The Bodies Left Behind

himself.
    “No shit. Who?”
    “This woman I met in April.” He didn’t know why he was saying this. He supposed because it made him feel good.
    “Bring her in here sometime.”
    “Ah, think we’re breaking up.”
    “How come?”
    “She doesn’t live around here.”
    The bartender grimaced. “Yeah, I hear that. Long distance. I had a stint in the reserves and Ellie and me were apart for six months. That was tough. We’d just started going out. And the fucking governor calls me up. When you’re married it’s one thing, you can be away. But just going out with somebody . . . it sucks to commute.”
    “Sure does.”
    “Where is she?”
    “Wisconsin.”
    The bartender paused, sensing a joke. “For real?”
    A nod.
    “I mean, it’s not like we’re talking L.A. or Samoa, Terry.”
    “There’re other problems.”
    “Man and woman, there’re always other problems.”
    Hart was thinking, Why do so many bartenders say things in a way that sounds like it’s the final word on a subject?
    “We’re like Romeo and Juliet.”
    The bartender lowered his voice. He understood. “She’s Jewish, huh?”
    Hart laughed. “No. Not religion. It’s her job more.”
    “Keeps her too busy, right? Never gets home? You ask me, that’s bullshit. Women oughta stay home. I’m not saying after the kids are grown, she can’t go back part-time. But it’s the way God meant it to be.”
    “Yeah,” Hart said, thinking how Brynn McKenzie would respond to that.
    “So that’s it between you guys?”
    His chest thudded. “Probably. Yeah.”
    The bartender looked away, as if he’d seen something troubling in Hart’s eyes—either scary or sad. Hart wondered which. “Well, you’ll meet somebody else, Terry.” The man lifted his soda, which had some rum “accidentally” spilled into it.
    Hart offered his own bartenderism, “One way or the other, life goes on, doesn’t it?”
    “I—”
    “There’s no answer, Ben. I’m just talking.” Hart gave a grin. “Gotta finish packing. What’s the damage here?”
    The bartender tallied it up. Hart paid. “Anybody comes around asking for me, let me know. Here’s a number.”
    He jotted down a prepaid mobile he used for voice mail only.
    Pocketing the twenty-dollar tip, Ben said, “PI’s, huh?”
    Hart smiled again. He looked around the place and then headed out.
    The door eased shut behind him as he stepped onto the sidewalk, the late May sky brilliant. The wind usually didn’t blow in from Lake Michigan but Hart thought he could smell the ripe scent of water on the cool breeze.
    He pulled on sunglasses, thinking back to that night in April, thinking about the absence of light in Marquette State Park. There was no such thing as a single darkness, he’d learned there. There were hundreds ofdifferent shades—and textures and shapes too. Grays and blacks there weren’t even words to describe. Darkness as plentiful as types of woods, and with as many different grains. He supposed that if—
    The first bullet struck him in his back, high and right. It exited, spattering his cheek with blood and tissue. He gasped, more startled than hurt, and looked down at the mess of the wound in his chest. The second entered the back of his head. The third sailed inches over him, as he dropped, and cracked obliquely into the window of the tavern. The glass began to cascade toward the ground.
    Limp, Hart collided hard but silently with the sidewalk. Window shards flowed around him. One of the bigger sheets cut his ear nearly off. Another sliced through his neck and the blood began to flow in earnest.

    “MORNING,” TOM DAHL SAID.
    He was standing in Brynn’s cubicle, holding his coffee mug in one hand and two doughnuts in the other. Cheryl from reception had brought them. They rotated the duty. Every Monday, somebody brought pastry. To take the sting out of coming back to work maybe. Or maybe it was one of those traditions that had started for no reason and kept going because there was no reason to stop it.
    She nodded.
    “How was your weekend?” the sheriff asked.
    “Good,” she said. “Joey was with his dad. Mom and I met Rita and Megan for brunch after church. We went to Brighton’s.”
    “The buffet?”
    “Yep.”
    “They do a good spread there,” Dahl said reverently.
    “Was nice.”
    “So’s the one at the Marriott. They have an ice statue swan. Gotta get there early. It melts down to a duck by two.”
    “I’ll keep that in mind,” Brynn said. “You