I’d never been here, but I recognized it. He didn’t have to tell me where we were. He stopped the car, shut off the engine, and looked out, staring hard. He gripped the steering wheel like he was clinging to a lifesaving rope.
“Is this where it happened?” I said.
“Up past the curve there. Cormac drove the Jeep into the clearing. I don’t really recognize it in the daylight.”
I couldn’t guess what he was thinking, why he’d wanted to come here. Wanting to come full circle, hoping to find closure. Something pop-psychological like that.
“You want to get out?” I said.
“No,” he said, shaking his head slowly. “I just wanted to see it. See if I could see it.”
“Without freaking out?”
“Yeah, something like that. I wondered if there’d be more to this place. If I’d feel something.”
“Do you?”
He pursed his lips. “I think I just want to go home.” He turned the ignition and put the car in gear.
On the way back to town I said, “I’ve never been back to the place where it happened to me,” I said. “Just never saw much point in going back.”
“That’s because you’ve moved on.”
“Have I? I guess it depends on what you call moving on. Sometimes I feel like I’m running in circles.”
“Do you want to go back? I’ll go with you if you want to see it.”
I thought about it. I’d replayed that scene in my mind a hundred times, a thousand times, since that night. I realized I didn’t want to see the place, and it wasn’t because I was avoiding it, or because I was afraid.
Ben was right. I’d come so far since then.
“No, that’s okay.”
We had lunch at a local diner before heading back to Colorado. We’d be caravanning back in separate cars. I was half worried that Ben might take the opportunity to drive through a guardrail and over a cliff, or into oncoming traffic, like he was still regretting not making Cormac shoot him.
But he seemed okay. He was down, but not out. Some life had come back into his eyes over the last week or so. Even though we were leaving New Mexico with stories, but no hard evidence. Statements, but no witnesses. Nothing to keep Cormac out of court.
Ben slouched in his side of the booth, leaning on the table, his head propped on his hand. “Everybody he’s killed—every thing he’s killed—deserved it. I have to believe that. I have to convince the court of that.”
With a sympathetic judge, a less gung-ho prosecutor, or just one person from Shiprock willing to come testify, this probably would all go away. Lawrence had called us lucky, and maybe we were, but only to a point.
What it all came down to in the end: Cormac had shot an injured woman dead in front of the local sheriff, and nothing we could say changed that. And my opinion of Cormac was definitely colored by the fact that the first time we met, he’d been coming to kill me.
“Cormac’s not clean, Ben. We both know that.”
“We’ve spent half our lives looking out for each other. I guess it blinds you. I know he’s killed people. The thing is, you drop a body down a mine shaft far enough off the main drag, nobody’ll ever find it. And nobody’s looking for the people he’s killed.”
Like what Lawrence said about bodies in the desert. Every place had its black hole, where people disappeared and never came back again. It made the world a dark and foreboding place.
“That’s how the pack took care of things,” I said. “T.J. ended up dumped in a mine shaft somewhere. I hate it.”
“Me, too.” He stared at nothing, probably mentally reviewing everything we knew, everyone we’d talked to, every fact and scrap of evidence, looking for something he’d missed, waiting for that one piece to slide into place that would fix everything. The check arrived, and I took it—Ben seemed to not notice it. I was about to go pay it when he said, out of the blue, “I should just quit.”
“Quit what?”
“The lawyer gig. Too complicated. I should go be a rancher like my dad. Cows and prairie.”
“Would that make you happy?”