by Layton Green
Mac chuckled. “Crazy bastard. He won’t have a job in the morning. He must think he has an offer she can’t refuse.”
“What?”
“Don’t you worry about that. I’ve got eyes on him, so I hope you’re playing me straight.”
Kirby swallowed. “Just call the station if he gets close. Don’t try anything yourself.”
“Now why would I do that? What’s he got on the mayor?”
“I don’t know.” Kirby gripped the phone. Explaining everything Preach had discovered wasn’t part of the agreement, and he didn’t want the mayor’s blood on his hands, too. “You might want to put a few guys on her, just in case.”
“You don’t know? Not buying it.”
“Trust me, he doesn’t tell me everything. Not after the leak.”
Mac’s chuckle was dark and throaty. “I don’t trust my own mother, bucko. Not even after I bought her a house.”
The decades-old suicide haunted Preach as he and Ari sped down the long gravel road. What had so devastated Deirdre Hollings that she felt it necessary to take her own life? Preach had seen her photo, the hopeful young eyes. The terrible pain the teenager must have felt, the loss of hope, swelled inside him.
What had happened all those years ago?
He focused on the deserted road snaking through the pines. Ray’s house was five minutes away, and he could feel Ari’s tension radiating out from the passenger seat. A gentle fog coated the night, an ephemeral veil that made everything outside the car seem unformed, as if Preach and Ari were moving inside a soap bubble of reality, creating the world as they moved.
He pressed his lips together. Maybe the mayor hadn’t murdered anyone, but she still hated his guts, and he felt sure she had given the order for Mac’s goons to come after him and Kirby.
Nevertheless, it was his job to protect her.
Headlights appeared in the rearview, the first vehicle they had seen since turning off the main road. Preach tensed; Ray had chosen his house for its isolation.
The lights grew brighter, rushing toward them at a much faster clip than they were traveling. Preach slowed and squeezed the wheel, straining for a glimpse of the vehicle in the mirror. It wasn’t a motorcycle, he was sure of that.
The headlights drew closer, and he realized they belonged to a battered pickup truck with a covered bed. He prayed it was just some redneck kids on a joyride. Just in case, he gripped his gun in his lap and told Ari to get low in her seat. She complied but tilted her head to watch the truck go by. As it passed, she drew a sharp breath. “That’s the same—”
Her words cut off with a scream as the tailgate popped down and something large and brown flew out of the bed, crashing into Preach’s windshield. An animal of some sort. The impact caused him to jerk to the right, into a steep ditch hidden in the darkness. Preach’s head struck the window when the car flipped on its side, and colored spots filled his vision.
The pickup truck screeched to a stop.
52
Kirby sat in his cubicle at the station, lifeless as a wooden doll.
Mac hadn’t had to set him up in the hotel like that. Humiliate him. He’d done it because he knew it would break Kirby down, hit him where it hurt the most. Worst of all, Kirby knew he had enjoyed it.
Now Kirby was in so deep he didn’t know how to get out. Which was Mac’s intention all along, he knew.
Another faithful servant.
He started to slam his fist down, then controlled himself. He couldn’t fail Preach and tip the chief off by making a scene. He had to finish this task, get through the night. When this insane case was over, he would salvage what remained of his career and come clean with Preach. If anyone would understand, it was the detective.
He snorted at his own naiveté. Get a grip, Kirby. You just sabotaged an ongoing police investigation by tipping off a criminal. Not even Preach will forgive you for that.
No, Kirby had dug his own grave. He was a living corpse, covered in dirt and stripped of his future, dragging his family down with him.
Chief Higgins finally gathered her things and closed her door for the night. She had stayed late; it was a few minutes after ten.
Kirby texted Preach to let him know, then slumped in his chair again. How long should he wait before heading to her house? Two more officers left in rapid succession, now that the chief was gone. Kirby was the last man standing, except for dispatch.
He rose to pace the station. A cup of water did nothing to ease the dryness in his mouth. He decided to wait five more minutes, and in the meantime he sidled into the chief’s office, still barely able to believe she had murdered three people and deceived them all so thoroughly. How could she go to work every day and look them in the face?
Probably just like I’m doing.
He didn’t know what he expected to find in her office. A diary detailing her deception? A picture of Deirdre Hollings taped to the underside of her chair? Serial killer action figures?
Just before he left, he slapped on a pair of evidence gloves and riffled through her desk. In the middle drawer, he found the manila folder Preach had been holding when he entered her office. He knew the detective had been keeping things from him, and he couldn’t help taking a peek. Thinking it through, it was odd that the detective had shown new evidence to the chief and not Kirby, when it was the chief who Preach no longer trusted. Maybe the detective was keeping up appearances by pretending to confide.
Kirby opened the folder and flipped through the photos, his eyebrows rising at the increasingly graphic subject matter. The detective had told Kirby about the photos at the Pizza Pub, but he was confused as to why Preach hadn’t just showed them to him earlier, with the chief.
He leafed through the final few, about to put the photos back in the desk when he saw her.
Jalene.
A shiver whisked through him, numbing his limbs and stealing his breath, scooping out a hole in his stomach. He imagined it was the sort of shudder people felt just before they died, a last gasp of mortality as their soul slipped into the ether and left the body to fall away, a discarded husk.
His throat constricted as he pawed through the rest of the photos, separating the ones of his sister and ripping them to shreds. He let the rest of the photos fall to the floor, and then stood in a daze, out of body, his arms slack at his sides.
Jared didn’t have a scholarship, and his sister didn’t have a hernia. Oh no, not at all.
Thank goodness!
She was just a little bit tender.
His displaced energy bounced back, hitting him like a drug. He started to overturn the chief’s desk in a fit of rage but stopped with his hands gripping its edge. Not from fear of reprisal but because he realized how futile it was. How useless.
And why bother with useless acts when he could do something that would actually address the situation? He had never felt so logical in his life. Yes, there was something he could do.
Something that would restore his sister’s honor, and speak for voices unheard.
Something that would matter.
After the initial shock of the crash, Preach felt a rush of cold air and heard the sounds of shattering glass, followed by heavy footsteps on the pavement, and an engine idling somewhere off to the side. He smelled cigarettes, a foul and musty barnyard odor, the metallic scent of spilled blood, and charred rubber from the truck’s sudden stop.
Then came the pain, focused in the side of his head and in his sprained wrist, spreading across his body in nauseating waves.
Sight returned last. His eyes blinked open, and he realized he was nearly upside down, his car stuck at the bottom of a wide ditch. A dead deer was sprawled on the ground in front of the car. Ari was slumped in the passenger seat, eyes closed, blood trickling across her forehead and covering her face and arms. He couldn’t even tell if she was alive.
A familiar black beard appeared in a jagged hole in the driver’s side window. Preach saw the shadowy outlines of more figures in the background.
&n
bsp; “Howdy, Detective,” Mac said, squatting down to talk. “Pity ’bout that deer. Must have come up out of nowhere.”
“Ari,” Preach managed to croak. He reached for his weapon with one hand and the seatbelt buckle with his other. If he could only get free, he could scramble out of the window.
Mac stuck a black handgun in his face. “Huh-uh.”
Preach looked up, gasping through the pain. “Call an ambulance. She could die.”
“You best be worrying about yourself.”
Mina strode out of the gloom in a calfskin jacket, leaned halfway through the window, and, with Mac’s gun in Preach’s face the entire time, plucked the detective’s gun and cell phone out of the car. After she managed to yank the passenger door halfway open, Mina rummaged through Ari’s pockets and felt all around her seat. “No phone,” she said.
Mac grunted. “Good enough. She ain’t coming to, and there’s no one around if she did.”
“You’ve got it all wrong,” Preach said, in desperation. “The mayor’s life is in danger! Leave us here and go help her. I know you need her.”
“It’s gone a little far for that, don’t ya think?”
“This isn’t about us!”
Mac cocked the hammer. “Everything you represent is about you and me, pretty boy. Fuck you and the privileged horse you rode in on.”
“Are you insane? Call an ambulance! I’m a police officer.”
“Can’t argue with that. If you survived, I’d be in a big old heap of trouble. Tell you what. I’m here because I’m guessing you found those blackmail pictures. Give me any copies you made, and I’ll let the girl live. Lie to me, and I’ll come back for her.”
Preach thought fast. Mac must be depending on an accomplice at the police station to snatch the originals out of evidence. He glanced at Ari and balled his fists. He didn’t have a choice. “They’re inside the stove on my porch.”
Mac made a call on his cell, Preach guessed to someone on standby at his house. Mac looked satisfied when he hung up the phone. “Just the one set?”
“I didn’t have time for anything else.”
He shoved the gun in Preach’s face. “If you’re lying—”
“That’s it. I swear. Now drag her out.”
Mac clicked his tongue, then winked at Mina. “Burn it down, girl.”
“You promised!” Preach roared. “Let her go!”
Mina popped the gas tank, lifted a plastic jug off the ground, and started dousing the car and the grass around it. The stench of gasoline was unmistakable, and it brought him back to Ricky’s garage, all those years ago. The screams, the flames, Ricky beating himself in vain.
Preach reached for the seat buckle but couldn’t get it to release. The sudden movement made him dizzy, and Mac chuckled at the effort.
Mina dropped the jug and flicked her thumb against her cigarette lighter, eyes eager as they studied the flame.
“I’m begging you to take her out of here,” Preach said. He couldn’t watch Ari burn. Not her. Not again. “She hasn’t seen a thing.”
“That’s real sweet-like,” Mac said. “But she’s had her chances, too.”
Mina dropped the match, igniting a sizzling flame in a wide swath along the ground. Preach bellowed and made a grab for the gun, but Mac swatted his hand away and struck him in the temple with the butt of the weapon. Preach lost consciousness as the fire roared to life.
53
Kirby parked outside the mayor’s house, right next to a Ford pickup with two of Mac’s men inside. They nodded as Kirby passed, assuming he was acting on Mac’s orders from the boss.
Dark patches encroached on the edges of Kirby’s vision. He parked the car with a rancid taste in his mouth, trying to shake off the roar in his head. Swallowing over and over, he walked down the driveway and rang the doorbell, somehow keeping it together until Rebecca Worthington opened the door, her eyes on his badge. “Can I help you?” she asked.
“Do you have a minute, Ma’am?” Kirby’s eyes flicked to the truck. “I’m Officer Kirby. Mac sends his regards.”
She frowned and let him inside, closing the door behind him.
“Where’s your family?” he asked. Speaking took effort, as if a vulture were perched inside his chest, squeezing his heart with its talons.
“At the lake house for the weekend.” Her eyes narrowed. “What’s this about? I wasn’t told you were coming.”
Kirby almost laughed out loud. What’s this about, he found himself muttering.
“Officer Kirby! What are you doing at my house at eleven p.m.?”
He looked down at the floor, felt the muscles along the sides of his neck start to twitch. When he looked up, his hands had balled into fists, and the tone of his voice was pleading, begging her to tell him the pictures were fake, that none of it was real. “You turned her into an animal,” he whispered.
“Excuse me?”
It took her a few seconds, but he knew the instant she figured it out. Her eyes pinched at the corners and then widened, recognized the narrow face and chestnut-colored skin.
And in that moment, he knew it was true, all of it, and his last shred of hope for a different future slipped away.
She tried to conceal her surprise. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. You’d better start explaining—”
He backhanded her across the face. “I saw the photos.”
She stumbled, blood seeping from the edges of her mouth. She looked at him with almost comical surprise, then drew up straight. With icy calm, she said, “So how much do you want? I’ll be paying for her twice, I suppose.”
He stalked toward her, slowly, and she took a step back. “We didn’t force her, you know,” she said. “We made her an offer and she accepted.”
“Shut up!” he screamed, whipping out his gun and raising it to eye level. “She had no choice. She did it to save her son. My nephew.” He shook the gun at her, spittle flying out of his mouth. “So you shut up!”
The mayor swallowed. She was backed against a wall. “I committed no crime,” she said, her voice a near-whisper. “You can’t release those photos.”
He took another step forward. “Release them?” he said, in disbelief. “I destroyed them.”
“I don’t understand. So why are you . . .” She trailed off as she looked in his eyes and understood. Sudden terror distorted her face. “You’re a police officer,” she said, trying to firm her voice. “If you don’t leave my house this very instant you’ll be relieved of your duties. Stripped of your pension. Then where will your sister be?”
If Kirby hadn’t sold out to Mac, maybe a call to reason would have prevailed. But it was all too much. He had no future. Not only that, but he heard something in the mayor’s voice when she mentioned his sister, a lack of empathy even when staring down a gun, that told him Jalene was nothing to her but a thing to be exploited.
Kirby had become a police officer because he needed to pay his bills and the department was hiring. While he had never believed in the system, he did share a deep-seated interest in one principle with his fellow boys in blue.
Justice.
An image from the photo of his sister dressed as a dog flashed through his mind, the one with the mayor laughing into her hand as his sister was violated by two men. Jalene’s eyes flat and barren, stripped of humanity.
“I don’t think I’ll be getting a pension,” Kirby said, in a thick-tongued voice.
He felt giddy, almost drunk, when he pulled the trigger.
54
Preach woke in a hospital bed with bleached November rays peeking through the blinds. He was lying on his side, facing a clock on the wall beside the window. 8:47 a.m.
Why was he still alive?
The events of the night before were still vivid, as if no time had passed and he was still trapped in the car. He shuddered and rubbed sleep out of his eyes, then shifted to his back and saw Chief Higgins sitting beside the bed.
His hands tensed under the sheet. He scrambled to a sittin
g position. A stabbing pain shot through his wrist, and his head felt as if someone was drilling a hole into it.
The chief’s hands were clasped in her lap. “Good morning, sleepyhead.”
“Where’s Ari,” he croaked. His throat was as dry and rough as a cat’s tongue.
The chief twisted the lid off a bottle of water and handed it to him. He wouldn’t have accepted anything unopened, but he drank half the bottle and repeated the question. The chief’s eyebrows lifted in approval. “She’s a brave one, isn’t she?”
Is, not was. His heart leapt. “She’s alive?”
The chief looked confused, then her face softened. “You poor thing. Of course you don’t know, do you?”
The chief’s demeanor, the whole Zenner-than-thou attitude, infuriated him. He wanted to twist her arm behind her back and march her through the streets, expose her for what she was. But she didn’t know that he knew, and he had to keep it that way for at least a few more hours, until he could contact Internal Affairs and set things in motion.
Unless the chief did know, and she’d come to the hospital to take matters into her own hands. The thought chilled him. She probably wouldn’t kill him in the hospital, but maybe she planned to take him out of there, then drug him on the way to the station.
That, he thought grimly, wasn’t going to happen.
He uncovered his hands in case he needed to move quickly. His senses on high alert, he decided to find out what he could about the night before.
“Tell me,” he said.
“Would you like some coffee first? Tea?”
“No.”
She lifted her own tea off the bedside table. “Ari was conscious the whole time. After the crash, she said you didn’t answer when she called your name, and when she saw Mac approaching the car and you finally woke up, she decided to play dead.”
“I must have blacked out when my head hit the window,” he murmured. “Go on.”
“Before you came to, she turned her phone off and shoved it in her underwear. Once Mac left, she managed to drag you out of the car and call 911.”