Too Close to Home

“No,” Derek said, almost dreamily. “I never heard anything like that at all.” His words were trailing off, like he was getting woozy. Spending the morning cutting grass in these sizzling temperatures would be enough to send someone into heatstroke. Add to that the shock of what had happened at the Langleys’, it was little wonder Derek looked as though he was about to collapse.

I grabbed him under the arms. Ellen said, “Derek? Derek?”

“Water,” I said to Barry. “I’ve got some in a cooler in the truck.”

Barry clearly had another plan and barked to a uniformed female officer, “I need some water here!” The woman bolted to one of the nearby cruisers, where evidently a few bottles were stashed. I eased Derek over to the closest Promise Falls police car and leaned him up against it. The cop was running back, cracking the plastic cap along the way, and handed the bottle to me. It was warm, but it was still water, and I brought it up to Derek’s lips and tipped it.

He took a few swallows, breathed shallowly.

“We need to get him inside, where it’s cooler,” Ellen said. Our house was still a hundred yards away, and the female officer offered to drive him. “I’ll go with him back to the house,” Ellen said to me, figuring, I guessed, that if I stayed behind with Detective Duckworth I’d learn even more about what had transpired in the night.

“It’s like he’s in shock or something,” Barry said as the car rolled up to our house.

“Wouldn’t you be?” I said. “Your best friend gets killed along with the rest of his family?”

Barry nodded slowly in agreement.

“So’s that your theory?” I asked. “That this is related to the case Albert was working on? Was there anything taken? The house torn apart?”

Barry appeared thoughtful. “I don’t know why the fuck this happened, Jim. All I know is, three people dead? There’s gonna be a shitstorm of interest around this one. Don’t think we’ve had a triple murder around here in some time, if ever. A few single ones of late, but something like this. .” He paused, then looked back to the highway. He seemed to be staring at our mailbox.

There was just the one, with the name Cutter on it. Last winter, I’d had to fix it after a snowplow took it down. The Langleys had their mail sent to a P.O. box in town. Albert didn’t like the idea of his mail sitting in a box by the highway, available to anyone passing by.

“What you looking at?” I asked Barry.

“Huh?” he said, as though he’d been daydreaming. “Nothing.”

FOUR

Before I could ask Barry anything else, our attention was caught by an approaching car. It was a big black vehicle, and it was slowing down at the end of the lane. Barry rolled his eyes and said, “Oh boy, we can all rest easy now, the big man is here.”

It was a Mercury Grand Marquis with heavily tinted windows. I could only see the car in profile, but I knew that the license plates on it read “PF 1.” What with all the other police vehicles up there, there was no room for the Mercury to pull over, so the driver opted to put on the flashers and block a lane of traffic.

Barry and I were standing side by side now, waiting for the great man’s appearance. Barry said to me, “Tell me why you did it.”

“Excuse me?” I was still thinking about the Langleys, and found Barry’s question a bit jarring.

“Why’d you punch him in the nose? How many times you going to make me ask you?”

“That’s just a rumor, Barry.”

“There’s not a civil servant in Promise Falls, or anybody else in town for that matter, who doesn’t know you punched the mayor in the nose,” Barry said. “It’s like our own urban legend.”

“You can’t believe everything you hear,” I said.

“Well, this is one of those stories I choose to believe,” Barry said. “This, and the one about Elvis working as a short-order cook at that diner just north of town.” He was watching the driver get out of the Grand Marquis. He was a tall man, lean, late thirties, with short blond hair except around back, where it hung down over his collar, mullet-style. “I mean, the mayor shows up at a council meeting, his nose the size of an orange, and guess who just happens to no longer be on the mayor’s payroll? Just think, you could still be working with Lance there if you hadn’t gone and fucked things up.”

“I’m happy with the way things have worked out,” I said.

The driver had his hand on the back door of the town car.

“What I heard is, even though you punched the mayor right in his fucking nose, you asked him for a letter of reference afterwards, and you got it,” Barry said. “I guess that was before you decided to go into business for yourself. Anyway, that tells me that you’ve got something on him that’s pretty fucking amazing. I mean, he never even pressed charges, and if there was ever a vindictive bastard out there, it’s Randall Finley.”

And with that, the door opened, and Mayor Finley emerged from the car.