The Righteous Path

by James D F Hannah

  Matt ran his hands through his hair. “People are in the hospital because of you. They will die because of your actions. You blew up someone’s place of business because you were too hotheaded to find out the person you wanted to intimidate was already dead. You act like this is you two against an unfair world, but it’s really just you wanting something that doesn’t belong to you.” He looked at Micki. “Your father robbed those banks and stole money. He’d have been just as guilty as the rest of them are. He’s not noble because he’s dead; he’s just dead. How do you fail to see this?”

  “They murdered him, Sheriff,” Micki said. “My daddy wasn’t a bad person. Mom always said he used to do bad things, but that was before he found out I was coming. Then these assholes talk him into doing something he probably didn’t want to do, but he did it on account of me. They thought they were getting this professional thief, but Daddy was reading old books, trying to figure out how to rob banks. And what did he get for it? What did I get for it? Nothing. The world might not care, but I do care. I care that I’ve never had nothing, but this bitch”—she spat the word at Iris—“she got to live off of that money.”

  Iris twisted her head around to glare at Micki. “I didn’t live off anything from my father. The bastard cheated on my mother. She was the only decent—” Iris screamed and sprung from the floor like an animal freed from its cage, leaping at Micki. Micki jumped back, fear and shock on her face. Billy came out of his chair and swung his gun hand through the air. He caught Iris across the face, and she screamed and fell backward, hitting the wall. She clutched at her cheek as blood ran between her fingers.

  Matt moved for his gun on the table. Micki came around Billy and aimed her pistol at Matt. Matt froze, staring at the gun. The girl smiled.

  “You want to test the universe, Sheriff?” she said. “Really see if it don’t care, Sheriff?”

  Matt pulled his hands back and lowered himself back into his chair.

  The front sight on the pistol had caught Iris below her right eye and had ripped down almost to her jaw. She trembled and covered her face with her hand again.

  "Your father, he didn't cheat on your mother," Matt said. "Whatever happens, you should know that."

  Iris didn't move. She stayed there on the floor, hiding her face, her body trembling.

  Micki raised her eyebrows. "The fuck are you talking about, Sheriff?"

  Matt motioned toward Iris. "She thought for years her father cheated with your mom." He looked to Micki. She had turned her own focus to Iris. "She saw him one night, outside your old place. Must have been around the time she was pregnant with you. Iris told herself father had knocked your mom up. He was just there to talk to your dad."

  Iris pulled her hands back enough to show eyes welled full of tears.

  "All your old man did was rob banks," Matt said. "I'm not sure if that's better or worse or what. But it's what the facts bear out."

  Iris’ eyes met Micki. There was a moment, a split second, where the women seemed to share a connection to one another. They both possessed with ideas of who their fathers had been. Both had been men who made choices that led them to cross paths, caused their fates to collide. Because that was how life worked, with the random intersection of lives. Matt felt the decades dividing these two women, the life experiences, the expectations that drove them at different points, those things passed through and in this second, these women understood one another.

  Everything existed in that moment, and just as quickly, the moment vanished.

  Micki shook her head and walked away.

  "Doesn't change shit," she said. "I still want my goddamn money."

  Matt slumped in his seat. “You’ve got no cards, Micki. I don’t know how else to explain this. The money doesn’t exist, and even if it did, there’s no way for you to get it. Let me and Ms. Warner go. Let me take you and Billy in and we end this with no one else hurt.”

  “No,” Micki said. “I want what’s mine. That money, we’ll get Billy somewhere he can record demos. Get himself a record deal.” She smiled again, looking at Billy with the emotion you only get when the world hasn’t worn away the pieces of you that allow that feeling to begin with.

  Billy, though, he stayed dead-eyed and emotionless. Gun in hand, focused on Matt. Matt knew Billy would kill him. He hadn’t missed a beat taking a swing at Iris, and she was fortunate it hadn’t blinded her.

  Matt took deep breaths.

  “All right,” he said. “What do you want to do, Micki?”

  “Are you fucking dense, Sheriff?” she said. “Money. I want paid what was owed to my daddy.”

  “By Campbell.”

  “By all those fuckers. They all owe me for putting me in the shit-storm of my life. They can all fucking die and rot, but I’ll get what they owe me.”

  “Then we’ll start with Campbell. He’s at the regional jail. We’ll talk to him and get account numbers from him. Find out what banks he’s got money in, and we’ll get it out in the morning.”

  “You serious, Sheriff?” Micki said. Her tone vacillated between glee and suspicion. “You’ll do that?”

  “Yeah, I’ll do that. I’ve got no particular inclination toward letting you two rubes kill me or Ms. Warner, and these guys are bastards anyway, so fuck it. Why not?”

  Micki squealed a little with delight, jumping up and down. “Fuck yeah!” She threw her arms around Billy’s neck and kissed him on the cheek. Billy betrayed no emotion. “This is it, honey. I told you we could do it.”

  “Yeah, you did.”

  Matt stood up. “Let’s go.”

  Billy rose from his chair. “If it’s all the same to you, Sheriff, I think it’ll just be you and me. Micki can stay here with what’s her face—”

  Iris glared at him. “I’ve got a name, you fucking hillbilly.”

  Micki moved toward Iris, raising her pistol to bring it down onto the other woman. Iris saw the movement and cowered.

  Billy said, “Stop.”

  Micki froze where she was. “She can’t talk like that.”

  “Bitch can talk however she wants; ain’t gonna matter soon, anyway. She says anything while we’re gone, shoot her in the stomach. Takes a long time to die that way. You suffer like you wouldn’t believe. Saw it in Reservoir Dogs. You bleed for a long time, and you wish to fuck you’d just die.” He walked over to the bed and grabbed a pillow and threw it to Micki. “Muffle the shot with that.”

  Matt heard Iris swallow hard. Micki looked at the pillow, then at Billy. She nodded without an expression on her face.

  Billy pointed the pistol back at Matt. “Let’s do this.” He grabbed Matt by the shirt collar, jerking him out of the chair, and dug the gun into the small of his back.

  They walked to the door, cold beads of sweat trickling down Matt’s neck, Billy pushing the gun further into Matt’s back.

  Billy spit out a little laugh. “You skinny as fuck, Sheriff.”

  “Cancer’ll do that to you.”

  “Yeah, I’ve had family with it. They looked like shit right there before the end. Kinda like how you look.”

  At the door, Matt paused. It caught Billy off guard and he stumbled but caught himself. He pushed at Matt.

  “What the fuck you waiting for?” Billy said.

  “I need to know something.”

  “Okay.”

  Matt gave his head a quarter-turn. “You and Micki. That thing for real?”

  Billy cocked his lips into a half smile. “It’s something to do.”

  “You got a plan, then? What happens after all this?”

  Billy shrugged. “Ain’t thought that far ahead. She’s a kid, and she’s fun, but this is real money we’re talking here. You can do a lot with real money.”

  “Yeah, I suppose you can.”

  Matt opened the hotel room door and stepped out into the hallway, Billy right behind him. They were barely past the door when Crash shot Billy with the Taser.

  Chapt
er 35

  Crash sat in the room next door, ear against the wall. Old hotel, thin walls, she made out enough to develop context and understand what they were saying. She heard the brief struggle, debated busting her way in and using surprise to her advantage, but as quickly as everything stirred to life, it settled and Crash instead took a deep breath and waited.

  Patience wasn’t in Crash’s nature. Matt had told her this more than once, and more so now since she became chief deputy. He said patience was the greatest virtue that a cop possessed.

  There was nothing even in the neighborhood of a plan before Matt knocked on the hotel door. He only told her to go into the adjoining room, listen close, play it by ear. Which was a terrible idea, Crash thought, but they also didn’t have much else to work with. Next to patience, Matt said, adaptability was a cop’s next best virtue.

  When she heard them getting ready to leave the room, Crash crept out of her own room as silently as possible—a gift developed through years of sneaking out of her parents’ house to find her way into mischief—and got herself into position.

  She crouched on her belly as the door opened and the men came out. Matt exited first, followed by Billy. She was about three feet away from the door, and she hoped Billy wouldn’t be looking for a tiny woman on the ground.

  He wasn’t.

  The coiled wires sprung free from the Taser as Crash pulled the trigger, and the barbs hit Billy somewhere mid-thigh, piercing his jeans, burying into his legs.

  Then the juice hit. Billy vibrated like a man possessed by the Holy Ghost, when what he was really possessed by was fifty thousand volts of electrical charge racking through his body. His teeth chattered, his eyes rolled to the back of his skull, and he dropped forward.

  The dead weight caught Matt off guard, and he spun around and grabbed Billy and pivoted him toward the floor. Matt reached for Billy’s gun. Billy’s muscles cinched to create a vise grip on the weapon. Matt grabbed Billy’s arm and slammed the man’s hand against the hallway wall. Billy couldn’t make a noise. Foam rolled out of his mouth. Matt pounded his hand over and over, watching the fingers loosen with each successive blow, until Billy’s hand opened and the gun dropped to the floor. Matt swept it up and brought himself around and aimed for the door.

  Micki stood in the hotel doorway, tears in her eyes, her own gun trembling in both hands. She made an anguished cry, a suffering wail that filled Matt’s ears.

  There was the gunshot, and a burning sensation erupted in the center of Matt’s chest. Pure instinct, and he grabbed for it, grabbed for the source of the pain, but there was nothing to embrace. He pulled back his hand, and all he saw was the blood.

  Another gunshot, and the fire inside Matt raged deeper as his feet gave out underneath him, and he slow-motion tumbled backward, stopping only when the wall met him. His vision blurred. Yet another roar of thunder, and this time he heard Micki scream.

  The outline of Crash filled his line of sight. Her voice called out to him from a hundred miles away, repeating his name, then yelling something about an ambulance. His name again.

  The world around him grew dark, and the sounds fuzzed out, like lost signals from distant radio stations.

  Crash said his name again.

  Matt.

  Matt.

  Matt.

  Chapter 36

  When Crash had been young—not that many years ago, she supposed—and dreamed of being sheriff, this wasn’t how Crash imagined it happening. That had always been the goal: to be sheriff of Parker County. Not the most glamorous of dreams, but no one ever said Charlotte Abigail Landing was the most normal or glamorous of women, and she was good with that.

  The entire first week on the job, she kept going to what had been her old office, rather than the sheriff’s office. To her, it was still Matt’s office. Didn’t matter they had already put up a new nameplate on the door. “Charlotte Landing, Acting Sheriff, Parker County.”

  She boxed up the few things Matt kept there and took them over to Rachel. Rachel accepted them and said thank you and politely closed the door. Crash knew Rachel’s plate would be full for a while.

  The county commission chewed Crash out for not following departmental protocol and not bringing backup to a hostage situation. She told them she had been going on the sheriff’s orders, and if they wanted to argue about everything, to take it up with him. That shut them up quickly, and the next order of business had been to name her acting sheriff, a title she would hold on to until the election in November.

  She wasn’t sure what pissed everyone off so much anyway: both Billy and Micki had survived for the county attorney to file a litany of charges against both, up to and including first-degree murder following the death of Wilma Campbell. The little psychos were going to prison for a long fucking time.

  The other deputies adapted quickly to her being in charge. She expected to catch more shit than she did, but they kept it all to good-natured ribbing and the occasional joke about her age. If none of them had wanted to deal with being chief deputy, they sure as fuck didn’t want the headaches that came with the sheriff’s badge. She still got called “Crash,” but when things came through the office, they deferred to her authority. Several times, she caught them calling her “Sheriff.” It sounded funny coming from their mouths, and she wasn’t sure when she would get used to it. Even in town, when someone said “Sheriff,” she looked for Matt but didn’t find him and remembered who they were talking to now.

  Iris Warner wrote her a thank-you card. It came to the sheriff’s department, the script so perfect and feminine. It almost embarrassed Crash for the nearly illegible scrawl she called her own handwriting.

  Crash ran into Gloria Miller while grocery shopping at Walmart. She pushed her cart through the cereal aisle, wondering who decided frosted shredded wheat needed to be blueberry flavored on top of already being frosted, when she looked up and saw Gloria. Her hair was finger-combed with gray throughout now, and her eyes swollen and puffy and dark. She stood there with her cart, looking at Crash.

  They stared at one another while that damn Smash Mouth song everyone sings at karaoke played through the overhead speakers. Other shoppers moved around them.

  Crash glanced into Gloria’s cart: bread, lunch meat, microwave meals, and six-packs of beer.

  Gloria brought her lips tight together and said, “How are you, Sheriff?”

  Crash nodded. “I’m good. Yourself?”

  “I’m here. You know how that goes.”

  “Yeah.”

  And then they let that uncomfortable silence sit between them for longer than they realized. Finally, Gloria said, “You have a good one, Sheriff.”

  “You too.”

  And they pushed their carts past one another and moved on with the rest of their night.

  Crash drove the groceries over to Cassie Peters’ place that night. It was a double-wide, this ancient thing older than Crash—much older than Crash, if she had to make a guess—with the aluminum siding peeling away like the skin on an orange. Lights were on inside, and Crash heard a TV playing as she pulled up into the driveway. She parked behind some Ford Escort sitting on two flats.

  Cassie met her outside as Crash walked toward the door, holding the bags of groceries. Cassie smiled at the sight of Crash before her expression shifted to confusion.

  "Hey there," Cassie said. "What are you doing here?"

  Crash moved the bags in her arms. "I was at the store, realized I bought too much, thought maybe you might need it."

  Cassie sucked in a few shortened breaths. She tugged at the hem of her Metallica T-shirt. "You don't have to—"

  "Don't have to do a lot of things, but I do them anyway." Crash gestured with the bags again. "You wanna grab one of these? They've heavier than you'd think."

  Cassie's face turned pink and her smile became awkward and she grabbed one of the bags. She snuck a fast glance inside, like a child looking for Christmas gifts.

  Crash look
ed toward the trailer. "Parents home?"

  Cassie rolled her eyes. "One's out saving her soul, and the other's one, I don't sure the bastard's got a soul to save."

  There it was, the edge Crash remembered from the night at the hotel, from listening through thin walls and hearing Micki Miller, hearing all that anger. Micki, consumed with resentment for the world not being what she thought it should be. Crash knew what that anger had been like, and she knew how she had dealt with it: loud music, martial arts, and deciding to become a cop. She couldn't make the world right, not the entire world, but she could work on her part of the world.

  "You want a job?" Crash said.

  The words were sudden, and they caught Cassie off-guard. "A job?"

  "We've got a mountain of old paperwork in the basement that needs scanned and input in the system. The clerks are all busy with everything else, so it's something you can come in and do for a few hours after school, and Saturdays if you feel industrious. It'll look good on your college application."

  That last part pulled laughter from Cassie. "College application. Whatever."

  Crash handed her the other bag of groceries. "You come by tomorrow afternoon and we'll get you set up scanning. Then let’s talk about college."

  The realization that Crash wasn't joking crept across Cassie's face. She nodded. "All right. I'll see you after school."

  "Yes you will," Crash said as she got back into her truck and backed out of the driveway. Cassie watched her from the driveway until the truck was in the road and pulling away, then she went back inside.

  About a month after that night at the hotel was when Rachel called Crash. She was sitting in her office—her office, she kept reminding herself—when her cell phone rang.

  “Everything okay, Rachel?” Crash said.

  “It’s fine, Crash. Listen, you doing anything after work?”

  “No plans at the present. Why?”

  “Because he’d like to see you.”