The Righteous Path: A Parker County Novel (The Parker County Novels Book 1)

by James D F Hannah

  “You want to test the universe, Sheriff?” she said. “Really see if it don’t care, Sheriff?”

  Matt pulled his hands back and lowered himself back into his chair.

  The front sight on the pistol had caught Iris below her right eye and had ripped down almost to her jaw. She trembled and covered her face with her hand again.

  Matt said, “You’ve got no cards, Micki. There’s no way you’re getting the money. Your best bet is to let me and Ms. Warner go. Let me take you and Billy in and we end this with no one else hurt.”

  “No,” Micki said. “I want what’s mine. That money, we’ll get Billy somewhere he can record demos. Get himself a record deal.” She smiled again, looking at Billy with the emotion you only get when the world hasn’t worn away the pieces of you that allow that feeling to begin with.

  Billy, though, he stayed dead-eyed and emotionless. Gun in hand, focused on Matt. Matt knew Billy would kill him. He hadn’t missed a beat taking a swing at Iris, and she was fortunate it hadn’t blinded her.

  Matt took deep breaths.

  “All right,” he said. “What do you want to do, Micki?”

  “Are you fucking dense, Sheriff?” she said. “Money. I want paid what was owed to my daddy.”

  “By Campbell.”

  “By all those fuckers. They all owe me for putting me in the shit-storm of my life. They can all fucking die and rot, but I’ll get what they owe me.”

  “Then we’ll start with Campbell. He’s at the regional jail. We’ll talk to him and get account numbers from him. Find out what banks he’s got money in, and we’ll get it out in the morning.”

  “You serious, Sheriff?” Micki said. Her tone vacillated between glee and suspicion. “You’ll do that?”

  “Yeah, I’ll do that. I’ve got no particular inclination toward letting you two rubes kill me or Ms. Warner, and these guys are bastards anyway, so fuck it. Why not?”

  Micki squealed a little with delight, jumping up and down. “Fuck yeah!” She threw her arms around Billy’s neck and kissed him on the cheek. Billy betrayed no emotion. “This is it, honey. I told you we could do it.”

  “Yeah, you did.”

  Matt stood up. “Let’s go.”

  Billy rose from his chair. “If it’s all the same to you, Sheriff, I think it’ll just be you and me. Micki can stay here with what’s her face—”

  Iris glared at him. “I’ve got a name, you fucking hillbilly.”

  Micki moved toward Iris, raising her pistol to bring it down onto the other woman. Iris saw the movement and cowered.

  Billy said, “Stop.”

  Micki froze where she was. “She can’t talk like that.”

  “Bitch can talk however she wants; ain’t gonna matter soon, anyway. She says anything while we’re gone, shoot her in the stomach. Takes a long time to die that way. You suffer like you wouldn’t believe. Saw it in Reservoir Dogs. You bleed for a long time, and you wish to fuck you’d just die.” He walked over to the bed and grabbed a pillow and threw it to Micki. “Muffle the shot with that.”

  Matt heard Iris swallow hard. Micki looked at the pillow, then at Billy. She nodded without an expression on her face.

  Billy pointed the pistol back at Matt. “Let’s do this.” He grabbed Matt by the shirt collar, jerking him out of the chair, and dug the gun into the small of his back.

  They walked to the door, cold beads of sweat trickling down Matt’s neck, Billy pushing the gun further into Matt’s back.

  Billy spit out a little laugh. “You skinny as fuck, Sheriff.”

  “Cancer’ll do that to you.”

  “Yeah, I’ve had family with it. They looked like shit right there before the end. Kinda like how you look.”

  At the door, Matt paused. It caught Billy off guard and he stumbled but caught himself. He pushed at Matt.

  “What the fuck you waiting for?” Billy said.

  “I need to know something.”

  “Okay.”

  Matt gave his head a quarter-turn. “You and Micki. That thing for real?”

  Billy cocked his lips into a half smile. “It’s something to do.”

  “We get these account numbers, what then?”

  Billy shrugged. “Ain’t thought that far ahead. She’s a kid, and she’s fun, but this is real money we’re talking here. You can do a lot with real money.”

  “Yeah, I suppose you can.”

  Matt opened the hotel room door and stepped out into the hallway, Billy right behind him. They were barely past the door when Crash shot Billy with the Taser.

  35

  Crash sat in the room next door, ear against the wall. Old hotel, thin walls, she made out enough to develop context and understand what they were saying. She heard the brief struggle, debated busting her way in and using surprise to her advantage, but as quickly as everything stirred to life, it settled and Crash instead took a deep breath and waited.

  Patience wasn’t in Crash’s nature. Matt had told her this more than once, and more so now since she became chief deputy. He said patience was the greatest virtue that a cop possessed.

  There was nothing even in the neighborhood of a plan before Matt knocked on the hotel door. He only told her to go into the adjoining room, listen close, play it by ear. Which was a terrible idea, Crash thought, but they also didn’t have much else to work with. Next to patience, Matt said, adaptability was a cop’s next best virtue.

  When she heard them getting ready to leave the room, Crash crept out of her own room as silently as possible—a gift developed through years of sneaking out of her parents’ house to find her way into mischief—and got herself into position.

  She crouched on her belly as the door opened and the men came out. Matt exited first, followed by Billy. She was about three feet away from the door, and she hoped Billy wouldn’t be looking for a tiny woman on the ground.

  He wasn’t.

  The coiled wires sprung free from the Taser as Crash pulled the trigger, and the barbs hit Billy somewhere midthigh, piercing his jeans, burying into his legs.

  Then the juice hit. Billy vibrated like a man possessed by the Holy Ghost, when what he was really possessed by was fifty thousand volts of electrical charge racking through his body. His teeth chattered, his eyes rolled to the back of his skull, and he dropped forward.

  The dead weight caught Matt off guard, and he spun around and grabbed Billy and pivoted him toward the floor. Matt reached for Billy’s gun. Billy’s muscles cinched to create a vise grip on the weapon. Matt grabbed Billy’s arm and slammed the man’s hand against the hallway wall. Billy couldn’t make a noise. Foam rolled out of his mouth. Matt pounded his hand over and over, watching the fingers loosen with each successive blow, until Billy’s hand opened and the gun dropped to the floor. Matt swept it up and brought himself around and aimed for the door.

  Micki stood in the hotel doorway, tears in her eyes, her own gun trembling in both hands. She made an anguished cry, a suffering wail that filled Matt’s ears.

  There was the gunshot, and a burning sensation erupted in the center of Matt’s chest. Pure instinct, and he grabbed for it, grabbed for the source of the pain, but there was nothing to embrace. He pulled back his hand, and all he saw was the blood.

  Another gunshot, and the fire inside Matt raged deeper as his feet gave out underneath him, and he slow-motion tumbled backward, stopping only when the wall met him. His vision blurred. Yet another roar of thunder, and this time he heard Micki scream.

  The outline of Crash filled his line of sight. Her voice called out to him from a hundred miles away, repeating his name, then yelling something about an ambulance. His name again.

  The world around him grew dark, and the sounds fuzzed out, like lost signals from distant radio stations.

  Crash said his name again.

  Matt.

  Matt.

  Matt.

  36

  When Crash had been young—not that many years ago, she supposed—and dreamed of being sheriff, this was
n’t how Crash imagined it happening. That had always been the goal: to be sheriff of Parker County. Not the most glamorous of dreams, but no one ever said Charlotte Abigail Landing was the most normal or glamorous of women, and she was good with that.

  The entire first week on the job, she kept going to what had been her old office, rather than the sheriff’s office. To her, it was still Matt’s office. Didn’t matter they had already put up a new nameplate on the door. “Charlotte Landing, Acting Sheriff, Parker County.”

  She boxed up the few things Matt kept there and took them over to Rachel. Rachel accepted them and said thank you and politely closed the door. Crash knew Rachel’s plate would be full for a while.

  The county commission chewed Crash out for not following departmental protocol and not bringing backup to a hostage situation. She told them she had been going on the sheriff’s orders, and if they wanted to argue about everything, to take it up with him. That shut them up quickly, and the next order of business had been to name her acting sheriff, a title she would hold on to until the election in November.

  She wasn’t sure what pissed everyone off so much anyway: both Billy and Micki had survived for the county attorney to file a litany of charges against both, up to and including first-degree murder following the death of Wilma Campbell. The little psychos were going to prison for a long fucking time.

  The other deputies adapted quickly to her being in charge. She expected to catch more shit than she did, but they kept it all to good-natured ribbing and the occasional joke about her age. If none of them had wanted to deal with being chief deputy, they sure as fuck didn’t want the headaches that came with the sheriff’s badge. She still got called “Crash,” but when things came through the office, they deferred to her authority. Several times, she caught them calling her “Sheriff.” It sounded funny coming from their mouths, and she wasn’t sure when she would get used to it. Even in town, when someone said “Sheriff,” she looked for Matt but didn’t find him and remembered who they were talking to now.

  Iris Warner wrote her a thank-you card. It came to the sheriff’s department, the script so perfect and feminine. It almost embarrassed Crash for the nearly illegible scrawl she called her own handwriting.

  Crash ran into Gloria Miller while grocery shopping at Walmart. She pushed her cart through the cereal aisle, wondering who decided frosted shredded wheat needed to be blueberry flavored on top of already being frosted, when she looked up and saw Gloria. Her hair was finger-combed with gray throughout now, and her eyes swollen and puffy and dark. She stood there with her cart, looking at Crash.

  They stared at one another while that damn Smash Mouth song everyone sings at karaoke played through the overhead speakers. Other shoppers moved around them.

  Crash glanced into Gloria’s cart: bread, lunch meat, microwave meals, and six-packs of beer.

  Gloria brought her lips tight together and said, “How are you, Sheriff?”

  Crash nodded. “I’m good. Yourself?”

  “I’m here. You know how that goes.”

  “Yeah.”

  And then they let that uncomfortable silence sit between them for longer than they realized. Finally, Gloria said, “You have a good one, Sheriff.”

  “You too.”

  And they pushed their carts past one another and moved on with the rest of their night.

  About a month after everything happened was when Rachel called Crash. She was sitting in her office—her office, she kept reminding herself—when her cell phone rang.

  “Everything okay, Rachel?” Crash said.

  “It’s fine, Crash. Listen, you doing anything after work?”

  “No plans at the present. Why?”

  “Because he’d like to see you.”

  37

  Crash showed up at the front door holding flowers because she thought that was a thing you did in circumstances like this. Truth be told, she didn’t know what circumstances like this were. Matt wasn’t a man inclined toward receiving bouquets of flowers, but it felt like the polite thing to do.

  Rachel hugged her before she had even got through the door. She took the flowers and wiped back tears. “Good to see you, Crash.”

  “Good seeing you too. How you holding up?”

  “Good. Real good.” She said it in that way meant to affirm herself more than anyone else.

  There was a long pause before Crash said, “It okay if I come in?”

  Rachel’s face flushed with embarrassment. “I’m sorry. My brain’s a million places these days. Come on in.” Rachel closed the door behind Crash and led her into the kitchen.

  “He’s asleep on the couch,” Rachel said. “His meds wear him out. He starts watching something on Netflix and then he falls asleep. I have to pause the movie as soon as he’s asleep because otherwise he feels bad for sleeping. Sometimes, he’s out so long, the sun goes down and he wakes up and it’s nighttime and he’s confused. I’m not sure always how much of the confusion is the meds and how much of it is just the exhaustion.”

  She rummaged through cabinets until she found a green vase she filled with water and set the flowers in. Crash took a seat at the kitchen table.

  From the refrigerator, Rachel produced a bottle of red wine. “Care for some?”

  “Sure. Is it any good?”

  Rachel opened the wine and poured Crash a glass. “No clue. The label’s pretty, and sometimes that’s all you need in life.”

  Crash sipped the wine. It was cold—which she had read was a no-no for red wines—but sweet with a twinge of bite underneath it. She took another sip. “It’s not bad.”

  “I guess that’s all you can ask from cheap wine,” Rachel said as she poured herself a glass of iced tea and sat down across from Crash. She held her glass out across the table. Crash touched the rim of her own against Rachel’s.

  “To drinking wine that might be shit, but not caring anyway,” Crash said.

  Rachel drank some of her tea and set the glass down. “Thanks for showing up in civvies.”

  Crash had changed into jeans and a snap-button shirt before coming over. It had been a request from Rachel, not wearing her uniform. Crash understood Rachel’s reasoning.

  “Not a problem,” Crash said. “I got into a roll with a dude today—wanted to give me grief because he got a speeding ticket. Came by the office pissed off at the world.”

  “You kick his ass?”

  “I told him we take a zero-tolerance attitude toward bullshit in the sheriff’s department. He was limping when all was said and done, though I guess I did most of the doing, and he didn’t have much to say afterward.” She smiled. “Matt would have liked it.”

  “I’ll bet he would have.”

  “You still on leave from the school?”

  “Yes. Insurance offered to have a nurse here during the day with him, but it seems so unnecessary. One comes in during the mornings, checks in on him, but I’d rather be here in case he needs anything.”

  “What about you and work? You can’t stay here forever.”

  She drank more tea. “He’s scheduled for surgery in two days. Gets himself a brand new liver. Which I suppose is like a new used car; it’s new to him. It’ll be better than the one he’s got.”

  “He ready for that?”

  “Doesn’t matter if he’s ready; he’s on a schedule now. They’re saying if it’s not now, it’s too late. Might be too late anyway.”

  “How’s he feeling about it?”

  “Fine. As fine as you can, I guess. Part of me worries he doesn’t care. Everything happened so fast. I don’t know how many more fights he has in him.”

  Crash finished her wine. The last sip was strong, as though all the sediment had found its way to the bottom. Which it likely had. That was how sediment worked.

  “Does he know?” she said.

  Rachel lifted an eyebrow. “About what?”

  “We’re both smart people here, Rachel, so let’s keep acting like we are.”

  Rachel laughed. “I have
n’t told him. Not yet.”

  “Gonna tell him?”

  “When the time’s right.”

  “Who’ll decide that time?”

  She shook her head. “I suppose I will. Not sure what to say to him. Not a thing I practiced or prepared for.”

  “He’ll take it the way he takes everything.”

  “So goddamn stoically it makes you want to puke.”

  “Basically.”

  From the living room, a voice said, “Crash finally get her ass here?”

  The women smiled at one another.

  Crash called back, “No!”

  There was laughter, and Matt said back, “Jesus but don’t make me try to get in there. You’re young and fit, and not dying, to boot. So if you please…”

  Rachel shook slightly at the words. Crash stretched her arm across the table and rubbed Rachel’s shoulder. Rachel’s face bunched up, straining out a smile through a pained expression, working to hold back tears.

  “You go deal with the asshole,” Rachel said. “I’ve got dinner to finish.”

  The last time Crash had seen Matt had been at the hospital, after the shooting, and he had been unconscious. The doctors kept him sedated, unsure of how he would be when he woke up, and needing him to remain as quiet and still as possible. When he did wake up, he told Rachel he wanted no visitors. Crash had debated on showing up to the hospital unannounced, then thought the better of it, knowing Matt, even in a bed, might raise enough ruckus to make a person regret an effort toward kindness. Matt was that kind of guy.

  Crash checked in with Rachel a few times a week to see how he was doing, to see how she was holding up. He was home a week before he agreed to let Crash come by. She hadn’t been sure what to expect.

  It might have been worse than she feared. He was propped up on the couch, sitting up but using one arm to hold himself upright. Dressed in sweatpants and a black T-shirt, and ready to be swallowed up by the clothing. His cheeks sunk deep into his face, and his eyes seemed ready to bulge free from their sockets. There was more white than dark in his hair now, longer than she had ever seen it, growing out awkwardly with points poking out everywhere. He had let a scraggly excuse for a beard grow; it was almost a checkerboard of colors. The beard might have been a saving grace since it hid the yellow in his complexion.