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“You look better with your hair down,” was the first thing Lorne said to her. She had no idea when he’d had occasion to see her, hair down or up. She’d anticipated the meeting long before it happened, greeting the monster that killed Vern. Somehow she had always known that Lester was incapable of killing the chief of police. His nagging wife? Sure. But Vern had been a good man, a figure of authority. Lester pulled over to the curb whenever an ambulance passed, whether or not it had its sirens on.
She supposed the best explanation for what happened next is that fancy psychiatrist term. Whatchamacallit. Transference.
She’d been crushing on Vern since her days as a rookie. Lorne takes him out. Vern leaves a vacuum. Lorne steps into the vacuum. So it goes.
It didn’t help that Lorne seemed to be the first man to notice she was a woman in God-knows-how-long. Not in the way the others did, either. Not in the way that the boys at the station told her she should turn in her gun five days out of the month. Not in the way her daddy kept hinting that she’d be happier playing hostess for him. Not even in Gus’s kind but fumble-fingered way.
Her daddy died in a botched robbery, or that’s what Bill said it was. Two funny-lookin’ guys. New to town.
It didn’t matter. Nothing they said had ever mattered, she realized, because the only two people in the world that mattered were dead. And it didn’t matter who pulled the trigger, because it all came back to one man.
Lorne was sitting on the edge of the bed when she finally got the door open. She greeted him with a shotgun. He greeted her in his underwear.
“A little inconvenient, right?” he said.
“You shut your mouth.” It was hard to hold the shotgun still. She had to keep blinking her eyes clear.
Lorne didn’t look even remotely upset. “What if I told you you’re shootin’ the wrong guy?”
“I’d say if you told me the sky was blue I’d run outside with a color chart.” Her mouth wobbled.
He smiled at her. She hated how he was looking at her, like he understood.
“Molly,” he said, “I know you’re angry at me, and you’ve got every right to be, but I’m not the guy you wanna shoot. I’m not even one of them.”
She’d forgotten to click the safety off. She did so now.
He didn’t even flinch. “I’m not the guy that shot your dad. I’m not the guy that’s been givin’ you grief by not confessing. I’m not the guy that stymied you because you were a better cop than me. I’m sure as hell not the guy that saw how good you were and didn’t protect you.”
“You shut up.” Her shoulders were shaking.
“Moll.” He stood. “Let me explain something.”
And he did.
And it made so much sense she wondered why she hadn’t realized it before. It wasn’t just one man who was really guilty. They were all a little guilty, each of them. Guilty and stupid and blind.
Bill answered the door in a hat with ear flaps. He hit the wall opposite the door and got blood on his family pictures.
The two fellas were in an ice shack. Her dad had dynamite in the truck.
Gus was going to report her, so she just shot him a little, in the leg. He looked at her like it was a betrayal, but no, he was the one who betrayed her. He hadn’t helped. He was supposed to, but he hadn’t. He’d just laid down and took it, let a murderer get away. She didn’t kill him because she saw his daughter, and she saw twenty years down the line when the girl would have to make some choices of her own.
Lester was the only one she regretted. He cowered and cried for his wife. She believed he really was sorry, when all was said and done. Maybe what she did was a kindness, then.
Lorne threw an arm around her shoulders back at the motel.
“These sheets aren’t clean,” he said, “I think the boy who changes them just shakes them out a little and puts them back.”
They had sex in the shower. She cried as they did it, but it was a cry of relief. She felt like she was shedding years of frustration in the water, to swirl around the drain like errant hair. They did it three more times that night, she did not wait but went greedily after what she wanted, pounding harder on his hips than she’d ever done.
She didn’t ask whose car it was the next morning. She just smiled and slipped her hand into Lorne’s front pocket as they drove away from town the next morning.
They fucked their way up a series of motels. In the morning she woke and was surprised to find Lorne still there. Lorne seemed to think this slightly funny.
“Because,” he buttoned the last button on his shirt, “I believe you are as fully capable of that as I am.”
It made sense. He was good at that. Eventually she stopped worrying about the future. Lorne inhabited the present quite nicely, so she joined him. It was fun, like going on road trips with her dad after her mom had died, when he was trying to forget he wasn’t raising a boy.
Lorne got a call from Minneapolis.
“I gotta go in,” he told her. He paused, like he expected her to say something. She felt like she might have, once upon a time, but it didn’t feel like goodbye. So she grabbed his ass. He huffed a laugh and was out the door.
Molly went to a diner and ordered meatloaf. The waitress brought her the plate and extra napkins because Molly was crying into the home fries. She stayed in the booth all day, ordering coffee and staring out the window.
Her phone rang.
“Where are you?” Lorne asked, “come here.”
The office was almost a letdown. It looked like a regular office, not a place for people like Lorne. But the second the man looked at her and asked, “experience?” she knew she was in the right place.
Lorne put a hand on her upper arm. “I know this is what you’d call highly unorthodox, but I have every confidence in her.”
She smiled.