“He had a gun,” Friar said, half-dazed.
“Who had a gun?” Dani asked.
“I don’t…Some fella…Stopped to fetch a coffee from the store down the way, and thought I should come by…He was just standing there…He had a gun, Dani.”
Dani gave him her best reassuring grin. “Nola? Luna? Are they…”
“Nola took out the other fella…” He paused as he relived the shooting in his mind yet again. “He had a gun, Dani. I wouldn’t have shot otherwise. I swear…”
She nodded. “Get home. Get some rest. We’ll get an official statement back at the station this afternoon.”
He hung his head and repeated in a mumble, “He had a gun.”
Dani and Spivey left him to grapple with his guilt and made their way through a small crowd of motel guests gathered around the scene. The pudgy, the still drunk, the heavily tattooed—every brand of cracker was anxious to get a look at the man the fat deputy had shot.
Dani had conflicted emotions seeing Randle examining the body. She hated him for walking out on his job the day before, and simultaneously hated him for having the nerve to show up to do his job when they really needed him, like nothing had happened.
Randle acknowledged her presence with his usual charm and sarcasm. “Oh, good. The little deputy is here to save the day.”
Ignoring him she asked, “You find the gun?”
Randle held up the 9mm at the handle with his gloved hand. “Fucker was ready for a battle. Kevlar vest. Nine mil. Six clips on his belt. He was ready for some shit, son.”
“ID?”
Randle shook his head. “Nothing. Not on him. Not in the truck they arrived in. Fucking thing doesn’t even have plates or a VIN number.”
“They?” Spivey asked.
Randle stared at him cockeyed. “I see you brought the fucking driver.”
Dani maneuvered around Randle to get into Nola’s room. There she spotted her deputy consultant stooped over another dead cracker. “You okay?”
Nola looked over her shoulder before saying, “Fine. Dumbass killed himself.” She showed Dani the bowed, bloody blade of the knife. “Karambit design. Great for combat, and unfortunately for him, it’s particularly useful for penetrating Kevlar.” She stood up. “No ID, but he’s sporting a few misspelled tattoos that should be easy to run down. Your boys, Kenny and Step, have already come and gone. They say they got a tattoo artist or two that might point us in the right direction.”
Luna turned in the bed but remained fast asleep.
“She slept through the whole thing,” Nola said. “Doctor gave her something to knock her out.”
“So you haven’t gotten anything out of her?” Spivey asked, sounding more than a little indignant.
Nola scowled his way. “You wanna try that again with less of a fuck-you attitude?”
“No,” Spivey said. “I don’t. Fuck you is exactly what I was going for.”
She pointed the blade of the knife directly at him. “Remind me again what happened to the suspect you were in charge of questioning…”
“What happened was I wasn’t allowed to question him…”
Dani shouted them both down. “Shut up! Everybody just shut the fuck up!” She gave the silence a few seconds to settle in before she added, “We’ve got a much bigger problem to deal with.”
“Yeah,” Spivey said, “what’s that?”
“How in the hell did they know Luna was here?”
Chapter 56
His debauchery had a purpose. Harley knew the darkness in men, real men. Men who didn’t give a shit about political correctness and diplomacy. Men who knew that the corpses of their enemies formed the only lasting foundation for peace. Men who knew that power was useless without brutality.
These were the kind of men Harley had surrounded himself with. He had built the militia up slowly, finding more and more affable savages along the way. He found if he fed their dark sides, they pledged their lives to the cause more easily.
With this latest group of recruits, he had true soldiers. Hard men who were totally devoted to their master general, and on this day of their graduation from recruit to full-fledged members, he amped up the depravity.
The working girls from Vegas did not make the trip. Instead, the men were to be entertained by the mothers and daughters of the immigrant class, the illegals who had set their country on a course of ruin.
As the women were escorted in, hands bound, hoods over their heads, Harley gave his men one last instruction before he sat upon his throne to watch the carnage. “Bury the trash when you’re done with them, gentlemen.”
Chapter 57
The women took charge. Luna, having finally awoken and found a stream of lucidity, was moved to the sheriff’s department where Dani felt she was safer. The men were dismissed. Given what Luna had been through, a male presence would do nothing to make her feel more at ease. This was Dani and Nola’s ballgame now.
They didn’t bombard Luna with questions. They set her up in the break room and fed her one of Rafe’s cheeseburgers. The battered woman ate it with increasing vigor. It was the first solid food she’d had in weeks, maybe more. She couldn’t be sure.
The conversation was casual at first. It was a man’s world, and that’s why it was so fucked up, that sort of thing. It seemed to Nola and Dani that the only time they’d ever felt really threatened in their lives was at the hands of a man. They both agreed they felt more at risk from a man than they did from any disease the media told them to be afraid of.
Luna followed the conversation at first without participating. She soaked in every word until her cheeseburger was gone, and then she added, “Duck was a good one. My husband. Never laid a hand on me.” She said this with the look of a woman longing to find a way to live her life backward, to go back to the time she’d had her Duck.
Dani added, “They ain’t all bad, I suppose. But when they are bad, they are fucking awful.”
Luna nodded in response and choked back a tear.
Nola leaned in close to her. “We can make them pay, Luna. Dani and I, we’re on your side.”
Luna effortlessly shifted from a nod to a shake. “They’s too many of them.”
“There’s always gonna be too many of them,” Dani responded. “That don’t mean we can’t make them pay like Nola said.”
“My dog…” Luna started but stopped when Dani placed Mac’s ATF ID in front of her.
“What happened to this woman?” Dani identified her as a woman on purpose. Calling her an agent would have removed the feelings of guilt from Luna that the deputy was hoping to tap into.
“I don’t know…My dog…You gotta check on my dog…”
“Fuck the dog,” Nola snapped.
Luna snapped back. “My dog…Check on my dog!”
Dani tried to calm things down. “I’ve been to your trailer, Luna. There is no dog. There’s no evidence of a dog. No dog bowls, no leash, nothing.”
“I have a dog! We had a dog!”
Nola and Dani glanced at each other.
“We?” Dani asked.
With a shaky hand, Luna pointed at the ATF ID. “We. We had a dog. Mac gave it to me. She called me from…She got me a dog.”
Nola considered her statement. “Wait a minute, wait a minute…Are you saying that you and Mac were…”
“We had a dog,” Luna said, cutting her off. “Jack Spivey.”
Dani cocked an eyebrow. “What about Jack Spivey?”
Exasperated, Luna said, “That was our dog. Jack Spivey. Mac named him. After a friend or something.”
Chapter 58
Dani hung up the phone with Spivey. The fact that there was a dog that shared his name in a kennel in Chattanooga barely piqued his interest. Giving a dog to a woman she was in a relationship with was Mac’s signature move. She’d given a half dozen other lovers the same gift, although she had never made any of them Jack’s namesake before.
It took some work, but Dani finally managed to convince Spivey th
at, at the very least, having the dog could help Luna relax and provide them with more details about what happened to Mac.
Putting the phone back in its cradle, Dani sat and processed what they knew so far. It amounted to scattered facts and events that added up to jack shit.
The door to the station opened and Otis shuffled in. He was sporting two-day-old beard growth and dark, heavy bags under his eyes.
He was followed inside by Randle, who had been changing the oil in his cruiser.
Dani hurried to him. “Laura? Is she okay?”
Otis shuffled past her. “No, she’s not okay. She’s in a coma.”
“But she’s alive?” Dani said. “That’s what I meant.”
“She’s alive.”
He disappeared into his office.
“Need some coffee, Otis?” Randle asked.
Otis didn’t respond.
Nola stepped out of the holding cell area as Dani and Randle walked to the doorway of Otis’s office. Neither deputy made an attempt to enter the sheriff’s domain.
“We’re making headway on the shooters,” Dani said. “We got a good idea of how many there were and what kind of training…”
Otis emerged from his office carrying the bottle of whiskey he kept hidden in the bottom drawer of his desk. He stopped as something in his peripheral vision caught his eye. It was Nola. He only took a second to look her over before he continued toward the front door of the station.
Dani and Randle didn’t try to stop him. Confounded, they remained frozen in their tracks until he exited the building.
It was Randle who eventually followed after him.
“Leave him be,” Dani said.
“I know that look, Deputy,” Randle said without breaking his stride. “That’s a man with something stupid to check off of his to-do list. He could’ve gotten a bottle of whiskey anywhere.”
“What’re you saying?”
“I’m saying he keeps that bottle in the same drawer he keeps my daddy’s old service revolver. You check that drawer and my guess is you’ll find it ain’t there.”
Dani thought about checking the drawer but she didn’t have to. She knew Randle was right. “Follow him. Let him have his space, but make sure he don’t get himself in trouble.”
Randle thought about cussing her out for telling him what to do, but he had a desperate man carrying a bottle of whiskey and a gun to follow.
Chapter 59
Spivey arrived at the kennel in Chattanooga, still not convinced he was going to leave with anything more than a flea-bitten mutt.
The kid behind the counter was a chipper little fuck, and Spivey couldn’t understand why. The place smelled like a dog-shit factory with a little piss and wet fur mixed in for good measure.
When Spivey told the kid he was there about a dog named Jack Spivey, he felt weird as shit.
The kid nearly jumped for joy. “Jack Spivey? Man, I love that crazy dog! So, wait…That makes you…”
Spivey raised an eyebrow. “Jack Spivey.”
The kid snapped his fingers. “That’s it. The lady who dropped him off said Jack Spivey would be coming to pick up Jack Spivey. She paid a shitload…oops, I mean a butt-load of money up front.” He picked up the phone and clicked the intercom system. “Attention, people. Jack Spivey is here to pick up Jack Spivey. This is not a drill. I repeat this is not a drill.” He laughed to himself and said to Spivey, “We’ve kind of been obsessing over the Jack Spivey–Jack Spivey thing. I mean, it’s cool, but it’s kind of weird, too. No offense.”
Jack nodded. “Weird’s the word for it.”
A bevy of workers dressed in scrubs entered the reception area, all anxious to get a look at the man the dog was named after. A girl with shimmering golden locks and a neck tattoo guided a little terrier mix on a leash.
Jack fought the urge to roll his eyes. It had to be a little dog. He wasn’t much of a dog person in the first place, but little dogs really pissed him off for reasons he couldn’t even explain.
The oldest kennel worker, a woman approaching forty, asked the kid behind the desk if he’d given Spivey the envelope yet.
“Nope. Got caught up in the Spivey on Spivey vibe.” He reached under the counter and pulled out a sealed envelope. “The lady said to give you this.”
Jack took it from him. “Thanks.”
“Said you’re supposed to open it before you leave.”
Spivey’s eyes traveled from the little dog to the envelope in his hand. He held it up to the light before tearing it open, out of habit. He pulled out a three-by-five index card that simply said, Wand the dog. Confused, Spivey showed the kid what the card said. “What the hell does this mean?”
Squinting, the kid read the note and shrugged. “Dog must be chipped.”
“Chipped?”
“Yeah, most people inject their pets with a little microchip that has the owner’s contact information. She must want you to make sure the information doesn’t need to be updated.”
“Can you do that here?”
“Yeah.”
Goldilocks with the neck tattoo lifted the tiny dog onto the counter, and the kid passed a wand over the area at the base of the dog’s neck on his back. In short order, a beeping sound indicated that the chip had been scanned successfully, and almost as quickly, the kid turned the computer screen to Spivey. “This information current?”
Spivey studied the screen. The phone number was his, but he’d never seen the address before. It was a town in Tennessee he wasn’t familiar with. “I’m not sure. I just moved, and I still haven’t committed the address to memory. Can you print that off?”
The kid considered his request briefly before he hit the print icon on the screen. After a few awkward moments of staring at Spivey in silence while the printer spit out the information, he handed the still-warm sheet of paper to Spivey. “I’m pretty sure that was the address she had me mail a note to.”
“A note?”
The kid leaned across the counter. “She gave me a hundred bucks to mail a note for her.”
“Note? What did it say?”
The kid shrugged. “I didn’t read it. The lady was nice enough to give me a hundred dollars. I figured reading the note would’ve been in bad taste. But it must have been about some kind of surprise for her boyfriend. She wrote the note on a piece of scrap paper she had in her pocket and then gave me a hundred dollars to mail it. I’m not really supposed to…”
“What makes you think it was a message for her boyfriend?”
“Because as soon as he went outside to have a smoke, she started writing the message.”
“He was with her? Here?”
“Yeah…”
“What did he look like?”
“Oh, shit. I didn’t bust her did I? I mean, she was a super nice lady…”
“What did he look like?”
“He…I don’t know. Kind of tall. Skinny, but with muscles and shit. Brown…or kind of brown hair. He had some sick ink on his forearms. That’s about all I remember. I mean, he was a major asshole if that helps.”
Spivey handed the kid a fifty-dollar bill for the information and turned to exit.
“Hey,” the kid said.
Spivey looked back at him leaning against the half-open glass door. “What?”
“You’re forgetting Jack Spivey.”
Spivey hid his look of disdain and took the leash from Goldilocks.
The two Jack Spiveys exited the kennel, both unsure of the other.
Chapter 60
“My boy got took,” Luna said as she watched the mommas escort Sarah to Dani’s desk.
Nola handed her a cup of coffee and the two observed the commotion at Dani’s desk from a well-worn sofa at the back of the station. “Took?”
“Kilt.” Luna brought her trembling hand to her lips and sipped from the cup.
“Oh.”
“Cousin done it.”
“Your cousin killed your son?”
Luna nodded. “Said it was an accident
. Left his gun out in the open. On the kitchen table. My boy got ahold of it. He wasn’t but four.”
Nola eyed Luna’s drained expression. “You sound like you don’t think it happened that way.”
“I know it didn’t. Cleve shot my boy on purpose. Got drunk, is what he did, and he gun my boy down on account of his troubled ways. He was autistic, my boy. He could be a handful. You had to know how to deal with him. Cleve didn’t know how, nor did he care to know how.”
Nola let Luna observe Dani interacting with Sarah and the mommas for a few seconds before asking, “Cleve see time?”
Luna chuckled. “Cleve got a fucking party is what Cleve got. Gun folks got him a lawyer, paid off the police, the judge, every-fucking-body. They even set up a website for him to collect money on account of his bad luck.” She turned to Nola, tears welling up. “That’s why God sent me Mac. To make Cleve and every one of them motherfuckers who give him money…to make them all pay for acting like my boy’s life didn’t matter.”
Nola, not knowing how to respond, gave a slight smile instead.
“You gotta pick up where she left off, Deputy.”
Nola thought of correcting her by telling her she was just a deputy consultant, but she quickly decided it didn’t matter. She returned her attention to the small gathering at Dani’s desk, and wondered how she had found herself in such a deep hole of shit. What’s more, she wondered why she wanted to dig it deeper.
Chapter 61
“Death in the name of freedom,” Harley said from his perch in front of his residence. His men, hungover, disconnected from reality, stood slump-shouldered before him. “That is the only sacrifice sanctioned by God. That is the supreme sacrifice. That is the divine sacrifice.”
His spiritual adviser, Tawny, stood next to him, affirming the master general’s statement with his hands raised and palms out. He was Harley’s antenna to the Almighty.
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