Free Bad Things by Michael Marshall Page B

said as I braced myself to submit to one of Bill Raines’s
    trademark hugs. Bill sure as hell hadn’t lost any pounds. When I’d
    fi rst met him he was big but rangy. There’d always been an even
    larger guy waiting to get out, however, and Bill had done his best
    to help him. He’d always been this huge, affable guy, who used his
    surname to make dumb but disarming jokes about the weather in the
    Pacifi c Northwest.
    We disengaged. “Well, shit on a brick,” he said. “How the hell
    have you been?”
    B A D T H I N G S 65
    I shrugged.
    “Yeah. Carol with you?”
    “No. I’m really just passing through.”
    We talked for a couple of minutes, establishing that Bill still lived
    out the north end of town, still worked at the family law fi rm down in
    Yakima, and was on his way to visit a client whose case he was affably
    confi dent of losing. I said I was living and working down in Oregon,
    without being more specifi c. I didn’t proffer a reason for being here
    in town. I asked about his wife, because you do.
    “She’s great,” he said, glancing at his watch. “Well, you know Jenny.
    Always got something on the boil. Look, shoot, I’m sorry, John—but
    I gotta run. Stupid fucking late as it is. You free this evening?”
    “Probably not,” I said.
    “Shoot. That changes, give me a call. Jen’s out of town. We’ll get
    wasted like old times, man. It’s been too long. It needs to happen.”
    “You got it,” I said.
    “Well, okay then,” he said. He seemed becalmed for a moment,
    then clapped me on the shoulder. “Shit, I really have to go. Later,
    yeah, maybe?”
    “Right.”
    I watched him hustle across the street to his car, wave, and drive
    away. Then I walked back to the motel, climbed in my own vehicle,
    and got on with doing what had been in the back of my mind all af-
    ternoon, had perhaps even been the real reason I’d been willing to fl y
    up here in the fi rst place.
    Maybe I’d never make contact with Ms. Robertson, and probably
    it didn’t matter anyhow. But there was one thing I could do, and it
    was about time.
    C H A P T E R 1 0
    When I was a hundred yards short of the gate I started to slow
    down, and eventually let the car roll to a halt. For the last ten min-
    utes of the drive it had felt as if I was shaking, gently and invisibly
    at fi rst—but growing in intensity until I had to grip the wheel hard
    to stay in control. As soon as the noise of the engine died away, I
    was still. When I was sure the shaking wasn’t going to start again, I
    opened the door and got out.
    I was now fi fteen minutes northeast of Black Ridge. I’d taken the
    Sheffer road, climbing gradually higher, then turned off onto the
    country road which doubled back up into the mountains. A few miles
    from here it all but ran out, narrowing to a perennially muddy track
    under the aegis of the forestry management ser vice. I walked up to
    the padlocked gate and stood looking over it, up the driveway.
    Was this enough?
    Over the last two years I had many times imagined being where I
    now stood, but in those morbid daydreams the gate had always been
    open and I had been there by prior arrangement. I had been pos-
    sessed, too, of a keen sense of rightness, of a meaningful deed being
    undertaken. As is so often the case, life had failed to mirror fantasy.
    B A D T H I N G S 67
    I took out my phone. I knew the house number, assuming it had
    not been changed. Perhaps. . .
    I turned at the sound of a car coming down the road, slowing as
    it approached. It was a spruce-looking SUV of the light and elegant
    type owned by people who have no genuine need for a rugged vehicle,
    but know their lifestyle requires accessorizing.
    It stopped a few yards past me and the driver’s-side window
    whirred down to reveal a cheerful-looking man in his fi fties.
    “Bob let you down?”
    “Excuse me?”
    The man smiled. “He’s a super Realtor, don’t get me wrong. Sold
    us our place—we’re up the road a mile? Moved over from