Hunter's Moon (34 page)

“What do I look like? Your lawyer?”

“Now that you mention it, you both take a lot of my money and I don’t see much in the way of results.”

“I’ve called your lawyer, and he’s working on getting you out of here,” Elliott said, ignoring CJ’s jab. “But I came to see you because you won’t return my calls.”

“Yeah, sorry about that. I’ve been on vacation.”

“Whatever,” Elliott said, waving him off. He leaned in close. “If you’d picked up your phone, I could have told you the good news and not had to bother driving over here, relinquishing everything in my pockets and enduring a pat down that’s going to give me nightmares for weeks.”

That made CJ smile. He was about to grant Elliott an apology when something his agent had said hit him.

“What good news?”

It was Elliott’s turn to smile. The man leaned back in his chair and looked as if he would withhold whatever the good news was from his best client. Considering the circumstances, and taking into account the fact that CJ had essentially ignored his agent for more than two weeks, he couldn’t fault him. He sat there and waited for Elliott to break, knowing he could wait him out.

Elliott knew it too so he gave up the charade. “As of 5:00 p.m. yesterday,
The Buffalo Hunter
became your bestselling book of all time.”

The look of shock on CJ’s face must have been what Elliott was hoping for because he grinned at his favorite client.

“That little stunt you pulled in Albany?” he said. “Best publicity you could have come up with. The second you hit the evening news the book started flying off the shelves.” He laughed and slapped the table, and CJ saw the guard flinch. “Come to think of it,” Elliott went on, “now that you’ve actually been arrested, you might break a sales record.”

As CJ watched his agent enjoy the moment, he himself was torn by the news. He was happy for the sales, but it was difficult to enjoy it while stuck in jail.

“Wonderful news,” CJ said, with a vocal inflection that said otherwise. “You must be so proud.”

“What? You’re not happy about it?” Elliott asked.

“You do realize I’m in jail, right?”

“A temporary setback,” his agent said, unknowingly parodying CJ’s new friend Lemon.

“Time’s up,” the guard said. He approached the table as CJ stood.

“Get me out of here,” CJ said to Elliott. “Then we’ll celebrate the book.”

Two hours later, CJ was alone in the holding cell. When the guard brought him back from his meeting with Elliott, Lemon was gone, which had disappointed him. He didn’t have anything against solitude. In fact, he functioned best when alone, which was probably why his marriage hadn’t worked out. But in here he had nothing with which to occupy his time. It left him alone with nothing but his thoughts, and as this was something of a dark period in his life, his thoughts were not the best companions.

So rather than brood over the myriad unpleasant things that occupied his world, he chose to focus on something pleasant, and it didn’t surprise him that it wasn’t his recent book sales. He thought about the house he and Dennis were fixing up. He hadn’t stopped to consider, during the work itself, how much he’d been enjoying himself, how cathartic a project like that could be. He was thinking about the work they still had to do when a guard—a different one this time—appeared at the cell door.

“Mr. Baxter, you’re being released.”

While that didn’t shock him as much as had Elliott’s pronouncement, it was a close second.

“I am?”

“You are.” The guard unlocked the door and stepped aside.

“Why?” CJ asked.

“I don’t know and I don’t care,” his jailer-turned-liberator said. “I just know the sooner you get up and get out of here, the sooner I can get back to my coffee.”

He didn’t have to tell CJ a third time. CJ followed the guard the same way he’d gone to see his agent, only this time they went through that room and out into an adjoining area, then to a window, which was where the guard left him.

Before CJ could say a word, a woman on the other side of the window slid a box through a slot at the bottom.

“Please make sure all your things are here and sign that piece of paper.”

CJ did as he was told. His wallet, watch, and car keys were accounted for, as was the key to the Horch. He signed the paper that itemized each of these things and slid it back through the slot.

“Where can I get my car?” he asked the clerk.

She looked at the paper work and said, “We don’t have your car. Were you notified that it had been impounded?”

“No.”

“Then it’s probably right where you left it.”

CJ grimaced. “That’s no good. I left it at my soon-to-be ex-wife’s house, and if I go over there I’ll probably wind up right back here.”

“Not my problem,” she answered with a shrug.

CJ decided that it would be useless to ask if she knew why he was now a free man. He gathered up his things and proceeded down the sterile hallway until he came to a door that, when opened, deposited him in the lobby, where he saw what was at least a partial answer to his question.

“For what I pay you, couldn’t you have got me out of there sooner?” CJ asked with a half smile.

His lawyer shook his head.

“I hate to say this, since no lawyer ever wants to admit they didn’t earn their keep, but I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“Come again?”

CJ shook hands with the man who had taken more of his money over the last few years than anyone else.

“It’s true,” Al said. “I just got in this morning from Atlanta.

And by the time I made it in to see the prosecutor, he’d already sprung you.”

Before CJ could ask the question, Al said, “Your wife dropped the charges.”

Out of all the surprising things CJ had heard so far today, that might have been the most unexpected.

“Why in the world would she do that?”

“Don’t ask me,” his lawyer said. “But if I were you, I’d get out of here before she changes her mind.”

The two men walked out into the Franklin sun.

“You mind giving me a ride?” CJ asked.

“For what you pay me, and because I didn’t do anything to spring you? Sure.”

CJ got into the lawyer’s new-smelling Lexus. “My hard-earned money at work,” he said.

“Consider it a high-class taxi.”

As they drove to CJ’s house, and since he assumed this would come back to him as billable time, he and Al talked a bit about the upcoming divorce, but without having seen anything from Janet’s lawyer yet, there wasn’t much they could do.

“Oh, I almost forgot to tell you,” Al said. “The counsel for our favorite book critic made us a settlement offer.”

“How much?”

“Thirty thousand.”

CJ whistled.

“It’s a good offer. If they take you to court with the wrong jury, you’re liable to lose a whole lot more than that.”

“Still . . .”

“You have the number-one seller in America right now, from what I hear. You can afford it.”

“Is that your sage advice?” CJ asked. “That I can afford it?”

“A whole lot easier than you could afford four times that amount.”

“If I lose.”

“Trust me, you’ll lose,” Al said with an emphatic nod.

“Tell me why I pay you again.”

“Because I provide curb-to-curb service,” Al said as he pulled up to the house.

The Horch was still there and CJ breathed a sigh of relief.

“Nice car,” Al said. “Is that yours?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes.” CJ left his lawyer to ponder that as he exited the Lexus and fished for the key in his pocket.

When he reached the car he hesitated before getting in. He stood there, his hand on the door handle, and looked at the house, realizing that it wasn’t his anymore. It didn’t matter whose name graced the mortgage; it was Janet’s house. He had no idea why she dropped the charges and he was curious enough to want to walk up, knock on the door, and ask her. And he still wanted Thor. But he knew better than to press his luck. He’d let Al fight it out. Maybe if CJ sent him to court with the dog as the only nonnegotiable point . . .

He opened the car door and got in and was about to slip the key into the ignition when he saw Janet open the front door and step out onto the porch. Then a tan blur zipped by her legs, heading straight toward the Horch. Thor didn’t wait for CJ to get out of the car before he jumped on him. CJ went to a knee so the dog wouldn’t knock him over.

As he roughhoused with Thor, he looked past the dog to where Janet stood watching. After a minute or so, once he’d calmed Thor, he stood but stayed close to the car.

“Thanks.” It was the only thing that seemed appropriate.

“You’re welcome,” she said.

CJ watched the dog head for the front of the house, sniffing as he went. When he lost sight of the dog he looked back at Janet. “Why are you giving him back?”

“Because he’s
your
dog. Now don’t ask stupid questions.” It was the kind of thing she often said, but this was the first time in a long while that he didn’t hear any malice in the words.

CJ suspected there was much he could say, though he also guessed none of it would come out right. Anyway, the moment felt perfect as it was. He whistled for his dog, and a few seconds later Thor came running around a corner. CJ opened the door and the dog jumped in, and CJ barely grimaced as the dog’s dirty paws clambered over the leather seats.

Graham stood on the porch, watching as the sun sank behind the trees and the fireflies began to twinkle in relief against the darkening grass. Absently he rubbed the knuckles of his right hand with his left. Behind him the house was silent, which meant that Meredith, if she was crying at all, was doing so quietly.

Still, he was certain the kids knew, because there was rarely a time when the house was absent the noises that accompanied childhood. The quiet behind him was like that of a tomb, and there was a part of him that hated that. Yet there was another part of him that was pleased with the power he had to make silent something that was, by its nature, vibrant.

The thing he regretted most was that it was likely things between him and Meredith would never be the same again. One does not hit one’s wife without some relational repercussions. Even now, in the solitude afforded by his outburst, he had no idea why he’d done it. She’d made a comment about the move to the house on Lyndale—one of those throw-away complaints about the work involved, the things that had to be fixed up around this place before they could put it on the market—and for some reason Graham had flown into a rage.

He knew that when he went in, after Meredith put the kids to bed, he’d explain it away as the cumulative stress of the campaign— one damaged in short order by his brother, his sister, and then his own parents, whose latest exchange suggested that George had not embraced Daniel’s admonition about keeping the family clear of scandal. All of those things were true, yet Graham knew that none of them had been significant contributors to what had happened this evening.

There was only one thing that was—a thing that Graham had carried with him since childhood, born in the Baxter blood, honed through experience, and sublimated by necessity. A thing that had only once reached its fullness, and that in Eddie’s death. That was what had bubbled to the surface tonight, the perfection of the violence that had coursed through the veins of every member of the family since before Silas Baxter had fired upon the British.

It was a truth that Graham could both embrace and rue at the same time, and he suspected that any one of his kin—even CJ —would have understood.

Chapter 27

The parade route took the fire trucks, the floats, the Adelia High marching band, and various other components down Main Street, until reaching City Hall, at which point it followed the traffic circle around and turned onto Second Avenue and then on to the park.

CJ, Artie, and Thor had great spots along the traffic circle, with the illusion of everything coming toward them before veering off into profile. CJ had never liked parades, had never understood the point of them, but Artie had insisted they attend the event, and CJ found he was actually enjoying the experience. A small-town parade had a different flavor than one in a large city. This wasn’t about spectacle as much as it was about community.