Second Chance Pass

“Maybe it’s more than Matt,” Joe said. “I get the feeling something’s really eating you.”

“Yeah?” he asked with a somber laugh. “Jesus, you’re psychic.” He took another long drink of his beer.

“Any chance you could just go ahead and get it out where we can look at it? Because if you’re gonna drink that fast, you’ll leave me in your dust pretty quick.”

Paul shook his head. “I fucked things up pretty bad, Joe. I got myself in a mess I’m not gonna get out of.”

Joe stared at him a long moment. Then he banged his glass on the bar and when the bartender came over he said, “Gimme another one of these, huh?” While he was waiting for a new brew, he turned to Paul and asked, “You have any idea how confusing you are right now?”

“Yeah. You should find more stable people to drink with.”

“Well, until I do…”

It was a moment before Paul finally said, “I got someone pregnant…”

“No,” Joe said, stunned. “No, you’re too smart for that…”

Paul laughed. “I guess I’m not. Maybe I should sue Trojan, huh?”

“Oh, Jesus,” Joe said. “Oh God. Someone special? I hope?”

“Nice girl,” Paul said with a shrug. “But it wasn’t…Aw, man. It was…We aren’t…Shit. It was just one of those things. You know? I’ve known her about a year, but I’ve only been out with her a few times. We really didn’t have anything going on except…”

“Oh, Jesus,” Joe said again.

Paul turned toward Joe. “While I was in Virgin River last fall I didn’t talk to her once during that time—that’s how casual. I came back here all the time to check on the company, my dad and brothers, but I never even called her. And she didn’t call me. But…”

“But…?”

“But I came home with my gut in a knot after everything that had happened in Virgin River and I called her. On instinct, probably. And guess what happened?”

“Oh damn,” Joe said. “What are you gonna do?”

“What are my choices?” Paul asked, hanging his head. “I’ll take care of her, of my kid. What else do you do?” He shook his head sadly. “I want it,” he said. “I know—it’s stupid. I should probably try something, like buying her off or something. Get her to make it go away—but if I have a kid coming, I want a part of that. I’m nuts, right?”

Joe smiled patiently. “I don’t know. Maybe you’re not nuts about that—but what about the mother? Is she someone you’re going to be able to work with on that?”

“No telling,” he said. “She wants to get married. I can’t do that. I’m only planning to do this marrying thing once, and then it’s going to be to a girl I love so much I can’t stop myself. If I married this woman, it would really fuck her up, worse than she already is. I can’t fake it—not something like this. I’d be the worst husband. You don’t marry someone that fast.”

“It’s a big, permanent step,” Joe said. “Only you know if you can make something like that work. If you can’t, you do the next best thing,” Joe said. “Man up. Take care of her.”

“It’s just that I slept with her when I love someone else. Why the hell did I do that? What kind of sorry bastard does that? What was I thinking?”

At this point in the conversation Joe was completely lost. Paul loved someone? It wasn’t as though men got together and talked about women they had crushes on—they just didn’t. They rarely said how they felt, period. He’d known Paul a long time and there’d been very few women. He was the quiet one; he kept back. Even when they were abroad together, at war, with a lot of tension to unload, Paul never hustled the women.

The bartender delivered Paul another beer, from which he took a deep drink.

“Love someone else?” Joe repeated.

“I’m such a screwup…”

“You love someone?”

“It’s wrong, that’s all. I had no business…”

“Paul. You love someone?”

“Yeah. I was a real horseshit best friend for years. Vanni. I just couldn’t help it. I didn’t want it to be that way, but—”

Joe drank a big gulp. He was prepared to help Paul through just about anything, but he never saw this coming. And why hadn’t he? Probably because he’d have done for Paul what Paul did for Matt—stay with the widow through everything. “Whoa,” he finally said. “Oh, shit.”

“Oh, shit,” Paul echoed.

“Vanni?”

Paul nodded grimly. “You wanna try to imagine how guilty I feel about that? I tried like hell to talk myself out of it. Sometimes I got damn close. I stayed away from them, you know? Because I could talk to Matt just fine, but if I saw Vanni, my heart wanted to explode…Aw God.” He put his head in his hand. “And now I’ve got someone else pregnant. Think I could’ve messed things up any worse?”

Joe shook his head, but he was thinking—yeah. You could’ve been the dead guy. “You sure this baby is yours?” Joe asked. “Maybe it’s not yours.”

“I thought about that,” he said. “Then I decided that was probably wishful thinking on my part. She said there hadn’t been a guy in a long time, which is why she got lazy on the pills. And what did I have? Some poor old condom in the wallet that thought it was never gonna get out of that package. I probably wore a damn hole in it just getting in and out of the truck. Nah, it’s mine.”

“But you’re gonna find out for sure before you set up the college fund, right?”

“Yeah. Sure. Right now, though, I don’t want to push on her too hard. She’s a wreck—a crying, miserable wreck. If she gets the idea I’m not going to step up—who knows what she might do. I don’t want her to get an abortion just out of fear that I won’t be responsible. I’m just going with the assumption it’s mine, since it most likely is. We’ll sort out the details later.”

“What are you gonna do about Vanni?”

“Hell, what can I do? Vanni’s in a lot of pain right now. You think I could help that pain go away by telling her I’ve loved her since the first second I saw her, but I went ahead and got some other woman I barely know knocked up?”

Joe smiled in spite of himself. “We might have to work on your delivery a little bit there, bud. Paul, keep your head here—it’s not like you cheated on Vanni. Huh?”

“Why do I feel like I did?”

“You’ve got your feelings all mixed up in guilt and regret, that’s all. You have to let yourself off the hook about Matt, for one thing. The way you feel about Vanni—it never messed with their marriage or your friendship.”

He slowly turned his eyes toward Joe. “Even though I don’t stand a chance with Vanni, I have to come clean about how I feel. It’s still too soon after Matt. You gotta believe me, I never wanted anything bad to happen to Matt.”

Joe gripped Paul’s biceps. “Of course you didn’t. But this business with Vanni? You owe it to yourself to know where you stand before you borrow all this trouble.”

“Yeah,” he said, hanging his head. “I’m sure she’ll just try to let me down as easy as she can…”

“Then again, you never know,” Joe said with a shrug. “Maybe it’ll go your way for once. In which case, right after she says, ‘I love you, too,’ you’re gonna have to say, ‘I’m going to be a father pretty soon.’ Whew.” Joe gave a short, unhappy laugh. “That’s gonna bite. I think, my friend, your ass is grass. Either way.”

Paul leveled his gaze at Joe. Then he said, “We’re gonna need a lot more beer.”

Two

Mike Valenzuela was the Virgin River town constable and, as such, he spent a great deal of time driving the back mountain roads surrounding the town, taking in the lay of the land. It was important to know the people, the structures, the vehicles. There was no better way to identify something unusual. He got out of his Jeep and walked among trees and shrubs for a while, staying mostly out of sight. He came upon a half-buried semi-trailer and metal storage unit that he’d seen before and had been keeping an eye on. There was a generator between the building and the trailer and camouflage netting stretched over the tops, strung between the trees, which identified it as a cannabis operation, but he’d never seen any activity around it. Mike kept his distance—they were sometimes booby trapped.