by Ed Gorman
And maybe that was part of the reason for his anger. She’d shut him out, and then she was dead before either of them could change the way things were. Maybe that was the reason he hadn’t heard his sister’s voice in the desert on the night he’d nearly taken his own life.
Maybe he hadn’t know her well enough to ask for that kind of help.
Maybe she was still shutting him out.
They were brother and sister, sure. They’d shared memory, time, and blood. But Glen had never known the secrets Kim kept locked up in her heart. And he wondered if you ever could know that about someone else, no matter what ties you shared.
Just lately, he’d been thinking about that a lot. He hadn’t reached any particular conclusions, but there was one thing he was sure of. In the time since he’d left El Pasito, he was beginning to understand his own secrets, and he was beginning to understand his own heart.
He wondered if someone else was beginning to understand those things, too.
It wasn’t easy to find a payphone anymore, but Glen turned one up.
He had to buy a phone card from a little Cajun girl working the till in the convenience store before he could make his call. The phone was on a pole across from the gas pumps. There weren’t a lot of people around, just a lot of kudzu. And that was okay with Glen. This wasn’t a conversation he wanted to share with anyone.
He dialed Lisa’s number.
A man picked up on the third ring. “Hello?”
Glen didn’t say a word.
“Hello?” the man said again. “Hey … is anyone there?”
A click on the line, and the familiar voice was gone. Glen hung up the receiver.
Well I’ll be damned, he thought, that voice still there in his head. J. J. Bryce and Lisa Allen.
He stood there a minute, thinking about it. A truck roared by on the two-lane highway, heading toward Baton Rouge. Glen shook his head, grinning. A lot had surprised him just lately, and he couldn’t see a single reason why this should be any different.
But, right now, that was okay with him.
Really, it was.
Man, if there was one thing J. J. hated, it was hang-ups.
He turned away from the phone. At least it hadn’t been another lawyer calling. Since the gunfight at the Barlow Corral, he’d had enough of lawyers. And administrative leave. And state and county investigators.
And the questions some of those guys asked. Especially that forensic specialist who’d discovered that the Howard clan had been gunned down with silver bullets. He’d asked if J. J. had any ideas about those. “Hell,” J. J. had said. “Maybe Barlow thought he was the Lone Ranger. The guy was definitely crazy enough.”
As it stood, investigators had connected the Howards to six murders in four states. Three of the victims had been married to Kale. Seemed he’d do the killing, and then his sister would come in a few months later and cash in the chips. She’d been smart enough to keep a low profile, mostly, and that had definitely been her M. O. in El Pasito. No one in town had even know that Kale had a sister — or a couple of brothers — out there at the house. Hell, that was probably why they kept the front window boarded up.
Anyway, J. J. was glad the deal was wrapping up. Next week he was going back to work. A couple months after that … well, the whole thing would probably be forgotten.
One could hope, anyway.
Lisa was sweeping the patio when J. J. stepped through the door. He was carrying a couple bottles of Pacifico, and he handed her one. She took a sip, and that was an improvement. The beer was good and cold.
“Who was on the phone?” she asked.
“Hang up. Don’t you hate those?”
She nodded. They sat on the back step for awhile. J. J. drank his beer and talked about going back to the cop shop. She listened. After awhile, he said, “I think I’ll drive over to Dos Gatos. Get some of those pork carnitas. We can have a barbeque tonight.”
“Sounds good.”
A few minutes later, he was gone.
Lisa sat there on the step, staring at Tres Manos in the distance. Afternoon clouds drifted in from the east, casting shadows over The Hands. Lisa sipped her beer and watched the clouds hang there. They hung a good long while, until the wind chased them off.
Lisa finished her beer, then got her clippers from the tool shed.
She worked in the herb garden.
She trimmed back the rosemary.
She trimmed it tight.
NORMAN PARTRIDGE’S compact, thrill-a-minute style has been praised by Stephen King and Peter Straub, and his fiction has received three Bram Stokers and two IHG awards. His first short story appeared in the second issue of Cemetery Dance, and his debut novel, Slippin’ into Darkness, was the first original novel published by CD. Partridge’s chapbook Spyder was one of Subterranean Press’s inaugural titles, while his World Fantasy-nominated collection Bad Intentions was the first hardcover in the Subterranean book line. Since then, Partridge has published pair of critically acclaimed suspense novels featuring ex-boxer Jack Baddalach for Berkley Prime Crime (Saguaro Riptide and The Ten-Ounce Siesta), comics for Mojo and DC, and a series novel (The Crow: Wicked Prayer) which was adapted for the screen. His award-winning collections include Mr. Fox and Other Feral Tales and The Man with the Barbed-Wire Fists. Partridge’s latest novel, Dark Harvest, was chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of the 100 Best Books of 2006. A third-generation Californian, he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, Canadian writer Tia V. Travis.
Rust
BY N. J. AYRES
You have to keep the dark voice away. It does no good. Life breaks every man, didn’t Hemingway say?
Trooper Erin Flannery, out of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania: Five-six. One-twelve, brown over brown. Red-brown over brown. Over hazel, make it, a kind of green. At her funeral, speakers said she was a loyal friend, good at her job, full of zip, had a beautiful smile. Everyone loved her, they said.
When she came aboard Troop M, even I thought of asking her out. But dating people from work — no good. The day our Commander, Paul Ooten, told us a female was joining us he warned not to engage in excessive swearing and crude remarks to see how she’d take it or to show she was one of the boys. He’d seen it before, and it was comical and juvenile, and nothing more than bias in the guise of jokes. He reminded us of the word “respect” used in the state police motto, and that our training includes the concept of military courtesy applied to civilians, peers, and superiors, whatever the gender. Unless some miscreant pissed us off while breaking the law, and then you can beat the shit out of him, he said. We laughed. Commander Paul Ooten. A lot like my dad. Upright, ethical, fair. Firm, yet fun when the time called for it. He also reminded me of my dad in the way he talked and in some of his mannerisms, like swiping a knuckle under his nose after he delivered a punch line. My father died when I was twelve. Heart attack in his police cruiser.
Everything changed.
My mother was okay for a while. Then she slowly took to drinking. By the time I was fourteen, she was into it full throttle. She dated, and each time it hardened me more. The idea of her wanting anyone but Dad sickened me.
It wasn’t like she brought guys home, but she might as well have.
As soon as I was out of school and found someone to share rent with, I moved out, enrolled in community college, and later, with my AA degree in hand, applied to the Pennsylvania State Police Academy. What I really wanted was to go to Missoula where my uncle lived, study writing and film, and then wind up in California or New York, doing that scene. But I needed money from a job. I more than satisfied the physical training, aced the written and orals. Bingo, I are a cop.
Within seven years I earned a couple of medals for distinction in service. The last recognition was from the community, the “DUI Top Gun Award” for nailing forty-nine intelligent people who got behind the wheel while drunk.
Once, when I was ten, I alerted some neighbors across the street that their house was on fire. They called me a hero. I
wasn’t a hero. I was an ordinary kid who knew enough to realize a ton of smoke was not coming from a leaf pile in the backyard. My dad was the hero. He ran to the house with a ladder to get Mrs. Salvatore from the second floor.
I’m twenty-eight today. Today, like when you go to the doctor and the assistants ask and even the doctor asks how old are you today? Uh, yesterday I was twenty-eight, and today I’m twenty-eight also, thank you. And I’m single after a two-year marriage to a girl who couldn’t dig someone who always thought he was right. I tried, really did, to see more gray instead of black and white. The marriage just wasn’t meant to be. She went back to Alabama, teaches elementary school there. I wonder how she’d view me now. How old are you today? A hundred inside.
When Officer Flannery transferred over she was required to put in her time on reception. Nobody likes that duty, but there aren’t enough civilians for it even though our governor is high on recruiting them. Right away the guys started testing her, seeing how available she might be. Married, unmarried, didn’t matter. It’s a thing guys do. I should say here I never saw our commander flirt or kid in any way that made it seem Erin was anything but another trooper.
Commander Paul Ooten’s a real family man. That’s what I heard all the time. I’d seen him with his family at a state patrol picnic once. Pretty wife. Two kids, about eight, ten.
And I saw him one night, behind a motel near Tannersville, coming down the stairs from the second floor, Trooper Flannery in front of him.
I had just gotten in my car after coming out of a restaurant. Parked perpendicular to the restaurant, nose in to the motel, I went to wipe moisture off the side mirror and then looked up. At first I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. The light over the staircase and landing was fuzzy from moist air. The couple had long coats on. I watched them walk over patchy snow to her car. She got in, and a different light, coming from the motel sign near the street, hit her face, brighter, paler. Paul shut her door. She rolled down the window, and he leaned over and kissed her, then stood watching as she pulled away.
The next day I had a hard time looking at him.
A couple of weeks later, I was at my desk on a weekend. I had off, but my review was coming up and I had to get some overdue paperwork in. Ooten’s door was open. Half of him was visible through the doorway, cut vertically, or I’d see him when he’d get up to go to his file cabinet.
Bill Buttons was in too. He’s a kiss-up. Buttons thinks he’s Bruce Willis. Shaves his head, swaggers around, crinks his mouth to smile. Sometimes when Ooten is around, Buttons makes like Bruce Willis making like John Wayne, saying, Wal, pardner, let’s get ‘er done. The effect: ridiculous.
That day, Paul Ooten came out of his office a couple of times, said something to Buttons, something to me. I tried forcing my feelings, tried to look at him the way I did before the night outside the motel with Erin. But I kept picturing him on her, her doing stuff to him.
When Buttons left for lunch, Paul — it’s hard to call him Commander Ooten anymore — came into Room 5 where there are mail slots against the all, a supply cabinet, a small refrigerator, the coffee machine. I was pouring coffee for myself. Ooten put a memo in a slot and then took some time to mention the weather, the Eagles game, and how he’d been thinking of taking a course in Excel. I couldn’t hide my lack of interest, but I guess because I had recently lost my mother to cancer, he said, “If you need to talk about it, Justin, my door’s always open.”
I said something like Thanks, I’m fine. His manner, the kindness behind it, touched me. And I resolved to put what I saw at the motel out of my mind.
What’s bitter is that Erin Flannery didn’t die from a car accident or a long-hidden disease. She died from brain trauma in her own home. Detectives interviewed the civilians in her life: family, friends, neighbors, they interviewed us at Troop M too, in due time. I wondered what Paul Ooten had told them. I wondered if the strained expression I saw each day is worry about his secret being outed, or if the tightness in his face was the shame he knew he brought to the badge. I’ll say this: for some guys, if they learned the commander was boning Erin he’d only be more of a hero in their eyes.
No boyfriend turned up in the investigation. Bill Buttons said that’s sure hard to believe, a piece like that.
A crime of opportunity, we concluded. It happens. Even to cops.
Kleinsfeldt said he overheard there was something odd about the evidence in her case, he didn’t know what. We asked who he heard it from. He wouldn’t say.
I reminded the guys that Flannery had been an LEO, a Liquor Enforcement Officer up in Harrisburg. It sounds like soft duty, but not necessarily. You go undercover to nab idiots who sell to minors. You look for cheats who avoid taxes by importing liquor from other states. You bust speakeasies. Yes, they still call them that, those enterprises too unenterprising to get a liquor license. The Bureau of Liquor Control Enforcement also goes after illegal video gambling machines, looking for operations suspected as hooked to corrupt organizations. Maybe she found one and was afraid she’d get cashed out because of it. Patrol sees our fair share of action, I don’t mean we don’t. It’s more than spotting violations of the vehicle code. When your number’s up you can get killed responding to a disturbance call as well as by some desperate speakeasy owner.
One time Erin found a note on the seat of her desk chair. It said he wished he were her seat cushion. She told me about it only because I was walking through the lobby and saw the look of disgust on her face as she studied the paper still in her hands. “Some jerk,” she said. Said it quietly, almost with sadness. I don’t know why that particular note would bother someone so much, but then I’ve never been a woman. I told her maybe it could be the computer guy, Steve Gress. He was in every week, supposedly upgrading our systems, which only created more problems. I’d noticed the way he looked at her.
Carl Carolla had a thing for Erin too. I could tell because of his talk around her. He’d roll out some cockamamie story about which creep he had to deal with that day, what some wise-ass said. He said, “Joker like that, what you do, you rack up more offenses. Keep the dumb-ass violator from his appointed rounds, and hit him hard in the pocket.” Carolla could be a suspect, maybe like if Erin told him to get lost after a clumsy pass.
Another cop, Rich Kleinsfeldt, resented her. Claimed women cops are a danger to everybody. Some dingbat can grab hold of their hair and then lift their sidearm, he said. Women’s hair, according to dress code, has to be above the uniform collar points. Even so, it could be used for a handle, especially if it was in a braid. Another species, they are, says R.K. I’ll agree that women offenders are the worst, you go to arrest them. They’ll bite, yank, spit, what have you. “She’s skeeter skinny anyway,” Rich said. “You want that for your back?”
Something funny about the crime scene. Is that what Kleinsfeldt said? I knew one technician at the crime lab in Lancaster I could check with, but it would look odd, my poking around when the case wasn’t mine. I let that idea drop.
Before what happened to Erin, I’d be on my runs, doing my job, and find myself thinking about Erin and Ooten. Ooten and Erin. The ring to it. Her power to lure him. I could understand it, yet not. I was just so disappointed in him. Hurt, you might say, though I cannot exactly say why. Ooten has awards of valor himself, the fact known by reputation and not by paper plastered on his office walls. From his example I did not display mine.
While Erin was at the front desk one morning and no public was in, I was getting pencils — pencils, by the way, not pencil. My seventeenth summer I worked at a dollar store. The boss was training me for assistant manager, said I could take college classes at night, couldn’t I, so I’d be free to do a full eight hours? In his instructions, he told me to keep an eye out for what the other employees might be up to. “If they aren’t stealing a little, they’re stealing a lot,” he said. Those words came to mind as I grabbed my second and third pencil for home. I did it right in front of Buttons, whose arm was in the cabinet too,
taking a stapler. He already had one on his desk. What did he need two for? I almost think I did it to show him I wasn’t such an uptight asshole after all. But I did razz him about it. He razzed me back about my three pencils.
On my way back to my desk I heard Erin say on the phone she was letting her hair grow out. Who was she talking to? Her lover? I couldn’t help but glance out the window to see if Ooten’s car was in the lot. It wasn’t. Every action or nonaction of Ooten’s
I couldn’t help but attach to her.
My review was scheduled for the last day of the month. You always get a little anxious at that time. No one zips through with zero criticism. The review was the same week Erin was to complete her probationary period at the same time, a thing she had to go through even though she was a transfer-in and not a cadet. We’re a paramilitary organization, the state police, why we’re called Troopers. “Soldiers of the law,” we are, and we suck it up when we get assignments we don’t want or when we get treated like newbies. Erin said she was content here for the time being, mentioned how good everyone was to her, how terrific Commander Ooten was.
Did she linger on his name? How would the others feel if they got wind of her seeing him on the side? There are more minorities on the force than women. Women, in other words, still stand out. Her misbehavior would come to tarnish all other females entering the force and could severely damage Commander Ooten.
And so it was that I asked if she’d like to have coffee sometime, after shift. In my own way, maybe I was trying to be a decoy. Protect her and the commander both. I was a little surprised that she took me up on the invitation. Not that I look like something a dog won’t eat. It’s just that if she had Paul Ooten, why me? Maybe she saw me as an opportunity for a decoy too.
