Son of a Gun Read Online Free PDF Page B

it up. The caked blood around it crackled and flaked, and a piece of hair clung to the pewter cover until I brushed it away. It was my mother and Ray’s wedding album. Blood had spattered across the bottom edge. I put it back on the shelf. Nearby lay a toppled bottle of holy water, also stained with blood. I put it in my pocket. I still have it in a box somewhere, and I still don’t know why.
    I got to work collecting what I wanted to take from that place. Josh was already sifting through the debris in the kitchen. I let my eyes roam around the trailer but had trouble focusing, couldn’t find any one thing. I didn’t want her clothes, her jewelry, her Catholic artifacts—what would I do with them? I didn’t want any of the books because they were probably Ray’s. I took the family Bible, a few trinkets I’d made or given her long ago, and all of the photo albums except the one stained with her blood.
    Outside, I put the things in my truck and walked aimlessly downhill toward the gate, toward the road, toward nothing in particular. The only sounds I heard were the scuffing of my sandals in the dust, the pounding of my heart, and the sound of the desert, which I’d almost forgotten in the time I’d been gone: a murmur you can only hear far away from power lines and passing cars, like an unseen mouth breathing words intoyour ear. A length of yellow tape hung in a bush, printed with black letters: Sheriff’s Line Do Not Cross. I took it, folded it neatly, and put it in my pocket with the holy water.
    Miles down the valley, cars slid south on the highway, a string of distant strangers driving toward Douglas. None of them knew what had happened here. Neither did I. I knew the aftermath, some of the facts, what the police had seen fit to tell us. We’d know more once Ray was found.
    I walked back up the hill to the clearing. Josh came out of the trailer. He gestured toward the barn. “Look around in there and take whatever you want,” he said. “We’re not coming back.” We’d agreed to come here just this once, and to sell it as soon as we could.
    I met Joe in the clearing and together we wandered the property, from the horse trailer to the barn to the storage shed, and gathered a haul. I took whatever I thought I might want to have, or whatever Joe suggested: a power drill, a set of tiki torches, an ice chest, and a gas-powered chain saw. I had no real use for power tools, and the backyard of our house in Tucson was choked with waist-high weeds, a bad place for flaming torches. I didn’t need a cooler. I’d never used a chain saw in my life. But I took them anyway. In a few weeks we’d sell my mother’s land, forty acres of empty desert, a shed full of ugly furniture and a barn full of moldy hay and a travel trailer where someone had been murdered, as a package deal at a bargain price.
    While Joe was loading our new belongings into the truck, I stood in the clearing and took a final look around. It was a habit from my childhood: every time we moved, after Mom got divorced or flipped a house for profit, I’d take one last walk through the empty rooms. I told her I was making sure we didn’t leave anything behind, but really I wanted to commit those places to memory, to remember where different versionsof our family had lived and grown and split apart. I couldn’t go back in the trailer, but as I turned away, I saw something in its aluminum skin. I walked closer. The metal bulged outward around a ragged hole the size of my pinkie finger. I stared at it for a long time before realizing a bullet had made it. A warning shot. Or a miss. Or maybe it had gone right through her.
    My brother and grandfather had already begun to walk back to their car. On my way to the truck I saw Joe standing by a fire extinguisher that hung on the side of the barn. Hay stored improperly can combust, and the extinguisher was there just in case. I’d tried to tell Mom that if two tons of hay caught fire, an extinguisher wouldn’t