The Devil's Bones

by Larry D. Sweazy

  Ginny was standing at the bedroom window, still naked, her arms crossed over her breasts. She had unfastened the sheer curtains and they fluttered in the breeze from the fan. The light from the bathroom mingled with the break of dawn, and Ginny's shoulder-length blonde hair glowed against her sun-bronzed body.

  A small blue and pink dragonfly tattoo, wings spread in flight, shimmered in the moisture on the small of her back. She was thirty-three, three years older than Jordan was, and her body showed little sign of bearing a child nine years earlier—she was thin, thinner than he ever remembered. She still looked ethereal, though, otherworldly, and forever young. For a moment, Jordan forgot about the needle, forgot again that he was a cop. But the pure image of Ginny at nineteen he'd held onto for so long faded quickly when the police radio buzzed again with static.

  “I don't know how much more I can take,” she whispered.

  “The heat?” he asked, searching for his socks. It had only rained a quarter inch in the last twenty-three days, and the temperature had hovered in the nineties for just as long, dropping into the mid-seventies at night. It was the hottest, muggiest August anybody in central Indiana could remember. The night air was so humid he could barely breathe, but seeing her standing there, he couldn't resist touching her velvet skin again, couldn't resist asking the question that was screaming in his head. He slid his hands around her waist and pulled her as close as possible.

  “Are you using?” Jordan couldn't see the expression on her face, but he felt her stiffen and then relax as she arched into him. Her neck smelled of jasmine.

  “No. Why would you ask me that?”

  “The needle in the medicine cabinet. I thought maybe there was some aspirin . . . I wasn't snooping.”

  Ginny pulled away and turned her back to the window, facing him. She was a good six inches shorter than he was, five-foot six to his six-foot one, and she had to reach up to touch his face. “It's Ed's, he's diabetic. Why? What were you thinking, that I'm shooting up?”

  “I thought Ed might be.” He was relieved that he was wrong, but he wasn't sure that she was telling him the truth. The answer came too quick—but he wasn't going to pursue it, for all he knew Ed Kirsch really was diabetic. Even though diabetes didn't explain the aluminum-foil rock. They both knew Ed Kirsch's history, knew he had used and sold pot and speed in the past, when they were teenagers. But as far as he knew Ed had given up that life a long time ago—at least the dealing part. Jordan wasn't sure Ed had ever quit using.

  There was no way he could make a bust for possession if the foil was a rock of cocaine, or crystal meth. How would he explain being in the bathroom?

  Ginny's fingers were like short shocks of electricity on his face as she touched the scar under his eye. Jordan recoiled, and she looked at him oddly, forced a smile—she knew she was out of bounds and she didn't care. She never had.

  “No, Ed knows better than that. Daddy doesn't like him the way it is. He's not going to give him a reason to arrest him,” Ginny said, shaking her head. “I just don't want to live the rest of my life like this. It has to be better than this, Jordan, it just has to be. I never dreamed marrying Ed would turn out like this. Let's run away. Go to Arizona or Florida, anywhere but here. Let's start over. Change our names. You could work on a fishing boat or be a guide in the mountains for tourists. I'll get a job at a grocery store, be a waitress. I don't care, as long as I don't have to be what I am now.”

  “We had our chance for that a long time ago. It didn't work out too well, if I remember right. You weren't ready, remember?”

  “I was young and stupid. I was scared. I didn't know what I wanted.”

  Jordan hesitated. He wanted nothing more than to rescue Ginny, take her out of the life she'd gotten herself into. He knew how bad things turned out—he had watched her fade a little more every day. But he'd stayed out of her life for so long . . . and he wasn't up to getting his heart broken again. At least not so quickly. If they got back together, it would have to be the right way. Not like this.

  He could watch Ed, arrest him if he was using or selling, but taking him out of the picture for Ginny wouldn't be a great start to any kind of relationship. They had enough baggage the way it was. “So now we'd just be stupid?” he asked. “I don't want to live anywhere else, Ginny. I can't just walk in here one day out of the blue and pick up and leave. Why would I want to do that? Why would you even think I would do that? Is that why you called me? You thought I'd sweep you up and take you away from all of your problems? Take you away from Ed? Come on, Ginny, tell me that wasn't your reason? We're not kids anymore. It's just not that easy—we'd have to give it some time. You'll have to leave Ed on your own.”

  Ginny sat down on the edge of the bed and grabbed up the sheet to cover herself, her eyes moist, on the verge of tears. “No. He won't let that happen,” she said, turning her head away.

  “I'm not scared of Ed Kirsch.”

  “You should be,” Ginny whispered. She took a deep breath. “I'm sorry, I just wanted to touch you. Feel alive again.”

  “You know something? I don't believe you.”

  Her lip sagged into a frown like it always did when she didn't get what she wanted. “You're nothing but a goddamned third-shift security guard, Jordan,” Ginny yelled. “Whether you want to admit it or not, and a gopher for my father. You've been under his spell since you were twelve. Look at you now. You're a grown man and it's no different. You're just a deputy in a stinking small town in Indiana. A big fish in a little pond with a gun on your hip to make you feel powerful. How could you like your life? Nothing's changed. Not even you, climbing in and out of my bed when the mood strikes you.”

  Jordan couldn't argue with her, she was right about most of the things she said. Being a cop in Dukaine, Indiana, with a total of two stoplights, was not like being a cop in New York City. It had its challenges, especially in late summer when the migrants came to town, but mostly he wrote speeding tickets and checked on locked doors at night—he really was a security guard on a basic level. But crystal meth had become a problem in the last couple of years, a rural scourge that had worked its way from the South and into the big cities—Indianapolis and Chicago—that Dukaine sat squarely between. Keeping an eye on the ammonia tanks, a key ingredient that could be found in the homemade drug, at the co-op was high priority. But even that only required sitting and watching. Users that made their own meth were a big concern and a drain on time—but the bigger problem was the mega-labs out west, rumored to be operated by Mexican drug lords.

  It was the Mexican connection and the transportation of the drug, considering the influx of migrants during harvest season, that concerned most of the law enforcement officials in Carlyle County. Jordan hadn't seen any sign of big-time operators in Dukaine, but that didn't mean they weren't there. He had seen, though, the devastating effect meth had on its users; he'd been involved in three busts in the last six months, and each time there were children in the house where the meth was being cooked. The users lost everything, and it was almost impossible to break the addiction. Security guards didn't have to deal with seeing that.

  “I didn't say everything in my life was perfect,” Jordan said. “Would I be here if it was?” He put his uniform shirt on—it stuck to his sweaty skin, making him even more uncomfortable. “I knew I shouldn't have come here.”

  “Don't go.”

  He kissed her on the forehead.

  She drew back and looked at him harshly. “You still love me. That's why you came.”

  The dog barked again. Jordan tried to ignore the remark, and took a step over to the window and looked outside. She was right about that, too. He'd never stopped loving her. How could he?

  There were seventeen trailers in the Royal Lane trailer park, all lined up ten feet from one another, facing a single unpaved road that led in and out to Main Street. Beyond the road was a set of railroad tracks that skirted an eighty-acre tomato field. Over the field, he could see the bright lights of the SunRipe plant glowing aga
inst the early morning sky, a warehouse the size of two football fields, all lit up like it was the last Friday night football game of the season.

  The plant was operating at full capacity, pumping out ketchup, spaghetti sauce, and various other products made from tomatoes, twenty-four hours a day. Tomatoes were the lifeblood of Dukaine, and the plant was the single largest employer in the southern half of Carlyle County. While the rest of Indiana was mostly covered with corn and soybean fields, there were over fifteen thousand acres of tomatoes in a hundred-mile radius of the SunRipe plant. During the picking season, an army of migrants descended on the town, more than doubling Dukaine's population from three thousand to seven thousand, straining the demand on every service in town, especially the police department. In all, thirty to forty migrant camps sprang up across the county every summer.

  The police department consisted of Jordan; Ginny's father; the marshal, Holister Coggins; and Johnny Ray Johnson, the other full-time deputy. In the summer, off-duty deputies from the county sheriff's department filled in on a part-time basis. Even with the help, the days were long for the three of them, working a minimum of six days a week, twelve hours a day. Jordan always worked the night shift. He liked the quiet. Johnny Ray liked the noise of the day, the joy of being a cop, the sun glaring on his badge, so the schedule worked out for the both of them. Holister, for the most part, was always on duty.

  Jordan didn't see anything out of the ordinary beyond the window, just the neighbor's cat crawling up onto a stained yellow brocade sofa that sat on the patio. He was jumpy because he knew he was somewhere he wasn't supposed to be. Breaking rules for the pure pleasure of it was something he thought he'd given up a long time ago. He was overreacting and he knew it.

  “Ed and me have been in trouble for a long time, Jordan,” Ginny said. The anger faded from her face as she dropped the volume of her voice and lowered her head. “You know that. Ed's been sleeping with that little redheaded tramp down at the truck stop for months. He says he's on the road, but we never have any goddamned money. I know where he is. I always know where he is, and he's not on a run to Texas like he's supposed to be. Damn it, Jordan, you're my safe place. My rock. The one I could always turn to . . . the only person who's ever been there for me. And I need you now, more than ever.”

  “Is this just a way to get back at Ed?” he asked, eyeing the door. “Call it even? Pretty easy to do if you ask me. Just call Jordan, he'll come running?”

  “It's been nine years, Jordan. If that was my reason, I would've done it before now.”

  Jordan knew about Ed and the redhead at the truck stop. He'd seen them together more than once, and he'd used that information to rationalize his own behavior a few hours earlier when he'd slid from the shadows and into Ginny's open arms. There were a million times he wanted to tell Ginny what was going on, but he'd vowed to stay out of their relationship, just like she'd vowed to stay out of his. And he'd vowed not to break the code of silence that came with his job. He knew a lot of secrets—knew more about most of the people in Dukaine than he wanted to. Every vow he'd ever promised himself seemed to be empty now, all in a matter of a few hours. What the hell had he been thinking?

  “It'd be different this time, I promise,” Ginny said. “You're the only man I ever truly loved.”

  “Sometimes, love's not enough.” Jordan drew in a deep breath of muggy air from the fan. For a second, he thought he saw fear flash across Ginny's face, like she wanted to tell him something, but the look disappeared as quickly as it had appeared.

  “I don't believe that,” Ginny said.

  “If it's time to leave Ed, then leave. I'll make sure he can't hurt you.”

  “You can't promise me that.”

  “Yes, I can. I can make sure he can't hurt you or Dylan—and I'm sure Dylan's old enough to understand what's going on. He probably knows you two can't stand the sight of each other. Trust me, you'd be doing him a favor. But I won't play second fiddle to Ed Kirsch ever again.”

  Ginny stood up, her eyes twisted as if Jordan had just slapped her. “You're a son of a bitch. A self-righteous asshole just like you've always been. You take what you want when you want it, and then you run. You always run, Jordan, when things get a little close, a little too complicated. You're hot on the outside, but cold as ice on the inside,” she said. “Get out. Get out of my house. Get out of my life, and stay out. I mean it.”

  “You're going to wake Dylan up.”

  “Are you afraid he'll tell Ed you were here?”

  “I'm sorry. This won't happen again.” He grabbed his utility belt and 9mm Glock off the dresser, snapped it on quickly, and walked out of the bedroom.

  “Don't go,” Ginny said, following him to the door of the bedroom. “Please don't go. I need you . . .”

  Her sobs followed him down the trailer's hallway and he heard a door open. He turned and saw Dylan, blonde hair tussled and sleepy blue eyes on the edge of tears, peering out of his bedroom door.

  Damn it, he thought, this is the last thing I wanted to happen. He put his index finger to his lips and whispered, “Go back to bed, everything's all right.”

  When the nine-year-old boy responded with a half-smile and disappeared back into the bedroom, Jordan eased out of the front door just as the birds were starting to sing and the streetlights were going off.

  CHAPTER 3

  August 21, 2004, 5:48 A.M.

  The sun was already a white disk in the pale blue sky when Jordan pulled into the police department parking lot. He'd driven the streets of Dukaine three times looking for something out of place, a reason for the dog to be barking, but he didn't see anything, not even a loose dog. He reasoned that his uneasy feeling was nothing more than his overactive imagination all mixed up with a heavy dose of guilt. It would have been easier to blame the heat for his nervousness. Everybody else was blaming the drought for everything. Like the call he got a couple of shifts ago. “I'm sorry, Jordan, I punched my wife because the A/C quit working, and I just lost my temper. It won't happen again, I promise.” In the winter, domestic disturbance calls came in because the furnace went out. He decided the weather really was responsible for stupidity. It was something to keep in mind, but it didn't make him feel any better.

  Like most small Midwestern towns, the road that ran through the center of Dukaine was named Main Street. All of the other side streets were named after dead presidents: Jefferson, Adams, Tyler, Kennedy, and Harrison. The police station sat at the corner of Jefferson and Main in the back of a two-story brick building that had once served as a hardware store until it went bankrupt and was bought by the town. The Town Hall occupied the front half of the building, windows replaced by plywood and painted dark brown to match the color of the brick, and the second story was used for storing Christmas decorations and old office equipment.

  The gravel parking lot was empty, with the exception of Louella Canberry's ancient Buick. A single water tower rose from a barren brown grass field between the police department and the volunteer fire department, freshly painted white with a ripe tomato on each side. The fire department was housed in a blue metal building with four-oversized garage doors. A basketball hoop stood alongside the driveway, the net torn and dangling on one hook, and a tornado siren sat atop the building, four rusted horns, one for each direction, to alert the entire town.

  Louella Canberry was the sole dispatcher for the police department. She was a retired second-grade teacher and had talked Holister into letting her try her hand at dispatching the day after she quit teaching. It turned out she was pretty good at giving orders over the radio, but Jordan wasn't surprised—she was the teacher everybody'd feared the most in elementary school. He didn't like her any more now than he did when she was his teacher. Somehow, they managed to tolerate each other, but it still pissed her off when he called her Louella instead of Mrs. Canberry.

  He grabbed up his gear to go inside the police station and put an end to the shift. There was nothing more he wanted than to go home and take a nice
long shower, sit in front of the air-conditioner, have a few beers before he went to sleep, and pretend last night with Ginny never happened. But a rumbling engine at the stoplight at Jefferson and Main made him hesitate.

  He looked over his shoulder and saw a SunRipe semi, a red Kenworth cab pulling a long white trailer dotted with tomatoes wearing smiling faces bouncing into a bottle of ketchup. The driver was hard to distinguish, but Jordan was pretty sure it was Ed Kirsch heading for home. The semi lurched forward and drove out of sight.

  A bead of sweat formed on his upper lip as he watched the diesel exhaust dissipate, heard the vibration of the big engine shift as the driver picked up speed. If it was Ed, there was no recognition on his part to wave, but that was normal. Ed and Jordan were good at avoiding each other, if they could. If they couldn't, the tone was as cordial as two prison inmates bumping shoulders.

  He knew he wouldn't be able to help himself—he'd watch Ed a little closer, find out if he was dealing again. But he wasn't sure what he'd do about it other than talk to Holister, see if he had the same concerns.

  When he went inside, Louella was sitting at the dispatch console, a battleship gray metal desk with an odd collection of twenty-year-old radio equipment piled on top of it, filing her nails.

  Jordan was glad to be out of the sun. One of the perks of working the night shift, six in the evening to six in the morning, was that he pretty much got to keep vampire hours, which lately, especially since the drought took hold, was worth all of the Friday and Saturday night fights he'd had to deal with.