City Problems

by Steve Goble

  “Right.”

  Soon after Tuck had put away his shotgun and Ollie had started breathing normally, Deputies Scott Baxter and Irwin Trumpower came through the door, guns drawn. Bax was low, Trumpower was high, and they made it look just like on TV. Trumpower was more Hill Street, while Bax was more Mayberry, but still, just like on TV.

  The guns went back into their holsters pretty quickly, though. Irwin, the senior of the two, spoke. “Got it all under control, Ed?”

  “Looks that way, Trump.”

  “Do not call me that.” His forehead, which always looked crinkled with concern even when he was telling a dirty joke, folded into deeper furrows.

  “Everyone calls you that,” I said. “Have for years.”

  “Not anymore,” Trumpower said. He added under his breath, “I watched the news today. Fuck that fucking guy.”

  “Should’ve heard him this morning,” Baxter whispered, aiming a thumb at Trumpower. “Madder than a wet cow on a Tuesday.”

  “What does that even mean, Bax?” Bax was known for having a blender somewhere between his brain and his mouth, and things came out of him a little mixed up.

  “Just means Irwin was upset about being called Trump, is all.” Baxter looked a little wounded.

  “OK,” I said. “Irwin it is. Cuff these guys for me? The gentleman there on the floor first, please. A count of assault against each, and attempt with a deadly on a peace officer against Skinny. Bag the knife there, too. It’s under that table.” I pointed. “It belongs to Skinny. Got his nice, grimy fingerprints all over it.”

  Trumpower cuffed Skinny. Baxter, who swears he’s older than thirty but looks like he should be playing the nice teen boy next door on an old-fashioned sitcom, cuffed Ollie and raised his eyebrows. “What started it?”

  I holstered my gun, and pulled my phone from my pocket. “That one there,” I said, pointing at Skinny, “exercised his free speech rights to say nasty things about gay people. Ollie exercised his free speech rights to call Skinny a stupid piece of shit, if I recall correctly. He might have called him a fucking stupid piece of shit, actually. I wasn’t really taking notes. Anyway, things sort of went downhill from there. The marketplace of ideas in all its glory, the epitome of civil debate. Like Twitter, only you could actually smell it.”

  “Huh?” Baxter never knew what the hell I was talking about, which evened the score a little bit regarding my inability to translate his habitual mixed metaphors into English. Trumpower got a laugh out of it, though. He had a good sense of humor, even if teasing him about his last name apparently was a bad idea now.

  “Never mind, Bax.” I finally glanced at my phone, and it buzzed again. It was the sheriff calling. I did not answer immediately. “You guys have any idea why Daltry might be calling me? He knew I had a date with a few beers.”

  “No idea,” Trumpower said. “He doesn’t have to check in with me before he calls detectives.”

  Skinny was standing, but wobbly. His nose was swollen, but the blood stream had slowed to a trickle. For a peacenik, Ollie hits pretty goddamned hard. Trumpower had the man’s head tilted back.

  “You need an ambulance, sir?” Trumpower, as always, was a professional.

  “No,” Skinny said softly, through a lot of drool. “I need a lawyer. I am going to sue detective man here. For false arrest! I was defending myself!”

  “Be sure to tell your lawyer you pulled a knife on me,” I said. “That will impress him. The judge will love that shit, too.”

  “Or her,” Tuck said, grinning.

  “Huh?”

  “You assumed the lawyer would be a him, Ed,” Tuck said. “Not cool.” He dates a lawyer.

  “Or her,” I said, nodding. “Duly noted.”

  Skinny got agitated. “Hey, what about my ride? My Harley, man …”

  “We’ll take care of it, sir.” Baxter grinned. “Saw that when we were coming in. Real nice.”

  “Better not scratch it up!”

  “We will be very careful.”

  I looked at Bax. “You thought I was in here fighting for my life and took a minute to admire a motorcycle?”

  “Just noticed it, is all,” Bax said. “Couldn’t help it. It’s sweeter than a pancake in heaven.”

  The road deputies hauled out the combatants after we discussed combining our eventual reports. I sat at the bar, not at all looking forward to writing my eventual report, and Tuck turned off Fox News and gave me my beer.

  “Damn, Ed, for a man who professes to dislike violence, you are awfully damned good at it.”

  “I kind of have to be.”

  “You are snake-quick, my man, snake-quick. Had those bastards under control in no time.” Tuck ran a handkerchief across the pearls of sweat on his forehead. “Thanks for handling that, man. I thought I was going to have to shoot someone. That would fuck up my perfect record. So, drinks are on me today.”

  “Thanks, bud.” I took a sip, nodding in appreciation. “And I’ll keep my mouth shut about the shotgun.”

  Then I called Sheriff Daltry.

  “Ed, I like it when my people answer on the first ring or two.”

  “Sorry, John,” I said. “I was hugging a big gay guy.”

  “What?”

  “Just joking, sort of.” I tried to sound like I didn’t want to flush the phone down the toilet, but I don’t think I succeeded. An actor, I ain’t. “Little bit of a fracas here at Tucker’s Bar and Grill, and I had my hands full of skinny dumbass and angry gay guy. They got in a fight. Road patrol came and mopped up, no one hurt bad. Skinny stranger took a hard punch in the nose, not from me, by the way. I thought it was broken, but maybe it’s not. It stopped bleeding bad, anyway, and he didn’t want an ambulance. Stranger pulled a knife and was professionally subdued at gunpoint.”

  “Any of that shit on body cams?”

  For a sheriff who always worries about what might show up on a deputy’s body cam, Daltry was forever saying such things out loud and forgetting he might be on speakerphone, or that calls can be recorded. “No,” I said. “Road guys got here after all was quiet.”

  “Good. You hurt?”

  “Not a scratch. I’ll type it all up tonight.”

  “Sure, Ed. OK.” John Daltry is a bit of an asshole, but he knows the job we do, so he didn’t ride me any further. “Listen, we have a detective from Columbus coming here on a missing person case. Teen girl, pretty blonde, I hear, and the cops think she might have come our way. I want you to help out on this end.”

  I do not like the words “missing teen girl.” They were not words I ever wanted to hear again.

  “Why does this Columbus cop think the kid was coming here?”

  “I don’t know, Ed. Maybe they suspect foul play, maybe the girl knows someone around here. We’ll know when we know. In the meantime, I’d like you to assist.”

  “Can’t Bob do that?” Bob Dooman was the other detective in the Mifflin County Sheriff’s Office. “I have racked up a lot of hours lately, John, and I’m already two beers in.” That was a lie, but Tuck was setting down my next one, so it was only a little lie. I planned to be two beers in by the end of this phone call, anyway.

  “Bob has OT issues, too, thanks to that Quincy bitch, and his kid is sick and Amy’s working. And I don’t like them Columbus high-and-mighty types coming into our turf anyway, so someone is damn well gonna babysit, and it’s gonna be a detective, not road patrol. The job is yours.”

  “All right, Sheriff.” I sighed, and took a sip of brew. The Quincy woman had stopped taking her depression meds and run off with her baby boy, and Bob Dooman had been busting ass for three weeks calling and driving to every town she had friends or family in. I’d been helping with that while handling most of the routine stuff—tractor thefts, barn burglaries, marijuana grow operations—in the meantime, along with breaking that wife-beating bastard’s alibi and showing up in court. Bob had found the woman and the kids, all safe, and had earned a little relaxation. His sick kid trumped my desire for beer and
good music, too, so it looked like I would get to babysit a Columbus detective. “He coming to the station, or am I meeting him somewhere?”

  “She,” Daltry said, sounding like he disapproved. “Yes, she’s coming to the station. Ought to be here in an hour or so.”

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll be there.” That was twice in the span of fifteen minutes I had incorrectly assumed someone working in law enforcement was a man. I decided to work on that.

  Daltry could have said thanks, but he ended the call instead. I put the phone down and hoisted the beer. Tuck squinted against the afternoon sunlight beaming into his otherwise properly dim drinking establishment.

  I drank my brew, enjoying the solid hops kick. “Tuck, my man, queue up Willie for me. ‘Heaven and Hell’ ought to do it.”

  “Since you kept people from dying all over my bar, I’ll do it, but you know I hate that Willie Nelson shit.” Tuck kept all kinds of music on his computer here, and played whatever seemed best for whatever customers he had at the moment. Left to his own devices, he was a metalhead. He shook his head hard, and his long black hair whipped like a flag behind his head, and all the beads in it rattled together. “I hate that Willie shit.”

  “I like Willie, and there’s no one here but you and me now, and I have to go back to work soon, so buck up,” I said, winking. “Oh, can you write down your witness statement for me? I want to relax, not interview you.” I took another sip, a deep one. “I’d leave out the part about you pulling a shotgun, if you know what I mean.”

  Tuck fired up Willie. I handed Tuck my notebook and a pen, and he started writing, tapping his bead-laden hair with the pen now and then in search of just the right words. When he isn’t pouring beer or listening to metal or dating a lawyer, Tuck writes poetry.

  “It doesn’t have to be Elizabeth Barrett Browning,” I said. “Just write it. Fast.”

  “A phrase well expressed has life, Ed,” Tuck said, smiling. “Always strive to put just the right words down on paper when you know the world might see them later. Every written line can be a legacy.”

  “Well, no one but a couple of lawyers, a reporter or two, a judge, and maybe, I say maybe, my boss will read this, so create fast and skip the iambic pentameter. I’m due back at the S.O. soon.”

  I was not looking forward to meeting this Columbus cop. I was pretty sure my week was about to start sucking hard. This cop was bringing city problems, and I’d had my fill of those.

  Not that life as a country detective was all IPA and roses, of course. It was not what I had expected when I left NYPD almost five years ago. Not at all. It was dangerous and depressing in its own way, but not every damned day, and not in a way that rips out your soul and stomps on it.

  Columbus, Ohio, wasn’t New York, either, but it had some of the same city problems I’d hoped to never see again, and now some detective was coming here and maybe bringing some of those problems with her. And they might become my problems.

  Law enforcement in Mifflin County wasn’t easy. We had drugs. We had break-ins committed by people who needed money to buy drugs. We had spousal abuse. We had drunken brawls. But we didn’t have that special kind of crazy that cities grow like bumper crops, the kind that makes people kill just for the hell of it, or plunge off a high roof because, hey, it’s Tuesday. The kind of crazy that breeds human animals, complete sociopaths. The kind that made me leave NYPD in a drunken tailspin, with a head full of my own special kind of crazy.

  I did not want city problems. No, no, no.

  I especially did not want missing teen girl city problems. I’d had my share of those, too. More than my share.

  I eyed the bourbon on the high shelf just beyond Tuck’s head, but signaled for another beer instead. I knew drinking more before meeting this cop was a bad idea, but that didn’t stop me.

  Tuck placed my third beer in front of me, and started to ask why I was agitated, but decided against that.

  I told myself it was probably a simple runaway case. Maybe the girl ran off with a boyfriend. Or a girlfriend. Maybe they were in a hotel somewhere, doing things teens do, and no one was getting hurt. Those cases tended to end after a day or two, with no real tragedy. Mom or dad would call us, say the kid came home. We’d ask a few questions, write a report, and file it. This case, quite likely, would be the same.

  I told myself that, but I knew there were other possibilities.

  Aside from drugs and discarded murder weapons, the most common criminal export around here was bodies. They killed people in the city, then drove them out to corn and woods country to dispose of the remains. I’d seen a few of those in my five years here, and counted myself lucky I hadn’t seen more. Counties closer to the big cities see that more often. None of the found body cases I’d handled here had been a teen girl.

  God, I said in my head, don’t let this be a dead teen girl.

  I wondered why I had so quickly gone past the scant evidence and jumped to the most morbid possibility, and drained my brew a bit faster than I had intended.

  Willie was singing on the good speakers, about how he couldn’t always tell whether he was in heaven or hell.

  I didn’t know, either. I’d fled New York’s hell for something that was not quite heaven, but it was close on good days.

  And now I worried that hell had followed me here.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Tuesday, 12:30 p.m.

  I RUSHED TO my trailer, which is only a few miles from Tuck’s but is around the bend from town and secluded behind some woods, out of sight from any other human dwellings. Just the way I like it. The F-150 tossed up dust as I turned off of Big Black Dog Road and rumbled down the long dirt driveway. Pine branches scraped at the truck in a few spots, but I could not hear them because I had “Lonesome, On’ry and Mean” playing pretty loud.

  I rent the trailer from a farm couple. It sits by a pond that really ought to be called a lake, but my landlords say it’s a pond and I don’t argue with my elders over what they call their own property. The late September sun was a bright floodlight on the oaks and maples and made the pond ripples shine like white gold. Burnt orange leaves swirled like drunken butterflies in the air. I didn’t have time to enjoy it, though, because some Columbus cop was looking for a missing girl.

  I showered fast, then scarfed down a ham sandwich and a Mountain Dew. I put on khaki pants and a dark blue Mifflin County Sheriff’s Office pullover shirt, then donned my tennis shoes and tucked the Smith & Wesson M&P 9-millimeter into my belt holster. I stepped outside, sighed at the red-tailed hawk circling over the giant hollow sycamore across the pond, then got my ass into the truck. I replaced the Waylon Jennings disc with Doc Watson and headed to work.

  My little slice of heaven is near Jodyville, where Tucker’s Bar and Grill is two doors down from the only traffic light and across the street from the only general store. The Mifflin County Sheriff’s Office is in Ambletown, about ten minutes away unless I use my siren and step on the gas. There was no need for that now, of course. I was going to be on time, unless a tractor got in my way.

  I passed the store, then braked hard. What the hell. I owed Nancy a fry pie, and the Columbus cop could wait. I parked, ran in for two strawberry pies, and returned to the truck. A few minutes later, I stepped up to Nancy’s porch, a fry pie in each hand.

  “Strawberry?” She smiled. “Oh, Ed, you did not have to do that.”

  She smiled widely, not caring a bit if the world saw she was missing a tooth or two. She had a big straw hat on, as always, and white strands of hair sprang from beneath it at random intervals.

  “Yes, I did have to do it.” I sat on the porch swing next to her and handed her a fry pie. She tore into the wax paper wrapper with glee. “I pay when I lose a bet, Nance. You won, fair and square.”

  “You been around as long as I have,” she said, “and you figure out how to win at checkers. I’ll be eighty in a week, Ed.”

  “No way,” I said. “Eighty?”

  “Yep!” She smiled big. “Gonna be a
party after church Sunday. You coming to church Sunday?”

  “Nope.”

  Nancy sighed. She had asked me to go to church every week since I’d found her stolen lawn mower, almost two years ago. “One day, you are gonna say yes.”

  “Not likely,” I replied. I consider theological matters to be too complicated and personal for discussion in committee, and I’d found most preachers get pretty irritated when you ask pesky questions. “I will try to drop by for the party, though.”

  I ate half of my fry pie in a couple of big bites. Nancy nibbled patiently at hers.

  “I hope you will come,” she said. “Lots of nice people will be there.”

  “There aren’t many people in Jodyville I don’t already know, Nance.”

  “Well, you need to know them better.”

  “OK, well, at the party, then. If I can. Cop’s work ain’t ever really done, you know.” I finished my treat and licked my fingers.

  “I know.” She waved at a bicyclist speeding down the road. The guy on the bike nodded and kept pedaling hard. “I’d like to ride fast like that,” Nancy said.

  “Speaking of getting somewhere fast, I have to run. Enjoy that pie.”

  “Thank you, Ed! You be careful, sweetie.”

  I ran back to the truck and headed toward Ambletown. Despite the pleasant visit with Nancy, I wasn’t really at ease, and I realized I had used the pie bet as an excuse to delay the inevitable. I shut the music off after a while. Doc’s guitar usually settles my mind, but this time it didn’t.

  I saw tractors in the fields harvesting corn, but encountered none on the road, so I pulled into the sheriff’s lot just a couple of minutes late.

  I went through the lobby instead of the “Law Enforcement Officers Only” door, because Debbie Maynard was dispatching today and Debbie is gorgeous—long brown hair, great curves, a smile like a supernova. She’s married, and she’s not the kind to cheat, but I like looking at her anyway. She knows I like looking, too, and doesn’t mind a bit. It makes the workdays more interesting for me, and she at least lets me think it makes the days go better for her, too.