It was a long night of answering questions and being treated with a significant level of suspicion, but Jericho didn’t mind. Wooderson was dead. No more desperate women were going to die, no more vulnerable men were going to suffer needlessly. And Jericho’s story would hold up, since it was almost all true. He hadn’t mentioned that he’d drawn his gun, and didn’t think he’d be caught out in that; the initial survey had found a neighbor who’d seen Jericho sitting in the cruiser and then standing and crossing the road, but the corner of his own house had blocked his view of what had happened in the Wooderson driveway. So the neighbor’s testimony, combined with clear evidence that the shot had been fired from a rifle some distance away, made it obvious that Jericho was a witness, not a shooter.
Still, it was almost dawn by the time he left the station. He needed to go home and get some sleep, but instead, he found himself heading for the mountains.
There was an altogether different battered pickup parked in front of the old cabin, and Jericho very carefully did not examine the taillights to see if their shape was familiar. Instead, he pushed the door gently open and stepped inside to find Wade lying on his back on the camping mattress and sleeping bag, eyes closed.
Jericho shut the door behind himself and undid his utility belt.
“You okay?” Wade asked from the floor. He sat up, slow and graceful, and pointed to a bottle on the rickety table. “Need a drink?”
“You taking care of me?” There was a definite instinct to keep his mouth shut and not push to hear answers he might not want, but Jericho overrode it. He needed to know. “Like you looked after me earlier tonight?”
Wade sighed and stretched over until he could reach the bottle himself. He spun the lid off with one practiced move of his thumb, lifted it to his lips, took a mouthful, and extended the bottle in Jericho’s direction.
Jericho took it—no reason not to—and as he swallowed, as the familiar warm bite hit his throat, he was glad of it. He lowered himself gingerly onto one of the wooden chairs, cautious until he was sure it would take his weight, then leaned forward so his head was only a little higher than Wade’s. He handed the bottle back, and then he waited.
Finally Wade said, “I’ll always try to look after you, Jay. You know that.”
“By sacrificing yourself?”
Wade’s shrug was just a dance of shadows. “If I had to, yeah. But in this case? This case that we’re not going to talk about in detail, for everyone’s sake? Not much risk. Not much sacrifice. Remember what you said when you asked me to talk to Kay’s dad? I know how to do these things without getting caught.”
Of course he did. The ballistics wouldn’t be traceable to him, and if he were brought in, he’d have an easily reinforced story of hunting or target shooting to explain any gunfire residue on his clothes or his vehicle. He’d have driven one of Scotty Hawk’s many half-wrecked trucks, one that didn’t have any trackers on it, one that the feds wouldn’t recognize. He’d probably shaken his surveillance off by trekking through the woods to another car. He’d have done it smart. He’d taken a human life, and he wouldn’t be punished for it. Suspected? Maybe, if anyone ever decided he had a motive. But he was used to living under suspicion.
“You were sure it had to be done?” Jericho asked.
“Youwere sure,” Wade replied calmly, and he lifted the bottle. “You were ready to do it yourself, but you knew it wasn’t smart. So I took care of it for you.”
He took care of it. Killing another human being was taking care of something.
Jericho wasn’t squeamish about killing; he’d seen enough of it in the military, and done enough of it himself. But that had been different. He’d never known one of the people he or his friends killed. Wooderson had been sick and dangerous, but he’d been a civilian. A father. One of the people Jericho had sworn to serve and protect.
And Wade had confirmed that he’d killed Wooderson because ofJericho’sdecision. The legal responsibility might have been shifted, but the moral weight was harder to move.
“You okay?” Wade asked, just as he had when Jericho first came in. Apparently he still wanted to hear an answer.
But Jericho didn’t have the words to express how he was. “Why’d you send me after Cory Barker?” he asked. “What was that for?”
“He was cooking meth in a residential neighborhood. I assumed you’d want to take care of that before somebody got hurt.”
“What else?” Jericho knew Wade was watching him closely, trying to figure out his mood. So that was two of them who weren’t exactly clear how Jericho was supposed to feel about any of this.
After a long wait, Wade shrugged. “I heard you were looking for snakes.”
Too long of a wait for an answer that shitty. Jericho pushed to his feet and took a half step toward the door.
Wade snorted like he was going to call Jericho’s bluff, going to let him leave and head out into the night alone. But then his expression softened a little. “I honestly don’t know, Jay. It just . . . occurred to me. I don’t run meth, so it wasn’t a business thing. I know him, and he’s an asshole, but so are lots of other people in town, and I’m not planning ways to get any ofthembusted. Or at least notallof them. This was just—it was an idea I had. I didn’t see a downside, so I let it happen.”
“Let it happen or made it happen?”
“Let. I wasn’t going to push it. I didn’t have a backup plan.” He was quiet for a moment. ”Remember when we were kids? Playing in the stream behind your place? Building dams and barriers and whatever, seeing which way the water would go? Sometimes you could drop one stone in just the right place and the whole stream would change course. Remember that?” Wade waited for agreement, but continued without it. “I told Elijah about the snakes. Dropped one stone. That was all. I had no plans to build a dam, and I didn’t get any benefit from having the water change course.”
“You were playing god?”
“I was . . . playing.”
It wasn’t enough, but anything more would push Wade into making something up. Jericho took a moment to be sure he was really as calm as he felt, then toed his shoes off and stepped onto the sleeping bag.
“Shove over,” he ordered.
