“I figured you’d be in bed when I woke up. You know, I sort of expect my wife to be in my bed in the morning.”

“Well, that was the plan.”

“What happened?”

“Gordon Brink got murdered.”

Ricky arched an eyebrow. “No shit? Who did it?”

“We don’t know yet.”

“Somebody kills a lawyer, do they get a prize or something?”

“It’s not a joke, Ricky.”

He wiped the chicken juice from his mouth with his arm. “So are you home for the day now?”

“No. I need to go back.”

“It’s Christmas.”

“Yeah, and this is a murder.”

He sighed with a little hiss through his front teeth. I think that was what frustrated me more than anything else, more than the drinking, more than the money he wasted, more than the times he came home smelling of drugstore perfume. It was the blame he directed my way when he didn’t get what he wanted. Like everything was my fault. Like we were drifting apart because of me. I was the one going to work, taking the night shifts, coming home and cooking meals and doing laundry. I felt like my life was a matchstick house, and I was holding it together with nothing but little dabs of glue. But to Ricky, it was never enough.

I’d met him at a high school football game six years earlier. This was not long after I’d gone to work at the sheriff’s office. At halftime, I was sitting by myself in the bleachers when a man with a cheesy grin under his mustache introduced himself as Ricky Todd. He wasn’t tall, but he had a tough, strong, mine-worker’s body, with big feathered blond hair and a mustache so thick you could mop the floor with it. Men came up to me all the time, so that wasn’t unusual. I was pretty and unattached, which is a rare combination in this town, but I had the reputation of shooting men down like Snoopy in his Sopwith Camel. Ricky didn’t let that stop him. He sat down and started talking to me.

What was it about him?

Why did I agree to go out with him when I’d turned down the others?

It wasn’t his looks, that’s for sure. In high school, he’d been popular and handsome, but then he went fishing with Ajax one summer, and while Ajax was horsing around with the reel, a hook caught Ricky in the face and yanked off a big chunk of his nose. The surgeons did their best to repair it, but it never healed right. Girls lost interest in him after that, in the shallow way that teenagers do. Ricky made jokes like it didn’t bother him, but way down deep, he was bitter as hell.