Kenny considered Step’s point. “That is true. Wouldn’t be very business savvy of us, would it?” His eyes jumped from butter knife to butter knife. “How ’bout we just yank two or three off instead of all of them?”
“I’ll-I’ll-I’ll p-p-pay.”
“Four,” Step said standing up straight. “Make sure you do the forehead. We want folks to know he fucked up.”
Kenny smiled, grabbed hold of the knife on Billy’s forehead and jerked up. The naked frozen man roared in pain. Kenny showed the knife to Step. “Damn! That thing was froze on there good. Tore free about a two-inch patch of skin.”
Step scrunched his nose and headed for the door of the freezer. “Get to pulling off three more.”
“You don’t want to tug none off?”
“Lord no!” He stopped just before exiting the subzero environment. “You’d do well to have Boss’s money by Friday, Billy. Elsewise we’ll freeze one of those butter knives to your pecker and snatch it free.”
Billy tried to answer, but his brain was too clouded from the cold and the pain.
“Sell your house, or the store or a kidney, whatever the hell you need to do to square up things with Boss.”
“Da-da-daughter,” Billy said as tears flowed out of the corners of his eyes.
“I don’t give a damn if your kid is sick.”
Billy managed to shake his head. “Se-se-sell.”
Step furrowed his brow. “What the hell does that mean? Sell what?”
Kenny looked as confused as Step. “I think he’s offering to sell off his daughter. Is that right, Billy? You talking about selling your little girl?”
Billy nodded.
Step’s cheeks turned red. “What the fuck?” He quickly approached Billy and knelt down. “Did you actually just suggest you’d sell your daughter?”
“Aaa-aaaa-eight,” Billy said with pleading eyes.
“Eight?” Step asked.
“Sarah,” Kenny said, dumbfounded. “That’s his girl, and I think he’s telling us she’s ain’t but eight.”
Step took a beat to absorb what Billy was offering and then yanked a butter knife from his stomach.
Billy howled in pain.
Step held the knife in Billy’s face; his severed flap of skin jiggled as Step’s hand trembled. “I oughta take this knife and cut your goddamn balls off for offering such a thing!”
“Pa-pa-please…”
Step stood and tossed the knife to the back of the freezer. “Let’s just close this piece of shit out now and get it over with.”
Kenny shook his head. “Can’t. Boss said to extend him some time.”
“Boss don’t know all the particulars. The man just offered to sell his own baby girl to pay off a debt. A thing like that calls for a closeout.”
“He’s just floopy from the cold, that’s all. He don’t know what he’s saying.”
Step moved back to the door. Kenny was right. Boss would kill them if they closed Billy out. “Fine, but all the knives come off now.”
Once he was gone, Kenny turned to Billy. “That was a pretty unsavory thing to do, offering up your daughter like that. I think my partner took it as a comment against his character more than anything else. He don’t appreciate being seen as a man that would buy a young gal off another fella.”
“So-so-sorry.”
Kenny shrugged. “You can be sorry all you want. I still gotta pull off all these knives now.”
Chapter 7
As soon as her uncle had vacated the building, Dani opened her desk drawer and pulled out the wad of tissues. Blades of grass decorated her desktop calendar as she put the tissue down and unwrapped it. The cigarette butt was a little flatter than it had been when she’d first laid eyes on it, but otherwise, it was intact.
She had no idea what in the hell to do with it, or what good it was to her, but it was something. It was a piece of evidence from a crime scene and that fact made her feel like a bona fide investigator.
She grabbed a pen and used it to gently roll the cigarette butt over. She whispered what she observed. “Cigarette butt. Approximately one inch long. No lipstick detected. Three white stripes circle the top of the filter.”
Unbeknownst to Dani, Terry Randle spotted her from the other side of the room and made his way quietly through the station to her desk. He stood motionless and listened to her describe the cigarette butt to no one in particular. Without warning, he reached down and snatched the filter from her desk. “What in the hell are you doing, little deputy?”
Dani stood like she was sitting on a spring and slapped Randle on the shoulder. “Goddamn it, Terry! You asshole! You’ve got your prints all over a piece of evidence!”
He laughed despite the fact that she’d managed to actually hurt him. “Evidence? For what?”
Dani settled her temper and held out her hand. “Give it here.”
“Tell me what it’s evidence for, first.” Deputy Randle had ten years’ experience on Dani, but lacked even the slightest interest in his law enforcement duties. The job was a paycheck to him, not to mention a few freebies here and there from local business owners. Other than that, he was as much a cop as a security officer at a shopping mall.
“Nothing that concerns you,” Dani said.
He held the filter between his thumb and index finger, and closed one eye as he pretended to study it. When he was sufficiently entertained, he snorted out a laugh and placed it in the palm of her hand.
Dani looked at it as if he had just placed a ticking time bomb in her hand. She grabbed one of the tissues off the desk and wrapped it around the filter.
Randle walked away and said, “In case you’re interested, it’s a Porter 100.”
She watched him move to his desk. “How do you know?”
“Used to be my brand, before I quit.”
Dani opened the tissue and looked at the filter. “I’ve never heard of Porter cigarettes.”
Randle sat at his desk and tapped his password into his computer. “Gotta be a real smoker to know Porter. They don’t advertise or nothing.”
“What’s so great about them?”
“They’re cheap as shit,” Randle said.
She put the tissue with the cigarette butt in her pocket and approached his desk. “They sell them just anywhere?”
Randle clicked away on his keyboard. “Nah, that was the pain in the ass about smoking Porters. Regular stores don’t carry them. You gotta go to one of them discount tobacco places to get a pack. I used to buy them by the trunk-load.”
“Where?”
Randle sat back with a smile as he stared at the screen.
When Dani heard a woman moaning from the small inboard computer speaker, she rolled her eyes and hurried around the desk. She tapped the spacebar on the keyboard causing the porn Randle was watching to pause.
“Hey!”
“Where’s this discount tobacco place?”
“Up the interstate, right off the Briar exit. Crazy Carl’s Cheap Tobacco or some stupid name like that.” He hit the spacebar and brought his porn back to life.
Dani stopped short of running to the front door.
“Hey, Dani,” Randle called out.
She turned to him.
“You want I should tell the state boys you absconded with evidence from their double homicide investigation?”
She was actually impressed that he was able to put that much together. “You want I should tell Uncle Otis you’re watching porn on a station computer?”
Randle guffawed. “Who the hell do you think sent me the link to this site?”
Dani quietly grunted in frustration. “What do you want?”
“A back rub,” he said, flashing a creepy grin.
“Terry Randle, I swear to Christ…”
“I was just kidding. Take my Sunday shift for the next three months, and I won’t say a word.”
“Fine.”
“Really? Shit, I should’ve said six months.”
Dani exited the building
before she had the opportunity to break down and confess to Randle that she would have taken his Sunday shifts for the next year or longer. She much preferred her time spent in her uniform over her time spent in her civilian attire. She felt like nothing at all without her badge.
Chapter 8
To describe Don Baker’s bar as a piece of shit hole-in-the-wall would be flattering, to say the least. It would take a serious upgrade to meet such a description. A majority of the swill that frequented the establishment led lives that centered on their drinking schedules.
Step liked the place because it made him feel better about his own dismal life. He sat at a table with his constant companion, Kenny, working on his fourth beer in the last thirty minutes. His blood pressure was only slightly less elevated than it had been when he’d left the walk-in freezer at Billy’s Meat Keeper.
“Took a cooler full of venison from Billy’s,” Kenny said, trying to break the silence that had crept up on them.
“I know, dumb shit. I was with you.”
“I know, I was just saying you might should come over tonight, and I’ll grill up some venison burgers.”
“Ain’t hungry.”
“I ain’t talking about now. I’m talking about later.”
“I ain’t hungry later either.”
Kenny threw back a swallow of beer from his bottle. “What’s got into you, Step? You still stewing over that daughter-selling business?”
“Hit me wrong is all,” Step said, sliding his beer bottle from one hand to the next over and over again.
“That don’t surprise me none, given your situation and all.”
Step stopped pushing the beer bottle around and stared down Kenny. “That ain’t a good wound for you to pick at, brother.”
“I ain’t got no desire to pick at it. I’m just saying, I can see how such a thing could irritate you more than necessary.”
“More than necessary?” Step responded, gripping his beer bottle tightly.
“Don’t raise up on me. There ain’t no good way to look at a man that would sell his baby girl to get out of a debt. I understand that, but it didn’t nearly spin me up like it done you. I gotta think your misfortune has something to do with your reaction. That’s all I’m saying.”
“We ain’t gonna talk about my misfortune. You hear me?”
Kenny patted Step’s shoulder. “Loud and clear, partner. Loud and clear.”
Step took a swig of beer.
“You know what’s got me puzzled?” Kenny asked.
Step didn’t answer because he knew he didn’t have to. Kenny was going to tell him no matter what.
“What would make a man go there? I mean I know he was cold, and he wasn’t looking forward to having no more of those knives pulled off him, but it still seems like a desperate place for a man to go.”
“Billy Campbell’s a lowlife piece of shit. That’s why he went there.”
“No, I get that. That goes without saying. I’m more wondering why he’d have it in his mind we’d be open to such a notion. You think we’ve developed that kind of reputation?”
Step shook his head. “Look around you, Kenny. The folks around here would sell little boys to priests for a sip of beer.”
“You miss my point. Right or wrong, priests have got a reputation for having little boy appetites. It’s almost like Billy assumed we’d want to buy his daughter because that’s the kind of thing we’re open to.”
“It don’t matter what we’re open to,” Step said, finishing another beer. “We were there collecting for Boss. Offering us his little girl doesn’t fix things with Boss.”
Kenny nodded with a smile. “Now you’ve hit onto something, partner.”
“Hit onto what?”
“Billy Campbell wasn’t offering up his little girl to us, he was offering up his little girl to Boss.”
“So?”
“So, it’s like the priest situation with little boys. You see what I’m saying?”
“I do not.” Step motioned for the waitress to bring him another round.
“Billy’s got it in his mind that Boss is open to such a thing. Why do you reckon that is? Could it be Boss has that kind of reputation?”
Step raised an eyebrow. “I’ve been working for the man a good while now. I ain’t never heard of him buying up little girls.”
“Do you know all his dealings? I don’t.”
Step shook his head. “I ain’t never done nothing but closeouts and collections for him.”
“Exactly. Me, neither. He’s got whole other enterprises we got no idea about.”
“He ain’t in the business of buying up—” Step stopped short when the haggard old waitress set a bottle of beer in front of him. When she was out of earshot, he leaned in and whispered, “Boss ain’t buying up little girls.”
“Maybe,” Kenny said.
“To what end would he be doing such a thing?”
“What do you mean?”
Step wiped his mouth with his shirt sleeve after taking a drink of his new beer. “I mean you don’t collect little girls like knickknacks. You gotta unload them somewhere. Where is it around here you think Boss is retailing out little girls?”
Kenny thought about Step’s point. “Suppose it would be kind of difficult to off-load that sort of merchandise.”
“Boss is a lot of things,” Step said, “but he ain’t into human trafficking.”
Kenny drank from his bottle. “Still curious.”
Step picked up his empty pack of cigarettes and let out a little growl. “Time to restock.”
“You should quit is what you should do,” Kenny said.
Step downed his beer and pushed back his chair. “I’ll quit smoking when you stop asking stupid questions.”
Kenny stood. “I keep telling you my inquisitive ways are gonna come in handy one of these days.”
“More likely to get us killed,” Step said as he staggered to the exit.
Chapter 9
Dani sat in her police cruiser with her smartphone to her ear. The sun was sinking behind the mountain peak past Crazy Carl’s Cheap Tobacco Company. She didn’t actually know why she was there. She was so excited to get a lead from her evidence that she didn’t stop to consider that all she really knew was what kind of cigarette the filter belonged to. It didn’t get her any closer to knowing who was smoking the cigarette. She could have it sent to a lab for DNA analysis like they do in all the TV shows, but as the Baptist Flats Sheriff’s Department was as far removed as you could get from even the most basic forensic facilities, she knew of no such lab. Even if she did, doing so would alert her uncle and, by extension, the state police that she had taken evidence from the scene of a double homicide.
So she sat outside in her car on her phone, waiting for Stan Rucker to pick up on the other end. Her heart thumped against her rib cage when she heard, “Rucker.”
She cleared her throat. “Stan? Hey, Stan, I don’t know if you remember me, but this is Dani Savage with the Baptist Flats Sheriff’s Department.”
There was a brief pause. “Shit yes, I remember you, Dani. How the hell are you?”
The tension she’d been feeling eased ever so slightly. “I’m doing great. Everything okay in your neck of the woods?”
“It is. We could use more pretty girls like you, but otherwise we’re right as rain.”
The left side of her upper lip curled. It felt like him calling her pretty was his way of saying she had no business being a cop. “Listen, I got wind of a missing girl case in your area today.”
Another pause. “Missing girl?”
“Yeah, a Kate Farrow.”
“Kate…hold on a second, would you, Dani?” His connection went silent. Dani suspected he put her on hold. A few minutes passed before he came back on. “Sorry about that. I’m manning the station all by my lonesome. Now what were you saying about a missing girl? Kate, was it?”
“Kate Farrow. I understand she went missing about four years…”
“Kate Farro
w? In Rock Hollow…Oh, wait a minute. It’s come to me now. Kate Farrow. Pretty little blond girl, worked over at that Biscuit Shack.”
“That’s her.”
“You’re right, she did go missing.”
“I was wondering what the status is.”
“Closed the case.”
“Closed?”
“Yep. We found her. Well, we found her body…pieces of it, anyway. Got struck down by a train walking home from the Biscuit Shack one night. Accident.”
“When did you find her?”
“Oh, must have been about two days after her mother reported her missing.”
This time Dani paused. “I don’t understand. I talked to her mother today…”
“And she was begging you to help her find her missing daughter. Yeah, she does that. Poor thing just can’t accept that her daughter’s dead. It’s a terrible thing. I feel awful for the poor woman. She’s hit up every police agency in every county around here. Surprised it took her this long to hit up the Baptist Flats SD.”
A truck pulled into the parking lot of Crazy Carl’s, and Dani watched as it came to a stop near the front door, quickly taking notice because there was something oddly familiar about the vehicle. “That is just strange as can be. Mrs. Farrow didn’t seem crazy at all.”
“I wouldn’t call her crazy. She’s just a mother holding on to hope that ain’t there. Breaks my heart to think about it.”
“So this happens a lot?”
“Does what happen a lot?”
Two men climbed out of the truck and entered the store.
“Someone like me calling up and asking you the latest on the case?”
“More times than I can count, Dani.”
“Curious,” the deputy said as she clamped her fingers around the steering wheel.
“Not really. Grief will push you to desperate measures.”
“No, that ain’t what I’m talking about.”
“What’s so curious then?” Rucker asked.
Dani hesitated because she knew she was about to cross a line that she couldn’t step back over. “I just find it curious that when I first called up and asked about a missing girl in your area, you had to give the matter some thought.”
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