“Hell, I’m not sure about anything anymore, Shane.” His arms folded over his chest.
“Join the club. Now, unless you need me here, I’m leaving.”
“I still think it’s funny, you dragging me out in the middle of the night.”
Carter lifted his eyebrows and played his trump card. “Maybe you shouldn’t be driving.”
“Why?”
“You smell like a brewery.”
Wes’s eyes narrowed. “You want to give me a sobriety test?” he asked, his voice low. “Your department fuckin’ calls me down here on some bogus information and then you want to give me a goddamned sobriety test. What the hell is this, Shane? Some kind of setup?”
“I told you what happened.”
“And I don’t believe it.”
Carter sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. “I don’t want to have to—”
“You don’t have to do anything, Shane. Not a damned thing. I’ll just go home and we’ll forget all about this.” He stood away from the desk and snagged his keys from the desk.
Carter pretended to be thinking it over.
Wes eased his way to the door. “It’s late.”
“That it is.” Carter rolled his lips in on themselves as if he was pondering the weight of the world; then he caught Wes’s guarded gaze and stared him down.
“Let’s call it a night.”
Carter nodded slowly, still appearing to think things through. “Tell ya what. You lock up here, go home, check things out, and, if something’s missing, let me know. I’ll send out a deputy, or you can fill out a report down at the station.”
“Great,” Wes muttered as he opened the door and a gust of icy air swept into the office. Carter walked outside and made his way to his truck.
“Take it easy on the drive home,” he warned, as if he really thought Wes might be inebriated. He knew better, could tell that Wes might have a slight buzz, but he was far from over the limit. But Wes was just paranoid enough that Carter could play on his worries.
Wes turned his collar to the wind. “I’ll be fine,” he said, stalking to his truck.
Not if I have anything to say about it, Carter thought, climbing into his own rig and watching Wes drive away in the rearview mirror. He smiled grimly as he noticed Wes’s particular attention to signaling, stopping for the requisite number of seconds at the flashing light, and keeping his pickup under the speed limit.
Just to give Wes something to worry about, Carter followed him for six blocks before turning in the opposite direction and heading home. The streets were nearly empty and as he drove out of town, no vehicle was visible in his rearview mirror. Which was all the better.
Carter drove outside of town and caught 1–84, heading west. The traffic was nil as the road was officially closed, but he ignored the barriers, driving around the iced barricades and, within a few miles, turning onto the Bridge of the Gods. He parked midspan. Leaving the truck to idle, he climbed out, walked to the side and pulled the videotape from his pocket. As he glanced down at the black case, he wondered what images of Carolyn had been caught on the damning video. Had she been naked? With Wes? In a compromising position? Or just a video of her fully clothed and smiling…who cared? He told himself he was better off not knowing and was surprised that so much of the old festering pain seemed to have disappeared. He really didn’t give a damn what Carolyn had done, but he sure as hell didn’t want it dredged up again.
Let sleeping dogs lie.
He wiped the tape case clean of any fingerprints and shivered in the cold. The wind blew harsh as a demon’s breath, knifing through his clothes. Snow swirled wildly. Beneath the bridge, the inky waters of the swollen Columbia River raged.
Teeth chattering, Carter dropped the tape onto the slick asphalt of the bridge. He stomped on the casing with the heel of his boot, smashing the plastic and shattering it into sharp black shards.
Not good enough.
He ripped the tape, stripping it from its spools; then he picked up the debris and hurled the whole damned mess into the dark, icy depths of the Columbia below. “Adios,” he said into the screaming wind and felt an unlikely sense of freedom.
He would burn the pictures in his pocket in the woodstove at his house. Nothing ceremonial about it. He’d just throw the betraying shots onto the fire and wouldn’t even watch them curl and hiss as they incinerated.
They would be destroyed. Forever. When Wes Allen’s house was searched, no pictures of Carolyn would surface to bring up the old scandal again. And Carter didn’t believe Wes would be stupid enough to mention to the police that someone had taken his prints or his video of another man’s wife—the sheriff’s dead wife. Even if he did, so what? Wes Allen wasn’t just his ex-best friend and wife’s lover; he was now Jenna Hughes’s stalker.
He was going down.