by Aaron Saylor
Before Elmer could finish screaming, Slone was on the girl from behind. He wrapped one arm around her waist, and yanked her up, away from Elmer. With his free hand, he ripped the knife from her hand and slung it across the room, where it stuck in the cracked drywall.
Lisa struggled against the sheriff’s grip. She fought him for two solid minutes before finally giving out. After that, John dropped her to the floor, and everybody caught their breath.
“What happened?” Slone asked, looking down on her.
“Motherfucker stole my pills,” Lisa said.
“Stole your pills?”
“Yeah. Stole my pills.”
“What kind of pills?”
“You know.” She glanced upward, caught his eyes for just a second, and then looked away again. “My pills.”
John looked around the living room, ready to thrash Elmer Canifax from wall to floor to ceiling and back to the floor again.
But Elmer was gone.
The bathroom door slammed shut in the background, at the far end of a long hallway. Right after that slam came a cha–click as Elmer bolted the door shut.
Slone turned towards the sound, took twelve big steps, and was in front of the bathroom door almost before the lock settled into its final position. He banged on the door one, two, three, four times, his big right fist denting the door’s wood with each heavy blow.
“Elmer!” he said, banging one, two, three, four more times. “Elmer, open this goddamn door!”
From the bathroom came a weak, “Where’s Lisa?”
“In the living room. Open the door,” said Slone.
“Who’s watching her?”
“I’m watching her. Open the door.”
“Did you whip her ass, sheriff?” Elmer asked.
The sheriff moved away, into the middle of the hall. He measured the distance between the door and one full extension of his right leg. “I didn’t have to whip her ass. Open the door, Elmer.”
“I ain’t openin’ the door,” said Elmer. “Not until I know that bitch got a good ass whipping out of this.”
“Elmer, if this door ain’t open in five seconds, I’m going to break it down,” Slone said. “And if I have to break this door down, then there’ll be an ass whipped. You got that?”
“I ain’t openin’ the door.”
“You sure?”
“Hell yeah, I’m sure!”
“Okay then.”
Slone’s foot hit the door with every single last pound of force that he could put behind. The doorframe cracked and splinters danced in the air. The door itself flew off its hinges, into the bathroom, and blasted Elmer in the side of the head so hard that he staggered back, tripped on the toilet, and collapsed on the bathroom tile.
And then, he felt a monstrous hand around his throat.
Sheriff Slone lifted him off the ground with scary ease and drilled his face into the bathroom mirror. The mirror shattered, but didn’t break apart, held together from the weight of Elmer’s left jaw pressed firm against the glass.
“You know what, Elmer?” said the sheriff, calm now. Scary calm. “I don’t think I’ve been back here since I got out of the hospital. What about that.”
He pulled Elmer’s head back, looked at him, saw shreds of blood and tissue. “Aren’t you glad to see me?”
“I swear to God I didn’t do nothing to that bitch,” Elmer said.
“Sure you didn’t,” said the sheriff. He shoved Elmer’s face back into the mirror and ground it in the glass. Scarlet oozed into the sink below. “You mean to tell me, that pretty little lady out there just pulled that big knife and jumped on top of you for no reason at all?”
Elmer wanted to answer. Elmer didn’t want to answer. Elmer couldn’t answer. Elmer thought it best that he not answer.
“No reason at all, huh?” asked Slone again.
Elmer still couldn’t answer.
The sheriff pulled back from the mirror. He smiled and pushed Elmer against the opposite wall, where he slid down and sat on a kaleidoscope of his own blood.
Things got quiet.
For five minutes, neither man moved. Elmer sat on the floor and whimpered and bled and cried and bled some more and cried some more. Slone just watched him. They breathed.
The sheriff bent to Elmer’s ear. “You know, I don’t really give a shit about that ol’ girl out front,” he said, slowly. “I’m just glad I got to come up here and renew our friendship like this.”
Elmer tried to get some words out but couldn’t, not with the pain still jagging down his face in sharp bolts. His lips parted. He tried to whisper but couldn’t even do that.
Slone grinned. “Come again?”
Elmer opened his lips a little more. A thin trickle of blood fell down the side of his nose and into his mouth. He flopped his head to the other side, the best he could do at that moment.
“Here’s the news, Elmer. My family’s numbers are down. That’s not good. And to be honest, we think you got something to do with it. In fact we’re pretty goddamn positive about that. That ain’t good, either, at least not for you anyways. So here’s the deal. I been down a while, but I’m back now, and that means the Slone family’s numbers are gonna go back up where they belong.
“You and all your parties, sellin’ to the kids, all that shit’s gonna slow down. Way down. You’re messin’ with our market, Elmer. We’ve put up with it for a while but we ain’t puttin’ up with it anymore. So back off. Back off, you hear? If you don’t, I’m gonna come back and see you one more time. And if that happens, a helluva lot more than your mirror’s liable to end up broken.”
Elmer lay there, and bled.
Sheriff Slone looked at him for another few seconds. He gave Elmer one more kick in the ribcage, then spit on the floor by Elmer’s head, and walked away.
From there, John Slone headed back into the living room. He found Lisa sitting on the couch, smoking a joint. He took the joint from her, ground it under his size twelve uniform boots, and led her outside to his cruiser. There, he threw her in the back seat and then he also retrieved her friend Emily and threw her in the back seat, too, for shits and giggles.
The sheriff slammed the cruiser door and got into the driver’s seat. He started the engine. He reached over to the passenger’s side, switched on the MP3 player. The Nazareth started up again.
Now you’re messin’ with
A SONOFABEEYITCH
Now you’re messin’ with a sonofabitch
Damn right. John Slone was back in the saddle. A bullet to the chest couldn’t even stop him. Not then, not now, not ever.
COURTHOUSE
The Seward County courthouse was a boxy, one–story structure of dark brown brick that looked like mud. After a fire destroyed the courthouse that had stood since the early 1900’s, the county built a new one in 1974 but decades later it wasn’t quite so new anymore. The place still had the same black–flecked tile floors, plaid upholstered furniture, and orange curtains that were there when it first opened. The judge’s chambers featured imitation oak paneling. Two ashtrays stood in every room. Folks used them liberally, since no smoking ban existed in Sewardville, and never would.
The sheriff parked his cruiser near the courthouse entrance. He got out, opened the back door of the vehicle and waited for Lisa and Emily to say something. “Either one of you ladies thinkin’ you might wanna fight with me when I pull you out of that car?” he asked, smiling.
“Fuck off,” Lisa shrugged.
He looked at Emily. “How about you?”
She gave no response or reaction.
The sheriff let out a bored sigh as he glanced around the parking lot. “Tell you what,” he said, not looking back at them just yet. “This can go one of two ways between us. You all can come out of there on your own, nice and quiet, and march yourselves into the courthouse there and on down to the sheriff’s department, and we can all get about on our day. Or, if you want, y’all can fight me. If you fight, I’m still gonna pull your asses out of there and we’re still goi
n’ inside. Only difference is that if I gotta drag you out, when you get there, those pretty little faces prob’ly ain’t gonna look quite as pretty as they do right now. You get me?”
The two girls thought about it, as if there really were anything to consider at all. Finally, Emily swung her legs around and exited the vehicle, though with her hands cuffed behind her she needed the sheriff’s help to gain full balance.
“That’s good,” Slone said..
Lisa decided she wanted to fight after all. She kicked the hell out of the seat in front of her, shook her head back and forth back and forth, and screamed animal nonsense, high shrieks that barely even passed as language.
Slone watched her, hands on his hips, unimpressed. He let her go on, hoping the tantrum would burn itself out soon enough, which happened sure enough. When she was finished, the sheriff grabbed her hair and yanked her out of the back seat, standing her up in the parking lot next to her friend.
John slammed the cruiser door shut and put one hand in the middle of each girl’s back, pushing them towards the courthouse entrance and then on through it.
In the courthouse, the steps of his heavy black boots echoed on the ‘70’s–era floor. The girls stiffened, trying to keep from moving forward, but with little effect. Sheriff Slone shoved them where he wanted them to go. He waved hello to the ladies he saw in the County Clerk’s office and proceeded down the hall, towards the large open room that housed most of the Seward County Sheriff’s Department.
On his way, he passed a row of photographic portraits that started on the main lobby walls and extended all the way to the back of the building, showing every one of the nineteen sheriffs to hold office in Seward County since 1880.
They found the Seward County Sheriff’s Department empty and quiet except for one deputy: J.T. Rogers, a slight man with black hair, parted to the right, and a Tom Selleck mustache. He sat at his desk reading a week–old edition of the Sewardville Times, as he’d done most days in the nineteen years he’d been employed by the Seward County Sheriff’s Department.
A wide, brown Formica counter ran at an L across the full length and breadth of the room, with a hinged door at the corner of the L that department employees could enter through and lock once inside. The two deputies’ desks lined up in the middle of the room, covered in paperwork and coffee cups that might or might not get cleaned up by week’s end. One of the empty desk chairs had a department windbreaker hanging on the back, and a cigarette still burning in the ashtray.
Slone pushed the girls against the wall, into a couple of brown wooden chairs that were linked by a metal bar. He walked towards the cigarette, picked it up and looked at it. “I thought I told you all, no smoking in here,” he said to his deputy.
“This ain’t a no–smoking establishment,” said Rogers.
“I don’t give a fuck what it is.”
“Well, that ain’t my brand.”
“I don’t give a fuck what brand it is, either,” Slone said, as he crushed the butt in the ashtray. He gestured to Lisa and Emily. “Take those bitches over to the jail and book ‘em in. I’ve already got tired of lookin’ at ‘em.”
Rogers folded up the newspaper. He strolled over to the girls and pulled them upright by the shoulders, unconcerned with their comfort or physical well–being. Each of the teenagers gave him a violent, squinty glare and in return, he knocked them both hard across the top of the chest, snapping their heads back hard against the wall. They yelped like kicked coyotes and muttered a few curses that the deputy neither understood nor cared to understand, but just for the shit of it, Rogers delivered a couple of well–placed forearms into their stomachs.
“You sure you want ta give me a hard time?” the deputy asked them, while they were still doubled over in pain.
Now they seemed sure that they didn’t. He led them away.
While they left, Slone walked towards the doorway that stood centered in the wall behind the row of desks – the doorway to his private office. He worked out of a spare room with only a desk, a black leather chair with wheels, and a Seward County Lions Club calendar on the wall. There was another black leather chair across the desk, for visitors both welcome and unwelcome.
He found Walt Slone inside, by the window, gazing outside at the stree
t with his back turned to the doorway.
“Hello, Mayor,” said the sheriff.
“Hello, Sheriff,” said the mayor.
“What are you watching out there?”
“The road.”
“Anything on it?”
“Not really. A few cars.”
They stood there, each waiting for the next one to speak, neither really concerned with the next step. Walt sat down in the sheriff’s chair and propped his feet up on the desk and without saying a word, dared his son to say anything about it.
Instead, John quietly stepped around to the other chair, the chair for visitors, and eased himself down into it.
Seconds passed.
Two minutes.
They waited each other out.
Beyond the window, an old man strolled along the road’s shoulder, pulling a tricycle behind him on a rope. Walt saw him out there, but didn’t remark.
Finally, the sheriff spoke. “You’re in my chair again.”
“I know,” said Walt. He smiled. “I like this chair.”
John smiled, too. “But it’s my chair,” he cracked. “I don’t suppose it ever crossed your mind that I might like this chair, too.”
“Not really. I don’t suppose it did.” Walt grinned wider now, like a big Texan holding the winning poker hand. The sheriff laughed, too.
Walt swung his feet off the desk. Rather than get up he settled into the soft leather back, resting his elbows on the wooden arms of the chair. “But even if that had crossed my mind,” he said, “I’d still be sittin’ right here in your chair, and you’d still be sittin’ right where you are.”
Deputy Rogers led the two girls, Lisa and Emily, into the county jailer’s office. He sat them down on a flat wooden bench with no back, just inside the glass double doors of the entrance.
He stepped up to a grimy plexiglass window that was glazed with thirty years’ worth of cigarette smoke. Behind the window sat Bunny Groves, the longtime county jailer who had supplied most of that smoke himself thanks to his three–packs–a–day penchant for Marlboro unfiltereds. Bunny was sixty years old, barely the height of a refrigerator and about half as mobile. His hair stayed plastered straight back and in the last few years had taken on a yellow tinge, also thanks to the Marlboro unfiltereds. He hardly talked, mostly just hummed and smiled every now and then. Nobody in town could remember why they called him Bunny.
Rogers tapped on the plexiglass. The jailer put down his cold double cheeseburger, and looked up through thin tendrils of toxic smoke.
“Hey, Bunny,” said the deputy. “Can you take care of these two fine ladies for me? Sheriff picked ‘em up from Elmer Canifax’s place just a little while ago.”
“It’s lunch time,” said Bunny.
“So?”
“So I’m eatin’ lunch.”
JT’s cell phone buzzed against his hip. He recognized the number. “I gotta take this,” he said, turning for the exit. “Book these two in. Sheriff wants ‘em to cool it here for a while.”
“What’s the charges?”
“Charges?” The deputy shrugged, and thought about it for a second. “Like I said, they come from Elmer’s so I’m sure you can figure something out. I’ll be back in a minute.”
With that, Rogers turned his attention to his phone. He picked up the handset, and wandered outside, all the way around the far corner of the building where no one else was within earshot.
“What do you want?” he asked the caller.
“We got a problem,” said the voice on the other end. It was Elmer Canifax.
Rogers let out a deep breath and said, “I told you not call me when I’m on duty. Actually, I told you it’d be best if you don’t call me at
all. Especially not on my damn cell phone. There’s old ladies that sit up listenin’ for cell phone calls to bleed through on their police scanners, you know that?”
“I don’t give a shit about that right now.”
“Maybe you’ll give a shit if the sheriff catches wind of me and you talking. Tell me Elmer, how do you think that would turn out for us?”
“The sheriff came to see me this morning.”
Rogers lost his breath. He imagined his face being crushed under one of Sheriff Slone’s cement–block fists.
“I told you. We got a problem,” said Elmer. “Some people around here ain’t big fans of competition, if you know what I mean. When can you come up here?”
“I’m pullin’ a twelve hour shift,” the deputy said finally, after he’d taken a moment to settle his mind back down. “I’ll come up tonight, after I get off. Don’t call me again. I’ll see you in a little while. Don’t call me again. I ain’t kiddin’, Elmer.” He hung up the phone, hoping their conversation went unnoticed by all the scanner radios across Sewardville.
BUSINESS
“I heard you went up to see our friend Mr. Canifax,” Walt said to the sheriff.
“Mmmmm–hmmmm,” said John. “Got a call that he was rough housin’ with one of the local beauties. Stupid shit, nothing new.”
Walt kicked back in the sheriff’s seat and clasped his hands across his stomach. “You should have taken the opportunity to kick that idiot’s head in,” he said. “He’s a big reason that business is off for us. This ain’t capitalism here. We don’t need competition.”
“Actually, I did give him a message while I was there.”
“Really? What kind of message?”
John shrugged. “The kind that says, ‘back the fuck off before I come up here and put you in a wheelchair for the rest of your little life.”
They laughed together.
Neither of them felt anything else should be said about Elmer. It was a simple matter of fact – Elmer was hurting their business, and he would be stopped one way or another. No need to waste time worrying about it any further, at least not for now, anyway. Things stood where they stood.