by Jane Graves
Alex nodded. “I’ll give you one thing, Stanley.”
“What’s that?”
“Your uniform looks good. Nice polish on the shoes. And the slacks. Nice sharp crease. I like that.”
“Uh … th-thank you.”
“Take them off.”
Stanley’s eyes shot open wide. “Huh?”
“I said drop your pants.”
Stanley stared at him dumbly. “You want me to take my pants off?”
“Didn’t I just say that?”
“Don’t, Stanley,” Val said, then turned to Alex, her voice tight with anger. “Don’t make him do that. It’s not necessary.”
Stanley glanced back at Alex, his gaze hopeful, as if he thought maybe he’d change his mind. Alex responded by leaning in closer to the deputy, lowering his voice to a malicious drawl.
“Now, Stanley, Val’s spent a lot of time here trying to convince you that I’m a real pussycat. But just between you and me, I’m not the kind of man who puts up with a whole lot of crap. And the minute anybody hands me any, I start to get pissed. Really pissed. Now, it’s up to you. Do you really want to mess with me?”
Stanley swallowed hard, then began to unbuckle his belt. Val buried her face in her hand, shaking her head. Stanley stepped out of the pants, revealing blue boxers with tiny white polka dots. Alex yanked the car keys out of one of the pockets, stuffed them into his pocket, then took the deputy’s pants and tossed them into Val’s van.
“Okay, Stanley. Tell me what tipped you off. How did you know who we really were?”
Stanley reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. Alex took it from him and opened it up, and he realized immediately that staying out of the hands of the authorities might be a lot tougher than he’d anticipated.
Henderson had done a fax blast, probably to every law enforcement agency in the state, something Alex definitely hadn’t expected. The man’s grudge against him was even more powerful than he thought, so much so that he intended to turn over every single rock he could in order to find him.
Alex folded the fax back up and stuck it in his hip pocket. Okay. At least now he knew what they were up against.
“Just so you know,” Alex said, “there’s no use trying to put anyone on our trail. Before you can even make it back to town, we’ll already have crossed the border into Mexico.” He turned to Val. “Let’s go.”
He left Stanley standing there and went to the driver’s door of the van. Val opened the passenger door, but instead of getting in, she reached behind the seat and grabbed two bottles of water.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
She didn’t respond. She turned around and walked back to Stanley.
“You’ll get thirsty in this heat,” Alex heard her say.
Stanley took the bottles from her. “Thanks.”
“Glenda. I think she really likes you. Just be yourself, okay? That’s all she wants.”
“That’s because she doesn’t know me very well.”
“No. She does. Trust me on that, okay?”
He nodded.
“Sorry about the pants. Alex can be so unreasonable. He’s not a killer, though. Really. Just a jerk sometimes.”
“Val!” Alex shouted.
“Gotta go.” She sighed a little. “I really hate the thought of going to Mexico, but if we don’t, Alex is going to end up in prison for something he didn’t do. I guess it’s a good thing I speak some Spanish, huh? It’s going to come in handy.” She gave him a smile. “Adios, Stanley.”
Stanley waved a little, as if they were two good friends parting ways. Val trotted back to the van and got inside. Alex put the vehicle in gear and hit the gas.
“What in the hell was all that about?” he asked.
“What? Giving him water so he doesn’t drop dead in the heat?”
“No. All that other crap. Right now that man is the enemy, and you’re treating him like he’s your best buddy. And you’ve got the nerve to tell him that I was being a jerk?”
“You were. You didn’t have to humiliate him.”
“He pulled a gun on us! Did you want me to just let him take us to jail?”
“No! But you didn’t have to tell him he isn’t fit to wear a badge and all that other stuff!”
“He isn’t fit to wear a badge!”
She fumed silently, wearing that stern-jawed, narrow-eyed expression again that said she wasn’t half-finished with him yet, though he sure as hell didn’t know why.
“Val,” he said, speaking slowly and distinctly so she wouldn’t miss his meaning. “He allowed a suspect to take the gun right out of his hand. He’s a danger to any other officer he works with.”
“You’re always so damned righteous. Not everyone can be as picture-perfect as you are.”
“He’s wearing a badge. He shouldn’t be. That pisses me off.”
“He’s a Barney Fife in a one-horse town! Will you cut him just a little bit of slack?”
“He wanted to take us to jail!”
“He was just trying to do his job, and you had to go and humiliate him. Telling him what a breeze it would have been to take you in if only he’d done it right. Well, that’s bullshit. I don’t give a damn what that poor guy did, he didn’t stand a chance against you.”
Alex just stared at her. “Whose side are you on?”
“All you had to do was take his car keys. You didn’t have to take his pants. That was gratuitous.”
“Gratuitous? I do something to make sure we get enough of a head start that maybe he won’t be able to put real law enforcement on our tails, and I’m being gratuitous?”
“Is that in some police handbook somewhere, Alex? The more you humiliate a man, the less likely he is to give you trouble? It’s got to be written down somewhere, because I know how you like to go by the book.”
“It was the best thing to do, and you know it,” Alex said hotly. “Without his pants, he’ll walk back to town on the dirt road instead of the highway, trying not to be seen. He’ll stand no chance of getting picked up. Hell, he’ll do everything he can not to get picked up. That’ll buy us at least a few hours before he tells everybody he knows that we were here.”
Val glared at Alex. “Can you imagine how that made him feel? Can you even imagine?”
“I don’t give a damn how he feels!”
“No. You don’t, do you? You never think twice about how anyone feels.”
Val turned to stare out the passenger window, her arms folded across her chest. Alex couldn’t believe this. If he’d ever wondered if he’d made the right decision to recommend her dismissal from the academy, he damned sure wasn’t wondering now. Not only was she reckless, she was a bleeding heart, and that kind of attitude would have gotten her killed within a year.
“Val, if I had to worry about the feelings of everybody I deal with every day, I’d never get my job done.”
She turned to glare at him. “If you worried about somebody’s feelings just once in your life, you might actually prove you have a heart.”
Alex gritted his teeth, willing himself to stay calm. A heart. Was that what she wanted him to have? Did she want him to be sweet and sensitive and all that other crap, so much so that he let his guard down? That he considered somebody’s feelings over their ability to escape?
He’d handled the situation with Stanley exactly as he should have, to minimize their chances of getting arrested. If he went looking for that heart that Val swore he didn’t have, both of them were going to be in big trouble. Connecting with people in a personal way, as Val was so prone to doing, only caused problems when the time came to lay down the law. He’d learned that lesson with Val herself, hadn’t he? If he hadn’t gotten so close to her, if he hadn’t made love to her that night, then when he was forced to dismiss her from the academy it wouldn’t have been nearly as traumatic for either of them.
Keep it impersonal. That was what he should have done then, and what he was right to do now. But just because he
was right didn’t mean that proclaiming it was the smartest thing to do. Val was so pissed at him that she wouldn’t be in any state of mind to get to work once they reached the Reichert ranch. He had to fix that. Right now.
“Maybe I was a little hard on Stanley,” he said.
Val turned slowly, a disbelieving look on her face. “What did you say?”
“I probably didn’t have to say all that. If I had it to do again, I wouldn’t.”
Val shifted around in her seat and stared at him. “You wouldn’t tell him how incompetent he is?”
“No. I wouldn’t.”
“Or tell him he could have taken you in, if only he’d done it right?”
“I wouldn’t do that, either.”
“Or taken his pants?”
“Now, I still would have done that. It was absolutely necessary to slow him down, and that’s about the only way there was to do it outside of shooting him. If you’ll think about it, you’ll know it’s true.”
Val looked away, then nodded. “Okay. I see your point.”
Alex let out a silent sigh of relief. He’d met her in the middle in a nice little compromise, and now maybe they could stay away from each other’s throats and get on down the road.
“Alex?”
“Yes?”
She sighed. “Look, I know I flipped out and said some nasty things to you. And I know I undermined your authority in front of Stanley, and I promise you I’ll never do anything like that again. But I just wanted you to see …”
She paused, as if searching for words.
“I know you don’t have any idea what a guy like Stanley goes through, because you’ve got it all. You’re smarter than he is, you’re way better-looking, you’ve got tons more self-control, and you’re about a thousand times more capable. Stanley doesn’t have any of that to fall back on. So when you start hacking away at him the way you did back there, it doesn’t take long before there’s nothing left.”
All at once, Alex was hit with the memory of Stanley’s face when he told him how incompetent he was. It was the look of a man who could probably count the things he’d done right in his life on the fingers of one hand. A man who’d reached for a moment of glory and had gotten humiliated instead. A man who had no trouble living up to his potential because he didn’t have any.
To his surprise, Alex felt an odd, thorny sensation begin to eat away at him, making sharp little stabs right into his conscience. He tried to brush the feeling away, but as he played back in his mind the things he’d said to Stanley, it only intensified. How much of that had actually been necessary?
You sorry son of a bitch. How many boxes of Cracker Jacks did you have to go through to get that badge?
The fruit thing. Just how stupid do you think I am?
Personally, Stanley, I wouldn’t trust you to take out the trash.
Val was right. It had been gratuitous. He hadn’t had to say any of those things to get the job done, yet still he had. He’d systematically kicked the shit out of a man who was already down and couldn’t have gotten back up if his life depended on it. And Alex couldn’t believe the feeling that came over him.
Shame. He felt ashamed.
Christ, he hated this. Since the day he met Val, she’d made quicksand out of things in his life that he’d always assumed were rock-solid. Made him feel things he’d never felt before. And here she was doing it again.
Stop thinking about it. It’s nonproductive. You have a job to do, and you need to get your head on straight.
They rode in silence for miles, drawing closer to their destination. The terrain was hilly with dry grassland, the forested areas limp and water-starved.
Then they came up over a hill, and suddenly the scraggly barbed-wire fence they had been following gave way to a white wooden one that stretched as far as Alex could see. In the distance, a narrow paved road led off the highway onto the property and disappeared into the trees. As they drew closer, they came to a heavy metal gate flanked on either side by brick columns. Small concrete slabs were inset into the columns, and carved into each one, in heavy block lettering, was the name REICHERT. He slowed the van, then came to a halt near the gate.
“Looks like we’ve arrived.”
chapter seventeen
Stanley trudged along the dirt road, every step he took a little wearier than the last. Sweat poured down his face. The breeze had kicked up a bit, swirling dust all around him until it adhered to every inch of his bare skin. He took off his hat, wiped his brow with the already-drenched sleeve of his shirt, then put it back on again. The sun was frying his legs, and he knew they’d be beet red by the time he got to town. Actually, that didn’t matter much, because nobody would be noticing the fact that his naked legs were sunburned. They’d only be noticing his naked legs. And with his luck, the sunlight would probably go through his boxers and give him a polka-dotted ass.
He took a swig of the water Val had given him, wondering how in the world a nice woman like her had ever gotten tangled up with a bastard like DeMarco. He’d been terrified when the guy told him to get out of the car, sure that anybody who’d murdered once wouldn’t hesitate to do it again. But Val had been right. DeMarco’s trigger finger hadn’t gotten itchy after all, and except for the fact that he was going to be humiliated beyond all recognition when he came back into town, he’d emerged relatively unscathed.
In a way, though, he wished the man had just gone ahead and shot him.
DeMarco’s words echoed through his mind over and over as he walked down this road, and every one of them was true. He was a screwup. A complete and total screwup. DeMarco might be a murderer, but he’d also been a cop, and he was certainly in a position to know how cops were supposed to behave. And what Stanley had done this morning evidently wasn’t it. He’d finally had the opportunity to do something really big. Something worthwhile. Something that would make the rest of the world sit up and take notice for once in his pitiful life.
And he’d screwed it up.
When he got back to town, the first thing he should do was notify the Tolosa police that he’d seen their fugitives. But he knew if he did, that sometime, somewhere, some way, word would get back to the people of Tinsdale exactly what had happened out on that highway this morning, and he couldn’t bear the thought of that. It was one thing to show up pantless. It was another thing for people to know just how badly he’d had to mess things up in order to make that happen. The two of them were going to Mexico, anyway, which meant that the Tolosa cops couldn’t pick them up under any circumstances. So he decided he’d just keep his mouth shut and hope that sometime in the far, far future, people might start to think that they’d just imagined that one day Deputy Obermeyer had walked into town half-naked.
And then he heard a car on the road behind him.
He spun around, feeling a jolt of mortification, only to realize that maybe it was a way to minimize the damages. He could beg a ride, and then get whoever it was to drop him off at his house. Yes, they’d tell the story, laughing their heads off well into the next decade, but at least the number of people who actually observed his humiliation firsthand would be limited to one. Hearsay was a whole lot better than having eyewitnesses. He decided this was a good thing.
Until he saw who was driving the car.
Glenda slowed her Toyota as she approached him, rolling down the window at the same time.
No, no, no!
He glanced around furtively, but he had no place to hide. There wasn’t so much as a tree nearby to climb or a shrub to squat behind. He was stuck right out there in the open for Glenda McMurray to laugh at.
He spun back around and kept walking, feeling his face flush as red as his legs. She pulled up beside him, driving as slowly as he was walking. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her looking at him with utter disbelief, her gaze focusing far too long on what was below his waist. Or what wasn’t.
“Stanley? What happened to your pants?”
“Keep on driving, Glenda,” he said, still wa
lking purposefully, still refusing to meet her eyes. “Just drive right past me and keep on going.”
“No! I’m not going to leave you here like this!”
“Why aren’t you at work?”
“My grandma dropped her glasses behind the dresser, so I had to run home for a minute. I was just heading back.”
“Why did you take this road?”
“It’s a shortcut to her farm if I come in from the back. I drive this way all the time.”
And if he’d known that, he’d have taken his chances on the highway.
“You’re not going to tell me what happened to your pants, are you?”
“Nope.”
“Why you’re walking instead of driving?”
“Nope.”
“Why you don’t have your gun?”
“Nope.”
“Stanley, why don’t you get in the car and let me take you home?”
He kept walking, wondering what in his life he’d done so awful that God would be punishing him like this. He’d tried to live a good life. He went to church. Tithed ten percent of his pitiful deputy’s salary even when he didn’t have it to give. Helped people out whenever he could. And now look what had happened. He thought he knew what humiliation was, but he’d never even scratched the surface until now.
“I suppose you’re going to tell everybody about this,” Stanley said.
“Now, why would I go and do that?”
“Because making fun of me is the number one sport in this town. That’s why.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“That’s because you haven’t lived here long. Pretty soon you’ll get the hang of it, right along with everybody else.”
“Stanley. You can’t just go walking back into town like that. Please. Just get in the car and I’ll take you home.”
God, what a decision. He could ride with Glenda minus his pants so she could see up close and personal what a screwup he really was, or he could walk home minus his pants and let the whole town witness his humiliation.
He’d already hit rock bottom with Glenda. Was it even possible to sink any lower?