While jotting some notes about the judge’s schedule in her tattered black notebook, Piper heard the bell over the door of the diner jingle as a man entered. He was someone she hadn’t seen during her weeks at the diner, and she found herself intrigued. After a couple days perched in one seat you tended to see the same people, so a stranger was interesting.
The man was tall and too thin for Piper’s taste, though, to be honest, she didn’t think she had a taste in men. Her past had made men as a whole seem rather repulsive. He looked like someone recovering from the flu in need of rest and food. Outside of that, he was beguiling enough in his own way to pique her curiosity, and she continued to watch him. His hair was dark, almost black, and cut short in a military style. He had great posture, and Piper thought perhaps he was a soldier who had mastered standing at attention. There didn’t seem to be anything extraordinary about this man, but for some reason Piper was captivated by him. She watched him the way you might watch a child who’s been accidently separated from his parents in a crowd—watching to make sure he found his way. This man seemed lost in some way, and Piper stared, waiting to see if he’d find what he was looking for.
Betty jumped up from the stool where she sat counting her tips when she saw him enter. “Bobby you look like you’ve been running all over hell’s half acre.” For a moment Betty looked like she might throw her arms around him, but instead she slapped him across the shoulder.
“Oh come on Betty, don’t give me any shit. I’ve been laying low for a while, waiting for this whole thing to blow over. Can I get something to eat or what?” Bobby scanned the diner as if to make sure whoever he was avoiding while laying low wasn’t present.
“You have nothing to feel bad about. It could have happened to any cop on the force. Two week suspension is malarkey. I’d’ve gone right in there and given that captain a piece of my mind if I didn’t think those crooked bastards would be in here shutting the diner down the very next day. You keep your chin up, and I’ll get you the usual.” Betty was halfway in the kitchen as she finished her sentence and Bobby had no time to retort. His face was flush with embarrassment, and he sulked over to the corner booth where Piper was sitting.
He didn’t notice Piper until he was almost ready to sit across from her. There were plenty of other empty booths, so she looked annoyed as she said, “Excuse me.” The man seemed to wake from a dream and shot back an equally irritated and confused look.
“This is my booth. You’re in my booth.” He stood waiting for the girl to gather her things and move. When no attempt was made, he backed away more aggravated.
“I’ve been sitting here for the last couple weeks,” she croaked at him. Piper thought to herself, what kind of weirdo has his own booth and expects people to get up when he comes in?
“That’s because I haven’t been here for the last couple weeks, but for five years I’ve been sitting here every morning for breakfast. So yeah, it’s my booth. But whatever, I don’t need this today.” He slinked into the adjacent booth as Betty re-emerged from the kitchen and immediately read the scene.
“Oh Bobby, get over it. It’s just a seat and this young lady has been a loyal customer, as loyal as you or Judge Lions. Like clockwork.” At the sound of these words Piper’s cheeks pinked. Had she been so obvious with her attempts at surveillance that a waitress could spot her motives?
“Fine,” Bobby mumbled. “I just want to get my life back to normal as soon as possible. My suspension is over, and I’m back on duty this morning. I was hoping that two weeks of being gone wouldn’t mean my whole life would be upside down.” He peppered the eggs Betty had brought him and moved them around his plate like a pouting child.
Betty smiled at him and squeezed his shoulder. “Well you weren’t suspended from the diner, and in the words of a wise man ‘move your feet, lose your seat.’” She leaned in and whispered loud enough for Piper to hear. “It’s going to be all right Bobby, and if it means that much to you, go sit with her.” He rolled his eyes up at Betty and put his hand over hers that rested now on his shoulder. He let the firmness in his jaw relax slightly but stopped short of smiling.
For no apparent reason, and without much thought, Piper was intrigued enough to chat with this man. “So what did you do? You know, what got you suspended?” Initiating a conversation with a stranger was completely out of character for Piper. She hated small talk. Why, she wondered, was she even bothering to talk to this guy?
“Who the hell are you?” he barked, and Piper shrank back, not expecting that degree of harshness from a man with such warm brown eyes. If this had been two years ago, if she had been back home still living her own life, then this man would have been in for the tongue-lashing of the century. She would have gone up one side of him and down the other, spouting expletives he probably had never heard before. But things were different now. Just like she had worked hard to lose her accent, she had worked hard to control her temper. Where she was from it was a weapon that proved necessary, but here all it would do was turn heads her way.
“Nobody,” she whispered. “You can have your seat back.” She was painfully aware of how drawing attention would undermine what she was doing here in the first place. She grabbed her things, left money on the table for Betty and hustled past him. He called something out, but Piper was already under the jingling bell of the door.
Bobby reluctantly peeled himself from the booth and jogged out to catch her.
“Wait,” he called out to the girl as she crossed the street. He saw her turn and look back toward him and then increase her pace slightly. He was a high school track star and one of the fastest men in his class at the police academy. There was no way she was going to out run him. He hadn’t been a perfect gentleman, but he wasn’t so rude that she needed to run away. This all seemed a little extreme to him.
As he jogged up behind her she stopped abruptly, looking completely frazzled by his presence.
“What?” she asked, clutching her notebook tightly to her chest. She worried that perhaps he had glimpsed her notes or maybe Betty had tipped him off to her peculiar behavior.
Bobby ran his hands over the bristly stubble that covered his cheek and sighed loudly, looking utterly overwhelmed. “I’m sorry I was short with you. I’m not having a great couple of weeks.” Piper caught a glimpse of his flexed bicep and felt herself drawn to it, staring for a moment. He stood nearly a foot taller than she was but, unlike some men of that size, he was warm not intimidating. He was the kind of man that made you feel safer when he was around. It was clear the blustery rudeness he had just exhibited was not his normal temperament. His face was tired but too gentle for that to be true. Still, Piper wasn’t interested in his apology.
“All right,” she snapped curtly, and began to turn away from him.
“That’s it? That’s all you have to say? I’m trying to apologize here.” He may have chased after her partially out of guilt but also because she was captivating. Not gorgeous, not exotic, but there was something fascinating about her. His curiosity, however, was waning as her rudeness seemed to grow. He had thought that he might be able to redeem himself by the over-the-top gesture of running after her and apologizing. He was wrong. Much like the rest of his life right now, things weren’t going as he had imagined.
He watched her impatiently tuck her silky brown hair behind her ear and he realized that maybe he had misread her. Back in the diner he thought her murky dark-brown eyes had been calling out to him in a haunting way. She seemed to have a depth that he had struggled to find in anyone lately. Maybe at first she seemed like something beautiful that had been knocked down and was waiting to be picked up and dusted off. Now standing on the sidewalk, with no words passing between them, he felt silly.
“Well, I guess that’s it then,” he said awkwardly, turning on his heels. It wasn’t usually hard for Piper to watch anyone walk away from her. She normally found herself relieved to be alone. This felt different. She had to stifle a little tug at her heart as she watched this man
leave, and all that did was annoy her. She didn’t need butterflies in her stomach; she needed ice in her veins.
Piper didn’t like the way he looked at her penetratingly, like he could see something that others couldn’t—the heaviness she carried. Starting right now he would be someone she’d need to avoid.
Chapter Two
“Betty.” Bobby waved her over before she could head back to the kitchen. “What’s that girl’s name, and, for that matter, what’s her story?” At that question Betty lit up like a Christmas tree and plopped herself down in his booth, his real booth, the booth he moved to the moment he came back to the diner.
“I have no idea. The girl doesn’t say a peep. Polite as pie, easily pleased, but she is closed up tight as a clam. I haven’t pried much, but you know how most people love to come in here and gush about themselves? Well she sits, reads, writes, and watches.” Betty’s hands were moving frantically, as they usually did when she gossiped. Bobby often wondered if she would know what to say if she couldn’t flail her hands around when she spoke.
“Watches what?” Bobby asked, losing more interest in the story by the minute. After Betty’s animated response he was more convinced than ever that the girl was probably only taking in the sights of a lackluster town and dreaming up some soap opera to write an English paper about. That was the problem with living so close to a college. You often found yourself dealing with entitled students.
“Everything. The girl seems like a private eye. She watches everything, and everybody. To tell you the truth, she’s got my antennas up. You know how I have that sixth sense about people? Well my radar is going off like crazy with her. She’s got something going on. I just haven’t asked the right questions.” Betty’s excitement over the whole thing had sealed the deal for Bobby. A nosy waitress hoping a boring customer will turn out to be something more than she is.
“I’ve got to get to work.” Bobby laid his money on the table for Betty and kissed her lightly on the cheek. The woman was a bit cracked but she’d been better to him than his own family at times, and something about her always made him feel good.
God knows he needed a reason to feel better. There were moments in everyone’s life that could be considered tipping points—events that became large black lines forever separating the before from the after. Bobby’s came two weeks ago, and it certainly changed his life, career, and plans.
Sam Manton. Just thinking his name put a brick in Bobby’s stomach. He’d spent four months of this year, his rookie year, building a case against this creep. Manton was pretty widely known for importing dope of all kinds into Edenville and the surrounding areas. No one in the department showed much interest, which still puzzled him.
Taking Manton down seemed like a no-brainer. Sure, maybe it was only water cooler chatter but the rumors of Manton’s deals had become enough to convince Bobby it was worth the department’s effort. It was at least worth investing some time into checking him out a little more.
Bobby remembered thinking that he signed on to this job to make a difference. He wasn’t interested in sitting around the donut shop on lazy afternoons with the rest of the beat cops comparing stories about the couple of times in their years of service they actually saw some action. He had heard the story of Donny Lee foiling a bank robbery so many times that he felt like he’d been there making a deposit himself that day. In reality, it was a transient guy passing through town who handed a note to the teller. She pressed the silent alarm, and Donny peeled himself off his diner stool, crossed the street, and strolled down to the bank when he heard it go over the radio. The guy was walking out with the money when Donny was walking in. He drew his gun, said, “Freeze,” and that was that. But now whenever the opportunity arose he told the story like a scene out of Point Break.
So one day Bobby decided he would spend his free time watching Sam Manton. He would do a little freelance P.I. work and see if the story would start to come together. The problem was it didn’t take much work on his end to see what was happening. Manton had been running guns into town and then selling them to drug dealers in nearby cities. His drug trades were fairly easy to spot as well but didn’t seem to be his main focus. The guns must have been where the money was because that’s what he was moving and moving them fast. It took some snooping, some eavesdropping, and some patience, but nailing him was not quite the insurmountable task Bobby feared it would be. There were moments Manton seemed to parade his deals down Main Street.
Bobby considered himself lucky. He would be the rookie who would make a name for himself through the takedown of a sloppy arms and drug dealer who had become too cocky. Bobby detailed reports and had documented everything he gathered in hopes of bringing the information to his captain. He assumed Captain Baines would congratulate him and form a task force to take down Manton with the information Bobby collected.
Baines was a brash, overweight, stocky man with a short temper. He didn’t tolerate anything that resulted in having to listen to static from the mayor. If a cop in his department did something to draw negative attention or acted a fool, he’d be in for a quick and fierce punishment from the captain. Bobby had tried to stay out of his way until this point. He had ignored the smell of whiskey on Baines’s breath as well as the bags under his tired eyes. There was a chain of command for a reason. It was Bobby’s job to take orders, not ask questions.
Much to Bobby’s surprise, Baines assigned Officer Rylie to assist him on the bust. He was told that the fewer people who knew about something this important, the better. Aaron Rylie was an old school cop who had been on the job for over twenty years. He kept himself fit, unlike many of the other cops his age, and Bobby appreciated that about him. He seemed to take his job seriously and didn’t let his many years of service become an excuse for taking a more lax approach to his duties. Bobby knew Officer Rylie was from the Irish crew of cops that had been part of some really impressive busts over the years. His reddish-brown hair had started to grey, and his skin was leathery from so many days out walking the beat. He was a man of few words but seemed very interested in what Bobby had been able to find out about Manton.
Bobby’s information suggested that the guns would be following the delivery schedule of a fake transport business Manton had created. This deal was especially important because it involved Manton being present to receive the shipment and meet a person who Bobby deduced was the supplier. He hadn’t managed to pinpoint who that was exactly.
The morning came and Bobby readied himself for what he assumed would be a career-changing moment. Little did he know how right he was. It certainly changed the trajectory of his life, but not for the better. Going in with only two cops seemed light when dealing with a serious case like this, but he ignored his gut and trusted his superiors as he had been taught to do in the academy. After all, they knew best.
Bobby and Officer Rylie arrived on the scene and the rest was a blur. The delivery had already been made. The new supplier, who Bobby assumed would be collateral damage and turn into another historical collar for him, had left. Perhaps they had been tipped off, or maybe Bobby had gotten his information wrong.
Officer Rylie nodded for Bobby to climb the chain link fence that separated them from Manton and two of his cronies who were hastily moving the crates into a truck for transport. Bobby landed and steadied himself after hopping the fence. He drew his weapon, announced himself and told them to put their hands up where he could see them. One man reached for what Bobby’s training had taught him to assume was a weapon tucked into the back of the man’s belt. When the perp saw Officer Rylie, he relaxed and moved his hands back to his sides. Bobby assumed the presence of another officer led the man to believe he was surrounded or outnumbered and it would be unwise to pull a weapon.
Manton gave a curious look over Bobby’s shoulder to Officer Rylie. He seemed puzzled rather than scared. It wasn’t the reaction Bobby anticipated, but hell, it was his first real action as a cop. Who was he to assume how anyone would act in this type of situation
?
Bobby approached the man who had reached for a weapon first and pulled the gun from behind his back, tucking it into his own belt and reaching for his cuffs. Officer Rylie was cuffing Manton and seemed to be speaking to him more than one would think necessary for a collar like this. Manton never spoke. Bobby was out of earshot, but whatever Rylie said had Manton nodding his head in agreement.
The process was going smoothly and Bobby’s confidence was growing with each passing minute. Bobby approached the third man, his service weapon now holstered, and read the scene as contained. He reached for his zip ties since his other cuffs were being used, and in that moment felt a wall of pain hit his face. He fell backward to the ground, stunned and unaware of what exactly had happened. There was a kick to his stomach and chest, then a stomp on his back as he attempted to roll away. He reached for his weapon and wondered for a brief second what Officer Rylie was doing. Finally Rylie was there, gun drawn and pointed directly at the man, telling him to back the hell up before he blew his head off.
Bobby lay there, gathering himself while Rylie cuffed the third man and called for backup.
When other squad cars began to arrive Bobby managed to stand and knock most of the dust off his uniform. But the skin over his cheekbone had split where the man’s gaudy gold ring had made contact. An ambulance pulled up and, as much as he had attempted to wave them off, Rylie had insisted Bobby go in and get checked out.
Ten hours later, when he had expected to be collecting the accolades for a job well done, Bobby was being suspended and gun dealers were being released back onto the street. The explanation he was given was that since this was Bobby’s bust he was the point person, even though Rylie had tenure. Rylie had mentioned this to him that morning, but Bobby was too insecure to ask him to elaborate on exactly what their roles would be. He didn’t want to sound green, so he clammed up and nodded his head in agreement. Because he was distracted by the boxing match he was having with assailant number three, none of the men had been read their rights. The officers who came to the scene to transport had assumed Bobby had done so, and proceeded to book them. Their lawyers, who were obviously the kings of technicalities, had been made aware of the minor detail and had their clients walking free in no time.
Chasing Justice Page 2
