by Dale Mayer
“Ethan Nebberly? Trainer from the K9 unit?”
“Yes,” Pierce said. “Give him a call and then call me back.” And he hung up.
He opened the motel door and stepped out on the long veranda to see where to grab some food. A fast-food joint was across the road. Definitely not his first choice, but, given the circumstances, he had few options. He pocketed his cell phone, grabbed his wallet, locked the door and walked across the street. He ordered a couple burgers and a coffee to go and sat there eating them. They tasted like sawdust, but they were food. As he ate, he wrote notes of what he’d seen and heard. Then he sent them to Badger.
Badger called a few minutes later. “This sounds bad,” he said. “It’s well out of the parameters of what we asked you to do though.”
“The thing is, in order to get Salem’s life back on track, Pete needs to come home to look after her.”
Badger chuckled. “I guess we didn’t give you parameters, and you took the job and ran with it, so we can’t argue that. What is it you’re thinking you can do? I want to know if anybody else can help. Possibly Kat can get the medical records, see how bad Pete is, see what he needs to become independent.”
“He’ll talk to Ethan. Then I’ll return to his house tomorrow and start measuring to see just what I think will be required.”
“I like the sound of that,” Badger said. “What do you want to do about his bank accounts?”
“I want them frozen,” Pierce said succinctly. “I’m not sure what his brother is up to, but I bet he’s been living off of Pete’s pension. And probably stocking it away for himself.”
“You’re not allowed to go in there and beat the crap out of him for that,” Badger said.
“You’re too far away to stop me,” Pierce said, then chuckled. “Still, I think if we were to charge this guy, Pete would have a hard time with that. But we need to find a way to get Pete home and his money back and to stop Ross from taking any more. Can somebody do a check on his bank accounts and see where the money is?”
“You’re not asking for much, are you?”
“You’ve got connections,” Pierce said. “You think I haven’t been around you guys enough to know that?”
“Well, maybe,” Badger said. “We do have some people. We might figure this out.”
“There are a couple cops in your group, right? Maybe you could talk to them about what our options are.”
“You know what? That’s not a bad idea. I think I’ll talk to Allison and Jager tonight, see if they have any idea what our options are going forward.”
“You should see the law in this town. There’s no support here from law enforcement,” he said. “The sheriff is an absolute nutjob.” He took a few moments to explain everything he’d seen and heard.
“This Jed guy threatened her with a loaded weapon?”
“Yep, whether she told the sheriff about it or not, I don’t know. Apparently it’s not the first time Jed’s gone after her, and the sheriff doesn’t give a shit. Jed’s a friend of his. And so is Pete’s brother. Ross knows there’s no one around who’ll stop him.” Pierce’s voice hardened. “Well, now there is.” He ended the call.
Chapter 5
When Hedi walked into work the next morning, a weird silence ran throughout the station. She glanced from one man to the next, but neither looked her in the eye. She frowned. “Who died?” she half joked.
Again no answer. Just this weird lack of noise, as if she’d walked in on a heavy conversation she wasn’t supposed to hear, and everybody shut up when they saw her. But, in that case, they should have seen her coming because she’d parked out front. She walked to her desk and logged on to her computer. Everything appeared normal, but she couldn’t get rid of the niggling sense riding her shoulders.
When the sheriff stepped out of his office and called her, she frowned. Again she looked at the other two deputies, but they kept their heads on their paperwork, studiously ignoring her. That meant something was definitely up.
She grabbed her empty coffee cup, walked to the coffeepot, filled it and headed into the sheriff’s office. “Good morning, Sheriff. How are you?” she said. She deliberately kept her voice up and cheerful, sitting down opposite him. “Had a hell of a visit with Jed yesterday.”
“That’s what I want to talk to you about,” he said, his voice thunderous.
“Oh, good. You’re finally on my side and charging him for assaulting a police officer,” she said in excitement. She knew it would be the opposite of what he planned on doing, but her words stopped him cold.
His mouth worked and then asked, “Did he assault you?”
“He rammed his loaded rifle into my shoulder and threatened me. He pushed me back several inches, and I refused to back down,” she said with a hard nod. “I told you that he would cross the line.”
“And I told you to leave him alone and to walk carefully around him.”
“Sure, except I get there, and all four screaming kids are terrified, and he’s running around like a crazy man with that rifle of his,” she snapped. She leaned forward. “Did you talk to him?”
Put on the spot, the sheriff shifted papers on his desk. “He called me this morning. He said you crossed the line.”
“Yeah? What line was that?” she asked. “Responding to a 9-1-1 call from a little girl?”
At that, the sheriff looked in the direction of dispatch on the other side of the wall. He couldn’t confirm or deny what she’d said because, of course, he had no fricking clue. “You didn’t mention anything about a 9-1-1 call when we were at the coffee shop,” he snapped. “You said you were going up there because one of the girls had called you. Little girls do that.” His voice turned snide. “They’re weak and whiny, and they don’t know how to suck it up.”
“No child should have to see their father shooting up the house in front of them. He’s done it many times—you know that.” Her tone was cool, her back rigid.
She needed a solution to purge this bloody office and wasn’t sure how to get it done. She had talked to her father about it last night, and he’d agreed to contact some people he knew, but the wheels turned slowly when it came to elected officials, and the sheriff had been running this town for way too long.
“What else did he say?” she asked in a conversational tone. “Or will you talk to him more about it when you bring him in?”
He glared at her. “You know you have this job only because I gave it to you, right?”
She tilted her head to the side. “Partially yes. I’m also the only one who goes out and handles anything in the field,” she snapped. “Stephen is great for paperwork, but you know as well as I do that he’s no good in times of trouble.”
The sheriff’s lip curled. “But there’s nothing wrong with Roy.”
“Nope, nothing wrong with him at all.” In her mind she added, There’s nothing right about him either.
Roy picked and chose where he went and what he wanted to do. Most of the time, he just wanted to hang around with pretty girls downtown. He called it citizen’s watch. She had another name for it. Roy was forty, always leering at her, and there was something extremely lecherous about everything he did. But he never, as far as she knew, crossed the line, and that made a difference. It was one thing to be slime, but it was another thing to be a complete sleazebag.
“You shouldn’t arrest Jed without backup.”
He started to bluster.
She held her ground. And waited.
“You know I’m not arresting him,” the sheriff said. “He had a bad day, that’s all.”
“Did he call you this morning?”
“I said he did, didn’t I?” The sheriff growled. “I’ll talk to him again. You stay away from him.”
“I’ll stay away as long as he stays away from those little girls,” she said, “and his wife. And any other godforsaken animal, two-legged or four.” She stood, marched to the door and turned. “Make sure you don’t get caught up in his garbage because you know this town will
only stand for so much. The minute he really hurts someone, and people find out you just sat by and let him get this bad …”
He rose and leaned over his desk, snapping like a turtle. “And who do you think will tell them that? You?”
She gave him a hard look. “Hell yes, me. And my father. Do you think I haven’t told him what the hell’s going on? And what about Roger? He might not be a deputy anymore, but he was for twenty-plus years. Do you really think they won’t start telling the world just how you’re running this town? And letting child abusers and wife abusers get away with that kind of shit?”
She didn’t wait for an answer. She opened the door and stepped out, closed it and leaned against it for a long moment because it was the one place the other two deputies couldn’t see her.
She stared down at her hands, angry that they were shaking. She shouldn’t be upset from the confrontation; she should be priding herself on having had it. It was hard to deal with. This office was a pain in the ass actually. But there was only so much she could fight. She’d tried to contact as many people as she could about the abuses, but what did you do when nobody backed you up?
Taking several deep breaths, she realized she’d left her coffee cup inside. Whatever. She walked to the pot, grabbed a clean mug, filled it, then she went to her desk and sat down without saying a word to either man. She could feel their glances, but she didn’t look up. She answered several emails and checked the report she’d written yesterday.
They were barely adjusting to a digital system. The sheriff still wanted handwritten notes, but she kept everything digital, just in case somebody decided to doctor her reports. A practice she’d started a long time ago when she realized only shit was going down here. Because she had no place to submit them, she sent herself a copy and a copy to her father, in case something happened to her, which, after a conversation with her father last night, she realized was a distinct possibility. It would be an accident, she was sure. She’d die in the line of duty, probably from something stupid, like shooting herself with her own gun, if the sheriff wrote up the report.
She printed off the report she had written yesterday and went over it with her pen. Nobody had seen it but her. When she was satisfied it was fine, she slipped it into Jed’s file and put it away. Then she wrote herself a small note and stuck the sticky on her monitor to check that the report was still there at the end of the day because she was damn sure somebody who’d been watching her will let the sheriff know, and he was likely to destroy it.
Jed’s file was awfully skinny. But she kept copies of everything she had dealt with online, just in case. She didn’t want a prosecutor saying Jed was a first-time offender and just give him a slap on the wrist. It was all she could do to sleep at night these days, thinking about those little kids ending up dead, and Jed taking them out back and burying them six feet deep, telling the sheriff some asshole kidnapped them. The sheriff would probably just stand there for a long moment, chewing his gum, as if deciding whether it was worth making up a report and chasing down this unnamed person. And probably choosing it wasn’t worth losing an inch off his fat ass and subsequently closing the case.
She hated that this was what she was working with—hated that this was what her badge stood for because it didn’t. It wasn’t what she stood for, and it was her badge, damn it.
And again she felt helpless, her mind returning to Pierce. She didn’t think he’d ever felt helpless. Something about him told her that he’d deal with this, one way or another. She’d heard both hero stories and horror stories about military life.
If he’d been subjected to any of the nightmares she’d heard about, no wonder he’d learned coping skills. But he didn’t seem to have any of that ingrained anger she’d seen in a lot of people. Pete himself had gone from being angry to being despondent, as if working through the various stages of grief.
He’d told her once that he was still grieving for what he used to be. He hadn’t come to terms with the man he currently was. She’d hoped he would see what he could become, but he was still stuck in the here and now of broken bones and missing limbs and a life that would never be fully realized, not as far as he was concerned.
She didn’t know what Pierce’s story was, but she could already see the kind of man he was. She just worried he was too high-strung and would cross the line, like Jed had. There was something about men like that. You just didn’t quite know when they would explode.
But whatever Pierce was doing now, he was doing from the heart, because nobody else seemed to care about this dog, and that was just wrong.
She was a huge animal lover herself. She had tried hard to get to know Salem, but Salem was already in hate mode by the time Hedi had gotten around to trying to be friends. She only hoped, given enough time, Pierce might find the dog.
Salem had been everything to Pete. Hedi had even seen him bawling as he left because the dog couldn’t go with him. She wished there was a way to reunite the two, but just wishing it didn’t make it happen; otherwise she would have wished that sheriff away a long time ago.
Pierce entered the rehab center and walked to the reception area. He looked around with interest. He’d been in a couple himself but always on a short-term basis. He asked the receptionist where Pete was.
She frowned. “He’s taken a turn for the worse.” Her voice was quiet. “He can’t have any visitors today.”
Pierce winced. “I’m sorry to hear that. Maybe leave a message I came to visit.”
She gave him a notepad, and he wrote down his name and number.
With a nod of thanks he turned and stepped outside. He had no doubt Pete’s downturn was based on Pierce’s phone call last night, and that shouldn’t be. Pete had enough things in his life to deal with, just getting back on his feet, without having to worry about what happened to his brother and his dog.
Pierce hopped back into his truck and headed back the way he’d come. It had been an hour and a half one way this morning just to get here. Next he’d go to Pete’s house, where Ross was effectively squatting.
When Pierce got within about ten minutes of Pete’s place, he pulled off on the side of the road and checked his messages. And, sure enough, there was one. He hit Dial, and this time Pete answered. His voice was quaking slightly. “Pete, how you doing? I heard you didn’t have a great night,” Pierce said, his voice calm, steady.
“I heard you came by this morning,” Pete said. “I’m sorry I missed you.”
“I might have a chance to get up there again,” Pierce said. “Just thought I’d stop in when I was close.”
“Will you do anything about my brother?”
“I’ll have a talk with him,” Pierce said. “Is there anything you want me to do about him?”
“I had a conversation here with a couple guys, and they think he’s probably stealing from me.” Pete’s voice was heavy. “The doctor said there’s no reason I couldn’t come home if some modifications were done and if I had some help.”
“I think that’s a great idea,” Pierce said. “The question then is whether you have the money to make that happen.”
“Yeah,” he said, “that’s partly it. I do get a decent pension, and I have my medical expenses covered. The property doesn’t have a mortgage, so I was kind of half hoping that maybe …” His voice dropped off, and he hesitated.
“That maybe what?” Pierce asked as he looked around the area. Not another vehicle had been on the road since he had turned onto it. “Your place is a little isolated, isn’t it?”
“It is,” he said. “That’s the way I used to like it. It’d be kind of nice to have somebody living close by now though. I do have neighbors to a certain extent,” Pete added hurriedly. “But they’re not necessarily the best kind.”
“Meaning that, when a guy gets into trouble, they’re not there for you? Not talking about Jed, are you? I haven’t even met his brother.”
“You’re not missing much,” Pete said. “They laughed at me when I said I was going into t
he military, that I wanted to serve my country. And they laughed when I came home in pieces too,” he said.
Anger speared through Pierce. “They laughed, did they? Maybe they should have done some time overseas. You and I both know what it was like. I came back mostly in one piece, but I was still in recovery for a long time. You need to focus on getting well. I’ll go talk to your brother and take a good look at your house. I just need your permission to go inside and to take some measurements and just to see what your options are.”
“You have my permission,” he said. “No matter what Ross tells you, that’s my house. I haven’t signed the title to him.”
“I hope not,” Pierce said. “And hopefully your brother hasn’t forged signatures.”
He heard Pete’s gasp.
“I’m not saying he did,” Pierce rushed to say. “Are there any public health nurses around here, or anybody who could come in on a whenever-needed basis?”
“No,” Pete said. “Almost everybody works in Fort Collins or elsewhere.”
“Or they don’t work at all I gather, now that the mill shut down.”
“Exactly,” he said.
“Pete, did you have a girlfriend before?”
“I did, yeah.” His voice brightened. “We used to call her Smelly”—he chuckled—“but her name is Smelina. It’s a Ukrainian name that the kids shortened to Smelly. Now she’s Lina.”
“I’m sure she prefers that.”
“True,” Pete said with another chuckle. “We were going out before I headed into the military, but, after my accident, well, I haven’t had anything to do with her.”
“Because of you or because of her?” Pierce asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Meaning, did she not want to see you because of your condition, or did you stop seeing her because of your condition?”
There was a hard silence, and then Pete said, “You don’t pull any punches, do you?”
“Nope. I don’t, and I got no patience for it. My wife divorced me and took my house and everything I owned while I was undergoing surgery,” Pierce said. “So I understand either way. But, before I meet Lina, I’d like to know.”