Nelson DeMille - Spencerville

"Why? Tell us why."

"Because... because..."

"Come on. Because he fucked your wife. Right? Chief Baxter fucked your wife."

Billy suddenly sank to his knees and put his hands over his face. He began sobbing. "Tell him to stay away from my wife. Tell him to stop. Stay away from my wife. Stop, stop..."

The men laughed. One of them said, "Get up. We're taking you in again."

But Billy had curled up into a ball on the ground and was crying. One of the cops grabbed him by his long hair. "Get up."

Keith walked up to them and said, "Leave him alone."

They turned and faced him. One of them said, very coolly and professionally, "Please move away, sir. We have the situation under control."

"No, you don't. You're harassing this man. Leave him alone."

"Sir, I'll have to ask you..."

The other cop poked his partner and said, "Hey, that's..." He whispered in his partner's ear, and they both looked at Keith. The first cop stepped up to Keith and said, "If you don't leave, I'm going to arrest you for obstructing justice."

"I haven't seen any justice here. If you arrest me or him, I'll tell the district attorney exactly what I saw and heard here, and I'll press charges against both of you."

The two policemen and Keith stared at one another for a long minute. Finally, one of them said to him, "Who's gonna believe you?"

"We'll find out."

The other cop said, "Are you threatening us?" Keith ignored them and went over to Billy. He helped the man to his feet, got Billy's arm around his shoulder, and began walking him toward the street.

One of the cops yelled to Keith, "You're gonna pay for tonight, Mister. You are definitely going to pay."

Keith got Billy on the sidewalk and walked him around the park toward the car.

Billy was staggering, but Keith kept him moving.

Finally, Billy said, "Hey, what's happening? Where we going?"

"Home."

"Yeah, okay, not so fast." He broke free of Keith and navigated the sidewalk on his own. Keith walked behind him, ready to catch him if he fell. Billy was mumbling to himself. "Goddamn cops always bustin' my balls. Hell, I never did no harm to nobody... they got it in for me... he fucks my wife, then..."

"Quiet down."

A few people on the sidewalk looked and gave them a wide berth.

"That son-of-a-bitch... then he laughed at me... he said she was a lousy lay, and he was finished with her..."

Keith said, "Shut up! Damn it, shut up!" He grabbed Billy by the arm and propelled him up the street and pushed him into the Blazer.

Keith drove out of town and headed west. "Where is this place? Where do you live?"

Billy was slumped in the front seat, his head lolling from side to side. "Route 8... oh, I'm sick."

Keith rolled down the passenger-side window and pushed Billy's head out. "Get sick outside."

Billy made a gagging sound but couldn't get it out. "Oh... stop the car..."

Keith found the old Cowley farm, which had the family name painted on the barn. He pulled up to the dark farmhouse and parked behind an old blue pickup truck, then wrestled Billy out of the car and onto the front porch. The front door was unlocked, as Keith suspected it would be, and he half carried Billy inside, found the living room in the dark, and threw Billy on the couch. He walked away, then came back, arranged him a little more comfortably and pulled off his shoes, then turned to leave again.

Billy called out, "Keith. Hey, Keith."

Keith turned. "Yeah?"

"Great to see you, man. Hey, it's great..."

Keith put his face in front of Billy's and said in a slow, distinct tone, "Get your act together, soldier."

Billy's eyes opened wide, and, in a moment of forced clarity, responded, "Yes, sir."

Keith walked to the front door, and, as he left, he heard Billy call out, "Hey, man, I owe you one."

Keith got in his Blazer and pulled onto the county road. Parked on the shoulder was a Spencerville police car. Keith kept going, waiting for the headlights to start following him, but they didn't, and he wondered if the police were going to finish their business with Billy. He considered turning around, but figured he'd pushed his luck enough for one night.

About halfway back to his house, Keith picked up another Spencerville police car that followed him with its bright lights on.

Keith approached the turnoff for his house and stopped. The police car stopped a few feet behind him. Keith sat. The cops sat. They all sat for five minutes, then Keith pulled into his driveway, and the cop car continued down the road.

Obviously, the game was heating up. He didn't bother to put the Blazer behind the house, but parked it near the porch and went inside through the front door.

He went directly upstairs and took his 9mm Glock from the cabinet, loaded it, and put it on his night table.

He got undressed and went to bed. The adrenaline was still flowing, and he had trouble getting to sleep, but finally entered a state of half-sleep that he'd learned in Vietnam and perfected in other places; his body was at rest, but all his senses were placed on a moment's notice.

His mind took off in directions that he wouldn't have allowed if he'd been in full control of his thought processes. What his mind was telling him now was that home had become the last battlefield, as he always knew it would be if he ever returned. That was the great subconscious secret he had been keeping from himself all these years. His memories of Cliff Baxter were not as dim as he'd indicated to the Porters, nor as fleeting as he'd told himself. In fact, he remembered the bullying bastard very well, remembered that Cliff Baxter had jostled him more than once, recalled Baxter's heckling from the stands during football games, and very clearly remembered Cliff Baxter eyeing Annie Prentis in the halls, at school dances, at the swimming pool, and he recalled the incident at an autumn hayride when Baxter put his hand on Annie's butt to help her up into the hay wagon.

He should have done something about it then, but Annie seemed almost unaware of Cliff Baxter, and Keith knew that the best way to enrage a person like Baxter was to pretend he didn't exist. And, in fact, Baxter's rage grew month by month, and Keith could see it. But Cliff Baxter was smart enough not to step over the line. Eventually, he would have, of course, but June came, Keith and Annie graduated, and they were off to college.

Keith never knew if Baxter's interest in Annie was genuine or just another way to annoy Keith, whom Cliff Baxter seemed to hate for no reason at all. And when Keith had heard that Cliff Baxter and Annie Prentis had married, he was not so much angry at Annie or Cliff Baxter as he was shocked by the news. It had seemed to him that heaven and hell had changed places, that everything he believed about human nature had been wrong. But as the years passed, he came to understand the dynamics between men and women a little better, and he thought he understood the processes that had brought Cliff Baxter and Annie Prentis together.

And yet, Keith wondered if things would have been different if he'd called Baxter out, if he'd simply beaten the hell out of the class bully, which he was physically capable of doing. He thought about doing now what he'd failed to do in high school. But if he chose a confrontation, then a fistfight in the schoolyard wasn't going to settle it this time.

At about midnight, the phone rang, but there was no one there. A little while later, someone was leaning on his car horn out on the road. The phone rang a few more times, and Keith took it off the hook.

The rest of the night was quiet, and he got a few hours of sleep. At dawn, he called the Spencerville police, identified himself, and asked to speak to Chief Baxter.

The desk officer seemed a little taken aback, then replied, "He's not here."