Wide Open (14 page)

Tel considered that, tapped the retired banker on the shoulder, and the two of them got up from the table and left through the door to the restaurant side.

Once they were both gone, Pete scraped his chair back from the table. “I’m going to get me a beer,” he said. “If that’s all right with you, Hallie?” He made a mocking gesture, like the sweep of a hat.

“A little early, isn’t it?” Hallie said.

“It’s never too early,” Pete said.

While he was gone, Hallie looked at Martin. He waited, his hands flat on the table, straight backed but relaxed.

“Did you kill her?” Hallie asked. She’d meant to ask him first about the symbols and the lightning bolt and the flash when blood touched the floor, but she had to know, had to see what he did when she asked. Pete was returning from the bar with a long-necked beer, and he stopped, looked from one of them to the other.

“Your sister was … incredible,” Martin said. “She was smart and funny, and it’s horrible—I know—to imagine a world without her. It’s horrible that you were so far away.” He crossed his hands. “I can’t imagine how you feel,” he said. “I wouldn’t presume. But I understand that you want to feel that there’s an explanation for—”

“Oh, there’s an explanation,” Hallie said. She backed up a step. Her leg hit the back of the table behind her. “I don’t know what that explanation is,” she said, “but I know there’s something going on. And I’m going to find out what it is.”

“You don’t know shit, Hallie,” Pete said. He took a long draw on his beer and instead of crossing behind Martin and sitting back down, he took a step away from the table and faced Hallie directly.

“What’s that thing you’ve got on your belt buckle there, Pete?” Hallie said.

Pete actually looked down at his belt, as if he might have forgotten what he was wearing. When he looked back up, his lips had thinned down and his eyes looked mean and hard. “What’s it look like?”

“I gave that to him,” Martin said smoothly. “It’s representative of what Uku-Weber is all about. And Pete is one of my earliest local investors.”

“Is that right, Pete? You’ve got money to invest?”

Pete smiled at her, hooked a thumb in a belt loop.

“Is that from the meth lab or because your father died before he had a chance to change his will?”

Pete slammed his beer bottle onto the table and took two long strides toward her. “You shut up,” he said.

“Oh, bring it on, Pete.”

“Pete.” Martin was halfway out of his chair.

You, too,
Hallie thought. It wouldn’t settle anything, wouldn’t get her one step closer to finding out what had happened to Dell. And she didn’t care. She’d been good for days, and it had gotten her nowhere.

She stepped sideways to get clear of the table behind her. “You want to know what I know?” she said to Martin, leaning slightly to her left to talk around Pete.

“This isn’t right, Hallie,” Martin said. “This isn’t what Dell would have—”

“Don’t you—don’t you dare!”

She started forward. Pete shoved her hard. She stumbled back, recovered, and started forward again. She knew where her prybar was. She could reach it if she had to. And she hoped she’d have to. Hoped—

“Hallie, stop.”

The voice was quiet, but it carried over her harsh breathing, over Pete’s curses, over the sound of a door closing. Hallie closed her eyes. An ache as big as the South Dakota short-grass prairie spun the breath out of her lungs.

“Boyd.” She turned.

“It’s not worth it,” he said, his voice still quiet, but firm.

“You don’t know that,” she said. She wanted to cry and hit someone at the same time.

“I do,” he said. Against her will, she was impressed by the way he looked at her, as if she were the only person in the room. Even when she knew it was a tactic—get them to focus on you and not the object—it was compelling.

“It’s fine, Officer,” Martin said, his hands up, palms outward, warding Hallie off like an evil spirit. “Just … let’s call it a misunderstanding, emotions running high.” His lips twitched up in a rueful half smile. “You know.”

Boyd didn’t smile back at him. He put his hand on Hallie’s arm. “Let’s go outside,” he said.

Hallie clenched and unclenched her fist.

Pete said, “Aw, Hallie, the Boy Deputy going to save you from yourself?”

Hallie would have been all the way over the table if Boyd hadn’t grabbed her around the waist and hauled her back. He shoved himself between her and Pete.

“Get out,” he said.

“Goddamnit!” Hallie said, “Let go of me.”

“Out,” he repeated.

His voice was no louder, but now there was a thin band of steel underneath. If she wanted Pete, she’d have to go through him. “Goddamn you,” she said, and wasn’t sure which one of them she meant.

15

Hallie was leaning against her pickup truck, her arms crossed over her chest when Boyd walked down the steps and across the parking lot toward her. He was carrying the prybar she’d left inside.

“No one’s pressing charges,” Boyd said as he approached.

His shirt was as crisp and clean and brightly white as the one he’d had on the first time she met him. His khaki pants were ironed with millimetric precision. The buttons on his shirt and his narrow brass belt buckle gleamed dully in the gray late-morning light.

Hallie snorted. “What charges, exactly? Walking with intent?”

There was something in the way he looked right then, something that made him seem not just young, but vulnerable. Like, despite the perfect haircut and spit-shined shoes, he didn’t actually know what to do. She blinked and it was gone, that feeling, and he was just … the Boy Deputy, just some guy.

“Yeah.” Boyd raised the prybar, slapped it into this right palm. It made a dull, heavy sound. “You were just carrying this in case the door stuck?”

“That’s right,” she said.

“You want to tell me what’s going on?” he said after a moment.

“What do you think is going on?” she said.

He sighed.

The glass front door of Cleary’s creaked open, like it was exhausted—opening and closing and closing and opening for twenty years and more. Pete stepped out, followed closely by Martin. Sarah Hale drifted out behind them, slid right past them and into the parking lot. Martin stumbled on the steps as she passed. Pete grabbed his arm.

A sharp shaft of light slanted across the parking lot. It glinted off the lenses in Martin’s glasses, and for a moment the red in his hair shone like fire. He turned and looked at Hallie squarely. A dark ring on his finger flashed gold. He pointed his finger at her, thumb raised, like a gun.

She didn’t realize she’d taken a step until Boyd grabbed her by the wrist. But that wasn’t what stopped her. It was the warmth of his hand on her arm, like, of the two of them, he was the one who was real.

Hallie could hear thunder, pitched so low, it was almost inaudible, like a rumble in her own chest. No rain, though, as the low clouds continued to scatter. Martin’s head came up, looked to the north, though the storm, wherever it was, had to be miles from town. Pete watched her, his dark gaze flickering down to Boyd’s hand on Hallie’s arm, flickering back up to stare directly at her as he opened his pickup truck door and got inside.

After they were gone, Boyd let go of her arm and stepped back. “You don’t have to talk to me,” he said.

“Dell’s death,” she said. “You want to talk about that?”

He blinked. “She died,” he said.

“Yeah. And?”

“And it’s an ongoing investigation.”

“Jesus!”

A muscle twitched underneath his cheekbone. “Look,” he said. “I don’t want to get called out like this again. I’ll arrest you if I have to. I mean, if you make trouble, or … get into a fight. But I just…” He rubbed a hand across his face. “I’m saying that if you want to talk, you can talk to me.”

“Yeah.” Hallie laughed at him. “You want to tell me about your ‘ongoing investigation,’ we’ll talk. Otherwise, forget it.” Deep down, in a place she was never admitting to him, she desperately wanted to talk, wanted someone to talk to. But if he wasn’t talking, then neither was she.

He half turned away from her, toward his car.

“Wait.”

He looked back.

“Give me my prybar,” she said.

He looked at the steel bar in his hands, like he’d forgotten it was there.

“Thanks,” she said as he handed it to her, though she wasn’t sure what she was thanking him for. She didn’t need him. If he wouldn’t talk to her about Dell, there had to be people who would. She tossed the prybar into the pickup bed and wrenched open the driver’s door. She climbed into the cab, stuck the key in the ignition, and cranked the engine. It caught, coughed, and died.

Shit.

She cranked it again. Then, a third time.

Boyd had opened his car door and started to climb in, but stopped with a hand on the window, waiting.
Go away,
she thought. She rubbed her left eye and cranked the engine again.

Nothing.

With a half-uttered curse, she popped the hood and climbed out of the truck.

“Problem?” Boyd asked.

She looked at him and didn’t say anything, just lifted the hood and propped it into place. The battery was new. The leads were all tight. She checked the belts and the wiring. It all looked fine.

“I can jump you.” Boyd hadn’t said anything while she’d been pottering under the hood, and despite herself, despite how annoying the whole thing was, she liked that, that he didn’t step right up to solve the problem, that he acted like she could, you know, do some damn thing herself.

She straightened, looked at him, and shrugged. “Yeah,” she said. “Fine.”

Twenty minutes later and it still hadn’t started. Hallie called Big Dog’s Auto—pacing in front of her truck because she did not have
time
for this. Both trucks were out, and Tom Hauser told her it would be at least a couple of hours. Boyd offered to drive her home.

Hallie tried to think of someone else to call. “Don’t you have—I don’t know—work?”

“It’s my job, ma’am.” His mouth quirked up in a twisted half smile, and she couldn’t tell if he was making fun of her or of himself.

“It’s almost noon,” she said. “I’ll let you give me a ride home, if you let me buy you lunch.” Wasn’t at all sure she wanted to spend more time with him, but she didn’t want to owe him either, and there wasn’t anything else she could do right now without a truck.

He stared at her. “All right,” he said, slowly. Then, a quick nod, as if he were talking himself into it. “All right. I’ll call it in.”

Hallie reached back into the pickup and grabbed a twenty she kept in the glove box for emergencies.

She chose the bar side of Cleary’s, which served burgers and fries because she thought she’d be more comfortable. The only customers were two men slouched at the bar and a middle-aged woman and her daughter at a round table near the door.

Prue Stalking Horse looked up sharply when they came in, but when she came to the table to take their orders, she looked as cool and imperturbable as ever.

Boyd went to the restroom to wash up. While he was gone, Prue brought their drinks. She said, “I didn’t expect that.”

Hallie’s right hand tapped against the table’s edge like a metronome, or the ticking of a time bomb. She forced herself to stop. “Expect what?” she asked Prue.

But Prue didn’t hear her—didn’t answer her, at any rate—just went back behind the bar, where she frowned and made notes with a pen she stuck behind her ear when she wasn’t using it.

Hallie was beginning to regret the impulse that had led her to offer Boyd lunch. What were they going to talk about?

He came back to the table, and she caught him staring at the bracelet Eddie had given her again. She started to put her hand under the table, then thought,
You’ve got to be kidding me.

“Why do you do that?” she asked him.

He startled, then settled back into himself, like a horse on a windy day. He reached across the table and took her wrist, turning it so he could look at the bracelet more closely.

“I saw this once,” he said. He fingered one of the lapis lazuli beads, then let it go. “It was…” He hesitated. “It was on someone who died.”

Well.

Maybe they shouldn’t talk about anything.

The sun emerged briefly from behind a bank of clouds; light slanted through the window near their table, striking the wooden floor and highlighting an old gouge laid crosswise to the grain. Hallie studied it and hoped their food would come soon.

“You lived here all your life?” Boyd asked, causing Hallie to blink.

“I was born here,” she finally said.

Prue brought their food—burger and fries for Hallie, BLT with lettuce on the side for Boyd—and left without saying anything, though she looked at Hallie for a long second, as though she was trying to pass her a message.

“You know her?” Boyd asked when she’d left.

“Prue? Kind of. My dad does.”

Things were quiet after that as they concentrated on eating. Hallie thought about what to do next. Tackling Pete or Martin directly now seemed out of the question, and she didn’t have a truck—probably wouldn’t until tomorrow morning

“You’re not from the West River, are you?” she asked Boyd suddenly.

“What?”

“West of the Missouri. Western South Dakota. We call it the West River.”

He shook his head. “Maquoketa.” Then, because she just looked at him. “Iowa. Eastern Iowa.”

“Huh.” She said, “Did you ever see the world’s largest popcorn ball?”

“No.” He laughed. It made him look young, but then everything did.

They talked about other offbeat places that one of them had either seen or not. The Corn Palace, which Hallie had been to twice—once with her parents before her mother died and once by herself, just to do it. Boyd said he’d been to the Iowa State Fair ten times, had seen the butter cow and the world’s largest pig.

Neither one of them had ever been to Mount Rushmore. “Although you see it sometimes,” Hallie said, “like, you come around a corner, and you can’t help it. It’s right there, like someday it’ll take over the whole sky.”