“Okay…” He didn’t seem too concerned, at least not yet.
“I’ve kind of been rationalizing that. I mean, it’s my job. As part of my job, I’ve come across information that relates to someone I know outside of the office. Someone I really like, outside of the office.”
He was just looking at her, just waiting. She continued. “But today I did something different. I kind of reversed it. I took information that I had from outside, and I used it inside. Not in a bad way! I mean, not in a way that would hurt you. I was just curious.” She took a deep breath. “What I should have done is asked you directly. I didn’t mean anything bad, but I violated your privacy, and I’m really, really sorry.”
His brow had creased into a frown. “I’m going to need some more details. What exactly did you do?”
“Okay, yeah, one more bad thing… I involved somebody else in it. Somebody I trust, but not somebody that you like all that much.”
“What did you and Deputy Don do?”
She took a deep breath. “I asked him to contact the National Personnel Records Center. I asked him to check if you’d been in the military.”
“What made you think I’d been in the military?” Joe asked. His voice was tightly controlled, and Megan really couldn’t get a read on the emotion behind it.
“Little things. You called yourself a ‘dumb grunt.’ And you used military time. And your house is really tidy—you made your bed super tight. And…I don’t know. It was mostly just a lucky guess.”
“It takes a long time to get records,” Joe said.
“Don knows somebody. He called, instead of filling out the paperwork.” She tried to keep things matter-of-fact, but she couldn’t do it. “Jesus Christ, Joe, you’re a fucking hero! Two Purple Hearts? Plus a bunch of awards I don’t even really know all that well, but…a bunch of them. And six deployments, in both Iraq and Afghanistan? Ten years of your life spent serving your country, and you come back and don’t say a damn word about it to anyone?” She took a deep breath. “Okay, I was wrong to dig. I wasn’t doing it as part of my job, I was doing it because I was curious about the guy I was falling for. Because I’m nosy. I’m not trying to deflect from that. But I just don’t understand, Joe. The cops are all over you because they think you were off on some sort of decade-long drug-dealer apprenticeship. They’ve been hounding you since you got back. You didn’t consider mentioning to them that you’d been serving your country, and doing a damn good job of it?”
“You really think they would have backed off, if they’d known?” He finally showed some emotion, but anger really wasn’t what Megan had been hoping for. “Why don’t you tell that to my Uncle Paulie? Four tours of Vietnam, triple Purple Heart, but they had him handcuffed to a desk for eleven hours yesterday. You think they gave a good goddamn about his service to his damn country?”
Megan had no idea what to say. “Okay. I didn’t know that. I’m sorry they treated him that way.”
Joe sat quietly for a minute, then shook his head. “Well, the old bastard’s brought a couple tons of pot across the border since then. But, you know—he did a good job in Vietnam.” There was the beginning of a smirk playing around the corners of his mouth, but Megan was afraid to take advantage of it. She wasn’t sure if the grin was for her, or for Uncle Paulie the veteran drug smuggler. So she sat as still as she could, and waited.
But Joe was apparently just waiting too. Or maybe he was thinking. Maybe he was thinking angry thoughts. “Do you want me to leave?” Megan asked.
The pause was longer than she was comfortable with, but no more than she deserved. “No. I don’t want you to leave.”
“Do you want me to shut up about this? Because I can. But I want to stop being afraid to ask you stuff. So if you don’t want to talk about something, I want you to tell me, ‘Hey, Megan! That’s off-limits.’ And then if you don’t say that, I can, you know—I can ask. Try to understand you.”
He was quiet again, and then he said, “Hey, Megan?”
“Yeah?”
“Were you in love with the governor?”
Damn. Fair. More than fair, really, because he was doing what she’d just said she should have done, asking right out instead of digging around. But that didn’t make it any easier to respond. She let herself think about it, then said, “No. But I thought I was.” She sighed. “If I get to stay—can I have another drink?”
“Shit, sorry.” He swung off the couch with the speed of a man whose manners had been instilled by a cranky grandmother. Megan watched him as he moved; she didn’t think she could ever get tired of watching him use his body, even for something as simple as walking to the kitchen and retrieving a bottle. He poured a splash into her glass, then his own, and sank back onto his end of the sofa. Then he just looked at her. She wasn’t sure if he was expecting more explanation or not, but she decided she might as well get it over with.
“I was infatuated. I was flattered. I thought it meant something, that someone so powerful would be interested in me.” Because that didn’t seem like quite enough, she added, “It was years ago. And I was stupid.”
He took a drink. “When I left, I was running away,” he said. “From the town, my family, the idea that I had to be what the town thought I was just because of who I was related to. All of it. So I didn’t tell anyone but Shanny and my grandmother where I was going. I didn’t want them to find me, or even think about me. I never planned to come back.” He looked around the room as if still a little surprised to find himself there. “And then when I did come back, I just didn’t want to talk about it. The Army. I just—I was done with it, you know? And I wanted to leave it behind. Like…” He looked over at the window as if he wished he could break through it and be free, but he kept talking. “I didn’t feel like hunting this year. Since I got back. I just—I’d had enough of guns for a while. Enough killing. So I told the guys I was busy, and they gave me a bit of a hard time, and they let it go. If they’d known where I’d been, there would have been talk. ‘What’s wrong with Joe?’ ‘Joe’s got PTSD.’ ‘Joe can’t see blood without freaking out.’” He glanced over at her. “None of that’s true. I don’t have PTSD, and I’m not afraid of blood. I’m just tired of it.”
She nodded, and then he said, “People who weren’t over there can’t really understand, and I didn’t want to try to explain it to them.”
“You don’t have to. Now, I mean. To me. I meant what I said. I won’t like it if you tell me to back off, but I can get over it.” She was a bit surprised to realize that she meant it.
Finally, a slow, reluctant smile that she knew was for her appeared. “Yeah. I might go with that, for a while.”
“Okay,” she said.
He looked at her, then leaned back a little further and glanced down at the space between his legs. “Kinda lonely over here.”
He didn’t need to ask her twice. She slid over into place and stretched her neck up for a kiss before snuggling in more cozily. They stayed like that for a while, and then she said, “If you had a dog, he could lie right there, on my legs.”
“If he did, I’d have to break up this happy scene in order to kick his ass off the furniture.”
She turned her head so she could get at least a glimpse of Joe’s face, and said, “Are you planning on going back? To the Army? Is that where you might move, where you couldn’t take a dog?”
He shrugged a little, and it felt evasive, not casual. He saw her expression, and his face softened. “Not really. Not the Army, at least. But there’s independent contractor work.”
“Independent contractors? Like, mercenaries?”
“Not necessarily. There are gradations. But Megan, that’s my skill set. I spent ten years learning combat. You know my other skill set? Running weed down from Canada, and distributing it. Which would you rather I do?”
“Bullshit. You said you did the w
ork on this place, and it’s gorgeous. You could do that for a living, couldn’t you? Hell, if you don’t want to be a contractor, be an interior designer! Or you’re working on cars, right? You could keep doing that. Or something outdoors—Tina at the diner said you’re great in the forest, so maybe you could be a guide or an outfitter. I don’t know. But there’s lots of options that don’t involve getting killed in someone else’s war, or going to jail for dealing drugs!”
“A bit of a pessimist, there,” Joe said. “I might not get killed. Or caught. And the money in those two is a hell of a lot better than any of the other stuff.”
“What do you need all this money for?” Megan asked. She wasn’t sure how serious Joe was about all this, but she thought it was something they should discuss. “You’ve got a great place to live, you can fix your own truck. Why do you need a lot of money?”
“Well, I just met a really classy lady, and I’d like to show her a good time…” His voice was teasing, but Megan sat up and hit him in the shoulder anyway.
“Don’t you dare! Don’t even try to use me as an excuse for any of that!” She stared at him until he gave in and nodded. Then she said, “I mean, assuming that I’m the lady in question…”
It was a good thing Megan was already sitting down, because she didn’t think she’d seen Joe’s shy grin before, and it was absolutely enough to make her weak in the knees. “That’s a pretty safe assumption,” he said. He pulled her mouth down for a kiss, and she squirmed around enough to get them face-to-face, stretched out and comfortable. The comfort was important, Megan decided, because she wanted them to stay like that for a long, long time.
Chapter Twenty
Megan was up and dressed the next morning by the time the knock came. She froze, and looked around for somewhere to hide, even though there was no real point in it. Whoever had arrived would have already seen her car in the driveway. But the visitor might not recognize her vehicle. Maybe she still had a chance of keeping this quiet. She realized Joe was watching her, and could see exactly what she was thinking. “Not because I’m ashamed,” she clarified. “Just because—you know. It’s private.”
He looked at her for a moment longer, then nodded. “You can wait upstairs if you want.” He headed for the door, and she only thought for a moment before slipping back onto the stool at the breakfast bar. She sensed it was an important gesture for her to make, and when Joe glanced back at her and smiled, she knew she was right.
“Deputy Don,” Joe said after opening the door. “Come in.”
“Sorry to come so early.” He glanced over to where Megan was sitting. “Good morning,” he said simply.
Megan kind of wanted to hug him, but first she wanted to know why he was there. “Is everything all right? You went to see Anna last night—is she okay?”
“She’s got an infection,” he said. “They think they caught it in time, but it’s complicating things.”
Joe’s face was closed, and Megan realized that this was his way of hearing bad news. She hopped off her stool and walked closer to the men. “How serious is it?”
Don shrugged unhappily. “I don’t know. Like I said, they think they caught it in time.” He looked her in the eye. “But I don’t think we should be waiting around. We might not know for sure, but we know enough to report our suspicions. There’s someone working in that building who gave information to the dealers. Anna and I went over it last night, and there’s no way it wasn’t an ambush. They absolutely knew we were coming.”
“I talked to my people,” Joe said. “They’re saying the meth’s coming from some survivalist types up the valley. They don’t believe Carson’s feeding information to anyone else.”
Don nodded. “That’s good to hear. But he still might go down when we report this. We need to be prepared for that.”
“So does he,” Megan said quietly. “We can do that, can’t we? Give him a little advanced warning?”
“He’s not a bad guy, Don,” Joe said. “I know you don’t like what he did, and I understand that. But him working with the Codys kept this town from blowing up, quite a few times. I don’t even think he was doing it for the money. Apparently he didn’t get much. He was just…” Joe shook his head in frustration. “Pot’s about the only industry left around here.”
“He’s a cop.” Don said it firmly. “He swore an oath to uphold the law, and he didn’t. If he’d just ignored the pot, that would have been bad enough. But for him to give you all information is way the hell over any line I’ve ever heard of.”
Megan couldn’t really argue with that, and she didn’t think Joe wanted to either. “But we can warn him?”
Don finally nodded. “Yeah. Okay. And then—we should call a lot of people. Make sure this goes big when it goes.” He looked at Megan. “You’ve got the state contacts, and you also know people in the FBI, right? I’ll call DEA headquarters, and the Department of Justice.”
“And what are we saying?” Megan asked. “I mean…it’s DEA, right? Styler?” She hadn’t actually discussed this with anyone yet, but it was all that made sense. “They’re the ones who’ve been getting in your way. I looked over the old records, and it was almost always the DEA who got your guys released, and who pushed you off leads. Styler signed off on it all. And she was really upset after the shooting.” Megan thought back to what she’d seen in the parking lot. “She seemed more angry than worried.”
“That’s who me and Anna came up with too.” Don shook his head in disgust. “Once we started putting it all together, it was fucking obvious. We just never got past the frustration before. Never looked for a deeper reason.”
There was another knock on the door.
Joe shook his head. “More visitors today than I had all last month.” He leaned past Don to pull the door open. “Sheriff,” he said, and Megan heard nothing but courtesy in his tone. “Come on in.”
Carson did, lifting his cowboy hat off his head as he crossed the threshold. He looked terrible—old and exhausted, with several days’ worth of stubble and sweat stains on his uniform. He turned to Megan. “Shirley suggested I look for you up here.” He glanced over at Joe before turning to Don. “And when I saw your car down there, I figured…I figured it was good. I could get it over with all at once.” Then he shook his head. “Well, not quite. I still need to take a trip down to see Anna. I’m hoping you’ll be generous enough to let me do that, once I’m done.” There was a tremble in his voice that Megan hadn’t heard before.
Joe stepped back a little further. “You should come in.” He nodded toward the couch. “Why don’t you guys sit down, and I’ll get coffee.”
It all seemed strangely civilized. Normal. Megan felt disoriented, and she was pretty sure Carson did as well. Although maybe in his case it had more to do with the fact that he obviously hadn’t slept in a couple of days. She started moving toward the couch, and Carson followed her, with Don coming along behind the sheriff. Herding him. For protection, or custody? Megan glanced over toward the kitchen, and Joe was looking back at her. He didn’t say anything, didn’t even change his expression much, but it was comforting anyway. After he handed the mugs of coffee to Don and Carson, he put a jug of milk and a little pot of sugar on the table, then stood behind Megan’s easy chair, his hand on the back of it, his fingers just touching her shoulder.
Carson looked at the three of them. “You know why I’m here,” he said softly.
“We were going to come find you,” Don admitted. “We were going to start making calls this morning.”
“I had nothing to do with Anna.” Carson looked at each of them in turn. “At first, I was worried that maybe I’d slipped up somehow, told somebody something that I thought was innocent, and it got to the wrong people. But I’ve been turning it over for two days now, and it didn’t come from me.”
“That’s what my people say too,” Joe reassured him.
<
br /> “But if they come looking for whoever the leak was on this, they might find you too.” Megan didn’t want to take away Carson’s hope, but she didn’t want him to fool himself either.
He looked confused. “I’m going to turn myself in,” he said, as if it were obvious. “What I’ve been doing—is it any worse than what Styler did?”
“Wait a second.” Don held up a hand. “Can you prove it was her? I mean—she’s our prime suspect. But we don’t have proof.”
“No. No proof.” Carson didn’t look too worried about it. “But it shouldn’t be hard to get. They can look through the DEA files and see if there was any valid reason for any of the people she cut loose. If there wasn’t a valid reason, we arrest that person and sit on him until he gives her up.” He stopped. “You arrest that person, I mean,” he corrected himself. “I spoke to her this morning, before I left. I didn’t quite accuse her, but I made it clear what I was thinking. And she didn’t deny a thing. Just asked what I was going to do about it.”
Joe’s fingers got a little heavier on Megan’s shoulder. “What did you say?” he asked.
“I said I was no one to talk. But I said I was going to anyway.”
“Jesus, Sheriff.” Joe didn’t sound impressed. “You just painted a huge target on yourself.” There was a pause before he added, “Or maybe that was the idea.”
Megan turned to look at him, then swiveled back to Carson. “What? Are you—are you trying to get her to come after you? Is that what Joe’s saying? Uncle Carson…”
“I’m too old to go to jail, Meggie. This way, at least it’ll make things clear. If someone comes after me now, we’ll know they were sent by Styler.”
“You’re too tired to make a rational decision,” Megan said. “I understand that you’re upset. It’s good that you’re upset. You’d damn well better be! But, Carson, we can figure this out. We can get you a good lawyer.”
“No.” His voice was quiet, but the shakiness was gone. “None of you are getting involved in this. I only came up to let you know, not to drag you down. This is my decision.”
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