Thin Gray Lines

by Mark Hazard

  Olive’s eyes darkened, and her chin tipped down, same as when her mother would dress someone down.

  “Your father is a good man,” Kline said. “We want him to avoid jail time. Everyone knew that Iris ran things here. Rodger was just a figurehead. Isn’t that right, Bill?”

  “A mascot basically,” pot-bellied Bill said. “Dumb as bricks that Rodger Tanner. At least, that’s what I could tell a judge.”

  “Sell to the co-op,” Kline said. “Use the money to get out of here. Move to Seattle and drink lattes. Go somewhere you’ll actually be happy.”

  “It’d mean a delay on the new distribution center,” Bill said. “But we’d keep everything running smooth with our customers. It’s what’s best for everyone. Hell, the whole community.”

  Olive raised her chin, eyes still dark, jaw set. “You knew.”

  The men looked blankly at her.

  “You knew all along.” She stepped closer. “You knew long before I did.”

  They shared a guilty glance.

  “My parents didn’t pull you into their orbit. You raced in, all eager to get on the teat.” She jabbed a finger. “Your farms only exist because of my father. Iris wanted to crush you. She wanted to bury you. Dad wouldn’t let her.”

  Another glance passed between them. Kline pursed his mouth.

  “The co-op was a compromise.” Olive said. “One of the only times I ever saw him fight her for something. I didn’t know why their fortunes had improved, but I knew why he didn’t want to crush you.”

  She looked them up and down, as if examining their souls and finding them wanting.

  “And now that he’s hurt, you’re rushing in again, but not for the teat. For the kill. You’re not little piggies. You’re jackals.”

  “Maybe we should have a talk with your father instead.” Kline crossed his arms. “Maybe he’ll see sense.”

  Randall was about to speak up, when Olive laughed.

  “Dad doesn’t own Tanner Farms anymore.” Mouth set in a line, she stared at him.

  A larger glint of uncertainty crossed Kline’s eyes.

  “You mean you sold already?” Bill asked. “Who does own it?”

  “I own it,” Olive said. “My name is on the deeds. I make the decisions.” She got closer to Kline, craning her neck. “My first executive decision was to personally run the farm.” She looked over her shoulder to Randall, silently drawing their attention to the best farmer in the area.

  “My second decision? Well, you two just made it for me.”

  “What do you mean?” Bill’s tongue flicked over his lips.

  “Tanner Farms has an escape clause in the bylaws of the co-op, whereas you do not.”

  Kline shifted his weight and made to speak but she cut him off.

  “If my father is incarcerated, I will enact that clause, severing ties with the co-op.”

  Kline huffed. “That’d be shooting yourself in the foot. Even if you could turn a crop.”

  “The co-op is how we keep our prices high,” Bill said. “Strength in numbers. It’s hard enough farming these days.”

  “Hard for you.” Olive walked to her car and popped open the hatch. “We can run on smaller margins, because of our size. In fact, that’s exactly what we’ll do.”

  “You can’t do that,” Bill whined. “You’ll undercut us. You’ll put the whole tri-state onion community at risk.”

  Olive pulled a shovel from the back of her car. She plunged it into the earth, then tossed dirt on their shoes.

  “Jesus… Olive!”

  Again, she flung dirt at their feet.

  “I will bury you all,” she said. “I will pick you off one-by-one, just like my mother wanted.”

  Kline backed away. “Now, Olive… I think you misunderstood. We just wanted what’s best for everyone.”

  She hefted the shovel, then smashed a set of halogen headlights out of Kline’s truck. “Lie to me again, Kline.”

  The big man’s lip began to quiver.

  “Jackals get crushed,” Olive seethed. “But piggies get fat. Something to think about.” She tossed the shovel at their feet and walked off.

  Randall followed after her, looking back over his shoulder at the two men as they argued and spat. But Olive didn’t look back once.

  Inside the entrance, he whipped his hat off. “Olive!”

  Finally, she turned and stuck her hands in her wig, the darkness of her eyes replaced by whites, wide with shock. “Holy crap. Holy crap. Did I just do that?”

  “Olive, you scared the blerrie pants off them.”

  “I just smashed a man’s headlights out. Was that too much?”

  Randall’s eyes were as big as hers. “No, dearie. It was perfect. Jackals and piglets. Where did you get all that?”

  In response, Olive lurched and vomited onto the long, oval table.

  Randall rubbed her shoulders, until she calmed her breathing. “It’s just a bit of nerves.”

  Leaning forward, wig hanging around her face, she mumbled, “I never liked that table.”

  “Well, you sure have ways of getting what you want.”

  She sniffed and wiped her mouth. “All I want is you and fifty tons of onions.”

  He chuckled, still amazed at her. “How does twenty thousand tons sound?”

  “That many?” She clicked her tongue. “I was way off. Guess I have more to learn.”

  “You will learn.” He kissed her on the forehead. “We both will.”

  FORTY-EIGHT

  April 3, 2006

  Kent, Washington

  Sergeant Jameson punched the brakes, propelling Deputy Corus into the seatbelt.

  “Did you see that guy?” Jameson pointed four fingers ahead. “Practically hit us.”

  Corus’s world went dim as pain streaked across his ribcage and clavicle. He coughed.

  Jameson hit the siren and pursued the bad driver and wrote them a $185 citation. He got back in, looking pleased with himself.

  “Well, that completes another day of keeping the streets safe. Time to go home to my beautiful bride and see what she has cooking for me.” He leaned his head onto his big shoulder, sporting a coy grin. “In the kitchen and in the bedroom.”

  Corus winced as a secondary wave of pain hit him.

  “Lighten up, Rook. The fires of passion have been relit but require constant stoking. You hear me? You gotta poke the coals and pump the billows.”

  “I hear you.”

  “Someday, when you’re married, all Big Danny J taught you is gonna grease your path to marital bliss. I tell you what. You’ll thank me then.”

  Corus had given up on Jameson getting it through his skull that Corus was already married. “When are you going to stop calling me ‘Rook’?”

  “When I bother to learn your name.”

  “You don’t know my name?”

  “From the sounds of it, you don’t even know your name.”

  After a moment, Corus laughed. “Aha, good one.”

  “Too bad you buzzed your head.” Jameson liked to change topics the same way he drove the cruiser. Jarringly. “I liked that funky haircut. But I guess it wasn’t very lawman-like.”

  “Indeed.”

  They parked in motor pool and headed inside to the bullpen where Jameson made Corus file their afternoon’s citations.

  “I’ll leave you to it, Rook. See you mañana.”

  “Hasta luego.”

  “What did you call me?”

  “I said see you later. I was responding.”

  “Oh, right. Speak English from now on.”

  Corus billowed his cheeks when Jameson fell out of earshot, dreaming of ice packs and Ibuprofen.

  Jim Cummins appeared at the edge of the bullpen by the CID cubicles. He pointed at Corus then curled the finger toward himself.

  Corus cursed inwardly. He’d been meaning to talk to Jim all day, but it had been one interruption after the other.

  “Jameson.” Cummins whistled in the big man’s direction. “With me
.”

  The sergeant turned in the corridor and rolled his eyes. Corus got up and threaded his way past Ruiz’ office where she was laughing and high-fiving with Godfried. She started doing a dance in her office, and Godfried joined in.

  Corus froze in the doorway, transfixed by the out-of-character display.

  “Don’t mind me, newbie,” Ruiz said.

  “Somebody got into the FBI,” Godfried said. “On to bigger and better things.”

  “Best part is, I don’t even have to talk to you about what went down in Walla Walla. Not my fucking problem.” She cackled, drunk with joy.

  “Congratulations,” he said.

  Ruiz ignored him, and he walked through CID and found a huddle of deputies and Investigators in a spot where he’d never seen anyone assemble before.

  Pineda’s desk.

  “What did you do?” A muscular deputy named Usman crossed his arms. “After they got you with the pipe wrench?”

  “What did I do?” Pineda asked. “Well, I roundhouse kicked the big guy, then disarmed the guy with the pipe wrench and beat his ass.” Pineda shadow boxed from his seat in his desk chair.

  “They got you pretty good, though,” Redmond said.

  “You shoulda seen them,” Pineda said. “Plus, there was six or seven of them. I ran ‘em off.”

  “You usually smell bad,” a ginger duty called Pickford said, “but this time I detect a note of caca de vaca.”

  “What did you say they were jumping you for?” Usman asked.

  “I was out sick that day buying cold medicine. They wanted it to make meth, fucking tweakers.”

  “That was their plan? To accost customers outside a CVS?” Pickford asked. “How many people did they plan to rob in daylight to get enough Sudafed?”

  “They didn’t share their plans,” Pineda whined. “I was their victim.”

  “You had me going up until the part about the roundhouse kick,” Usman said.

  “Hey.” Pickford swatted Usman in his large pectoral. “Let’s go to the CVS and pull camera footage from the parking lot.”

  “Good idea. Which one was it, Pineda?”

  Pineda looked at the floor. “I… I don’t remember.”

  “You don’t remember which CVS you got jumped at?”

  Usman and Pickford nodded to one another.

  “See ya later, roundhouse.”

  “Pineda, you’re a bad liar.”

  “He’s a better liar than he is a cop.”

  The laughed as they walked off.

  Redmond shrugged. “Well, I believe you.”

  “You do?”

  “Nah, man. Nah.” Redmond walked off, laughing to herself. “Believe you got your ass beat, though.”

  Pineda scowled, lines in his face furrowing deeper, when he spotted Corus six-feet-away.

  “I was there,” Corus said.

  Pickford and Usman and Redmond all stopped.

  “I happened by the same place,” Corus said. “Pineda took a beating but then he fought them off. Tough son of a bitch.”

  Pineda set his swollen jaw, looking down at the carpet.

  Corus reached in his pocket and set a phone down on the desk beside Pineda. “You dropped this during the fight.”

  Pineda picked it up, saw that it was his. A scowl formed, as if he was once again about to bite a helping hand.

  “Well, thank you, deputy.” He glared over at his naysayers. “Nice to see a little brotherhood around here.”

  After they walked off, Pineda said through his teeth, “Go fuck yourself.”

  Corus winced. “Ooh. Do I need to get the bungee cord?”

  “It wasn’t a fair fight. You jumped me.”

  “When you want a fair fight, come and get it.”

  Pineda looked both ways. “You better never tell no one.”

  Corus brought a finger to his lips.

  As he stepped into the Chief Detective’s office, he caught a dangerous twitch of Jim’s gray mustache and halted in the doorway.

  “Chief, can I just start by saying—”

  “You two were supposed to go to Walla Walla,” Jim said too calmly. “Check things out, sniff around. Iris Tanner is dead. Her husband is in a wheelchair.” Jim looked at a paper on his desk. “I see another fatality and a pair of broken legs by the Spokane Airport. A dead Canadian is never good. Oh, and a farm worker absconded with millions of dollars in drug money in a stolen plane and crashed it into some kind of onion factory?”

  Jameson looked at Corus in alarm. “Wait, that was the big fire?” Then he bit his tongue.

  “Yes sir,” Corus said. “Those events all transpired.”

  “And?”

  “And local Sheriff’s deputies made the biggest drug bust in Walla Walla county history. Street value 1.2 million. They took out Princess and her operation. Now Ferdinand’s cooperation isn’t needed, and you can proceed with the hit-and-run trial.”

  “Are you being cute with me?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You’re definitely getting ahead of yourself. Ferdinand will be asked to testify in Rodger Tanner’s trial as well. For whatever good it will do.”

  “Who’s Rodger Tanner?” Jameson asked.

  Jim and Corus both stared at him.

  “I mean… I know who Rodger Tanner is, of course.” Jameson backpedaled. “I thought you said, Bodger, and I was thinking, who’s Bodger?”

  Jim cocked his head to the side, before closing his eyes and taking a breath.

  “Ruiz’ contact in Walla Walla told her two of our men came down. Didn’t make a very good impression. He told you to leave?”

  “That’s true enough, sir,” Corus said.

  “I saw a picture on his desk and complimented his dog,” Jameson said. “Turned out to be his kid. I’ve been blessed with extremely handsome children, sir. My gauge is off.”

  “Ruiz has been celebrating all day that she’s moving to the FBI.” Jim leaned back in his chair. “She had a few margaritas at lunch, so it was hard to follow, but she said Nelka saw you at the crash site? Something about you being Mexican and working on the farm?”

  “I don’t get the long face,” Jameson said. “That farm was a distribution node, sending drugs into three states, Canada and Asia. Now it’s a smoking hole in the ground. Isn’t that why you sent the Rook? I mean, us?”

  “Jameson, I’m going to ask you this one time.” Jim took off his glasses and held them by the earpieces. “Do you know anything about what happened on that farm?”

  Jameson didn’t keep much of a poker face. His shoulders dropped, and he opened his mouth to fess up.

  “Jameson was nearby,” Corus said. “But I was the one actually on the farm. I got hired as a field hand. It was a totally legal way to get a look around. I speak Castilian Spanish, but it’s backbreaking work, and my Mexican accent slipped. One worker, Jorge, he took exception, worried I was, well, some kind of cop. Things deteriorated from there, and I felt like a matador in the ring with three bulls at the same time.”

  “Sounds like a helluva story,” Jim said, as if that was his whole point. “The kind you report to your superiors.”

  “That’s my fault. We got in late last night. Rook wanted to go to your house, but I told him to can it until the morning,” Jameson said. “But we got called to that train derailment this am before we got our shoes tied. Then it was like every driver in the county took their asshole pills today. It was non-stop.”

  Jim looked at his desk wearily, full of crime scene photos and open files. The Paper Mache killer was still on the loose. After a long period of inactivity, during which some suspected he’d died, he’d made a reinvigorated return.

  “Can I have a minute alone with the boss?” Corus asked Jameson.

  “Fine by me,” Jameson said. “Am I excused from the principal’s office?”

  Jim brushed him away and motioned to a chair across from him.

  Corus sat.

  “Jameson’s right,” Jim said. “I should be drinking margari
tas, having our own celebration. The Tanner operation is flattened. This is undeniably a good thing. But for some reason, I don’t want a margarita. Why is that, deputy? What should I feel right now?”

  Corus took a breath. “I will never lie to you. You deserve that out of respect, but you also have my loyalty, sir.”

  “And that loyalty involves following my directives?”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t direct you to burn the Tanner operation to the ground.”

  Corus thought he understood Jim’s consternation better. “You gave me remarkable latitude, sir. And I exceeded a generous mandate.”

  Jim put his glasses back on but didn’t speak.

  “It’s like hitting a patch of ice at fifty miles an hour,” Corus said. “And something kicks in. Instinct, trying to keep you on the road. I didn’t kill Iris Tanner or fly a plane into a building, but I don’t deny my influence.”

  “Hard to argue with the result.” Jim unfurled his fingers. “But I gotta ask questions. Are you more than a bundle of instincts? Can you adapt to what we do? What if I ask you to follow instructions, and…” Jim closed the outstretched fingers into a fist.

  “Instincts are just a series of decisions,” Corus said. “I can take you through each one. Tell me what I should have done better. I want to learn.”

  “Did you shoot anyone in Spokane?”

  “I wasn’t even there.”

  “Did you commit any crimes?”

  “Is it a crime to steal from a drug smuggler?”

  “Jesus. Never mind.” He examined Corus out the corner of an eye. “Wait. You wouldn’t steal for personal gain.”

  “It was so I could stay with Jorge and Chito while they went to the plane. Hold on, I’ll be right back.”

  Corus dashed out to Jameson’s desk and pulled a canvas tote out of a bottom drawer. He returned and set it on the desk.

  Jim looked inside. “What’s this?”

  “Before Jorge took the plane, I yanked out the flight data recorder and all the paperwork.”

  “I still don’t understand where this plane enters the picture,” Jim said. “The Tanners owned it?”

  “No. To start with, the Tanners weren’t drug dealers, sir. I think Arlo Falcone was dealing on the side, and Baynes before him. The reason they kept Ferdinand at arm’s length was because they didn’t want the Tanners finding out what they were doing. Pretending they were executing the wishes of a mysterious boss made Ferdinand easier to deal with. For a time.”