Chasing the Bear by Robert B. Parker Read Free Book Online

said. “Tell it just like it happened until the bridge. They hid on the bridge, he went on past them downriver. Don’t know where he is.”
    “Work for you?” Patrick said to me.
    I nodded.
    I said, “I did kill him, though, didn’t I?”
    Patrick and Cash both looked at my father.
    “You made it easier for him to kill himself,” my father said. “But you didn’t make him kidnap Jeannie, or beat her, and you didn’t make him chase you down the river with a bowie knife. And you didn’t require him to do it drunk, understand?”
    “So why not just tell the whole truth?”
    “It saves some trouble if we don’t,” my father said. “I told you once that there was right and wrong and there was also the law. Law can’t always be about right and wrong. Sometimes the law gotta do what the law is required to do. I know and you know and Patrick knows and Cash knows and Jeannie knows that what you done was not only right, it was . . .”
    He mulled his word choice for a minute.
    “It was goddamned heroic,” he said. “But the law can’t just know things. It has to decide them in a legal way. They got to investigate. They got to talk about it in the DA’s office. Maybe they have to talk about it in court. Things drag on. They finally decide that what you done was self-defense, and they leave you be. And we’re right where we are now. Except in the meantime we all been annoyed at some length.”
    “Why does it have to be that way?” I said.
    “ ’Cause not everybody agrees on what’s right,” Cash said.
    “Luke Haden probably thought he was right,” Patrick said. “If he cared.”
    “So a . . . country, a state, whatever, gotta have laws to protect us from the people who don’t know what’s right or don’t care,” my father said.
    We all ate in silence for a while.
    “Course that’s what I think,” my father said. “But you got a right to think different. If you think you need to tell the law everything that happened, and I can’t talk you out of it, then I’ll go down to the station with you and go the whole way with you, whatever way it goes.”
    I looked at my uncles.
    “A course,” Cash said.
    “Naturally,” Patrick said.
    “But you all think it would be a mistake,” I said.
    “Never a mistake,” Patrick said, “to do what you think is the right thing to do.”
    My father nodded.
    Cash said, “Amen.”
    “So how can you be sure what you think is right, is right?” I said.
    “I don’t know,” my father said.
    “So what do I do?” I said.
    My father grinned.
    “Best you can,” he said.
    “I think I got to tell the truth,” I said.
    My father nodded.
    “Okay,” he said. “We’ll go down tomorrow, talk to Cecil. All of us.”

Chapter 25
    In the morning my father drove me down to the police station and waited for me outside in the car while I went in to see Cecil Travers.
    The policeman at the desk told me to sit down and Sergeant Travers would come out for me.
    I sat on the hard oak bench near the station house door and in maybe five minutes Cecil Travers came out.
    “Come on into my office,” he said. “Tell me what I can do for you.”
    Cecil listened very carefully to everything I said. And nodded and listened and nodded and listened. When I got through, he leaned back in his chair and looked at me.
    “You’re a smart kid,” he said.
    And I shrugged.
    “Brave too,” he said.
    “I was scared all the time,” I said.
    “Had reason to be,” Cecil said. Then he cleared his throat. “I don’t see enough evidence here to charge you with a crime.”
    “Even though I moved the sign?”
    “That is correct,” Cecil said.
    “He might not have died if he’d been able to see the sign,” I said.
    “But you might have,” Cecil said. “And what about the girl?”
    I nodded.
    “You’re a kid,” Cecil said. “You did the best any kid could do, with what you had, and you won. Take it and go home and be proud of it. Hell, nobody’s even reported Luke