“You wouldn’t be saying that if you hadn’t seen her,” he said. “Anyway, she tells me she’s been thinking about me this whole time. And that she’s been running from this man Harwood, the same man I had stopped all those years ago. She wanted me to help her. So I put her up in my house.”
She lied about that, too, I thought. All this history with Rudiger. What a surprise.
“I didn’t try to take advantage of the situation,” he said. “Although I was thinking about what it’d be like to have her in the house every day, see her in the morning, make breakfast for her. I remembered she always had this thing about having breakfast made for her. She didn’t seem too hot on that idea, though. It was too much all at once, she said. I told her she’d stay in my house and I’d find a place in town for a while. She liked that idea. But she said she’d be calling me one night. One night she’d call me and ask me to come over. That’s what she said. I waited. And waited. When this private eye started watching her, I figured something would happen. Maybe I’d get to be the knight in shining armor.”
He looked at me, like he had forgotten I was sitting there next to him. His eyes seemed to have a little trouble focusing on me. “And then something did happen,” he said.
“What happened?” I said.
He stood up, holding on to the stool for support. “I’ll show you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Come with me,” he said. “I want to show you something.”
“Chief, it’s getting late here.”
“McKnight, either you come with me or I’ll arrest you. I swear to God, I’ll make something up and arrest you. We’re having a good man-to-man conversation here. Don’t screw it up.”
I followed him outside. He got in his squad car, motioned me to the other side. “Get in,” he said.
“Where are we going?”
“Just get in,” he said.
I got in the front seat. He started the car and backed it up, right into a lamppost.
“Chief, I don’t think you should be driving,” I said.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “Who’s gonna pull me over?”
“That’s not what I’m worried about.”
“It’s not far,” he said. “We’ll be there in one minute.”
He pulled out of the parking lot, drove north on the main road, past the little motel with the cannon on the sign. “I told you the story about the cannon,” he said.
“You told me.”
“I told you. That’s good. I told you the story.”
It was a dead-straight road, so he managed to keep at least two wheels on it at all times. Those four shots at the bar, they couldn’t have been his first of the night. When I noticed the empty bottle rattling around under my feet, it started to make sense. “Chief,” I said, “I really don’t think you should be driving right now.”
“Almost there,” he said. He took a hard right turn onto a side street. He didn’t hit the stop sign head-on, but the pole scraped the passenger’s side of his car with a loud metallic screech. I grabbed the dashboard and held on.
“Ouch,” he said. “That one hurt. There goes the police budget.”
“Chief, please,” I said. “Stop the car.”
“We’re here,” he said. “Home away from home.”
He pulled up to a small cottage, slamming on the brakes as he hit the mailbox. When I got out of the car, I saw the long scrape on the side of the car, and in the headlights, the mailbox post bent over at a forty-five-degree angle. Aside from that, no problems.
“Come on in,” he said, walking to the front door. I reached into the car and turned off the lights and the ignition, took the keys with me. I figured I’d just see him inside, make him lie down, and then leave. I could walk back to my truck.
“How do you like it?” he said as he turned on the light. It wasn’t much of a place, just one tiny living room with a patched-up couch and a coffee table. A small television sat on one of those metal caddies with the plastic wheels, the kind you used to see back in the sixties. There was a table for two in the dining room, with metal chairs covered in vinyl. Also from the sixties. He turned on the dining room light and pushed a pile of papers onto the floor. “Sit down,” he said.
I hesitated a moment, then sat. Humor the man, see this through, then get the hell out of this town and never come back.
He brought back a bottle of Wild Turkey and two glasses. “Set us up,” he said. “I’ll go get exhibit A.”
“I don’t think either of us needs any more to drink tonight,” I said.
“Just pour,” he said. He left the room, going into what had to be the bedroom. I just sat there in the cheap glare of the overhead light, waiting to see what he was talking about.
He came back into the room with a shotgun. Just what I needed to see at that point. Another shotgun.
“You know what this is?” he said, sitting in the chair across from me.
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t breathe.
“For God’s sake, McKnight, I’m not going to shoot you. Relax.”
He laid the gun on the table. It was pointed away from me. I tried to breathe again.
“I bet you don’t know what this is,” he said.
I shook my head.
“This is the gun Maria shot Wilkins with.”
I just looked at it.
“I bet you’re wondering why I have it.”
I nodded my head.
“After she shot him, she called me. It was about nine o’clock at night. I figured, This is it. This is the call. She wants me to go over there.”
“I thought I told you to pour us a drink,” he said. He took the bottle and poured himself three fingers, then poured the same for me and put it down in front of me. I didn’t touch it.
“She wanted me to come over all right,” he said. “Because she had just shot a man on her front porch, and she didn’t know what to do. I went over there and saw what had happened, told her to get in her car and get on over to Rocky’s place, quick. Act like nothing had happened. I took the gun, looked around outside a little, made sure nobody was around. Then I left. When I got back to the station, the phone was ringing, somebody calling in about the gunshot. I let Rocky go down first. Then I was right behind him, after I stopped in here to hide the gun.”
He drank half the glass and looked at me. “You ever do something that stupid?” he said.
“Chief, you made a mistake,” I said. “I can understand how it happened. Why don’t you put the glass down and go to bed.”
He shook his head. “It gets worse,” he said. “Once you do something stupid, you gotta do something else. And then something else. It kinda just builds on you, you know? Until you don’t have any control over it anymore.”
“What else did you do?”
“Oh, not that much,” he said. “Besides compromising a crime scene, hiding evidence… What else did I do?” He drained the rest of his glass, leaned forward to pour another. He missed the glass with some of it, dribbling whiskey onto the barrel of the shotgun.
“I almost killed you, for one thing,” he said. “When I dragged you in for no reason. Took the cuffs off you. I was thinking maybe I could shoot you right then, tell everybody you tried to jump me. Then you wouldn’t be trying to find out what’d happened to Wilkins, and wouldn’t be…” He looked to his right, as if he could see all the way across town. “You wouldn’t be in that house. With Maria.”
“You didn’t do it,” I said. “It didn’t happen.”
“Rocky showed up,” he said. “If he hadn’t, I think I would have done it. I really do, McKnight. I would have killed you. That’s how far it’s gone. One mistake, then another. Until you don’t even recognize yourself anymore.”
“Chief…”
“You know what else?” he said. “Your man Wilkins there. The con artist. I’ve been talking to the doctor. I
