The Lesson of Her Death

of the terror that assaulted him now as he lined up the fat white envelopes of bills and pulled toward himhis blue-backed plastic checkbook, soon to be emasculated.
    The telephone rang. He answered it. He listened then looked at his watch. Wynton Kresge said, “Well, I don’t know.” He listened some more. “Well, I guess.” He hung up.

W ynton, come on, get the lead out of your cheeks. You look like a walking tombstone.”
    Corde spun the squad car around the corner and pressed the accelerator down. The four-barrel engine, factory-goosed so it could catch ’Vettes and Irocs, pushed both men back in the vinyl seat.
Come on Wynton cheer up cheer up cheer up
.
    “What you got there?” Kresge looked at the seat under Corde’s butt. “What you’re sitting on?”
    A backrest of round wooden balls strung together. It looked like a doormat. “Good for the back,” Corde said. “It’s like it massages you.”
    Kresge looked away as if he’d already forgotten he’d asked the question.
    “You like to fish?” Corde asked him.
    “I don’t want to today.”
    “You don’t what?”
    After a moment Kresge resumed the conversation. “Want to go fishing.”
    “We’re not going fishing,” Corde said. “But do you like to?”
    “I like to hunt.”
    “I like to fish,” Corde said. “Hunting’s good too.”
    They drove past the pond where Jennie Gebben and Emily Rossiter had died. Corde didn’t slow down and neither of them said a word as they sped on toward the Fredericksberg Highway.
    After ten minutes Kresge touched the barrel of the riot gun lock-clamped muzzle-up between them. “What’s this loaded with?”
    “Double-ought.”
    “I thought maybe it was rock salt or plastic bullets or something.”
    “Nope. Lead pellets.”
    “You don’t have to use steel? I thought with the wetlands and everything you had to use steel.”
    Corde said, “It’s not like we shoot that much buckshot at people ’round here.”
    “Yeah, I guess not. You ever used it?”
    “Drew a target a couple times. Never pulled the trigger, I’m mighty pleased to say. You got a pretty wife.”
    “Yep.”
    “How many kids you got, all told?”
    “Seven. Where we going?”
    “Fredericksberg.”
    “Oh. How come?”
    “Because,” Corde said.
    “Oh.”
    Twenty minutes later they pulled into a large parking lot and walked into the County Building. They passed the County Sheriff’s Department. Corde noticed an empty office being painted. It was T.T.’s old one. There was no name on the plate next to the door. He could picture a nameplate that said
S. A. Ribbon
. Corde and Kresge continued on, to the office at the end of thehall. Painted in gold on rippled glass a sign read,
County Clerk
.
    Kresge stopped to study a
Wanted
poster in the hall. He said to Corde, “You got business, Detective, I can wait out here.”
    “Naw, naw, come on in.”
    Corde walked through a swinging gate and into a dark, woody old office presided over by a dusty oil painting of a judge who looked like he’d spent the entire portrait session thinking up cruel and unusual punishments.
    From a desk under the window, a grizzled bald man, wearing a wrinkled white shirt, bow tie and suspenders, waved them over.
    “Rest your bones, gentlemen.” The county clerk dug through the stacks of papers on his desk. “What’ve we got here, what’ve we got here.… Okay. Here we go.” He found a couple sheets of paper, dense with tiny type. He set them in front of him. “You’re a crazy son of a bitch, Corde, to pass up that chance.”
    Corde said, “I probably am.”
    “They were good and pissed, I’ll tell you. Nobody wanted it this way.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “In case you hadn’t guessed.”
    “I had.”
    “What’s he mean?” Kresge asked Corde.
    The clerk added loudly, as if he hoped to be overheard, “And nobody here is real happy we inherited you know who.”
    Corde supposed he meant Ribbon. “You can’t pin that on me.”
    The county clerk grew solemn then spread the papers out in front of him. He flipped through a three-ring binder. He stopped at one page and began speaking rapid-fire toward the book. “Okay raise your right hand by the power vested in me …”
    Corde was looking at the sour portrait above their heads. Kresge followed his eyes. The clerk stopped readingand looked at Kresge. “You gonna raise your hand or what?”
    “Me?” Kresge said.
    “You’re
the one being deputized.”
    “Me?” The man’s baritone rose