Free Accustomed to the Dark by Walter Satterthwait

let Martinez escape. Neither did Robert Hernandez. Why punish them by withholding the information? ”
    â€œ I’m not punishing anyone .”
    â€œ No? Then what are you doing? ”
    â€œ I’m trying to locate Martinez and Lucero .”
    â€œ But why you, Joshua? ”
    It always came down to that. Why me?
    The cops had more resources. They had more equipment, better communications.
    But that didn’t matter, finally. I was searching for Martinez and Lucero because right now it was the only thing I could do. I would’ve gone insane sitting around the house, sitting around the office, waiting to hear from Hector or Hernandez.
    And it was Rita’s life, and mine, that had been violated by that rifle bullet. It was up to me, so I told myself, to find the men responsible.
    And perhaps I sought them because a part of me believed that if I found them—if I found Martinez, as I’d done five years ago—I could somehow guarantee Rita’s recovery.
    I was thinking such thoughts as I drove along that empty highway when, with no warning at all, the world abruptly shifted and it occurred to me that this was nonsense. That nothing would guarantee Rita’s recovery. That, no matter what I did, no matter what anyone did, Rita was not going to recover.
    The thought of her death took on a sudden inescapable weight and reality, and I was hit in the center of the heart by a blackness that was unbearable.
    I pulled over to the shoulder and I stopped the car. Once again, I couldn’t breathe.
    For a few moments I was lost deep within a bottomless pit. Rita was gone, forever, and everything had changed.
    Grief revises life, rewrites it forward and back. Evoke a small brittle hope, and grief blots it out. Summon a bright remembered joy, and grief twists it, transforms it into a dark swollen pain that seems, through some venomous magic, preordained.
    Grief grants you only the aching timeless present, this wretched inescapable moment, and it insists that you will be snared within this, alone, for the rest of time.
    All you can do is slog your way through. Or try to.
    I told myself that Rita was still alive. That the doctor believed she would recover.
    I got my lungs working again, and I filled them with air once or twice. I had put Leroy’s telephone on the passenger seat. I picked it up, flipped it open, dialed the number for the hospital.
    Rita was in a coma still. But she was alive.
    I flipped the telephone shut, put the car into gear, and I drove back onto the highway.
    I was just passing the Ribera turnoff, about twenty miles south of Las Vegas, when the telephone began to chirp. It had chirped three or four times before. Friends, offering condolences and help, and one caller who had simply hung up.
    I lifted it from the seat, flipped it open. “Hello.”
    â€œJoshua. Where are you?” Hector Ramirez.
    â€œOn the road,” I said.
    â€œYou’re using a cellular phone.”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œI just got a call from the Staties. From Hernandez. He says he got a report that you’re heading north on the Interstate.”
    I hadn’t recognized the trooper, but apparently he had recognized my name.
    â€œSo I called the office,” he said, “and I got you. But you’re not at the office. Call forwarding?”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œWhere are you going?”
    â€œNorth. Like the trooper said.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œTo check something out.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œNot sure yet. I’ll fill you in when I am.”
    â€œJesus, Joshua, do you always have to be an asshole?”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œYeah,” he said. He paused.
    I glanced around me. Foothills to the left, pasture to the right, clusters of fat cows happily grazing on emerald grass.
    â€œI talked to the hospital,” he said. “There hasn’t been any change.”
    â€œI know. I just called.”
    He paused again. “All right. Listen.