And so I started from the beginning, from the moment I climbed out of my car and walked up on the porch. What I heard. What I saw. What I said. What I did.
And Ewing asked me again for details on the knife.
“You mean, did I see the knife?” I said.
“Did you see him holding it?”
I looked down at my hands for an answer. All I saw was Coleman mauling Jess. It overpowered everything. I tried to slow-blink it away, but it wasn’t working, just like it hadn’t earlier when I was listening to Leon. The roaring still filled my ears.
“I was watching Leon,” I lied. “He was yelling. He had my attention because Railes pointed his gun at Leon first. Of course I’m not sure what Railes saw.”
“Okay. Did you see the victim holding the knife after he went down?”
“I only saw the knife on the floor. Maybe he dropped it as he fell.”
“I need you to think clearly about this one, Mitchell.”
“It’s clear.”
“Leon Spencer claims Coleman never had the knife, that Railes made that up.”
I shrugged for Ewing’s sake. My mind was already made up. “I couldn’t verify that for you.”
My chest spooled tighter. No, I’d never be the same after this. I couldn’t tell you for sure why I lied, but it wasn’t only Billy Railes’s voice whispering in my ear before help arrived:You better be a team player this time, Mitchell. Last chance.
“Is this story going to hold up when the independent investigator arrives to review Billy Railes’s use of lethal force?” Ewing eyed me as if he thought his stiff glare might either get me to crack or keep me in line for good. Make me a team player from this point on.
“Why wouldn’t it?”
“Because they aren’t going to ask it once. They’ll ask it a thousand times and you can’t give them one little opening.”
“There’s not much to keep straight,” I said. “I saw what I saw.”
It’s not that I wanted to protect Railes. I didn’t. I couldn’t stand the guy. I couldn’t stand the whole culture that produced guys like Railes. Tolerated and encouraged them, too.
But I’ll admit it.
As much as I wanted to protect myself, I still wanted to get back at a dead Coleman, too.
True, I didn’t want any more backlash from cops. In a weird way, I thought providing cover for Railes might earn me a ticket to the inside club, not that it was a ticket I wanted. But avoiding more backlash was only part of the story.
My reasons for backing up Railes were all too personal and something I needed to keep to myself. They were all tangled up into something ugly and raw rearing up inside me, snatching away my ability to do the right thing.
As I said, hate is like fear. You can’t control it when it takes you. It can overshadow everything. In that moment, I felt Coleman got whathe deserved, no matter how he got it, and nobody else should pay for it and nothing more should be made of it, even if it was at the hands of mind-numbingly stupid Billy Railes.
I knew I was as wrong as the clouds were bloated and dark above me.
Leon was a wreck by the time he was situated in theSaneSuite in town. A nurse had him in a room where I watched through one-way glass and listened over an intercom. They wanted him to talk about the rape, but he wouldn’t. He was in shock, still working his key chain with intensity. I felt as low as the underside of a stray tick in a dark forest, waiting for a wandering deer.
Leon’s word against mine. All I had to do was “remember” things differently when the investigator arrived in the morning.
Wallace called me, but I couldn’t stomach talking to him. I texted him and told him I was held up. I focused on Leon, watching them take him through it all again, coaxing him to discuss the rape after he’d given his statements about the shooting. When he got to the part where Coleman pulled him back from the door, I thought again of Sophie. How she told me that when Josh, her rapist, was kissing her, it felt good at first.
He got a hand under her shirt and she thought that was all right, too. She was okay with things progressing—until he pulled her in way too tightly.
He gripped her arms to the point that they hurt. When she tried to squirm away, he only jerked her in tighter. Josh wasn’t going to ask because he didn’t want to get ano.
Out in the dark under those great ponderosas, hours after we ran into the woods, she whispered to me that she began to block things out. That she’d flashed to a boa constrictor, clamping around its prey, and that clicked to an old urban legend that had stuck in her mind, about a girl who loved her pet snake and would let it sleep in her bed.She whispered the tale to me, that the girl fed the boa a rat once a day, but suddenly it quit eating. It wouldn’t eat for weeks, so she took it to a reptile shop and spoke to a specialist, who told her to not let the snake out of the cage until it began eating regularly again and tonotlet it sleep with her ever again. When the girl asked why, he said, “Because it’s stopped eating to make room to digestyou.”
