Savage Rising

by C. Hoyt Caldwell

  The silence and twitching jaw muscle returned. “My deputies?”

  “You said it yourself, there ain’t no one else in this county that’s worth a shit, law wise. And I damn sure don’t want Friar or Randle sitting in this chair…”

  “But you’re the sheriff.”

  He nodded. “I am that. For now. But I ain’t got it in me to go through another election. It’s your time. What you lack in experience, you make up for in brains and grit. I’ll help you with the campaigning. Talk to my donors. That idiot John Bucky will run against you. He runs every damn election, and he gets exactly two votes. Him and his brother, Earl. Bastard’s own kids don’t even vote for him.”

  “Earl died,” Dani said in fog.

  “There you go. He’s down to one vote.”

  “But I’m…I’m not ready…I don’t know how to be sheriff…”

  “Well, shit, neither did I when I started. It’s not a job you know. It’s a job you learn. I’ll get you as prepared as I can. More prepared than I was. You’ll be a damn sight better at this than I ever was.”

  “You can’t…I mean, you’re the sheriff! That’s who you are. You can’t not be that.”

  Otis leaned back in his chair. “Up till a year ago, I was Jeannie Royal’s husband. I didn’t think I could be nothing else. Didn’t wanna be nothing else. But here I am…”

  Dani narrowed her gaze. “You’re still Aunt Jeannie’s husband. Her being dead don’t change that.”

  He hesitated before replying, “Yeah, it does, little deputy. It most certainly does. It don’t mean I love her any less, but…”

  Dani cut him off. “This is Laura’s doing ain’t it?”

  Otis didn’t respond. He just held Dani in a gnarled gaze.

  “She come in here and you two do all that flirting. You give each other the eyes. I ain’t gotta remind you that she’s the one that dragged us into that mess last year. If you think about it, she’s the reason Aunt Jeannie ain’t here no more…”

  Otis slammed the palm of his hand down on his metal desk, startling Dani. He bellowed, “Enough, Deputy!”

  Dani jerked back and instinctively placed her hand on her chest. She’d heard Otis yell plenty of times, but this was different. He was beyond angry.

  He sat silently for what seemed like an eternity with his index finger pointed straight at Dani. The muscles in his hands ached, and his fingernails dug into his palm. Finally he said in a strained voice, “You’re gonna vacate my office right now. I don’t wanna see you until I can make sense of what you just said to me. Understood?”

  Dani was devastated by what she had said. She hadn’t meant a word of it. It just slipped out. She wanted to tell Otis, but she could see by his quickly developing bloodshot eyes that he didn’t want to hear a word from her. She pushed herself up out of the chair and turned to exit the office, stopping short at the sight of Sarah in the doorway holding a hot cup of tea. The poor girl was shaking, and tears were rolling down her cheeks.

  Otis called out to her. “C’mon in, little bit. Let’s see if we can find the valve to turn off those waterworks.”

  Dani’s shoulders slumped as she exited the office and felt her mind divide yet again.

  Chapter 20

  Cleve hated the fucking trek up what locals called Ass-Crack Mountain. It wasn’t a mountain at all. It was two steep hills that joined together and formed a thin gap up the slope. There was a cave that sat dead center between the two hills, halfway up the slope, and it bore the unfortunate name Asshole Cave. But for reasons obvious to the Gray Rise, they all called it Bitch Cave.

  It wasn’t just the construction of the hills that saddled them with the asshole monikers. It was also the fact that the area was host to a large sulfur deposit. The place smelled and looked like ass.

  Cleve never made a hike up the gorge without a cigarette in his mouth, masking the stench with the stinging odor of menthol. Oliver, unfamiliar with the cave’s reputation, had not brought any such protection. He simply covered his nose with a cupped hand.

  Cleve turned to him as they traversed the slippery footing. A heavy rain had drenched the area the night before, adding a thick layer of humidity to the stench and a top layer of soil that made each footstep unstable. “Smell ain’t so bad in the cave. It usually ain’t this bad at all. Rain must have kicked it up.”

  Oliver was too focused on climbing without falling to reply.

  “Next time you need to bring something to ward off the stink from your nostrils.” Cleve slipped and caught himself with his hands. “Shit.” He winced after smelling the mud that covered his palms. “Fuck.” His cigarette fell out of his mouth. “Goddamn it.”

  Oliver tried desperately to not look amused.

  “I’m glad as hell this is my last time out here. Fucking shithole.” He turned to Oliver again. “This is all you and your class from here on out.”

  “What is?”

  “This shit duty. Stuff that is way below my station.” He found solid footing and scrambled up the last five feet to the cave opening.

  Oliver followed with little trouble.

  Cleve pulled his pack of cigarettes from his back pocket. “Now you get why we use this place. It’s hard as shit to find, and it ain’t pleasant to breathe when you get here.”

  Oliver nodded as he tried to avoid using his nose in the breathing process. “Makes sense. What do we use it for?”

  Cleve lit his new cigarette and then smiled with the butt perched between his yellowing teeth. He motioned with his head toward the cave opening. “Go on in. Have a look.”

  Oliver turned to the blackness and then back to Cleve. “You coming?”

  “I’m coming. You first.”

  Oliver retrieved his cellphone from his pocket and pressed the flashlight app. He had to stoop slightly to enter, but once inside he found a cavernous space. The end of his light did not reach the back of the cave or the top.

  Cleve entered and howled at the top of his lungs. The sound echoed and bounced around the craggy walls. He breathed in deeply. “You see? Don’t smell near as bad.”

  Oliver was about to tell him he agreed when a whimper from the belly of the cave caught his attention. He quickly pointed his light in the direction he thought the sound was coming from.

  Cleve chuckled and cried out, “We’re back!”

  “What is that?”

  Cleve pulled a small flashlight from his pocket and pushed past Oliver. “It ain’t a what. It’s a who.”

  Oliver watched the glow of Cleve’s flashlight travel a few more feet into the darkness before he followed. The whimpering got more frantic as the two men got closer to it.

  “There she is,” Cleve said in a mocking tone. “All prettied up for the new fella I brought.”

  Oliver stepped to the right of Cleve and felt his mouth immediately go dry at the sight of a woman duct-taped to an old chair that looked like it belonged in an ice cream parlor.

  “Meet my cousin Luna,” Cleve said, stroking her mud-covered hair. There wasn’t much of her that wasn’t covered by the wet red clay, which was as plentiful as the darkness in the cave.

  Oliver stared at her, still breathing heavily with an open mouth.

  “Ol’ cuz here went rogue on us. Hooked up with a spy. Some bitch fed.”

  Oliver swallowed the dryness.

  “Cleve,” Luna said with a great deal of difficulty. She hadn’t eaten in days, and her last sip of water was hours ago, from the two men Cleve and Oliver had replaced. “Kill me, Cleve. Please.”

  Cleve laughed and clapped his hands together. “That’s a turn right there. That’s what that is. Last time I was here she was begging me to let her go. Wanted me to save her life because we’re cousins. Now she wants me to off her. Yes, sir, that is a turn.”

  Oliver finally spoke. “What are we…I mean, what are we going to do to her?”

  Cleve turned to Oliver with a look of rage. “Do to her? What the fuck do you mean by that? You wanna do things to her? You a pervert,
GC One?”

  “No,” Oliver said, taking a step back. “I wasn’t saying…I just…”

  Cleve busted out a deep laugh. “I’m messing with you, dumb shit. You can do whatever the fuck you wanna do to her. Everyone else has. ’Cept me, of course. I’m her cousin. I ain’t that hillbilly. Main thing is we gotta make sure she don’t die.”

  Oliver felt a wave of relief wash over him.

  “Harley’s got it in his mind that she ain’t said everything there is to say about the fed spy she partnered up with. He says to keep her here until she’s ready to talk.” Cleve stooped down and looked Luna in the eye. “You hear that, cuz? As soon as you tell us everything you know, you’re out of here. We ain’t gonna kill you. You’re a Pike, after all.”

  “I don’t…” Luna said, her voice reedy and hoarse. “I don’t know nothing more. She was Harley’s girl. He knew her better than me.”

  Cleve stood straight up and flicked his cigarette into her lap. “Then you ain’t going nowhere.” He turned and moved past Oliver. “I’m gonna go outside and take a shit. Fuck her if you want to.”

  Oliver watched Cleve’s light bounce toward the cave opening. When Cleve cleared it, the GC One turned back to Luna and licked his dry lips. He squatted next to her, and she prepared herself for his assault.

  Instead, he reached toward her lap and flicked the lit cigarette to the floor of the cave.

  Chapter 21

  It’s not that Spivey hated kids. He just didn’t want to have anything to do with them. He was better off that way. They were better off that way. It was in everyone’s mutual interest that Spivey and children never mix.

  Sarah Campbell stood against the wall near the door to the back offices, stealing glances at the visitor whenever she thought he was looking away. Dani had greeted Spivey when he arrived at the station and told him to have a seat in the waiting room until she wrapped up some paperwork. She really didn’t have anything urgent. She just wanted to make the man who claimed to be Luna Conway’s brother sweat it out before she sat down with him. He might be slightly more pliable if he’d had time to stew under the fluorescent glare of the Baptist Flats SD’s waiting room.

  Sarah had strolled into the waiting room as soon as she saw him take a seat in the cracked-cushioned chairs that lined the wall. There was something in his face that intrigued her. The well-trimmed dark beard and cold blue eyes adorned a face that was etched with well-defined wrinkles around his eyes. He sat motionless and emotionless, as if he were a mannequin on display in a department store.

  For his part, Spivey did everything he could to not acknowledge the child. She might mistake it as a friendly invite to engage with him in conversation. He plastered a look of disinterest on his face so she wouldn’t approach.

  But the man with no expression was utterly fascinating to Sarah. She drifted deeper into the waiting room and found herself behaving unnaturally nonchalant. She even started humming, a habit she had never practiced before.

  Spivey became more annoyed by the minute. The child was getting too close. He wondered if he was under any obligation to respond to her if she did the unimaginable and spoke to him.

  There was a magazine on the table in the same row of chairs that the bearded man was sitting in. Sarah told herself she’d been wanting to read the magazine for some time now. She couldn’t fathom why she hadn’t done so. She stood and walked purposefully to the table. Picking up the magazine, she opened it and let her eyes shift so far to the right that she could see the man in her peripheral vision. He still had not moved a muscle. He was amazing.

  Spivey’s stomach tightened. The fucking kid was going to say something to him. He just knew it.

  Sarah turned the page of the magazine and immediately said. “Hmmm,” as if she had just read a fact she had not known, when she had not even read a word on the page.

  Spivey finally made his first move. He sighed.

  “What?” Sarah asked.

  Spivey sat in a long moment of silence, still deciding if convention dictated that he had to answer the kid. When he could think of no situation where remaining silent would be acceptable, he reluctantly said, “I didn’t say anything.”

  “Oh,” Sarah said, sounding almost apologetic. “I thought I heard you ask my name.” She blushed before she finished the sentence. What a stupid thing to say.

  Spivey shook his head slowly and said, “I didn’t.”

  “Oh,” Sarah said again, finding that same apologetic tone. “Sarah.”

  Christ. Now what? “Jack Spivey. I’m here to see Deputy Savage.”

  Sarah smiled. “That’s my momma.”

  “Really?” Spivey said, showing interest for the first time.

  “Well, kind of,” Sarah said. “I’ve got five mommas.”

  His interest became weighted down with confusion. “How the hell did you swing that?”

  Sarah giggled. “Kind of just happened. Dani and Kenny and Step are mostly my parents…On account they’re the ones that come and got me…”

  Dani stepped into the waiting room and held back a gasp as she heard what Sarah was saying. “Sarah!”

  Spivey and Sarah were jolted by the tone of Dani’s voice.

  “You get back to Friar’s desk and get some knowledge out of them schoolbooks my tax dollars are paying for.” She tried to make her request sound relaxed and folksy instead of nonplussed.

  Sarah put the magazine down and took a step back. She was about to turn, but an idea came to her before she twisted around. She approached Spivey and stuck out her hand. “Nice to meet you, Jack Spivey.”

  Both Dani and Spivey had the same expression: a confused smile that came with a slight wisp of a laugh.

  “Yeah…Uh, nice…nice to meet you, Sarah.” He shook her hand before she skipped away with a grin. He almost hated himself for thinking it, but the kid was all right. He also made a mental note to contact Greer to run down as much information as he could on the girl who had five mommas.

  Dani worked through the image of Sarah warming up to Luna Conway’s so-called brother and barked out, “Let’s go to the break room,” to Spivey as she walked past him.

  He nodded and pushed himself out of the chair. His head was turned back to the waiting room as he walked. The image of the girl standing there and announcing she had five mommas perplexed the shit out of him, and when they sat down at the table in the break room he started to ask Dani about it.

  Dani cut him off before he could get too deep into the question. “Baptist Flats is a regular Peyton Place, Mr. Spivey. People divorce and marry neighbors two, three, four times over. These kids all have stepmommas and ex–stepmommas, and future stepmommas. It goes round and round.”

  “So are you Sarah’s step- or ex-step, or just plain momma?”

  Dani scrambled for an explanation. “None of the above. I’m wha’cha call her guardian. Now, it’s complicated and a bit personal. Let’s get down to why you’re here.”

  “I was just…That ATF ID? You have any luck finding the owner yet?”

  Dani let out a “Huh,” as she leaned back in her chair.

  “What?”

  “It’s just curious is what it is.”

  “What’s curious?”

  “You got an awful keen interest in that ID.”

  “That surprises you? This agent, this McElhenney, she had my sister’s phone number. And in case you’ve forgotten, my sister is missing. I’m thinking we find this agent, we find my sister.”

  “When’s your sister’s birthday?” Dani asked sharply.

  Spivey gave her an eat-shit grin. “Hell if I know. I don’t keep up with that shit.”

  “All right, what color’s your sister’s hair?”

  “It’s been just about every color in the rainbow. She dyes it every other month.”

  “Is your sister right-handed or left-handed?”

  He crossed his arms and smiled. “She’s right-handed.”

  Dani almost audibly groaned when she realized her question was u
seless. She had no idea if he was right, but that wasn’t the point. She wanted to see him hesitate, shift his eyes to the right as he tried to invent an answer. She decided to show her cards. “I’m just gonna say it. You ain’t Luna Conway’s brother.”

  He stared.

  “I ain’t got the slightest notion why you would pretend you are her brother, but…”

  His will to keep up the lie slipped away from him. “I’m looking for Mac.”

  “Who the hell is Mac?”

  “Patricia McElhenney.”

  Dani’s mouth dropped open. “You’re ATF?”

  Spivey shook his head. “Mac’s a friend of mine. I’ve known her since she was a kid. Her family got ahold of me, and said no one’s heard from her in weeks. I used my corporate security channels to track her to this area. All I know is she was working with Luna Conway. On what, I haven’t a clue. I just know that Mac and Luna are now both missing.” Again, it was just enough of the truth to make him sound convincing.

  “Why didn’t you just tell me all this shit from the beginning?”

  “Two reasons. Mac works deep cover, and I have no idea what she was working on, and two…” He hesitated before continuing. “I don’t trust local cops.”

  Dani had to keep from agreeing with him on his last point. “So, why the hell won’t the ATF call me back on her ID?”

  “I told you she was deep cover. They have no interest in confirming her existence to anyone. Trust me, they’re looking for her. Protocol is to stay low profile by using an existing network of CI’s.”

  She tried to hide her confusion when he said “CI’s.” It took a few minutes to remember where she had heard that before. Law & Order. It meant confidential informant. She had to bury her smile once she figured it out.

  “So, can I have it now?”

  “Have what?”

  “The ID.”

  She considered his request. “Why?”

  “Because I can run it for prints and trace evidence without drawing attention, and, no offense, but I’m pretty sure we’ve got access to higher-end equipment than this backward-ass shithole.”

  She didn’t reply. She just let her flared nostrils do the talking. He was right, of course, but fuck him. Arrogant bastard.