Peter Heller - The Painter

Wheezy pocketed the envelope, stepped over to the squad car, motioned me out, held up the truck keys.

“Want me to have them valet park it?”

“I think I better change hotels.”

“Nah. The guests love this stuff. Think of the stories they can tell.”

“Newspaper?”

“Nope. Not protocol to report executed search warrants. Think how that would mess up investigations. Go upstairs, take a hot bath. We left the bathroom nice and clean.”

I got out of the car, stretched, took a long draught of cool, high altitude autumn air.

“Nice place to paint, that roof room,” he said. “We were up there, of course.”

“Can you match broken window glass?” I said.

His head came around. All his cheer fell away. He studied me. I was thinking that one crumb on the shoulder of the ranch road that matched the pieces in his envelope would place me unequivocally at the scene. Not proximity, but ground zero. Not to mention if they found the pack while they were looking for the glass.

“We can try. It’s not a precise science. It’s like tire tracks: the most you can say is that the pieces are of the same type and match two million other trucks on the road.”

I took the keys.

“Things can pile up,” he said. “What they mean by the weight of evidence. It just piles and piles up and you carry it all with you until you’re walking around like a hunchback. You, not me.”

He wheezed. He shook his pant leg out of his shoe. “Try to be good,” he said and walked off.

What Bob had said at the gas station. Be good. I was good. I think. Being good, on the other hand, is really hard.

I watched Wheezy go, and then watched as he turned around abruptly. He came back.

“Just had an idea,” he said. “I’m going to take a little trip now”— wheeze —“back up to the scene of Grant’s demise. Go look for a little broken glass. Why don’t you come? You know, see some new country.”

New country. He and I, we both knew it wasn’t new for either of us. His eyes were dancing.

That’s what they do, don’t they? I thought. They get the killer back to the scene of the crime and they watch him like a hawk and wait for him to trigger and slip up and give it all away. And just after I thought that, I thought, What the fuck! Of course I’ll go with you!

I’ll go, because if I don’t you’ll stumble on the rucksack, my personal warrant to the pen, stumble on it while you’re looking for crumbs of windshield—and why you didn’t find it already I’m not sure, it must be under some brush, you must have been focused on the mess in the gully. Of course I’ll go. And if I can distract you somehow, or you can distract yourselves, I’ll slip over to that rock and get rid of the pack. Not sure where, or how, but I have two hours of highway till then to figure it out, make a plan.

I kissed Sofia fast and told her I was glad to see her and that I’d probably be back by nightfall, don’t ask. I nodded to Steve. I got into Wheezy’s unmarked Crown Vic and when I craned out the window and lifted a hand they both waved awkwardly. Wheezy drove. I leaned my head back against the front passenger seat and I thought, I have no frigging plan. No plan. Then I must have fallen asleep.

I can’t say I had a plan when I woke up. Nothing came to me in a dream. He was joggling my shoulder, he was saying, “Hey tough guy, hey Jim”—the second time he’d called me by my first name—“rise and shine.” And: “Jesus, you snore like a freight train! You must have been whipped.”

He got out and stretched, and wheezed the fresh high-plains air as if it were clearing his lungs which it wasn’t. I heard the two squad cars pull in behind us. Must have rained here, too, recently, I smelled the grass of the valley and the damp earth. I got out, stretched with the fat detective as if we were warming up for a yoga class.

We weren’t. We were twenty yards east of the boulder which was just off the shoulder of the road. All they had to do was walk by it looking for glass and they could not help but see the rucksack behind it. My heart began to hammer and I could feel my face flush with heat. He was watching me with a casual sideways glance as I made myself take in the ribbon of ranch road running up into the pretty meadowed valley where the elk had been. And the ponderosas on the hill, and the trees along the creased bottom where the arroyo would be. Made myself take it in like a tourist.

“Pretty,” I said.

He grinned. “Pretty like a postcard or pretty like one of those places you can’t get out of your head?”

I shrugged. He turned and spoke low to the deputies who began to comb the dirt of the road and the edges of the shoulder. Looking for window glass. They began just ahead of our car and very slowly moved west, toward the rock.

“Let’s take a walk,” he said, pointing to the gully.

“Just a sec,” I said, maybe too quickly. “I’ve got to take a leak.”

He studied me for a beat, said, “Be my guest.”

I glanced around as if looking for a place, as if I were shy, settled on the boulder with an expression that was meant to convey, Oh look there, a perfect piss spot! Maybe none of it very natural—and isn’t this why they brought us out here after all? To test and rattle us? Fuck that, I walked forward, and I passed the furthest deputy who was crouching and picking up a crystal crumb with a pair of tweezers and moving it toward a clear envelope, I walked and made myself go one step at a time, go slow. As if I weren’t walking straight toward my own conviction.

I looked back once, again as if I were shy, and Wheezy was in intense conversation with the deputy who was holding up the little envelope with the glass. Perfect. They were in a kind of huddle, so I speeded up, I covered the last fifteen feet in a near jog. If they just kept talking, bent in conference—I could grab the rucksack and hurl it like a hammer throw far into the grass, further up the hill. They wouldn’t be searching the hill, they were looking along the road for glass. That would be enough, get it just out of sight. I could come back tonight and get it. Yes. If they just kept talking, the others bent to the road—if. It was my only chance. All I needed was to get the pack maybe ten or twelve feet further back and into the tall grass.

I stepped fast up to the boulder and stepped around it, reached for my fly.

There was a bush, a saltbush growing right up against the hump of rock. Just about the color of the rucksack.

It wasn’t there.

There was nothing there. Grass, the bush. The rock. Nothing.

My mind sped up, ran. Wait—wait. Maybe. I might not have left it here. Maybe. Where else? I ran through the whole scene again, the sequence from first seeing Grant’s spotlight. I did, I took it with me down the hill because I remembered clearly how heavy it was, how it swung as I ran and how I’d wished I’d left it up in the trees as I came down the hill, thinking, Dumb. Should’ve left it . And I remembered yelling to Grant to come get me, come and get it over with, and I remembered charging my truck and finding him, and after that I had no memory of the rucksack, not one. I had left it here.

Had they already found it? Fuck. No. No way, I would already be in jail.

Wheezy must have noticed, because when I was done peeing, actually peeing out of sheer nervousness, he looked at me strangely and brought a deputy with him and they searched carefully all around the rock and up into the grass of the hill.