“Stay put,” she told me.
She hauled Perez to her cruiser and stash him in the back seat. She carried his boots and threw them in after him. Then she walked over to the ambulance and talked to one of the EMTs.
When she came back, Jenna told me they were taking Guthrie to Municipal Hospital. “You broke his nose, and they’re pretty sure he has a concussion. I have to take you in, Roy, and get a statement. Two against one, I can write it up as self-defense. That’ll fly with most people.” Then she grinned. “Unless they know you like I do.”
“Thanks, Jen.”
“I’ll have to hold onto you until until Sheriff Guthrie gets to the station, though. If I don’t, he’ll just come get you.”
“Mind if I follow you in my truck? That way you don’t have to give me a ride back here.”
“What makes you think I would do that?” she joked, then tilted her head slightly and smiled to make it plain she was being rhetorical when she asked, “Can I trust you?”
It was a rhetorical question “Until we’re alone, anyway,” I replied, and wagged my eyebrows a la Groucho Marx.
She flashed a saucy little grin and said, “Yeah right,” letting me off the hook for teasing her when we both knew nothing would happen. I wouldn’t cheat on Nelly and Jenna wouldn’t have let me anyway.
We’d had a thing going before I started seeing Nelly. I hadn’t been home long when Wayland’s police chief, Joe Strain, asked me if I would give his officers a few lessons in modern army combatives. Strain was old school. His officers had to attend the law enforcement academy in Tyler. He didn’t think they graduated adequately prepared for a situation in which a perp could not be subdued by ordinary means, and he wanted his people to have an option to using their firearm if things went from bad to worse.
Strain had also been a good friend of my father’s. For that reason more than any other, I agreed. Jenna had been among the officers present at the UltraFit gym when I drilled them on Army Ranger close-combat fundamentals twice a week for six weeks.
Meeting Jenna had been one of those moments when you both know you’re destined to be friends, if not more. She and I engaged in a torrid relationship for a few months. But then we both realized we had to either take a step back or get married. I wasn’t ready to get hitched and she said she wasn’t either..
Jenna okayed me following her. This time I left Makker inside the cab of the truck. The police station was quiet. An officer manning the main desk in the lobby buzzed us through a door into the inner sanctum and used the intercom to summon someone to the booking desk, where Jenna handed over Perez. The charge: disturbing the peace. Then she took me down a short shiny hall to the line-up room and, from there, another room with a half dozen white metal desks and some filing cabinets. She sat behind one of the desks and I settled into one of two chairs facing it.
“I called Sheriff Guthrie on the way here,” she said. “Want some coffee?”
I declined. She sat back in her chair and sighed.
“I’m guessing you’re in trouble with Nelly because of this,” she said.
“Looks like it..”
“She’ll get over it.” She looked at me for a moment in silence. I flattered myself by thinking she might be giving consideration to letting me know she was available should Nelly prove unforgiving. On the other hand, it was more likely that she was debating whether or not to call me an idiot.
She pulled a form out of a desk drawer. “So what did Andrew say that made you decide to take him out and break his face?”
“Some things that humiliated Nelly.”
“What kind of things?”
“They were sexual in nature.”
She snorted softly and shook her head. “That doesn’t surprise me.”
“Why not?”
She shrugged and began writing on the form. “He thinks he’s God’s gift, you know? He was like that in high school. Several women have filed complaints just since I’ve been here. Nothing serious. He just doesn’t handle rejection real well. So tell me true, Roy, why did you take him and his buddy outside?”
She wasn’t going to let me off the hook, so I had to admit to what she and Nelly already knew.
“To remind him that words and actions have consequences.”
“So you stepped on his pride and he threw the first punch.” She was still writing.
“I guess I did. And yes he did.”
“Then Perez pulled a knife.”
“That’s right.”
“So he could be charged with assault with a deadly weapon. Except you had just broken Andrew Guthrie’s face so maybe he just wanted to defend himself.”
I smiled bleakly. “Maybe. But it doesn’t matter. I’m not going to press charges. And he’s not in lockup for disturbing the peace. He’s there because he’s a drug-pushing banger.”
“You do know that wasn’t a fair fight.”
“You mean because there were two of them?” I smiled, showing her that I knew that wasn’t what she meant.
We heard the door connecting the hallway and the lineup room open and close, and the heels of boots worn by a big man in a hurry hammering the floor.
It was Adam Guthrie, the sheriff of Creed County.
7
At six-foot-six and two-hundred-and-fifty pounds of brawn, Guthrie filled the doorway as he stopped and fastened a steely gaze on me. He wore a Resistol straw cowboy hat, a brown uniform shirt with the Creed County Sheriff patch on the shoulders, Wrangler jeans and a pair of black Dan Post smooth leather boots. A star was pinned to the shirt and a Smith & Wesson Model 29 .44 Magnum revolver was holstered on his hip. His face was square-jawed and sun-browned.
“So you’re the son-of-a-bitch who busted up my boy,” he said. His voice sounded like a cement truck full of gravel.
“Yeah, that was me,” I said. A simple statement of fact.
He turned his steely gaze on Jenna. “You done with him?”
She looked worried. “Just about. Finishing up my report.”
“You gonna lock him up?”
“No. Are you, Sheriff?”
He didn’t answer that. He struck me as a man who didn’t feel it was necessary to answer to anyone. “Mackey tells me you got the Perez kid in lockup.”
Jenna said that was so. I assumed Mackey was one of the police officers I had seen on the premises.
“He have any drugs on him?” asked Guthrie.
“Nope.”
“What a shame.” He looked at me again. “Heard about you. Wayland’s very own war hero.” He said it the way people do when they’re setting up the punchline of a joke.
“I’m no hero.”
Jenna spun the report around and pushed it across the desk to me, putting a ballpoint pen on top if it. “Read that and sign it, please.” She turned her attention to Guthrie. “Would you like some coffee, Sheriff?”
“Nope. You’d make a man a good wife, Officer Rekar. How come you aren’t married yet?”
“How come you think that’s any of your business, Sheriff?” she asked, with a faux smile.
Guthrie chuckled. “You’re a feisty one, aren’t you? Pretty, too.”
“That reminds me. Been wanting to ask. How come you don’t have any feisty, pretty female deputies?”
Signing the report, I wondered if she just didn’t like the sheriff or was trying to divert some of Guthrie’s ire away from me. The signature in place, I stood up, to attract the man’s undivided attention.
“Thank you, Officer Rekar,” I said. “If that’s everything, I think I’ll go home.”
Guthrie shook his head. “Creed, you and me are gonna have a talk. Outside. Now.”
He left the room.
Jenna looked up at me with worried eyes. I smiled and gave her shoulder a comforting pat and said, “No worries.”
When I walked out of the station, Guthrie was leaning with arms folded on the hood of a white Wrangler 4x4 with a winch and heavy-duty grill guard on the front, an impressive rack of lights on the
roof, and of course the word SHERIFF emblazoned on the sides in big electric blue letters.
“Roy Creed,” he sneered. “War hero. Distinguished Service Cross. Bronze Star. Purple Heart.”
“I could’ve done without the last one. But like I said, I’m no hero. I served with some, heroes, though.”
“Army Ranger. Makes you a tough guy, right? Fighting the Taliban. You’ve been home, what, six months?”
“Almost a year.”
“And stayed out of trouble, until tonight.” He pushed off the Jeep and stepped closer to loom over me, getting in my space. He was six inches taller and about seventy pounds heavier. And there was a lot of power behind the forefinger he shoved into my chest. “And tonight you bought into a world of trouble.”
“Your son has a foul mouth, Sheriff.”
He glared at me, wanting me to back down, to step away. But I couldn’t do that. If I did, the situation would escalate.
“He also has a broken nose and a mild concussion, you son of a bitch.”
I wanted to tell him that somebody had to teach his son some manners. But he was trying to provoke me so that he could throw me in jail, if not under it. So instead I just shrugged and said, without inflection “Your son is a big guy. Strong. I had to stop him somehow.”
Guthrie grunted, glowered a moment more, and then turned to begin pacing back and forth in front of his Jeep. He lifted his Resistol and ran blunt fingers over a thick, graying crew cut. “Tell me one thing. Was a woman involved?”
I said there was.
“That’s his mother’s fault,” he muttered. “He needed her around growing up. But she ran off.”
That explained Andrew’s low opinion of women, I thought. I wasn’t about to say it, though, since I didn’t have a death wish.
“Believe you me,” continued Guthrie, “I’d like nothing better than to toss you in a cell and throw away the key. But my son isn’t going to press charges against you.”
“Did he say that or are you saying it?”
“I’m saying it. He doesn’t need to go through that.”
I nodded. The sheriff wanted to keep his son as far away from the legal system as possible. Harking back to what Jenna had said about Andrew, I would have bet money that the complaints against him had been of the sexual harassment variety. Then, too, there was Andrew’s blood alcohol level, which I suspected had been high, and which was now part of the medical record. And, finally, he had been hanging out with a Toro gangbanger.
Guthrie waggled a finger at me. “You just stay away from my boy, you hear?”
“For the record, he started the dance. Took a swing at me.” I wasn’t making excuses. I wanted to see how he would react.
“I don’t have a single doubt in my mind that you provoked it.” He took a menacing step closer. “See? You’re confrontational.”
That caught me by surprise but I didn’t show it. I was standing there, at ease, my expression as blank as a dead man’s. The Army had drilled that into me and it was second nature. But apparently because I wouldn’t back away I was confrontational.
Guthrie was frustrated. He scowled at me, anger raging inside. It was a mirror image of the look on Andrew’s face earlier tonight.
“I’d like nothing better than to fuck you up right here and now,” he growled.
I could have responded, with something like, “But you don’t want to lose your job because it’s all you’ve got,” or “But you don’t want a broken nose” or just a name, “Ike Soames” because Ike was the best defense attorney in the county and most of the people wearing stars around here didn’t like him because he had a knack for getting his clients off the hook, sometimes thanks to shoddy or questionable work by law enforcement.
But I didn’t say a word, didn’t look away, and didn’t back off. So Guthrie gave up.
“Like I said, stay away from my boy. If you mess with him at all then as God is my witness you’ll regret it.”
That I took seriously, and nodded. The sheriff turned to his ride and I went to my truck. Makker was sitting alertly in the passenger seat, ears up, watching Guthrie through the window glass with the intensity of a laser beam.
I didn’t turn the radio on. I was too busy moping. When I passed the city limits sign it was 12:37 AM. Had I been smarter, Nelly would be sitting where Makker was. She and I would have spent the next twelve hours in or near my bed. But no, I’d had to play the knight in tarnished armor.
Nelly could handle comments like the one Andrew had made, the one that had provoked me into doing the macho thing, which most of the time was a stupid thing to do. She ran a small town Texas honkytonk so she had a thick skin. In short, I had let Andrew Guthrie manipulate me. There was no getting around that. Then I had hurt him worse than I had to. So I indulged in some serious self-recrimination during the ride home.
I stopped indulging when the Ford trundled down my private road and the headlights bounced across the front of my cabin – and on Nelly’s blue Mustang GT parked in front of it.
I parked alongside and got out. She was sitting in the rocking chair on the porch. When I opened the screen door Makker beat me to her, wagging his tail. Nelly sat on her heels and gave him a hug. Then she stood up and gave me one. Just like that, everything was right with the world again. Among her many fine attributes, Penelope Rouse was quick to forgive. Now I just needed to forgive myself.
As we walked inside the cabin I put the night’s events behind me. I was happy to be done with Andrew Guthrie, Antonio Perez and the sheriff of Creed County.
Except I wasn’t.
8
A couple of days later I was driving up FM 555 towards the Interstate, bound for a cutting horse show in Tyler, hauling two of my horses in a 4 Star Runabout bumper trailer. Both of the horses had plenty of cow sense and athletic ability but I wasn’t going in the hopes of getting a ribbon or two. I just wanted to get out of Wayland for a few days.
I stopped at the Express Stop convenience store just shy of the Interstate to fill up the Ford. The tank was half full but while the Triton engine had a lot of power it also guzzled gas when pulling a trailer loaded with over a ton of horseflesh.
It was a rainy late afternoon. I had intentionally gotten a late start, waiting for the front to come through. The cloud cover was low and pervasive. The rain was steady and cool on the skin. Getting out of the truck, I zipped my windbreaker up to the neck and pulled my baseball cap down low over my face as I made for the store entrance.
As I reached it, I saw a young woman about to exit, so I opened the heavy glass door for her. She was carrying a well-traveled leather suitcase in her right hand and a Monster Energy drink in a lime green can in her left. There was a backpack slung over her left shoulder. She wore a straw cowgirl hat, an orange windbreaker, a knee-high denim skirt and short tan Tecovas boots. Strawberry-blonde hair was styled in a short layered bob. Her face was oval, slightly sunburnt, with big expressive blue eyes, a button nose and a generous, full-lipped mouth. She wore no makeup. She didn’t need to. I guessed she was between eighteen and twenty years of age.
“Thank you!” she said exuberantly, with a bright smile.
“My pleasure.”
The air conditioning was set for hot summer days in the high nineties. In my drenched condition I was chilled. The woman at the counter was in her sixties, slender and spry. She looked up from wiping the counter with a brown paper towel and flashed a warm, dentured smile. Her tag said her name was Marge.
“Howdy! What can I do you for?”
“Thirty dollars, premium, on thirteen.”
She keyed that into her register, repeating it as she did so. “Anything else, sweetie?”
“That’s it.” I paid in cash and went outside.
As I walked around my rig to get to the pump I noticed that the blonde girl was nearly to the highway, angling in the direction of the overpass about fifty yards to the north. I assumed she would be looking for a ride on one of the Interstate feeders. It wasn’t good weather f
or hitchhiking.
My back was to the intersection when I began pumping the gas. I looked around sharply when I heard the shimmying squeal of tires. A red Chevy Silverado Double Cab was fishtailing as it came to a shuddering stop on the shoulder in front of the girl. I saw the back of two heads through the rear window.
A four-door sedan passed from the south and its headlights played briefly on the back of the Silverado. I registered the red truck’s plate number out of habit. The sedan passed and rolled on under the overpass, turning left onto the Interstate feeder.
The Chevy’s passenger window came down. The girl stood there, apparently talking to the people in the truck. I watched for about a minute and then the dispenser’s automatic cutoff kicked in. Hooking the dispenser back on the pump I looked up again and saw the red truck’s passenger door open and an arm reach out. I assumed it was the offer of a hand up.
But then the girl wrenched her arm away and stepped back. She started walking, with quick angry strides, towards the overpass. I could hear her shouting, dimly, through the sound of the rain, but couldn’t make out the words.
The truck door slammed shut and the Silverado lurched forward, then began to roll along the shoulder, forcing the girl onto the steep slope of the roadside ditch. She dropped her suitcase as she lost her balance and nearly slipped down into the muddy bottom. The truck stopped and a man got out on the passenger side. He grabbed the suitcase. She reached for it but the man tossed it into the back of the truck. Then he grabbed her outstretched arm.
I was running then. She looked around, for help I assumed, and saw me. I couldn’t see her expression as the man grabbed her with his other arm and tossed her into the cab. For an instant her legs dangled but he grabbed them and pushed her up and inside. Realizing I wasn’t going to reach the Chevy in time, I stopped splashing through the rain puddles, spun around and ran back to my truck. I heard the Chevy’s door slam and the engine whine and the tires shimmy again.
Nearing the Ford I had a split second to make a crucial decision. Should I spend a precious minute or two detaching the trailer?
The Highways of the Dead (A Creed Crime Story Book 1) Page 3