by Shannon Hill
Cousin Robert scowled, face reddening. Uncle Eller answered quickly, harshly, “We did not, as you put it, ‘get ten million’. We could provide only a fifth of the ransom in cash.”
“So they let you off the hook for the other eight million?”
Neither Eller answered me. We stood there in the cold January afternoon with the sun bouncing diamond sparks off the snow, and said nothing. I got an unbearable urge to fidget, and fought it down. I had to make one of them blink first.
Uncle Eller gave in. That surprised me. I’d have put my money on Cousin Robert.
“If that’s all, Sheriff?”
“That’s all,” I said, because I knew asking questions was going to get me nowhere. For the moment, anyway. “Uncle. Cousin.”
I turned and headed back to the warm comfort of my cruiser. I spent a moment petting Boris, who was drowsing with his paws crossed over his nose even though the heat was cranked to maximum. Once I felt my irritation ebb, I put the car into gear and drove away.
7.
A thaw set in, turning the snow to water, and the ground to cold mud. I sat on the couch and drank hot cocoa. Boris had sacked out next to me, a happy little cat-smile on his face, his tummy white and soft and exposed, his legs tucked in and his paws curled. Somewhere in his feline dreams, he was bringing down a bison.
Lucky cat.
I had insomnia.
I’d been getting insomnia off and on since I’d gotten home. I wasn’t surprised. Under the circumstances, to use Dr. Hartley’s phrase. I was having dreams of being cold, and I’d bought a nightlight for the short hallway from my bedroom to the living room and kitchen. I’d even thought about a security system. But mostly I was relying on hot cocoa and time spent staring at home shopping networks. All those exercise and fitness and diet infomercials depress me. Home shopping channels, on the other hand, bore me to sleep in about half an hour flat.
It was a long half-hour.
My brain wanted to spin its wheels all night about how I’d gotten tazered but Boris hadn’t caused mayhem. Had he slept through it? Had he realized too late? I knew I might never know, and that bugged me like a piece of sand in my eye.
Then there was the problem of Shotgun and Tall. Nobody was waving cash around within a ten-county area. And believe me, cash-waving would get noticed. Had they really taken the money and run?
I don’t know why, but I also had trouble believing Tall meant to leave me to die. It would’ve been easier to not leave three cans of soup and the two comforters, for all the good they did me. Given that it’s possible to die of hypothermia in seventy-degree water, it’s not too hard to die of it when you’re in a forty-degree cellar, comforters or not. But why give me the chance if murder was on their minds? They could’ve shot me in the head and dumped me anywhere on those logging roads, and I’d not have turned up till someone tripped over my bones. If I’d ever turned up at all.
Another nagging question. How much money had the Ellers paid? I had no idea, because Steven Clay hadn’t returned my calls. Nor could I be sure he’d tell me a damn thing. They’d paid at least two million, from what Uncle Eller said, but it’s not too often a ransom demand goes down just because you can’t pay the whole thing in cash.
I tried not to think about the Great Bungle, which is how I was referring to the so-called investigation into my abduction.
I also tried not to think about the fact Maury Morse had advised me to let Tom remain acting sheriff for a few more weeks. “Just till you get a bit more settled back in,” he’d told me that afternoon, wringing his baseball cap into a wreck in his hands. The guy’s bald spot had been shiny with sweat, and it hadn’t been from the weather. “You look kinda tired.”
Tired, Aunt Marge has often remarked, is code for “old” or “sick” or, among those attempting tact, “scary”.
Twenty or so minutes into the soft sales patter on stoneware, my brain gave up. I woke up sprawled on the couch with Boris perched by my head. He was grooming himself. Noisily. I felt the rasp of his tongue as he slurped along his leg and caught part of my ear for good measure.
I love my cat, but ewwww.
I yawned. I stretched. The light seemed very bright for early morning.
I saw the clock on the shelf, and swore so loudly that Boris put his ears back.
It was ten in the morning.
I stormed into the office fifteen minutes later. I perfected the three-minute shower in college, and any cop knows how to go from bed-head to presentable in the time it takes most people to figure out how to pour their first cup of coffee. The only reason I’d taken as long as I had was Boris’s reluctance to get his paws mussed walking to the car.
There is no cat as fussy as one who used to live out of a dumpster.
I didn’t bother with hellos. “Why the hell didn’t you call me?”
Kim mutely pointed to Tom, sitting at his desk, one of those cheap metal ones that I swear must cost about five dollars to make. I’ve got one, and so does Kim. Only Punk lacks a desk. If we gave him one, there’d be no room for the fold-out sofa where we sleep when we’ve got someone in custody in our cells.
Tom reddened from head to toe, but said calmly, “Punk can take a few extra shifts.”
Boris cradled in my arms, I hollered, “Do I look like I can’t handle my job?”
Kim stared at her desk. Tom stared at his hands. Punk turned a strange color but got out, “Well, no, not really.”
I huffed. I sat down. I let Boris go. He hopped onto my desk and lashed his tail at the world. You ever hear someone say, “If Momma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy”? Boris had refined it to, “If Momma ain’t happy, someone’s losing an eye.”
My frustration burned my throat. It’d been two weeks and a day since I’d gotten thrown in a trunk, and the jail was empty. Nobody was in custody. We had no solid leads, no solid evidence. For all I knew, Tall and Shotgun were sipping cold beer and chuckling over the ease of getting ten million. I couldn’t even get the K&R insurance guy to return my calls.
Why exactly did I come into work?
I’d half-formed an idea of throwing a suitcase in the car and driving down to Florida, someplace quiet on the Gulf maybe, when the telephone rang. Kim fielded it, shutting her emergency chocolate drawer with a quick, guilty look. “Sheriff Department. Oh, hello, Chief. Yes, she’s right here, but she’s…”
I already had my hand out for the phone. Kim walked the handset over to me and mouthed, “Chief Danes.” I smiled a big fake smile and said cheerfully into the phone, “Kurt, how can I help you today?”
“Sheriff, I hate to do this to you.”
When someone uses your title instead of your first name, you know it’s not going to be good.
“We turned up Craig McElroy.”
I put the phone on speaker, and repeated for everyone’s benefit, “You found Craig McElroy? Where?”
“In his truck. Off Wolf Creek Road.” Kurt paused significantly. “He’s been dead a while, Lil. Even with the cold, it ain’t pretty.”
It’s the hell of my job that I knew what he meant. “How long is a while?”
“I’m guessing he lived just about long enough to pick up the money.”
Tom spoke up. “How do you figure?”
The speaker made Kurt’s reply tinny. “There’s an empty leather bag next to the body in the truck. Right next to the shotgun I’m thinking put that big hole in his head.”
***^***
We beat Vernon Rucker to the Wolf Creek Road scene by maybe twenty minutes, thanks to Kurt calling us first. I felt a little queasy when I got out of my cruiser, and for once, Boris stayed right in my arms. He’s a terror in town, but out in the woods, he realizes he’s somebody’s lunch. Punk stuck close, too. He’d napped in the back seat most of the way. Or pretended to. Neither of us had been too happy with Tom ordering him to baby-sit, but it was quicker not to argue.
Kurt reached out and gave Boris a pat on the head that, if Boris hadn’t been so shocked, would’ve g
otten his fingers ripped up. “So that’s the famous cat sheriff,” he said, and waved us further up the road. It was all mud and ruts, and on one side, steep drop-off to Wolf Creek. The melt had the creek rushing at a good clip. If the truck had gone over the edge, it would’ve been months before anyone found it or Craig McElroy. But the turn-off was surprisingly wide, and a narrow path led down to the water. Fishing spot was my guess.
The F-150 matched the Campbell kid’s description all right. Except for the hole in the driver’s side window. A nearby tree had caught part of the shotgun blast, a few pellets in the bark. The state police crime scene boys were already picking them out.
I got as close as I dared to study the corpse. The critters had been at it, but I could still tell from the size and build that this could have been Shotgun. Wearing old work boots, jeans, a camouflage-print jacket. He was slumped in a way that suggested he’d been facing someone in the passenger seat when the shot took him. The window had broken from, I would bet, the combined force of his head and the shotgun blast. Safety glass isn’t unbreakable, after all. Just safe.
I took a closer look. Not easy to do without trampling something. The cab had lots of little holes that had me wondering.
I walked over to Lieutenant Breeden. We’d faxed or e-mailed every police department in three states with a description of the F-150, the bag the ransom was put in, and the Chevy sedan Tom and Punk had spotted picking up the ransom. We’d had a be-on-lookout, a BOLO, for McElroy, too. It was unsettling to think he’d been that close to home the whole time. When I said as much, Breeden nodded. “Raises some questions.”
That it did. I gave Punk a go-away look, and he stumped off to rejoin Kurt. Breeden sighed, shoulders drooping. “Any chance you can call off your aunt?”
“Is there ice skating in hell yet?”
He sighed again. He’d have been a happier man if he’d broken free of his mother, whose influence Aunt Marge exploited shamelessly to get my way. “Anything you want to know?”
Lots, but I started with, “McElroy own a Chevy Malibu?”
“We’re going over his place right now. Last call I got, the guy had six-seven cars in the yard, under tarps, and another four in this old barn. I’ll fax over the information when we’ve got it.”
I nodded to the truck. “Is it just me or does it look like there might have been two shots fired in there?”
Breeden shrugged one shoulder. “We bagged two shells. We’ll know more later. Anything else?” He glanced downhill, past me, and his blank face got even blanker. “Chief Rucker’s here.”
I shifted Boris’s weight and muttered a nasty word.
“He’s officially in charge, Lil,” said Breeden lamely, “I can’t change that. Neither can you.”
I snarled, mostly to myself. “If you quote that Saint Francis serenity thing, I’ll throw Boris at you.”
“You being here is a courtesy, you know that.”
Which was his way of reminding me I had no official status except as “victim”. Lucky for me, it was pretty clear McElroy had been dead long enough I wasn’t much use as “suspect”.
Not to say this stopped Rucker from bleating like an old sick bull, “What’s she doin’ here?”
God bless Breeden. “Identifying the suspect.”
What remained of the suspect, more like. I retreated to my cruiser before Rucker could huff and puff his way uphill to me, and let Boris slide back into his seat. His fur was on end, his whiskers stiff, his mismatched eyes pitch-black, and he kept opening and closing his mouth. Filtering all the smells, most of them strange, all of them tainted by the dead body in the truck.
Rucker was blustering at Breeden. Punk labored over, his prosthesis skidding in the muck. He spat out a word that even I blinked to hear, then remarked, “Danes ain’t happy. He wants this off his hands.”
I risked a grin. “So does Breeden. Rucker wins.”
Punk stared past me, and down at the creek sixty feet below us. “Gonna be someone he trusted, I bet. Someone he didn’t lock up the guns around.”
I almost shrugged. “You know Rucker’ll pin this on some nonexistent hobo.”
We both looked uphill, where Rucker and Danes were talking. Or Rucker was talking at Danes, who looked like he’d hand over the keys to the kingdom to get Craig McElroy’s murder off his books and onto someone else’s. He’d do what was easiest for him. He didn’t like intrusions into his jurisdiction. Fastest way to get everything back to normal was to let Rucker do whatever he liked. Not a bad man or a bad police chief, just one who saw this as an external matter. There’s a lot of them around.
I got settled behind the wheel. Punk slid into the back, and started cleaning the crud off his prosthesis. We’d gotten back to the main road before he spoke. He startled me. I’d figured he’d gone back to sleep.
“It’s okay, y’know,” he said. “Not sleeping so much. I still get twitchy when I drive past where I wrecked. It’s normal. This early in, you only start worrying if it stops bothering you.”
I did not like being transparent, not even to a deputy. “Watch much Dr. Phil on your days off?” I asked acidly.
I caught a flash of his grin in the rear view mirror. “Nope. Oprah.”
8.
Everyone was happy to let Vernon Rucker have the case. Danes got to keep the potential embarrassment of an open homicide on someone else’s shoulders. Breeden got to tell his mother truthfully that it was out of his hands, which didn’t do much to get her off his back, but did remove Aunt Marge. Rucker got to crow about his big case. Even Aunt Marge voiced approval, since it meant I wouldn’t be getting myself into more “trouble”, as she calls it. The only people not happy were the personnel of the Sheriff’s Department of Crazy, Virginia. And we didn’t get a vote.
I don’t drink. Being raised by Aunt Marge, a dietitian and borderline health nut, does that to you. You also don’t smoke, take recreational drugs, trust traditional medicine and pharmaceutical companies, eat anything processed or anything ending in –os, unless it’s avocados. I reckon I’ll live to be 113, or die at 50 from sheer lack of pre-embalming. But I do have my vices. Chocolate is the biggest one.
So when we decided to drown our sorrows, we did it at Old Mill, in a booth in the back . There is no tavern in Crazy. When you can buy cold beer at the grocery store and drink it on the way home, bars are superfluous. But Seth understands people need to drink somewhere besides their cars and homes, so he’ll keep Old Mill open till about eleven at night. After eight, you’re out of luck if you want hot food, but he keeps vats of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream handy, and there’s always plenty of “nibbles”, as he calls them. Pretzel nuggets, chips and salsa, mixed nuts. Good beer food to go with the three beer brands Seth had on offer. He had a few low-end wines, too, but no hard liquor. Kept the church ladies happy that way.
Across the table from me, Tom nursed a bottle of Sam Adams, as preferable to Coors or Budweiser. Punk stared at a ginger ale. I poked at a hot fudge sundae made with chocolate ice cream. Next to me on the bench, Boris popped his head up over the edge of the table and lapped at a small saucer of heavy cream.
I sighed. “Sucks.”
Punk said, “Yeah.”
Tom grunted.
Boris slurped.
I reached out and poked a pretzel nugget. It skittered toward Boris, who batted it enthusiastically off the table, and vanished onto the floor to pursue it.
Punk drank the ginger ale. He looked like a man reconsidering temperance.
Tom finished his beer. He did not look like a man who’d ever consider temperance.
I poked at the ice cream some more.
If there’s anything more glum than unhappy cops trying to drink away their troubles, I don’t want to know what it is.
I ate some of my ice cream. I’d be running extra miles out of guilt this week, but then, who cared if I got a little soft here and there? Only man in my life had four feet and a tail. And, it so happened, a pretzel nugget in his teeth as he jumped back up
beside me. He deposited it on my lap and merowled for praise. I told him he was wonderful, and he settled in to worry at the pretzel nugget like a dog with a bone.
Tom reached out and grabbed a handful of mixed nuts, and started to sort them out, meticulously, by type. Cashews, peanuts, hazelnuts, macadamia nuts, pecans. Then he lined up some pretzel nuggets, so he had five of each.
“That’s the most…” Punk started, and stopped. We watched Tom in fascination. This was a guy who, at work, barely remembered to stack papers in To-Do and Done piles. Yet here he sat, all obsessive-compulsively weird on the snacks.
Tom stopped long enough to drink half his second beer. Then he said, out of nowhere, “Tanya wants to get married.”
I choked, and came close to having ice cream go up my nose. My mind was definitely no longer on my problems. “Did she go down on one knee and all?”
Tom shot me a dirty look, and a dirtier one at Punk for laughing. “It ain’t funny! I don’t wanna get married. Not yet. She keeps talking about why waste time.” Tom shuddered. “I know life’s short, that’s why I wanna take my damn time!”
It wasn’t nice to laugh, but I did. “Sorry,” I said, and Boris’s tail twitched hard, twice. Punk pointed at it, and laughed harder, sputtering something about my cat ratting me out.
“Look, tell her you can’t think about it while you’re acting sheriff,” I advised, glaring at Boris and his tattle-tail. “Too much stress or something.”
Tom lit up. Poor sucker. “Will she buy that?”
I went for honesty. Damn cat didn’t give me much choice. “No. But she’ll back off and play the martyr card. It’ll give you a week or two.”
“Or,” said Punk, not too helpfully, “she’ll dump you.”
Tom sulked. “Y’all are supposed to be my best friends, not my big fat pains in the ass. I got enough of them already.”
That set us off again. I have no idea why. I’d just decided it was time to go home on a happy note when my cell phone rang. It wasn’t even my shift. Then I realized it was Punk’s cell phone. He was on shift. At least, technically.