The Righteous Path: A Parker County Novel (The Parker County Novels Book 1)

by James D F Hannah

  “Micki Miller was dating one of the McCoy boys.”

  “But then again, sometimes I suppose there’s no good way to start it off, so you just shove the whole thing in there.”

  “Aside from that being the worst way of describing it imaginable, that was my thought too.”

  If the Millers were known for a willingness to do whatever it took to make a dollar, using something of a shotgun-blast approach to the enterprise, the McCoys’ reputation was about focus. They had grown marijuana for decades, and the stories about the family grew as fast as the crop. The patriarch was an old bird named Tennis McCoy, who ran the family business with an iron-handed authority. No one had heard much out of Tennis in months, though. There were rumors—whispers made their way to Matt, and he could have gone straight to the source to get the rumors confirmed but opted to leave that dog alone. Besides, he doubted there were many tears shed over the old man.

  “Did you find out anything about the McCoy kid?” Matt said. He and Crash had gone down the street to O’Dell’s for lunch. Most of the courthouse workers filtered down that way around the same time, and Matt and Crash were at a table watching the waitresses hustle around, refilling soda glasses and setting down plates of cheeseburgers and salads and cheese fries.

  Crash sipped her Diet Coke. “Micki’s friend didn’t know much about him. He’s a few years older. She wasn’t sure how they met. She wasn’t even sure what he looked like. Just that he and Micki started seeing one another a few weeks back, and Micki is over the moon about him.”

  “Did she say ‘over the moon’?”

  “She did not, no.”

  “I didn’t suspect she did. I doubt any teenager has used that term in years. I’m not sure why you even used it.”

  “Audrey Hepburn said it once. I think.”

  “You watch Audrey Hepburn movies?”

  “I do. I’m a woman with a college degree. When you start off in higher education, they give you that poster from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, an obsession with pumpkin spice, and an interest in 35-millimeter photography.”

  “Find much about McCoy?”

  “No criminal record. No college. No social media, but neither does Micki.”

  “The McCoys aren’t the tweeting kind.”

  The waitress brought out their food—cheeseburgers and fries for both. Crash attacked her bacon-and-blue-cheese burger with vigor.

  Crash froze in mid-bite when she realized Matt hadn’t touched his food and was instead looking at her.

  “Something wrong?” she said.

  Matt shook his head. “Nope. Continue.”

  Crash took a bite of the burger, chewed, and swallowed. “You think we should go out to the McCoy place and talk to them?”

  “I do not.”

  “How come?”

  “Because I don’t want to die any faster than I am already, and going out there is doing nothing but asking to expedite the process.”

  “But they might know something.”

  “They may, but if they do, they won’t tell us. The McCoys keep the lights on by growing pot. We show up in a cruiser and start asking questions, what do you think their response is going to be?”

  “When framed that way, I feel like the response won’t be good.”

  “I doubt they’d shoot us on sight, but they sure as hell won’t throw out a welcome mat. Trying to get information out of them that they don’t want to give won’t do anything but create more problems than we already have.”

  “Then what do you recommend?”

  Matt ate some of his own burger. His had grilled onions on it and a cool pink center. Perfect.

  “That after I finish this burger, I call the county attorney’s office again and chew Nolan’s ass until he gets me a court order for that video from Campbell’s house.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about, Matt.”

  “I know what you’re talking about, and I’m saying we handle the situation we can handle until we figure out what to do about the other situation.”

  Crash’s expression betrayed frustration. Matt drank his Sprite.

  “You think there’s a proper way of doing this, Crash, and you’re not wrong,” Matt said. “But it’s not the way to go with this circumstance.”

  “Why not?”

  “For the same reason the best way to stop a car isn’t driving into a brick wall.”

  “That makes not one lick of sense, Matt.”

  Matt glanced at his plate. He wasn’t as hungry as he thought—or at least as he felt he should be. The burger was good, but his stomach raged against everything in protest, and he pushed the plate away.

  “You remember how we handled the thing with the white supremacists?” he said.

  “I held a gun on one of them in the Riverside, so yes, Matt, I remember. I also remember you guys hot-dogged the whole situation, and it pissed off Jackie Hall.”

  Matt chuckled. “That last part was a bonus. But the thing is, there was no ‘by the book’ for a situation like that. They’ll tell you at the police academy there is, but something like that is its own unique beast, and you treat it that way. The reason it’s called ‘by the book’ is because it’s what people expect you to do. Sometimes, you’ve got to go with the unexpected.”

  Matt expelled a small burp. Bile. Lunch rolled angrily inside him.

  “Or it may not, and those little girls would have died, and the other hostages would have died—” he said.

  “Rachel was a hostage. She would have died.”

  Matt set the flat of his palm down hard on the table. “What we did was take the road less traveled, and that seemed to make the difference.”

  “You want to work harder to make this car-into-a-brick-wall analogy stick?”

  Matt sighed. “Try this: Conventional wisdom says to stop your car, you apply the brakes until the car stops moving. That’s one way of doing it. There’s also a more extreme way of handling the situation, which is you can drive your car into a brick wall, and that’ll do in a pinch if your brakes don’t work.”

  “Talking to the McCoys, that’s driving into the brick wall, even though that’s what the rules say we’re supposed to do.”

  “Yes.”

  “So what you’re saying is that the rules of normalcy don’t apply to the McCoys.”

  “They do not. There’s another way to stop the car, and what we do is find what that way is.”

  “I don’t like this idea that different rules apply to different people, Matt. My thing was always that the law is applied without regard to anything else. Rich or poor, white or black. Lady Justice and the blindfold and all that.”

  “And that’s how it should be, but it’s not how it always is.” Matt motioned for the waitress to bring the check. “We’ll figure it out.”

  Matt paid for lunch; Crash offered, and Matt laughed it off. On the way out, they spoke to people they recognized from the courthouse and were headed up the street when nausea hit Matt. He rushed into the alley and bent over behind a dumpster and puked.

  Crash stood at the alleyway entrance and said nothing. She had seen this before, and she knew Matt well enough to leave him alone. She heard him heaving and retching and the splattering against the pavement.

  The vomiting took a while, and when he came back, Matt was as pale as fresh snow, with yellow tendrils of bile and saliva hanging from his lips. He wiped at his face with a handkerchief and blew his nose. His red-rimmed eyes watered. He struggled to smile, to make the situation less uncomfortable, and they walked back to the office without another word.

  When he got home that night, he didn’t tell Rachel about vomiting, or the call he made to Dr. Fordham once he got back to the office.

  All Fordham said was, “Chemo.”

  “No,” Matt said. “I’m holding out on the liver.”

  “I’m done screwing around, Matt. I’m serious. We need to schedule a start date.”

  “But I’ll lose my hair, and get puffy, and I won’t be pretty anymore,
Doc.”

  “But you’ll also be less dead. How’s dead look on you?”

  “Not in my color wheel.”

  “Then you see my point.”

  “You are making one, yes.”

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joe Strummer, this might be a breakthrough.”

  Matt sighed. “She wants a baby, Doc.”

  “A lot of women do.”

  “Me on chemo won’t help that happen.”

  “Not in the short-term, no, but—”

  “She’s in her forties, and I’m closer to being fifty than not, plus, you know, fucking cancer, so our short-term isn’t like most people’s.”

  “Then you need to determine which she wants more: a theoretical baby or an actual living, breathing husband. Also, I’d recommend you smoke pot.”

  “What the hell kind of doctor are you?”

  “The kind who knows it helps with nausea and lack of appetite.”

  “You don’t understand how long I’ve been a cop, Doc. The whole idea of it pushes against everything I’ve done for decades now.”

  “Don’t smoke when you’re at work and it’ll be fine. I would wager you know the places to procure such a thing.”

  “Through my line of work, you sometimes run across the occasional purveyor of the good tree.”

  “That sounds fucking embarrassing when you say it. Find yourself a pot dealer. If you use it in the evenings, it will help with the nausea, and you’ll be hungry. Have Rachel buy Doritos.”

  “Should I listen to the Grateful Dead while I smoke it?”

  “No one should do that, Matt. The cancer is suffering enough.”

  At home that night, Rachel talked about her day and made supper and they lay on the couch together, arms wrapped around one another. Rachel curled into him, a movie playing on the TV that neither of them paid attention to.

  Sometimes, in moments like this, Matt forgot he had cancer. He forgot about work, about paperwork, and about things he needed to fix in the house and whether they should get a dog—Rachel was rooting for one, in addition to the baby, which Matt chalked up to overcompensation. He forgot about the lingering guilt and worry he had about Carl and what he planned to do with the rest of his life and whether that time was six months or thirty years.

  Matt forgot about everything except how wonderful Rachel felt next to him. He wanted to push the pause button and savor the moment as long as he could, no matter how unrealistic the idea was. He knew at best, it was all nothing more than a succession of moments—good and bad—and all he could hope to do was to remember them, to have something to hold on to when the moments that followed weren’t as good.

  They went to bed and they made out like teenagers, which was sometimes the best Matt could do. He didn’t always have the stamina to take it to the next level, and Rachel never pushed, never rushed. She was soft and gentle to him. He didn’t let himself get frustrated when things didn’t respond the way he thought they should. There had been plenty of times where his cock had just lain there, flaccid, flopped to the side.

  This had been part of a learning experience for them both. Rachel had taken it personally at first, that Matt was already losing interest. A talk to Fordham taught them that this was typical with cancer patients. A response brought about by exhaustion.

  They developed other techniques. Matt had found other ways to be giving to her, and Rachel, she didn’t complain about that. Sometimes they spent half the night kissing and touching one another, a playful exploration that reminded them of what it had been like when they were younger and learning one another’s bodies. But this came without the fevered rush of youth, with a gentleness and a sense of contemplation. Matt rediscovered birthmarks on Rachel that he had forgotten about. Rachel found new places on Matt that, with the slightest bit of pressure, elicited gales of ticklish laughter, and sometimes a startling state of arousal.

  On those nights, as they slept, they clung to one another as if the other might float away into the night.

  Matt’s cell phone ringing broke them both of their sleep.

  1:18 a.m.

  Matt answered. Crash on the other end.

  “Everything okay?” Matt said.

  “There’s been another one,” she said.

  12

  The lights were visible long before Matt made the turn up the road toward the house. A mixture of flashing blue lights from police cars and the red lights from EMS. People stood in their front yards, dressed in pajamas and bathrobes, watching it all with that uniquely human combination of compassion and morbid curiosity. Hoping the neighbors were okay and grateful it hadn’t been them.

  The ambulance pulled out of the driveway, the siren screaming to life as it passed Matt, leaving him a space to park his cruiser. Several of the cruisers already there belonged to the state police, and a knot wrestled in his stomach.

  Crash stood at the head of the driveway, talking to another deputy and a pair of uniformed state troopers. Matt’s cruiser slid into the space, and Crash rushed to catch him as he exited the car.

  “He’s here.” Her voice was hushed, almost whispered. “Jackie Hall.”

  Matt slammed the car door harder than he intended. “What happened?”

  “Same M.O. as before. Attackers were waiting for the victims in the house as they were coming home.” She motioned to the road. “That ambulance you passed was taking them to the hospital.” A beat. “They were coming back from visiting grandchildren.”

  “How bad this time?”

  “They pistol-whipped them both. The husband got the brunt of it this time. The wife, she’s younger—looks like she was a trophy at one time—and she took it better than he did.” Crash looked back to the house. “Couple’s name is Peter and Kara Carlton. He’s late sixties, and she’s maybe fifty, I’m guessing. They had a dog. A golden retriever. The wife said the dog always barked when they came home, but they got inside, and he wasn’t there. That’s when they realized something was wrong.” Crash’s voice sharpened. “We found the dog in the back yard. It looks like they beat it to death with a baseball bat.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah, I’ll say they may have called on him, but he didn’t answer the phone.”

  “Let’s keep the blasphemy minimal tonight, Crash. We need everyone we can get rooting for our side.” Matt’s eyes shifted over to the state troopers. They were young—neither of them looked more than twenty-five—and they were built like bouncers at a bar, with shoulders broad and straight. It was as if they had broom handles strapped back there. Their uniforms were crisp and fit well, and they wore their flat-brimmed hats low over their eyes.

  Crash turned to her notebook. “State police was here when I got here.”

  “They been behaving themselves?”

  “They’re good kids. They’re young.”

  Matt laughed. “Have you suddenly progressed to being a wise sage?”

  “Not really, but I’d bet I’m more badass than either of them.”

  “A breeze could knock you over, Crash.”

  “I’m small, but I’m mighty.” She bared her teeth like a dog readying for a fight and growled.

  “I’m terrified.” Matt twisted his head around. “Where’s Hall at?”

  “Inside. He was talking to the wife.” Crash flipped pages on her notebook. “He seems like a nice guy, Matt.”

  Matt ignored the comment. “How’s the wife seem?”

  “As fine as you can be after watching your husband get beaten.”

  “She know about the dog?”

  “It seemed like a lot to dump on her all at once.”

  “She back up what Campbell told us?”

  Crash shook her head. “She said there were only two of them. And they asked about money from ‘the Guthrie job.’”

  Matt wrote the phrase down in his notebook and underlined it for emphasis. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Well, shit, Matt, if I knew, it might suck the mystery out of all this.”

  “Did Carlt
on or his wife have a clue what they were talking about?”

  “Mrs. Carlton was in hysterics. They tried talking to her, but she was on the floor next to her husband, sobbing.” Crash swallowed hard. “They smeared shit on the walls like before, but the violence on the victims escalated. There’s blood on the walls. The wife, she’ll be in the hospital for a while, but the husband, he’s not leaving.”

  Matt heaved a deep breath. “Only two attackers? You think someone broke away from the group? Or are these two going off on their own?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll be honest, Matt, that this is outside of anything I imagined going on here. This is what you hear about happening in other places, the stories parents tell their kids so they don’t move off to the big, bad city.”

  “Those are thin lines these days. The shit we always thought made us better than those places, that’s hanging outside our back doors.”

  A large shadow fell through the open front door, and behind it came Lieutenant Jackie Hall. Hall was a big man dressed in a white short-sleeved dress shirt, the underarms stained yellow, and a flowered blue tie and shiny gray slacks. He wore his shield on a lanyard, the badge resting on top of his ample gut. He ran his ham-sized hand over the top of his close-cropped blond hair and saw Matt, giving him a big smile like they were the best friends on earth.

  Hall made his way over, and the closer he got, the more Matt could see how red and flushed the big man’s face was. He huffed a few breaths of air and placed his hand on the hood of Matt’s cruiser, shifting his weight over to that side, and Matt heard the car’s suspension whine like a whipped puppy.

  “How you doing, Sheriff?” Hall said.

  The contents of Matt’s stomach soured.

  “I’m great, Lieutenant. How are you?”

  “Couldn’t be better. Just waiting on the baby to show up.”

  “Didn’t know you were expecting. How far along are you?”