Winston took hold of Frye’s left arm and spun his body so that his back slammed against the passenger’s-side door. He splayed Frye’s legs with his knee, and he threw his left forearm under Frye’s chin to keep him pinned there. The men’s faces were inches apart, and Winston could hear Frye’s breathing and feel his pulse pounding in his neck and smell beer on his breath.
“Boy, never put your hands on an officer,” Winston said. “Never.”
He felt Frye’s right hand flick toward the gun he had holstered on his hip, but Winston was faster, and before Frye was able to get ahold of his pistol Winston had his pressed against the soft skin below Frye’s chin. He held it there, his mind thinking things that shocked him. Did he want to shoot Bradley Frye? Could he? How would he explain it, and could he get away with it? These thoughts passed through Winston’s mind in the time it would’ve taken a bullet to leave his gun and enter Frye’s head, which ended up being enough time for Winston to check himself. Instead of squeezing the trigger, he lowered his left hand and unholstered Frye’s pistol and tossed it onto the dirt behind him. He wondered if drinking had made Frye braver and stupider than he otherwise was.
“I told you to leave that weapon at home,” Winston said. He took a step back toward the house and lowered his pistol.
Frye stood up straight and ran his hands over his clothes like he was either grooming himself or checking his body for bullet holes.
“Do that in a couple of months and you’ll be holding a gun on the high sheriff of Brunswick County.”
“That’ll be fine,” Winston said. “I’ll still be the faster draw.”
“You going to shoot me now?” Frye asked. “First, you shot one in Gastonia and now a white boy down here. It’d be a hell of a way to end your career. Go from shooting criminals to shooting heroes.”
“No,” Winston said. He sighed, holstered his pistol. “I’m not going to shoot you. I’m not even going to kick your ass, especially not without an audience because you’d just lie about it anyway.” Winston kept his eyes on Frye and walked backward in the yard until he stood over Frye’s weapon. He bent down and picked up the gun and cracked the cylinder, turning it up so the bullets slipped out. He closed his hands around them, but he held the unloaded gun out to Frye, who took it and slid it back into his holster. “And you’re not a hero, Brad. You’re a soft-handed daddy’s boy who grew up with money and mistook it for brains. If you become sheriff it won’t make you any smarter or any braver than you were when you were a punk-ass kid ganging up on Black kids because you thought it would make your daddy proud.”
“You keep my daddy’s name out of your mouth.”
“You keep out of the Grove, Brad, unless you’re invited, and I can’t imagine a soul there wanting to see your face. Those people have been through enough.”
“Those people are drug dealers and vandals. You saw what happened to Rodney Bellamy. And now they’re setting these houses on fire.”
“We don’t know what happened to Rodney Bellamy,” Winston said. “And we don’t know who set this fire. It could have been you. Stay out of the Grove, Brad.” Winston, his fist still closed around the bullets, lifted his hand. “I’m going to hold on to these. Why don’t you head home. My office will reach out to you tomorrow for a statement, maybe call you back out here to look around in the daylight.”
“I’ve seen all I need to see to know what happened,” Frye said.
“Then I reckon you can go.”
Winston stood in the yard and watched Frye’s truck drive around the cul-de-sac at the end of the road before turning and gunning his engine on the way past Winston. Winston stood there until the truck’s taillights disappeared and he could no longer hear the noise of its engine. The sounds of the night—frogs, the lap of the water, crickets—lifted up around him like a television set that’s volume was slowly being raised. He considered stopping by the address on Spoonbill where the call had come from, but the lights in the neighborhood had all gone off for the night and the fire had been put out, and whatever would need to happen next could wait until morning.
Chapter 12
Colleen woke to the sound of her father’s voice outside her bedroom door, his knuckles tapping gently. She’d been dreaming—something about the water knocking through the pipes of an old European city, a place she’d never been. She opened her eyes now, slices of sunlight cutting into them like razor blades. Her wristwatch sat where she had left it on her bedside table, and she picked it up and examined it, but her vision was too fuzzed with sleep to read it, though she was able to see and feel that she still wore her mother’s ring. She let her head fall back onto her pillow.
“Colleen,” her father said. He knocked again. “I need you to wake up, honey.”
She knew he was knocking because her mother had woken up and gone downstairs and had been unable to find her ring. She imagined the fear and panic that had probably shot through her upon discovering it gone. For a moment, Colleen wanted to feel that it served her mother right for leaving the ring exposed while a stranger spent the night in their home, and then she felt guilty for being the one who had taken it.
“Okay,” Colleen said, just loud enough for her voice to escape her mouth. A headache thrummed on the edge of her temples, but she fought it with thoughts of a hot shower, Tylenol, and a glass of water.
“You up?” her dad asked, apparently not having moved from his spot outside in the hallway.
“Yes,” she said, frustrated now, remembering what it was like to be woken up for school as a teenager or called by her parents to some other morning duty she didn’t want to perform. Her mind confronted the possibility that perhaps Scott was on the phone, and her chest seized in an icy panic. She’d unplugged the jack from the back of the phone the night before just as she was falling asleep on the off chance that it would ring in the night for her father or in the early morning for her mother, and she had not considered that Scott might call her. But if it was early here it was even earlier there, and there was no way he would call unless it was an emergency. And Scott was alone in Dallas. There could be no emergency when Scott was alone because he was the most self-reliant person she’d ever met.
She stretched her arms above her head, her mind turning toward Danny and what he’d said the night before about her not having anything more in common with anyone in the world than she had in common with Scott, and she knew it was true and that Danny was right. At their wedding, Scott’s parents’ pastor had read the verses—she couldn’t remember the name of the scripture—about love being patient and kind. But where were the verses about grief? Where were the verses about grief being selfish and cruel and solitary?
She sat up on the edge of the bed and put her elbows on her knees. She rubbed her eyes and ran her fingers over her face. She squeezed her mother’s ring off her swollen finger and closed her hand around it. She checked her watch again, now fully awake. It was a little after 8:00 a.m. Her father knocked again.
“Jesus,” she whispered to herself.