Lester
Lester’s truck rumbled and bounced on Tokach Road back toward Mindy’s trailer. He had the wipers going on high as a heavy layer of snow started coming down pretty good. Big, wet flakes pelted against the windshield from the hard wind, covering the road and making it a bitch to see. Now, with the dropping temperature, he’d have to worry about the dirt roads icing over. When they did that, they were going to be slicker than bacon grease. Like the missus always said, When it rains it pours.
Lester had called up to the state troopers’ office in Towanda from Doc Pete’s office. Told dispatch about the situation he had on his hands so that they’d send a cruiser down his way. They had asked him if he had a suspect, and he told them that he did. He didn’t tell them about Danny’s broken jaw. He figured that could wait. Put out one fire at a time, as Lester’s grandfather used to say. The Towanda dispatch told him to hold tight and help would be on the way.
This whole thing was a damn mess. He knew he’d be the one to have to make the call to Mindy’s folks. Probably best to do something like that in person, but he didn’t know if he was up to that. How exactly do you tell two parents that their daughter was beaten and strangled and killed in cold blood? Johnny Knolls was a big son of a bitch, too. Temper like a hound with ticks. Mindy was his baby girl, and Lester knew what he’d want to do in Johnny’s situation: hang Danny up by his bootstraps and gut him like a deer. And, to make matters worse, Mindy had a pair of older, overprotective brothers. Nothing like their old man. Not mean and unpredictable like Johnny, but two no-nonsense kind of men who would want an eye for an eye.
“Hell.”
Murder wasn’t something he signed up for. He’d grown used to dragging drunks out of bars on payday. Breaking up fights. Domestic stuff. Housewives taking a bottle or a frying pan to the side of a drunk or cheating husband’s head. But at the end of the day, it was usually just a broken nose or a few stitches. Not anything like this nonsense.
And the cherry on Lester’s turd sundae was that his deputy lost his cool and went apeshit and broke a man’s jaw. Danny probably deserved it, but it wasn’t their job to give payback. Lester knew that Sokowski had dated Mindy off and on for a while now. He didn’t even try to keep track if they were currently an item or not. The fact was that Sokowski stuck his weasel in near everything that moved in Wyalusing, and everyone knew it.
Lester had been wanting to take the wife up to Niagara Falls for a few days in a week or so. Their forty-fifth wedding anniversary was approaching, and Niagara was where they had spent their honeymoon. It was only a four-hour drive up that way, and he figured that the missus would like that pretty well. Bonnie deserved a special weekend. The woman earned it. She was a damn good wife who had lived a life full of disappointments; not being able to bear any children was definitely the biggest. Still to this day, he could see her inner longing for kids and grandbabies every time they were out at a restaurant watching other families together. Eating and laughing and enjoying themselves. At least Lester had had his job over the years to fill the emptiness. All Bonnie had were the cats and sewing and tending to her garden. Yet she never complained none. God bless her.
A nicotine craving started to crawl all over him, so he found his cigarettes and lit one up. Unrolled the window despite the freezing cold outside. The breeze felt mighty good on his face.
“Hell,” Lester muttered again as he blew out a cloud of smoke. Up ahead he saw Mindy’s trailer and took another, deeper draw on his cigarette.
