This Is What I Want (24 page)

SAM

The timing was exquisite. When Sam’s truck came to a rolling stop where Ellison met Main, Raleigh’s Lexus dissected the intersection and headed south, toward Sidney. Sam let another pickup, Elbert Fleener’s, slip past before he fell in. He’d watch this play out from an actionable distance.

A mile out of town, Elbert, hauling potable water, took the right turn Sam knew was coming, and then it was just him and Raleigh in the visible portion of the southbound lane. Sam didn’t move up to close the distance. He turned the radio off and settled into the white noise of the truck’s tires against asphalt.

Back in town, Raleigh had passed him without even a glance, and Sam couldn’t be sure whether he’d know the truck, anyway. No matter. He would hang back, a silent stalker, and he would go where Raleigh led. And there . . .

Well, that was a good question, wasn’t it? Sam hadn’t exactly given that much thought. Patricia sure had the fear in her eyes, though, and he had been all too willing to let her think he was going forth with the worst of intentions. She’d tried to sit there, serene, while the ceaseless waves of anger and hurt had pounded on him, and he’d turned that around right quick by getting up and leaving. She was slumped and broken when he left, and that served her right for what she’d done.

He wouldn’t mind throwing a little fear into Raleigh, too. Sam shifted in his bucket seat and fastened a harder grip on the wheel. Nobody respects a commitment anymore. That’s what it comes down to, Sam figured. If Patricia had been inclined to wander, then she was weak. If Raleigh proposed to be there to scoop her up, then he was opportunistic. Neither quality was worth bragging about.
Maybe,
Sam thought,
I can keep this guy away from some other poor bastard’s marriage if I can scare him a little
.

Piece by piece, then, the course of action came to Sam, the workability of it just as evident. He tightened up again, anticipating, committed. He flipped the radio back on and the voice of the old crooner Jim Reeves floated into his ears, delivering an apt tune for the occasion:

He’ll have to go
. . .

When Raleigh turned into the Lazy Z parking lot, Sam registered a sliver of surprise. It’s not that Sidney could boast four-star accommodations, but the Z couldn’t even dream about such plaudits. At its best, it was an overnight stay for travelers seeking wider horizons. At worst, it was a flophouse. Whatever the case, Raleigh and his snooty attitude and his new Lexus fit the scene bizarrely.

Sam idled into the parking lot and backed into a space across the lot from where Raleigh stood at his trunk, retrieving his notes and his laptop case. Sam watched from the cab, sizing him up, for he’d never before looked at this man, someone he’d known since he was a kid, and tried to ferret out the best way to kick his ass. Sam’s mouth went to cotton as he looked Raleigh up and down. For the first time, Sam noticed that he was actually a bear of a guy—maybe six four, probably 210, 220. Big hands. Broad shoulders. Sam had always dismissed Raleigh as a sissy, someone lost in pretty word swirls that didn’t amount to anything worth talking about. Now, here, he looked a hell of a lot more formidable than that.

“Nerves,” Sam told himself. “It’s the nerves, damnit.”

He forced himself to stick to his tossed-together plan, and now he reached under the passenger-side seat, his blind hand coming across the thick forged steel he’d been certain he’d find there. He found his grip and drew it out, eighteen inches of monkey wrench, the vise jaws gone to casual rust since their last use. It would do. Small enough to handle easily, big enough to threaten damage—or inflict it, if necessary.

He opened his door and brought his left foot to the pavement. He stood erect, and the right foot followed. He shut the truck door, which responded with a creak, and Sam froze. Raleigh, unbothered, continued sorting through his papers in the trunk. Sam crept forward, his left arm at his side, his hand holding the wrench.

Sam took steps slow and deliberate. He licked his lips and swallowed the saliva pooling in his mouth. As he approached, his shadow swept across Raleigh’s open trunk, and that’s when Raleigh finally turned around. Sam pulled himself up to a stop.

Raleigh looked him in the eye first, and Sam tried to fashion a poker face out of the moment.

“What are you doing here?” Raleigh asked. His eyes moved now to the object in Sam’s left hand. “Is that for me?”

Sam’s body stiffened, his mind locked in a stalemate with his motor skills. His limbic system engaged, screaming out orders to start swinging. His hand, however, loosened the grip on the wrench.

“You’re a piece of garbage, Raleigh,” he said at last.

“I’ve been called worse.”

The nonchalance. The sheer gall. Sam hadn’t felt in his right mind since Henrik had gone after him, and now the only thought that bubbled up was one cloaked in incredulity. How could Raleigh be so unaffected by what he’d wrought?

Sam dropped the wrench at his own feet.

“I figured,” Raleigh said. “You don’t have the guts.”

Sam held his gaze. “You’re not worth it. You’re a piece of garbage who takes advantage of other men’s wives.”

Raleigh closed the trunk of his car and adjusted the box of papers under his arm.

“I have sex with a lot of married women,” he said. “Guilty. Maybe husbands ought to ask themselves why that’s happening. I’ve never taken advantage of anyone.”

“You took advantage of Patricia.”

Raleigh sat back against his car. “Ah, yes. Well, Patricia is someone special, isn’t she? She’s not like the others. Two things about that. First, I didn’t have sex with Patricia. Second, last I checked, she went back to you, although for the life of me I can’t see why. This isn’t really about her, though, is it?”

“Rationalize all you want,” Sam said. “You’ve put my marriage in jeopardy.”

“Simple truths simply aren’t truthful. You put it in jeopardy, long ago, with your inattention and stupidity.”

In the staring contest that ensued, Sam tried to find a shore he could swim toward. Anger at Patricia. At himself. At Raleigh, no doubt. But the encounter left him shaken, too, because he hadn’t expected Raleigh to be so matter-of-fact or dead in the eyes. The violence Sam hoped to marshal relied on an equal, opposite reaction from the object of his rage, and Raleigh offered nothing there.
He’s a sociopath,
Sam thought. This man, with a seemingly boundless capacity to suss out empathy and human motivation, was an empty vessel.

Sam hung his head. Raleigh pushed himself off the car and brushed past him.

“Next time,” Raleigh said, “don’t bring a wrench if you’re not prepared to use it. Makes you look like a schmuck.”

Sam waited till the receding steps fell fully away and the opening and closing of the door signaled that Raleigh was inside. Then, he knelt, picked up his wrench, and went back to his truck. Once out of the parking lot, he turned the nose of it north toward Grandview. Home. Or what home used to be, anyway.

THE CHIEF

If anything, Alfonso looked even worse. Adair sat at his hospital bedside, Dea across from her on the other side, holding her husband’s hand. The swelling in Alfonso’s face had cut off the oxygen to his burst capillaries, leaving the bruises morphing from red to blue. He sucked water from a Styrofoam cup through a straw, and then he handed the cup to Dea and smiled. He’d been smiling the whole time Adair had been there. It was unnerving.

Adair tried again.

“Alfonso.”

He turned his head her way, and Adair got a fresh look at the deep, stitched-up cuts on his cheekbones and the jagged line along his brow. It was as if he hadn’t defended himself at all. She looked at his arms and hands. Nothing there. None of it made any sense, and Alfonso was no more inclined to shed light on the situation now than he had been hours earlier, in the park.

“Alfonso,” she said again, “I’m going to level with you. I think I know who did this.”

“I fell down,” he said. The words came out malformed.

“Bullshit.” A sharpness she hadn’t intended infused the words, and Dea let out a squeak, then fortified her hold on her husband.

“I fell down,” he said.

Adair shook her head. She looked at the Medeiros children, all four of them, ranging from age four to twenty. They held up the wall across from their father’s bed, long-faced and sullen.

It was Dea who finally spoke.

“We don’t want any more trouble,” she said. “Alfonso’s sorry this happened, aren’t you, baby?” Alfonso turned his head and looked at the ceiling, sad-eyed. He nodded.

“
You’re
sorry?”

“Please,” Dea said. “We don’t want any more trouble.”

The exodus of RVs and cars with plates from elsewhere passed Adair southbound as she drove back to Grandview. The gathering she’d obsessed over and planned for had disbanded, and by the evening, there’d be little evidence the crowds had ever been there. She remembered, now with a damning perspective, what Swarthbeck had told her after her first Jamboree planning meeting. “It’s gonna be a whipsaw. You’ll think it’s never gonna end, and then it will be over like that. The damnedest thing.” She wondered now if he meant it as an advisory or a warning.

At the Country Basket, as she was coming out of the store with an energy drink, she met Sam Kelvig coming in. They lingered outside the glass doors silently, facial contortions filling out the meanings for which words were insufficient.

“I’m sorry,” she said finally.

“I know.”

“Do you hate me?”

“No,” he said. She took note of the deadness in his eyes and words, and she didn’t feel better.

He pushed through the doors to get inside the store, and Adair exhaled.

Back in the car, she fished her phone from the console and punched in a text message.

Where are you?

She sipped her drink and watched the screen.

North end. Sup?

Meet me on Telegraph Hill. Need to talk. Five minutes.

K.

On the hill above Grandview, Adair sipped the last of her drink and set the can on the hood of her cruiser, next to Joe LaMer. She was tired. Every blessed inch of her.

She telescoped her gaze across the valley. The afternoon had rolled in overcast. Spotlights punched holes in the cloud cover and illuminated patches of the town below. Beautiful. The kind of day people don’t appreciate the way they should.

“You look tired,” LaMer said.

“Yeah. I am.”

He crossed his arms and tried to find the spot on the horizon that had drawn her attention. “So what’s up?”

“I need to ask you something,” she said.

“Shoot.”

“What happened to Alfonso?”

LaMer took off his cap, holding it in his right hand while his left scratched at his dampened hairline. “Got beat up.”

“Who did it?”

“I don’t know.” LaMer put himself back together. “Why?”

“I think you do know.”

“No, I don’t. But you have a theory. Let’s have it.”

Adair set her jaw. She had no cards here—just whatever amount of gumption she could muster. All she had was the fact that Alfonso’s beating, so repellent to everyone else, hadn’t seemed to move LaMer, and she wanted to know why.

“I don’t have a theory,” she said. “Just questions. Gut feelings, maybe. What if I told you I don’t trust you anymore?”

LaMer got a faraway look about him. It was the one she’d seen in Pete’s on Friday, as though he wasn’t really with her.

“I guess I’d say I was sorry to hear that. I trust you.”

“Sure you do.”

He said nothing.

“I don’t think we can work together,” she said. “What if I asked you to leave?”

“I’d say no.”

“You can be on a rig tomorrow making a lot more than we’re paying you.”

“No.”

They were squared off now, each dug in and unyielding.

“I’ll keep pushing,” she said. Her heart revved.

“Swarthbeck will put me right back on the job. You have to know this. You’re in much more jeopardy than I am, Adair.”

She felt her knees go, as if someone had sliced the tendons. She caught herself and held steady.

LaMer only looked at her. He didn’t need to do anything else. The meanings and the intimations were clear enough.

“You disappoint me,” she said, turning and heading back to the door of her cruiser.

“Sorry,” he said.

“No, you’re not.”

She dropped into the driver’s seat of the cruiser, fired it up, then spit gravel in LaMer’s direction as she raced out of there, back to the highway, down the hill, into the cold cradle of the town below.

PATRICIA

She’d managed to fill the big suitcase, the one they’d bought at that outlet store outside Denver, with enough clothes to last her a week, which was about as long as she imagined Nancy and Mel Drucker would want her staying in their basement. They were good people, the Druckers, but a week was the outskirts of anyone’s toleration of visitors, and so Patricia had her mind set on that marker as a time for her to leave before she trampled the welcome mat.

After that? Well, that’s uncertainty for you. The Druckers lived two blocks away, and she figured she could stand that distance from Sam and the house and everything she’d managed to claim in this life. If a week and a two-block walk couldn’t put a damper on this rage she’d unleashed, if Sam couldn’t find a place in his heart for her anymore, she’d have to face up to some choices she never thought she’d have to make.

A rap at the bedroom door. “Mom?”

“Yes.”

Sunlight sliced the darkened room as Samuel slipped past the door and found her at the chore.

“No,” he said. “You’re not doing this.”

She lugged the suitcase off the bed and onto the floor. “It’s for the best.”

“It’s not. It’s madness. Where’s Dad?”

“I don’t know.” That was the truth, as far as it went. She’d braced herself for some indeterminate calamity, but there’d been no sign of it. No sirens or phone calls or footsteps at the door. No Sam, either, and that frankly terrified her.

“Well, come out into the living room and sit down until he gets here.”

“I should just go.”

“Mom,” Samuel said. “Sit down and talk to me.”

Patricia mostly listened, rapt, as Samuel laid bare the notions she’d been considering in ways that she hadn’t examined. He told her of his talk that morning with Megan, how he’d bent her ear about happiness and how slippery it seemed. Megan had said, simply, that she no longer sought happiness but fulfillment. When her marriage ended and her job went away and her mother died, compelling her to return to Grandview and take care of her father, she didn’t figure happiness was something she was likely to see again. She was wrong about that, he said. Happiness comes and goes, all the time.

“It’s transient,” he told Patricia, in Megan’s words. “It’s driven by circumstance. And I sat there and I said, ‘My god.’ I mean, my god. I thought if I changed this or that, or went somewhere new, I’d find it. It doesn’t work. For me, it hasn’t worked. I think I’m looking for the wrong thing.”

Patricia nodded. Her eyes filled.

“You love him,” Samuel said.

“Yes.”

“He loves you.”

She nodded.

He put his arm around her and pulled her in, and she folded herself into his shoulder, and she buried her burden there.

Nighttime fell, and they were alone in the house. Almost as if on cue, Jamboree had ended and the first cool, wet day of the summer slid into its place, dropping a gully washer on Grandview.

Patricia and Samuel dined on soup, the quickie potato kind that she’d often made for him and Denise when they were kids. She mostly let him be; it was clear he was chewing on something inside. Their talk had been a catharsis of sorts, but now she wasn’t sure for whom. Her tears had dried and her jumbled insides had sorted themselves out again, and for all of that she was thankful. Samuel, on the other hand, had drawn inward and quiet, and she knew that well. When he was a little boy, it had bothered her to the point of worry, that someone so young could seem so serious and self-contained. The pediatrician in Billings had told her not to stress out about it, that Samuel was a normal, healthy boy in all of the measurable ways. Now, that stoicism fit him better. He was considered and kind, a full-grown man.

When Sam breached the front door, drenched and distant, his bloodied bandage askew on his head, Patricia and Samuel were up and tending to him.

“Dad, are you OK?” Samuel guided him to a seat in the living room.

“Yes. Fine.”

Patricia reached for the bandage, and he looked at her a bit bewilderedly but allowed her to remove it in a slow unfurling.

“Where have you been?” she said.

“Around. Been thinking.”

“Tell us,” Samuel said.

Patricia disposed of the soiled bandage and went to the hall closet to find a fresh dressing. She came back and nodded at Sam, and he tipped his head forward so she could wrap it.

“I saw Mel Drucker at the Double Musky. He said you’re moving in.”

“Not moving in,” she said, her voice a whisper. “Just . . . I don’t know.”

“I wish you wouldn’t.”

Patricia completed the job, and she slipped her fingers under his chin and lifted his head. His eyes were ringed in red.

“OK,” she said. “I won’t.”

Sam leaned back. “I’ve been thinking about what Mama said. I think I’ll move over there while I’m closing up the house.”

“OK,” Patricia said. She clamped down hard on what was coming up from her.

“Just temporary. We’ll see how it goes,” he said.

She nodded.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“I’m sorry, too.” He reached out, and she set her hand in his. Samuel, from his seat next to his father, found Sam’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze. Patricia closed her eyes and tried to hold the picture in her aperture for as long as it could last.