Something caught her eye before she could decide. A man. Tall. Stout. Full head of hair.
Chief Watkins sitting down at a blackjack table.
“I have to go,” Nic said.
He started to protest but Nic hung up the phone. She clicked it to silent, then slid it back into her purse.
What now?
She watched and waited from the adjacent room.
Watkins played blackjack. Then craps. Then roulette. Laughing. Drinking. He wore a button-down shirt and loose-fitting jeans. His hair looked groomed with gel or spray. He had a more youthful look about him, like he was trying not to be the man in charge of a dying town, but a man who could be any man, from any place. Maybe he came here to pretend he was that man.
As he moved from table to table, he was greeted by other patrons, waitstaff, dealers. He was known here. And it filled him up. Nic watched from the far corner of the bar, sipping water. Wanting vodka. Desperately wanting vodka. Thinking about her father and Evan—God, Evan and his guilt and tears. Then her mother’s email—the one about her marriage and how she couldn’t accept love.
I’d rather he punch me in the face.
And the one about her fear—I can’t lose another child.
Anger stirred, then attached itself to the man who was now indulging himself without a care in the world.
Finally, Watkins got up. He was on the move. A young woman in a tight minidress and thick platform boots had sidled up next to him half an hour before, and now she was convincing him to leave. She wasn’t attractive but she’d been wearing him down. Touching his arm. His back. Laughing boisterously when he spoke. He had already bought her two martinis and a pack of cigarettes.
They walked to another table where she’d left her coat. He helped her put it on. She led him to a back door.
Shit!
Nic ran out the front entrance, then turned right to where she thought they might have exited. She saw no one as she walked around the side of the building. Then she heard it—the laughter ofa woman. Drunk laughter. Then the deep voice of her companion. The voice of Chief Watkins.
Staying close to the building but out of the lights, she listened until she saw them move from the side of the building into the parking lot. She let them get ahead, then followed them, weaving through the rows of cars so she was out of sight. The laughter stopped. She heard the click of a car unlocking, then she saw headlights. Then a door opening, closing. She hurried now to see the row where the lights were coming from. She walked there slowly, quietly. The lights went off. The car was not leaving.
She got to the row and began to move along the back of each car, looking inside, listening for sound.
She walked until she heard them. The unmistakable sound of a man moaning. It was soft, coming through a small crack in the window. She slid to the far side of the adjacent car and looked through the windows. It was too dark to see, until a car rolled past on the other side, briefly shining a light through the windshields of each car in her row. It was quick, but unmistakable—Chief Watkins sitting in the driver’s seat. Eyes closed. Face contorted with anticipation, the melding together of pleasure and frustration as the woman leaned over him from the passenger side, her head moving up and down. The light was gone, but not the sound.
Nic walked around the car that was shielding her view. She could see that Watkins’s car was gray, but it was not until she had a clear view that she saw the make. A charcoal-gray pickup truck. Chief Watkins. The woman.
She squatted down behind the truck, heart pounding now.
Think.
The glass was intact on both taillights, but she couldn’t tell if the bulbs were out. She would have to wait until he turned the ignition.
Another laugh. The smell of a cigarette from the window. Something aboutfifty bucksandthat’s pretty steepand then,you should have asked before, asshole.
A door opening, closing. The woman stumbling away.
Then Watkins in a cruel, mocking voice.Cheap whore.
And then the ignition. The lights. Both of them working. Still, it had been two weeks.
She hurried back to the other side of the adjacent car, and managed to snap a photo with her phone as Chief Watkins drove away.
19
Day fourteen
Mick does not come home. This is the first time he has not been home all day and now, apparently, all evening.
