and made her way to the bathroom at the end of the hall, the one past the door to Derek’s room. She considered flushing after relieving herself and decided even that might wake him. It could wait until morning.

Two more hours, Lord, she thought as she left the bathroom. Two more hours of good sleep, that’s all I w—

She stopped halfway down the hall. The downstairs had been dark when she left the bedroom, hadn’t it? She had been more asleep than awake, but surely she would have noticed a light on.

Are you sure of that?

No, not completely, but there certainly was a light on down there now. White light. Muted. The one over the stove.

She went to the stairs and stood at the top, looking down at that light, brow wrinkled, thinking profoundly. Had the burglar alarm been set before they went to bed? Yes. Arming it before bed was a house rule. She set it, and Ralph had double-checked it before they went up. One or the other of them always set the alarm, but the double-checks, like Ralph’s poor sleeping, had only begun since the death of Terry Maitland.

She considered waking Ralph and decided against it. He needed his sleep. She considered going back to get his service revolver, in the box on the high shelf in the closet, but the closet door squeaked and that would surely wake him. And wasn’t that pretty paranoid? The light probably had been on when she went to the bathroom and she just hadn’t noticed. Or maybe it had gone on by itself, a malfunction. She descended the steps quietly, moving to the left on the third step and to the right on the ninth to avoid the creaks, not even thinking about it.

She walked to the kitchen door and peeked around the frame, feeling both stupid and not stupid at all. She sighed, blowing back her bangs. The kitchen was empty. She started across the room to turn off the stove light, then stopped. There were supposed to be four chairs at the kitchen table, three for the family and the one they called the guest chair. But now there were only three.

“Don’t move,” someone said. “If you move, I’ll kill you. If you scream, I’ll kill you.”

She stopped, pulse hammering, the hair on the back of her neck lifting. If she hadn’t done her business before coming down, urine would be running down her legs and puddling on the floor. The man, the intruder, was sitting on the guest chair in their living room, just far enough back from the archway that she could only see him from the knees down. He was wearing faded jeans and moccasins with no socks. His ankles were riddled with red blotches that might have been psoriasis. His upper body was just a vague silhouette. All she could tell was that his shoulders were broad and a little slumped—not as if he was tired, but as if they were so crammed with workout muscle that he couldn’t square them. It was funny, all you could see at a moment like this. Terror had frozen her brain’s usual sorting ability, and everything flowed in without prejudice. This was the man who had killed Frank Peterson. The man who bit into him like a wild animal and raped him with a tree branch. That man was in her house, and here she stood in her shortie pajamas, with her nipples no doubt sticking out like headlights.

“Listen to me,” he said. “Are you listening?”

“Yes,” Jeannie whispered, but she had begun to sway, on the edge of a faint, and she was afraid she might pass out before he could say what he had come to say. If that happened, he would kill her. After that he might leave, or he might go upstairs to kill Ralph. He’d do it before Ralph’s mind cleared enough to know what was going on.

And leave Derek to come home from camp an orphan.

No. No. No.

“W-What do you want?”

“Tell your husband it’s done here in Flint City. Tell him he has to stop. Tell him that if he does that, things go back to normal. Tell him if he doesn’t, I’ll kill him. I’ll kill them all.”

His hand emerged from the shadows of the living room and into the dim light cast by the single-bar fluorescent. It was a big hand. He closed it into a fist.

“What does it say on my fingers? Read it to me.”

She stared at the faded blue letters. She tried to speak and couldn’t. Her tongue was nothing but a lump clinging to the roof of her mouth.

He leaned forward. She saw eyes under a broad shelf of forehead. Black hair, short enough to bristle. Black eyes, not just on her but in her, searching her heart and mind.

“It says MUST,” he told her. “You see that, don’t you?”

“Y-Y-Y—”

“And what you must do is tell him to stop.” Red lips moving inside a black goatee. “Tell him if he or any of them tries to find me, I’ll kill them and leave their guts in the desert for the buzzards. Do you understand me?”

Yes, she tried to tell him, but her tongue wouldn’t move and her knees were unlocking and she put her arms out to break her fall and she didn’t know if she succeeded in that or not because she was gone into darkness before she hit the floor.

3

Jack woke up at seven o’clock with bright summer sun shining through the window and across his bed. Birds were twittering outside. He sat bolt upright, staring wildly around, only faintly aware that his head was throbbing from last night’s vodka.

He got out of bed fast, opened the drawer of his bedside table, and took out the .38 Pathfinder he kept there for home protection. He high-stepped across the bedroom with the gun held beside his right cheek and the short barrel pointing at the ceiling. He kicked his boxers aside, and when he got to the door, which stood open, he paused next to it with his back to the wall. The smell wafting out was fading but familiar: the aftermath of last night’s enchilada adventures. He had gotten up to offload; that much, at least, hadn’t been a dream.

“Is anybody in there? If so, answer up. I’m armed and I will shoot.”

Nothing. Jack took a deep breath and pivoted around the doorframe, going low, sweeping the room from side to side with the barrel of the .38. He saw the toilet with the lid up and the ring down. He saw the newspaper on the floor, turned to the comics. He saw the tub, with its translucent flowered curtain pulled across. He saw shapes behind it, but those were the shower head, the grab handle, the back-scrubber.

Are you sure?

Before he could lose his nerve, he took a step forward, slid on the bathmat, and grabbed the shower curtain to keep from going ass over teapot. It pulled loose from the rings and covered his face. He screamed, clawed it aside, and pointed the .38 into the tub at nothing. No one there. No boogeyman. He peered at the bottom of the tub. He wasn’t exactly conscientious about keeping it clean, and if someone had been standing in there, he would have left footprints. But the dried scum of soap and shampoo was unmarked by tracks. It had all been a dream. A particularly vivid nightmare.

Still, he checked the bathroom window and all three doors leading outside. Everything was buttoned up.

Okay, then. Time to relax. Or almost. He went back to the bathroom for one more look, this time checking the towel cabinet (nothing) and toeing at the fallen shower curtain with disgust. Time to replace that sucker. He’d swing by Home Depot today.

He reached absently to rub the back of his neck, and hissed with pain as soon as his fingers made contact. He went to the sink and turned around, but trying to see the back of your neck by looking over your shoulder was worse than useless. He opened the top drawer under the sink and found nothing but shaving stuff, combs, an unraveling Ace bandage, and the world’s oldest tube of Monistat: another little souvenir from the Age of Greta. Like the stupid shower curtain.

In the bottom drawer he found what he was looking for, a mirror with a broken handle. He rubbed the dust from its reflective surface, backed up until his butt was touching the lip of the sink, and held up the mirror. The back of his neck was flaming red, and he could see little seed-pearl blisters forming. How was that possible, when he slathered himself with sunblock as a matter of course, and didn’t have a sunburn anywhere else?

That’s not a sunburn, Jack.

Hoskins made a little whimpering sound. Surely no one had been in his tub early this morning, no creepy weirdo with CANT tattooed on his fingers—surely not—but one thing was certain: skin cancer ran in his family. His mother and one of his uncles had died of it. It goes with the red hair, his father had said, after he himself had had skin tags removed from his driver’s side arm, pre-cancerous moles from his calves, and a basal cell carcinoma from the back of his neck.

Jack remembered a huge black mole (growing, always growing) on his uncle Jim’s cheek; he remembered the raw sores on his mother’s breastbone and eating into her left arm. Your skin was the largest organ in your body, and when it went haywire, the results were not pretty.

Would you like me to take it back? the man behind the curtain had asked.

“That was a dream,” Hoskins said. “I got a scare out in Canning, and last night I ate a shitload of bad Mexican food, so I had a nightmare. That’s all, end of story.”

That didn’t stop him from feeling for lumps in his armpits, under the angles of his jaw, inside his nose. Nothing. Only a little too much sun on the back of his neck. Except he had no sunburn anywhere else. Just that single throbbing stripe. It wasn’t actually bleeding—which sort of proved his early morning encounter had only been a bad dream—but it was already growing that crop of blisters. He should probably see a doctor about it, and he would… after he gave it a few days to get better on its own, that was.

Will you do something if I ask you? You won’t hesitate?

No one would, Jack thought, looking at the back of his neck in the mirror. If the alternative was getting eaten from the outside in—eaten alive—no one would.

4

Jeannie woke up staring at the bedroom ceiling, at first not able to understand why her mouth was filled with the coppery taste of panic, as if she had narrowly avoided a bad fall, or why her hands were raised, palms splayed out in a warding-off gesture. Then she saw the empty half of the bed on her left, heard the sound of Ralph splashing in the shower, and thought, It was a dream. The most vivid damn nightmare of all time for sure, but that’s all it was.

Only there was no sense of relief, because she didn’t believe that. It wasn’t fading as dreams usually did on waking, even the worst ones. She remembered everything, from seeing the light on downstairs to the man sitting in the guest chair just beyond the living room archway. She remembered the hand emerging into the dim light, and closing into a fist so she could read the fading letters tattooed between the knuckles: MUST.

What you must do is tell him to stop.

She threw back the covers and left the room, not quite running. In the kitchen, the light over the stove was off, and all four chairs were in their accustomed places at the table where they ate most of their meals. It should have made a difference.

It didn’t.

5

When Ralph came down, tucking his shirt into his jeans with one hand and holding his sneakers in the other, he found his wife sitting at the kitchen table. There was no morning cup of coffee in front of her, no juice, no cereal. He asked her if she was okay.

“No. There was a man here last night.”

He stopped where he was, one side of his shirt squared away, the other hanging down over his belt. He dropped his sneakers. “Say what?”

“A man. The one who killed Frank Peterson.”

He looked around, suddenly wide awake. “When? What are you talking about?”

“Last night. He’s gone now, but he had a message for you. Sit down, Ralph.”

He did, and she told him what had happened. He listened without saying a word, looking into her eyes. He saw nothing in them but absolute conviction. When she was done, he got up to check the burglar alarm console by the back door.

“It’s armed, Jeannie. And the door’s locked. At least this one is.”

“I know it’s armed. And they’re all locked. I checked. The windows are, too.”

“Then how—”

“I don’t know, but he was here.”

“Sitting right there.” He pointed to the archway.

“Yes. As if he didn’t want to get too far into the light.”

“And he was big, you say?”

“Yes. Maybe not as big as you—I couldn’t tell his height because he was sitting down—but he had broad shoulders and lots of muscle. Like a guy who spends three hours a day in a gym. Or lifting weights in a prison yard.”

He left the table and got down on his knees where the kitchen’s wooden floor met the living room carpet. She knew what he was looking for, and knew he wouldn’t find it. She had checked this, too, and it didn’t change her mind. If you weren’t crazy, you knew the difference between dreams and reality, even when the reality was far outside the boundaries of normal life. Once she might have doubted that (as she knew Ralph was doubting now), but no more. Now she knew better.

He got up. “That’s a new carpet, honey. If a man had sat there, even for a short while, the feet of the chair would have left marks in the nap. There aren’t any.”

She nodded. “I know. But he was there.”

“What are you saying? That he was a ghost?”

“I don’t know what he was, but I know he was right. You have to stop. If you don’t, something bad is going to happen.” She went to him, tilting her head up to look him full in the face. “Something terrible.”

He took her hands. “This has been a stressful time, Jeannie. For you as much as for m—”

She pulled away. “Don’t go there, Ralph. Don’t. He was here.”

“For the sake of argument, say he was. I’ve been threatened before. Any cop worth his salt has been threatened.”

“You’re not the only one being threatened!” She had to struggle not to shout. This was like being caught in one of those ridiculous horror movies where no one believes the heroine when she says Jason or Freddy or Michael Myers has come back yet again. “He was in our house!”

He thought about going over it again: locked doors, locked windows, burglar alarm armed but quiet. He thought about reminding her that she had awakened this morning in her own bed, safe and sound. He could see by her face that none of those things would do any good. And an argument with his wife in her current state was the last thing he wanted.

“Was he burned, Jeannie? Like the man I saw at the courthouse?”

She shook her head.

“You’re sure? Because you said he was in the shadows.”

“He leaned forward at one point, and I saw a little. I saw enough.” She shuddered. “Broad forehead, shelving over his eyes. The eyes themselves were dark, maybe black, maybe brown, maybe deep blue, I couldn’t tell. His hair was short and bristly. Some gray, but most of it still black. He had a goatee. His lips were very red.”

The description struck a chime in his head, but Ralph didn’t trust the feeling; it was probably a false positive caused by her intensity. God knew he wanted to believe her. If there had been one single scrap of empirical evidence…

“Wait a minute, his feet! He was wearing moccasins without socks and there were these red blotches all over them. I thought it was psoriasis, but I suppose it could have been burns.”

He started the coffeemaker. “I don’t know what to tell you, Jeannie. You woke up in bed, and there’s just no sign anyone was—”

“Once upon a time you cut open a cantaloupe and it was full of maggots,” she said. “That happened, you know it did. Why can’t you believe this happened?”

“Even if I did, I couldn’t stop. Don’t you see that?”

“What I see is that the man sitting in our living room was right about one thing: it’s over. Frank Peterson is dead. Terry is dead. You’ll get back on active duty, and we… we can… could…”

She trailed off, because what she saw in his face made it clear that going on would be useless. It wasn’t disbelief. It was disappointment that she could possibly believe moving on was an option for him. Arresting Terry Maitland at the Estelle Barga ballfield had been the first domino, the one that started a chain reaction of violence and misery. And now he and his wife were having an argument over the man who wasn’t there. All his fault, that’s what he believed.

“If you won’t stop,” she said, “you need to start carrying your gun again. I know I’ll be carrying the little .22 you gave me three years ago. I thought it was a very stupid present at the time, but I guess you were right. Hey, maybe you were clairvoyant.”

“Jeannie—”

“Do you want eggs?”

“I guess so, yeah.” He wasn’t hungry, but if all he could do for her this morning was eat her cooking, then that was what he would do.

She got the eggs out of the fridge and spoke to him without turning around. “I want us to have police protection at night. It doesn’t have to be from dusk to dawn, but I want somebody making regular passes. Can you arrange that?”

Police protection against a ghost won’t do much good, he thought… but had been married too long to say. “I believe I can.”

“You should tell Howie Gold and the others, too. Even if it sounds crazy.”

“Honey—”

But she rode over him. “He said you or any of them. He said he’d leave your guts strewn in the desert for the buzzards.”

Ralph thought of reminding her that, while they did see the occasional buzzard wheeling in the sky (especially on garbage day), there wasn’t much in the way of desert around Flint City. That alone was suggestive that the whole encounter had been a dream, but he kept quiet on this, as well. He had no intention of winding things up again just when they seemed to be winding down.

“I will,” he said, and this was a promise he meant to keep. They needed to put it all out on the table. Every bit of the crazy. “You know we’re having the meeting at Howie Gold’s office, right? With the woman Alec Pelley hired to look into Terry’s trip to Dayton.”

“The one who stated categorically that Terry was innocent.”

This time what Ralph thought of and didn’t say (there were oceans of unspoken conversation in long marriages, it seemed) was, Uri Geller stated categorically that he could bend spoons by concentrating on them.

“Yes. She’s flying in. Maybe it will turn out that she’s full of shit, but she worked with a decorated ex-cop in that business of hers, and her procedure seemed sound enough, so maybe she really found something in Dayton. God knows she sounded sure of herself.”

Jeannie began to crack eggs. “You’d go on even if I’d come downstairs and found the burglar alarm had been shorted out, the back door was standing open, and his footprints were on the tile. You’d go on even then.”

“Yes.” She deserved the truth, unvarnished.

She turned to him then, the spatula held high, like a weapon. “May I say that I think you’re being sort of a fool?”

“You can say anything you want, but you need to remember two things, honey. Whether Terry was innocent or guilty, I played a part in getting him killed.”

“You—”

“Hush,” he said, pointing at her. “I’m talking, and you need to understand.”

She hushed.

“And if he was innocent, there’s a child-killer out there, running free.”

“I understand that, but you may be opening the door on things far beyond your ability to understand. Or mine.”

“Supernatural things? Is that what you’re talking about? Because I can’t believe that. I will never believe that.”

“Believe what you want,” she said, turning back to the stove, “but that man was here. I saw his face, and I saw the word on his fingers. MUST. He was… dreadful. It’s the only word I can think of. Having you not believe me makes me want to cry, or throw this skillet of eggs at your head, or… I don’t know.”

He went to her and encircled her waist. “I believe that you believe. That much is true. And here’s a promise: if nothing comes of this meeting tonight, you’ll find me a lot more open to the idea of letting this go. I understand there are limits. Does that work?”

“I guess it has to, at least for now. I know you made a mistake at the ballfield. I know you’re trying to atone for it. But what if you’re making a worse mistake by keeping on?”

“Suppose it had been Derek in Figgis Park?” he countered. “Would you want me to let it go then?”

She resented the question, considered it a low blow, but had no answer for it. Because if it had been Derek, she would have wanted Ralph to pursue the man who’d done it—or the thing—to the ends of the earth. And she would have been right beside him.

“Okay. You win. But one more thing, and it’s non-negotiable.”

“What?”

“When you go to that meeting tonight, I’m going to be with you. And don’t give me any crap about it being police business, because we both know it’s not. Now eat your eggs.”

6

Jeannie sent Ralph to Kroger with a grocery list, because no matter who had been in the house last night—human, ghost, or just a character in an extraordinarily vivid dream—Mr. and Mrs. Anderson still had to eat. And halfway to the supermarket, things came together for Ralph. There was nothing dramatic about it, because the salient facts had been there all along, literally right in front of his face, in a police department interview room. Had he interviewed Frank Peterson’s real killer as a witness, thanked him for his help, and let him walk free? It seemed impossible, given the wealth of evidence tying Terry to the murder, but…

He pulled over and called Yune Sablo.

“I’ll be there tonight, don’t worry,” Yune said. “Wouldn’t miss all the news from the Ohio end of this clusterfuck. And I’m already on Heath Holmes. I don’t have much yet, but by the time we get together, I should have a fair amount.”

“Good, but that’s not why I’m calling. Can you pull Claude Bolton’s rap sheet? He’s the bouncer at Gentlemen, Please. What you’re going to find is possession, mostly, maybe one or two busts for possession with intent to sell, pleaded down.”

“He’s the one who prefers to be called security, right?”

“Yes sir, that’s our Claude.”

“What’s up with him?”

“I’ll tell you tonight, if it comes to anything. For now, all I can say is that there seems to be a chain of events that leads from Holmes to Maitland to Bolton. I could be wrong, but I don’t think I am.”

“You’re killin me here, Ralph. Tell!”

“Not yet. Not until I’m sure. And I need something else. Bolton’s a tattoo billboard, and I’m pretty sure he had something on his fingers. I should have noticed, but you know how it is when you’re interviewing, especially if the guy on the other side of the table has a record.”

“You keep your eyes on the face.”

“That’s right. Always on the face. Because when guys like Bolton start lying, they might as well be holding up a sign reading I’m full of shit.”

“You think Bolton was lying when he talked about Maitland coming in to use the phone? Because the taxi driver lady sort of corroborated his story.”

“I didn’t think so at the time, but now I’ve got a little more. See if you can find out what was on his fingers. If anything.”

“What do you think might be on them, ese?”

“Don’t want to say, but if I’m right, it’ll be on his sheet. One other thing. Can you email me a picture?”

“Happy to do it. Give me a few minutes.”

“Thanks, Yune.”

“Any plans to get in touch with Mr. Bolton?”

“Not yet. I don’t want him to know I’m interested in him.”

“And you really are going to explain all this tonight?”

“As much as I can, yes.”

“Will it help?”

“Honest answer? I don’t know. Have you got anything back on the stuff you found on the clothes and hay in that barn?”

“Not yet. Let me see what I can find on Bolton.”

“Thanks.”

“What are you up to right now?”

“Grocery shopping.”

“Hope you remembered your wife’s coupons.”

Ralph smiled and looked at the rubber-banded stack on the seat beside him. “As if she’d let me forget,” he said.

7

He came out of Kroger with three bags of groceries, stowed them in the trunk, then looked at his phone. Two messages from Yune Sablo. He opened the one with the photo attachment first. In his mug shot, Claude Bolton looked much younger than the man Ralph had interviewed prior to the Maitland arrest. He also looked stoned to the gills: thousand-yard stare, scraped cheek, and something on his chin that might have been egg or puke. Ralph remembered Bolton saying he went to Narcotics Anonymous these days, and that he’d been clean for five or six years. Maybe so, maybe not.

The attachment on Yune’s second email was the arrest record. There were plenty of busts, mostly minor, and plenty of identifying marks. They included a scar on his back, one on his left side below the rib cage, one on his right temple, and about two dozen tattoos. There was an eagle, a knife with a bloody tip, a mermaid, a skull with candles in the eyesockets, and a good many others that didn’t interest Ralph. What did were the words on his fingers: CANT on the right hand, MUST on the left.

The burned man at the courthouse had had tattoos on his fingers, but had they been CANT and MUST? Ralph closed his eyes and tried to see, but got nothing. He knew from experience that finger tattoos weren’t uncommon among men who had spent time in jail; they probably saw it in the movies. LOVE and HATE were popular; so were GOOD and EVIL. He remembered Jack Hoskins telling him about a rat-faced little burglar who’d been sporting FUCK and SUCK on his digits, Jack saying it probably wasn’t the kind of thing that would get the guy girlfriends.

The one thing Ralph was sure of was there hadn’t been any tats on the burned man’s arms. There were plenty of them on Claude Bolton’s, but of course the fire that had wrecked the burned guy’s face might have erased them. Only—

“Only no way was that man at the courthouse Bolton,” he said, opening his eyes and staring at the people going in and out of the supermarket. “Impossible. Bolton wasn’t burned.”

How weird can this get? he had asked the Gibney woman on the phone last night. Weirder, she had replied, and how right she had been.

8

He and Jeannie put the groceries away together. When the chore was done, he told her he wanted her to look at something on his phone.

“Why?”

“Just take a look, okay? And remember that the person in the photo is quite a bit older now.”

He handed her his phone. She stared at the mug shot for ten seconds, then handed it back. Her cheeks had lost all their color.

“It’s him. His hair is shorter now, and he’s got a full goatee instead of that little mustache, but that’s the man who was in our house last night. The one who said he’d kill you if you didn’t stop. What’s his name?”

“Claude Bolton.”

“Are you going to arrest him?”

“Not yet. Not sure I could, even if I wanted to, being on administrative leave and all.”

“Then what are you going to do?”

“Right now? Find out where he is.”

His first thought was to call Yune back, but Yune was digging away on the Dayton killer, Holmes. His second idea, quickly rejected, was Jack Hoskins. The man was a drunk and a blabbermouth. But there was a third choice.

He called the hospital, was informed that Betsy Riggins had gone home with her little bundle of joy, and reached her there. After asking how the new baby was doing (thus provoking a ten-minute rundown on everything from breast feeding to the high cost of Pampers), he asked her if she would mind helping a brother out by making a call or maybe two in her official capacity. He told her what he wanted.

“Is this about Maitland?” she asked.

“Well, Betsy, considering my current situation, that’s sort of a don’t ask, don’t tell kind of deal.”

“If it is, you could get in trouble. And I could get in trouble for helping you.”

“If it’s Chief Geller you’re worried about, he won’t hear it from me.”

There was a long pause. He waited her out. Finally she said, “I felt bad for Maitland’s wife, you know. Really bad. She made me think of those TV news stories about the aftermath of suicide bombings, survivors walking around with blood in their hair and no idea of what just happened. Could this maybe help her out?”

“It’s possible,” he said. “I don’t want to go any further than that.”

“Let me see what I can do. John Zellman isn’t a total asshole, and that town line titty-bar of his needs a new license to operate every year. That might incline him to be helpful. I’ll call you back if I strike out. If it goes the way I think it will, he’ll call you.”

“Thanks, Betsy.”

“This stays between us, Ralph. I’m counting on having a job to come back to when my maternity leave is over. Tell me you hear that.”

“Loud and clear.”

9

John Zellman, owner and operator of Gentlemen, Please, called Ralph fifteen minutes later. He sounded curious rather than irritated, and was willing to help. Yes, he was sure Claude Bolton had been at the club when that poor kid had been grabbed and killed.

“Why so positive, Mr. Zellman? I thought he didn’t go on duty until four PM.”

“Yeah, but he came in early that day. Around two. He wanted time off to go to the big city with one of the strippers. He said she had a personal problem.” Zellman snorted. “He was the one with the personal problem. Right under his zipper.”

“Gal named Carla Jeppeson?” Ralph asked, scrolling through the transcript of Bolton’s interview on his iPad. “Also known as Pixie Dreamboat?”

“That’s her,” Zellman said, and laughed. “If no tits count for shit, that ole girl’s gonna be around for a long time. But some men kind of like that, don’t ask me why. Her and Claude have got a thing, but it won’t last long. Her husband’s in McAlester now—bad checks, I think—but he’ll be out by Christmas. She’s just passing the time with Claude. I told him that, but you know what they say—a foreskin just wants to get in.”

“You’re sure that was that day he came in early. July 10th.”

“Sure I am. Made a note of it, because no way was Claude gonna get paid for two days in Cap City when he had his vacation coming right up—with pay, mind you—less than two weeks later.”

“Kind of outrageous. Did you consider firing him?”

“No. At least he was honest about it, you know? And listen. Claude’s one of the good ones, and they’re scarcer than hen’s teeth. Mostly security guys are either pussies who look tough but don’t want anything to do with a brawl if one breaks out in front of the runway, as they sometimes do, or guys who want to go all Incredible Hulk every time some customer gives them a little lip. Claude can throw somebody out with the best of them when he has to, but most times he doesn’t. He’s good at quieting them down. He’s got a touch. I think it’s on account of all those meetings he goes to.”

“Narcotics Anonymous. He told me.”

“Yeah, he’s up-front about it. Proud, actually, and I guess he’s got a right to be. A lot of guys never get that monkey off their backs once it climbs on. It’s a tough monkey. Long claws.”

“Staying clean, is he?”

“If he wasn’t, I could tell. I know from junkies, Detective Anderson, believe me. Gentlemen is a clean place.”

Ralph had his doubts, but let it pass. “No slips?”

Zellman laughed. “They all slip, at least in the beginning, but not since he’s been working for me. He doesn’t drink, either. I asked him why not once, if drugs were his problem. He said both things were the same. Said if he took a drink, even an O’Doul’s, he’d be off looking for blow or something even stronger.” Zellman paused, then said, “Maybe he was a douche when he was using, but he isn’t now. He’s decent. In a business where your trade comes to drink margaritas and stare at shaved pussies, that’s kind of rare.”

“I hear you. Is Bolton on vacation now?”

“Yup. As of Sunday. Ten days.”

“Is it what you might call a stay-cation?”

“You mean is he here in FC? No. He’s down in Texas, somewhere near Austin. It’s where he’s from. Hold on a second, I pulled his file before I called you.” There was the sound of shuffling papers, then Zellman was back. “Marysville, that’s the name of the town. Just a wide spot in the road, from the way he talks about it. I got the address because I send part of his paycheck down there every other week. It goes to his mother. She’s old and pretty feeble. Got the emphysema, too. Claude went down to see if he could get her into one of those assisted living places, but he wasn’t too hopeful. Says she’s one stubborn old nanny goat. I don’t see how he can afford it, anyway, on what he makes up here. When it comes to taking care of old people, the government should help regular guys like Claude, but does it? Bullshit it does.”

Says the man who probably voted for Donald Trump, Ralph thought. “Well, thank you, Mr. Zellman.”

“Can I ask why you want to talk to him?”

“Just a couple of follow-up questions,” Ralph said. “Small stuff.”

“Dotting i’s and crossing t’s, huh?”

“That’s right. Do you have an address?”

“Sure, to send the money. Got a pencil?”

What he had was his trusty iPad, open to the Quick Notes app. “Shoot.”

“Box 397, Rural Star Route 2, Marysville, Texas.”

“And what’s Mom’s name?”

Zellman laughed cheerfully. “Lovie. Ain’t that a good one? Lovie Ann Bolton.”

Ralph thanked him and hung up.

“Well?” Jeannie asked.

“Hang on,” Ralph said. “Notice I’ve got my think-face on.”

“Ah, so you do. Could you use an iced tea while you think?” She was smiling. It looked good on her, that smile. It looked like a step in the right direction.

“No doubt.”

He returned to his iPad (wondering how he had ever gotten along without the damn thing), and found Marysville about seventy miles west of Austin. It was little more than a dot on the map, its single claim to fame something called the Marysville Hole.

Ralph considered his next move while he drank his iced tea, then called Horace Kinney of the Texas Highway Patrol. Kinney was now a captain, mostly riding a desk, but Ralph had worked with him several times on interstate cases when the man had been a trooper, logging ninety thousand miles a year in north and west Texas.

“Horace,” he said after they had finished with the pleasantries, “I need a favor.”

“Big or small?”

“Medium, and it requires a bit of delicacy.”

Kinney laughed. “Oh, you need to go to New York or Connecticut for delicacy, hoss. This is Texas. What do you need?”

Ralph told him. Kinney said he had just the man, and he happened to be in the area.

10

Around three o’clock that afternoon, Flint City PD dispatcher Sandy McGill looked up to see Jack Hoskins standing in front of her desk with his back turned.

“Jack? Did you need something?”

“Take a look at the back of my neck and tell me what you see.”

Puzzled but willing, she stood up and looked. “Turn to the light a little more.” And when he did so: “Ow, that’s one hell of a sunburn. You should go down to the Walgreens and get some aloe vera cream.”

“Will that fix it?”

“Only time will fix it, but it will take some of the sting out.”

“But a sunburn is all it is, right?”

She frowned. “Sure, but bad enough to have blistered in places. Don’t you know enough to put on sunblock when you’re out fishing? Do you want to get skin cancer?”

Just hearing her say those words out loud made the back of his neck feel hotter. “I guess I forgot.”

“How bad is it on your arms?”

“Not quite so bad.” No burn on them at all, in fact; it was just on the back of his neck. Where someone had touched him out at that abandoned barn. Caressed him with just his fingertips. “Thanks, Sandy.”

“Blonds and redheads get it the worst. If it doesn’t get better, you should get it looked at.”

He left without replying, thinking of the man in his dream. The one lurking behind the shower curtain.

I gave it to you, but I can take it back. Would you like me to take it back?

He thought, It will go away on its own, like any other sunburn.

Maybe so, but maybe not, and it really did hurt worse now. He could hardly bear to touch it, and he kept thinking of the open sores eating into his mother’s flesh. At first the cancer had crawled, but once it really took hold, it galloped. By the end it was eating into her throat and vocal cords, turning her screams into growls, but listening through the closed door of her sickroom, eleven-year-old Jack Hoskins had still been able to hear what she was telling his father: to put her out of her misery. You’d do it for a dog, she’d croaked. Why won’t you do it for me?

“Just a sunburn,” he said, starting his car. “That’s all it is. A fucking sunburn.”

He needed a drink.

11

It was five that afternoon when a Texas Highway Patrol car drove up Rural Star Route 2 and turned into the driveway at Box 397. Lovie Bolton was on her front porch with a cigarette in her hand and her oxygen tank in its rubber-wheeled carrier beside her rocking chair.

“Claude!” she rasped. “We got a visitor! It’s the State Patrol! Better come on around here and see what he wants!”

Claude was in the weedy backyard of the little shotgun house, taking in wash off the line and folding it neatly into a wicker basket. Ma’s washing machine was all right, but the dryer had shit the bed shortly before he arrived, and these days she was too short of breath to hang out the clothes herself. He meant to buy her a new dryer before he left, but kept putting it off. And now the THP, unless Ma was wrong, and she probably wasn’t. She had plenty of problems, but her eyes were fine.

He walked around the house and saw a tall cop getting out of a black-and-white SUV. At the sight of the gold Texas logo on the driver’s side door, Claude felt his gut tighten. He hadn’t done anything for which he could be arrested in a long, long time, but that tightening was a reflex. Claude reached into his pocket and gripped his six-year NA medallion, as he often did in moments of stress, hardly aware he was doing it.

The trooper tucked his sunglasses into his breast pocket as Ma struggled to rise from her rocker.

“No, ma’am, don’t get up,” he said. “I’m not worth it.”

She cackled rustily and settled back. “Ain’t you some big one. What’s your name, Officer?”

“Sipe, ma’am. Corporal Owen Sipe. I’m pleased to meet you.” He shook the hand not holding the cigarette, minding the old lady’s swollen joints.

“Same goes right back, sir. This is my son, Claude. He’s down from Flint City, kind of heppin me out.”

Sipe turned to Claude, who let go of his chip and held out his own hand. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Bolton.” He held onto Claude’s hand for a moment, studying it. “Got a little ink on your fingers, I see.”

“Got to see both to get the whole message,” Claude said. He held out the other hand. “I did em myself, in jail. But if you’re here to see me, you probably know that.”

“CANT and MUST,” Trooper Sipe said, ignoring the question. “I’ve seen finger tattoos before, but never those.”

“Well, they tell a story,” Claude said, “and I pass it on when I can. It’s how I make amends. I’m clean these days, but it was a hard struggle. Went to a lot of AA and NA meetings while I was locked up. At first it was just because they had doughnuts from Krispy Kreme, but eventually what they were saying took hold. I learned that every addict knows two things: he can’t use and he must use. That’s the knot in your head, see? You can’t cut it and you can’t untie it, so you have to learn to rise above it. It can be done, but you have to remember the basic situation. You must but you can’t.”

“Huh,” Sipe said. “Sort of a parable, isn’t it?”

“These days he don’t drink nor drug,” Lovie said from her rocker. “He don’t even use this shit.” She cast the stub of her cigarette into the dirt. “He’s a good boy.”

“I’m not here because anyone thinks he’s done something bad,” Sipe said mildly, and Claude relaxed. A little. You never wanted to relax too much when the State Patrol swung by for an unexpected visit. “Got a call from Flint City, closing out a case would be my best guess, and they need you to verify something about a man named Terry Maitland.”

Sipe brought out his phone, diddled with it, and showed Claude a picture.

“Is this the belt buckle the Maitland fella was wearing the night you saw him? And don’t ask me what that means, because I sure don’t know. They just sent me out here to ask the question.”

This was not why Sipe had been sent out, but the message from Ralph Anderson, relayed to Sipe by Captain Horace Kinney, was to make sure everything stayed friendly, with no suspicions aroused.

Claude examined the phone, then handed it back. “Can’t be positive—that was a while ago—but it sure looks like it.”

“Well, thank you. Thank you both.” Sipe pocketed his phone and turned to go.

“That’s it?” Claude asked. “You drove all the way out here to ask one question?”

“That’s the long and short of it. I guess someone really wants to know. Thank you for your time. I’ll pass this along on my way back to Austin.”

“That’s a long drive, Officer,” Lovie said. “Why don’t you come in first, and have a glass of sweet tea? It’s only from a mix, but it ain’t bad.”

“Well, I can’t come in and sit, want to get home before dark if I can, but I’d take a taste out here, if you don’t mind.”

“We don’t mind a bit. Claude, go in and get this nice man a glass of tea.”

“Small glass,” Sipe said, holding his thumb and finger a smidge apart. “Two swallows and I’m down the road.”

Claude went in. Sipe leaned a shoulder against the side of the porch, looking up at Lovie Bolton, whose good-natured face was a river of wrinkles.

“Your boy treats you pretty good, I guess?”

“I’d be lost without him,” Lovie declared. “He sends me a ’lotment every other week, and comes down when he can. Wants to get me in an old folks’ home in Austin, and I might go one of these days if he could afford it, which right now he can’t. He’s the best kind of son, Trooper Sipes: hellraiser early, trustworthy later on.”

“I heard that,” Sipe said. “Say, he ever take you out to the Big 7, down the road there? They make one hell of a breakfast.”

“I don’t trust roadside cafés,” she said, taking her cigarettes from the pocket of her housedress and clamping one between her dentures. “Got ptomaine in one over Abilene way back in ’74, and like to die. My boy takes over the cookin when he’s here. He ain’t no Emeril, but he ain’t bad. Knows his way around a skillet. Don’t burn the bacon.” She dropped him a wink as she lit up, Sipe smiling and hoping there was a tight seal on her tank and she wasn’t going to blow them both to hell.

“I bet he made you breakfast this morning,” Sipe said.

“You bet he did. Coffee, raisin toast, and scrambled eggs with plenty of butter, just the way I like em.”

“Are you an early riser, ma’am? I only ask because, with the oxygen and all—”

“Him and me both,” she said. “Up with the sun.”

Claude came back out with three glasses of iced tea on a tray, two tall ones and a shortie. Owen Sipe drank his in two gulps, smacked his lips, and said he had to be off. The Boltons watched him go, Lovie in her rocker, Claude sitting on the steps, frowning at the rooster-tail of dust marking the trooper’s progress back to the main road.

“See how much nicer the cops are when you ain’t been doin nothin bad?” Lovie asked.

“Yeah,” Claude said.

“Drove all the way out here just to ask about some belt buckle. Think of that!”

“That wasn’t why he came, Ma.”

“No? Then why?”

“Not sure, but that wasn’t it.” Claude put his glass down on the step and looked at his fingers. At CANT and MUST, the knot he had finally risen above. He stood up. “I better get the rest of those clothes off the line. Then I want to go over to Jorge’s and ask if I can help him out tomorrow. He’s roofin.”

“You’re a good boy, Claude.” He saw tears standing in her eyes, and was moved by them. “You come here and give your ma a big old hug.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Claude said, and did just that.

12

Ralph and Jeannie Anderson were getting ready to go to the meeting at Howie Gold’s office when Ralph’s cell phone rang. It was Horace Kinney. Ralph spoke to him while Jeannie put on her earrings and slipped into her shoes.

“Thank you, Horace. I owe you one.” He ended the call.

Jeannie was looking at him expectantly. “Well?”

“Horace sent a THP trooper out to the Bolton place in Marysville. He had a cover story, but what he was really there for—”

“I know what he was there for.”

“Uh-huh. According to Mrs. Bolton, Claude cooked them breakfast around six o’clock this morning. If you saw Bolton downstairs at four—”

“I saw the clock when I got up to pee,” Jeannie said. “It was 4:06.”

“MapQuest says the distance between Flint City and Marysville is four hundred and thirty miles. He never could have made it from here to there in time to make breakfast at six, honey.”

“The mother could have been lying.” She said it without much conviction.

“Sipe—the trooper Horace sent—said he didn’t pick that up on his radar, and thinks he would’ve.”

“So it’s Terry all over again,” she said. “A man in two places at the same time. Because he was here, Ralph. He was.”

Before he could answer, the doorbell rang. Ralph shrugged on a sportcoat to cover the Glock on his belt and went downstairs. District Attorney Bill Samuels stood on the front stoop, looking strangely unlike himself in jeans and a plain blue tee-shirt.

“Howard called me. Said there was going to be a meeting—‘an informal get-together about the Maitland business,’ is how he put it—at his office, and suggested I might like to come. I thought we could go together, if that’s all right.”

“I guess so,” Ralph said, “but listen, Bill—who else have you told? Chief Geller? Sheriff Doolin?”

“Nobody. I’m no genius, but I didn’t hit my head falling out of the dumb-tree, either.”

Jeannie joined Ralph at the door, checking her purse. “Hello, Bill. I’m surprised to see you here.”

Samuels’s smile was without humor. “To tell you the truth, I’m surprised to be here. This case is like a zombie that won’t stay dead.”

“What does your ex think about all this?” Ralph asked, and when Jeannie gave him a frown: “Just tell me if I’m stepping out of line.”

“Oh, we’ve discussed it,” Samuels said. “Except that’s not quite right. She discussed and I listened. She thinks I played a part in getting Maitland killed, and she’s not entirely wrong.” He tried to smile and couldn’t quite make it. “But how were we to know, Ralph? Tell me that. It was a slam-dunk, wasn’t it? Looking back… knowing all we did… can you honestly say you would have done anything different?”

“Yes,” Ralph said. “I wouldn’t have arrested him in front of the whole fucking town, and I would have made sure he went into the courthouse by the back door. Come on, let’s go. We’re going to be late.”