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  “No,” he said quietly. “Alex Martin has decided not to file charges against you.”

  John was stunned silent by this. Duncan studied his reaction intently. John’s wrist tingled, a memory of the secondary impact he had felt when he had slammed Alex Martin’s head into a cottonwood trunk. Duncan continued, “He cited your friendship with Mike. Said he thought you were going through a lot because Mike sure is. All you guys are, which I can understand. But he also added that he never wants to lay eyes on you again. Don’t take it personal, but I happen to feel the same way. You’ve got a lot swirling around up in that head of yours, John Houck. Bring it under some kind of control before you come back to Owensville.”

  “Where is he?” John asked.

  “Beats me.”

  “Not Mike. Alex.”

  “He’s at home. Waiting for Mike.”

  “He’ll be waiting for a long goddamn time.”

  Duncan groaned and rubbed the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. He got to his feet and lifted his hand, as if he had spent the past few minutes giving John sound investment advice, only to watch him sink his money into snake oil. Duncan was almost out the door when John said, “He’s hiding something. Maybe he said it was because I was a Marine and Mike’s friend, but he’s not filing charges against me because he wants this over, and that means he’s hiding something.”

  “Are you accusing him of murder?”

  “I said he’s hiding something. That’s all.”

  Duncan forgot about his planned exit entirely, closed the distance between them slowly. It was the first time since they had met that John saw what the man looked like angry. “You don’t believe most people have good intentions, do you, Mr. Houck?”

  “I beat the holy hell out of him tonight and he’s not filing charges against me. Pardon me if I don’t think he was able to work through that in less than four hours. I think he wants me out of here as much as you do.”

  “That’s fine. But I need you to remember that you may be a veteran, but in my book, you’re a civilian, which means when you have a suspicion about something you report it by phone to an officer of the law. And that’s the end of it for you. Got it?”

  John didn’t answer. Duncan didn’t move an inch. Finally he said, “Have I made myself clear, son?”

  “Yes, you have.”

  Bowers lied to me. He repeated these words to himself like a mantra. They carried him home, through the harsh, unfiltered dawn that lit his way back to Cajon Pass and his trailer park, where his neighbors were rising and going to work, making him feel like a gutter drunk returning from a bender. Everything inside his trailer seemed to point an accusing finger at him. The unmade bed suggested the presence of someone else who had not expected him home so early because he was supposed to be out there still, looking for Mike’s body, hunting for bloodstains on the floor of his bedroom.

  Mike Bowers lied to me. True, he hadn’t gone so far as to invent a fake wife, had never mentioned anyone who might be waiting at home for him aside from his Holy Roller parents in Phoenix. But it had been a lie of omission. Wasn’t that the worst kind?

  John pulled a beer from the fridge, downed it in several swallows, and collapsed at the kitchen table and remained frozen there as if awaiting the arrival of a tax man.

  He stopped himself from dozing off by going to the phone. Bowers and his father had the same first name, but when the operator told him there were fifteen different listings for Michael Bowers in the Phoenix area, he groaned and asked the woman to give him a minute. When he took three, he thought the operator might hang up on him. Then, as if a ghost were speaking to him, he could hear the derisive manner in which Bowers had once referred to his parents as Mike and Suzy. There was one listing for a Susan and Michael Bowers in the Phoenix area. He dialed the number and got the machine after a few rings. A chipper, high-pitched female voice with a trace of a Midwestern accent told him to leave a message. The sudden beep left him feeling as if he were back up on the high-dive board at Las Pulgas, staring down at a swimming pool full of other potential Recon Marines, the skull and crossbones leering at all of them from the far wall.

  He managed to stutter his name, but as soon as the words “friend of Mike” left his mouth, he heard the machine shut off, then the sound of the receiver on the other end brushing against fabric. “Who is this?” a frantic female voice asked him, even though he had just told her.

  “My name is John Houck. I served with your son—”

  “Mike,” she asked, voice accusatory. “You’re a friend of Mike’s, are you?”

  He heard a man enter the room. Words passed between them, but the woman was obviously holding the receiver to her chest. It sounded like the woman was protesting as the receiver was pulled from her hand. Then a man’s voice, a slightly weaker version of Mike’s commanding baritone, said, “We aren’t interested in hearing any more of your slander today. Is that clear?” In the background there were louder protests from the woman—Mike’s mother. She was probably trying to tell Mike’s father that John was not the same man who had called earlier. But Mike Sr. ignored her. “If you are confused as to the whereabouts of our son, perhaps it is the good Lord’s intention that you stay that way!”

  Only after he hung up was John able to assemble the brief sequence of events. Clearly Alex Martin had phoned Mike’s parents to find out where he might have gone. In the process, he had let them in on Mike’s big secret. John prowled up and down his trailer for about half an hour, telling himself he was giving Bowers Sr. enough time to calm down. But when he tried their number again, an automated voice informed him that his phone number had been blocked.

  This time he called information and asked for a listing in Owensville, California. He already knew Mike wasn’t listed, but the man he had been living with was. But when John called the number for the house, the phone rang ten times before he was given a voice mail message. In a clear and level voice, Alex Martin told him that no one was available to come to the phone. Neither one of those people was identified by name.

  John didn’t leave a message.

  The phone woke him at a little after six in the evening. John’s plan had been to drive to Phoenix and try to confront Mike’s parents face-to-face, but exhaustion had overtaken him, and he woke up to the orange light of dusk framing the shade over his tiny bedroom window.

  As soon as John answered, Alex Martin said, “He said you were a good Marine but you had all kinds of shit in the way.”

  “Like what?” John asked as he sat up straight.

  “Like you drove yourself nuts ’cause you couldn’t live up to your sister and you never wanted to admit to any of the other guys that you were living in the shadow of a woman.” Alex let this hang. There was a ragged edge to his voice that suggested tears or alcohol or both. John thanked God he hadn’t confided in Mike what had been done to his brother; he doubted he could have kept his cool if Alex had thrown that at him in this moment.

  “He never said one word about you,” John said carefully.

  “He didn’t need to. He was going to spend the rest of his life with me. You? He only had to lie to you for six months.”

  He could hear the fear in Alex’s voice, the fear that John hadn’t been hallucinating the night before, so he ignored his insults and said, “I called the house.”

  “I’m not staying there,” Alex said. “I can’t stay there right now. I’m at a motel.”

  “Has he come back yet?”

  A long silence, and then Alex said, “You know he asked me if he should tell you. He thought maybe you would understand. Or try to, at least. He was thinking about inviting you up here.”

  “And what did you say? When he asked you?”

  “I told him based on what he’d said about you I thought you would spit in the one eye he had left.”

  John’s anger got the best of him and he sat up quickly on the side of the bed, as if Alex were standing against the wall in front of him. “Then why the hell are you
talking to me right now?”

  Alex went so silent John thought the connection between them had broken. Then, in a quiet voice he said, “The flat sheet’s gone.” John didn’t catch his meaning at first, but Alex gave him some time to. “Last night, when I got back to the house, I went to unmake the bed, and the flat sheet was missing. There was just the comforter and the pillows. So I checked the mattress, and there’s a stain. It could be any—”

  “Have you told Duncan?”

  His answer was implicit in his silence. John felt his hand tense around the receiver. “Something else was going on in that house last night that you don’t want Duncan to know about.”

  “We ass-raped some choirboys as soon as we got done designing a nice dress for your sister. Fuck you, asshole. It was our home. You want to get to me? Then go back to treating me like a killer.”

  “No.”

  “Something changed your mind?”

  “Yeah. You’re not strong enough to do what I saw.” Only after he hung up did John feel a startling urge to apologize. Sure, he didn’t like being called an asshole, but he had not intended the words to wound, even though he was sure they were God’s truth.

  5

  After he hung up on Alex, John wrote out a list of possible courses of action, all of which seemed insane as soon as he put them to paper. Contacting some of the men who had served with him and Bowers on their last tour so they might put some heat on the Hanrock County Sheriff’s Department would require him to try to convince each one that he hadn’t gone off the rails, had truly seen Bowers with his chest cut open. The idea made his palms sweat. Maybe it didn’t matter—the guys who hadn’t been deployed again were scattered to the four winds.

  There was no other choice but to drive to Phoenix himself and confront Mike’s parents face-to-face, and he was getting ready to pack an overnight bag when something slammed into the side wall of his trailer, right below his window. Having forgotten that he had lost the Sig the night before, he reached for the holster behind the headboard and broke into a cold sweat when his fingers grazed empty leather.

  When John opened the front door of his trailer a crack, Alex Martin stepped forward into the security light’s near-blinding halo. No strange car parked nearby. Obviously he’d been trying to sneak up on him. But he wasn’t dressed to do harm. He wore a dark green polo shirt with an alligator label, jeans that showed off his time at the gym, and a heavy black waffle-print coat with a faux fur collar. A branch had clawed him during their race through the rain, leaving a long scratch on his left cheek that was starting to scab over. John didn’t remember him being so tall, probably because he wasn’t hunched over sobbing or running like hell to get away from him. The muscles he had were vanity muscles, the kind he’d lose in a few weeks if you got him away from whatever protein powder he was devouring every morning.

  With a wave of his right hand, John invited him inside. Alex followed, reaching into the flaps of his coat. As soon as John took a seat, Alex gently set his Sig on the tiny table in front of him, then backed away from it as if it were radioactive. “I found it a few yards from the house,” Alex said.

  “Thank you.”

  Alex nodded, gave his full attention to the floor. He stood with his back to the fridge, his arms crossed, and if John hadn’t known how much time it had taken him to get there, he probably would have assumed he didn’t intend to stay for more than a few minutes.

  “Tell me what you saw,” Alex finally said.

  The tone of his voice was gentle, not the lisping parody of homosexuals John had acted out and laughed at all his life, but something strangely close. His lips were parted slightly; John thought it looked almost like he was anticipating a kiss. I’m not a homophobe, John thought, wondering why this word had entered his vocabulary so easily. But he better make it clear he’s not expecting anything out of me that requires me to drop my drawers. Telling Alex what he had seen the night before would be equivalent to signing some sort of pact that wasn’t quite clear to him. Nevertheless, he needed to be believed.

  So John told him, starting with his decision to deliver the gift in person and his long drive through the rain. He described how he had been forced to ask for directions from a gas station attendant who had treated him as if he were dirt—now he could see that this woman had known Mike’s secret and had been afraid of what a reunion with John might bring. He told Alex about how he saw the Force Recon decal through the rain and debated going back to town for a room before he headed up the driveway, entered the house, and found Mike lassoed to the bed’s headboard, his chest hacked open, and his blood the color of ink in the dark.

  Then he remembered the detail about the V-shaped bloodstain on the doorknob. When he mentioned this, Alex blinked and straightened against the counter he had been leaning against.

  “You saw it, too?” John asked, hating the desperate note in his voice.

  Alex nodded. “On the front door, when I started running.”

  In the silence that followed, John expected the guy to break down in front of him, to sob like he had done in the woods. Instead, Alex appeared to be in a daze, as if he were straining to visualize the scene John had just described.

  “He never told me that you had a way with words,” Alex said.

  John almost asked Alex if he were being sarcastic, but he could tell he was sincere from the way he was standing, still dazed, staring away from John now, as if his image were too bright to look directly into. “Right,” John said. “He was too busy telling you about how I wasn’t a real man because I…how did he put it? Because I live in my sister’s shadow?”

  Alex seemed surprised to hear his own cruel words repeated back to him. It looked as if he had forgotten about making the comment just hours earlier, and John realized that given the events of the past forty-eight hours, that was probably the case. Then Alex lowered his eyes, shamefully. “He said all kinds of things about you depending on what kind of mood he was in. Picking one over the other…that was unfair of me.”

  John felt a tightening in the center of his chest, but he wasn’t sure which small revelation had caused it. Mike, whom he had been too ashamed to face for months after their return home, had respected him enough to say all manner of things about him. And now someone he had almost killed the night before was apologizing to him. The sound of his sudden deep breath startled them both. Embarrassed, John got to his feet and brushed past Alex, pulling a beer from the fridge and blaming the four he’d already had for the change that had just come over him. It was easier than entertaining the idea that Alex Martin’s gentleness was responsible for the knot in the center of his chest.

  “I was high,” Alex said. “I hadn’t planned on it, but I was.”

  John was too startled by this admission at first to realize that Alex was coming clean about what he was covering up about the night before.

  “You didn’t plan to be? What does that mean?”

  “I think Mike spiked my drink with a drug called GHB. Because we’d been fighting. Because he wanted me to loosen up. I’d told him you weren’t supposed to mix it with alcohol, but I guess he thought he had the right dose. He didn’t. I passed out downstairs.” In the silence that followed, Alex must have seen confusion on John’s face because he said, “A few months ago we went down to San Diego to hit the bars. A friend of mine gave Mike some to try, said it was for people who wanted to get buzzed but didn’t like to drink.”

  John said, “It’s the date rape drug.”

  “I know that,” Alex said, an edge to his voice. “I didn’t exactly sign off on this habit, okay? I thought it was a one-time thing. Just that night, you know? Going out to the bars. It was hard for him.”

  “Because he didn’t want anyone to know he was gay.”

  “No. Because he had one eye. Gay guys aren’t exactly charitable when it comes to being overweight, let alone physical deformities.”

  “What about you?”

  “I couldn’t have cared less. But it didn’t matter how many time
s I said that to him. He started taking it whenever we had sex. He felt…incomplete.”

  Be cool with this, John told himself. He’s testing you. Don’t be the hater he thinks you are. “He could get it up on that stuff?”

  “He didn’t need to get it up to do what he liked to do. I did.”

  In any other circumstance John would have quickly excused himself and beelined to the nearest shower. But instead a bark of laughter escaped him before he could stop it. In the silence that followed, he looked up to find Alex glaring at him. John said,

  “I’m just waiting for the next big revelation, that’s all. Was he going to have a sex change, too?”

  “I’m sorry I’m such an oddity to you, John.”

  “I wasn’t talking about you. I was talking about Mike.”

  Alex rolled his eyes, gave a throaty grunt, and sucked in a deep breath through his nostrils, a series of gestures John found to be so condescending, he tensed his fists against his lap. Maybe Alex sensed his anger because when he spoke again, it was quickly, almost breathlessly. “After I got off the phone with you I went to see Duncan and I told him everything I just told you. I also told him the flat sheet was missing from the bed. Then when I told him about the stain, I figured he would place a call to the sheriff in Boswell. Instead he interrogated me for three hours. Several times he asked me if I wanted a lawyer. I declined.”

  Alex gave him a chance to respond, but John was too stricken by this information to come up with something to say. Alex said, “Tonight at midnight will be almost twenty-four hours since Mike went missing. Another day and he’s officially a missing person and Duncan starts taking all this seriously. And if he starts thinking it’s a murder, he’s got two primary suspects: a Marine and a faggot. And mark my words, he will pick the faggot, because that’s who he is. That’s how he was raised and that’s how his mommy and daddy were raised and so on and so on.”