The Shop

by J. Carson Black

  Jolie said, “I’d like to ask you about Maddy Akers.”

  “Maddy?”

  “Mrs. Akers. The police chief’s wife.”

  Amy bit her lip. “You know? I’m late for an appointment. Can we do this later?”

  Jolie heard the crunch of car tires again and automatically stepped back to get out of the way. A GMC Yukon came toward them between the two rows of parked cars. When it drew even, the window buzzed down and a dark-haired woman peered out. “Amy?”

  Amy had gone from nervous to terrified.

  The woman hopped down from the Yukon. She wore jeans. A simple top hugged a lean, strong body. Her sunglasses and the haircut and color looked like they cost a tidy sum.

  The Yukon was silver. Maddy Akers owned a silver Yukon.

  The woman said to Amy, “I’m glad I caught up with you.” She swiped at a stray hair. “I can’t make it in to the apartment today, so you’ll have to handle the eviction yourself. You think you and Niraj can do that?”

  Amy reminded Jolie of a rabbit standing up in the road, trying to figure out which way to run. Finally, she nodded.

  “I have something to tell you…” The woman stopped. She looked at Jolie’s shield and then at Amy. “Is something going on? Are you in trouble?”

  Amy just stared at her.

  The woman said, “Are you…?” Stopped, and tried again. “You’re here because of my husband?”

  Jolie introduced herself. In the corner of her eye, she saw Amy starting to back away. Jolie gave her a look that said, Stay where you are.

  The woman said, “You’re here to tell me about, um…” She stopped, took a breath. “You’re assigned to my husband’s case?”

  “You know about your husband.”

  Maddy Akers nodded. Jolie couldn’t see past the sunglasses, but the woman looked miserable. Like a sky as storm clouds moved in. She’d staved them off for a time, but now they were racing across the heavens until the whole sky was black. Jolie knew the feeling. She knew what Maddy Akers was going through. Disbelief had turned to stinging betrayal, the question running around and around in her head: Why? All this she felt coming from Maddy Akers in the fraction of a second before the woman started to cry.

  She cried silently, tears running down her face. Pressed her manicured fingers against her cheeks, trying to stop them.

  Jolie needed to talk to Maddy, now. Amy took advantage of her ambivalence. “Can I go now? I have to be somewhere.”

  Jolie nodded. She’d catch up with her later. Amy stormed toward her car with new purpose, shoulders pushing forward like a running back, bag crushed to her chest.

  Maddy Akers looked at Jolie. The tear tracks were still on her face, but she seemed composed. “Can we get out of here?”

  Maddy locked up her car and got into Jolie’s. They drove in the direction of Gardenia PD, but Jolie made sure the Starliner Motel was on the way. Maddy Akers asked to stop there, which was what Jolie had in mind. Jolie had no plans to take her to the Gardenia PD, where her husband had been the chief, where all manner of emotions would be swirling around and there would be factions and allies and plenty of kid gloves. But she didn’t want to go directly to the Palm County Sheriff’s Office, either. That might make Maddy suspicious. Jolie wanted this to be between the two of them.

  They parked outside room nine. Everyone was gone now. They couldn’t go in, but that didn’t seem to bother Maddy. They sat in the car, and the two of them stared at the yellow tape stretched across the open doorway. On the way over, Maddy’d told her she’d been driving around since she heard the news from her husband’s second in command early this morning. Jolie asked her where she went, but Maddy couldn’t remember all the places. “I just drove,” she said. Meridian Beach, Port St. Joe, up to Wewahitchka and back. She turned off her phone because she didn’t want to hear from reporters.

  Jolie didn’t push her. She knew Maddy wouldn’t need any prodding to unburden herself. Pushing might even cause her to pull away. The woman had questions of her own. Did anyone hear anything? Was he found right away? Who found him? Who would do this? All the questions an innocent victim of a senseless crime would ask as they tried to get their arms around the enormity of the death. As if the details would help them. Some questions Jolie could answer, which she did.

  They both knew it was all prelude.

  Maddy Akers stared at the windshield. “I just don’t understand how he could—” She stopped herself.

  Jolie waited, then asked, “Could what?”

  Maddy swiped at her eyes under the dark glasses. “How he could let someone just walk up on him like that.”

  Jolie stayed quiet.

  “I don’t understand why he was here at all. Why would he come to a place like this? It wasn’t like him. People will say it was some woman. I don’t believe it.”

  “I don’t either.” Which was the truth.

  “How could he do this to himself?”

  “Do what?”

  Maddy stared at her. “What do you mean?”

  “You said, ‘How could he do this to himself?’”

  Maddy covered her mouth.

  “How could he do what?”

  Maddy turned in her seat and stared at Jolie. “You wanted us to stop here, didn’t you?” She bent her head down, swiped at her eyes again. Bunched her fist and hit her thigh, twice, hard. “I can’t do this,” she said through a blur of tears. “I tried. I just wanted to—oh, shit. I couldn’t let them—” She stopped, staring at Jolie clear-eyed. “I think you’re getting the wrong impression here. Either that, or you’re trying to put words in my mouth.”

  Jolie put the car in reverse and backed out of the parking space.

  “Where are we going?” Maddy demanded.

  “I need to take your statement.”

  “That’s it? That’s all?”

  Jolie said, “What else is there?”

  8 LANDRY

  ARCADIA, CALIFORNIA

  Landry turned onto his street, which looked like every other street in the housing division in which he lived. The division was called Orchard Commons, although there were no orchards, and he didn’t know what a “commons” was. But Orchard Commons was ten minutes on the 210 from Santa Anita, one of the reasons he bought in here.

  Landry felt dispossessed. His wife Cindi was out of town with her sister. Two days ago he’d dropped his kid off at camp near Lake Arrowhead. She’d be gone for two weeks.

  Cindi would be back in three days, but Landry missed her already.

  They had been childhood sweethearts. They grew up together. He had been away for most of their marriage. Bosnia in the nineties, two deployments in Afghanistan, three more deployments in Iraq, and eight months working security for Kellogg, Root & Brown. But in the last few years, he’d made sure he stayed home as much as possible, making up for the time they were apart. Even on overnight trips, he missed her. It was a physical ache that centered just under his navel, and if it could be given a name, that word would be “longing.”

  This was worse by far. He had never been the one left behind before.

  It was comforting to drive through the maze of houses in the flat, hot, California sunlight. The place was familiar in its sameness, every house looking like every other house, with the exception of the cars parked out front and the configurations of the bushes and trees. Every house had a two-car garage. Every house had a peaked roof. All the houses were tan stucco. Nice and neat, no surprises, their shadows falling the same way on the same white concrete driveways lining up to the same clean black asphalt.

  There were people who would call this subdivision “cookie-cutter.” But Landry prized order. It was an American thing, miles and miles of houses that looked the same. Like McDonald’s. When he thought of his country, he thought of McDonald’s, shopping malls, and subdivisions like this, all of them uniquely American. It was the new way. It was the twenty-first century.

  He parked out front and went inside. Cold—Cindi kept the air conditioner cranked up
.

  Shutting the door on the hot California light, Landry experienced a brief twinge of futility. It happened more and more as he got older, the feeling that he was dispossessed. Life didn’t have much purpose other than the purpose he gave it—his family, the racetrack, his job. It was that feeling that had caused him to go back to Iraq.

  Landry was good at one thing—he was a warrior.

  With Cindi and Kristal gone and the house empty, the feeling came back in spades. He set his keys and wallet and change on the dresser and walked to the kitchen. Not having his girls with him made him restless. He took out the orange juice and drank it right from the carton.

  Orange juice was starting to give him heartburn, but he ignored it. The same reason he wouldn’t go to a doctor for any ache or pain or even the flu. Doctors only look for trouble, and when they find it, before you know it they put you in a hospital where a cold can turn into pneumonia and you’re on life support.

  Of course in his job, he had regular checkups. He didn’t comply, he’d be out, and the only thing he loved more than his wife, his daughter, and the ponies was his job.

  He did things for his government that no one talked about. The only difference, as far as Landry could see, was that in this job he’d never been face-to-face with his employer. In fact, he didn’t even know the name of the company. Some operations, he knew, needed to be outsourced. But the job was the same: to protect and defend the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

  Landry couldn’t stand being in this empty house. He decided to go to his brother’s barn at Hollywood Park and check on their Derby hopeful, see if the quarter crack on his foot was any better. He headed back to the bedroom to get his wallet and keys, stopping by the open doorway to Kristal’s room.

  Cool air came from inside, scented with strawberries. His daughter’s lair. A Keep Out sign had been tacked to the door, but she left it open all the time—mixed signals. Kids, he found, wanted their parents to interfere. They craved structure. They knew that life was hard and scary and treacherous, so they wanted someone to protect them. Even when Kristal protested, it was halfhearted.

  Landry rarely crossed the threshold into her room, however, because he trusted her. She knew damn well she’d better do the right thing, and therein lay the trust.

  He was about to start down the hallway again, but his eye caught the poster on Kristal’s wall.

  Brienne Cross.

  He’d glanced at the poster a few times on his trips down the hallway to the bedroom, even though he didn’t like the way it made him feel.

  But this time, he found himself unable to turn away.

  It was as if he were in a forest, and something caught his eye, and he’d looked away and then back again, and saw an exotic bird in the branches where none existed before. He thought Kristal had taken the poster down. It had been well over a month since Brienne Cross died. He’d read Kristal’s raw grief on Facebook, the childlike grief of losing an idol, but he’d thought that was over.

  And yet, the poster remained.

  He shrugged. Turned away. Almost.

  His neck creaked as he looked back. Something compelled him. It felt as if he were in a long tunnel, and the only way out was to look at Brienne Cross.

  Brienne lay in an infinity pool. Everything was completely still around her. Her face rose partway out of the water, long hair like golden seaweed spread out in a fan. She wore a skimpy blue bikini top. Her breasts rose up, droplets of water on satin flesh, surrounded by a deep, saturated blue. As if she had been a sculpture partially poured into a mold, or had been formed by an upheaval in smooth, pale rock. Her eyes wide open and startled, her lashes beaded with water. Her lips—

  Her lips were parted. He recognized her expression. Surprise. His fingers closed around the crucifix on the chain around his neck. The silver filigree felt warm—alive to his touch.

  He went back to that moment. Suspended on a breath Brienne Cross never got to finish, the moment she looked up into his eyes.

  He saw those eyes, blue orbs filled with light. He saw them change from surprise to trust.

  She had accepted that he knew what was best. She knew she was in good hands, even as he extinguished the light in her eyes and stopped her heart.

  His heart wrenched inside him, as if it had been torn loose of its moorings. The feeling went away almost immediately. It was not physical pain. It was emotional. He could not turn away. He could not move. All he could do was stare at the poster.

  He had shared something with her nobody else would. In that moment, he had known her better than anyone could have ever hoped to. He had held her with his eyes, he had told her without words it was all right, and she had submitted.

  It was a communion they shared.

  He realized he had never known a more emotional moment, or conversely, a moment so completely devoid of worldly passion.

  He’d been raised Catholic. He didn’t give a damn about that mumbo jumbo, the rosary, the confession, the standing up and kneeling down and repeating phrases over and over—as if those phrases would somehow take, somehow transform. They were just words sent into a void. That was what he’d always thought.

  But now he knew that religion was real, and that transformation was possible.

  All in a rush, he knew the truth. The world fell away, and it was just the two of them. There was no Cindi, there was no Kristal, just the two of them, Brienne Cross and himself, inextricably bound together.

  He had never questioned a mission. In fact, he tried to know as little about the people he was charged to kill as possible.

  But this was different.

  Landry had carried out his mission. He had killed Brienne Cross.

  Now he needed to know why.

  9

  Maddy Akers said to Jolie, “Did you know Kathy Westbrook had an eight-year-old son?”

  Jolie and Maddy were in the new interview room at the Palm County Sheriff’s substation in Meridian Beach. So new you could smell the white paint on the walls. They sat catty-corner at the small table pushed up against the wall, close enough to touch.

  “Kathy’s son,” Maddy continued. “That’s what bothered him the most. He couldn’t stand the thought of that little boy out there somewhere without his mother. You know what happened?”

  “Why don’t you tell me?”

  “Jim was primary on the hostage negotiation; he had an FBI agent for his secondary. Jim spent hours talking to Luke Perdue.”

  Jolie knew the story well. A few hours into the hostage situation, Chief Akers had persuaded Luke Perdue to throw out his gun. Luke must have seen one of the snipers and panicked. Standing in the doorway, he’d held Kathy Westbrook in the crook of his arm to use her as a human shield.

  Both snipers fired simultaneously. Luke Perdue took a round dead center in the shallow triangle of eyes and nose. That bullet came from the sniper on top of Stearing Automotive. The other sniper, the one on the railroad car, missed his shot. His bullet took a downward trajectory through Perdue’s jaw and obliterated Kathy Westbrook’s frontal lobe.

  “Jim yelled for them to hold their fire, but they didn’t listen. Poor woman—he said she was there in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  The Starliner Motel was a regular stop on Kathy Westbrook’s medical sales route. She was headed to her room when Luke Perdue popped up out of nowhere, put a gun to her head, and forced her inside.

  Nobody knew why he did it.

  “You don’t know what Jim went through the last month. He blamed himself for that woman’s death. Even though he knew he did everything right. But late at night, you know? It creeps back in. He shot himself last night, but he was dead before that. He couldn’t live with what happened.”

  “You say he shot himself?”

  “That was a mistake. What I meant to say was someone shot him.”

  “Oh. I guess I misheard. Still. I can see why he might do that. Kill himself. You yourself said how depressed he was. If he did kill hi
mself, it would be so unfair. To you, to your children. You have kids, right? They’re both grown?”

  She nodded.

  “Can you talk for the mic?”

  “Okay. Yes, I have two kids.”

  “You know what? If my husband killed himself, I know what I’d do.” If? God, you’re such a liar. “I’d make it look like something else, like somebody killed him. I wouldn’t hesitate for one minute. I don’t have kids, but if I did, I’d do it for their sake.”

  Jolie could see the wheels turning. Cagey. Then Maddy surprised her. “You’re damn right I did it. And I’d do it again.”

  Maddy gave her statement.

  Once she’d made her decision, Maddy was anxious to explain.

  Her husband had called her from the Starliner Motel. He’d told her he was going to kill himself, and she pleaded with him not to. She heard the sound of the gunshot. She raced over, running two red lights to get there.

  Maddy told Jolie she’d made up her mind standing in the doorway of room nine. Nobody else was around. Nobody heard the shot. She was alone with her husband of twenty-four years, except it wasn’t her husband lying on the bed anymore.

  She thought about her two adult children, what they’d think. She thought about the funeral, law enforcement coming from all over the state—the hero’s funeral for a fallen cop. And yes, she thought about his life insurance policy. She thought about how she’d meet her bills now that her husband was gone.

  She sat on the one chair in the room and cried. And then she went to work.

  A cop’s wife, Maddy knew all about gunshot residue. Jim Akers had shot himself in the temple—not through the mouth. Already it looked like a homicide. She cleaned up the gunshot residue on his hands with a moist towelette from her purse—the sharp alcohol-and-perfume scent Jolie had smelled in the bathroom wastebasket. Maddy took his gun because he’d shot himself with it. She took his backup gun because she might as well make a clean sweep. She took his phone to be on the safe side.