Richard Russo - Everybody's Fool

That jogged Raymer’s memory. “Any sign of his dog?”

“In the burn? No. No canine remains. Just the one human skeleton.”

“You’re sure?”

“Be pretty hard to miss.”

Walking back up the driveway, Raymer kicked something solid that felt like a stone but sounded metallic. It took him a moment to find it in the dark. A stopwatch. Sully’s? There’d been one on the kitchen table that morning, he remembered, and Sully’d put it in his pocket when they left. Had he accidentally dropped it when he got back home and came up the drive? No, it was too heavy. In the night’s stillness he’d have heard it hit the gravel. Maybe he couldn’t spot it in the dark and figured he’d look again in the morning. Possible, but again Raymer doubted it. It was supposed to rain again later that night. He wouldn’t have left it lying there on the ground, not when he had a flashlight in the truck.

The crowd had begun to disperse by the time the coroner arrived. He and Diamond, their shoes covered with plastic, were standing in the middle of the burned trailer, studying the body’s charred remains. “Raymer,” said the coroner. “I heard you resigned.”

He ignored this. “Can you guess the victim’s height?” he asked. “Based on…that?”

“I’ll be able to tell you within an inch or two tomorrow,” he said. “Right now, I’d be guessing.”

“Okay, so guess,” he said. Diamond seemed puzzled by all this.

The man cocked his head. “Five-seven? Five-eight?”

“Guess again,” Diamond said. “Sully was a good six feet.”

Raymer’s radio barked static. “Chief?” the night dispatcher said. “You there?”

“Yup.”

“That yellow-and-purple vehicle we’ve been looking for finally turned up. Parked out back of the Sans Souci. We figure Roy Purdy must be holed up inside.”

“Not possible,” Raymer told him.

“Why not?”

From where Raymer stood, just outside the shell of the trailer, he could make out a blackened human foot. “Because then he’d be in two places at once.”

—

HE COULD HEAR the dog barking from the foot of the steep drive. The husband’s big flatbed was parked at the top. What the hell was the man’s name? Suddenly it was there: Zack. Cutting his lights, Raymer pulled up and parked behind the truck. There were lights on in the house, which suggested that despite the lateness of the hour and the circumstances, somebody was awake in there. Ruth, his wife, was in critical condition at the hospital, so it was probably Zack, the man he’d come to arrest. There could be someone else, though. They had a granddaughter who sometimes stayed with them, but he guessed she’d be at the hospital, too, along with her mother. Raymer hoped so. He didn’t want to have to cuff the man in front of his loved ones. Getting out of the car, he thought about double-checking his.38 to make sure it was loaded and the safety was on, then decided not to bother. He wouldn’t be able to grip it with his bandaged right hand, and it would be useless in his left.

He paused to do a quick inventory of the truck bed, noting a big red gas can. Even in the moonlight he could see gas had sloshed out of its mouth recently. Only a small amount was left in the bottom. The barking seemed to be coming not from the house but the enormous shed out back, the scorched, mangled roof looking like it had been struck by lightning. The sight of this conspicuous damage caused Raymer to swallow hard. Why hadn’t he himself been reduced to cinders? A padlock was dangling, open, from the latch, and as soon as he opened the shed’s door, Sully’s little dog came bounding out, squealing with delight. Did he recognize Raymer from the cemetery that morning, or did he just love people? Amazing that the animal could be in such high spirits given his condition, one eye swollen shut, the fur on his muzzle singed and matted with blood. Taken together with his half-chewed-off dick, he made a grisly spectacle. “You look like you had a rough night,” Raymer told him, and the dog yipped enthusiastically, as if a little empathy was all he needed to be happy.

A light came on over the back door then, as well as a floodlight attached to the peak of the shed, illuminating the entire yard. A moment later a man in a sleeveless T-shirt came out and stood on the porch, scratching his enormous belly thoughtfully with his left hand. Raymer had seen the man around town and marveled at the thatch of unruly cowlick that was his distinguishing feature, pretty unusual on anybody but a kid. His right wrist and forearm were awkwardly wrapped in gauze and masking tape. “I been expecting you,” he said, his voice carrying in the darkness.

“You know why I’m here, then?” Raymer said, approaching the house, the little mutt doing joyous laps around him. He half expected Dougie to advise him on how to proceed, but not a peep. Maybe he was gone for good. That’s certainly what it felt like standing here, quite some distance from the nearest neighbor, with a very large man who’d already killed one man tonight: like he was on his own. “That looks painful,” he said, staring at his bandaged forearm and wondering how badly it was burned.

“It is,” Zack admitted. “Serves me right, I guess.”

“How’d you know he was in Sully’s trailer?” Raymer said. “Your son-in-law.”

“I didn’t,” he said. “I went there to tell Sully she was gonna make it. My wife. She was in a coma, and they kept tellin’ us she might not wake up, but then she did.”

Raymer, like everybody else in Bath, had heard about Sully’s long affair with Ruth and also that her husband knew all about it. Apparently the fact they’d been sharing her didn’t preclude the possibility of friendship and might even, weirdly, have been its source. Would Raymer and Jerome have arrived at some similar arrangement if Becka had lived? If she’d been killed in a car wreck years later, long after they all knew where they stood with one another, would Raymer’s first thought have been to inform Jerome, since he’d loved her, too? “But when you got to the trailer, Sully wasn’t there.”

“There weren’t no lights on,” Zack told him, “but I heard this little guy whimperin’ inside, and when I knocked I heard somebody stirrin’ in there. I figured it wasn’t Sully. He’d’ve come to the door. But this guy sounded hurt, so I went in.”

“The door was unlocked?”

The man chuckled. “Sully never locked a door in his life. Most of the time he wouldn’t even think to close ’em.”

“And you found him inside. Your son-in-law.”

He nodded. “I turned on a light, and there he was in the doorway, rubbing his eyes like he just woke up. He said, ‘This ain’t working out like I planned.’ I asked him what he’d planned and he said, ‘You’re supposed to be Sully.’ We just stood there lookin’ at each other for a minute. Then I said, ‘Aren’t you gonna ask how she is?’ And he said, ‘How who is?’ That was when I seen he was holdin’ that hammer.”

He showed Raymer his left elbow, which he must’ve used to block the blow, now ballooned up to the size of a knee.

“You don’t have to talk to me,” Raymer said. “In fact, you probably shouldn’t, not without a lawyer. You know your rights?”

He shrugged. “I watch TV.” He listened patiently while Raymer recited the Miranda, resuming his story only when that was over. “He got the one blow in, but that was it. Roy ain’t much of a fighter. He likes to punch women. Kick poor defenseless animals. But a big guy like me? I just picked him up and tossed him. The back of his head hit the edge of the counter and that was that. He just laid there, not movin’.”

“An accident, then.”

“I never meant to kill him, if that’s what you mean.”