The Deputy

by Victor Gischler

  The shot nearly made me crap my pants.

  Karl dropped his gun and went to the floor face down, squirming and cursing a blue streak. “You fucking cunt. Oh, fucking shit! You shot me in the ass, you bitch. Damn, that hurts.”

  “Just stay down, Karl. Toby, get his pistol.”

  I grabbed it.

  “Oh, you complete fucking whore.” Karl was making fists and groaning between outbursts, his eyes crushed closed against his ass pain.

  Amanda took a step closer, spared me a glance. “I got your message, but when I tried to call, the phone was out. Didn’t think I’d be shooting anyone today.”

  “It’s been that kind of night.”

  She said, “Karl, I’m going to grab one arm and Toby’s going to get the other, and we’re going to drag you as gently as possible into the cell, okay? Then we’ll fetch Doc Gordon. You give us any trouble, and I’ll put another one in you. Understand?”

  Karl nodded. His face was a sweaty grimace.

  We hauled him into the vacant cell, dropped him on the cot and locked it.

  “Toby, put that chair over by the far wall and have a seat.”

  I did what she told me.

  She slapped one cuff on my wrist, the other to the radiator.

  “Oh, come on.”

  “I don’t have time to hear your story right now, Toby. Sorry. Can’t take any chances. We’ll see what happens when I get back with the doc.”

  “Great.”

  She jerked a thumb over her shoulder at the hellcat. “You can start by explaining who the hell that is.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Doc Gordon worked on Karl’s ass in the cell. I heard him tell Karl to hold still, but Karl hissed and bitched every time the doc poked at him. Amanda swung a leg over the edge of the desk, regarded me with her hard, cop eyes.

  I’d never have eyes like that, I realized. I’d never make it in the cop business because I wouldn’t be able to put that expression on my face. I knew Amanda, liked her a whole lot better than I’d liked Karl or Billy. She treated me more or less like a fellow deputy, not a part-time errand boy. But right now she was looking at me like some interesting species of bug under a microscope. She’d been a cop back in Eastern Oklahoma. Claremore, I think. She’d said she’d wanted to live farther out in the wilderness, do outdoorsy stuff like hiking and the rock climbing. So here she was in Coyote Crossing just under a year.

  Anyway, I knew I wouldn’t be able to lie to those cop eyes. Besides, I needed to tell somebody. Unload. So I started the story at the beginning with losing Luke Jordan’s body. She didn’t seem surprised to hear about me and Molly, and I figured it didn’t really need to be a secret no more anyway since Doris had run off. I told her about the truck full of Mexicans and putting an axe through Billy’s neck and my upside down Nova. I told her about Roy’s big-rig and the hole I put in the Mona Lisa Motel. I told her about my son.

  I felt exhausted by the end, put a cigarette in my mouth.

  “You’re not supposed to smoke in the stationhouse,” Amanda said.

  The look on my face must’ve been the saddest thing in the world because she rolled her eyes and said, “Go ahead then.”

  I smiled a weak thank you at her and puffed one to life.

  “Where’s the chief?”

  I frowned. “I got a bad feeling he’s dead.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “He went out to the Jordan’s place and that was the last anyone heard of him.”

  “You think the Jordans are part of the smuggling?”

  I nodded, puffed.

  Doc Gordon came up behind us, cleared his throat for our attention. He wore an undershirt and pajama bottoms and carried a black doctor’s back. The pajama bottoms were green and covered with fish. He was in his late fifties and stooped, hair gone completely white. Round, thick glasses. He looked like a man who didn’t want to be awake.

  “How is he?” Amanda asked.

  “I cleaned him up,” Gordon said. “And I gave him a shot for pain, so he’s sleeping. Bleeding stopped. I got a bandage on him. He’ll need to get over to county, so somebody can pry the bullet out, but he’ll be fine for a while.”

  “Thanks, Doc. Send the bill to the town council like usual, okay?”

  “Them? They don’t get around to paying bills very fast. But there’s no hurry, I guess. What happened?”

  “Part of an ongoing investigation.”

  The doc waved that away like he was swatting a fly. “I can take a hint. Fine then. I’ll be back in the morning to change his dressing.” He left grumbling, but that was just Doc Gordon’s way. He wasn’t happy if he wasn’t grousing about something or other.

  I looked at Amanda. “Now what?”

  “Now we call in some help. We’ve got to find the Jordan brothers and the chief, and we’ve got a crapload of illegal aliens running helter-skelter all over the county.” She picked up the phone.

  “That won’t work.”

  She put the phone to her ear, frowned. “I thought it was just my phone.”

  “Nope. I was thinking the main junction box.” “You think something happened to it?”

  “Or somebody.”

  “Damn. This place needs a cell phone tower.”

  She unlocked the cuffs. “I’m going to level with you, Toby. You’re probably going to come out okay with Billy. It was self defense. I don’t know what they’re going to say about all the other stuff. You can’t just let a bunch of illegals loose on a town, and you sure as hell can’t crash a truck into a motel. But I need you right now to stay here and watch these two. I’m going to check the juncture box. Stay by the radio, okay? I’m taking the number two squad car.” She handed me Karl’s Glock. “Just sit tight and stay out of trouble.”

  “Right.”

  “Where is the junction box?”

  “Across the street from the sewage plant pump house. They clustered all the utilities in one place.”

  She paused in the doorway, looked at me with her cop eyes one more time. “Stay here.”

  “I’m not going to do anything more ambitious than smoke this cigarette.”

  And then she was gone.

  I sat there and smoked the cigarette all the way down, then dropped the butt into Billy’s mug. The butt hissed out in the cold coffee. Karl snored lightly from his cell.

  “Cowboy,” the hellcat whispered from her cell. “Talk to me.”

  I sank in my chair, put my feet up on the desk. “What about?”

  “What would it take to get me out of this cell?”

  “A stick of dynamite.”

  “Look at me, cowboy.”

  I looked.

  With thumb and forefinger she tugged the hem of her dress over her knees, showing a taste of thigh. “A girl like me can do special things for you, make you feel like you’ve never felt before.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Money, then. I can give you more than you’ll make on cop pay in ten years.”

  “Lady, how about shutting up for a while?”

  Surprisingly she did.

  I let my chin hit my chest, closed my eyes. I could probably sleep for a week. I felt fatigue pull me slowly into a long, dark drop.

  I was on stage in a honky-tonk. I thought I recognized the place, a sawdust-on-the-floor shithole just south of Lubbock. I was playing along with some song I didn’t recognize, trying to make the chords, but my fingers couldn’t hold the strings down. The strings bit into my fingers, and I jerked my hand away. I wiped the blood on my shirt, saw I was wearing the khaki deputy shirt. I’d wiped blood on the star, and when I tried to wipe it off I just wiped more on.

  The drummer yelled “keep playing” at me. I looked at him. The drummer was Billy, blood leaking over his face from the huge gash in his forehead. I tried to climb down from the stage, but the crowd kept pushing me back.

  I heard a woman call my name. The voice sounded familiar but fuzzy. I looked around but didn’t see her. There was no w
ay to get off the stage. I felt urgently that I needed to get down, the crowd looking at me, the guitar a useless thing in my hands.

  “Toby!”

  I kept looking for the source of the voice calling to me. “Toby!”

  I opened—

  —my eyes.

  “Toby!” Amanda’s voice squawked from the radio.

  I shook the cobwebs out and grabbed the microphone. “I’m here.”

  She said, “Listen, somebody’s done a number on this junction box. Looks like they’ve ripped out half the wires.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “The state police are an hour away,” Amanda said. “I’m going to drive up to the Texaco and put in a call and come right back. Can you hold down the fort until then?”

  “No problem. Be careful.”

  “See you soon. Over and out.”

  Amanda was being optimistic. The drive from the state police barracks at Morrisonville was an hour, but she’d have to explain what she needed on the phone first. Then they’d hem and haw and get their ducks in a row. Plus Amanda needed to get to a working phone at the Texaco.

  I guessed a good two hours. If we were lucky.

  After the weird dream, the idea of sleeping suddenly didn’t appeal. I took Karl’s Glock and my own .38 and the hellcat’s automatic and laid them out on the desk, lined them up by size in descending order. I went to the back room and came back with the cleaning kit and went to work on the guns. I started with mine. Karl’s was already spotless. The little automatic was such a piece of shit, it wasn’t worth cleaning, but I did it anyway.

  I reloaded the .38, holstered it.

  If I hadn’t been so damn tired, the knock on the door might have startled me. As it was, I merely turned toward the front door lazily and squinted, wondering who it might have been this time of night, hoping it wasn’t some damn crisis.

  Hell, it was the police station after all. Maybe it was even a legit emergency.

  “Come in,” I called.

  Wayne Dobbs stuck his head through the door, took off his hat. He seemed embarrassed to be at the police station.

  “Come on in, Wayne. It’s okay.”

  He came in. “I tried to call, but my phone was on the fritz.”

  “There’s a lot of that going around.”

  “Lightning hit the junction box again?”

  “Something. We’re looking into it. What can I do for you?”

  “I was on my way in to prep for breakfast when I saw some vagrants out by the Tropicana. Thought you might want to know.”

  The Tropicana was the defunct drive-in theater east of town, about two miles past the Mona Lisa Motel. I couldn’t summon up very much civic concern about vagrants.

  “I’ll make note of it,” I told Wayne.

  “It’s just that there’s quite a few of them, and they got a pretty big campfire going. Fire like that could get out of hand.”

  “What are you doing prepping for breakfast? Didn’t you close Skeeter’s down last night?”

  Wayne frowned. “My morning man crapped out on me.”

  “Sorry to hear that. More work for you.”

  “Par for the course. Listen, one more thing. Some of them Jordan boys are tooling around in a pickup truck and they seem pretty pissed off about Luke. I’m not sure what they’re going to do. Just thought I’d mention it.”

  “Did you tell them I was babysitting Luke’s body?”

  “Sure. I told them what I knew about the whole thing.”

  Hell.

  “Holy cow, that’s her right there!” He pointed at the hellcat in the cell. “That’s the gal what was talking to Luke right before he got himself shot.”

  “Wayne, I need you to keep a lid on this.”

  His face wrinkled up all bewildered. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, we don’t need any vigilante stuff.”

  “Oh, I get you. Sure, mum’s the word.” He thought about it a moment. “Say, listen, I hope I didn’t cause any trouble talking to the Jordans.”

  “It’s okay. Wayne, you seen Chief Krueger?”

  “Not since we were all together at closing time. Why?”

  “No reason. Just need to check with him on something.”

  “Well, I best get over to the restaurant,” Wayne said. “I got the early shift of truckers and dirt farmers going to want the usual, and if any more of my help craps out on me I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do.”

  “Okay, then. I’ll let the chief know about the vagrants.”

  He flipped me a two-finger salute and was gone.

  Maybe when they fired me from being a deputy, I could work for Wayne. He seemed to have trouble keeping help. I guessed the pay probably wasn’t so good, but how hard could it be scrambling eggs and flipping pancakes? Or maybe I could work nights and pour beers and such.

  Breakfast. The idea of scrambled eggs and a fat slab of ham and a hot cup of coffee made me want to weep. Hash-browns.

  I forgot about breakfast and thought about Luke. The idea that notorious jerkweed and lowlife Luke Jordan just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time was just too far out to believe. He was tangled up in this illegal alien smuggling or I was a monkey’s uncle.

  “Hellcat. Hey, hellcat. You awake?”

  “Why do you call me that?” asked the Mexican woman.

  “You won’t tell me your name.”

  “No.”

  “Okay, then. What was Luke Jordan to you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “How was he involved? He had the keys to that truck.”

  “Leave me alone,” she said. “I’m tired.”

  “Fuck tired. Was he your partner? The Jordans are in on it, ain’t they?”

  “Go tug on yourself, cowboy.”

  Shit.

  I sighed, stood up and pushed away from the desk. I stuck Karl’s Glock in my waistband at the small of my back, shoved the little automatic in the front pocket of my jeans. I walked toward the front door.

  “Where do you go?” asked the hellcat. “Out.”

  I locked the door behind me and scanned Main Street. Quiet as a grave.

  I climbed into Roy’s big-rig, tried to crank it up, but it wouldn’t start. I guess you could only pound these things so much before they gave out. I popped open the last energy drink and gulped it warm. It almost came right back up. It was just that bad.

  The big-rig was shot, and the Nova was belly up. But I still had one set of keys in my pocket, and I couldn’t see how it would matter now if I borrowed one more vehicle. I walked down to Luke Jordan’s pickup truck. It was still parked where his body should have been.

  The inside of Luke’s truck smelled like stale beer and armpit. I started it up, and the V-8 rumbled under the hood. The radio wheezed some old country song at me. I let it play. The music seemed to go with the truck.

  I’d thought my part of this was all done. I’d been more than satisfied to hold down the fort at the stationhouse and let Amanda run for the cavalry. But I didn’t like the idea of the remaining Jordan brothers cruising the streets looking for somebody to fill full of lead, and I had the idea they might stop by the stationhouse sooner or later. Even more than my concern about the Jordan brothers was one last question that kept nagging at me.

  I put the truck into gear and headed for Chief Krueger’s house.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Luke Jordan’s Chevy pickup rattled north up the six, past residential streets, the space between houses getting farther and farther apart until I was back into the black of the Okie night.

  North of town was not as deserted as the Six south to the Texaco station and the Interstate. Pinpoints of light glittered from ranches and farmhouses here and there. Double-wides on fifty-acre spreads. The soil was better in this direction, some scattered crops, good grass for cattle. My folks’ place was about ten miles north of town. Sometimes when I drove by, a pang of loss hit me in the chest, but I didn’t drive by that often.

  Kr
ueger’s place was a few miles out. A nice two-story stone house, garage, empty barn. He didn’t want animals. The chief was a solitary man, never married, no kids. I’d been to his house exactly one time, when he had the department and families out for a Fourth of July barbecue. Ribs and potato salad and Coors Light. Chief Krueger was friendly and welcoming off duty. On duty he was all business and hard as a railroad spike.

  My first week on duty, the chief took me around on night patrol, showed me the ropes. We passed a couple of rowdies spilling out of Skeeter’s near closing time, some college guys on a road tip, Arkansas caps and sweatshirts. Maybe they thought it would be a cool experience for their blog to tie one on in some Podunk whistle-stop. Anyway, the chief give them a warning, friendly but stern, like maybe they should have a few cups of coffee before they got behind the wheel.

  The drunkest one got lippy, said he didn’t need no fat Okie flatfoot telling him when he’d had enough and started making fat lawman jokes like the chief had come out of Smokey and the Bandit or something.

  Imagine a volcano about to erupt, the ground vibrating under your feet right before the big explosion.

  You wouldn’t think a man that big could move so fast. The chief had his nightstick out and slapped across the one punk’s knee in one smooth motion. His friend’s mouth fell open, not believing, and Krueger poked him a hard one in the gut. The guy bent over, sucking for air. We piled them in back of the squad car, and they spent the night in jail. The next morning, the chief escorted them to the edge of town, and he told them not to come back.

  Chief Krueger solved a lot of problems without troubling a judge or the court system. It worked. Coyote Crossing was a peaceful town.

  Tonight things had gone wrong.

  And if the chief wasn’t around to be on top of it, then something bad must have happened. I aimed to find out what I could. I owed him that much.

  I turned down the dirt drive, passed the chief’s mailbox. About two hundred yards to the house. It was dark, no cars in front, but maybe in the garage. The porch light was dark. I climbed out of Luke’s pickup, approached the house slowly. After the night I’d had, it was all too easy to imagine dark figures lurking in the shadows. I didn’t want any surprises, squinted all around before climbing the porch steps and knocking on the front door. When nobody answered, I knocked slightly louder. I thought about taking off, but I hadn’t come all this way just to knock on the front door.