Download e-reader versions at (www.joshuamalbin.com/soap-and-water).

The first ten minutes Meg begged David to turn back. The second ten the begging turned empty: even if Wyatt hadn’t been killed instantly, by then he’d have bled to death.

Finally she gave up and imploded. She cried a little without sobbing and then went numb, her eyes welling tears from time to time in a physiological function disconnected from her feelings, all the way back to Las Vegas and the hotel.

**********

There they parked. They took the elevator up and David got off at her floor.

She told him she didn’t need his goddamned emotional support, and he could just fuck straight off and go to his own room.

“I was there just like you, Maggie,” he said. “Maybe I need support.”

“I bet you do,” she said. “Since it’s your fault.”

He sighed. “Anyway we’ve got to call the cops.”

She let him in.

He called the local Territorial Authority office from her room phone, said he had to report a murder, and immediately began to argue with the dispatcher about whether he should have phoned some other department instead, since the crime hadn’t been in Clark County. Meg locked herself in the bathroom and drew a bath. She mixed the water painfully hot, almost scalding, and lowered herself into it without self-mercy, hoping the shock would…do something. She wasn’t sure what. The sharp pain at her crotch, breasts, ass, and underarms did rattle her, make her feel more awake, but nothing more profound happened.

David knocked on the door. “They’re on their way,” he called.

“Fine,” she said with what felt like the last of her strength, and let her body sink until tiny waves lapped the edges of her face and her knees pierced the cold air. Water filled her ears so she heard nothing but the thrum of her own heart. She lay that way a while. Eventually, though, the back of her neck started to hurt from the inadvertent pressure her legs, trying to straighten, transmitted up her spine to the top of her skull. She slid upright, soaped up and rinsed off, then pulled the stopper and dried herself.

She put an ear to the door to make sure the Mips hadn’t yet arrived and heard only the TV, so she piled the clothes she’d been wearing in the tiny wastebasket, walked out naked, and began assembling a new outfit from her pack. David sat on the bedspread watching cable news. Since their divorce she’d been relatively modest around him, especially sober. Nudity removed from sex represented a degree of intimacy she no longer wanted. Now, though, she showed herself as a sign of contempt, to tell him he meant as much to her as a pet.

That reminded her. The cat.

She pulled on a shirt and jeans. “Be right back,” she said, and swept out.

**********

She bribed a maid to let her into Wyatt’s room. She wasn’t even sure how much—she pushed cash into the woman’s hand, whatever amount she’d been carrying, and it was enough.

She heard it mewling from the bathroom as soon as she got inside. She opened that door and it raced out, froze, and raced back to press itself against Meg’s shins, whining.

She refilled its water bowl and pull-tabbed open one of the cans of cat tuna by the sink. She couldn’t see a food bowl, so she set the can on the floor by the water. The cat crouched beside it and bit at the pressed fish, working its teeth and purring. She bent over the litter box, shutting her mind to the odor, and emptied it a little at a time into the toilet, flushing regularly.

Now she needed the gym bag to carry the animal back to her own room. She checked the closet, the dresser, and in the end found it behind an armchair. The message light on the room’s telephone was blinking. She hesitated a moment, suspended among emotions: Curiosity. Guilt over that ghoulish curiosity. The desire to deal with whoever had called Wyatt. A strong, irrational fear that the message would be him, speaking from beyond death. Finally she sat at the head of the bed, picked up the receiver, and punched in the voicemail code.

“It’s me,” said a woman’s voice. “That’s fabulous news! I talked to my pastor and he says I should go, if you accept Jesusso Emmy doesn’t end up on a bad path. Call my cell.” She gave a number. Meg scribbled it on the hotel stationery pad there on the nightstand, hung up, and dialed.

The same woman answered.

“My name is Margaret Anthony,” Meg said. “I’m a friend of Wyatt’s. Are you his ex-wife?”

There was a pause. “You aren’t a girlfriend, are you?” came the suspicious reply.

“No!” Meg said. “Not—  No.” She heard car noises and children’s music. “He’s dead. He was shot.”

Another pause. “Wait a minute,” the woman said. “I’m pulling off the freeway.” Some more noises, one of which sounded like a turn signal, and things abruptly quieted. “What did you just say?”

“We were supposed to interview some Possemen,” Meg said, “and then…”  She didn’t know what to say. With David she could throw it in his face and call it his fault, but no way she’d accuse him to a stranger. The woman might believe her and David could get in trouble. Besides, it wasn’t really his fault alone. It was just as much Meg’s for insisting Wyatt bring a gun—not to mention getting them kidnapped a second time. It was Wyatt’s own fault, too, for telling David where to find them.

The cat stalked from the bathroom, leapt to her lap, and began scrubbing its face with its paw to clear lingering particles of tuna from its whiskers.

“Where?” The woman’s tone grew clipped. “Where’s his … You know, where is he?”

Another one Meg couldn’t answer. How could she say they’d left him in the desert?

The woman didn’t wait anyway. “Are you still in Las Vegas? Who’s making arrangements?” She paused. Then: “Ihave my daughter in the car. I’ll call you later.”

The cat settled into a posture it had taken many times before in Wyatt’s truck, with its rear touching Meg’s hip, body draped along the top of her thigh, chin on her knee between its front paws. It purred heat into her leg, and she felt her own breath slow in response. She began to cry again, more genuinely than before, and leaned forward to put her face beside the cat’s. It stretched out its nose to a tear on her check and then drew its head away and closed its eyes. She stroked its back and it kneaded its front claws contentedly in the fabric of her jeans, pricking the skin beneath. She drew the bag close and then, before the cat could protest, scooped it up and dropped it in, zipping the top closed over its head. It complained and scrabbled at the inside.

She returned to the bathroom and in the litter box stacked the remaining half-bag of litter, the water dish, and the cans of food. She tucked it under her left arm, came back out, lifted the bag by its handles, and left.

**********

She arranged things for the cat as well as she could in her own bathroom. Military policemen eventually arrived and took David away with them on a helicopter ride to recover Wyatt’s body. Another two stayed in Meg’s room to get descriptions of the man who’d shot him. She spent a little while looking over one’s shoulder, giving directions as he tried to make a facial composite on his laptop. Back East she and David probably would have been at least nominal suspects of a murder investigation the police would be at least somewhat interested in solving, but it seemed pretty clear that these two Mips were only asking questions as prelude to some mildly troublesome paperwork that would in turn go nowhere, but what the hell, it was their job.

A third man who showed up after them did have a pointed interest, but not in Wyatt. He used “debrief” as a noun and focused on the Posse’s weaponry, numbers, and command structure. He became giddy when she revealed she’d seen hundreds of them gathered at the Circus Circus and loading into trucks, and grilled her for a whole hour about it. She didn’t even mention the earlier, real kidnapping because then he’d only stay hours more to suck out details of the Posse’s mineshaft hideout, and she wanted them all to go. She was done with the West. Both sides were rotten and everyone in between got screwed. She was done even trying to expose the rottenness and wrecked lives to the world. She worked for a propaganda press that would never print the truth as she knew it, and as long as she drew a salary there she was no better than the woman back in Denver she’d branded Riefenstahl. Wyatt had been an honest writer and she and David had gotten him killed; they’d been able to direct him here and there and straight to the mouth of a gun because they had money and he was poor; and he was poor because people would rather read the Post Times’ spin than the untrained, uncensored blog of a Western yokel. It was as inevitable as a mathematical proof, and now she was going home with two deaths and nothing else to her credit.

David returned before the Army-intel Mip had finished. He’d brought a paper shopping bag, which he put on the floor by the end table. He stood against the wall, arms folded clumsily through the sleeves of the sport coat he still hadn’t taken off, staring fixedly at the Mip until the man decided he’d had enough of his “debrief” and went.

“I said I don’t need you,” she said.

“And I said maybe I do.” David reached into the paper bag and produced a half-liter bottle of gin and a liter of tonic water. He crinkled the cellophane wrapping off one of the room’s plastic cups and unscrewed the cap on the gin. “Did you know he had a wife?” he said. He put the cup on the end table and poured. “Lord knows how she found out already, maybe the Mips. I get back from the helicopter—and we did find him, not that you asked, they dragged him into the bushes like fucking carrion but we found him, and then the other copter starts shooting at someone on the ground…  Anyway, I get back and I’ve got a message from the office. Not from her. Her church’s lawyer. He says we can deposit Wyatt’s life insurance and worker’s comp and whatever else he’s got coming straight into the main fund of the Forever Life Christian Credit Union.” He drank. He had not included any tonic and the swallow made him shudder.

She was tempted to feel superior at the woman’s rush to cash in, but reminded herself that she was in no position to feel superior to anyone.

David sat down on the far side of the bed, his face to the blank wall partitioning off the bathroom. His shoulders rounded and his head drooped. She stood, let the cat out of its tile prison, and leaned against the end of that short wall, looking down at him sadly. He’d based his peace of mind on her defective common sense, just as she’d based hers on the journalistic ethics neither he nor her other editors had. It was no good wanting things. Someone else always ended up in charge of giving them to you, and that person’s mind was on what he wanted and a third person controlled. Yes, sometimes you could barter for a little stability, as David had tried to do with her. But her rejection and this whole damned region of the country showed how well that worked.

She sat down next to him and the cat jumped up too. She petted its head with one hand and David’s with the other.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “You were right.” About a lot, though she didn’t have the nerve or energy to specify. She shouldn’t have gone to the interview. She shouldn’t have come West in the first place. She also didn’t say anything about the sodden train that admission dragged with it to the front of her mind: furious as she was with David for getting Wyatt killed, she was just as mad at him for being right against her wishes. She cringed at the feeling. It was horribly petty.

He put his head on her breast and curled an arm around her belly. “I’m not sorry,” he said. “I screwed up, but at least you’re not dead and neither am I.” He began to tremble and she realized he was weeping. “You know I never saw someone who’d been shot? You probably have plenty of times.”

“Only a couple,” she said.

He clung to her like a limpet and she felt sorry for him. That’s how it always was. That’s why she could never remarry him or raise his child. Of the million things she wanted to tell her nonexistent daughter, half concerned how to live with pride. How could she repeat even one if she married this man for whom she had more pity than respect? How could she stand to watch him pass along his version of wisdom, too, to her child?

She would disentangle herself from him as soon as they got home. She’d disentangle herself from her job, too, find something that didn’t make her feel like such a whore. Maybe she’d continue Wyatt’s blog, reporting free of her editors. Or no, the blog was his. She’d write her own, with other voices from the West. In any case, she’d make a break. She’d improve herself. Two dead on her conscience required that she do something.

She pressed her lips to David’s bald scalp and gave his shoulder a little push, intending it as a motherly gesture to detach him. Instead he raised his face from her chest and kissed her, his mouth ginny, hot with tears and desperation.

She let him press her backward, onto the bed, one last time for pity’s sake, closing her mind to him like she’d closed it to the litter box. No more after this. When she’d fixed her life and was worth it, she’d find someone new and maybe, if she was lucky, for the first time in years she’d sleep with a man she loved. It would be wonderful to fall in love again.

The cat paced by their heads, sniffing them.

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