You’re the one who chose this.
Grace answered on the first ring.
“It’s me,” he said.
“I’m nervous,” she said. “Can we skip the hey how’s it goings?”
“Fine with me. I got my Netflix to watch same as you.”
There was silence.
“That was a joke,” he said.
“What’s happening with my son, Bud?”
He wondered how he ought to answer that. After thinking a few seconds, he said: “Billy was hanging out in places that he would have done better to have stayed away from.” He almost added,
“He hasn’t been charged yet,” he continued, “but I have a feeling he might be.”
“What about your friend Patacki?”
“Grace,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “He’s my kid.”
He felt himself pass from annoyance into anger and then Even Keel took over and he was just bored. It had never been any different from this, she was always asking for things.
“It looks like Billy might be tied up with this dead man they found in that old plant,” he said. “How tied up, I don’t know, because he’s not talking.”
“Should we be getting a lawyer?”
“Yes,” he said. “Knowing Billy, you ought to be getting a lawyer.”
“Buddy—”
“I’m trying to help you,” he said. “I’ll do all I can.”
He got off the phone quickly. Why was he trying to help her? He didn’t know. Resisting the urge to pour a tall drink, he glanced out over the deck, the colors were getting nice, it would be a fine sunset. Put a potato in the nuker. Cook your steak. Make a salad. He carried the steak out to the grill and felt himself getting into his routine again. Fur had come back from his adventuring, impeccable timing as always.
“Not for you,” he told the dog. He closed the grill on the steak and went back in to fix the rest of his meal.
There was plenty else to worry about besides Billy Poe. The state’s attorney was investigating Don Cunko, Harris’s good buddy on the city council, and soon enough they’d discover that the club basement and wet bar installed in Don’s house had been paid for by Steelville Excavation, the same folks who’d won the bid to replace Buell’s sewer system. Harris liked Cunko. Maybe he had bad taste in friends. No, he thought, Cunko had crossed the line, first by taking the money, then by having parties in the new basement. But it was not a good idea to get self- righteous—there was plenty they could get him on as well. He’d never taken any money, but he’d always taken other liberties, especially when encouraging certain townspeople to move to greener pastures. It was the reason Buell had half the crime rate of Monessen and Brownsville. There were a lot of people who could talk. None of them were particularly credible, but there were enough of them. The Cunko investigation brought that fresh to mind.
There were some pressing decisions as well. The city council had just come out with the new budget, the infrastructure was crumbling, and the EPA had ordered the city to repair the sewer system, which had been spilling sewage into the Mon during heavy storms. The Buell PD’s share of the budget had gone from $785,000 to $541,000—the biggest cut in the department’s history. In addition to cutting back training and keeping the department’s already clapped- out vehicles in service indefinitely, he would have to lay off three of his full- time guys. Which was nearly everyone.
He looked at his six- by- six elk and wondered when he’d be able to get to Wyoming again. Not till after retirement. As of next month, the department would consist of him, Steve Ho, Dick Nance, and twelve part-timers. Bert Haggerton was gone for sure. No one would miss him. But Harris would also have to get rid of Ron Miller, who had kids in college. Miller, who he’d known twenty years. But Miller was lazy, a clockwatcher, if Miller got a call in the middle of lunch, he would order dessert. Jerzy Borkowski, who was also going to get cut, was no better. They were small- town cops but things were changing, you needed a different attitude, the Mayberry days were over. He felt another surge of relief at keeping Steve Ho—he’d thought the council would make him keep Miller, who was the most senior officer. He could probably lie to Borkowski and Miller—tell them the council had made the decision on who to fire and who to keep—but in a town this size they would hear the truth soon enough. Neither one of those men would ever speak to him again. He would have to accept that. Haggerton wouldn’t, either, though he didn’t care about Haggerton.
The steak, he thought. He went out and flipped it. All was not lost.
“Beat it,” he told Fur, who was inching closer to the grill.
Eventually, everyone knew, the department’s budget would be cut again and the Buell police would cease to exist—they would have to merge with the Southwest Regional out of Belle Vernon. Three years before there had been another budget crisis; the city ran out of money in late November and for the last four weeks of the year all the city employees went to the Mon Valley Bank and took out loans in lieu of paychecks. On the first of the New Year everyone took their loan slips to the city cashier’s office and the city paid them off. Harris was pretty sure those things did not happen in other places.
The Valley’s population was growing again but incomes were still going down, budgets still getting smaller, and no money had been put into infrastructure for decades. They had small- town budgets and big- city problems. As Ho said, they were approaching the tipping point. Most of the other Valley towns, with the exception of maybe Charleroi and Mon City, were over the edge and would never come back. The week before, a man had been shot in the face in broad daylight in Monessen. It was like this all up and down the river and many of the young people, the way they accepted their lack of prospects, it was like watching sparks die in the night. Just to get an office job you had to go to college and there were not enough of those jobs to go around—there could only be so many computer programmers, only so many management consultants. And of course those jobs were moving overseas now at the same rate they’d once shipped the steel jobs.
He didn’t see how the country could survive like this in the long run; a stable society required stable jobs, there wasn’t anything more to it than that. The police could not fix those problems. Citizens with pensions and health insurance rarely robbed their neighbors, beat their wives, or cooked up methamphetamine in their back sheds. And yet, everyone wanted to blame the cops—as if the department could somehow stop a society from collapsing. The police need to be more aggressive, they would say, until you caught their kid stealing a car and twisted his arm a little hard—then you were a monster. Civil rights violator. They wanted easy answers, but there weren’t any. Keep your kids in school. Hope those biomed companies move down here.
In the meantime, enjoy what you can. He fixed his plate and gave Fur his two cups of kibble. The dog looked longingly at Harris sitting there with his plate in his lap, his steak and his chive potato. Harris shrugged and went on eating.
There would be time later for a nice fire, maybe he would finish that book. James Patterson. He would forget about Billy Poe.
“Get over here, meathead.”
Fur came and sat down next to Harris, knowing he was about to get some steak.
When he went into the office the next morning there were already messages. The important one being from the DA—they’d found a witness in the case who claimed to have been present at the time of the murder. The witness was fingering a football player whose name he couldn’t remember, but he was positive he’d know him in a lineup. Did that ring any bells?
Harris returned the call but the DA was out somewhere. He sat at his desk and rubbed his temples. His little stunt with the jacket had not mattered one bit. It was still there, for all he knew, but it was no longer relevant. Murray Clark—the name of the witness—Harris ran him in the computer. DUI in ’81, another one in ’83, an arrest in ’87 for disorderly conduct. Nothing since. He rubbed the stiff muscles on his neck. A man who had, most likely, turned himself around. Not enough to discredit him on a witness stand. He switched off the computer monitor. He couldn’t let himself think about this anymore—it would turn him inside out.
