Rude Awakening

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Rude Awakening Page 2

by Susan Rogers Cooper


  My cousin Earl, gone now for some twenty-odd years, was a friend of Dalton’s daddy. I was in grammar school when they were hanging out, but I remember the elder Pettigrew well. Dalton is definitely a clone of his daddy: big and blond and not very bright; Dalton’s daddy should have been a football player but was too clumsy to do much. His name was Peter Pepperidge Pettigrew, known throughout the high school as ‘Threepee’. After high school he went away from Longbranch, coming back about a year later with wife, Clovis, and the first of the three Pettigrew children: Hawke, another clone of his daddy. Unfortunately, the middle child was a girl, Mary Ellen, and she, too, took after Threepee. That boy had some serious genes.

  Seeing me, Gladys said, ‘I’ve been telling her Dalton doesn’t come on duty til Monday!’

  ‘That so?’ I said.

  ‘That’s what the roster says!’ Gladys said, staring daggers at me and shoving the roster under my nose. Seeing as it was a Friday, and Gladys had initiated ‘casual Fridays’ a couple of years back, she was attired that day in stretch denim pants that covered what my nephew Leonard said was called ‘junk in the trunk’, which Gladys had a serious amount of, and a long-sleeved denim shirt that Gladys herself had appliquéd with multicolored spring flowers, yellow-and-black bumblebees and pink and purple butterflies. Her champagne blonde hair was curled in a tight new perm and her cheeks were as rosy as Max Factor could make ’em.

  I pushed the roster back a bit, so I could see what she was shoving under my nose, and looked. It definitely said Dalton was off today, through the weekend and not on again until Monday morning.

  I showed the roster to Clovis Pettigrew. ‘That’s what it says,’ I said.

  ‘Well, that’s not what my boy told me!’ she said, hands on hips, scowl on face. Actually, I’ve never seen her face look anything other than how it did now, so maybe it wasn’t a scowl, maybe that was just the way her face looked. Or maybe she’d been scowling for so long, the wind changed and she now wore it permanently, just like my mama always warned me.

  ‘He said he was coming in to work this morning?’ I asked, picking up real quick like, which is what a duly elected sheriff should do.

  ‘He left yesterday evening, saying he had to work the night shift. Then when he didn’t come home this morning like he was supposed to, I got to calling his cell phone. And instead of talking to me, there was a message saying he had to work straight through to Monday. Some undercover thing!’ Clovis said.

  Uh oh, I thought. We don’t do undercover, and even if we did, I’d never use Dalton for such a thing. The boy wouldn’t be able to persuade a two-year-old that he was anything other than a cop.

  ‘Ma’am,’ I said to Dalton’s mama, ‘let me look into this and I’ll get right back to you. I’ve got your number and I’ll give you a call.’

  Arms back across her chest. ‘No, I don’t think so, Sheriff,’ she said. ‘I think I’ll just wait here until you produce my son.’

  ‘That’ll be kinda hard, Miz Pettigrew,’ I said, thinking fast. ‘With Dalton being undercover and all, I don’t want to blow his cover by calling him out too soon. If there’s something you need me to pass on to him, I’d be glad to.’

  Her hands moved to her hips as she studied me. ‘If you get my boy in trouble with this undercover business, I’ll have your badge. You understand me, Sheriff?’

  I wasn’t sure what she was gonna do with my badge, but I nodded just the same. ‘Let me get a message to him,’ I said, ‘and I’m sure he’ll get a chance to get back to you later today.’

  ‘Just tell him to call me. That’s all.’ With that, Clovis Pettigrew swung around and marched out the door and Gladys and I both breathed a sigh of relief.

  Turning to Gladys, I asked, ‘Where’s Dalton?’

  ‘Hell if I know!’ she said, which was one of the very few times I’d ever heard her use a cuss word. But Clovis Pettigrew has that effect on people.

  ‘Find him!’ I said.

  ‘Where? He’s obviously not at home and he sure as heck isn’t here! He doesn’t go any place else!’ Gladys said.

  She had a point. I went back to my office and called up my second-in-command, Emmett Hopkins, who was at home today, since he’d be covering the weekend. I woke him up.

  ‘You know where Dalton is?’ I asked him.

  ‘Dalton?’ he repeated, sounding sleepy, which made me feel a little bit guilty, but it was a measure of my manhood how quickly I got over it.

  ‘Yeah. We can’t seem to find him. You send him out on something?’ I asked.

  ‘Uh uh,’ Emmett said. ‘Haven’t talked to Dalton since yesterday morning.’ There was a small silence, then he said, ‘But he did seem excited about something. When I asked him what, he just said he had a busy weekend coming up.’

  ‘Well, according to his mama he left there yesterday evening, saying he was going undercover and wouldn’t be back until Monday,’ I told Emmett.

  ‘Say what?’ Emmett said. I could hear the bed covers rustling as he got himself up.

  ‘You heard me,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, I heard you, but that’s bullshit,’ Emmett said.

  ‘I know that. I wouldn’t use Dalton for anything undercover. Even if we had anything we needed somebody to go undercover for. I’m thinking he lied to his mama.’

  ‘No shit,’ Emmett said. ‘Dalton lied to his mama. That’s not like him.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ I said.

  ‘So where is he?’ Emmett asked.

  ‘Hell if I know.’ I hung up without a goodbye and sat at my desk thinking. Dalton had today and the weekend off, told his mama he wouldn’t be back until Monday and he wasn’t due back here until then. So why was I upset? Dalton was a grown man and if he decided to get away from his mama for a day or two, who could blame him? He’d talked a while back about wanting to get married. He’d said at the time that he didn’t have a girlfriend or anything, but that had been a while ago. Didn’t mean he didn’t have one now. So maybe he was with a woman. That was a good thing. At least to me – doubt his mama would see it that way, though.

  I couldn’t help thinking back to when Dalton first came on with the sheriff’s department. My predecessor, Elberry Blankenship, was sheriff then and him and his wife went to the Church of Christ, where Clovis Pettigrew had dragged her children twice a Sunday – every Sunday of their lives.

  At that time, Dalton was twenty-two years old and had held five jobs. Because of his size, when he graduated high school, Bodine’s Feed & Grain hired him right up, knowing he was big enough and strong enough to throw around the huge sacks of feed and other stuff Bodine’s Feed & Grain sold. That is, until they found out he was very politely not selling deer feeders, deer licks or the very expensive (the prize that kept Bodine’s Feed & Grain in the black every year) deer blinds handmade by Lester Bodine, Sr himself. Dalton just didn’t believe in shooting animals. He got fired.

  Rigsby’s Five & Dime fired him because he couldn’t seem to get the price gun to work; and his table-waiting days at the Longbranch Inn concluded after he spilled a cup of coffee, two eggs over easy, grits and biscuits all over His Honor, the Mayor. There was a job at some place over in Bishop that I know didn’t last too long, and one in Taylor County that ended in him being asked not to come back that way anytime soon.

  It was a grave Clovis Pettigrew who practically begged the sheriff to hire Dalton after the retirement of Dale Morgan, who had dropped dead two days after retirement, which goes to show you either don’t retire period or you retire real early so you can enjoy it. Anyway, with great disquiet, the sheriff hired Dalton, mostly for answering the police band radio, which he took to real well. When the sheriff took him out to the shooting range, and gave his own personal gun to him to shoot, he saw that not only was Dalton a crack shot, he didn’t shoot a single civilian that popped up on the course. So he sent Dalton up to Oklahoma City for training and got him back six weeks later with a C average in everything but the shooting range, where he made straight A+s. He
’s been a sworn-in Prophesy County Deputy Sheriff ever since.

  I stopped my ruminating and got back to my report, with my last thought on Dalton, ‘I hope the boy gets laid.’

  CHARLIE SMITH

  Charlie Smith liked his new job as police chief of Longbranch, Oklahoma. It beat the hell out of being a homicide detective on the Oklahoma City force. Oklahoma City might not be the biggest city in the country – hell, in the southwest – but it did have its fair share of killings, and although most of them were smoking-gun killings, Charlie didn’t believe in misdemeanor murder like a lot of his fellow officers. In fact, Charlie decided to leave the big city force before he got jaded, which was something he saw a lot in his fellow detectives. He wanted to move somewhere where not only was murder a rare thing, but it was also an important thing; a thing that made people sit up and take notice, cry on their neighbor’s shoulder and demand justice, no matter who was the victim or the perpetrator.

  So he was glad he’d moved to Longbranch, and so were Beth, his wife, and their two girls, Courtney, age nine, and Isabel, age six. The girls loved their new schools and their new teachers – where there had been thirty-three to a class in Oklahoma City, here in Longbranch it was more like 20/1, odds very much in his girls’ favor. And Beth, well, Beth just loved it. She’d joined the Methodist Church, something she hadn’t been part of since she was a kid, and had just about talked him into at least going. Charlie thought he might talk to the pastor first; he had a few thousand questions on the subject before he let himself get too involved. But best of all, now they were talking about maybe having another kid: that boy Charlie’d been wanting. Well, practice makes perfect, he thought with a grin.

  Charlie Smith had what his wife – and other women, truth be known – called a ‘shit-eating grin’, or, to put it more delicately, a ‘cat-ate-the-canary’ kind of smile. His teeth were a bit crooked, which somehow added to the charm started by his light brown, almost blond hair, shiny green eyes and tall, lanky, ‘I’m a cowboy’ body and stride.

  He pulled up to the pristine little three-bedroom, two-bath, two-car-garage house in the Meadowbrook Subdivision. White brick with gray-blue trim, the house had a wide, natural wood front door with beveled glass inlay. The little walkway up to the door had two blue pots with an abundance of pansies, and some ivy plants hanging from the little front porch. The yard, he’d noticed, had already been mowed and it wasn’t even April yet. The hedges were trimmed, and the grass next to the driveway had a really nice, enviable one-and-a-half-inch straight edge. Somebody knew his fertilizer, Charlie thought.

  He normally wouldn’t be on a call like this himself, but his boys (and one woman – he wouldn’t say girl, no way, no how) were spread pretty thin, and this looked like a pretty cut and dried accident, from the phone-in. He was wearing his uniform shirt over a pair of blue jeans, which he could do since he was the chief. He liked that perk a lot.

  The ME’s van was already there and the pretty front door was partially open. Charlie rapped on the wood and pushed the door open further, loudly calling out, ‘Chief of Police!’

  ‘Back here!’ came an answer from a voice he recognized as Dr Rose Church, who his friend Sheriff Milt Kovak referred to as ‘the new ME’, or Medical Examiner, but who Charlie just thought of as ‘the ME’ because he’d never met the old one.

  Charlie followed the voice back to the master bedroom. A large room, he noted, with a four-poster king-sized bed, big-ass dresser and mirror and a matching chest of drawers. There was even a lounge chair in a corner, just like he used to see in those old 1940s movies his mother liked to watch all the time. Something with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, something like that.

  He could see Dr Church’s rather large rump sticking out of the bathroom door, but the sobbing he heard coming from the bed stopped him short. The bedclothes were rumpled and a lady sat on the other side of the bed from where Charlie stood. She was facing the bathroom door. She was wearing nightclothes and a bathrobe, and her curly blonde hair was mussed.

  ‘Ma’am?’ he said and the lady turned around. It was then that he saw the bathrobe was draped over one arm, which was in a cast and sling. She was a pretty lady, maybe late twenties, early thirties, with what looked to Charlie like natural blonde hair (he didn’t see any roots so it had to be, he thought), big, wet blue eyes and one of those mouths that instantly give men dirty thoughts from just looking at.

  ‘Yes, Sir?’ she said. He could tell right away that she was a local. There was just a way of talking in this county that pegged him as city-bred the moment he opened his mouth.

  ‘I’m so sorry about your loss.’ Charlie went and sat down on the bed next to her, but as far away as the king-sized mattress would let him. ‘Is it OK if I ask you some questions?’

  The young woman nodded her head and sniffed.

  ‘Your name is Carolina Holcomb?’ he asked, and she nodded her head. ‘And the deceased is your husband, Kevin Holcomb?’

  Her face crumpled up and a sob broke out of her mouth, but she managed to nod her head.

  ‘Can you tell me what happened here, Miz Holcomb?’

  Carolina Holcomb nodded her head once again, took a deep breath and let it out. ‘I was in bed ’cause of my arm . . .’ she said, indicating the sling. ‘I was on pain pills.’

  ‘Can I ask what happened to your arm?’ Charlie asked.

  ‘I was in a car wreck yesterday with my girlfriend. We were going shopping.’

  Charlie nodded. ‘And?’

  ‘You mean today? With Kevin?’ she asked, her pretty face scrunching up again as the tears started up.

  ‘Yes, Ma’am. I’m so sorry to be bothering you about this right now, but I gotta.’

  She sniffled and nodded her head. Charlie reached across her to a box of Kleenex on the bedside table, handing her one.

  She took the offered tissue and thanked him, then sighed. ‘Anyway, I was taking a nap. These pain pills . . . You know?’

  Charlie nodded in agreement.

  ‘When I woke up, I didn’t see Kevin or hear him. He had the day off to look after me. So I called for him ’cause I was thirsty . . .’ She gulped in air. ‘He didn’t answer. And I had to go to the bathroom. The door was closed . . .’

  She leaned against Charlie and began sobbing all over again.

  Dr Church came out of the bathroom, and Charlie gently moved the girl off his shoulder and got up.

  ‘What‘ja got, Doc?’ he asked.

  She shook her head, then nodded for him to follow her back into the bathroom. As subdivision bathrooms go, it was pretty big, but it was still a stretch for Charlie, Dr Church, Dr Church’s assistant and the prone body of Kevin Holcomb.

  Dr Church nodded to a bottle of ammonia on top of the toilet and then to a bottle of bleach knocked over on the floor next to the toilet. ‘Looks like the poor bastard was trying to clean the bathroom.’

  ‘Well, it’s something a man should never do,’ Charlie agreed, ‘but I never thought of it as a capital offense.’

  Dr Church didn’t laugh. Charlie knew that it was one of the reasons Milt didn’t like her much.

  ‘You mix ammonia and bleach together without proper ventilation and it turns into a lethal gas.’ She pointed at the window. ‘He didn’t even bother to open a window or turn on the vent in here. Not that that would do much good. Most of the vents they put in these houses just move the air around in a circle.’

  ‘No shit?’ Charlie said, staring at the vent in the bathroom ceiling. He’d have to check into that when he got home.

  ‘So mixing that stuff killed him, huh?’ Charlie asked.

  ‘Dead as a skunk in the middle of the road,’ answered Dr Church.

  Charlie looked at her, and one corner of her mouth moved a fraction upward. Damn, he thought, I think she made a joke!

  ‘So, you declaring this an accident?’ he asked her.

  Dr Church shrugged. ‘They don’t have a spot on the form for stupidity,’ she said. ‘Gonna have to call it
an accident.’

  DALTON

  Dalton tried lifting his head but it hurt too much. He opened his left eye and peered at his surroundings. There was a Dumpster – a dark blue Dumpster with a bunch of black garbage bags sticking out of it and more on the ground around it. Pavement. The ground was pavement. There were brick buildings. Two of them: one on one side of the pavement and one on the other. One was red brick and the other was kind of orange-colored. He made an executive decision: he was in an alley.

  Dalton started to laugh but it hurt his head even more so he stopped. But still, an executive decision: that was pretty funny. He giggled. He tried lifting his head again and it didn’t hurt quite as much. He rolled over onto his side, lifting himself up slightly on one elbow. Yes, he was definitely in an alley.

  And he wasn’t wearing pants.

  EMIL

  The six months of preparation flew past. There was so much to do, especially when one was motivated, and Dr Emil – excuse me, just Emil Hawthorne (no more medical license, more’s the pity) – was extremely motivated. Some of the favors owed to him took a little encouragement to get a return, but he got those returns. Nobody said no to Emil Hawthorne for long.

  The man that awoke from the coma was a haggard, withered man. His hair and beard were gray, his muscle tone close to non-existent, his face wrinkled and, most unfortunate of all, his penis flaccid. But there were pills for that. All he needed from those favors owed was money. Lots of money. A hairdresser, a gym, a little Botox here and there and some Viagra, and all that was left was a trip to Barneys Co-op.

  When one goes through the process of becoming a psychiatrist, one must go through psychotherapy as part of the training. It was noted by the eminent Dr Stanley Malvern that Emil Hawthorne appeared to lack the ability to accept responsibility for some of his actions. Dr Malvern diagnosed Emil Hawthorne with a personality disorder and recommended that he not be admitted into the psychiatric fellowship he was seeking to join.

 

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