by Dave Daren
I nodded along with what the man said and made a mental note of his directions and once again sorely missed the ease of things that my phone had granted me, prior to its very untimely demise.
The directions sounded easy enough, at least, and if he was right about the timing of things, I shouldn’t be too late getting in to regroup with Brody and Evelyn.
I took a long sip of the energy drink and winced at the taste. I didn’t know what a “cool rush” was supposed to taste like, but this just tasted like battery acid. But, if it gave me any sort of energy boost, I’d take what I could get.
I smiled at Bill again and didn’t even make an attempt to hide my weariness.
“Thank you again for all your help,” I said with genuine sincerity.
He made a dismissive sound and waved his hand.
“Bah, don’t worry about it,” he said. “You look like you’ve had a hell of a night. I just hope things start lookin’ up soon.”
I sighed and nodded my head again in agreement before I lifted up my energy drink in a goodbye and walked back out into the cool, dry air of Tolar, apparently.
It didn’t take me long to start filling my tank back up with gas, and it felt good to stand in the breeze and stretch my legs out while I leaned against my dusty car door and waited for the pump to click off. Somehow, I swigged back the rest of the vile energy drink and swallowed it down with a grimace I didn’t bother to conceal.
The adrenaline that had coursed through my body for what had seemed like an eternity had finally faded away into what I could only call bone deep exhaustion. I felt every move I made and every step I took reverberate through my entire body. But I couldn’t stop now, not when there was so much that still needed doing.
I slotted the gas pump back into place and tossed the newly emptied can into the weather-battered plastic trash can at the side of the pump before I slipped back into the driver’s seat. I replayed Bill’s instructions in my head one last time as a reminder before I pulled out of the dusty gas station lot and left a cloud of dirt in my wake.
Bill had been correct about the drive, and I stayed straight along the never-ending road until it forked into two, where I then followed the road that wound to the left.
Unlike my drive in the night, this trip seemed to take no time at all. Maybe it was the energy drink sloshing through my stomach and the caffeine burning a hole in my brain, but I felt truly awake for the first time in hours as I caught sight of a familiar old road that curved along the outskirts of Crowley.
The relief to be back on my home turf, even along the outer edge I rarely had reason to visit, was enough to propel me further along. It didn’t take me much longer after that to weave my way further into town as I followed the streets I’d come to know like the back of my hand during my time in Crowley.
My car sputtered to a grinding stop outside of the local sheriff’s department a few blocks over from the law firm in one direction and my apartment in the other. The sounds coming from my car were none too reassuring, but I didn’t have the time to worry about that now.
I slammed the door closed perhaps a bit harder than I should have before I twisted the crick out of my back, and with my bullet-ridden phone in bloody hand, I made my way into the sheriff’s department through the narrow, sepia-tinted glass door.
Even this early in the morning, an air conditioner worked overtime from its perch braced in a window. Thin, multi-colored strands of ribbon fluttered with the cool air pumped into the room from where they were knotted around the AC’s grates.
The lobby, if it could be called a lobby, of the department was small. Four desks of the old greenish-gray metal variety sat in two rows of two and faced the front door. A few plastic chairs crowded closer to the front of the room for what I assumed were waiting purposes. Another narrow doorway led back to what looked like a hallway from where I stood.
Save for a young man that looked closer to a teenager than an adult asleep with his head propped in his palm at the frontmost left desk, the room was empty.
I didn’t know what else I should have done, so I simply walked up to the desk and rapped my good knuckles against the cheap, wooden top.
The kid startled, and his eyes shot open. The unflattering brown of his starched sheriff’s department issued shirt made his pale skin look almost yellow under the buzzing fluorescent lights overhead. Even with a bit of life in him now, he still looked too young for the shiny badge pinned to his chest. I wondered, perhaps a bit rudely, if the badge was the plastic kind they gave to children.
I cleared my throat and raised an eyebrow at him as I scanned his chest for a nametag to find that just below the star-shaped badge was a thin rectangular tag that read JENKINS.
Jenkins looked surprised to see me. His posture straightened, and he seemed suddenly like an actor in his first role at a community theater or a kid wearing their parent’s shoes. I couldn’t help but sympathize with him, even if my patience was already running thin after the night I’d had.
“Hello, sir, what can I do for you?” He asked with his high, thin voice.
I watched as his eyes drifted down to the phone in my blood-crusted hand. Maybe I should have rinsed it off back at Casey’s Convenience, but it had honestly slipped my mind.
I hooked one of the plastic chairs from the line along the wall with my ankle and scraped it across the floor toward me. I braced my good hand against the back of the seat as I lowered myself down into it.
“I’d like to report a crime,” I said with a thin smile. “Am I able to do that here?”
Jenkins nodded once, and then once again with a more serious look on his face as he scrambled for a pad of paper and a pen from the mess on the cluttered desk.
The analog clock behind him on the wall promised me that it was 7:29. It felt a little late in the morning for the building to be so dead, but maybe the graveyard shift turned over at eight.
I turned my focus back to Jenkins as he stared at me with wide, ready eyes, his pen poised above his notepad. I wondered for a moment if this was the first time someone had come in to report a crime to him, but shook the thought away as I shifted in my seat.
“Are you ready?” I questioned and waited for him to nod. Once he did, I continued.
“Last night, between nine and ten P.M., I witnessed an illegal chemical dump,” I began and didn’t miss the small furrow of confusion that creased Jenkins’ brow as he jotted down what I said.
“A chemical dump?” he asked while he practically sounded out each syllable in disbelief.
I gave a singular nod and rubbed my fingers along my jaw. I’d witnessed the thing, and it didn’t sound much less crazy to me.
“Yes, a chemical dump, perpetrated by Knox Chemicals,” I continued. “And after I witnessed the dump, one of the men shot at me and destroyed my phone.”
I placed my destroyed phone on the edge of Jenkins’ crowded desk as proof.
His eyes bugged comically wide as he stared at the shattered iPhone. From the top corner of the spiderwebbed glass screen, a bullet sat lodged in the metal. I felt a shudder roll through me as I imagined if the bullet had hit my hand instead.
“Did they… did they shoot your hand, too?” Jenkins asked as he pointed at my injured hand with the edge of his pen.
I lifted my cut hand to the light and flexed my fingers. The split skin stretched and ached over the bones along the back of my knuckles. I’d spent plenty of my escape through the desert wondering how exactly I’d received the injury.
The best I’d been able to come up with was that when the goon had shot my phone out of my hand, it had spun in the air on its way toward the ground, and I’d reached out on instinct to catch the damn thing and sliced my hand open on a razor-sharp shard of glass.
It had probably needed sutures, but even in my limited medical knowledge, I knew the window had closed for that to be a viable option.
“No, just the phone, then the shattered glass did this,” I explained before I dropped my hand back into my
lap. I really did need to clean off the blood from my knuckles soon because it was beginning to itch.
Jenkins gave another slow, disbelieving nod, but he resumed dutifully scribbling down everything I said. He cleared his throat and cut his eyes up to me once again.
“Did… did anything else happen?” Jenkins asked with a clear waver in his voice.
I sighed and gave another sharp nod as I leaned back in my seat.
“They then proceeded to chase me through the desert for hours,” I finished with a sweeping wave of my uninjured hand.
When I laid it out like that for another person, all bare bones and without the fear I’d felt, it sounded crazy.
In fact, Jenkins probably thought I was crazy as he scribbled down everything I’d said. If I hadn’t lived everything I’d just said, I’d think I was crazy, too. But getting the story off my chest to someone else, someone that wasn’t directly involved, felt like a weight off my shoulders.
Heavy footfalls echoed in the small, suffocating room, and I looked up at the sound. Apparently, Jenkins wasn’t the only person working in the department that morning after all.
Towering over the ever-younger looking Jenkins in his squeaky desk chair was Sheriff Thompson. I’d only met the man once when we’d crossed paths on a case I’d worked on months before that had involved a domestic dispute, but I’d recognize that dour look on his face anywhere.
We hadn’t had a pleasant first meeting, and he looked none too thrilled to see me now. Thompson clapped his meaty hand down onto Jenkins’ shoulder and gave me a simpering smile that didn’t meet his eyes.
“Landon,” he greeted with an unpleasant twist of his lips.
Jenkins looked between us like the unfortunate child caught in the middle of a parent-teacher meeting in elementary school.
I pasted a neutral smile onto my face as I looked up at Thompson.
The Sheriff wore the same unflattering shade of brown as Jenkins, but while the kid’s shirt hung loosely off his frame like a costume, Thompson’s was well-worn, and he carried himself like it was simply a part of his body. The same thing went for the gun holstered along his hip and the star-shaped badge on his chest.
“Sherriff,” I greeted with a nod of my head.
He grunted at my response before he turned his focus down onto Jenkins. The poor kid sat stock-still as his eyes darted up and down between the two of us as he seemed to try and figure out if he’d done something wrong.
Thompson gave a soft hum as he leaned down to snag the notepad from under the leaking tip of Jenkins’ pen. It had left a dark, bleeding splotch in the center of the page.
The sheriff’s eyes slid across the page before he looked back at me. Something in his expression had shifted from mild disdain to an emotion I couldn’t quite place, but his grip tightened on Jenkins’ shoulder and the kid slouched a little lower in his seat. Thompson looked up at me with a sharkish smile.
“Freddy, how about you go ahead and leave Mr. Landon’s report here to me,” he urged with a coldness to his tone that I thought only I noticed.
Jenkins seemed eager to end the confrontation and gave a quick nod of his.
I shrugged my shoulders, as if this wasn’t a worrisome shift, and rose to my feet. I grabbed my broken phone from the corner of the desk.
That action drew Thompson’s attention, and his eyes dropped to the phone and my knuckles before he looked up again. He flashed that same concerning smile before he gestured for me to follow him down through the narrow doorway and into the hallway.
The air wasn’t much more pleasant in the hall than it had been in the main lobby, but I followed him the short way down to the end of the hallway and turned after him as he stepped into what I presumed was his office.
His desk was the same aged, painted metal as the desks in the lobby, but unlike the desks in the lobby, his desk had an impressive name plate that bore the inscription SHERIFF J. THOMPSON.
I couldn’t help but wonder what the “J” stood for, but I didn’t dare ask as I settled into a slightly more comfortable chair than the one I’d just been seated in.
The walls were decorated with various photos and framed newspapers as well as a few accolades. The blinds behind his desk were still half-slatted closed and cast the office in a strange light.
Thompson still hadn’t pulled his eyes off the phone in my hand, and he only looked away as he dropped himself into his own chair behind his desk. He started to tap the paper he’d taken from Jenkins’ with one, thick finger in a slow, almost ominous rhythm.
I shifted to the edge of my chair because I wasn’t sure what was going to happen, but given the last twenty-four hours I’d experienced, I wanted to be ready if the growing anxiety in my gut was correct.
“So,” Thompson dragged the word out into numerous syllables. “You said you were shot at and attacked?”
He said it like someone else might have said “saw aliens.”
I could feel the tide in the conversation already beginning to turn.
“Not attacked,” I corrected. “Chased. I was chased after being shot at by men partaking in an illegal chemical dump for Knox Chemicals.”
I refused to break Thompson’s gaze as he grunted.
He leaned forward to plant his heavy elbows on his desk, and I didn’t like the way he leaned forward toward me or the sneer working its way into the corners of his thin mouth.
“You understand that all of that sounds a bit... far-fetched, don’t you, Landon?” Thompson questioned with that same simpering tone. “You could have broken your phone doing any old thing. Did you get any license plates or pictures of these mysterious men? Any faces?”
He gestured toward me as if to gesture at my phone where it sat in my lap.
I shifted in my seat to lift the phone up to let him see the bullet still embedded in the damn thing. I didn’t say a word, but I raised my eyebrows in question, but Thompson continued to smile at me like I was a daft child.
“It’s Texas, son,” he said. “Everybody and their grandmother has a gun and an itchy trigger finger to match. And without any real evidence, I don’t think I can take your word for it. You’re still new to the town and all, not sure how trustworthy you are.”
“To be clear,” I spoke as I managed to maintain a level tone. “You’re implying that some random person in Crowley could have shot my phone while just going about their day, and I made up an elaborate story to cover it up?”
I stared at him in practical awe as the realization set in around me.
Thompson was owned by Knox, too.
I was a fool for not realizing it sooner. If Knox had gotten a stranglehold around the EPA, why shouldn’t he have had the local sheriff by the short hairs, too? Only, while it seemed like he’d leveled the EPA with a threat, I had the feeling he was lining Thompson’s pockets instead.
“I’m not implying it, I’m explicitly saying it,” Thompson said as his tone went to ice. His eyes cut to the phone again before he looked back up at me. The ice melted, just barely, and he seemed to force himself to soften.
“Could I see that?” he asked with a sort of hunger I couldn’t ignore. He reached his fat hand out toward my phone.
I lowered my hand back into my lap and shoved the phone into my front pocket. I thought it was better to keep it where I couldn’t lose sight of it with the way Thompson was watching me.
“No, I think I’ll keep a hold on it,” I responded as I rose to my feet as the chair scraped across the ground behind me and let out a curdling screech. “Thank you for your time, Officer.”
I stared down at Thompson and didn’t hide the disgust working its way across my features.
“It’s Sheriff,” he corrected as his eyes narrowed. “And by all means, don’t be a stranger if you get chased by any more mysterious men with guns.”
He smiled, like we’d just had a pleasant little chat.
I’d never been a violent man, but I could have thrown something in my frustration. I didn’t say a word as I sta
lked out of the rinky building and into the now blinding morning light.
I wanted to scream and pull at my hair and curse Abraham Knox’s name until my throat went hoarse. Instead, I calmly made my way to my car and settled in for the short drive to the office. It was all I could do to keep my composure.
My car sputtered pitifully as I pulled to a halt in my usual parking space. It looked like Evelyn had already arrived, in her own car for once. I’d never seen her car up close, but the boxy Buick suited her, I thought. It was the same gunmetal gray I associated with her personality.
I slammed my car door closed before I made my way up to the law firm’s door. I truly hoped that was Evelyn’s car, because the door was already unlocked when I went to slide my key into the lock.
I was too tired to be worried about a potential intruder, however, and bumped the door open with the toe of my dirty shoe.
Despite the fact I’d been gone for what felt like an eternity, nothing in the office seemed to have changed from the morning before when I’d left.
Evelyn’s gray-helmeted head popped up from behind a stack of file boxes. Her eyes widened at the sight of me for only a split second before she regained her composure.
Her low, efficient heels clicked against the floor of the office as she made her way over to me.
“Sit down before you drop dead, Archer,” she scolded me as I swayed in the doorway.
I didn’t need to be told twice. I nodded and moved to sit behind my desk. I sank into my chair with a sense of immeasurable relief to be back home, to be out of my car, and most importantly, to be out of the line of fire.
I fished my phone from my pocket and tossed it onto the desk, and Evelyn’s eyes followed my gesture.
Her mouth gaped like a fish’s as she caught sight of the bullet that protruded from the screen. She looked a little comical, like I’d imagine a sitcom mother to look when frightened, not like the hardened paralegal I’d grown to enjoy.
“Is that--” she began.
“A bullet,” I finished for her with a succinct nod of my head. “Did Brody catch you up to speed about what happened?”
