When Ghosts Come Home(45)

After leaving the island, Winston drove past the airport, and he could see a cruiser parked on the runway, the airplane still sitting sideways not far away from it. He knew Glenn had been out there for most of the night, but he couldn’t remember which deputy had relieved him, meaning he couldn’t picture the face of the deputy who was now probably fighting sleep, his head lolling against the driver’s-side window as the sun climbed in the sky.

As he drove north on Highway 133, Winston’s mind was quiet for the first time since the airplane had come in and woken him from sleep, and that meant it was open to things he did not want to think about or recall. He’d been fighting it, but Rodney Bellamy’s murder had been on the edge of every thought Winston had had since he’d found Rodney’s body. While the fact of Rodney’s murder was enough to send explosive jolts of panic through him, it was the imagined moment of Rodney’s murder—the moment at which Rodney knew he would be killed—that was haunting Winston. Had Rodney known he would die the moment he saw a gun pointed at him? Had he thought of his wife’s face or spoken the name of his baby boy?

In all his years of police work, Winston had never had the experience of believing that his own death was imminent, and the one time he had taken a life he had not considered the possibilities of what that man was thinking. It had all happened so fast—at least he wanted to believe that was the case; he wanted to believe that the man had not had time to think of his wife or his children or the set of circumstances that had landed him behind the counter in the pharmacy on Franklin Boulevard back in Gastonia, his pistol held on the pharmacist and the young girl who worked the register, Winston’s pistol pointed at the man’s chest from where Winston stood on the other side of the counter.

But there had been time enough after it was over for Winston to think of everything panic had not allowed him to consider. The man’s name; it was James Dixon. He’d been thirty-one years old, married, with two young children. No record of arrests or convictions. He’d been laid off, but for years he’d worked as a mechanic at the Firestone Mill and lived in the Black section of the mill village, and a few days after his funeral, that was where Winston had driven, parking his car up the road from Dixon’s house and wondering what he’d expected to gain from being in such proximity to the dead man’s home.

The first time Winston had sat in his car near Dixon’s house, he’d sat behind the wheel clutching an envelope stuffed with nearly five hundred dollars, which was as much money as he could afford to offer without making things tough for him and Marie and Colleen. He’d also sat there with both an explanation and an apology prepared to deliver to Dixon’s wife. He couldn’t understand her grief, and he was awfully, inexplicably sorry for it. He just saw the gun in her husband’s hand. How could he have known it was unloaded? It had all happened so fast, and there was not time to notice that the magazine was missing, that the pistol was so rusted as to have been incapable of firing. Winston could not possibly have asked about Dixon’s job or his family or his desperation or what that thirty-seven dollars in the till would mean to them.

That day, while Winston sat in the car, a little boy no older than six or seven had stepped out the front door of the mill shack with a child’s slingshot in his hand. He’d walked to the edge of the yard and stopped to pick up bits of gravel that he loaded into his toy. He aimed for a tree in the middle of the yard, and from inside his car, Winston could hear the slap of the rocks each time one smacked against the tree’s trunk. Soon, a woman came outside, a young baby on her hip, and she said something to the boy. The boy turned to go in, and the woman looked up the street and saw Winston. Had she known who he was, what he had done? Her eyes settled on his for a moment, and then she turned and followed her son inside the house.

Winston’s hand went to the handle on the car door, his other hand holding the envelope of cash, but something kept him in the car, gave him permission to wait, to come back tomorrow, to put off the apology and the errand that had sent him there. The next day, there was a truck parked in the driveway, and Winston watched an older Black man walk in and out of the house a couple of times. He didn’t know who the man was, and he thought it best to come back when Dixon’s wife was alone. The next day, the family was gone, but Winston had never forgotten Dixon’s family, and he knew that even though they had never met him, they had never been able to forget him either.



When Winston pulled up to the near-empty arrivals area at the Wilmington airport, he didn’t even have a chance to put the cruiser in park before a man stepped off the curb, opened the passenger door, and leaned inside.

“Hey,” the man said, extending his hand across the seat toward Winston. “Agent Tom Groom. Your pilot.”

Winston reached out and shook the man’s hand. The man wore a navy blue polo shirt tucked into khaki pants. He wore the standard-issue SIG holstered at his side, and he had the same standard-issue bearing of the other agents Winston had met over time, the same rigidity, the same distance and withdrawn air about him.

“Nice to meet you, Agent Groom. I’m Sheriff Winston Barnes,” he said. “I hope you didn’t wait too long.”

“Not at all,” Groom said. He lifted up an army-green duffel bag so that Winston could see it. “Mind if I toss this in the back?”

“Go ahead,” Winston said.