William Lashner - Fatal Flaw

“You need to show pity on Bohannon.”

“Come again?”

“He’s a screwed-up kid who fell in with someone truly evil and lost himself in the process. Cutlip bent him to his will and, in so doing, destroyed him. I’m not saying he shouldn’t pay for what he did, but he was just a tool that Cutlip used and tossed away without a backward glance. Bohannon was going to scratch himself to death out of guilt if we hadn’t shown up when we did. Give him a deal and take your venom out on Cutlip.”

The cops came out of the room waving a plastic bag with the gun inside. It had been sitting atop the bed, just where Dwayne and I had left it for them to find.

“I’ll think on it,” Jefferson said before leaving me to talk it over with the ranking uniform. It wasn’t hard to figure what would happen next. They would take Dwayne now to Dover and charge him with a firearms violation. They would take him to Dover, but he wouldn’t be in Dover long. Jefferson would extradite him to Pennsylvania, where he would be assigned a lawyer who would make a deal in exchange for his testimony against Lawrence Cutlip. I didn’t know how long he’d get, it would be a lot, and all of it deserved, but he would get some kind of a deal, and the Delaware firearms charge would undoubtedly run concurrently. He’d spend part of his life outside the prison walls, and that didn’t bother me one bit. It was funny how at the start of the case I had wanted nothing but the harshest vengeance visited upon the man who shot Hailey Prouix through the heart, and now I had done what I could to make sure the law went as easy as possible on her killer. But I had seen the writing on his skin.

“You don’t look very happy,” said Detective Breger, coming up from behind me. “You should be dancing.”

“I’m jitterbugging. Doesn’t it show?”

“It looks like you ate one fried oyster too many. But you had quite the day, finding Bobo and, before that, breaking Cutlip like you did.”

“I didn’t break Cutlip.”

“Sure you did.”

“No, Detective. He wanted us to know about him and Hailey. He was proud of it. As soon as he found out she had been keeping his letter with the others, that she never stopped loving him for some twisted reason, he wanted us to know. All I did was let him. The hemming and hawing, the tears, the hesitancy, it was an act, and I was his straight man, but he wanted to crow.”

“He pretty much confessed to murder on the stand.”

“That was the price for his bragging rights. I’ll bet right now that bastard is smiling. I’ll bet right now he’s talking about her to his fellow inmates. How supple she was, how fine she was. How she was the sweetest twelve-year-old ever to sashay down a junior high corridor.”

“Stop it. You’re beating yourself up over something you weren’t even in the same state to stop. All you did was clean up the resulting mess. You have nothing to be sick over, you did swell.”

“I don’t feel swell, I feel dirty.”

“Guys like that, even locking them up makes you want to take a shower.”

I kicked at the cement.

“You did well, son,” said Breger.

“Are you turning sweet on me, Detective?”

“No. In my book you’re still an obnoxious punk. By the way, we need you to sign off and let us examine those phone logs.”

“What?”

“The phone logs. To your home phone. We still want them.”

“No you don’t.”

“Really, we do.”

“No you don’t.”

“Yes, yes we do. We need to tie up all the loose ends. That was the deal.”

“You don’t want those phone logs, trust me. Jefferson will make an offer, Bobo will confess, both he and Cutlip will end up in prison. Put them away, swallow the key to Cutlip’s cell, and end it.”

“I was right, wasn’t I?”

“No phone logs.”

“All along I’ve been right.”

“The case is over, our deal is null and void.”

“The thing that puzzles me, Victor, is how in the hell you thought you’d get away with it.”

“But I did, didn’t I.”

He stared at me for a moment, his strange gaze playing across my face, and then he burst out in laughter, a deep, bellowing laughter, the first I’d ever heard from him. He burst out in laughter and slammed me in the back. “Maybe you did at that,” he said, walking away, and then he burst into laughter again.

I walked over to Beth and Skink, who were standing together in a corner of the lot.

“What went on in there?” said Beth. “We were scared out of our skulls for you.”

“It’s over. The case is over. Jefferson has to okay it with his boss, but it looks like Guy’s getting out tomorrow.”

“You were up there for an hour and a half.”

“It seemed longer,” I said.

“Did he do it?” said Skink.

“I wouldn’t let him tell me, but, yeah. He did it.”

“What went on in that room for an hour and a half?” said Beth.

“I had some questions, and he answered them, and that was it.”

“You don’t want to talk about it.”

“No I don’t. Ever. Never. But I’ll tell you this: What he told me will haunt my dreams to the day I die. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

We turned away from the scene at the motel, the three of us turned away and started heading down the road, our shadows marching before us like soldiers.

“There’s a crab shack on the bay what I know of,” said Skink, “where they gots them fat and covered with spice. You interested?”

I looked at Beth. She shrugged.

“They serve beer?” I said.

“Longnecks, mate.”

“Music?”

“A jukebox from heaven. Nothing from after 1967. Five plays a buck.”

“Sounds about right,” I said.

So that’s what we did, the three of us. Skink drove us down to some red-painted shack on the bay with brown paper on the tables, where we pounded on the hard shells with our hammers and ate till our fingers bled. Skink lit a cigar and told us stories, Beth cracked jokes, I drank beer enough so the sea shifted and the land heaved and the sun dropped low over the water. It was a night of celebration and camaraderie, of noisy arguments with the blowhards at the next table, of sadness and hilarity, of Skink baring his teeth in laughter. Elvis was on the jukebox, and so was Louis Armstrong, blowing the blues, and by the end the brown paper was covered with bits of red shell and long-necked bottles, cobs shorn of corn, a cigar butt, all in an evocative pattern that would have made Joseph Cornell proud. It was a lovely evening, proof that life could be more than the sordid adventure we had just passed through, a lovely evening, perfect enough to almost make me forget.

Almost.

I AWOKEwith a start from my sleep. I sat up on the living room couch, scratched, looked around. In the dim city light slipping through the slats of my shade, the apartment looked old and hard, lonely. I had been there too long to be objective enough to figure what it said about my life, but somehow, now, it seemed lonelier than it should.

Then I noticed that the chain latch of my front door, the chain I fastened each night out of habit, was hanging loose.

Guy had done it again, left me like a thief in the middle of the night. This time I didn’t scour the apartment frantically for him, this time I didn’t desperately work out where he was headed. This time I knew. I rinsed my face in cold water, I put on a pair of jeans and a white tee shirt, my raincoat, took a six of Rolling Rock out of my fridge, and headed out after him.

He had just been released and didn’t know yet where he wanted to go, so I had volunteered my place for a few nights while he decided. He was through as a lawyer, his felony conviction on fraud would see to that, and his marriage was broken, though not irretrievably, as Leila remained forever stalwart. There were more questions than answers in his future, which might have been the best thing he had going for him. But he seemed dazed when he stepped out of the prison, justifiably confused and angry, having been accused of murdering his lover and forced to defend himself without ever yet having been given the opportunity to mourn. He just needed time, he told Leila, who was standing outside the prison yard with me, and I assumed that after having spent six months sleeping on a prison cot, he needed a full-size bed, too. Which is why I was sleeping on the couch when I awoke with a start to discover him gone.