Empty Mile by Matthew Stokoe Page A

figuring that maybe I was doing more harm than good by being there, I backed out of the room and left him alone.
    An ambulance was pulling into the driveway as I joined Stan outside again. A cruiser from the Oakridge police department had already arrived and two uniformed cops were climbing out of it.
    They both had mustaches and one of them wore yellow-lensed sunglasses. They asked us briefly where in the house Pat was and how we came to be there, then the one with the sunglasses and the two ambulance men, who’d just pulled a gurney from the back of their wagon, went inside. The other cop got out a pad and took our details and asked more questions and wrote down our answers. In a little while the ambulance guys came back out and told the cop there was no chance of resuscitation. They got into their truck and started the engine for the air-conditioning and sat in the cab making notes on a clipboard. The cop said he wanted us to walk him through exactly what we’d done inside and took us into the house.
    When we got to the bedroom the cop in the yellow glasses was standing with Bill by the writing desk and it looked like they were just finishing up. Bill’s anger seemed to have dissipated and he was reasonably composed, but as I entered the room he shot me a quick hateful glance which neither of the cops caught. Stan and I reenacted what we’d done. When I mentioned turning the DVD player off, the cop with the glasses went over and looked at the machine. When he saw there was no disk, he asked me what I’d done with it.
    Bill spoke before I could answer. “I took it out of the machine. I’m sorry, I didn’t think it was important.”
    “What did you do with it?” The cop’s tone was only one of mild inquiry. We hadn’t been rushed or cross-examined during their inquiry and as far as I could tell no one here was treating the scene as suspicious.
    “I put it on the pile.”
    “What was it?”
    Bill looked blank for a moment.
    “I can’t remember.”
    “That’s okay, don’t worry about it. Was it this one here?”
    There was a stack of DVDs on a cabinet beside the TV. The cop took the one off the top and held it up. “This it?”
    Bill nodded. “It must be. I didn’t look at it.”
    The cop took the disk out of its cover and nodded to himself. “ Barefoot in the Park . I like that movie.”
    The DVD was a commercially recorded rental and certainly not the disk I had seen when Stan and I first found Patricia. Bill was lying. I was pretty sure he had the real disk concealed under his windbreaker. But what difference did it make? If Pat had been watching something more personal than a Hollywood love story—a family video of happier times, perhaps—who was I to interfere if Bill wanted to keep part of this horrible event private? So I said nothing. And Stan, who had paid no attention to the DVD beyond wanting the TV to be quiet, had no idea that there was anything to say nothing about.
    Stan and I went outside again, but Bill stayed in the bedroom with his dead wife. We spent another half hour making formal statements which the cops typed into a computer in their car; after that they told us we could go.
    When we got home, Stan put on his Captain America suit, jammed his glasses on over the mask, and settled himself in front of the TV. I made him the peanut butter sandwiches he asked for and he sat and munched and focused his attention on some Japanese action cartoon.
    “How come you put the costume on?”
    “Huh?”
    “The costume. Why?”
    Stan looked down at himself and smoothed the red, white and blue material over his belly. He turned his attention back to the TV and said without looking at me, “Protection.”
    He didn’t answer when I tried to talk to him further, so I went into the kitchen and called my father and told him about Pat. The conversation was not long. I outlined what had happened, he asked for details and then he was silent. He cleared his throat a couple of times but was unable to