Page 90 of Never Flinch

“Help you, fella?” the farmer shouts over the racket of the tractor and the spinning mower blades. “You lost?”

“Yes!” Trig shouts back. “I’m lost!”

He takes the Taurus from his pocket and shoots the farmer twice in the chest. The sound of the gunshots is all but lost in the roar of the tractor. The farmer rears back as if beestung. Trig gets ready to shoot him again, but then he slumps forward. His hat falls off. Thinning gray hair blows in a light breeze, reminding Trig of milkweed puffs.

A car goes by on the highway. It slows. Trig gives the car a wave without turning around—all okay here—and it speeds up again. Trig takes the leather folder from his pocket and thumbs through the thinning collection of slips inside. He feels no sense of worry, just as he never worried in the old days when he’d drive home sipping from a handle of Smirnoff between his spread thighs. There is a sense of perfect rightness about this encounter, and oh God, such relief. The need will come again, but for the moment all is well.

I need MA instead of AA, he thinks, and actually laughs.

From his folder he takes the slip of paper with Brad Lowry printed on it. Lowry was Juror 12 in the Duffrey case. Trig picks up the farmer’s straw hat and puts Lowry’s name in it. Not hurrying, he also puts the slips for Jabari Wentworth (Juror 3) and Ellis Finkel (Juror 5) into the hat. The farmer has welded a handy step-up onto the side of the peakseat. Trig uses it and pushes the farmer back into an upright position, being careful not to joggle the transmission and start the tractor moving. Then he jams the hat down on the farmer’s head. Eventually, someone will take the hat off. Eventually, the slips of paper will be found, and will be understood.

A farm truck full of equipment passes. Trig stands where he is, as if conversing with the farmer. The truck passes. He goes back to his car and drives away.

I’m going to be caught.

Not a guess but a stone-cold fact. He’s remembering something that happened near the end of his drinking, the thing that got him to his first AA meeting. Three blocks from his house, drunk as a skunk with that handle of vodka resting against his crotch, he saw blue lights go off in his rearview mirror. Calmly, he had screwed the cap on the bottle, put it in the passenger footwell, and pulled over, telling himself the cop wouldn’t be able to smell vodka on his breath like gin or whiskey, at the same time knowing that was a myth.

The cop flashed his light in Trig’s window and asked for his license and registration. Trig handed them over, getting the registration from his Toyota’s glove compartment—a different Toyota, but similar to the one he was now driving. The cop put his light on them, then went back to his cruiser. Trig tried to put the bottle of vodka in the glove compartment. It was too big to fit. Under the passenger seat. Also too big. He thought,I may or may not spend tonight in the city drunk tank, but for sure my name will be in the paper’s Police Beat column tomorrow.

The cop started back. Trig returned the big bottle of vodka to the passenger footwell. It was the best he could do. A sense of fatalism washed over him.

“Have you been drinking, sir?”

“I had a couple after work, but that was hours ago.” Not slurring. Or hardly at all.

“I see by your license that you’re close to home.”

Trig had agreed that was so.

“I suggest you go there, sir, and not get behind the wheel again until you are sober.”

He then shone his light into the passenger footwell, spotting it on the three-quarters-empty bottle of vodka.

“If I see you weaving again, sir, you will go to jail.”

So nothing in writing, just a verbal warning. That would not happen after killing seven people.

I should have taken the Rev’s calendar instead of just changing the name. That was what Daddy would have called “too clever by half,” probably punctuated by a clip to the side of the head. And what about the vehicles that passed while you were “talking” to the farmer? What if one of them saw the old guy slumped forward and thought it was peculiar? What if one of them jotted down your license plate?

He doesn’t believe anyone did that, but the calendar is a different matter. That will have been gone over by experts, and they may already have decided that he has altered TRIG to BRIGGS. It’s true that Trig is only a nickname, and nothing like his real one, but hehasused it at AA and NA meetings. Almost always out of town, it’s true, but he has attended the Straight Circle meeting on Buell Street a few times. What if someone in that meeting knows him in what alkies and druggiescall “the other life”? He doesn’tthinkthat’s likely—most of those at Straight Circle are low-bottom alkies and homeless drug fiends—but it’s possible. One thing is sure: he won’t be going to Buell Street again.

And look on the bright side, he tells himself.I’ve name-checked eight of the twelve jurors. I might even get them all.

In his rearview mirror, he sees a State Police cruiser coming up fast, and flashes back to that night when he saw blue lights in his rearview. That same sense of fatalism comes, as comforting as a blanket on a cold night. He touches the .22 in his pocket, slows down, pulls over. He’ll shoot the cop, put a name in his hand, and then—maybe, maybe not—shoot himself. The cop car sweeps by him, speeding on down Route 121 toward Rosscomb.

“No,” Trig says, letting go of the gun. “Not done, Daddy. Not done yet.”

He turns on the radio, but he’s too far from the city to pick up the news station, so he settles for some old-time rock and roll instead. Soon he’s singing along.

Chapter 14

1

Holly is preparing to leave for Madison, the next stop on Kate’s tour, when Izzy calls and tells her Russell Grinsted isn’t Trig. “His alibis for Rafferty and Sinclair both check out. His gun and his wife’s are the wrong caliber. Bottom line, the guy wasn’t scared to see us, just pissed off.” As an afterthought she adds (not without satisfaction), “Our visit may have tipped his marriage over. It was teetering anyway. He’s been cheating on his wife.”

Holly hardly hears that part. She can feel her cheeks heating with the kind of flush that would look feverish rather than pretty if she looked in a mirror (so she doesn’t). “I sent you on a wild goose chase. I’m sorry, Isabelle.”

“Don’t be. It was a good deduction, just off-base. It happens. You were right about the other thing. We’ve got a forensics guy who’s also an amateur graphologist. He spent part of his Saturday night looking at an enlarged photo of Reverend Rafferty’s calendar under magnification. You were right. It’s TRIG, not BRIGGS.TintoBwas the giveaway, he said. No question in his mind. If the Bill Wilson alias means the guy has been going to meetings, we have a real chance of finding out who he is. Trig isn’t like Dave or Bill. It stands out.”

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