Читать книгу Whatever it takes - Paul Cleave - Страница 16

Eleven

Maggie gets Father Frank some fresh water and asks him if there’s anything else we can do to make him comfortable. He tells us that he’s fine, and promises he’ll have more energy when I come back later this afternoon.

We step outside and the day has gotten hotter. I listen to the porch timbers straining against the nails. It was hot back when I used to live here, but this is something different. This feels like somebody drilled for oil and went too far, venting heat out from the planet’s core.

There’s another car in the parking lot now. It’s shimmering in the heat, and the man leaning against it is shimmering too. He’s no longer in uniform, but he’s wearing the same hat he always used to wear. He has the same horseshoe mustache and the same gun strapped to his waist. He’s wearing a pair of aviators. He’s lost weight, and a lot of what’s left has been redistributed. His hair has gone gray, but it’s still thick, and the smile lines have turned to frown lines and the frown lines he had back then have turned to furrows deep enough to slot a dime into. He has his arms folded across his chest and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. There’s a chipped red portable oxygen tank next to him, parked up on a couple of wheels, a tube running from it to over his ears and under his nose. I’ve been back in town for thirty minutes, and other than Maggie everybody I’ve seen so far is on oxygen. Maybe the town is so hot the air here burns your lungs. I’d have thought that mixing smoking with oxygen was one seriously bad idea, but it doesn’t seem to bother him. Maybe he likes the idea of going out in a ball of fire.

I walk down the steps and my feet crunch into the shingle. I put my sunglasses on before my eyes catch fire. I stand a few feet away from Sheriff Haggerty who is no longer Sheriff Haggerty, but Walt Haggerty, a man I’ve known most of my life, a man who, under different circumstances, I’d be shaking his hand and telling him how good it is to see him. He stays leaning against the car and keeps his arms folded and I can’t see his eyes behind his glasses.

“Noah,” he says.

“Sheriff.”

“It ain’t Sheriff anymore, son.”

“I heard,” I tell him. “I’m sorry about your stroke.”

“That’s not the thing you need to be sorry about.”

I stare at him and he stares at me and the temperature gets a little hotter and the sun gets a little higher and the shadow he’s casting gets a little smaller.

“You shouldn’t have come here,” he says, and then he looks at Maggie. “You shouldn’t have called him. Frank . . . you know Frank’s not in his right mind.”

“Come on, Sheriff,” she says, putting on her lawyer voice. “Father Frank asked me for Noah’s help, and I wasn’t going to let him down. You have every reason to just leave us be.”

Haggerty’s face tightens. He looks from Maggie back to me. “Listen to me very carefully, Noah,” he says. “There’s nothing for you here. There’s no case here. What I said to you twelve years ago still stands, only given the circumstances I’m going to let things slide a little. I’m going to give you the chance to let Maggie drive you to wherever you came from. You do that, and we don’t have a problem.”

“And if I don’t?”

He turns to adjust something on his oxygen tank. There’s a faded sticker on it. Only two words I can make out are Property of. His left arm hangs without much purpose. Looking at Father Frank, I thought only half of him was there. Looking at Haggerty, it’s like the stroke took away a third of him. Time has made these men smaller. He leans back into the position he was in earlier, only now his left arm is hanging and his right hand is on the butt of his gun. The stroke wasn’t kind to him, but strokes aren’t known for decency.

“That’s not something you want to find out, son.”

“Only thing I want to find is Alyssa,” I tell him.

He pushes himself off from his car. It’s takes more effort than it should. “Like I told you, there’s no case here. I’m giving you an hour’s grace here, son, and that’s only because of our history. You’re still here in an hour, then I can’t stop what’s coming your way.”

“And what’s that?”

He takes the cigarette out of his mouth, tosses it onto the ground, and grinds it out with the heel of his boot. He looks at me for a bit, and then climbs into his car, dragging his oxygen tank with him. We watch him pull away.

The dust from his car hangs in the air, then starts to settle on my damp clothes and skin. There’s no wind to shift it.

“He’s just trying to throw his weight around,” Maggie says. “It’s not like he’s actually going to come after you to drag you out of town. He has no authority here. Still, I knew he’d be mad, but I didn’t realize he’d still be that mad.”

I tortured his son. Then I shot him, and tortured him some more. It’s not something you stop being mad about. “He’s taking me being here better than I thought. What do you think he meant when he said there was no case here?”

“Doesn’t matter what he meant,” she says. “He’s not investigating it. He doesn’t know what’s going on.”

“He might be retired, but I don’t doubt he knows what’s going on.”

“So now what? You’re not going to let him run you off, are you?”

“No,” I say. “Of course not. He’s an old man,” I say, “trying to throw his weight around like you said.”

“One with a gun,” she says.

“And an oxygen tank,” I say. “The wheels on that tank are so old I’ll hear them squeaking a mile away. I doubt he can even shoot straight. You saw the way his arm was hanging.”

“He’s right-handed,” she says. “The stroke affected his left. Don’t forget his son has a grudge too.”

“They don’t scare me.”

“They scared you enough twelve years ago,” she says.

“Twelve years ago was a different story. Back then it wasn’t about being scared, it was about being sensible.” I turn to look at her. “You must have known before you called me this was going to happen.”

She nods. “You’re right. But Frank . . . he was insistent.”

“These two cars,” I say, nodding toward the two other cars parked here. “One of them belong to Father Frank?”

“The Toyota,” she says. The beaten-up Toyota looks like it should be buried in the graveyard out back. It reminds me of my car. “Keys should be in the ignition.”

I look at my watch. Haggerty said he’d give me an hour. “I’ll go talk to Drew, see what he says.”

“Should I come with you?”

“No. There’s no reason to make trouble for you with Haggerty.”

“Okay,” she says. She gets into her car. “You’ll call me soon?”

“Of course. Despite everything, it’s good seeing you again, Maggie. I’ve missed you.”

She blushes. She’s unsure what to say, and I don’t need her to say anything. She drives off, putting more gravel dust into the air. I check out the Toyota. It’s old and well used and looks like it would double in value if I hosed it down. Keys are inside it, like Maggie said. Could be because nobody would steal a car from a priest. Or because nobody would steal this car from anybody. The steering wheel is hot. The engine complains when I try to start it, and for a while it could go either way, life or death. It chooses life. For now. There’s a grinding sound when I try to wind the windows down, and none of them budge. When I try again I can’t even get the grinding sound. I turn the air conditioning on. The air is warm and stale. I turn it back off.

I drive out of the parking lot with fifty minutes of freedom left.