Outside the Law

by Phillip Thompson

  She had a second of self-doubt, picked up her phone to call Harper, but thought better of it. They definitely had different agendas on this one.

  The Ford pulled off the highway into the parking lot of a beat-up little building that served as a general store. She tapped the accelerator just enough to close the distance without looking obvious.

  She wheeled into the lot and saw the driver standing in front of three men—white men—all of whom looked like standard blue-collar locals. Which confirmed her hunch. The driver was the same kid who was with Hack in the store the day before. He tried hard to look big city. Dope dealer big city, with the oversized Raiders jersey and red ball cap, zirconium rock in his ear and three-hundred-dollar sneakers. All four were smiling like they knew one another and one, the greasy-looking one in crusty jeans and stained short-sleeve shirt, was working on a tall boy. In broad daylight. She could think of absolutely no reason for the Taurus driver to know these guys. So much for him being alone. And too late to call Harper now.

  They all stared as she parked and killed the engine.

  She climbed out of the car, stood by the hood and stared back across the thirty feet or so of gravel. Shielded her eyes from the glare with her left hand, a neutral look on her face.

  “One of y’all drive that Ford?” she called.

  The driver snickered. The beefy one, on the far right, frowned. Trouble.

  The driver nodded. “Yeah, baby, I do. Why you need to know?”

  She shrugged. “Taillight’s busted. Thought you might want to know.”

  Driver laughed. “You gone write me a ticket?”

  She lowered her hand. “No, but I would like a word, in private.”

  That got their attention.

  The beefy one looked agitated and moved his hand toward his back.

  “Don’t do that,” she said, but he was already pulling an automatic into view.

  Everything happened at once: the Taurus driver yelled and darted toward the store entrance; the beefy one was fast, but she was faster and fired her Sig Sauer twice, hitting him in the throat and chest as he fired at her. The shot went high over her head even as she swiveled to her left to cover the other two. The beer drinker was hauling ass toward a pickup truck on the other side of the parking lot, and the other guy, the tall one, stood facing her, feet apart and both hands wrapped around a revolver. She saw his eyes and felt a hammer blow on the side of her head. She went down on her right side, the wind knocked out of her and the world spinning. She couldn’t hear and saw the world turning red, then realized blood was pouring into her eyes. She grabbed her head with one hand and fired three wild shots. She had no idea what she hit. The Taurus driver bolted out of the store, gaped at her, then pushed the shooter out of her field of view.

  She passed out for a second and came to, hearing the sound of a vehicle, a truck, roaring away, the drone of the engine fading fast. She rolled onto her back and tried to clear the cobwebs.

  She was hurt bad, she knew. She could barely think, but she pushed herself to her knees, then to her feet and staggered to her car. She threw her weapon on the front seat and grabbed her phone. It seemed to take hours to figure out how to use it, and she had to wipe blood off her hands and the phone. She finally mashed the button.

  He picked up on the second ring, and she was glad.

  “Colt,” she said. “I’ve been shot.”

  “Where?”

  “In the head.” She slumped against the car, which felt like it was moving away from her.

  “OK,” Harper said. “But what I meant was what is your location?”

  “Oh, sorry.” she said. She mumbled a description of the store as the phone slid from her hand.

  Goddamn, it’s hot, she thought as she slid down the side of the car, coming to rest against the front tire, her legs straight out in front of her and a terrifying blackness rushing at her.

  HACK

  He eased open the door to the back bedroom and peered in. Rhonda Raines sprang from the bed but stopped cold at the sight of the revolver in his hand. Her demeanor showed strength, but that strength was betrayed by the fear in her eyes. And as long as she showed fear, he maintained the control he needed.

  “You will come with me,” he said, opening the door wide and standing aside to let her pass. She walked by, chin slightly raised. “Down the hall to the kitchen,” he said.

  “Sit,” he said when they reached the table. He pulled two cups from a cabinet and filled both with coffee from a pot that steamed and hissed from the counter by the sink. “Sugar? Milk?” he asked.

  She shook her head, one defiant shake. He smiled and sat a cup in front of her, then sat opposite her.

  She shot him a look, half defiance, half curiosity.

  “I have no intention of killing you, if that is a concern of yours,” he said. “That is, if I don’t have to.”

  She scoffed. “If you don’t have to. What kind of simpleton do you take me for?”

  He let that pass and nodded. “There is a larger purpose for which you were selected.”

  She cocked her head, and her brow furrowed. “What are you talking about, purpose? And selected?”

  He drummed his fingers on the oak tabletop. Her obliqueness was a burden. Yet, she did serve a purpose. He cleared his throat, mostly for effect. “As I said, you have a purpose. And that’s all you need to know. I now need you to accomplish a simple task for me.”

  “And what would that task be?”

  He did not expect her insolence. Clearly, she felt herself to be his equal. The very thought angered him.

  She stared at him with eyes that in any other person would have made him think of himself as prey and raised her cup to her lips.

  “You are going to call your former boyfriend and arrange for him to meet me here.”

  “What?” Her voice ricocheted off the kitchen walls. She sat the cup on the table hard enough to launch a globule of coffee that arced, like a large brown teardrop, halfway across the table and landed in a Rorschach pattern on the light-colored wood.

  “I believe I spoke clearly,” he said.

  “Boyfriend? I don’t have a boyfriend, old or otherwise.”

  “Come now, Ms. Raines, in a small town such as yours your dalliances with certain law enforcement officials does not go unnoticed.”

  “What?” She narrowed her eyes at him. “You mean Colt?”

  He nodded.

  She laughed. Further angering him. “You’re not from around here, are you? Colt is not my boyfriend. Never was. My word, you been listening to the wrong people.”

  “Ms. Raines, I advise you to not be evasive,” he said, trying not to grit his teeth.

  “Had you been listening to the right people,” she continued, apparently undeterred, “we wouldn’t be having this conversation because you would know that Colt, besides being the best friend I’ve ever had, always has my back.”

  He smiled. “Precisely. And it is that status, romantic or otherwise, that I will exploit.”

  “In what way?”

  “You will speak to him on my behalf.”

  “What for?”

  He slid his hand off the table to the holster under his jacket. “Again, you don’t need to know. All you need to do is call him, give him your location, and convince him to come here.”

  “Why?” she said. She looked confused, and he knew she was. “And how am I supposed to convince him to come to…to wherever we are?”

  He pulled his revolver and pointed it at her face across the table. Her eyes went wide, and she froze. But her eyes still blazed.

  “Tell him I’m holding you at gunpoint.”

  COLT

  It took John and him about ten minutes to get to the store, and the only conversation en route consisted of John saying, “Hell of a way to run a reelection campaign, boss.”

  He shot John a glance. “To hell with reelection. I didn’t want the job anymore anyway.”

  “Yeah, I kinda gathered that,” John said.


  He grunted and hunched over the steering wheel when he saw the sign for Matt’s Mart. He was going a little too fast, and the truck slued into the parking lot, slinging gravel toward the storefront. He hit the brakes and threw the gearshift into park. He and John were on the ground and moving almost before the truck came to a stop.

  McDonough was sitting against the front tire on the driver’s side. At least he thought it was her. Her face was obscured by a silver-haired man squatting in front of her, fussing with what looked like a field dressing.

  “Hey,” he called as he and John trotted over.

  The old guy jerked his head around. His face was red and his crystal-blue eyes glittered in an intense scowl, like an angry clown mask. “Gunshot wound,” the old man called out. “I got the bleeding stopped but she’s in shock.”

  He stooped over to get a closer look at both the old guy and McDonough. The old man threw up a forearm to block him.

  “Watch it, got dam it,” the old man said. “I said she’s in shock. EMTs are on the way, but I need to keep her stabilized.”

  He stood straight, looked at John, who shrugged. And grinned. Just barely.

  “Who the fuck are you?” he said.

  The old man snorted but didn’t even turn his head. His full attention was focused on the blood-soaked compress that he held against McDonough’s head. Her eyes were closed, and blood was smeared across her face. He couldn’t tell how bad her wound was.

  “George Giles,” the old man said. “I own this place. I also did a tour in Vietnam as a navy corpsman at Khe Sanh, taking care of Marines. So I know what I’m doing. And who the fuck are you?”

  “The sheriff and an, uh, acquaintance,” he said, a little surprised at Giles’s ferocity.

  “Mmmmhmmm, so she’s a cop?” Giles said to him.

  “What makes you think that?”

  Giles’s laugh sounded like a phlegm-filled bark. “Well, hell’s bells, son, she’s packing a compact nine-mil in a fast-draw holster,” he said. “Plus, she’s got a badge that very clearly says ‘A-T-F’ on it.”

  John snickered behind him. “Well, goddamn, Doc, get some,” he said.

  Giles turned his head and cocked an eyebrow at John, an acknowledgment.

  He sighed, rather than scream at the old fart. “So, Doc, what’s the situation?”

  “She took a nine-millimeter slug to the side of her head,” Giles said. “It only grazed her skull, but it grazed the shit out of her. She’s got a three-inch avulsion—a gash—under this dressing. Knocked her silly, as you can imagine. She’s disoriented and lost a lot of blood, but I think she’ll be fine. Breathing is shallow, pulse is rapid but strong. She’s going to need stitches, and she’s gonna have a hell of a concussion.”

  He nodded, impressed. “Thanks,” he said. He felt a rush of relief he couldn’t explain, other than McDonough was a cop, too. “You see anything?”

  “Oh, hell yeah, I saw the whole thing,” Giles said. “They was three of them in my store, all buying beer when this little gang-banger pulled up.” Giles cut his eyes at John, who stood as passive as a statue. “Then the three guys walk out and start talking to him—he was a kid, really.”

  He held up a hand to stop Giles. “These three guys. What did they look like?”

  Giles described each of them, noting they were white but not local. “Yeah, it seemed weird to me,” he said. “Then she rolled in.” He gestured at McDonough with his free hand. “I couldn’t hear the conversation, but before you know it, the one guy pulls a gun and all hell breaks loose.”

  “Which one pulled a gun?” John asked.

  “The dead one right over there by the door,” Giles said.

  He and John turned and noticed for the first time the body of a man laid out in the shade of the storefront, on his back, arms spread in a pool of dark blood.”

  “No shit,” John said.

  He noticed McDonough’s hand twitch, then flutter toward her head. She mumbled something, and Giles put one hand on her shoulder and the other against the compress. McDonough groaned and tried to push away his hand.

  “Hey, there, now, you stop that,” Giles said.

  “Get off me, goddammit,” McDonough said.

  “That’ll be enough of that,” Giles said.

  He stared at the dead man. “Who shot him?” he asked.

  Giles snorted. “Well, hell, she did. Some of the damnedest shooting I ever seen, I’ll tell you that. That dipshit over there had already pulled his piece out, and she still managed to draw down on him and put two rounds through him. This little girl is fast.”

  He nodded and looked from the dead guy back to McDonough. “So who shot her?”

  “One of the other guys,” Giles said. “He stood there by the door, too, like he was on the range, two hands on his weapon and fired a shot at her before the black kid pushed him toward the truck they rode up in. Then they hauled ass out of here.”

  He nodded again. “And that’s it?”

  “What else do you want? An explosion?” He fussed over McDonough some, even as she struggled against him with profane protests and claims of being “fine, goddammit.”

  “Fair enough,” he said. “I’m going to go check on the dipshit.”

  “Ahite,” Giles said. “I’m sure that sumbitch is still dead.”

  HACK

  Incredulous. If he were asked to describe his reaction to what Dee had just told him, with Strickland and Foster nodding behind him, it would be incredulous.

  He glared at the three of them standing in the kitchen like little boys who just confessed to knocking out a neighbor’s window with an errant baseball.

  “And Preston is dead?” he said. “You’re sure of that?”

  Dee nodded. “I know what dead looks like. That chick smoked him good.”

  “That…chick, as you call her, is in all likelihood a detective.”

  “That’s what I figured.”

  He continued to stare, not so much at them as his own thoughts. He could already feel repercussions that he’d face in Memphis over this fiasco. If he were ever allowed back in Memphis. This was Knoxville all over again, even though he’d sworn to himself that Knoxville had been an isolated mistake, an aberration. Brooks would not see it that way, of course. Not at all. A sudden feeling of loss rushed at him and made him uncomfortable in its unfamiliarity. At best, the future that loomed was one of exile in obscurity and poverty, and the prospect of it stabbed him with the memory of the life he had left in Kentucky. The certainty of avoiding such a future, which he had felt just a few days ago, evaporated in the kitchen and caused his entire body to shudder. It left him light-headed. He had become accustomed to a lifestyle of power, gratification, and a certain affluence, however ill-gotten. His reputation fed his own self-image and fueled his desires. All that—indeed, his very existence—now lay in jeopardy. His only possible solution was complete the task at hand, regardless of the outcome.

  Lashing out at these imbeciles would serve no purpose. His was a solvable problem. He considered himself a professional, and he would behave as one.

  He focused on Dee, who wore a thin sheen of perspiration across his mahogany face.

  “Is the woman dead?” he asked.

  Dee shrugged. “Ain’t got no idea. We hauled ass outta there as fast as we could. She was shot in the head, though.” Strickland and Foster nodded in unison.

  He looked up to the ceiling and back at Dee. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “We are about to bring this situation to a resolution. With one Sheriff Colt Harper.”

  Dee looked at him, his eyes a question. “Yes, Dee, Harper. He has always been a target, even after this idiot Delmer Blackburn decided to become an entrepreneur. And he is still my target. The fates have delivered him to me under the most unlikely of circumstances, but circumstances that I will take full advantage of.”

  He looked past Dee to Strickland and Foster. “You two,” he said, pointing. “You are to be posted outside where you can maintain complete surveillance
of the road running in front of the house. Dee, you stay inside with me.”

  Strickland stuck a finger in the air, like a fifth-grader about to ask a question in class. “Uh, Mr. Hack, what are we looking for?”

  “For a vehicle,” he said, keeping voice level. “In it will be this sheriff to whom I’m referring, who may possibly be traveling with a large black man. Both of them will be armed. So you should be, as well. When he arrives, I will deal with him personally.”

  Strickland’s face took on a pained look. He nodded at him to ask the question on his mind.

  “So, when this sheriff gets here, we do what?”

  He smiled. This man was not going to win an award for logic. “You convince him that it will be in his best interest to relieve himself of his weapon. I will take care of the rest.”

  Strickland nodded as if he understood, though his expression left doubt that he did.

  Dee cleared his throat. “How do you know Harper is going to come here? Does he even know where we are?”

  He cut his eyes over to Dee. “You let me worry about that. You just follow orders.”

  Dee nodded, then turned to the other two. “You heard the man,” he said. “Get your asses outside.”

  He watched them file out of the kitchen like obedient pupils, then he walked down the hall and opened the door to the room that held Rhonda Raines.

  COLT

  He squatted over the corpse and examined the man’s clothing. He wasn’t dressed like a thug or a dealer or anything, really. He looked like a normal guy, golf shirt, aviator sunglasses. Two entry wounds, one in the upper chest, just missing the heart, the other dead center of the throat. The pulpy wound made him wince more than the wide circle of blood staining the golf shirt. Taking one in the throat had to hurt like a bitch.

  From the look of it, the guy fell straight back, arms thrown out. A Glock 19 lay a few inches from the outstretched fingers of his right hand. He scanned the gravel around the body, located one spent shell. That had to be the round fired at McDonough, the one that missed.