It’s private property—I’m allowed to drive fast, Sam always said when he bothered to call her on it.
One look at her face tonight as she stepped out of her reconditioned ’77 Mustang, and Kyle knew he wasn’t going to call her on anything.
Normally he hated the sight of her in the manly beige slacks, shirt and tie that made up her Fort County deputy uniform.
Not because of the manliness, but because of what they represented. The job. The danger. Her obsession.
Tonight, he hardly noticed her apparel.
Beer first and then talk, he’d learned when she had that wild look in those familiar blue eyes. The look that asked him if she was insane. Or the world was.
The look that told him she’d been seeing something really ugly while he was staring at the stars.
She grabbed the beer he handed her and sat down without a hello. Lying back in the handmade pine chair she used so much he thought of it as hers, she downed half the beer.
“How’s Grandpa?” she finally asked.
“Better today. The swelling in his legs went down and he made it to the table for all three meals. Bitched at me for burning the toast, too.” He grinned.
“Did he know who you were?”
“I’m not sure. I was either me or my dad. He knew he was with family. I’m good with that.” It was when the grandfather he’d grown up with as a second parent thought Kyle was a stranger that he struggled.
“Where’s Zodiac?”
“In the barn. Lillie’s ready to foal.” And the German shepherd would alert him if there was a problem that required his attention before morning.
“You need to hire yourself a hand.”
He held up the two he had, beer bottle included. “I’ve got all I need.”
“Your father had two men, plus you and your grandpa, helping him.”
“He had twice the land to work and the money to pay wages. I’ve got help coming for harvest. I can do the rest myself.”
“You think you’re gonna break even this year?”
“Maybe.”
By next year, his time would be up. Either the experimental crop paid off or he had to find Grandpa and himself a new place to live.
Which would kill the ailing old man who’d never lived anywhere but this farm.
Kyle wasn’t kidding himself. It would probably kill him, too.
He had one more year before the bank called his loan. One year to get his ass out of the hole he’d dug himself.
“You gonna tell me what happened tonight?”
“I was talking to a guy on the phone when he blew his brains out.”
“Jesus, Sam, what happened?” In Fort County? Where cops were called when mothers and daughters had spats. Kyle studied her expression, or as much as he could see in the darkness. “Why’d he do that?”
“Guess it was something I said.”
2
Samantha debriefed with Kyle as best she could. She’d already written her report at the sheriff’s office. There’d be a more formal conference with her superior in the morning, but that was mere procedure.
And if she had serious trouble coping, she could always call Kelly Chapman. It wouldn’t be the first time.
Tonight, though, she needed the friend who knew her better than anyone. She needed Kyle.
“We found about an ounce of meth, spilling out of the bag, on his coffee table. There was a pipe on the nightstand in the bedroom. And a needle in the trash…”
Samantha took a long sip of beer, savoring the familiarity of the experience, the “country backyard barbecue everything’s going to be okay” taste. She didn’t see anything in the darkness around her, though she knew the shapes of Kyle’s barn, a tractor, his truck.
“The place was torn up, shattered glass on a wedding photo. Looked like he’d been throwing furniture. Nice stuff.”
Kyle hooked his foot beneath hers.
“His wife had a single bullet through her chest. She was about our age. Wearing a white blouse and jeans. Cute. I heard her call come through on the radio. I was only ten minutes away. She was already dead when I got there.”
“Were you first on the scene?”
A dangerous position to be in. And she knew what would follow her admission—a lecture from Kyle.
“I’m telling the story here.” She needed him on her side. “One of the rooms had bunk beds,” she continued. “There were two young sons. They were spending the night with their grandfather.”
The bottle felt good against her lips. She wanted to keep it there, keep sucking down the comforting taste of beer.
“Better slow down, girl. At the rate you’re going, the evening will be over in less than ten minutes. Hardly worth the drive out.”
According to her most recent alcohol-blood-level test—a self-requirement, not a departmental one—two was her legal limit.
Giving him a belligerent look, Samantha sipped again. “I’m telling you, Kyle, we’ve become infested with this crap. Meth is everywhere. Destroying us. It’s all I’m seeing anymore.”
“It’s all you’re seeing because of the line of work you’re in.” Kyle had never hidden his aversion to her career.
Nor had he stopped trying to convince her that his strongly held opinion on the matter was the right one.
“Don’t start on me,” she warned him.
“Now might be an appropriate time to take a good hard look at yourself.” Opening another beer, he tossed the cap toward the cardboard six-pack container—scoring a clean shot. “I might be dense or backward or something, but last I checked, happiness didn’t look anything like you.”
“I love my job.”
“That’s why you’re up late on a Monday night, drowning your brain so you don’t have to think about your day on the job?”
If he wasn’t her best friend, she would have left.
“Like your work doesn’t ever cause you stress?” He was the one who worried every day that he might lose his precious farm. “And it’s not just because of the line of work I’m in,” she added, skipping back to his earlier comment. “Meth use has become an epidemic. And not only with losers, either. This guy tonight—his neighbors say that up until six months ago he was an engineer at Samson pulling in a six-figure income.” Samson was an aerospace plant forty miles from Chandler. “His father-in-law thinks he started using last summer. That’s when his behavior changed, at any rate.”
Kyle’s silence usually meant she had his attention.
“I was talking to Danielle from Child Services yesterday, and she said that almost three-quarters of their cases have to do with meth in some way. Three-quarters of their cases, Kyle. Do you know many children that involves? It’s scary.”
“We live in a scary world, honey. Or most of you do. Look around you.” He indicated the yard where they sat. “There’s fresh air to breathe. Peace and quiet and stars in the sky. Maybe, after tonight’s violence, you can appreciate life out here a little more.”
“What I’m seeing in Fort County…” she began, ignoring his all-too-predictable comment. “I think it’s worse than a lot of the rest of the country. Maybe not out West where the Mexican drug influence is so prevalent, but for this part of the country, we’re way above statistics. Even our own. Meth use is up over one hundred percent from last year at this time.”
“The economy’s been in the shitter. What do you expect?”
“Drugs take money. Especially if they’re being imported.”
“So what’s your explanation?”
“I think it’s like you say—it’s been a hard couple of years and many people are getting desperate. But I also think this stuff is being made locally. In large quantities, like in Mexico—more of a mass production approach, not the little mom-and-pop labs we’ve seen in the past.”
“What makes you say that?”
“There’s so much of it, for one thing. And the recipe that’s being used, for another. There are several different ways to make meth, different ingredients
that can be used. What we’re finding here isn’t as pure as the stuff that comes from Mexico. And also, it would have to come from here to make it cheap enough for the number of users we’re seeing.” She’d done her homework. And she was scared. “Ohio’s been hit hard, especially the Dayton area, with NCR pulling out and GM leaving, and so many other factories closing. More people are out of work, a record number of them, searching for jobs that aren’t there. They need money. A superlab, which is what the mass production meth labs are called, could support an entire factory’s worth of workers. And good times or bad, there’s always going to be a market for drugs.”
He was staring out over the yard, his eyebrows drawn.
“Just because we’ve never had a superlab in this part of the country before doesn’t mean there isn’t one. As a matter of fact, it makes sense that someone from the West would take advantage of the situation here and get a lab set up, say, at the crossroads of Interstate 70 and 75. That’s the ideal location for transport to all parts of the country.”
He didn’t respond.
“Desperate people do desperate things, Kyle. And…I don’t know, aside from all that, I just have a feeling—”
“Women’s intuition and police work do not go hand in hand,” Kyle interrupted with another oft-repeated remark. “You’ll get yourself killed thinking that way.”
She’d scared him. His remark, focusing only on her last sentence, ignoring the facts, told her so.
“My intuition saved my life the night I knew not to approach a speeder I stopped until I called for backup.” She’d handled them on her own many times before. And that night, she’d saved herself a bullet to the chest. Another officer, one who arrived wearing a bulletproof vest, took the hit, escaping with only a bruise.
“What would save your life is getting out of that uniform and staying out,” he said, looking up into a tree with branches they could hardly see in the darkness.
Sam had once been jealous of those trees. And the fields. Back when she’d wanted Kyle to love her more than he loved his farm. She still wondered what he saw, what he felt, when he gazed out over his land.
Whatever it was, she couldn’t see it. Even in daylight.
“You could’ve been killed tonight.”
“No, actually, that was Chuck.” Her closest friend on the force. “He was out front when the guy blasted the bay window. The bullet missed Chuck by a foot.”
Because the other deputy had been crouched down. Thank God for good training.
“Will you be tracing this meth? To learn where the ingredients are coming from?”
“We’ll send it out. We’ll know in a couple of days if it’s ice or not, but I can already tell you it isn’t. From the way it was packaged.”
“Ice?”
“The stuff that comes from Mexico. Like I said, it’s a much purer form. And it’s a lot more dangerous. Not that it matters our stuff is a lesser quality drug. The crap is spreading like a virus and at the rate we’re going in our fight to stop it, it might as well be coming from Mexico.”
“Here, this will help. At least for now.” Kyle handed her a second beer, cap removed. “In the long run, if anyone can get them, Sam, it’s you. You’re the best damn cop I’ve ever heard of. Anywhere.”
“Uh-huh.” She took his praise with a grain of salt. “And how many cops have you been in contact with?” Their small group in Fort County and Chandler and a couple of the surrounding burgs. And only when he’d been with her or her family.
“I have a television.”
“When’s the last time you turned it on?”
“A couple of weeks ago when it looked like a tornado might be moving in.”
The only way she’d been able to talk him into getting a satellite dish was by showing him the weather channel one night while he was at her place in town.
Sam had a double-wide modular she’d inherited from her grandfather—her dad’s dad, a retired deputy—when he’d passed away five years before at the age of ninety.
“And it doesn’t seem to matter how good the cops are,” she added. “We simply don’t have the money to go to war.”
“But if the problem’s local—it just means finding the labs, right? Like last year, when you were part of the sting that busted the woman in town who was making the stuff in her bathroom and selling it to kids at the high school.”
If only it was that easy. The investigating was usually the most straightforward part. “And that little bust cost the county almost six thousand dollars,” she said, having a hard time pulling herself up after this latest testament to a fight they might not win. In her grandfather’s day—hell, even in her dad’s day—being a cop was about upholding the law.
Now, like everything else, it was about money.
“First, you pay law enforcement, and as you know, our budget’s been cut in half in the past two years, but that’s a whole other issue. Then you make the arrest. You house the perpetrator in a county facility. You pay for a trial—you pay to clean up the lab, which creates about six pounds of toxic waste for every pound of meth. And you have to do all of that for every single case, so then you pay for treatment for the perpetrator, which is usually required at sentencing. The county goes bankrupt before half the operations are shut down.”
“You’re telling me you don’t have the money to stop these people. That you guys aren’t even trying because you can’t afford to?”
She drank some beer. She thought about keeping quiet because mum was the word around headquarters these days, and then reminded herself that she was with Kyle.
He might not like what she had to say, but she always tried to be honest when she talked to Kyle.
“It’s not quite that bad yet, but yes, you’re partially correct. We’re working with such a small crew, we don’t have much time to put into the investigations. And we have to consider whether one bust is big enough to be worth the expenditure of monies, or if we should just turn a blind eye and wait for a bigger bust that’ll give us more bang for our buck.”
“Sweet Jesus, Sam. I had no idea it had come to this.”
“Not many people do. Except, of course, the operators. They seem to be multiplying like flies.”
“In Fort County? We’re out in the middle of nowhere!”
“A perfect cover for a superlab.”
“I wish you’d quit saying that.”
“If it’s happening, my silence isn’t going to make it go away. The only way to get rid of it is to talk about it. Find it. Go after it.”
“And you really think that’s what we have here? Some kind of mass production?”
“It’s possible. I hope not.”
“God, I hate your job.”
Being a cop was the one part of her Kyle didn’t understand. Or like. And that wasn’t going to change. She’d given up hoping a long time ago.
“I’m kind of tired of it myself at the moment,” she said, unfastening the top button of her shirt. “Mind if I take this off?”
His grin was slow and warm as he glanced over at her. “Do I ever mind?”
No. His fondness for her body had never been in question.
“I need you tonight, Kyle.” He was her drug. Her escape. The place she came when she needed to find herself within the cop she’d become.
“Then you’ve got me, baby.”
“Now?” Sam pulled her belt strap out of its loop.
“Any time you need me, Sam. You know that.” It was the closest he’d come to telling her he loved her since they’d broken off their engagement for the final time thirteen years before. He’d been married and divorced since then.
She’d been promoted—twice.
Kyle didn’t get embarrassed about much of anything. She loved how he just dropped his pants to use as a blanket for her bottom and made love to her right out there in his backyard. And then, wrapping her in clothes just in case Grandpa stirred, he carried her to the large oak bed he’d carved with his own hands and held her until she fell asleep.
In spite of the fact that she was a big strong cop.
“You ready?”
The girl nodded.
“Today’s delivery is different. This guy isn’t a parent, but he really needs what we can give him. Instead of going up to a house, you’ll have to wait at the corner by the trash can and then, when he pulls up in his car and asks for directions, you write them on the bag and hand it to him.”
“I know. I got it.”
“You’re sure you aren’t afraid?”
“I’m sure.”
“If this goes according to plan, I’ll pay you double.”
She nodded again.
“Remember what I told you? If he makes a move on you, drop the bag in the trash can, scream and run. If he makes comments but stays inside the car, just play along.”
Another nod.
“No eye contact.”
“Okay.”
“You’re a good girl. The work you do, it’s vital to so many people. You understand that, don’t you?”
“Yes, Mac.”
“You know how those kids—and their parents—would suffer if they didn’t have you? It’s drops like the one today that let us finance the rest of them. That let me pay you.”
“I know. It’s okay, Mac.”
“You’re getting prettier by the day, and that worries me. You’re going to have to be savvy, watch your back at all times, or you’re of no use to us. Remember the self-defense classes. Promise me you’ll practice what you learned or I won’t be able to employ you anymore.”
“I’ll be careful. I promise.”
She needed the money. She wanted to go to college and her mother didn’t make enough to pay their bills. He understood that. But she had to understand something, too—that the world was a tough place.
“Good. I’m glad. I’d hate to lose you. You’re by far the most promising teenager I’ve ever worked with.”
Her eyes remained downcast.
She was the kind of girl you spent your whole life hoping to find.
And he’d met her now, like this….
“Maybe someday, when you’re a little older, we could, you know, hook up.” He’d broken his number-one rule.
The Second Lie Page 2