She had her bag stowed in the trunk and was unlocking the driver’s door when he confronted her, pounding his fist on the fender. “I’m just a man, not a superhero like you. I’ve got ten homicides I’m working. And I actually try to have a life other than this job.”
“And I don’t have a life. Well, you’re right, Wills. I go home to my dog every night. I’m sure you’ve got women stacked up waiting, like your unsolved homicides.”
“I don’t deserve this crazy bullshit.”
“Crazy?” she repeated, then turned her back on him, got into her car, and slammed the door. Wills receded in the rearview mirror, watching as she tore out of the precinct drive.
* * *
• • •
Salt twisted her neck, turning to face the living room and checking for Wonder on the floor beside her. The green sofa cover was bunched under her thighs. She groaned thinking about the harsh words between her and Wills last night.
Wonder stirred, stretching in his sleep. She had a hunger pang and an ache from her full bladder.
Her fist was balled tight under her tank T-shirt, between her sweat-sticky breasts. She scanned the entrance to the room from the shadowed hall. The sun through the curtains threw lace patterns on the dark green hooked rug and its warmth amplified the odors of her own night sweat and Wonder’s fur, sweet, like drying silage.
The ticking of the mantel clock echoed off the beveled mirror behind it. Wonder moaned at some menace from his dream.
Her fingers found the flat bone of her sternum and pressed to slow the drumming from her heart. She curled her short nails into damp skin between her breasts. Feeling the bone, she remembered how, after her father died, she had wished for colds, so her mother would rub her chest with mentholated ointment and cover it with a cloth warmed by the bulb of the bedside table lamp. She’d lied, faking colds, to get her busy, nervous mother near her. She’d felt guilty wanting her mother’s attention when her mother had her hands full cooking, washing, taking care of her baby brother, and reading the Bible. Wrong to lie about having a cold just to steal her mother’s touch. Her mother’s hands had grown nervous and too busy to soothe, pat, or give caresses. It had become clear to Salt that she was on her own.
Salt dropped her hand to the dog’s smooth head. He lifted his snout, pushing his cold nose to her hot palm, his dreams forgotten. The thumping in her chest began to subside as she synced her breath with Wonder’s waking breath. He didn’t worry about intruders, and only reacted when need be.
Salt’s hunger motivated her empathy for the dog and so, untangling from the afghan, she shifted her feet to the floor.
33.
CONFRONTATION
In other regions of the country the hot weather would be over. But in Atlanta, summer was dragging her dry skirts into late September. The green leaves had turned brittle and brown at the edges, covered in red dust. In The Homes, parched grasses strained to hold ground; what little survived was beaten down and trampled by the feet of residents who longed to be outside, out of close apartments, away from potential confrontations that often boiled over in the heat. The hot wind blew Styrofoam food containers, lottery tickets, eviction notices, and cheap advertisements through the rutted streets.
Based on the information obtained from Dirty Red’s wire, the feds had secured the warrant for Stone, who hadn’t been seen for weeks. Salt hadn’t even felt him lurking. She watched for Red during her shifts, and hoped that Red would survive both Stone and the crack that the ATF money could buy.
Her Thursday shift was over and exhaustion soaked her to the bone, looking for Red, looking for Stone, watching the gang, Lil D, her eyes straining more and more to see clearly.
* * *
• • •
The sheep were fed and in the paddock. Wonder followed and watched as Salt shed her jeans and boots, turned out all the lights, then padded to the kitchen in T-shirt over panties for the nightly glass of wine. The wide plank floor of the hall felt cool on her feet as she walked back to the living room. Wind from a yet distant storm whipped the branches of the big tree beside the house, their shadows flailed on the blue gray of the front room wall.
A door slammed somewhere on the unused second floor. Salt set the glass of wine on the lowest step and faced the upstairs. Her mother had closed the house up and moved with her new husband and Salt’s brother to North Carolina before Salt had left for college. Salt’s mom and her brother had never come back, never, even for a visit. The ghosts that haunted these rooms belonged to Salt alone. The full-moon light coming through the windows ebbed and flowed as clouds rushed in front of the storm. Even in total darkness her feet could find the familiar worn places in the wooden steps. She started up without realizing she was lifting her feet. The wine on an empty stomach was in her bloodstream so quickly. Wonder followed, watching her step by step. At the top, the hallway stretched out just as long as it had seemed when she was small, the carpet runner woven in green and lavender wisteria vines. The hall walls were lined with old portrait photographs, some turn of the century, her father’s people. A faint odor of wilted flowers still tinged the mustiness of the hall, bereft of furniture. None of the benches and tables had been left.
The doors to all rooms were closed, four bedrooms, two on each side and, at the very end of the hall, the sleeping porch. She felt unarmed. The moonlight shining in the downstairs windows didn’t reach the upstairs hall. Trying to see in the dark, her vision began to blur from the edges to the center, the bedroom doors seemed to shift closer, then farther away. Wonder kept stepping in front of her feet, herding her in no particular direction. She tripped or stepped on his paws whichever way she turned. Thunder rolled. The dog made a new sound, like a whine. “It’s okay. It’s far away,” she told him. As she reached to smooth his back to calm him, his static-infused fur rose to her palm.
Her brother’s bedroom was first on the right. When she pushed the door open, although the moon was on the other side of the house, the room was filled by ambient light from the windows. She passed through the bathroom that adjoined their bedrooms.
“Baa. Bleat. Baa, baa.” The sheep in the paddock below this side of the house were getting worked up, cueing one another. Wonder’s ears twitched, almost vibrating.
The carpet on the floor of her old room was faded and there were permanent indentations where her chest of drawers and bed had been. The old rug had once been sky blue with all kinds of birds winging their way across the floor. Now in the dark, the bright night outside lit up a window-shaped portion of the floor and the two birds in the shadow frame seemed to float on night air.
She left her room by the hall door. Directly across was the guest room, which in her memory had never been used. The hinge whined as the door swung inward. This room was the only one that didn’t have a rug. The shades were pulled but the moonlight snuck around the edges, like it itched to get in. She shut the door and turned to go back toward the stairs, walking quickly past her parents’ bedroom door. At the head of the stairs she stopped. Determined, she turned back and pushed open the door to the big bedroom. Moonlight filled the room, filled every corner, while the wind tossed shadows high on the walls. The roses on the rug were in full bloom, as bright in the night as they had been on the day her father shot himself.
Salt shut the door on the moonlit room and stood there, mixing up memories, thinking of dead Shannell on the other side of the door, her hair tangled in a garland of briar roses and dangling wisteria. Wonder gave a short woof and skittered to the stairs. His nails clicked on the downstairs hall floor. When she turned to go down, the door frame of her parents’ room shifted and framed the hallway. Her eyes were at it again, merging images, mixing present with the past. She steadied herself on the banister going down.
Wonder was at the back door, still giving the short woof sound that meant he didn’t have anything to growl at but was saying What? What is it? In the distance, heat lightning spr
ang up from and down to the ground. A low rumble sounded from the direction of the city.
She put her hand on the dog’s head. “It’s still a ways away.” A little strange: he’d never been troubled by storms before. Was she spooking him? The sheep increased their bleats, every one of them, each familiar by their individual shout and tone. They were pushing against the paddock boards and clanking their hooves on the metal gate. Wonder went into a full growl.
The first volley tore across the entire back of the house. Salt fell, grabbing for Wonder’s collar and rolling them both back toward the kitchen. The refrigerator’s skin had holes, not dents. Pepper’s words registered in an instant: armor-piercing. There would be no cover. The shooter didn’t have to aim or even be a good shot—the weapon was fully automatic.
The second volley was lower and ripped through the back porch and kitchen. Toaster, canisters, and the empty blue jar that had held Wills’s orange flowers exploded on the counter. Wonder pulled at his collar to get to the screaming, terrified bleating sheep, their hooves frantic against the fence.
She had to move, but standing up to run for her gun hanging on the closet door in the bedroom would make her an easy target. She calculated the seconds it would take to go the twelve yards.
There was another fully automatic blast but this time not at the house. The silent seconds afterward were broken by the sound of only one sheep, bitter but precious information. The gunman was, in those moments, pointing away from the house, killing the sheep. She grabbed the dog and sprinted for the bedroom, just as the next spray ripped through the walls.
She scrambled through the hallway, her hand on Wonder’s collar, dragging him along as he was working against her, trying to get out to the sheep, whose cries were fewer and fewer. “That will do,” she commanded him while throwing both herself and the dog into the bedroom.
The gunman, still outside, was closing in. Glass shattered in the hallway, the family photos. Salt snatched the gun from her belt on the door hook and shoved the dog inside the closet. “That’ll do,” she repeated, latching the closet door.
The back screen door slammed. Without looking she came out shooting toward the kitchen with one hand while tearing from the bedroom to the living room.
Another spray of bullets followed her. Then there was silence, except for the sound of a gun clip dropping, the click of another magazine shoved into a weapon and the bleating of one sheep, the smallest dam.
Then Stone’s voice. “Here, doggy, doggy,” high with false sweetness.
Salt threw her arm around the stairwell wall, fired into the hall, and ran for the second floor. Rounds raced her, tearing through the upstairs floor behind her.
She reached the double doors of the sleeping porch, looked back down the hallway of broken glass, splintered wood, her bloody footprints, and the top of Stone’s head appearing from the stairwell. Aiming, forcing herself to breathe and bring into focus both front and back sights, she fired just as the sights doubled in her dominant eye. The upstairs hall shattered as she leaped over the rail of the second-floor porch onto the slanting roof.
Faintly the wail of a siren entered her consciousness before she began rolling, weapon flying, nails grabbing for purchase, hearing that one bleating dam calling from the paddock.
* * *
• • •
There were puddles under her arms, rain pelting her face. The heat had been washed by the storm and she was cold. A voice drawled, “She’s ah-openin’ her eyes.” Somebody call Central Casting. That was the voice of a Southern sheriff if ever there was one. Then a matching voice in the rich black range: “Tha am-bu-lance Eee Tee A, one away.”
Salt squinted from a flashlight’s glare but could see very clearly the fine white wires that joined together in the bulb of the light.
34.
MEDICINAL PURPOSES
The rolling bed of the CAT scan machine delivered Salt out of its tomb and into the bright examining room. Pepper, sitting in a plastic chair against a near wall, leaned forward. Wonder, wearing a Red Cross rescue saddle, was on the floor beside him, the whites of his eyes showing, watching the technician.
“Good boy,” she said. Wonder trotted over and licked her lowered hand. “Thank Mr. Gooden for bringing him,” she said to Pepper.
“You can do that yourself. He’s in the waiting room.” Pepper’s smile, as always, warmed the room. “The dog’s good medicine; he just needed a cover story.”
“Hey guys, just because we got him the disguise doesn’t mean he can take over,” grumbled the burly nurse, helping Salt off the machine and onto another exam table. Her muscles were beginning to stiffen. Bloody abrasions down her right arm and leg stung when she moved. The hospital gown didn’t do much in the way of concealing the scrapes and scratches. Her mother’s huge hydrangea bush had apparently broken her fall, as well as hidden her from Stone, before he fled the sirens. She was scratched and bruised and there was what the doctors called “suspicious tissue” in the area of the old head injury.
“The doc will be with you in a few,” the nurse said, hitting the automatic door panel and leaving the room.
Blue paper hospital slippers covered the cuts on her feet. Salt pointed them toward Pepper. “Self-inflicted. I ran through the broken glass of family photos.”
His expression didn’t change, his eyes studying her, his mouth set. “Something’s catching up to you. Does it have to do with family? You ready to tell me what?”
The automatic door sounded and a young guy with an energetic walk almost jogged into the room. “I’m Doctor Quake. Don’t say it. You’re Officer Alt. How’s your eyesight?”
Salt blinked, squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them. No fuzziness on the periphery, no ghosts floating in the light. “I think it’s actually better.”
“How long since you’ve been having problems with your vision?” The doctor seemed very young to be a specialist. He had blond hair, blond eyelashes, his blue eyes clear and sharp.
Pepper was looking at her with his head slightly cocked and his eyebrows raised. He was not smiling and his scar moved up and down as he clenched his jaw.
“Honestly, I’ve kept thinking it would clear up. Since I was shot in April, Doc,” she answered, still looking at Pepper.
“Salt,” Pepper said. He and Wonder both lowered their heads. “Do you know how this makes me feel?”
“I know, I know, I should have said something.”
The doctor stepped to the side. “Guys, I’m gonna go check on another patient. I’ll be back shortly.” He backed out of the room with a small smile and a wave.
“Pepper.” She rolled her head toward the closing door.
“It makes me feel like you don’t trust me.”
She sat up, holding the open-backed gown to her chest. Her legs dangled. She felt very like a child, throat muscles tightening. “It was just,” she croaked, “my father.”
“What about your father?” Pepper sat up straight. She noticed that he was wearing jeans but instead of a shirt he had on a pajama top covered in little white clouds on a sky-blue background. He must have dressed in a hurry.
“He— You mean you hadn’t heard about him?”
“All these years, girl, I’ve left it to you to talk about him. Figured you would talk about him when you could.”
“I needed him. I needed to keep him close.”
Pepper came over and put his hand on her head. Then she cried. The clouds on Pepper’s shirt held the rain and she started to laugh.
* * *
• • •
Salt didn’t have to be admitted but the doctor insisted she return for further tests regarding her head injury. The clarity of vision that she had recovered in the previous night’s encounter remained. By ten a.m. Pepper had her and Wonder in his minivan headed for last night’s scene of destruction. When they came within sight of the long drive to the old
white house, Wonder stood up on the backseat and began that short woof again, the woof that had been the warning before Stone’s assault.
There were cars and trucks, a lot of trucks, parked along her drive, Blessing’s Dodge beater, Fuzz’s red truck, Sarge’s new SUV. Almost every guy from her shift.
Pepper looked at her when she turned to ask. He said, “The other zones are covering our calls tonight. Command approved it.”
“What?” she asked.
“This was never your problem alone.” As he pulled beside the house, Blessing, Big Fuzzy, Sarge, and all the rest, wearing dirty jeans and filthy shirts, stood at attention in front of a truck that blocked her view of the sheep paddock.
* * *
• • •
Ten cops spent ten hours fixing most of what Stone had spent ten minutes destroying. They hauled furniture, splintered and torn beyond repair. They swept glass, sanded holes in wood and plaster, removed rugs laced with shrapnel, replaced panes of glass. They also dug a grave and buried four sheep.
Ten cops plus one Homicide detective. Wills stayed after the last of her thin blue line had left.
* * *
• • •
Boots off and sitting in the old metal glider in the backyard, he moved over and handed her a glass of whiskey when she and Wonder walked in from the paddock. Wonder was at a loss. “It’s hard to herd one sheep,” Salt said.
Although she had been ordered to stay out of the way, her friends had consulted her on every item from the house that had to be trashed. She felt bone tired but the adrenaline still lingered from the night before. Also, she hadn’t been able to bathe since before Stone’s attack.
“Bet I smell worse than a sheep,” Wills said, echoing her thoughts while pulling at his shirt.
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