Another Big Bust

by Diane Kelly

Mrs. Tucker turned to her friends. “Excuse me a minute.” She lay her cards down and pointed an accusing finger at the others. “Nobody look at my cards while I’m gone.”

  We ventured into the hall, where Zane gave her a quick rundown. “We’re here about your place on Whippoorwill Lane.”

  “Nice place, isn’t it?”

  “Sure is,” he agreed.

  “My husband and I raised our family there. The house is a bit rundown now, but the land’s worth a small fortune. I’m hanging on to it so I can pass it down to my kids.”

  Zane said, “We noticed you’ve got a large metal building out there.”

  “Mm-hm,” Elsie Mae said. “That’s where my husband—God rest his soul— stored his fishing boat. That boat was his baby. Not that he ever had much luck on the lake. Most days he’d come home empty-handed.” Her eyes narrowed. “Why are you asking?”

  “We’re trying to locate some property that disappeared in the area.”

  “Disappeared?” She frowned. “You mean it was stolen?”

  “Yes,” Zane said.

  “What makes you think the stolen property’s in the boathouse?”

  “Nothing in particular,” Zane said, “other than the fact that your place is close to where the property was last seen and the structure would be large enough to contain it. At this point, we’re just trying to rule out some of the possibilities, narrow down our search. We’re wondering if someone’s living at the property.”

  “Sure, we’ve got a tenant,” she said. “Don’t know his name, though. My son handles all of that stuff for me.”

  “How long’s the tenant lived there?” Zane asked.

  “Six months or so,” she said.

  Zane and I exchanged a glance. Six months was more than enough time for the tenant to make a trip down to the DMV to update his driver’s license, and three times as long as the sixty-day grace period allowed under state law. Whoever was living there didn’t seem to want to go on official record at that address.

  I whipped a notepad and pen from my fanny pack. “How can we get in touch with your son?”

  Elsie Mae rattled off her son’s name and phone number without a hint of hesitation. Her mental faculties remained amazingly acute for someone her age. Heck, I had a hard time remembering my own phone number sometimes, and I was nearly sixty years younger than her.

  “You might have a hard time reaching him,” she warned. “He and his wife are on a cruise along the French Riviera for their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Reception could be spotty if they’re at sea.”

  We thanked the woman for her time and returned to the Tahoe, where Zane placed a call to the woman’s son. The call went immediately to voicemail. Zane left a message, asking the man to give him a call, “S'il vous plait.” He ended with “Au revoir.” He slid his phone back into his pocket. “What do you know? I’d thought those two years of French in high school had been a waste of time, but I’ve used it twice today.”

  “Ooh la la.”

  We headed back on Highway 64. As a blue Chevy sedan came rocketing toward us, Zane’s gaze shifted to his dash-mounted radar. The LED readout showed 89. The driver must have spotted the light bar on top of the SUV, because he hit his brakes. The car dipped forward for an instant before leveling out and continuing toward us at the speed limit. The fiftyish man at the wheel stared straight ahead as he passed us, another dead giveaway. Speeding? Who, me?

  “Busted,” Zane said.

  Zane slowed, flipped on his lights, and said, “Hang on!” as he whipped his SUV around on the shoulder to go after the car.

  Hanging on to the handle mounted over the door, I said, “What excuse do you think he’ll give you? Full bladder? Family emergency? Broken radar? Late for a funeral?”

  He cut me a glance. “Want to make it interesting?”

  “Sure. I’ll put five bucks on family emergency.” As the SUV leveled out, I pulled a five-dollar bill from the pouch on my belt and lay it on his dash.

  “My money’s on full bladder.”

  The driver pulled his car over to the side of the road, and Zane pulled up behind him. After matching my $5 bet, he slid out of the SUV, citation pad in hand. He and Zane exchanged a few words, Zane wrote him up a ticket, and the guy was on his way once again.

  When Zane climbed back into the SUV, I said, “Well?”

  “His wife called and said the backyard chickens escaped their coop. He’s on his way home to help her round them up.”

  “Chickens are family, too.” I grabbed the money from the dash and held it up in triumph before stuffing it into my pouch.

  Zane glanced at the clock. “My shift’s up in half an hour. Maybe you should stick around this evening. I could introduce you to the Chatham County nightlife.”

  “Can’t,” I said.

  “Got a date with your boyfriend?”

  “No.”

  His brows rose. “Girlfriend?”

  “No. Got a swing shift to work.”

  “So no date, then.”

  “No.”

  “What about the boyfriend or girlfriend?”

  “Don’t have one of those, either.”

  “But if you were to have one or the other, it would be…?” He cocked his head in question.

  “It would be a boyfriend. A rich one with a Ferrari and a mansion. He’d look like Joe Manganiello, too, and he’d treat me like a queen, do all the cooking and cleaning while I sunbathed by the swimming pool.”

  He cut me some sexy side eye. “Good to know.”

  Flirting on the job was extremely unprofessional of both of us. But it was a heck of a lot of fun, too.

  We drove back to the diner and climbed out of the SUV. Zane walked me over to my bike.

  “You busy tomorrow?” he asked.

  “No.” My pulse accelerated. If the organ were a car, its tires would be squealing. Is Zane going to ask me on a date?

  “When Mrs. Tucker mentioned her husband having a boat, it got me thinking. I’m fairly certain that property backs up to Jordan Lake. We could take my kayak out tomorrow, find out if we might be able to see anything from the backside of the property.”

  So not a date. Dang. Still, it would be a chance both to see him again and to try to catch the car thief or at least eliminate potential suspects. “Not a bad idea. But if we’re going to work this case together, we need to make it official. Have your sheriff contact my captain and request my assistance under our departments’ mutual aid agreement.”

  “You women.” He scoffed. “Always wanting to put a label on relationships.”

  Though I knew he was only trying to push my buttons, I said, “You’re the one always telling me I’m out of my jurisdiction here. I’m only trying to dot my I’s and cross my T’s.”

  “I suppose that beats dotting your T’s and crossing your eyes.” He did just that, rolling his eyes inward to look at his nose and earning himself a well-deserved groan from me. He pulled a business card and pen from his pocket and jotted down his phone number and home address. “Come over around noon. That’ll give you time to catch some shuteye after your shift, but leave us with plenty of daylight hours to explore that part of the lake.”

  “Works for me,” I said. “See you then.”

  He stepped back but stood watching as I slid my helmet on and climbed onto my bike. I started the motor and gave the engine a little rev. As I drove off, he watched me go. In my rearview mirror, I watched him watch me. Nearly collided with the marquee sign, too. How embarrassing!

  Chapter Ten

  Taking a Load Off

  I was four hours into my swing shift and stretching my legs at Southpoint Mall when my phone vibrated with an incoming text. I pulled the phone from my pocket and read the screen. All it said was Thanks. I didn’t recognize the number, and no name popped up. Whoever had sent it wasn’t in my contacts. Hmm.

  I typed back. Who sent this?

  A moment later, a reply came in. Your father.

  My fingers seemed to type of their ow
n accord. Working swing. Time for my dinner break. Meet me at Chili’s on Fayetteville Road?

  Had I really just asked my father to have dinner with me? It was a risky proposition. Things could go really bad. But maybe Trixie was right. Maybe I needed to work through my feelings and maybe, good or bad, confronting my father is what it would take. Then again, maybe I had lost my ever-loving mind.

  Three full minutes passed before his response came in. Ok.

  I returned to my bike, rode it the block or two to the restaurant, and requested a booth where I could see the door. Twenty minutes passed and I wondered if he’d changed his mind, when the door opened and there he was. I raised a hand to get his attention, and he walked over, his steps short and hesitant. He slid quietly into the other side of the booth. A scab had formed over the split lip he’d suffered last weekend, and his cheekbone still bore a faint bruise. But his clear eyes told me he was sober tonight, and his hangdog expression told me he just might feel bad about the way he’d talked to me the preceding weekend, for blaming my mother for his failings.

  I simply stared at him for a long moment. He cast furtive glances at me between toying with the menu and salt shaker.

  Finally, I said, “You’re welcome.”

  His gaze met mine and held. Speaking softly, he said, “I didn’t deserve that bail money.”

  I thought back to the police reports from his childhood. “You’ve gotten a lot of things you didn’t deserve.”

  “I know!” he snapped sitting bolt upright, his posture and demeanor changing in an instant. “I didn’t deserve your mother, and I didn’t deserve you girls. That’s why I left.” He looked away, and I could see a vein in his neck pulsing.

  “No.” I reached across the table and grabbed his wrist, taking it in mine. “That’s not what I meant.”

  He turned to look at me again, and I eased back on my grip. “I meant you didn’t deserve this. These scars.” I raised his hand before gently releasing it. “You weren’t bitten by a dog.”

  He looked down at the scars then up at me, before turning away again. “How do you know?”

  “Police reports.”

  I sat back and mulled over what he’d just said, about not deserving my mother, my sister, and me. Clearly, his upbringing had left him with no sense of self worth. And though he had been a little older than my mother when they’d met, he’d been hardly more than a kid himself. He’d probably been overwhelmed by the responsibilities of fatherhood, by the end of a childhood he’d never even had a chance to experience. He’d acted immaturely and irresponsibly, but it was understandable under the circumstances, even if wrong.

  We shared another long moment of silence before he looked at me again. “I really screwed things up, didn’t I?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But you might be able to unscrew them.”

  His eyes flashed in surprise and remained bright with hope. “Really? You think so?”

  “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t. It might not be a total unscrewing, and it might take a while, but I know Mom and Brie. If you explained and apologized, they’d hear you out.” I leaned forward. “None of us wants to keep holding on to this resentment. It’s been weighing us down far too long, and we’ve been looking for a reason to let it go. Give us one.” He’d probably feel better, too, if we cleared the air. He’d likely been hanging on to a lot of guilt and regret. “Just let me lay some groundwork first. You broke my mother’s heart. She might need to ease herself into the idea.”

  His exhaled a long breath and sat back in the booth, scratching his head in a vain attempt to hide the fact that he’d just wiped a tear from his eye. His voice cracked when he spoke again. “How is she?”

  “Mom? She’s good. Married. Has another kid, a boy, smart as a whip. Still works part-time at the same grocery store.”

  He nodded, chewing his lip. “Her husband, is he good to her?”

  “The best. He helped us out when you left, took us in.”

  He nodded again, closing his eyes for a brief moment. “And Brie?”

  “Tune into WRNR,” I said. “She does the morning traffic reports.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned.” He beamed with pride before looking away again. “I’m glad you two turned out all right.” Though he didn’t follow his statement with despite me leaving you in the lurch, it was clear that was what he meant.

  “So what are you doing these days?” I asked. “Besides picking fights at bars.”

  “Looking for a job. I worked the last six years for a local moving company down in Tallahassee, but they sold out to a bigger outfit and put all the loaders out of work.”

  “Six years, huh? So you were showing up on time? Doing a decent job?”

  “I was. Staying out of trouble, too.”

  Looked like I wasn’t the only one who’d grown up since he’d left.

  He grimaced. “But when I came back here, everything just . . .” He shook his head and let the sentence remain unfinished. I could finish it for him, though. Coming back here had brought up a lot of bad stuff, and he’d fallen back into old, destructive habits.

  “My stepfather said one of his suppliers is looking for a loader,” I said. “You’ve got experience handling boxes. He might give you a shot. But you’d have to pull your weight.”

  Dad sat up straight. “I would.” The hopeful expression on his face said especially now that I’d have a good reason to.

  “All right, then,” I said. “I’ll put in a good word for you.”

  The server arrived and we ordered. Over dinner, my father filled me in on his last twenty years. After running out with Mom’s money, he’d decided it would be better for everyone if he left town and got a fresh start somewhere else. He’d eventually worked his way down to Florida, with stints of a year or two doing odd jobs in various towns and cities in South Carolina and Georgia. He’d never married and had no more children.

  “The longer I was gone,” he said, “the harder it was for me to come back. I figured y’all were better off without me.”

  Truthfully? He was right. We had been better off without him, in the long run. But even though he’d said it, it wouldn’t be nice to agree with him. He’d already figured that out for himself. Besides, just because we’d been better off with Mr. Yancey as our father figure, it didn’t mean we’d come out of things unscathed, that we couldn’t have benefitted from some type of relationship, however limited, with our biological father.

  “Where are you staying here in town?” I asked.

  He named a rundown motel known for cheap rates, cheap hookers, and an occasional bedbug infestation. No wonder he’d been in no hurry to get out of jail. “I went by my mother’s place,” he said. “Another family lives there now. Apparently, she passed on a few years ago. Lung cancer.”

  That’s irony for you. I offered to help pay for an extended-stay hotel, but he wouldn’t have it.

  “You’ve done enough already,” he said.

  We walked out to our motorcycles, and parted ways with my promise to arrange a face-to-face between him, Mom, and Brie. I wasn’t quite ready to hug him just yet. Still, when I climbed back onto my police bike, I felt strangely taller and lighter, unburdened and free. Trixie had been right, as usual. I sent her a text to let her know her guidance had been spot-on. Had dinner with my father. Filled the fuck-it bucket. I followed the message with a kissy-face emoji.

  Chapter Eleven

  The Buck Stops Here, Too

  At half past midnight, a light drizzle began to fall. I rode my police bike back to the station and exchanged it for a cruiser. Riding a motorcycle was dicey enough under the best of conditions, but factor in rain-slick roads and poor visibility and riding the bike would be nothing short of perilous. I might be brave, but I wasn’t crazy.

  I’d just started the engine when my cell phone buzzed with an incoming text. I pulled it from the cup holder and checked the screen. The message was from Amberlyn. Had a great t
ime tonight! He’s got a friend for you.

  After spending the day with Deputy Archer, I’d all but forgotten Amberlyn’s promise to have her new romantic interest rustle up someone for me if her date went well. I supposed I should be excited about the prospect of meeting someone new, but I was more excited about my plans to perform further surveillance with Deputy Archer tomorrow. Maybe we could take our professional relationship to another level, add a personal element. He seemed interested, possibly. Still, I gave Amberlyn a thumbs-up in response. Better hedge my bets, right?

  #

  Luckily, the rain had moved on by the time I woke late Sunday morning. After showering and pulling my hair back in a pony tail, I slid my wallet and phone into the pouch on my belt, kissed Oscar on the cheek, and set out on my Harley. While small, shallow puddles remained along the sides of the road, the sun was out in full force this morning and had dried last night’s rain off the roadways.

  My GPS app led me to a one-story gray brick ranch home off Highway 920 about halfway between the towns of Pittsboro and Bear Creek. While the home was at least five decades old, it appeared to be well-maintained. It had black shutters and white trim, with two black rocking chairs on the front porch. It sat about fifty yards back from the road at the end of a driveway paved with asphalt, and was surrounded by a four-foot chain link fence. Zane’s Sheriff’s Department SUV sat under a metal carport that had been erected off to the side, outside the fence perimeter. A dark blue king-cab Ford pickup sat beside it. The bed contained a bright red two-person kayak. Yellow nylon rope secured the plastic vessel to metal cleats along the top of the truck bed.

  I brought my motorcycle to a stop beside the car port, cut the engine, and removed my helmet. As I climbed off my bike, a big black dog rose from the porch and wagged his tail as he barked a friendly greeting. Rrruff! Ruff-ruff! The dog appeared to be mostly lab but with something shaggy mixed in. Having heard his dog announce my arrival, Zane opened the door and stepped outside. He wore a pair of cargo shorts and tennis shoes along with an untucked black T-shirt that accentuated the long, lean lines of his body.