CHAPTER 31

.....Wednesday.

.....The cry of a red-tailed hawk cut through the air.
.....Sheriff Roy Crawford sat on the hood on the Humvee and looked down on the only life he had ever known. He took a pull from the bottle of Rolling Rock in his hand and considered his realm, his domain.
.....Far below the bluff that he had parked the vehicle on, he could see the movement of people and vehicles making their way about the avenues of the town, on their way to something or away from something, big things that seemed so damned important from where they were looking.
.....Things that now seemed so utterly insignificant from where he perched. That’s it, that’s been my world for the last forty years? he wondered. He shook his head at the damned shame of it, the failure of forty years spent not doing one whole hell of a lot with the years.
.....Under the wide, Wyoming sky the town seemed to be nothing more than the patch it was on the rolling tapestry of indifferent landscape.
.....The hawk spiraled overhead in a widening gyre.
.....He finished off the beer and drew back, hurling the empty green bottle high towards the blue sky so that it arced and fell down towards the town.
.....The hawk appeared indifferent. To the bottle, to him, to the town.
.....It took a very long time before he heard the bottle shatter on the rocks below. He sighed and pulled another one from the half-empty six-pack parked beside him, and cracked it open with the key to the Humvee.
.....He was done.
.....All it came down to now was whether he drove back down into the town and set his affairs in order before he left, or just say fuck-all and keep driving.
.....His possessions were never really his and he wouldn’t miss them, toys bought on someone else’s dime. He’d unload the Humvee before anyone would even realize he was gone. He knew a guy in Cheyenne that would take it off his hands, no questions asked.
.....At this point, only the stragglers from the media were looking for him; everyone else, and even those that he had called friend, considered him a pariah.
.....He supposed he was.
.....Hell, even before he became one he was one. The good folk of Harding, Wyoming had smiled at him on the streets, but he was finally realizing just how much effort those smiles took. Of the hidden uneasiness of how much he and his crew knew about their hidden lives.
.....He knew even more than they were afraid to suspect, more damned dark secrets than he even wanted to know. The shit he knew that was behind the smiles he met on a day to day basis made him tired, weary of humanity in general.
.....Weltschmertz, the Germans called it, and he was in a world of it.
.....He was sick of being behind the cameras, seeing everything but missing what was important.
.....He still wanted that Ziegler boy dead, of course. But in a way that was struggling to his forebrain, he understood the why of what happened. Small shit that builds on up into big shit, like the experiment where they drop a little froggie in a pot of water, then slowly turn up the heat until the critter boils alive... never knowing what the hell was in the process of happening until it was too late.
.....Harding was in a world of shit, shit you would never notice until it was also too late.
.....He’d miss the damned town, of course. The comfort of seeming to know the who and the why of any given moment. He’d miss his friends, despite them being the bastards they were being now, and he’d miss Tanya. He’d miss Pierce, but he could take that ache with him anywhere in the world he went.
.....The only regret he held was that he didn’t tap Julia when he had a chance.
.....There was no need to go back. Eventually the friends would understand and everyone else could just go to hell.
.....There was nothing more he needed from Harding, Wyoming.
.....Of course, the $750,000 that he had skimmed from the Homeland Security annuities and squirreled away in the Grand Caymon bank account would do more than its share of soothing any homesickness that might arise.
.....He slid off of the hood, grabbed what was left of the six-pack and climbed into the Humvee. All roads led to the rest of the world.
.....He turned the key and the beast roared to life. Maybe his old man was on to something, bastard that he was.
.....The only thing you have to fear is fear itself...
........ and bad luck, of course.
.....He threw the former battlewagon into gear and set about putting that behind him.