The Last Good Day (28 page)

Of course, that might be his own guilty conscience, he thought, noticing a pair of headlights intensify behind him. It was going to be a helluva conversation when he told her the company might be going down the tubes along with most of their savings. And having Bill Brenner involved just made it worse. Lynn had always despised the man, referring to him as “that greedy little bridge troll.”

He sped up as the car behind him put on its high beams, making a glaring white spot in his rearview.
Why is this guy riding my tail?

Near Indian Ridge, he tried to slow down and let the other car pass, but it stayed stubbornly in the single lane behind him. The high beams switched off and then flashed on again, a blink in the middle of a long cold stare.

Barry stepped on the gas and shot past the golf course construction project and the Van Der Hayden estate, doing a hair over forty, trying to lose him. But the glow from the headlights just seemed to heat up on the back of his neck.

He glanced up at the rearview, trying to glean what the guy wanted. But there was only a stark silhouette behind two blinding lights. Barry’s suspension squealed as the Saab listed on the turn.
Gimme a break.
He raised a hand. He was just thinking of veering onto the detour past the cow pasture, when the other driver suddenly reached up and put a revolving cherry top on his roof.

“Pull over,” said a voice over a loudspeaker, as if it were addressing Barry from the heavens.

“Oh
shit.
” Barry slowed down and pulled off on the deserted stretch right before the old millpond, realizing he should’ve seen this coming both literally and figuratively.

The cherry top kept pulsing behind him, throwing Maraschino red waves over his windshield.

Naturally, Michael Fallon was taking his time getting out of the car behind him, as if he had to arrange some special transport for the ungainly size of his balls. Barry pulled out his cell phone and tried to call Lynn. The answering machine picked up after two rings.

“Honey, I think I’m about to have a serious problem with your old boyfriend,” he began.

Fallon climbed out slowly, his shadow narrowing and lengthening on the desolate road as he approached the Saab.

“Call me back right away …”

“Sir, put that phone down.” Fallon stood by his open window.

“If you can’t reach me on the cell, try the police station …”

“Sir, I asked you to put that phone down …”

“He just pulled me over on Prospect without due cause.” Barry started to talk faster, determined to get as much of this conversation on tape as possible.

“Sir, a police officer is giving you an order …”

“I love you,” Barry said, staring at the cop and making sure he heard every word.

His authority ignored, Fallon suddenly reached through the window and tried to grab the phone. From old athlete’s instinct, Barry pushed the hand away, as if he was protecting the ball. Instantly he knew he’d made a serious mistake.

“Get out of the car with your license and registration.” The lieutenant drew back, no longer a man to be trifled with. “Keep your hands where I can see them at all times.”

Mechanically, Barry turned the phone off and got the proper cards from the glove compartment. “Why is it, pray tell, that you had me pull over, Officer?” he asked, trying to keep his temper in check.

“You were doing forty-two in a thirty-five zone. I clocked you with the radar gun.”

“After you almost ended up in my backseat because you were so close on my bumper. That’s great professional police work there.”

“Get out of the car, please.”

Barry remained at the wheel. “I believe I have the right to say no.”

Though it had been so long since he’d been a criminal attorney, he wasn’t sure exactly what the law said at the moment.

“Sir, you’ve already put your hands on me, so I can charge you with obstruction and resisting arrest if I feel like it,” said Fallon. “Now get out of the damn car and give me your license and registration.”

Moving deliberately, as if every gesture was being filmed, Barry climbed out, noticing that it was distinctly chillier up here in the hills than it was closer to the river.

Fallon took the cards and stood there studying them in the revolving light. He looked bulkier tonight, and it dawned on Barry that he was probably wearing a Kevlar vest under his windbreaker as well as a Glock in his shoulder holster.

“I understand you had a talk with the chief this morning,” Fallon said, without taking his eyes off Barry’s ID picture.

“We ran into each other buying coffee. But I guess you already knew that too.”

“I know a lot of things.”

A silver Nissan Pathfinder whipped by hard, nearly sideswiping both of them, but Fallon didn’t bother to look up.

“You’d think that if a man has a problem with somebody, he’d take it up with him directly instead of whining to the boss.” He put the license and registration on top of the Saab, where they could easily blow away. “I’d tend to say that’s a little on the chickenshit side. Wouldn’t you?”

“All right”—Barry raised his chin—“then let me take it up with you personally.
Stay away from my wife.
Is that direct enough?”

“
Your wife
may be a material witness in a murder investigation. I’m entitled to ask her anything I want.”

“Well, what she described to me didn’t sound anything like legitimate questioning.”

“Maybe she didn’t supply you with all the pertinent details. Ever think about that?”

“I heard enough,” Barry said. “Next time you want to talk to her, I think an attorney should be present.”

He started to reach for his license and registration as a GMC Safari came rushing by, blaring prime-time Rant Radio.

“Excuse me,” said Fallon. “I didn’t say you could take those back yet, did I?”

“Why? You have something else you want to say?”

“Turn around and put your hands together.”

“You’ve gotta be kidding me. I’m
a lawyer.
”

“I don’t care what you are. You interfered with a police officer doing his duty. Now give me your hands before I have to use the pepper spray.”

“Jesus Christ.” Barry turned slowly and presented his hands as if he was humoring an unreasonable child.

He heard the jangle of cuffs coming off Fallon’s belt and then felt cold steel biting deep into his wrists.

A Volvo station wagon cruised by slowly, and three children stared out at him through the back window. He felt a drizzle of embarrassment as their puzzled expressions receded and the Volvo’s brake lights flared in the distance.

“You have the right to remain silent.” Fallon took him firmly by the elbow and marched him back toward his unmarked Caprice. “Anything you say can and will be used against you …”

In the chill, Barry’s old knee injury started hurting, a painful throbbing in the cartilage that reminded him that the most powerful man in the United States at any given moment was not the president, not the head of the joint chiefs of staff, not even the chairman of GE, but a police officer with a loaded weapon and full discretion.

Fallon finished with Miranda, opened the back door of the Caprice, pushed Barry in, and slammed the door after him. Then he leaned against the side of the car for a moment as if he needed to catch his breath and clear his head. Barry watched the little condensed clouds come out of the lieutenant’s mouth and evaporate, thinking,
I am fucked.
He put his head against the window, resolving to try to stay calm.

The car sprung up as Fallon stopped leaning against it, walked to the front, and got in the driver’s seat.

“You know, you’re really about to make a huge mistake,” said Barry. “It’s not too late to put the brakes on this.”

“Excuse me, but
I’m
driving.” Fallon looked over his shoulder as he started the motor.

Lights surged across the dashboard, and Barry saw an orange cursor blinking on a small Motor Display Terminal. The car made an abrupt U-turn, leaving the Saab by the side of the road as if it had broken down.

The backseat of the Caprice was hot and stuffy. Despite the fragrance tree dangling from the rearview, there was an overwhelming odor of oil rags and gasoline. Barry felt his stomach turning before they’d even reached the first stop sign.

“You wouldn’t consider cracking the window, would you?”

“I’m fine,” said Fallon.

“You’re not going to call this in?” Barry rested his head against the glass, as if this was no matter of pressing concern.

“We’re five minutes from the station,” Fallon said sharply. “You gonna start telling me what to do?”

“No. Just curious. That’s all.”

As they cruised past the old Victorian on Birch Lane, Fallon shoved a cassette into the tape deck, and the winsome old 10CC hit “The Things We Do For Love” came on.

“Your wife used to like this song.” Fallon tapped two fingers on the wheel, keeping time. “You know that?”

“Doesn’t sound like her taste.”

“She used to make me play it for her over and over on the jukebox. I lost track of all the quarters I spent.”

Barry looked out the window, studiously ignoring him, as they joggled over a rough patch of road, the small lit-up porches of Indian Ridge appearing to extinguish in the dark as they passed.

“She used to like French Fries with mayonnaise too. Did you know that? She had to stop eating them because they made her skin break out.”

Barry bowed his head, trying to will himself to get into the Zone mentally, that place where you seemed to be both in the middle of the play and somewhere above it at the same time. But the rattling of a crowbar at his feet kept bringing him back.

“See, I know a lot of things you don’t know,” said Fallon.

The Zone.
Stay in the Zone. Don’t let him get to you. Concentrate. Pretend you’re alone on a mountaintop. Or on the foul line. Make the rest of the world fade away, so there’s only a hoop and a net floating in empty space. The crowbar clanked as they hit a pothole.

“She still like it rough?” Fallon grinned back at him.

“What?”

“I said,
does she still like it rough?
” They picked up speed, heading into the low-slung neighborhoods closer to the river.

All at once, Barry was out of the Zone and imagining himself taking the crowbar in both hands and splitting Fallon’s skull with it.

“Why don’t you shut the fuck up?”

“Oh, yeah,” said Fallon, beginning to enjoy himself, “she used to be up for anything. Absolutely anything.”

Barry’s wrists strained and bulged from the cuffs cutting off his circulation.

“Of course, that’s probably all over now. You probably never got any of that. It’s never the same after the first go-round. Especially after they have kids. It’s like seeing the Yankees in ’71 or the Stones in ’89. All the juice is gone. After that, it’s just going through the motions, isn’t it?”

Barry felt rage bubbling in his gut, threatening to boil out of him. Of course, that was what this cop wanted. To have an excuse to beat the balls off him.

“I’m sitting here, trying to decide which is sadder,” he said, staring at the tendons in the back of Fallon’s neck. “The fact that you’re still talking about this twenty-five years later or the fact that you thought it was that big a deal in the first place.”

“Oh, it was a big deal. Believe me. It was a big deal.”

“Then how come I never heard your name before?” he asked, focusing on the razor line where the hair was shaved. “Sounds to me like you’ve spent a lot of time making this into something it wasn’t.”

Fallon suddenly became very quiet, and a thin roll of skin appeared on the back of his neck. They’d reached a stop sign at the bottom of the hill. Moonlight rippled on the river ahead like floating wreckage. The police station was a sharp right. But on the left, Barry remembered, there was a series of abandoned old factories, a little RV park, and big vacant tracts with
FOR RENT
signs. He remembered Lynn warning Hannah never to go down that way, saying that no one would ever hear her scream if she was in trouble.

He watched the roll on the back of Fallon’s neck slowly expand like baking dough.

“Is that what
she
said?” Fallon asked, adjusting his rearview.

“My wife is a photographer. She always gives me the full picture.”

“Oh, she does, does she?” He turned the mirror a little more to study his passenger. “She ever talk about my family anymore?”

Barry looked out the window, trying not to take the bait and drive the hook any deeper into his own mouth.

“So are we going to the station?” he said. “Or you got some other idea?”

Fallon turned down the music abruptly. Through the underbrush of his bristle cut, Barry saw a faint second roll of skin, just an inch or so above the first one.

The lieutenant gave a surly grunt. “Hey,” he said quietly, “you don’t know shit about the full picture.”

I hurt him.
Barry watched the two rolls disappear.
Sitting here with both hands cuffed behind my back, I somehow managed to put a hurting on him.

“Excuse me.” He leaned forward. “You need to check your map? Because I know the way to the police station if you don’t.”

A northbound train passed before them, its windows lit up like the sprockets of a film running through a projector.

“Okay, fine. Let’s go your way.” Fallon dutifully put on the signal and turned the car right. “Maybe I can get you there in time for the last bus over to the county jail.”

29

AS SHE WALKED
through the glass double doors, Lynn remembered the last time she’d visited the town’s police station was senior year, right after she got stopped with Jeanine trying to buy beer with fake IDs. At Jeanine’s insistence, Lynn had stuffed the bag of pot she was carrying down the front of her pants in the squad car and then spent five minutes in the ladies’ room trying to flush it down the toilet while a matron waited outside. She could still recall the horror of the seeds and stems welling up over and over in the dank water that kept returning.