The Phone Company

by David Jacob Knight

  “I’m headed that way now.” He turned on his blinker toward MC Estates before pulling out. “Wouldn’t be a typical Monday, would it?”

  Already today, Bill had helped Old Becker, who’d locked his keys in the truck over at Hank’s Hardware; he’d helped some motorist stranded on the side of the road in need of a jump.

  What he hadn’t done yet was get his weekly call from Mrs. Hayworth about that tall man who was always skulking around her mansion grounds. Bill checked it out for her every time, not because he thought Mrs. Hayworth was in any trouble, but because he really liked the old schoolteacher’s lemon squares. The prowler always turned out to be her gardener anyway, doing his job, and they’d all sit around enjoying a treat and a glass of milk.

  Usually the first day of the week, Bill would also issue half a dozen speeding tickets to guys like Andy Travers, who always slept in late for work after a drunken weekend. Or sometimes it was those snot-nose Anderson kids, the ones who’d tagged Hayworth Diner with the words “Killer food” in bleeding red spray paint.

  The joke had made Bill laugh. The whole town made the same joke anyway, or something like it. The founders of Cracked Rock were buried so close to the grilles you had to wonder whether the diner wasn’t some big trap set by zombies.

  “Pulling in now,” Bill said, nearly five miles later.

  He turned into the county trailer park, which Aaron always affectionately called “Meth Cook Estates.”

  A pool of glass shards glittered across the wide entryway. Bill steered around it—and slammed on the brakes when a guy with a balding mullet went rolling across the cruiser’s hood.

  A few thuds, and the guy disappeared off the other side.

  “Rat, what the hell?” Bill got out and marched around, hand on his gun.

  Ray “Rat” McCurdy hid behind the cruiser, peeking up through the passenger window with wet, beady eyes. “She coming?”

  “Back away from the vehicle,” Bill said.

  He eyed Rat’s waistband, which was clearly visible beneath his wife beater, amazingly white if not for the recent grass stains. No concealed weapon in the waist. And the guy’s pants fit so tightly he couldn’t even sneak a blade in his pockets. Rat wasn’t really who Bill had to worry about anyway.

  “Where is she?” Bill asked, scanning the pathways between the trailers, all white, yellow, or brown with different-colored skirting and trim; a little sunflower windmill whirled in a clump of grass. “She take a shot at you?”

  “I broke her pig,” Rat said, still peeking through the cruiser’s windows. “I didn’t mean to. You know how she gets.”

  Bill followed Rat’s line of sight to a turn in the road. The McCurdys’ trailer was down that way. A lot of people’s were. So were a lot of people’s kids.

  “She got a gun, Rat? She take some shots at you?”

  Rat, still crouched, grabbed Bill’s leg. “You got to arrest me, officer. You got to take me in.”

  “You going to tell me what happened?”

  “It’s like I told you. I broke her pig. I was doing dishes, and I accidentally bumped it off the counter, broke its ear clean off. You got to arrest me, she’ll kill me!”

  “Let go of my pants, Rat.”

  “No!”

  The sinewy little man wrapped himself around Bill’s calf and thigh, hugging the officer’s leg like some four-year-old.

  “Get off,” Bill said, trying to kick Rat away. “I’m not arresting you, Rat. Far as I can tell, you haven’t done any—ow, what the hell?”

  Rat had started to bite the inside of Bill’s thigh. His teeth let up for a second. “Sorry, officer!” But then he was gnawing again at the flesh beneath Bill’s black pants.

  It ended with Rat smiling smugly, cuffed in the back of the cruiser. “Hey,” he said when Bill pulled down the road toward the McCurdys’ trailer. “Where you going? Where you taking me?”

  “Calm down. I’m just going to talk to your old lady.”

  “What?” Rat disappeared from the rearview, and Bill glanced back through the plexiglass to find him lying down across the backseat. “You never saw me—I ain’t here.”

  Bill shook his head and parked in front of the white trailer, near the drive. He scanned the area before getting out.

  The barbecue had been tipped over and briquettes had spilled all over the gravel drive. Other than that, their property was the cleanest in the park, their strip of grass cut and kempt. It always amazed Bill how neat the McCurdys were.

  Pam McCurdy’s station wagon sat in the driveway, next to an old rusty Ford truck that seemed familiar. Sacks of fertilizer filled the bed of the pickup.

  “Whose truck?”

  “Work truck,” Rat replied.

  Bill nodded. He’d figured Rat was running some kind of errand for the farmer’s supply.

  Beside the Ford lay their daughter’s pink tricycle, a ribbon and horn attached to one handlebar.

  Bill saw Pam peeking out the trailer’s bay window. “Your daughter home?” he asked Rat.

  “Don’t know. Don’t know where she ran off to. Now quit talking to me. She’ll see me!”

  Bill looked back to the bay window, where Pam had disappeared behind the curtains. “Okay, Rat, I’m going to talk to your old lady, all right? Behave yourself.”

  At the porch, Bill climbed the steps and knocked on the front door. “Mrs. McCurdy? This is Deputy Biggs. I just want to talk. Come on, now.”

  He knocked a few more times.

  “Mrs. McCurdy? Pam!”

  “Momma says she ain’t home,” a little voice said.

  At the end of the trailer, little Candy McCurdy stood no taller than the aluminum skirting, hiding most of her body around the corner of the house. A pink clip, decorated with a plastic daisy, held back one side of her dishwater hair.

  “Hey, there,” Bill said. “Your momma and daddy fighting?”

  Candy nodded.

  “Your daddy broke her pig figurine, I take it?”

  “No.”

  “It’s okay,” Bill said, “you can tell me what happened.”

  “He didn’t break anything. Momma caught him texting some bitch.”

  Bill grimaced. It broke his heart hearing Pam’s words coming out of a six-year-old’s mouth. “Your mom took a shot at him?”

  “No,” Candy said.

  Bill came down the steps, slowly. He stood nearly six feet and three inches tall, an imposing figure even for adults. He didn’t want to scare her off, but he thought casting a bit of a shadow might help. “Candy. It’s against the law to lie to a deputy sheriff. Tell me the truth, now, sweetheart. Your daddy said your mom took a shot.”

  “No,” Candy said. “It was me. I shot at them both.”

  Bill stopped, frowning. Candy hadn’t looked away, hadn’t even glanced; she’d just dropped the revelation on him like some dirty bomb. Bill had developed a pretty good bullshit detector over the years. It amazed him that all it took was some sweet little girl to make him lose his sense of smell.

  “Candy, if you’re lying to me . . .”

  The girl shifted, and something clunked against the skirting, sending a metallic echo under the house. “They’re always fighting. I tell them to stop, but they never listen.”

  “Where’s the gun now, Candy?” Bill took the last step off the porch.

  The little girl’s eyes began to well up.

  “Candy?”

  Hanging her head, she stepped out from behind the trailer to show him what had clunked against the skirting.

  A .45 Colt.

  Revolver.

  Had the gun been black polymer instead of gunmetal gray, it might have looked like a toy, but not this thing. This thing had deadly weight. Plus unfired rounds in the cylinder.

  “Whoa,” Bill said, crouching to get down on Candy’s level, realizing that a shadow wasn’t quite what he needed now; he did, however, need his head. “Whoa, now. I want you to lay the gun down and back away, all right? I’m going to pick it up, all right, sw
eetheart?”

  The little girl’s lips trembled. “Am I going to jail?”

  “Absolutely not. Just lay it down, okay? We’ll talk.”

  Candy nodded and bent over to lay down the weapon. But then her mother, Pam, came tearing out of the house in her uniform for the gas station.

  “There you are!” she screamed. “Give me that!” Pam pushed past Bill, leaving a stink trail of gas.

  “Mrs. McCurdy, please—”

  “Stay back!” Candy screamed, leveling the gun at her mom.

  Pam actually stopped, shoes crunching gravel, and Bill knew what he already suspected: Candy could barely steady the gun, it was so heavy, but the six-year-old had told the truth. She’d fired the shots.

  Pam crossed her arms and leaned toward her daughter. “You give me that gun right now, you little shit.”

  “Whoa,” Bill said, “hey, now.” He stepped between Candy and her mom, hands raised. “Believe me, sweetheart, you don’t want to do this. I’ve done it before. For my job. Doesn’t matter what’s right, you still feel like a bad guy.”

  “I am a bad guy,” Candy said. “She’s a bad guy.”

  “Come on now, that ain’t true. She’s your mom. She loves you. And you’re good, too, I know you are. Now please, Candy, set it down, all right?”

  The girl trembled all over, big tears streaking down her cheeks. Bill could tell she was about to give in.

  “Screw this,” Pam said, stepping around him.

  “Freeze!” Bill said, heart clenching, just waiting for the boom.

  Candy cried out as her mom tore the gun away from her.

  “You fat bitch!” the little girl said, causing Bill another grimace. Pam grabbed for her, but Candy ran into the house, sobbing and slamming the door.

  Pam turned to Bill with the gun. For a second, her eyes shot toward the cruiser, where Rat, who had been peering intently through the window, suddenly ducked down, mullet flipping up in the back.

  “You arresting him?” Pam asked.

  “Think I might.”

  “Good.”

  She gave the giant revolver to Bill, and he immediately emptied out the cylinder into his hand. He didn’t like to admit it, and he hoped Pam didn’t see it, but he was shaking.

  “You ought to charge him for leaving that where Candy could get at it,” she said. “Endangering the welfare of a child, or whatever.”

  Bill adjusted his hat, scratching it against his sweaty head. “Nah, I’m just going to hold on to him a bit, let the blood cool.” Rat had bitten Bill, and that was enough justification for taking him into custody. Though he didn’t like the idea of leaving the little girl alone with Pam.

  “You treat her right,” Bill said, pointing at the trailer where Candy had disappeared. “Or maybe one of these days she will shoot you.”

  Pam smiled at him, arms still crossed. “Have a good day, officer.”

  “Will do.”

  * * *

  After putting Rat in a holding cell, Bill went back out on patrol. “Man,” he said into his hands-free device.

  “What’s wrong?” Aaron asked. They talked over the phone all the time, whenever Aaron wasn’t making dispatch calls. They usually kept an open line. But they hadn’t said much to each other in the past hour.

  “Oh, just the little McCurdy girl,” Bill said. “Candy.”

  “Oh yeah, I know. It’s like they were setting her up for failure, naming her that.”

  “I feel like bringing her back a Happy Meal or something.”

  “You stopping for lunch?”

  “Pulling in right now.”

  “You never bring me back a Happy Meal,” Aaron said. Bill could practically see her lower lip pooching out in one of her patented pouts.

  “You’re always going on about your diet,” he said, steering into the drive-thru lane.

  “I don’t want the food, I want the toy.”

  Bill laughed, but it was short-lived. He couldn’t help but go back to his thoughts. “I feel bad for her is all. No kid should have to grow up like that.”

  “Aw. Tough cop, heart of gold.”

  “Shut up,” Bill said, smiling. “Heart of golden arches.” They both laughed, and he pulled up to the giant menu. He considered the salad but went for the nuggets, soda, and fries instead.

  A few cars away from the service window, Bill looked across the street. Something had caught his eye.

  On that side of town, nature trails twined through stands of ponderosa pines and other evergreens. Steve’s dog, Barksdale, trotted off the gravel shoulder and disappeared down one of the trails.

  Bill grabbed his binoculars and scoped out the woods. He thought he saw movement through all the shrubs and boughs, but the foliage grew too thickly back there.

  He lowered the ’nocs and squinted.

  What’s back there, Barks?

  Kids would often hide out on the trails, skipping school or partying, and they’d always leave an abundance of evidence: beer bottles, empty fifths, cigarette boxes, aluminum cans of just about every variety, butts. Some of the creek banks along the trail grew rocky and steep, and more than a few times someone had fallen down and broken something.

  Injured hikers, juvenile delinquents: who knew what the German shepherd was sniffing out?

  “Damn it.”

  “What now?” Aaron asked. “They making you wait for the nuggets again?”

  “No, I just saw Barksdale.”

  “And you’re stuck in line.”

  “Yep.”

  “Jump out and follow him.”

  “And get between these guys and their lunch?”

  “Sure.” After a second, Aaron added, “I still don’t get why you won’t let that poor dog enjoy his retirement.”

  “It’s his own damn fault,” Bill said. “He won’t stop working.” Barks had once been part of the department’s K-9 Unit until a horrible bear trap injury. Some idiot had laid the traps all around his pot farm, and Barks had nearly lost a paw. “He’s like a private eye now—gets in more trouble than ever.”

  Aaron laughed.

  It didn’t take long before Bill’s smile faded. “I don’t think I ever told you this, but Barksdale isn’t from our K-9 unit. Not originally.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “Well, that’s just it. He showed up one day, fully trained. We have no clue where he came from. Wasn’t from any agency in the state, as far as we could tell. And when he showed up, he had blood all over his muzzle.”

  “Wow, his own?”

  “No. There was this case, a bit before your time. Missing persons. Two kids gone long enough we’d started expecting bodies, you know? But then this dog comes out of nowhere, and he leads me straight to this guy’s house. That’s where I find the missing kids locked in the basement, still alive but . . . worse for wear.”

  “Oh my god, that’s terrible.”

  “Yeah. Point is, Barks has been a hero since the day I met him. Dog’s uncanny. I’d follow him anywhere. To hell, maybe.”

  “What happened to the perp?” Aaron asked.

  Bill felt a moment of heat. He’d mentioned the blood. He shouldn’t have mentioned the blood.

  “He didn’t make it,” Bill finally said, hoping to shut down further questioning.

  The truth was, Barksdale had ripped out the perpetrator’s throat. Bill and the coroner had covered the dog’s ass, blaming it on a mountain lion that had been stalking local livestock. They’d protected their own, and Bill wanted the dog—the best damn police dog he’d ever seen.

  “If you love him so much,” Aaron said, “why didn’t you keep him?”

  Bill shrugged, even though his dispatcher couldn’t see it. “Barks really liked Steve’s kids. Steve, not so much.”

  “Hah!”

  Bill smiled and tapped his steering wheel, staring out at the woods. “Not following Barksdale is like ignoring my scanner.”

  “Yeah, yeah, he’s a modern-day Lassie.”

  “He’d bite you for saying
that.”

  “Really?”

  “No. But this isn’t just Timmy down a well.”

  The customer two cars ahead of the cruiser still hadn’t moved. Bill tapped harder on his wheel.

  “Aaron?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m putting on my lights.” He turned them on and booped his siren.

  She giggled. “I so wish I was there to see this.”

  Bill booped his siren again, and the cashier stuck his head out the service window. The pimpled kid said something to the customer in line, and suddenly Bill was able to pull forward. Quickest O’Donald’s trip ever.

  He stopped at the window.

  “My nuggets ready?”

  Bewildered, the kid called back into the kitchen for Bill’s order. “Sorry, sir, but the nuggets—”

  “Just give me the fries, then. And my drink. Hurry!”

  Bill grinned as the kid scrambled for a cup. Not a minute later, he grabbed his sack and soda, paid for the nuggets anyway, and tore away from the restaurant, roof ablaze.

  He gazed out into the nature trails as he drove by, spotting something, but just for a second. He tapped his brakes, but then realized there were a bunch of cars behind him, and no shoulder to pull off on, just a steep gravel bank.

  Bill glanced back once more and kept driving. He thought he’d seen something back there, a black suit, a spot of blue, a scrap of pale face turning his way.

  He’d drive to the trailhead, then, maybe walk in, see why Barksdale was sniffing around.

  Out of sight of O’Donald’s, Bill turned off his lights and opted for stealth.

  * * *

  Sarah Gregory came out of the park restroom with her cigarette only to see her friend Anastasia driving off without her. “Hey!” she called out, running after the Jetta. Then she saw Bill’s cruiser pulling in, and Sarah stopped.

  Cursing, she stomped the cigarette into the pine needles covering the pavement. She thought about running into the trees, but Bill had already seen her. Running would only get her into deeper shit.

  The cop got out and leaned against his car, smiling at her over the white roof. “Field trip?”