Free Firefly Rain by Richard Dansky

my head. “Nope.”
    She smiled like a mean old porch cat. “Then I guess you’d better start walking.”

seven

    I did walk then, all the way back to my front door. Anger fueled me for the first few miles, but after a while that faded and just left me with a long, slow road. A few cars passed me—a very few, truth be told—but none of them slowed. I saw curious faces looking out through their windows, but that was all. I thought I recognized one or two, but I couldn’t be sure. It had, like the woman had said, been a long time.
    The first part of the walk was easy enough. Some smart man in Raleigh had designated the stretch of road out of town a state highway. Near as I could tell, that meant that it got paved every so often in order to keep some construction company or other working. Still, it made my walk easier, at least for a while. Eventually, the pavement went away and the road turned to white stone gravel. The houses that lined the road grew farther apart,the fields more frequent and larger. There were stands of trees I walked past large enough to hide a small army or a herd of deer, and more than once I startled a covey of birds into exploding into the sky. It was nice enough to look at, I thought, but a trifle dull. After an hour and a half of heat and dust, I was even ready for Carl to pull up next to me and order me to get in. No such luck, though. It was just me and the road.
    As I walked, I reflected on my conversation with Officer Hanratty. There were things I had left out of my story and I wasn’t sure why, for they surely didn’t paint Carl in a good light. The envelope full of money, for one thing, and the fact that he’d opened my mail, for another. I’d left the fight, if you could call it that, out as well, but that was a bit more understandable. You don’t want to tell a police officer that you attempted to assault the man you think stole your car. You especially don’t want to tell a police officer that the old man in question kicked your ass when you tried.
    Officer Hanratty herself confused me. At times she’d seemed almost friendly, like she and I shared some kind of special view on the rest of the town. Other times, she’d been as tight with the old-timers as I could imagine anyone being. There had been an implied threat there at one point, and a sense that she knew more about things than she was telling. Had she talked to Carl already? I couldn’t rule it out, and I had no way of knowing what he might have said. It was a lead-pipe cinch, though, that anything Carl said would be believed over anything I said. Carl was
from
here, after all. I was the boy who went away.
    The fact that she made me walk back to the house angered me as well. Whatever the good law enforcement officers back in town might think, I wasn’t some spoiled city boy who expected the police to drop everything to ferry me back home. I had not expected Officer Hanratty to give me a ride back to the farm, even though it would have been the work of minutes for herto do so. But the unrestrained glee when she’d told me I’d be walking, well, that was something else again. The woman could have at least called me a cab, assuming there were any cabs to be had, or sent me out with an officer who could at least pretend to look at the site. Maybe she, too, was trying to teach me something about the town I’d come back to. If so, she’d done a piss-poor job. All I knew was what the sights along one particular road looked like these days. Hell, I hadn’t even bothered to walk around town.
    Still, some aspects of the conversation did cheer me slightly. If this was just Carl—or one of Carl’s friends—trying to put me in my place, then I had every reason to believe that the car would reappear soon. I didn’t hold out much hope for recovering the contents, but they were all insured. So was the car, and I chuckled to think about Carl trying to provide cash for
that
particular transaction. The image of the old man walking