know they took that piece of buckshot out of him. He could wake up any minute, you know? I’m sitting here thinking, If he remembers what happened, all hell is gonna break loose. Maybe it would be better for everybody if he didn’t wake up. That county man who’s watching him, I’m thinking maybe I could go tell him to go home. I’ll watch him myself. Nobody’s looking, I’ll pull the plug on the respirator thing. I’m actually thinking this, McKnight. This is what I’ve come to.”
I sat there and listened to him. He was staring down at the gun.
“I know I’d kill that Harwood in a second,” he said. “That much, I’m sure of. I even told Maria that. I told her I’d kill Harwood for her, if that’s what it took. She didn’t believe me. She said she knew I’d never be able to do that.”
“Chief…”
“It gets even better,” he said. “There’s more to the story. I bet you’re wondering why I’m letting her lead me around by the dick this whole time. Aren’t you? Doesn’t it seem a little strange to you that I’m doing all this?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Delilah.”
“What about her?”
“What about her?” he said. “You want to know what about her? Maria told me she was my daughter.”
I didn’t have anything to say to that one.
“She told me it wasn’t her husband. They’d been trying for years. It was me, she said. I’m Delilah’s father.”
“When did she tell you that?”
“When she showed up here in Orcus Beach,” he said. “Eighteen years later, she tells me I’m her father. That was all part of the package, McKnight. When everything settled down, it was gonna be me and Maria together for the rest of our lives. With a daughter to come visit us.”
I let out a long breath, then sneaked a look at my watch. It was almost three in the morning. My hand was throbbing. I needed more ice.
“I bought it,” he said. “I totally bought it.”
“You don’t think it’s true?”
“I wanted to know for sure,” he said. “I knew she was born down in Florida, after Maria ran away. I called the vital records office down there, asked them to help me find Delilah’s birth certificate. They found it in two minutes, read it to me right over the phone. You know how hard it is to get a birth certificate in Michigan, McKnight? Things are different down there, I guess. Anyway, it said the father was Arthur Zambelli, deceased, but that was no surprise. Who else was she gonna say? But it also had the hospital where she was born, in Tampa. I called over there and got the medical records. This time, I had to tell them I was a police officer, but they didn’t even make me fax a letterhead or anything. They just gave me the information.”
“What did they tell you?”
“It said that baby Delilah’s blood type was B, and mommy Maria’s was O.”
“And yours is…”
“I’m an O,” he said. “An O and an O don’t make a B.”
“Okay, so she lied to you.”
“You know what else I did? Just for the hell of it?”
“What’s that?”
“I got the forensics report on Arthur Zambelli. From when he fell down that ditch and broke his neck. They did an autopsy. You wanna know what his blood type was?”
“Go ahead.”
“He was an A,” he said. “An O and an A don’t make a B, either.”
“Okay,” I said. “So what? What does it matter?”
“I think I know who Delilah’s real father is,” he said.
“Who?”
He just looked at me. He didn’t say anything.
“No,” I said. “No way.”
“They were together,” he said. “All that time when she was married to Zambelli. I know it.”
“You gotta be kidding me.”
“They’ve always had this sick thing between them,” he said. “I can see it now. I can see the whole-”
“For God’s sake,” I said.
“The whole sick thing,” he said.
He looked at his drink. He put it down, picked up the shotgun with one hand. With the other, he fumbled around in his shirt pockets, finally pulled out a piece of paper folded in half. “You want to know what I was seriously thinking about doing this afternoon?” he said. “Here, read this.”
I took it from him and unfolded it. It was a piece of official Orcus Beach stationery, with the little cannon insignia on the top. It read, “For Maria, and everything I wanted to believe.” That was it.
When I looked up, he had the shotgun barrel in his mouth. I dove over the table and knocked the gun away from him. He grabbed at it. For one horrifying instant, it was pointed right at my face. I knocked it away again, flipping the table right over into his lap. He fell backward in his chair, with the table and me and the gun all flying in different directions. Somehow, the gun landed without firing, without blowing either of us into pieces. He lay there on his back, his knees up in the air over the edge of his chair. I crawled over to him and looked at his face.
“Was that necessary, McKnight?” he said. “I was just seeing if I could reach the trigger. In case I work up the nerve someday.”
“Why are you doing this to me, Chief? Why did you bring me here?”
“Are you Catholic?”
“No,” I said. “I’m not Catholic.”
“So you’ve never been to confession.”
“No.”
“Father, forgive me for I have sinned,” he said. “It has been forty-five years since my last confession.”
“I’m leaving,” I said. “You need to sleep this one off.”
“I thought you’d understand, McKnight. I thought you’d be the one person in the world who I could tell this to. To whom, I mean. To whom I could tell. All of it.”
I got to my feet, turned the table back upright. I was going to leave the gun lying there in the corner, then thought better of it. I broke the gun open and put the shells in my pocket. Then I put the gun, still breached, on the table. I put his car keys next to the gun. I picked up the suicide note and put that next to the gun, too.
“McKnight,” he said. He was still on his back. His eyes were still closed.
“Good night, Chief,” I said.
“Give me the phone,” he said.
“Good night.”
“I want to call her,” he said. “Give me the phone. I want to call Maria.”
“Don’t call her,” I said. “Go to bed.”
“I’ll get it myself,” he said, not moving. “I’m going to call her. I’m going to wake her up and tell her that I know. She’s not my daughter.”
“Good night, Chief.”
“Don’t go,” he said. “You can’t go. You have to be my witness. I want somebody else to hear this.”
“Good night, Chief.”
“You can’t go,” he said. “You’re under arrest. I order you to stay here and be my witness.”
“Good night, Chief,” I said. And then I left. I walked out into the cold air, past the chief’s car and the leaning mailbox. I walked back down to the main road, all the way back to Rocky’s place. It still looked open, even after three o’clock in the morning.
This is what you do in Orcus Beach, it would seem. You sit around and you drink, and you think about all the mistakes you’ve made.
I fired up the truck and got myself out of there. At the edge of town, I saw the sign in the rearview mirror, WELCOME TO ORCUS BEACH, the letters backward, and under that the cannon in the sand.
I rolled down my window and threw out the two shotgun shells. And then I just kept driving.
