She drove into town, into the shop parking lot, through the open gate, and parked just behind the building, facing Frank’s Jeep. As she opened the door and stepped out, she saw that one of the overhead garage doors hung about two feet off the ground. Probably getting too stuffy in there for Jerry. Might as well open it up all the way.
Frank was out of the truck and walking beside her as she went to the side door, which she found was locked. She rapped on the door, and they waited. There was an awkward tension now; Frank’s silent, blank-faced reaction to her rant in the truck left her uncomfortable. It would be nice if he’d responded, or at least if the silence seemed like a response, as if she’d angered him and he was sulking about it. Instead, he was impossible to read, just stood there with every thought and emotion tucked in a locked box and hidden from the world.
Jerry must have the radio on, because he didn’t hear her knock. Or he’d reverted to typical Jerry form and chosen to ignore it. She got out her keys and unlocked the door and pulled it open, held it for Frank.
“Thanks.” He walked past her and into the shop, and she followed, letting the door swing shut behind her. She’d made it maybe two steps inside when he whirled back to her, put his hand on her shoulder, and guided her backward.
“Outside.”
“What?”
He didn’t answer, just kept his hand on her shoulder while reaching for the door handle. Her confusion switched to irritation, and she twisted free from his grasp.
“Let go of me. What are you doing?”
He had the door open and was reaching for her again as she stepped around him and saw the blood.
It should have induced immediate terror, maybe, but instead her reaction was simply to follow it with her eyes, some natural curiosity telling her to find the source before she responded. There was a drain in the center of the concrete floor, a big rusted grate with nickel-sized holes, and a thin trail of blood was leaking into it now. Up from that the flow widened, and then she saw Jerry.
He hung in an awkward half-lean from the front of the Lexus, his hands bound to the car’s grille with a length of wire, his head flopped sideways onto his left shoulder. There was a thick dark line across his throat, just under his chin, and beneath it was the pool of blood that had spawned the rivulet running into the drain. His left leg was bent unnaturally, and there was a strange bulge high on his thigh, almost at the hip. Nora’s eyes recorded all of this in a split-second stare, and then she said, “
“Don’t.” Frank had her arm again, his grip rougher than before.
“
“Dead. He’s dead. Don’t go over there, don’t touch him. We need to leave now.”
She started to fight him, twist her arm loose, but then her eyes focused on the bulge on Jerry’s leg again and for the first time she understood what it was. The bone. That was the bone pushing at the skin, trying to escape. They’d broken his leg. That understanding brought the nausea on in a wave, and she started to sink to her knees. Frank caught her and kept her upright, moved her back toward the door. Her jaw went slack, and for an instant she was sure she’d be ill, but then he had her outside and into the fresh air.
“Oh, no, Jerry.” She was on her knees on the pavement now, aware of a sudden heat in her face and neck. “No, Jerry, what did they do, what happened to him, what did they do to him?”
She tried to get to her feet, and Frank put his hand on her shoulder and shoved her gently back.
“Stay down. I’m calling the police.”
She put her hands flat on the gravel and squeezed them into fists, wanting to hold something, watching idly as one short fingernail split against the stone.
“Did you see his leg?” she said. Frank was talking in a low voice into his phone. She repeated the question, and still he talked only into the phone. Her hands were trembling now on the gravel. She asked the question a third time as he put the phone back into his pocket and knelt beside her, wrapped his arm around her back.
“Did you see his leg?”
“Yes.” His voice was soft.
“They hurt him,” she said.
“I know.”
“They did that to his leg.”
“I know.”
From the time he’d called Nora and left the first message the night before, Frank had tried diligently to convince himself that most of this was undue worry. That his impression of the men who’d come to her body shop was inflated by the adrenaline of the moment, that bad memories of a man he barely knew had driven him to exaggeration and paranoia. All of that ended when he stepped into the body shop with Nora behind him and saw Jerry Dolson tied to the car, his blood drying on the floor. There’d been no exaggeration, no paranoia. He knew these men now, not by name, maybe, but he knew them. Waiting for the police with his arm around Nora’s back as she wept, Frank felt a pang of desire to see his father in a form he’d been sure he would never wish to recall—with gun in hand.
These men were good, but his father had been better. Faster of body and faster of mind, a deadlier shot, superior in every quality of combat. The image of his father as the violent but righteous crusader, an idea that Frank had come to love as a child and loathe as an adult, returned to him in a desperate ache.
His world disappeared into a cacophony of sirens then, three police cars arriving in succession, men emerging with weapons drawn as if there were anything they could do.
18
__________
They separated Frank from Nora almost immediately, and for the next six hours he didn’t see her again. None of the cops bothered to search him for a weapon at first, but he was conscious of the gun in his shoulder holster, and eventually told the officer who seemed to be in charge of the scene that he was carrying. The guy didn’t handle it well, took the gun and then searched Frank with rough hands, as if he might have voluntarily given up the pistol only to attack them with a knife a few minutes later.
At first it was nothing but local cops, small-town guys who all seemed to achieve a certain level of shock with the realization that someone had been tortured and murdered at noon on a Saturday in the middle of town. They ran through the basic motions, asked Frank the basic questions, but nobody seemed focused, a high level of confusion permeating the group.
He was left alone in an interrogation room at the little Tomahawk police station for more than an hour. People came and went outside, talking in soft voices, and he caught snippets of their words, muttered curses and musings, references to Mowery. Tomahawk’s police department had just hit the big time, and Frank probably understood this better than they did.
When the door finally opened again, the cop who entered wasn’t one he’d seen before. Even before the guy settled into a chair across the table and introduced himself, Frank knew he was an outsider. He was about fifty, with a receding hairline and weathered skin, bony shoulders poking at his shirt. When he looked at Frank, one eye drifted just a touch, seemed to gaze off to the left and up.
“Mr. Temple, my name is Ron Atkins. Feel free to call me Ron. How are you doing?”
“Fine,” Frank said. “Who are you with?”
Atkins raised an eyebrow. “You imply I’m from a different agency than the one that brought you here.”
“I do.”
“What makes you think that, might I ask?”
“You don’t look excited.”
