time, packing it in, talked to me on the way out.”
Barry nodded. “Well, there you go.” I thought he was done, and then he said, “That lady, watching the news. She did more than most people. She actually got up, went to her door, and opened it to stick her head out, just to be sure.”
“But she didn’t hear the second shot, so she sat back down.”
“Yeah, pretty much. But she thought she heard a man’s voice. Thought she heard him say one word.”
I waited.
“She heard someone say ‘shame.’”
I let the word bounce around inside my head for a second. I thought back to what Natalie Bondurant had told us after she’d spent some time interviewing our son.
“Derek,” I said. “That’s what he heard someone say, in the Langley house.”
“I know,” Barry said.
I ran my hand over the top of my head. “Barry, there’s so much going on, I can’t keep it all straight.”
“You and me both,” he said. He said I was free to go and turned to walk away, then stopped and looked back. “There might be some good news about your son today,” he said.
I started to open my mouth to ask, but Barry held up his hand. “I got nothing else to tell you.”
“Then let me ask you about something else,” I said, closing the distance between us. “There’d be a report somewhere, wouldn’t there, about Brett Stockwell taking a header off Promise Falls?”
“Ten years ago?”
“Yeah.”
“I suppose so.”
“I’d like to see it.”
Barry studied me for a couple of seconds. “Let me see what I can do.”
THIRTY-ONE
We still managed to get another yard in before lunch. Drew threw himself into his work. I couldn’t help thinking that if he’d put the same energy into robbing banks as he did into cutting yards, he’d have a shitload of money tucked away someplace by now. I was going to phone Ellen about Lance, but decided she didn’t need any more news to distract her from dealing with Natalie Bondurant, and getting our son sprung from jail.
For lunch, we drove back down by the river, just down from the falls, even got the same picnic table.
“So that was the mayor,” Drew said, taking a drink from his water bottle. “Finley.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“And you used to work for him.”
“I did. Not a period I’m particularly proud of, but we all have to do things sometimes that we don’t much care for. The thing is,” and the words were catching in my throat as I tried to say them, “he wants me to come back and work for him again, now that his regular guy is dead. And the truth is, I could use the money.”
“So. .” Drew looked at me. Here it was, his second day on the job, and it was looking like he was about to be laid off. And after all he’d done to save his boss’s life. And his boss’s wife’s life.
“Look, I haven’t made up my mind yet,” I said.
Drew bit into his sandwich. “It’s okay,” he said. “Whatever you decide.”
“Ellen won’t believe it,” I said. “If I go back and work for him, it’d have to be temporary, that’s for sure. Until he found someone else to replace Lance.”
“So Lance was his driver?”
“Yeah. He’d been with the mayor’s office a long time, doing the same thing I did, before I quit.”
“Why’d you quit?”
I took a deep breath. “There were lots of things. But they all came to a head one night. Things got a bit out of hand.”
“What do you mean?”
“Let’s just say that marriage is not all that sacred an institution for this guy, and the thing is, to a degree, if you want to fool around behind your wife’s back, that’s none of my business, you know? I don’t have to like it, but then I’m not the morality police, either. But Jesus, when it’s a kid. .”
Drew picked up on that right away. “A kid?”
“You know, a street kid. I looked at her ID. Even if he didn’t know for sure, he could have guessed she was underage, there was no excuse. Listen,” I said, recalling that I was supposed to keep my former boss’s indiscretions to myself, “I shouldn’t even be talking about this. It’s over. Maybe, I don’t know, he’s not as big an asshole now as he was then.”
Drew said, “So you just quit?”
“After I’d punched him in the nose, I kind of had to.”
“So this kid, she was hooking?”
I nodded. “I gave her my name and number, told her to get in touch with me, but she never did.”
“But you knew who she was,” Drew said. “You’d seen her ID.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“You never tried to track her down, help her get her life back on track?” Drew asked.
“No,” I said. “I didn’t do that.”
I felt Drew’s eyes on me. “I remember her name,” I said. “Sherry. Sherry Underwood.”
“And you’re going to go work for that man again?” Drew asked. “A man like that?”
“Maybe people change,” I said, although I didn’t believe, in my heart, that Randall Finley was really any different today than he was back then. Maybe just more careful. “You’ve changed, haven’t you? You tried to rob a bank. Would you do that today?”
Drew thought about the question. “Maybe,” he said.
The fact was, if I went back to work for Randy, I’d be doing it for my son. To pay for Derek’s lawyer. I’d have driven Satan himself to work if it meant I’d be able to help my boy.
We were nearly wrapping up for the day. We were hot and sweaty and matted with grit. My cell rang.
“Something’s happening,” Ellen said. “Natalie just called and told me to meet her at the courthouse. Get here as fast as you can.”
I dropped Drew off at his mother’s house, then booted it downtown. He’d been pretty quiet the rest of the afternoon, at least during those moments when we weren’t using any of the equipment. Once in the town’s center, I had to circle the block three times until I found a spot long enough to accommodate the truck and trailer.
I looked a mess, but from the sound of Ellen’s voice, this was not the time to go home and take a shower. I found her and Natalie Bondurant near the front entrance to the courthouse. Ellen gave me a quick once-over, smiled, and said, “You’ve got a twig stuck to your neck.” She reached out and plucked it off.
I liked that she was smiling.
“They’re dropping the charges,” Natalie said. “They’re kicking him loose.”
“Oh my God,” I said and threw my arms around Ellen. We held on to each other as Natalie continued.
“The case was already falling apart,” she said. “They might have had enough to go to trial, but they knew they’d never win. What clinched it was the gun.”
“The gun?” I asked.
“The one found at your place last night. They ran a ballistics check on it and determined it was the same weapon that was used on the Langleys.”
“Jesus,” I said, taking my arms from around Ellen. “So those two, Mortie what’s-his-name and his buddy, they killed Albert and Adam and Donna.”
“Well, that’s yet to be proved,” Natalie said. “But that’s the gun they left behind. It’s difficult to build a case against your son when he’s sitting in jail and the gun he supposedly used ends up in the hands of those two. Not that there isn’t a way it couldn’t have happened, but the cops would have to connect the dots, and there aren’t any dots to connect.”
