"Cover me with what?" Benny said.
"With the morning. Flood at ten, and again at noon. I'll be back by one."
"Where are you going?"
"A dentist."
"You don't have a dentist." He looked at me over the thermos. "You told me last year you don't have a dentist. You said you'd go when something fell out."
I was already at the door. It was ten to nine on Friday, and I'd been up since three, and I hadn't turned on one light in my kitchen because I didn't want to see what I'd put on the table. A pad of paper. A pen. I'd written HARTZELL at the top and nothing under it.
I drove up Peach under the billboard. LET'S GET YOU ON THE WATER, thirty feet wide, him pointing down at the traffic with his sunglasses on. I'd driven under it every day for a year and never once looked up.
Hartzell Marine and RV is on upper Peach, a mile past the mall, in a lot big enough to land a plane on. It's four acres of boats. They sit on trailers in rows with their noses up, every one of them wrapped in white shrink-wrap for the winter, so that from the road it looks like a field of enormous marshmallows. A banner across the showroom roof said LET'S GET YOU ON THE WATER. Under it, the billboard face, the real one, shorter, waving at me through the glass.
I stopped the Ranger at the edge of the lot with the engine running.
The deal was, I'd ask him one question. One. If he answered it like a person, I'd turn around and go to work, and I'd never say another word to Cody Hartzell that wasn't about a hockey stick.
I got out.
\ \ \*
"Nell!" He came across the lot to meet me with both arms out, in a quarter-zip with the company logo on his chest and a paper cup in one hand. He'd seen me through the window. "Look at this. Are we buying a boat?"
"No."
"I hear you. Nobody ever buys a boat in February, and everybody buys a boat in April. It's called the long game." He put his free hand on my shoulder, and I stepped out from under it, and he let it fall as if that had been the plan. "Can I get you a coffee? We've got one of those machines with the little cups. It's not great. It's free."
"I'm good."
"Come on. At the end of the day, it's cold." He was walking me, easily, down a row of wrapped boats, away from the showroom door. I could see a receptionist behind the glass, and a salesman in a tie at a desk, and past them a couple in matching Penguins jackets standing at the nose of a big pontoon and looking up at it the way you look at a house you can't afford. "What can I do for you? Is it Owen? Because I want you to know, I'd never. The glass, I get it. I take that seriously. If you want him on the ice, great, and if you don't, that's your call, Mom."
"Tell me about the kitchen," I said.
"The what?"
"At Tasha Greer's. The seventh of February, two thousand fourteen. The kitchen."
He didn't stop smiling. He smiled the whole way through. But his free hand came up, as if it had been called, and went to the side of his neck under the jaw, and stayed there. Flat. Covering. For maybe one second, and then he must've felt it, because he took it away and put it in the pocket of his quarter-zip like a man hiding a lit match.
"To be fully transparent," Cody said, "I have been advised by my attorney not to discuss two thousand fourteen with anyone. Which I respect. Because I'm a respectful guy."
"Birdie scratched you."
"That's a serious thing to say, buddy."
"She went at you in the kitchen. Tasha saw it. She texted me come now, and ten minutes later she left, and you were at that party, and you were scratched, and you've got your hand on your neck right now."
"I don't," Cody said.
"You do."
"I think," Cody said, and the cadence had gone out of it, the buddies and the long game, and what was left was just a man talking, a little too high, "I think you need to go. Right now. Okay? I'm asking you nicely. This is a business. My father's business."
"Show me your neck."
"Nell."
"Show me."
He took my arm.
It was above the elbow, through my coat, and he took it hard. It wasn't a squeeze, it was a clamp, fingers going all the way around, and he turned me with it, toward the road, toward the truck, like a person turning a shopping cart. And the cup in his other hand went over, and coffee went down both of us, and the cup hit the asphalt and rolled. I looked at his hand on my sleeve. It was the same hand. Big and flat. That hand had been on his neck. That hand had been on Owen's.
I put both of mine on his chest and shoved.
I didn't know I was that strong. He went back two full steps and sat down against the nearest boat, and the boat took him. It was a pontoon on a trailer in a skin of white plastic, and he went into it with his back and his elbows, and the shrink-wrap gave with a noise like a chip bag the size of a garage, a long rubbery shriek, and held, and bounced him, and let him slide down into the snow at the foot of the trailer wheel.
There was no sound for about three seconds. Then, from the nose of the next pontoon, the man in the Penguins jacket said, "Whoa."
His wife already had her phone up.
\ \ \*
"Debbie!" Cody was on his hands and one knee in the slush, and the quarter-zip was dark with coffee, and his voice had gone up and cracked. "Debbie! Call my dad! Call my attorney! Everybody saw that! Rick, you saw that, she assaulted me!"
The salesman in the tie had come out of the showroom door with a sheet of paper in his hand. He stopped when he saw me. I had my hands in the air in front of me, I noticed, at about chest height, the way you hold them when somebody tells you the paint's wet.
"Ma'am," Rick said. "Ma'am, I'm going to need you to stay right there."
"I'm leaving."
"I'm going to need you to stay."
"I'm leaving," I said, and I went. I walked, I didn't run. I had the sense that if I ran it would be something else.
Halfway to the Ranger I stopped, and I turned around, and went back three steps, and picked up his coffee cup off the asphalt. It was a white paper cup with a brown ring and the logo in blue, and it was about a third full. I'd seen it on TV once, a detective picks up the cup a suspect throws away, and says nothing, and somebody at a lab says match. It was the only thing I could think of that was a plan.
"Is she taking my cup?" Cody said, from the ground.
"Ma'am," Rick said.
I got in the truck and put the cup on the dash. In the mirror I saw Rick write something on the back of his hand, with a pen, looking at my plate.
I felt wonderful. That's what I remember most. For about a mile and a half down Peach I felt wonderful, light and hot and clean, like the first morning you can breathe after a cold. And then I turned onto Thirty-Eighth, and the heater came on, and my arm started to hurt where he'd taken it, all the way around, in the shape of his hand.
\ \ \*
Lorraine was waiting at the rental desk with the incident book open. It was ten past eleven. I'd been back an hour and a half, and I'd made it through one flood without anybody saying a word, which I'd taken for luck.
"I had a call," Lorraine said. "A Debbie, from Hartzell Marine and RV. She wanted to know whether employees of this facility are permitted to put their hands on members of the public on their lunch hour." She lifted the reading glasses off their chain and put them on. "I said that depends. Is it Nell? And she said, it's Nell. So I said I'd put it in the book."
"He had his hand on Owen."
"Then say that. Say it to Detective Kovach, and say it to me, in the book, in one sentence, with a date." She held out the pen. "He's a volunteer coach, Nell. Do you know what a volunteer is, to the city? A liability with a whistle. I can't touch him without a form, and now I've got a form on you."
I wrote the sentence. It took three tries, and my handwriting looked like somebody else's.
I flooded at noon. Big Sue went around and around with my arm aching on the wheel, and every time I came past the south end I could see the Ranger through the lobby glass, out in the lot, with a white paper cup sitting on its dash.
My phone rang at five past twelve in my coverall pocket. I pulled it out and stopped the machine in the middle of the ice, with the water still laying down behind me, and held it with both hands.
"Where are you?" Kovach said.
"On the ice."
"Good. Stay there. Don't go anywhere between now and three o'clock, and at three you come see me. State Street. Second floor."
"What happened?"
"The judge signed it. Noon, on the dot. The warrant." I could hear her put something down, wax paper, I thought, a sandwich. "No-contact hearing's off. Doesn't matter now. He's got a warrant. Don't call him. Don't answer him. That's all I'm going to say on this phone."
"I didn't call him."
"Also, a man in a Penguins jacket has put you on the internet," Kovach said. "I'm not saying it's the worst thing I've ever seen. I'm saying I've seen it twice."
She hung up.
I finished the ice. I did every lap.
Garrett called at one-fifteen. I turned the phone over on the bench. He called again at two-thirty, while I was in the lobby with a roll of tape and a kid's lost glove, and I let it ring all the way through. On the third try, the screen read GARRETT in the capitals I'd typed in myself. I put my thumb on the side of it and the screen went dark.
\ \ \*
By a quarter to three the coffee in the cup on my dash had frozen solid. I put it in a sandwich bag from the first-aid cabinet, because it seemed like what you do.
You take the stairs at State Street, because the elevator's a rumor. They're wide stone steps, worn in the middle like soap, and at the top there's a long yellow hall with radiators along one wall, knocking. I'd walked it once before. I walked it again with a frozen cup of coffee in a sandwich bag, and every radiator I passed had something to say about it.
Kovach had a hoagie open on her desk, on its wax paper, with half of it gone. She looked at the sandwich bag first. Then at my face.
"What's that?"
"It's his."
"Whose?"
"Cody Hartzell's. It's got his, you know." I put it on the desk. "It's his coffee. He dropped it. I didn't drink it."
Kovach looked at it. The coffee had frozen on the way, so the inside of the cup had a brown ring around a brown disc, like a very small hockey puck.
"Hon," she said.
"It's abandoned property."
"Abandoned." She picked up the hoagie again, and put it down. "Okay. I'm going to tell you something and I don't want you to take it personally. An hour ago, Cody Hartzell walked into this building with a lawyer in a camel coat. He rolled up his own sleeve, I'm speaking figuratively, he opened his own mouth, and my tech swabbed the inside of his cheek. Voluntarily. In front of a witness. It's on its way to the state lab right now, and they've promised me early next week." She pushed the sandwich bag back across the desk with one finger. "Abandoned property? Hon. He walked in."
I sat down. I hadn't been asked.
"He's cleared?"
"I didn't say that. I said he's cooperating, which is what it looks like when you've got a good lawyer and nothing to lose. It may be he's got a lot to lose." She chewed. "You put a hand on him."
"Two hands."
"In front of fifteen people."
"It was six."
"And a man with a phone." She looked at the ceiling, then at me. "The lawyer asked me if you were going to be charged. I said you're a witness. He said, a witness to what? And I didn't have a good answer for him. So you listen to me. You're done with him. You're done with the lot, and the rink, and the glass. You get him anywhere near Owen, you call me, and you don't go over there."
"Kovach, the scratch—"
"I know about the scratch."
I stopped.
"His lawyer opened with it," she said. "Before he'd sat down. That's why he walked in. We're working it, all of it, and you let us."
"The judge signed a warrant for Garrett."
"That's a different subject, and I want to talk about it." She wiped her fingers on a napkin, one at a time. "The warrant's signed. It's on the board in the squad room. Somebody will find him, probably in a day, maybe two. Sorensen's telling him to walk in. I hope he listens, because once he's in the county prison waiting on a hearing, it takes weeks to get him out of it."
"Weeks."
"If it goes well. And here's what I need to say, and then I'll let you go. If you help him stay out of their way, that's hindering. It means helping a man dodge an arrest. It means you're in it with him. You hear what I'm saying? It stops being a witness who got a letter. It's you, in a room."
"I'm not helping him."
"Are you going to?"
I looked at the radiator behind her. It was knocking again.
"No," I said.
"Good." She put the sandwich bag in her desk drawer, and shut it. "I'm going to throw that out later. Don't ask me where."
\ \ \*
I went down the stone stairs with my hand on the rail. On the landing my phone buzzed, and I stopped. The screen said GARRETT, and under it, three new voicemails.
I didn't play them. I put my thumb on them, one at a time, and I held it there, and I made them go away.
I stood on the landing at State Street with the wall cold against my shoulder blade. It had taken one afternoon, like unplugging a lamp.
The phone buzzed again in my hand. A different number. A local one I didn't know. One new voicemail.
I played it with the speaker against my ear.
"Nell. It's Cody Hartzell." No buddy. Behind the voice there was a restaurant, plates, a TV. "I'm going to be straight with you, and my attorney is going to be with me when I say it, so I'd ask you not to hang up. Six o'clock tonight. Rudy's, on upper Peach, the back booth. Come." There was a breath on the line. "I know what you think happened in that kitchen. You're half right."