Chat - Archer Mayor [43]
It was a defining moment—a split second when the entire course of the next few minutes rested with Dan and whether he chose to take that hand as a challenge to fight, or as the pacifying gesture it was meant to be.
As far as Joe was concerned, it was a no-loser, with his personal preference being for an old-fashioned piling-on. His famous self-restraint notwithstanding, Joe Gunther was feeling a slow, boiling rage deep inside. The mere possibility that his family had been threatened by this man was enough for Joe to wish him ill beyond a simple threat of legal action. In his youth, Joe had never hesitated to join a fight—a fact only rarely recalled by others now. But in this moment, had Dan offered even the slightest excuse, Joe was ready to try his hand in a nostalgic and perhaps soul-cleansing violent blowout.
But it wasn’t to be. Right at the edge of letting loose, Dan took a deep breath and suddenly relaxed, giving Gunther a nasty smile. “You bastard. You know I’m still looking at the Bitch. One fuck-up and I get life.” He gently slid the deputy’s hand off his shoulder. “Well,” he added, “no such luck. I don’t know what you jerk-offs’re cooking up, but I’m gonna get a lawyer and shove it up your ass.”
“Asses,” Joe told him. “Proper grammar.”
Dan’s eyes narrowed before he smiled again. “Right. You would know. Mister Straight-and-Narrow. Guess your brother’s not so fancy, though. He have too much to drink before he tried killing your mom? Or did he do it for the inheritance? Must be driving him nuts waiting for her to kick the bucket.”
Joe could feel his face burning, despite the cold, but he remained silent, not trusting himself to use his voice. The older deputy, to his credit, spun Dan around and pushed him toward his pickup. “Go home, Dan,” he said. “Let them do their job. You wanna call a lawyer, do it from there.”
“You bet I will,” Dan snarled at him, yanking the truck’s door open. “And then I’ll sue every last cop in this fucking department.” He pointed a finger through his window at Joe, adding, “I’m also gonna make it my life mission to knock you off your pedestal, you preachy cock. You’re gonna wish you were in intensive care instead of your faggot brother. You wait. You won’t know what hit you.”
Again Joe didn’t react, although, by now, the initial onslaught of Dan’s venom had dulled through repetition.
Dan Griffis gunned his engine and shot out of the garage’s dooryard, his vehicle’s back end slithering back and forth on the icy ground.
The three men watched him hit the asphalt beyond and squeal away, tires burning. The older deputy turned toward Joe. “We could nail him for that, just for what-the-hell.”
Joe nodded, acknowledging the point, but answered, “I’d sooner save my ammo for when it counts.”
“Yeah,” the deputy agreed. “I see what you mean.”
Joe stepped back inside and closed the door. He paused before rejoining Rob, for a moment’s worth of privacy. Dan Griffis had always been a bully, a drunk, and a self-involved show-off, from the first time Joe met him, many years ago.
Unfortunately, despite the soothing adage that such people were forgettable, they were not, and their abusiveness mattered and cut deep. It was, in fact, their very careless aggression that caught the public eye and put them higher on the food chain of notoriety. They became a force not only because of the violence of their demeanor but because of the paradoxical respect society granted them as a result. People may admire a good man, but they will more often rally around a brute.
This depressing truth had been Dan’s fuel his whole life, as it was for so many of his kind, and yet, whenever Joe encountered it, it rattled him still. He wasn’t cynical enough, even now, not to find the insult fresh and disappointing every time.
Pulling his earlobe and sighing slightly, he reentered the office.
“Noisy,” Rob commented. “He gone?”
“Gone,” Joe told him, thinking, but far from forgotten.
Barrows pushed his rickety chair away from the desk and gestured toward the screen. Hovering in its center was the earlier