“Brad?” Against all reasonable hope that it wasn’t true, he finally had to admit that his suspicions had been correct.
“No, no, no,” Connie mumbled.
He stood to let the paramedics get close to Connie…and to go arrest Brad McCloskey.
One of the men said, “Busy morning. There’s a big fire out on Sideroad 90. A neighbor called it in. Reported an explosion.”
“Okay, I’ll head out there.”
“No!” Connie said.
Cash spun back around. “Let them help you.”
“Is my mom overdosing?” Austin asked.
“No. She’s just really high.”
“Cash,” Connie called while the emergency personnel strapped her onto the gurney.
“Yeah?” he asked.
“Not Brad.”
“What? But you said it was McCloskey.”
“Mary Lou. Not Brad.”
She might as well have slapped him. Sweet Mary Lou?
“Mary Lou,” she emphatically, like a drunk overemphasizing a point. “I wanted money. She said no. Take drugs.”
Connie tried to blackmail Mary Lou about Austin’s relationship to Brad and Mary Lou had given her meth instead of money?
Human nature and the strange directions it could take never ceased to amaze him.
They wheeled Connie out to the ambulance.
Cash drove Austin to the hospital.
“Austin, I hate to do this to you, but I have to leave for a while.”
Austin looked close to panic.
“I’ll be back to pick you up and then you’ll stay with me. Got it?”
The boy’s shoulders relaxed and he nodded.
Cash squeezed one his thin arms. “I’m with you, Austin. You won’t have to handle this alone.”
* * *
SHANNON SAT AT Janey’s dining room table with her laptop in front of her, scanning the Controlled Substance databases to see who’d been buying the ingredients to make meth.
No one here in Ordinary, as far as she could tell. There were ways around any law, any source of information the DEA came up with, and any criminal might find a way to cheat it.
She transferred to a database that allowed her access to the local pharmacies’ purchase orders.
An hour later, she sat up straight, her heart racing. Bingo! Thank freaking goodness, bingo.
Cash had been right all along. The meth cook was Brad McCloskey.
Shannon’s phone rang.
“Shannon?” Cash was on the other end of the line.
“Cash, we got him. Brad McCloskey.” Her voice hummed with excitement. “You should see what I uncovered.”
“Fill me in when you get here.”
“Get where?”
“I’m at a farmhouse on Sideroad 90.” Compared to her, Cash sounded subdued. “You need to get out here. Now.”
After giving her directions, he hung up. She scooted out to her car and lost no time getting there.
The grounds were covered with fire trucks and cop cars and an ambulance.
And a burned-out RV.
Hallelujah.
The meth lab.
She parked on the driveway and walked to the site. Cash saw her and approached.
“Who’s farm is this?” she asked.
“It belonged to Brad McCloskey’s parents-in-law. They’re both dead now.”
Excitement roared through her. They’d caught the culprit. She grasped his arm. “You were right. He’s been ordering through the pharmacy and cooking it out here.”
“No.”
“No?”
“We were close, but so wrong, too.”
“What do you mean?”
“It wasn’t Brad. It was his wife, Mary Lou.”
“The sweet, conservative, church-going wife?” Oh my God. She’d totally missed that, had not even suspected.
Cash led her to the clearing between the old farmhouse and the still-smoldering RV.
Paramedics were lifting a woman onto a stretcher, facedown, her back badly burned. Her scalp was an angry red where the hair had been singed away.
A car spun crazily into the driveway and sideswiped her car.
“Hey,” she yelled and stepped forward to give the idiot a piece of her mind. Cash stopped her with a hand on her arm.
“It’s Brad.”
“Do you think he was part of this?”
“Mary Lou already said no.”
Brad ran to his wife, close to the edge of control. He was clearly terrified and bewildered. The guy didn’t have a clue what his wife had been up to.
“What happened?” He reached a hand to touch her then pulled it back, realizing how badly hurt she was.
Mary Lou opened her eyes and whispered something.
Brad bent forward to hear her better. One side of her face was mashed onto the stretcher but she managed to speak again.
“So sorry.” Her voice was raw, gritty, her throat no doubt seared by the heat of the fire.
Brad looked from his wife to a paramedic to a firefighter. To the burned RV. “I don’t understand. What happened?”
Cash stepped forward. “There was an explosion in the RV and Mary Lou got caught in it.”
“What was she even doing out here? We don’t use this place. We were going to put it up for sale in the spring.”
“We can discuss it later in my office.”
“Your office? Why?”
“It’s better if we talk about it there.”
“No. I want to know right now. What’s going on?”
Cash sighed. “Mary Lou was making methamphetamines while you were at work. She ordered supplies through the pharmacy.”
“That’s absurd. Mary Lou would never do anything like that. I—”
His face was so struck by a realization that Shannon leaned forward. “What? What are you remembering?”
“She insisted on keeping the books for the store.”
Cash nodded.
“She wouldn’t let me touch them. But meth? That’s— That’s illegal. It’s immoral.” His voice became strident. “Mary Lou wouldn’t do that. She’s a good person.”
“It appears that she did.”
Brad bent over Mary Lou again.
“Why, Mary Lou?”
“Mad about Connie. Wanted leave you. Needed money.”
The paramedics wheeled her toward the ambulance with Brad running alongside. They hit a rock and Mary Lou gasped.
“Careful!” Brad shouted.
“Needed money,” Mary Lou said.
“I would have given you money, even if it was to leave me. I love you, Mary Lou. I would have sold the store.” Brad stopped to catch his breath. “I would have given you anything.”
As she was loaded into the waiting ambulance, tears streamed from the one eye they could see. Thinking of Tom, and whoever else had got hooked on Mary Lou’s meth, Shannon wasn’t stirred by her tears.
She leaned close to Cash. “I have trouble feeling sorry for her.”
“I know what you mean. She isn’t the woman I thought she was.”
“I guess there’s such a thing as limited compassion. I’ll save mine for her victims.”
A moment later, she and the paramedics were gone, with nothing left of them but dust churned up into the air then slowly settling back to earth.
Brad turned away and nearly broke down. “What will happen to her?”
“After she’s recovered from her injuries,” Cash said, “she’ll stand trial.”
Shannon picked up from there. “She’ll be charged with trafficking methamphetamines.”
Brad swiped his hands down his face. “It’s serious, isn’t it?”
“About as serious as it gets.” All of the compassion she couldn’t feel for Mary Lou came through for Brad. Poor guy hadn’t had a thing to do with this. She watched Brad stumble to his car.
“Come on.” She pulled on Cash’s sleeve. “We have work to do.”
They checked the house first. They found only a couple of lab coats for evidence. Nothing else inside the house was used for the lab.
“Looks like she’d done it all in the RV.” They went back outside and studied the burned-out vehicle. “At least there won’t be any contamination left. Here, at any rate,” she amended. “There’ll be a dump site somewhere. We need to find it.”
They walked the grounds until they did.
“What a damn waste of a pretty piece of land.” Surveying empty and soiled containers, Cash shook his head. “Look at this crap. The ground will be contaminated.”
“Yes.” Shannon turned over an empty container with the toe of her shoe. “We need to get it cleaned out before it leaches into the groundwater.”
With a disgusted curse, Cash turned and stomped away.
* * *
CASH DECIDED TO pick Austin up from the hospital later that evening. He had a load of paperwork to do. He’d done a bunch until he figured he couldn’t let Austin wait for him any longer. He’d have to finish up in the morning.
He left Shannon on the phone with the DEA planning the clean-up operation at the farm and headed to the hospital.
He found Austin sitting in the hospital room with his mother. She was sound asleep.
Austin looked up when he entered and the frown disappeared from his face.
“Hey,” Cash said. “Come on. I’ll take you home. Are you hungry?”
Austin nodded.
“You must be starving.”
“Yeah.”
Cash drove him back to Ordinary and parked outside of Chester’s Bar and Grill.
Inside, he led Austin to a booth. Seemed that all he was doing these days was feeding hungry boys—Austin and Jamie.
He needed to fatten Austin up but his first priority was to make him healthy. He wanted him eating more than his usual burgers and fries.
Chester’s wife, Missy Donovan, came to take their order.
He ordered steak for himself, rare. “You think you could eat a steak, Austin?”
“I’ve never had one.”
“Bring a small one for Austin, medium well,” Cash instructed Missy. “What vegetables do you have tonight?”
“Broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, parsnips.”
“We’ll take all of them. Load his plate up.”
“You got it, Cash. What’ll you have to drink?”
“I’ll have a beer.” Only one. He could use a couple, but he was driving. “How about a glass of milk for Austin. Whole, not skim.”
When the food arrived, Austin blinked.
“Dig in.”
“My mom made parsnips once. I hated them.”
“Okay, eat around them.”
Cash popped one of his own into his mouth. It was crunchy on the outside and fragrant with rosemary.
“You have to try one of the parsnips. I don’t know what Missy did to them, but they’re amazing.”
Austin looked dubious, but took a small bite of one, nibbled then nodded. “It’s good.”
He ate the rest of the parsnip and most of the vegetables and steak, but Cash knew he was preoccupied thinking about his mother.
Cash himself was preoccupied. He wanted to talk to Shannon, itched with the need to find out what would happen to them now. Finding that lab had been bittersweet.
What was next for them? He had to wait to find out. He sensed that Austin needed his undivided attention.
Austin put his fork down and asked, “What’s gonna happen to my mom?”
“Keep eating, Austin. I’d say she’s addicted to the meth Mary Lou was giving her.”
“So, like what Shannon was talking about at school at the assembly yesterday?”
“Yes. She’ll need rehab. I phoned around and found an available bed for her in a detoxification program in Billings. While she’s there, you’ll live with me. That okay with you?”
“Yeah. That’s good.”
There was a subject that he had to broach even though he didn’t want to. “There is an alternative.”
“What? The social worker like you said before?”
“God, no. I’m not going to do that to you. I will have to talk to them, but I’m pretty sure they won’t have a problem with you staying with me.”
“I’ll tell them that’s where I want to be and if they make me go someplace else, I’ll run away.”
He raised a hand to stem Austin’s rising anger. “They won’t make you go somewhere else. I’m as certain of that as I can be.”
“Then what’s the other place you were talking about?”
“With your dad. Your real dad.”
“I don’t want to go with him. I want to go with you.” Austin had raised his voice and panic ran through it.
“Okay. If Brad kicks up a fuss, I’ll talk to him. I don’t think there’ll be a problem there. His wife got burned really badly today, so he’ll be with her.”
He put his utensils down on his empty plate and pushed it away.
“I just didn’t know whether you would want to go with him because he’s your dad.”
“I don’t know him and I don’t like him. He thought I was shoplifting. I know you and I like you.” Austin said it as though his word was final and copied what Cash had done with his utensils and plate.
“Can you eat dessert? A sundae?”
Austin nodded and, a few minutes later, ate a strawberry sundae while Cash drank decaf coffee.
They picked up clothes for Austin from his trailer then drove to the convenience store in Monroe and loaded up on groceries.
By the time they got to Cash’s house, Austin was asleep.
Cash left him in the passenger seat and carried the groceries into the house. When he opened the door, Danny and Paddy ran out to greet him.
After depositing the groceries in the kitchen and putting a few things away in the fridge, he walked back outside and headed to the car, whistling for the dogs as he went.
They came running.
“There’s someone here for you, boys.”
Cash opened the passenger door. Paddy jumped inside onto Austin’s lap and licked his face. Not to be outdone, Danny put his long front legs on the seat and licked Austin.
Austin came awake with a jerk. “What?” Then he recognized the dogs and knew where he was. “Hey, guys, what are you doing?” He wiped his mouth and pretended to be grossed out, but Cash knew the truth. The boy was thrilled.
Cash set him up in the small bedroom at the back of the house. Austin fell asleep quickly.
Cash let the dogs out to run some more while he unpacked all of Austin’s clothes and threw them into the washing machine—no telling when they’d been washed last. They smelled sweaty. He picked up the clothes he’d had on from the floor of the small bedroom and closed the door so the machine wouldn’t wake him. The boy was exhausted.
His socks reeked.
When he had the first load running with extra detergent, he called the dogs back in and gave them dinner.
After they finished, he walked down the hall to Austin’s room and opened the door.
Danny and Paddy ran in and jumped onto the bed with the boy. Paddy curled into a ball against his chest and fell asleep in seconds. Danny lay across his legs, all three squished onto a single bed.
When he woke up in the morning, if the dogs were still there, Austin would be thrilled.
After he transferred the laundry to the dryer, he glanced at the clock. Eleven-thi
rty. He walked into the living room and called Shannon. Since they’d found the lab this afternoon, he’d had one underlying question scooting around in his brain. Now that the day was over, he needed an answer.
“Were you asleep?”
“Cash, hi. No. I was getting ready for bed, though. What’s up?”
He brought her up to speed on what was happening with Austin and his mother.
“It’s good of you to take him in.”
“Thanks. Listen, Shannon, I’ve been thinking. What happens now that the meth lab is gone? You’ll be here for a few more days to clean it up. What then? What happens to us?”
“I don’t know.”
“I gotta be honest. I’ve fallen for you hard. I want to live with you.”
“Where, Cash? Here in Ordinary?”
“Yes. What’s wrong with that?”
“It wouldn’t work for me.”
He picked at a piece of lint on the armchair. “So your career is more important to you than I am.” He wasn’t surprised, but he was disappointed. Devastated.
“Don’t put it like that.” Shannon sounded so close, he felt like he could reach out and touch her. He wanted to.
“How should I put it?”
“My job is important, not just to me, but also to the people I protect from scumbags.”
“Can’t someone else do that job?”
“Of course they can, but I have skills. I have drive and a passion for the job. I was born to do it.”
“So, there’s no way we can work this out? You don’t want to even try?”
“I do. As hard as you’ve fallen for me, I’ve got it bad for you. But I don’t think you’ll like my solution any better than I liked yours.”
“What do you mean? That I should leave Ordinary?”
“That would be one way to work it out.”
“You would make a commitment to me if I left Ordinary and followed you and your job around?”
“Yes. I never thought I would say that to a man, but yes, I would commit to you, Cash. I love you.”
“But you love your career more—”
“Don’t say that. It’s so unfair and simplistic. I could say that you love your life here more than you love me.”
Did he? His life here was important to him. He’d built something solid and so unlike his childhood, he couldn’t give it up. What about his friends? What about C.J. and his family who he thought of as his own family?
No Ordinary Sheriff Page 21