A Grant County Collection Read online

  Robert said, 'You know what they do to cops in jail?'

  Jeffrey felt his throat close. 'We're not going to jail,' he managed. 'Even if they found something . . . some way to connect us to this . . . it was such a long time ago –'

  'No,' Robert said. 'I'm asking you. I have no idea except what I've seen on television, and that's enough to make your blood turn. What do they do to cops in jail?'

  'Robert –'

  'I'm serious, Jeffrey. What do they do to them? What should I expect?'

  Jeffrey looked at his friend maybe for the first time since the other man had entered the room. Except for a few lines around his eyes, Robert looked the same way he had in high school. He was still fit and a little lanky, but the way he slouched into the chair and bounced the heel of his shoe up and down was new. On the football field, Jeffrey had known every thought going through the other man's mind, but now he had no idea what Robert was thinking.

  Jeffrey finally asked, 'What are you trying to say, Bobby?'

  'I'm not trying, I'm telling. I shot Luke. I shot him in cold blood.'

  Jeffrey was sure he had heard wrong.

  'He was having an affair with Jessie.'

  Shock stopped Jeffrey for another moment. 'What are you –'

  Robert's tone was matter-of-fact, like he was talking about killing ants in his garden instead the death of another human being. 'I went to the store to pick up some things, then I came home and found them together. He was . . . shit, I guess you know what he was doing with her.'

  It was too much; Jeffrey couldn't handle anything else today. 'Robert, why are you saying this? It's not true.'

  'I got out my gun and shot him.' He shook his head. 'Not like that. I saw them first, then I went back to get my gun. I came back into the room and Jessie screamed. I asked them what the hell they were doing. He tried to make excuses and I just pulled the trigger.'

  Jeffrey stood up. 'Don't say anything else to me.'

  'His head . . . it just exploded.'

  'Robert, shut the fuck up. You need a lawyer.'

  'I don't need a lawyer,' he said. 'I need something to wipe this out of my mind. I need something that'll help me forget what it was like seeing his head just –'

  'Robert,' Jeffrey interrupted, making his voice firm. 'You don't need to tell me this.'

  'Yeah,' he said. 'I do. I'm confessing. There wasn't a break-in. The second piece is my backup. I used it to shoot myself. Sara knows, she saw where I held the gun. Jesus, that was stupid, but I did it. I wasn't thinking. I didn't have a lot of time. The lights were already turning on next door. You get called out on these things as a cop and you think, "Christ, what a fucking idiot," but the truth is when it happens to you, you don't have time to think. Maybe it's shock or fear or some kind of stupid thing that just kicks in, but you make mistakes. You don't want to get caught, but you can't think how not to.' He indicated the chair. 'Sit down, Jeffrey. You're making me nervous.'

  Jeffrey sat. 'Why are you doing this?'

  'Because it's not right,' he answered. 'I talked to Hoss this morning, gave him my statement just like I told you last night. It's like back when we were in school. Any old story we reel out, he bites.'

  'He doesn't know any of this?'

  'No, I wanted to tell you first. I owed you that much.'

  'Robert,' Jeffrey said, thinking the man had done him no great favor. Despite the sense it made, Jeffrey could not believe the story. He had grown up with this man, spent countless hours listening to records with him, talking about girls, planning the cars they were going to buy when they turned sixteen.

  Robert said, 'I've got to take responsibility for my actions. That man is dead because of me, because I couldn't control myself – all my anger and hatred and . . . everything. It just came up to the surface and the next thing I knew, he was dead on the floor.' He started to tear up. 'I killed him. He's dead. He was screwing my wife and I killed him.'

  Jeffrey pressed his fingers into his temples, not knowing what to say.

  'Did you know Jessie had a miscarriage a few months ago?'

  Jeffrey tried to talk past the lump in his throat. 'No.'

  'Would've been a boy. How do you like that? It's the one thing that would have finally made her happy, and God just wouldn't let it happen.'

  Jeffrey doubted seriously anything could make Jessie happy, but he still said, 'I'm sorry.'

  'It was my fault,' Robert said. 'Something about me . . . I don't know, Slick. Something about me never works for her. I'm just poison.'

  'That's not true.'

  'I'm not a good man. I'm not a good husband.' He gave a heavy sigh. 'I've never been a good husband. People stray for all kinds of reasons, I guess, but in the end . . .' He looked up. 'I haven't been much of a friend to you.'

  'That's not true,' Jeffrey repeated.

  Robert just stared at Jeffrey, a kind of despair on his face. He slumped back farther in the chair as if he did not have the strength to sit up. He kept staring at Jeffrey, his eyes moving back and forth like he was reading a book.

  'It was me,' Robert finally said. 'It was all me. I killed Swan and I killed Julia, too.'

  Jeffrey felt like all the breath had been sucked from his lungs.

  'All that other stuff – I did that, too.'

  'No, you didn't,' Jeffrey insisted. What the hell was he talking about? There was no way Robert had killed anybody.

  'I used a rock to hit her in the head,' Robert told him. 'It was pretty quick.'

  'You didn't do that,' Jeffrey said, either anger or fear making his voice waver. This was just too much. 'Everyone thought she ran away. You said it yourself less than five minutes ago.'

  'I lied,' he countered. 'I'm telling you the truth now. I threw the rock in the abandoned quarry. You'll never be able to find it, but my confession should be good enough.'

  'Why are you saying this?'

  He stood up, wincing from the pain in his side. 'Go get Reggie.'

  'I won't. Not until you tell me why you're lying.'

  Robert knocked on the window and motioned Reggie inside. 'I want Reg to take me in.'

  'That's not –'

  'It's better this way, Slick. Simpler. Now we've got everything tied up all neat. It's finally over and done with.' Robert wiped his eyes. 'Look at me crying like a girl.' He gave a humorless laugh. 'Reggie sees me like this he'll think I'm some kind of pansy.'

  'Fuck Reggie,' Jeffrey said, just as the deputy walked in. Reggie's eyebrow shot up, but for once, he kept his mouth shut.

  Robert held out his hands to the deputy. 'You need to cuff me.'

  Reggie looked back and forth between the two men. 'This some kind of stupid joke?'

  'I killed Luke Swan last night,' Robert said, putting his hand in his front pocket. For some reason, Jeffrey's first thought was that he was going to pull out some type of weapon. Instead, Robert showed them a spent bullet.

  Reggie examined the casing. 'Federal,' he noticed, just like the bullets Robert had in his Glock.

  Robert told him, 'It was just sticking out from his head.' He put his index finger to the area beneath his ear. 'Just the tip of it, right here. You wouldn't think a bullet would be like that, just peeking out like someone put it there, but it slid right out. I didn't even have to pull much.'

  Reggie still wouldn't buy it. He handed the bullet back to Robert, but Robert wouldn't take it. 'Y'all are shitting me, right?' He snorted a laugh. 'This one of your practical jokes, Bubba? You trying to get me in trouble with Hoss again?'

  'Stop dicking around, boy,' Robert demanded, his tone harder than Jeffrey had ever heard it. Robert was Reggie's superior, and he was giving him an order when he said, 'Cuff me and read me my rights. Do it by the book.'

  Jessie came in, her drink topped off to the rim. 'Y'all want something to . . .' Her voice trailed off as for once she noticed that she was not the center of some drama. Her eyes locked onto Robert's, and in the split second before she managed to control herself, she looked terrified. She re
covered quickly, but still put her hand to the doorjamb like she needed something to keep her from falling over. 'What did you tell them?'

  Robert's eyes watered again, and his voice was full of regret as he said, 'The truth, baby. I told them the truth.' Again, he held out his hands to Reggie. 'Luke Swan was having an affair with my wife. I came home and found them together, and I shot him.' He shook his hands. 'Come on, Reggie. Get it over with.'

  Jessie murmured, 'Oh, Jesus.'

  Robert said, 'Cuff me.'

  Reggie put his hand to the back of his belt, but he did not get his handcuffs. 'I'm not cuffing you,' he said. 'I'll take you to the station to talk to Hoss, but no way I'm putting handcuffs on you.'

  'Reggie, I'm ordering you.'

  'No fucking way,' Reggie said. 'Not that I wouldn't love to see you riding in the back of my car, but I ain't gonna have Hoss come down on me for something you did.' He added, 'Not this time, anyway.'

  'You need to do this by the book,' Robert told him.

  Reggie would not relent. 'I'll go crank up the car, let it cool down a little. You come out when you're ready.'

  'I'm ready now,' Robert said. When Jeffrey moved to follow them, he held up his hand. 'No, Jeffrey. Let me do this alone.'

  Jessie was still in the doorway, and Robert had to pass his wife to leave. Jeffrey watched as Robert kissed her cheek, saw the way Jessie flinched away from his touch, try as she might to pretend she wasn't. Jeffrey wanted to grab her and shake her, to throw her to the ground and throttle the life out of her, for treating Robert this way. There was no way he had killed a man. Jeffrey did not buy it. Something was not right here.

  Still, when Robert asked Jeffrey, 'Look after Jess for me, will you?' Jeffrey nodded.

  He told Robert, 'I'll be up at the station later.'

  'Jess,' Robert said. 'Give him the keys to my truck.' He managed a sad smile. 'I don't guess I'll be needing it for a while.'

  'Don't say anything to them, not even Hoss,' Jeffrey coached. 'We need to find you a lawyer.'

  Robert left the room without responding. Seconds later, the screen door popped shut.

  'Well,' Jessie said, then took a long drink. The glass had been nearly full when she started and she had left little more than the ice cubes. Jeffrey watched her throat work as she drank it all down, wondering how she could appear to be so calm with her husband on the way to being charged with murder.

  Jessie sucked an ice cube into her mouth before dropping it back into the glass. 'This must be the best day of that old hick's life.' She waited for Jeffrey to say something, but he did not oblige. 'Reggie's been waiting like a hawk lo these many years, looking for the day Robert stumbled. I'm sure he's planning on swooping in tomorrow and getting that promotion that has so long eluded him.'

  'Doesn't sound like Robert's the one who stumbled to me,' Jeffrey told her, letting all the bile he felt rise out in his tone. This was her fault. She had brought this down on Robert. She had brought this down on all of them.

  'Oh, that's just perfect, Slick. So damn typical. He shoots and kills a man and somehow you manage to paint me in the black.'

  'Why'd you cheat on him?' Jeffrey demanded. 'Why?'

  She shrugged like it was a casual thing. There was something nervous about her, almost twitchy.

  'He was good to you.'

  'Now, don't go getting on your high horse, Jeffrey Tolliver. You're forgetting who you're talking to.'

  'I never cheated on anybody,' he said, disgusted by the knowing look she gave him. Jeffrey might have done his share of fucking around, but he made certain the women he was involved with knew exactly what they were – or were not – getting into.

  He said, 'When I make a promise to someone, I keep it. I sure as shit wouldn't run around on my wife.'

  'Easy to say now,' Jessie said, sucking the liquor off another ice cube. She smacked her lips. 'You're the worst kind of cheat because you think you're too good to let it happen.'

  'Don't you even care that he's going to jail? This is a death-penalty state, Jessie. He could end up getting a needle in his arm.'

  She looked down at her glass, swirling the ice around.

  'How'd it start?' Jeffrey demanded. 'Were you buying drugs from him?'

  'Drugs?' She looked startled. 'Robert?'

  'Luke Swan,' he said. 'He was using. Is that how it went down?' He grabbed her arm, looking for needle marks. 'You two shot up together and it went from there?'

  'You're hurting me.'

  He pushed up her sleeve, checked the crease of her elbow and under her arm.

  'Stop it!'

  He checked her other arm, spilling ice onto the floor. 'What made you do it, Jessie? What?'

  'Goddammit, Slick,' she screamed, pushing him away. 'Where the hell do you get off?'

  'I don't have time for this,' Jeffrey said, thinking if he did not get away from Jessie right now he'd really hurt her. With Sara last night, the thought repulsed him, but now he wanted nothing more than to smack some sense into Jessie.

  He said, 'Give me Robert's keys.'

  She held his gaze for a second longer, then said, 'They're in my purse in the kitchen.' She waited a beat, like she wanted to make sure he knew she was making a choice. 'I'll go get them.'

  Jeffrey paced in the doorway as he waited for her. He was sick of this crap. It was one thing for Reggie to break his balls, but he sure as shit wasn't going to take it from Robert's cheating wife.

  'Here go,' Jessie said, coming back from the kitchen with a full drink in one hand and the keys in the other.

  'You're some piece of work,' he said, holding out his hand for the keys.

  She gave him a strange look that he could not quite read. 'I should have married you.'

  'I don't recall asking.'

  She laughed like what he had said was the funniest thing she'd heard all day. 'You watch, Slick.'

  'Watch what?'

  'That Sara of yours sure seems to have you tied around her little finger.'

  'Leave her out of this.'

  'Why, because she's better than me?'

  It was true, but Jeffrey didn't want to get into it. He had learned the hard way that you could not reason with a drunk. 'Give me the damn keys.'

  'You're gonna marry her, and then you're gonna fuck around on her.'

  'Jessie, I'm only going to tell you one more time.'

  'There's gonna come a day when you realize you're not the center of her world anymore, and then you're gonna run out sniffing around for something new. Mark my word.'

  Jeffrey kept his hand out, forcing himself not to speak.

  She held the keys over the palm of his hand and dropped them as she said, 'Come see me in a couple of years.'

  'I'd rather watch my dick rot off.'

  She smiled, holding up her glass in a toast. 'Until then.'

  Robert's truck was the same piece-of-shit '68 Chevy he had been driving since high school. The gears were temperamental, and the whole truck groaned each time Jeffrey tried to shift. There had to be some art to making the truck move, but that knowledge was lost on Jeffrey. At each stop sign, he lurched like a sixteen-year-old kid just learning to drive, the engine cutting out more often than not as he tried to get the damn thing into first.

  Once he drove out of Herd's Gap, he did not know where to go. Sara was probably at the funeral home going over the bones. Hoss was at the station booking Robert. Jeffrey could go home, but his mother would be there for lunch and the last thing he needed was to watch his mother fortifying herself with cheap vodka before she started her second shift at the hospital. Dealing with one alcoholic a day was enough. He was heading toward Nell's, thinking she'd probably already know about Robert's arrest by now, when he remembered Possum.

  That was the way it had always been with Possum: he was an afterthought. Unlike Robert, who was on the football team with Jeffrey and could carry his own socially, Possum was a third wheel, someone who tagged along as a buffer between his two ultra-competitive friends. He laughed at their
jokes and kept score between them. Not that Possum was completely altruistic. Sometimes he got lucky and managed to snag some of Jeffrey's and Robert's castoffs.

  Nell was definitely one of Jeffrey's castoffs, and one he had been glad to get rid of. Even as a teenager, she had known exactly what she wanted and was not afraid to speak her mind. That her mind was usually focused on what she saw as Jeffrey's many faults was the biggest problem he had with her. She was very outspoken and could be downright nasty when it came to giving her opinion on his latest transgressions. If not for the fact that she was one of the few respectable girls in school who still put out, he would have dropped her after their first date.

  Jeffrey would be the first to admit that he liked a challenge, but Nell was the sort of person you could never win with. In the end, he had to admit that Possum was a better fit for her – he didn't mind being told what to do and gladly accepted any sort of criticism at face value – though Jeffrey had been surprised to learn the month after he left for Auburn University that they had gotten married. It made him wonder what had been going on behind his back. Nine months later, he realized exactly what had been going on. If he let himself think about it, it still stuck in his craw, but in all fairness, he had told Nell they should date other people when he moved away. The problem was, he had imagined her pining away for him, not jumping into the sack with his best friend.

  Jeffrey forced the truck into second as he turned into the parking lot of Possum's store. The place was still run-down and depressing, with faded Auburn flags banking either side of the door. Signs in the windows advertised cold beer and live bait; two things essential to any small-town country store.

  The bell over the door clanked loudly as Jeffrey entered the building. Wooden floors that had been installed back during the Depression squeaked underfoot, dirt from sixty years of wing tips and work boots and now sneakers filling the grooves.

  Jeffrey walked straight to the back and pulled out a six-pack of Bud from the walk-in cooler. Before the door closed, he pulled out a second six-pack and walked to the front of the store.