Maggie heard sirens close-by. The Sheriff’s Office was just over four miles away. She looked up. “What happened?” she asked the first face she saw, a short, gray-haired man in shorts and a tee shirt.
“I didn’t see it, I just heard it,” he said, eyes wide.
“It was some high school boys,” said a woman’s voice. Maggie turned to see a red-haired woman that she knew she knew, but she couldn’t place her name. “Adrian Nichols and that boy…Stuart. Stuart Newman, Lyle Newman’s oldest. Some other kids I don’t know the names of.”
“Why?” Maggie blurted, but she didn’t wait for the answer. She leaned over Dwight, felt his blood, warm and slick, on her stomach as she put her face right over his. “Dwight, I’m here. I’m here.”
“It was an accident,” a young male voice said. Maggie glanced up at a tall, thin boy with dirty-blond hair and the beginnings of a goatee. “It was an accident,” he repeated more quietly.
“Who?” Maggie barked the question at him.
“Ryan. Ryan Warner.”
Maggie knew the name, but she didn’t know why. It failed to conjure a face. She put a hand to the side of Dwight’s face. “It’s gonna be okay, I promise,” she said.
The fact that Dwight had been meeting the bus suddenly asserted itself in her mind, and she jerked her head back up. “Where’s his little girl?”
The red-headed woman answered, waving vaguely at the corner. “The bus left. With all the kids. He told the bus driver to go.”
“She didn’t get off the bus?”
“The elementary kids hadn’t got off yet,” the boy said.
“Ma’am?”
Maggie looked up to see a tall, attractive brunette in her late forties or so. She was holding out a faded denim shirt. Maggie took it. “Thank you.” She pressed it on top of her already soaked tee shirt before she realized that the woman had probably meant it for her to wear. She didn’t care. She looked down at Dwight’s face, which was even paler than it had been a moment earlier, just as his eyes fluttered open.
“Mag—,” he started, his voice barely a whisper.
“I’m here, Dwight!” Maggie cried. “They’re coming. Everybody’s coming!”
He blinked a few times, but his eyes were unfocused and aimed somewhere over her shoulder. “I can’t feel myself, Maggie.”
“That’s okay! It’s okay!” Maggie said, but his eyes had fluttered closed again. “Dwight?”
Maggie checked his pulse. It was still there, but weaker. Maggie looked up as she heard a scream. She knew it as a woman’s scream, but it sounded like a fierce, badly-wounded animal. Maggie looked up to see Dwight’s wife Amy running across the street.
“Dwight!” she screamed, as her eyes lighted on her husband.
She was barefoot, and her pretty, flowered dress wrapped around her legs as she ran without thought or moderation. The left side of her red hair was curled, the right still straight.
The sirens sounded shrilly behind Maggie, along with a screeching of brakes and tires. She looked over her shoulder to see an EMT truck sandwiched between two SO cruisers.
Amy reached Maggie and Dwight, and she fell beside her husband, bits of gravel embedding themselves in her pale, freckled knees. “Baby? Dwight?”
Maggie put a hand on her arm as she heard the paramedics running behind her. “He’s alive,” she said, though she wasn’t positive that was still true. “They’re gonna help him, Amy.”
Amy didn’t take her eyes off her husband. She had a hand on either side of his face. “Dwight? Listen to me. Dwight?”
Larry Mancuso, one of the paramedics, dropped to his knees, his duffel beside him. Maggie had gone to school with his older brother, Jason. “Gunshot?” he asked without looking at her. Tate Moran, several years younger, ran up behind him with a gurney.
“Maybe six, seven minutes ago,” Maggie answered. “It sounded like a .22.”
“He’s gonna be okay!” Amy said. She had streaks of mascara running down her cheeks. Maggie had never seen in her in make-up, except for Maggie and Wyatt’s wedding. Today was a special day.
“Amy, I know you want to stay right by Dwight,” Larry said as he pulled surgical dressings and a blood pressure cuff from his bag. “But I need you to let me have him, okay? I need some room.”
“Amy,” Maggie said quietly, as she put a hand to her underarm and lifted her. “You know Larry and Tate. They’re the best, the very best.”
Once standing, Amy looked at Maggie and smoothed her messy hair with a shaking hand. Her engagement ring glittered in what little sunlight there was. A tiny diamond. Maggie had helped Dwight pick it out. He’d had $185 to his name that day.
“Where are the kids?” Maggie asked her.
It took a moment for Amy to answer, her eyes fixed on the EMTs, and what they were doing to her husband. She looked up at Maggie suddenly, like her hearing had been delayed.
“They’re with Tina,” she answered quietly. “Next door.”
Maggie nodded. She heard more cars screech to a stop behind her, but she didn’t look. She stood next to Amy as they both watched Larry and Tate do their jobs. A moment later, she felt someone beside her. It was Wyatt, holding out his old gray flannel shirt, the one he kept in his truck for changing the oil or doing repairs..
He slipped it around her shoulders, and she took her eyes from the ground, watched his hands do up the buttons. There were only three buttons left on the shirt, but it was better than her standing there in her blood-stained bra. Wyatt’s hands were steady, but when she looked up at his face, and his eyes met hers, she saw the fear. Beneath his impressive moustache, his mouth was set firmly, the lines around it no longer laughing.
Fewer than two minutes later, the EMTs loaded Dwight into the back of the van. Maggie had stepped forward, thinking she should go with him, but then realized it was Amy who needed to do that. It was Amy’s place. Maggie watched her climb into the back of the van, and then it was gone, sirens wailing as it sped around the corner.
More deputies had arrived, as had Sheriff Bledsoe. He’d ordered several deputies to talk to the witnesses who were still standing there. Two other deputies moved their cruisers to block the road. Another had taped off the scene without Maggie noticing.
“Ryan Warner,” she said to Wyatt.
“What?”
“Ryan Warner is the shooter.”
“The kid from this morning?” he asked, his abundant brows meeting over his nose.
“What kid?” Maggie asked.
“On Sky’s phone.”
“I don’t know,” Maggie said, shaking her head. “I can’t remember that kid’s name.”
“Stay here.”
Maggie watched him walk over to Bledsoe and say a few words. Bledsoe turned and yelled for Myles Godfrey, a deputy with thick, black hair and thick black glasses. Wyatt walked back to Maggie as a light rain finally started to fall.
“Let’s go,” he said. “We’ll take the truck.”
He put a hand on Maggie’s shoulder and turned her toward his truck. She looked over her shoulder at the ground where Dwight had just been.
Her tee shirt was stilled balled up, lying in the gravel now, unrecognizable as having ever been light blue. Dwight’s blood was being diluted by the rain, and rivulets of it were disappearing into the gravel and grass. In a few minutes, it might even be gone. That just didn’t seem right.
Bennett Boudreaux blinked a few raindrops from his long, dark lashes as he twisted another mango from one of the dwarf trees. It succumbed to his hand without protest, and he slipped it gently into the canvas tote on his shoulder.
The bit of sunlight still peeking through the clouds glinted on his hair, still full, and still mostly brown, with touches of silver at his ears. A damp lock of it fell over his forehead, and he brushed it back before turning to look at Miss Evangeline.
“Would you get back on the porch, please?’ he asked, a bit of irritation in his voice. “It’s starting to rain in earnest.”
Miss Evangeline looked up sharply as she picked a large mango up from the ground. Her thick bi-focals were almost covered in raindrops, and her red bandana was doing nothing to keep her head dry. She tucked the mango into one of the cavernous pockets of her flowered house dress, the weight of it and three other mangoes threatening to pull the faded dress down around her feet. A Piggly-Wiggly bag hanging from the hook on her aluminum walker was laden with several more fallen fruits.
At close to one-hundred, if not beyond it, she weighed less than most first-graders. With her wrinkled, papyrus-like Creole skin and her scrawny frame, she often reminded him of a thin cigar.
“Why I got to go the porch, me?” she asked in her raspy voice. “You out here the rain.”
Boudreaux watched her make preparations to straighten to her full fifty-seven inches. “Because I still have an immune system,” he said. He turned back to the mango tree and reached for another ripe one. “Yours expired decades ago,” he added quietly.
“What you say?” she barked behind him.
He turned to look at her. “I said I don’t want you catching cold,” he said more loudly.
Miss Evangeline’s tongue rooted around her lower plate as she glared at him. “Boy, I been your nanny fifty-eight year,” she snapped. “I don’ need no short-pants Cajun boy try to baby me, no.”
Boudreaux sighed, but tried to do it quietly. He was sixty-three years old, and while he was fit and could pass for a much-younger man, he certainly couldn’t be confused with a boy in short pants.
“With all of these mango trees out here, you don’t need to be getting yourself soaked picking up fallen fruit,” he said.
His Low-Country style, two-story house was on a double lot that was rare in Apalach’s Historic District. Aside from the garage and Miss Evangeline’s small cottage, the entire back yard was given over to the nine full size and twelve dwarf mangoes that he had planted for her, mangoes that few people managed to grow this far north.
“I ain’t gon’ volunteer no more my mango that sorry squirrel, no,” she said behind him. “Look here.” She prodded at a mango with the toe of her terry-cloth house shoe. “One bite he take this one. One bite he take that one. Taste the mango then let it rot here the ground.”
“We’ve got plenty.”
“You got plenty money, too, but I don’ see you throwin’ it round the yard, no,” she countered, slowly bending to fetch another mango. “Maybe you don’ remember them day we don’t have nothin’!”
“I remember, Miss Evangeline.”
“Ain’t gon’ leave no mango for him, no,” she went on, glaring at a mango in her hand. Half of it had been gnawed away. “I gon’ clean up my shotgun. Blow his mangy ass right out his eye sockets, me, he come pillage me some more.”
Boudreaux had confiscated her shotgun back in the eighties, but he didn’t bother reminding her.
“Hey!”
Boudreaux looked up to see Amelia, his housekeeper/cook and Miss Evangeline’s daughter, standing at the top of the steps that led to the wraparound porch. Her skin was the same freckled shade as her mother’s but she was tall, and her frame was solid and imposing.
“Oyster Radio say a sheriff deputy got shot,” she called.
Boudreaux felt something slither in his stomach. “Who?”
“Don’t say,” she answered, the brisk breeze playing at the hem of her own faded house dress. “Got shot over to Eastpoint and on the way to the hospital.”
Boudreaux pulled out his cell phone, thumbed open his recent calls list and pressed Maggie’s number. It went to voice mail. He switched to his contacts list, raindrops tapping at his screen, until he found the number for the Sheriff’s Office. He seldom called it; as the town’s most-celebrated criminal, he had little occasion to do so. A woman answered.
“Maggie Redmond—Maggie Hamilton, please,” he said.
“I’m sorry, she’s not available,” the woman said. He could hear tension and hurry in her voice. “Can someone else help you?”
“Where is she, please?” he asked, trying to sound more polite than his nerves urged him to be.
There was a moment’s hesitation. “Who’s calling, please?”
Boudreaux was accustomed to his name opening many doors, but this wasn’t one of them. “Her father,” he answered.
There was a moment’s hesitation, then “She’s on her way to the hospital.”
The voice went on, but Boudreaux had already lowered the phone and disconnected. He shoved it into his pocket, then hurried the several yards to the steps. He took them two at a time and dropped the bag of mangoes at Amelia’s feet as he passed her.
“I’ll be back.”
The emergency room at Weems was small but well equipped for most trauma cases. Dr. Stan Ridgeway had been the surgeon on call when the hospital was advised that Dwight was on the way, and he was there within a few minutes of Dwight’s arrival.
The first order of business was to repair the common iliac artery, which had indeed been nicked by the bullet. As Dr. Ridgeway had quickly advised Amy, Maggie, Wyatt, and several members of Dwight’s close-knit family, Dwight had lost a great deal of blood, which caused his blood pressure to drop far too low for extensive surgery. The plan was to repair the artery and give him the blood he needed, then airlift him to Port St. Joe for the surgery to remove the bullet and repair the other damage it had caused. So far, they didn’t know what that damage was.
Maggie and Wyatt leaned against the wall in the surgical waiting room, while Amy, along with Dwight’s parents, waited around the corner, just outside the operating room. Maggie had seen the horror in Mrs. Shultz’s eyes when she’d looked at Maggie’s stomach, at her son’s blood smeared there, and Maggie had hurried, with trembling fingers, to tie the tails of the shirt in a knot.
There was a window just a few feet away, with a vending machine on one side of it and a water dispenser on the other. The rain was pelting the glass, and Maggie tried to let the drum-like rhythm calm her mind.
Wyatt leaned against the wall beside her, making her feel stronger and calmer just by being present. He was lost in his own thoughts, she knew. It had been Wyatt who had hired Dwight, and before he’d resigned as sheriff, it had been Wyatt who had suggested he go for a promotion.
Wyatt cared deeply about all his people, and they were still his people, but Maggie knew he felt particularly protective of Dwight. She wished he wasn’t trying to blame himself right now, but she knew that he was. As was she.
She reached over and wrapped a few of her fingers around a few of his. He rubbed them with his thumb as stared at the floor. Footfalls from around the corner made both of them turn their heads as Sheriff Bledsoe rounded the corner and hurried toward them. He was neat as a pin, as always, every remaining blond hair in place, his expensive tie and more moderate suit meant to make him more imposing than his small stature did. He carried a manila file folder in one hand.
“How is he?” he asked them while he was still a few yards away.
“They’re repairing a nicked artery, so they can transport him to Sacred Heart,” Wyatt said quietly.
Bledsoe stopped in front of them, his chest heaving just a bit, and looked from Wyatt to Maggie.
“We’re interviewing everyone that was there, including the school bus driver, the neighbors that saw or heard it, the kids,” he said. “Except for Dwight’s kid. We haven’t been able to locate this boy Ryan Warner yet.”
“What about the other boys that were there? The ones that started the fight or whatever?” Maggie asked.
“I don’t know why they bothered running,” he answered. “They were all at home, except for the kid that stayed on scene. We’re taking statements now.”
“What happened?” Wyatt asked.
“Well, we have to compare stories, get everything filled in,” Bledsoe answered. “But it appears that this kid Warner felt threatened by the other boys and pulled a gun. Dwight tried to intervene, to calm the situation, and from what we’ve heard so far, the shooting was accidental.”
“But the kid had a gun,” Maggie said. “On the school bus, and I assume at school beforehand. He took a gun to school.”
“Yeah,” Bledsoe said. “But the witnesses are saying the shooting wasn’t intentional; Dwight was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“He shouldn’t have been there,” Maggie said. “He shouldn’t be here. He should be at his promotion ceremony.”
“He was,” Bledsoe said. “Didn’t he get to tell you?”
“What?”
“Yeah, this morning. We—”
“No, we were on our way there,” Maggie insisted, wondering if he’d fallen on his head.
“Yeah, uh, I guess he forgot to tell you,” Bledsoe said. “So, yeah. Sergeant’s pay and sergeant’s benefits as of eight this morning.” He looked at Wyatt, who was staring at him, eyes narrowed. “Wyatt was there.”
“It was nice,” Wyatt said after a second.
Bledsoe held out the file folder. “I forgot to get you to sign as witness, though.”
Maggie stared first at Bledsoe, who handed Wyatt his pen, and then at Wyatt, who used the wall as a desk to add his signature to the promotion documentation.
“Where’s Dwight’s wife? His family?” Bledsoe asked her.
It took Maggie a moment to answer, she was that taken aback by what he was telling them. “They’re in the hall outside the operating room,” she answered. “Down there.”
Bledsoe took the folder and pen back from Wyatt. “I’ll go speak with them. We’ll need a statement from you, Lieutenant, but it can wait until you come in in the morning. Team meeting at 7:30.”
He headed down the hall, and Maggie looked at Wyatt.
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