Night Is the Hunter by Steven Gore Page A

life.
    There was nothing he could say, except, “Sorry.”
    Junior folded his wallet shut. “You didn’t do nothing. That’s just the way things are.”
    â€œI was a cop back then. Maybe . . .”
    Donnally didn’t know how to finish the sentence.
    Junior narrowed his brows at Donnally. “You must be one of those guys who thinks everything is his fault. I had a shrink in the joint who talked about that. He said it was the flip side of paranoia.” He lifted his chin toward Donnally. “You paranoid, too?”
    Donnally shook his head. “No, just careful about what I do. I grew up with a father who wanted to be big, too. Huge. And he made it. He influenced how the whole country saw itself, but he ducked the responsibility that came with the power.”
    â€œHe like a politician or something?”
    â€œA movie director.”
    Donnally surprised himself. Talking to a stranger about his father. And he wasn’t sure why. He wondered whether it was because Junior’s father was missing for most of his life, while Donnally’s father spent most of his life missing in another way, even lost to himself.
    He also wondered whether he was prepared to disclose thehidden truth about his father out of nothing more than a kind of fairness.
    â€œWhat movies?”
    â€œ Shooting the Dawn and Fallen .”
    Junior held out his arms like he was holding a machine gun, then jerked his arms in imitation recoils. “Bam. Bam-bam-bam.” He lowered his hands. “I loved those flicks. Watched them over and over. Soldiers jumping up and spraying the jungle with them M16s.”
    He looked hard at Donnally. “And you been spending your life trying to make up for him?”
    Donnally shrugged.
    Junior smirked. “What a waste.”
    â€œThen what have you been doing?”
    â€œTrying to get away.”
    Donnally stared at him. Junior had no insight into himself. None. The shrink in prison hadn’t seemed to have done him much good. In Junior’s language of double and triple negatives, he wasn’t going nowhere.
    â€œYou were just about to go kill somebody. That’s not getting away.”
    Junior smiled. “Only if I get caught.”
    â€œThat’s not what I meant.”
    Junior’s smile died. “I’ll never get away. I carry it all with me. All the questions and half the answers.” He paused and bit his lower lip. “Why do you think the detectives didn’t include the name of the guy who called my father just before he got shot? The guy that got him to walk to the window and look down.”
    Donnally thought back on the occasions when he’d left names out of reports.
    â€œIn my day, I’d leave out people I needed to protect. Maybe he was a witness in something else or maybe an informant for the police.”
    Junior shook his head. “You ain’t even close, man. Ain’t . . . even . . . close . . . He was the police.”

CHAPTER 13
    J udge Ray McMullin gazed down at the police reports about the Edgar Rojo Sr. homicide. Detective Ramon Navarro had retrieved the file from storage again, but this time he made copies for Donnally to show to McMullin. All Navarro would say was that something was starting to smell bad, but he was still unwilling to be seen by other detectives in the department as sniffing along a trail related to Dominguez.
    The judge turned each page, ran his finger down the text as he read, licked his fingertip, caught the top edge of the next, flipped it over, and continued.
    Donnally wasn’t surprised McMullin had no recollection of the issue of who’d made the call and why the name hadn’t been disclosed. Not only had twenty years passed since the trial, but as a matter of law, judges don’t read the police reports for fear of being influenced by untested allegations. They were allowed to consider only the evidence that had been placed before them in pleadings and in