All The Way Down

Chapter 4

"I'm going to need to ask you a few more questions," Bullard said. "Mind coming with me to the police station?"

"All right," I croaked.

I felt Michelle's hand on the small of my back. "Are you okay?" she asked.

I nodded dully.

"I'll follow you to the station," she said.

Bullard led me over to one of the police cars and told me to ride in the front. The fact that Brick was gone and that I could have been driving my car that night was sinking in. I wondered if it had been Cal behind the wheel of my car. The image of his head exploding all over the interior of the Camaro made me swallow hard.

I doubted that Michelle could keep up with Bullard's driving, but I turned in the seat and checked to see if she was behind us anyway. I braced myself against the door as we rounded a corner. Bullard pushed the car hard enough to make the tires squeal a little at every turn.

When we arrived at the police station, sodium lamps mounted on the face of the brown, two story building lit the handful of cruisers and civilian cars in the lot. I followed Bullard inside through double doors. His desk was one of a dozen desks in the main room of the ground floor of the police station. He waved me to a straight-back metal chair beside his desk, which was clear aside from a notepad, an ashtray, and a 3x5 picture of him standing in the snow beside a large cougar he'd shot.

"Want a cup of coffee?" he asked.

"Yeah. Thanks."

Bullard walked to the pot and returned with a pair of coffee mugs. Mine was white and had a big chip out of the lip like it had been dropped. I took it and held it with both hands.

"Mister Harper, may I see your driver's license?"

I put the coffee on the desk and pulled out my wallet. I handed my laminated driver's license to him. Bullard took it from me and began copying my address down.

"Is this address current?" he asked without looking up.

I stared at Bullard's flat top haircut. His scalp reflected a healthy pink in the fluorescent light.

"Yeah," I said. I took a sip of the coffee. It was scalding and tasted corrosive.

He was still writing, head down. "Delorean. That’s an unusual name."

"That’s what I hear," I replied.

He handed the license back to me.

"What are you doing here in Alamogordo?" he asked.

"My brother died after a wreck out at the quarry yesterday. Guess it was my turn tonight."

Bullard leaned back in his chair. The springs in the chair creaked under the load. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and watched me while he lit one. He exhaled through his mouth before tossing the pack on the desk.

"Your brother was the truck driver. Brick I think it was."

"Bricklin. That’s right."

"So far as I know, what happened to your brother was an accident," Bullard said. "Do you know different?"

"What are the odds that his wreck and what happened to my car are unrelated?" I said.

"Well," Bullard said, "I don’t speculate on things like that. I read the report on your brother's accident. Either he fell asleep at the wheel or the truck got away from him. It happens."

I pointed at the pack of cigarettes. Bullard said to help myself. I picked up his lighter. It had a rattlesnake on it with a red stone where the eye would be. I shook a cigarette from the pack, lit it and took a pull from it. I held the smoke for a moment and let it out slow. I had managed to go several weeks without a cigarette and this one ranked up there with the best. It seemed to cover the taste of the coffee, which was a plus.

"Were you close to your brother?" he asked.

"No."

"Had you been in touch with him recently?"

"No."

"How were you contacted?"

"Brick gave my name as a reference when he hired on at the quarry. They called me."

"And you do what for a living?"

"I track people down who steal money from banks."

"Like a bounty hunter? No offense, but you don’t look like someone who could take down bank robbers for a living."

"The people I hunt took money from banks through bad loans or fraud. They don’t steal the money at gunpoint."

"Are you armed?"

"No. I haven’t needed a gun so far. Usually I just find the people who took the money and the police make the arrest."

"Okay. I got it. Are you working on anything right now? Anything in this area?"

"No. I’m just here because of what happened to my brother."

"And you’re staying where?"

"At the Sunrise Inn."

Bullard nodded to himself, settling something in his mind. Then he brushed some ash from the legs of his pants and exhaled as he spoke. "I’m not going to say that it isn’t possible that your brother’s accident and what happened to your car tonight are connected, but I doubt it. This is a friendly enough town, but we see things like this along the highway from time to time. Likely it’s the result of the driver of your car giving someone the finger, or looking at someone else's girlfriend too long at a stop light. You’ve got out of state tags on your car, and the way your car’s built it looks like it would get a lot of attention from other drivers. Who knows?"

I heard heels striking the linoleum of the police station floor and looked over my shoulder. Michelle had her purse under her arm and was coming towards us. She said hello, pulled up a chair from another desk and sat down by me. Bullard watched her with an appraising eye. I took a final drag off the cigarette and ground it out in the overflowing ashtray. There was an uncomfortable silence while Bullard watched me.

"Do you have any idea what happened?" Michelle asked Bullard.

"Well, Ma’am," Bullard began, "the man driving Mister Harper's car was injured by a shotgun fired from another car. Our officers are trying to locate witnesses now. Your friend here seems to think that there's some sort of vendetta against his family."

Michelle looked at me with wide eyes.

"Mister Harper," Bullard continued, "have you had any disagreements with anyone since you arrived in town?"

"No."

"Has anyone threatened you?"

I thought about Ray's behavior that morning. Unfriendly, yes, but not threatening. "No," I said. I rubbed my eyes. It felt as if I had sand under the lids.

"All right then," Bullard said, "I don't see any reason to assume that what happened tonight was directed at you, any more than there's reason to think your brother's death wasn't an accident. Coincidences actually do happen. The results haven't come back from your brother’s autopsy, but they don't expect to find anything except injuries from the wreck."

I could see that I was wasting my breath. "Fine," I said. "Am I free to leave now?"

"Yes you are," he said. "We'll need to keep your car as evidence until we can sort out who fired the shotgun at it and why. I'll be in touch as soon as we know more."

Michelle waited until we were outside in the parking lot to say anything.

"Did you find anything out before I got there?" she asked.

"The police think my family is a lightning rod for random catastrophes. That was about it."

We climbed up into Michelle’s Jeep and she got us out of there. I had my head against the window for a while. I just wanted to lean against something and close my eyes. I felt her hand rub my arm, or maybe I was imagining it. I was vaguely aware of getting into my hotel room and collapsing on the bed in my clothes. Then I was out.