The Dime

by Kathleen Kent

  The image of the banner at the compound snakes across my memory: THE KING JUBILEE HERITAGE VILLAGE.

  Seth reaches down and pats me on the arm. “We kept searching for you, Riz, but we were pretty certain you were gone.”

  He looks at Craddock as though waiting for approval to continue.

  Craddock says, “It was Bob who brought us to you.”

  “I don’t understand,” I say, the drug stupor diminishing at Craddock’s alarming words, the elusive question I had about Hoskins trying to resurface.

  “Before he died, he was able to make a call,” Seth tells me.

  “That’s not possible,” I say, shaking my head emphatically. “He got shot in the head.”

  The recollection of Bob’s body being slammed against mine, his blood spattering on the dashboard, makes the room tilt sickeningly.

  “We know,” Craddock says. “We found his body. The bastards had left it in the car, hidden in the woods, close to a junkyard. Don’s Auto Parts near Lake of the Pines. In the yard were several large commercial trucks. When we searched the car, we retrieved his cell phone, pushed under the front seat.”

  That was the question I had wanted to ask. The whereabouts of Bob’s second, personal phone.

  “The phone was covered in blood,” Seth continues. “His fingerprints on it. We figure…he didn’t die right away; he must have been stunned at first by the shot. At some point he regained consciousness long enough to pull his phone out of his pocket and press one auto-dial button for help. The person he dialed answered the call. She knew the call was from him, but she couldn’t hear anything but breathing.”

  “What number did he dial?” I ask.

  Craddock looks down at his hands. “His daughter’s.”

  I lick my lips and glance away, swallowing back tears that, once started, will be impossible to stop.

  Seth clears his throat gently and continues. “He must have then shoved the phone under the seat. It allowed us to track his location. It didn’t look good for you being alive, but since we didn’t have a body yet, we bided our time.”

  We didn’t have a body yet, Seth had said, and I realize that he was talking of looking for me, my lifeless corpse. Bob, stunned and probably terrified, almost dead, had made one last, herculean effort to reach out to the living.

  Seth is looking at me, concerned. I give him a nod to continue.

  “We tapped the junker’s phone and knew right away he was in touch with the Roys. And we knew from conversations they were holding a female cop. We watched him for days before he finally led us to the Roy house. The hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my years of law enforcement was leave Bob’s body in that car.”

  I feel the drug trying to drag me into sleep, but when Seth tells me they’ll come back tomorrow with the rest of the story I take hold of his arm and croak, “The hell you will. Finish it.”

  A battery of local officers, Texas Rangers and four federal agents, followed the junker to a gate at a dirt road leading to the house, where a brief exchange of fire took place with two armed guards. The three of them, the junker and the two guards, were killed almost immediately by the Ranger snipers and the house at the end of the road was breached.

  Seth says, “I don’t have to tell you what we found in the house. A woman and Curtis Roy dead. And that’s a story we all want to hear when you’re stronger.”

  “How did you know to find me at the village?”

  Craddock smiles sadly and says, “Well, it wasn’t hard. You bled like a wounded water buffalo through the whole house, across the yard, and into the woods.”

  Ryan says, “Craddock and I followed your tracks through the trees while the rest of the force drove the length of the dirt road behind the house, hoping to find you on the far side of the property. We heard several shots fired, and we took off running in that direction. And for ten minutes we ran. I had a hell of a time keeping up with Daniel Boone here.”

  “Daniel Boone, my ass,” Craddock says. “It was Ryan who took out Tommy Roy with his service pistol. That shot was close to fifty yards.”

  “Just proves fat men can run when they need to,” Seth says, and we all laugh.

  I study Ryan, his baby face not quite as babyish as when we’d raided the St. Borromeo students’ party. Killing someone will do that to a person.

  Ryan is looking at me, his lips slightly parted, brow furrowed. “When I dropped him, you were in the middle of the road, fending him off with a bayonet. You had to know he was going to kill you, but you stood your ground.”

  “Yeah, well, I wouldn’t have stood for long. Lucky for me you scored so high in marksmanship, Kevin,” I tell him, and his smile widens. “I bet the sergeant has a plan to give you a commendation for that.”

  Ryan’s smile falters and he looks at Craddock, who looks at Seth.

  “What?” I ask, but they grind their hands in their pockets and their eyes all go in different directions. Seth tells them to wait outside, that he’ll join them in a minute.

  When they’ve left, Seth squeezes my arm. “Sergeant Taylor had a heart attack a few days after you went missing. He was taken right away to the hospital but was dead on arrival.”

  I close my eyes, unable to cope with the swelling of grief, and let myself be carried under by the dark wave this time. As soon as the burning tears begin to leak from behind my closed eyelids, Seth leaves too.

  I don’t bother calling out to him to ask after Evangeline Roy. If they had found her, they would have told me. There are still too many unanswered questions about where she came from and how she managed to pull herself, in a relatively short time, to the top of the heap of the drug game in East Texas. If she’s not dead, she’s already regrouping, waiting for new followers. Waiting for uplift.

  38

  A week before Thanksgiving, Jackie and I move into our new home. It’s a small two-bedroom house with a tiny yard—a starter house, I believe it’s called—but the fixtures are new, the roof is solid, and the foundation is, as yet, uncracked. The neighbors seem unfazed by the appearance of lesbians on their tranquil, suburban shores.

  A few days after my rescue from the Roys I had surgery to repair the ruptured Achilles tendon and spent the entire month of October clomping around in a cast and then a boot, watching too much television with my leg elevated on the couch, trying to keep my temper in check. I started rehab six weeks after surgery, but it was slow going. And I had the distinction of scaring away more physical therapists in seven days than any other patient in the history of the facility. Time will tell if I’ll be able to walk without a limp, let alone run.

  Thanksgiving Day, we invite everyone: all of Jackie’s family, including her truculent grandparents; Seth; Nadia, our Russian neighbor, and her two sons; even the general from Weatherford, sans Civil War uniform, who we discovered had been rendered homeless, reduced to living in his car. We sit at three different tables, somehow making conversation with one another, all of us gravitating to our most suitable dinner partners. Nadia and Rodean, Jackie’s grandmother, exchange recipes, finding in common a love of all things made with root vegetables. Anne insists on serving Seth personally, pressing on him second and third helpings of everything, smothering him with motherly attention.

  Jackie had asked me in my fever dream, the dream of being on the beach at Cape May, what I wanted out of life. “Joyful noise” is what I remember telling her.

  She now pulls me aside between the soup and the turkey courses to tell me how happy she is. She hands me a gift-wrapped box and says, “Happy anniversary, Betty. Nine years ago today, I met a ferocious woman who changed my life. I can’t imagine being in this world without you.”

  Inside the box is a new Saint Michael’s medallion with a long silver chain. I smile and kiss her, then slip the chain around my neck. I will wear it every day, and I will go to my grave without admitting to her that the gift has made me profoundly sad. It’s as though the new Saint Michael medal forever supplants the old, erasing all of the memories attached
to it and affirming that the Saint Michael given to me by my mother and worn by three generations of Rhyzyk women is gone forever.

  After dinner, I find James Earle and the general sitting in chairs in the backyard, talking about their war experiences, James in Vietnam, the general in Korea, and passing a flask amiably back and forth. Sergei and Jackie’s nephew Lonny volunteer to walk Rita the rescued poodle around the neighborhood, and they return an hour later, both wearing a light fog of marijuana.

  After the orgy of pumpkin and pecan pies, the muted sounds of the football game—Green Bay being destroyed by Detroit—accompany the inevitable snores from men lapsing into sugar comas. I wander through the house like an invading spirit, searching for something to quell a sudden restlessness. I look at all of the people brought together by birth and by unlikely circumstance and remember the toast that James Earle had made outside of Babcock’s Barbecue, calling us the unclaimed. For most people, that’s true at least part of the time. For the rest of us, it’s true most of the time.

  Seth catches my eye and asks me if I knew that most Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare but are consumed in only twelve minutes. Halftimes at football games are twelve minutes, he reminds me. He tells me with a drowsy smile that he doesn’t think that’s at all a coincidence. I laugh and agree with him.

  For a moment I think I’ll flop down next to him on the couch, share with him the beer I’ve just opened, and confide to him that I might have been wrong about the answer I gave him to the question he posed to me that night at Slugger Anne’s. He’d asked me what I had given up to be a great cop. My response, coming from a place of pride and more than a little defensiveness, had been that I had given up nothing.

  My answer now might be very different. Or then again, it might not. To speak of it out loud would just be so much whining. I hand him the bottle and tell him I hate his guts for beating me back to work.

  I walk to the front door, slip on a light jacket, and step out onto the front porch for some air. It’s late afternoon, the street empty and all too quiet. Benny’s voice has been silent since my dream of the pay phone on the deserted Brooklyn street. I’m worried that I won’t hear him until I’m able to run again.

  My hand in my jacket pocket finds my car keys, and after sending a quick text to Jackie, I get in my car and drive off much too quickly, burning rubber in a way that will probably bring concerned neighbors out onto their front yards to look for hooligan teenagers.

  I drive down to Riverfront Street and turn into the parking lot fronted by the two large cylindrical tanks, the bronze buffalo, the oil derrick, and the old-fashioned phone booth—the Fuel City truck stop, taco stand, and car wash, which I haven’t visited since that day two years ago when I delivered my defiant message to the Dallas skyline. There are, even at this fading, twilight hour, a few cars and pickup trucks parked in the lot. Fuel City’s doors are open 24/7, even on holidays, and half a dozen people are lined up at the brightly lit takeout windows to pick up their Thanksgiving tacos.

  I limp to the back of the building and lean against the metal pen holding the small group of longhorns huddled together. The temperature is dropping, close to freezing, and the bars where my hands are resting are uncomfortably cold. I’m wearing only a thin leather jacket with no hat or gloves, and I’ve begun to shiver.

  I look for and find the liver-spotted steer with the largest sweeping horns, the left one now broken at the tip. The cement wall at the back, the one painted with colorful balloons and the optimistic message WHERE DREAMS COME TRUE, has started to fade and crumble. It’s pocked with small holes, and I wonder if maybe the old renegade got fed up with the hollowness of the sentiment and took a few runs at the wall.

  The longhorn regards me dully until I climb through an opening between the poles and start walking slowly toward him. I look once over my shoulder, but no one seems to notice the tall, too-thin woman with shaggy red hair and a limp approaching the half-ton animal cautiously, like a wounded matador. The steer lowers his head defensively but there is no menacing shaking of horns. Just a few slow blinks and one long exhaled breath to let me know he has me in his sights.

  I ease closer, within a few feet of his massive head, ready to stumble away should he commit to charging, and we eye each other for a while until he decides I’m not a threat. He lifts his head again, nostrils wide and open to the air, and I reach out one tentative finger and connect with the stiff hide, encrusted with Trinity River bottom dirt and smelling of diesel fumes.

  I know that, when I’m ready, I’ll have to face what I went through with the Family, to, in Uncle Benny’s words, “reap some grim,” to sick up all of the rage and frustration over being violated, ridding myself of their poison. To come to terms with the violence I inflicted on others. With Evangeline’s slipping away.

  In normal times, that would have meant pushing myself to run twelve miles when I was only prepared for seven.

  I have another month and a half before I go back to work, on limited duty. It’ll be strange walking into the station and not seeing Sergeant Taylor at his desk, his vital, get-it-done energy gone.

  His replacement has already set up shop in his office. Another get-it-done cop who spent five years in Narcotics before being transferred to a different division. An ambitious man who then spent five years in Homicide. I’m speaking, of course, of Marshall Maclin.

  The reflections of the lowering sun have begun firing off the glass buildings to the east; the electric lights blink on at the Reunion Tower, the tiny red Pegasus rotating in its slow and stately flight over the office buildings and the expensive high-rise apartment dwellings.

  I turn and watch all the neon come on and I decide that, after all, it is a fucking beautiful skyline.

  Acknowledgments

  This book would never have been written without David Hale Smith, editor of the Dallas Noir anthology, who challenged me to write a contemporary crime story for the collection, which was the foundation for The Dime. For that I am so very grateful.

  My deepest gratitude also goes to my wonderful agent, Julie Barer, who encouraged me to explore new directions, and to my editor, Joshua Kendall, who enthusiastically embraced this project, guiding the manuscript with a keen editorial eye and a wicked sense of humor.

  I am indebted to the following people for their generosity in sharing their time and expertise, assisting in the research for this book. Whatever I got wrong is totally on me: Det. Brantley Hickman of the Plano Police Department; Det. Marilyn Hay (ret.) and Det. Paul Park, both of the Dallas Police Department; Dr. Jeanne Joglar; Deana Kalley; and Dana and Julie Moon. Many thanks to Theo and Lorin Theodosiou for their spirited conversations and unstinting support.

  My heartfelt thanks for all the incredible support from Mulholland Books and Little, Brown: Michael Pietsch, Reagan Arthur, Heather Fain, Nicole Dewey, Sabrina Callahan, and Pamela Brown. I now know that my life is charmed, because once more I got to work with the best copyeditors on the planet, Pamela Marshall and Tracy Roe.

  And to all my family and friends who have supported and cheered me on, I will be forever grateful.

  About the Author

  Photo credit: Remi David

  Kathleen Kent is the author of three bestselling historical novels, The Heretic's Daughter, The Traitor's Wife, and The Outcasts. She is also the author of the short story “Coincidences Can Kill You,” published in Dallas Noir, which was the inspiration for The Dime, her first work of crime fiction. Kent lives in Dallas.

  Also by Kathleen Kent

  The Outcasts

  The Traitor’s Wife

  The Heretic’s Daughter

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