In the Ground (David Wolf Book 14)

by Jeff Carson

  That’s how being sheriff this time around was beginning to feel. He was working his fingers to the bone, or, more accurately, his backside through the cushion of his office chair, trying to keep this huge machine called the Sluice-Byron County Sheriff’s Department running smoothly. And apparently paperwork was the grease for this machine. Mounds of it. They were more problem sets. More homework.

  And here he was hauling ass back to the office because he’d missed something, playing catch up again. He could only be thankful this time around was almost over. Did he get a passing grade? Frankly, as long as he was back behind the desk as Chief Detective come the end of it all, which, according to MacLean was exactly what was going to happen, he didn’t care.

  He cracked the window, letting the cool breeze blow away his negative thoughts.

  The echo of Patterson’s two kids’ voices still bouncing in his head, his thoughts shifted to his own son Jack and daughter-in-law Cassidy. And to little Ryan. Although Wolf was barely in his fifties now, becoming a grandfather to Ryan was a role he settled more easily than he could have imagined possible.

  Wolf longed to see Ryan again, with his joyous smile and waddling walk. They were only a few dozen miles away, but there was a mountain range between them that took an hour and a half to drive up and around. It had been weeks since he’d last seen them.

  He picked up his phone and dialed Jack’s number.

  The digital ringtone purred through the speakers of his cruiser.

  “Hey Grumpa,” Cassidy answered, using Ryan’s name for Wolf.

  "How are you?" Wolf asked.

  "Great.” There was clinking and noises of the kitchen in the background. "Just cooking up some dinner. How about you? Sounds like you’re driving.”

  “Oh you know, keeping busy.”

  “How are your final weeks going as sheriff? Are you going to miss it?”

  “It’s going well. And I’m not sure I’ll miss it that much.”

  “Really? Wow, Jack never told me that. I’m glad it’s almost over for you, then.”

  Wolf listened to the sound of her cooking. Now in their early twenties, Jack and Cassidy were following in the footsteps of Wolf and his deceased ex-wife, Sarah, having a crack at married life and raising a kid at an early age. They were doing a better job than he’d done.

  “Hey, speaking of not missing things that much,” Cassidy said, “I was down in Aspen yesterday and went past Lauren’s art gallery and saw it was closed up."

  Even with all the therapeutic sessions with Dr. Hawkwood over the last two years, Wolf still felt a small shock pulse through his system at the mention of his former fiancée. He had not seen Lauren or her daughter Ella since that afternoon they’d ceremoniously buried Jet, and, symbolically, their prospects of ever getting back together. He often wondered what they both looked like now but hadn’t gone so far as to drive down to Lauren’s art storefront in Aspen to find out. He’d intentionally remained farther north in the Roaring Fork valley, closer to Carbondale, where Jack, Cassidy, and Ryan now lived.

  "Anyway,” Cassidy continued in her conspiratorial tone, “I heard from one of my friends there that she met some guy and moved out to San Francisco with him.”

  The phone rustled, and then the muffled sounds of conversation filtered through the speakers.

  “Hey!” Jack’s voice filled the cruiser.

  Wolf blinked, the fog of Cassidy’s news slowly lifting. “Hey, how’s it going?”

  “Good. You?”

  “Not bad. Just working, you know. How’s life at the station?”

  Jack said nothing, and the kitchen noise disappeared in the background.

  “You there?” Wolf asked.

  “Yeah, sorry. I was just leaving the room. Hey, sorry about that. You know Cassidy when she has a piece of juicy gossip.”

  “It’s okay,” Wolf said. “It’s…” why was he still talking? “It’s okay. I said how’s life at the station going?”

  “Oh, it’s great. Chief says I’m doing well. Had a car crash the other day I wish I hadn’t seen, but…part of the job, you know?”

  Wolf nodded. “Yeah. Definitely part of the job.”

  “It’s wet out, so that’s good. How about you? What’s new in Points?”

  “A lot, actually. Some mine workers outside of Dredge called in a DB. It’s one of their own.”

  “Really. And it’s foul play?”

  “Looks like it.” Wolf liked having these professional chats with his son, which were more frequent with Jack’s career change. Jack had majored in geology in college, but once out had decided to serve as a firefighter. Either job choice would have been fine in Wolf’s eyes, but he had to admit he was happy with Jack’s decision.

  And he was equally proud of how Jack had gotten the position. Wolf had known the fire chief personally over in Carbondale, but Jack had threatened to disown him if he said anything behind the scenes to help. Wolf had followed orders, and although it had been a long, grueling process to get hired, Jack had landed the job.

  “Ryan, come here!” Jack’s phone rustled. “It's Grandpa. You want to talk to him?"

  Wolf smiled in anticipation, already hearing “Grumpa! Grumpa!” in the background.

  "Okay, here he is." Jack put them on speaker phone.

  "Grumpa!”

  "Hi there, buddy! How are you doing today?"

  He responded with a sentence about kicking something, and running fast? Wolf had no clue.

  "Really? That sounds amazing.”

  Cassidy’s voice called in the background. "He's says he's learning how to play soccer. He learned how to kick today and he’s really fast.”

  "Oh, okay, wow! That's great. So he went straight from walking to playing soccer. That was quick.”

  “I love doggies!”

  Wolf smiled. “Doggies are great. Maybe your mom and dad—”

  “—Maybe not quite right now!” Cassidy yelled.

  “Right, sorry,” Wolf said. “So, hey, how about this weekend? You guys still coming over?”

  The speaker phone cut off and Jack was back on. "Actually my shift is changing, so it’s not looking good. I’d be dead asleep the whole time. How about next week? I’ll be off then.”

  "Yeah, sure," Wolf said, hiding his disappointment.

  Ryan was screaming in the background. "Okay, Ryan wants to talk to you again.”

  "Put him on."

  Another stream of unintelligible syllables came through the speakers, but this time it was because of reception.

  “Hello?”

  A single blast of noise carrying Cassidy’s voice came through the speakers and the call cut out. He was climbing the southern side of Williams Pass, which was never a good spot for cell reception. After another pop of static he slowed to the side of the road.

  "You guys are breaking up,” he said.

  Cassidy’s voice came through again. “…I just thought he’d want to know…she moved on…I don’t care, he needs to hear it—”

  The phone call ended.

  He sat still in his seat, engine idling on the emergency pull-off halfway up the pass. A single vehicle coasted by.

  He rolled down the windows and shut off the engine. Silence enveloped the car, save the faint whoosh of the vehicle as it turned out of sight in the sideview mirror.

  He thought of Lauren and Ella out in San Francisco, a place he’d never been, living with a man he’d never met. She had moved on. Good for them, he thought. And he meant it.

  There was a rustling in the trees off to the right and a deer climbed up the embankment to the edge of the road. The animal tiptoed into his lights and stopped.

  Wolf put an elbow out the window.

  “Hey,” he said.

  The deer turned its head, ears high. Its oil-drop eyes stared. Big ears flapped at swirling bugs.

  They sat like that for a while—Wolf staring at the animal, the animal staring at an alien machine—until some synapse fired in its brain. The deer lurched a tentative st
ep, then broke into a trot, and then sprinted across the road, up the steep cut on the other side. Underbrush crashed violently as the deer disappeared into the dark forest above.

  Wolf checked the mirrors and leaned to check out the passenger window. When he found nothing out of the ordinary, he looked at himself in the rearview mirror. His eyes were bloodshot. The skin of his face seemed to be of a stranger’s it was so pallid and wrinkled looking.

  He fired up the engine, rolled up the windows, and drove.

  Chapter 4

  The air is hot foam in Wolf’s throat. The grate of insects whining almost drowns out the voice in his earpiece.

  “West, clear.”

  “South, clear.”

  “Wait a second,” Wolf says. “I’m seeing some movement at the edge of the forest.”

  Encounters with Sri Lankan elephants are not uncommon in these parts of the country, but it seems strange that one would be testing the edge of the raised meadow so close to an idling CH-47 Chinook helicopter.

  The movement is human, Wolf realizes, as a boy with a heavy backpack emerges from the jungle wall and into view in his scope.

  “Shit. There’s a kid walking out of the jungle.”

  Wolf tracks the child for a few more steps, then tracks back to the edge of the lush forest where two men are making shooing motions with their hands.

  When Wolf tracks back to the kid the boy has disappeared, replaced by a girl with long clay-red hair and gangly limbs. The backpack is no longer earthen in color, but vibrant pink.

  “Sir!” The voice in Wolf’s earpiece makes him flinch. “Sir!”

  A bird-sized insect jumps from the grass and lands on his face. The pinpoint claws of the bug dig in.

  The image of the girl bobs. Wolf cracks open his other eye and sees she is nearing the helicopter. One of the women standing in line to board is pointing at her, looking just as startled by her appearance as Wolf.

  She is carrying a bright red pencil in her hand, thumb poised over the tip like it’s a detonator in her hand.

  “Sir!”

  Wolf squeezes the trigger and the gun kicks against his armpit.

  Wolf snorted, choking on saliva. He sat up hard, slamming his skull against something hard.

  “Shit.” He clasped both arms around his head as pain reverberated in his head.

  “Are you okay?” Heather Patterson was bent over him, holding a pair of crutches in one hand, reaching out for him with the other.

  His eyes fluttered open and he got his bearings. With his arm he wiped a stream of drool off his face, feeling the imprint of carpet on his skin. A dagger of pain stabbed between two of his lower vertebrae as he sat up.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “Yeah. What’s up?”

  Patterson backed away and gave him some room to crawl out from under the edge of his desk and off the floor. When he slithered out of the cloth sleeping bag she turned away. “Geez.”

  “Sorry,” he said, grabbing his Levi’s from his office chair and slipping them over his boxer shorts. “What time is it?”

  “7:10.”

  Damn, it was late. He rubbed his eyes, scanning her foot. It was wrapped with a flexible bandage.

  “What’s the prognosis?”

  “Sprained ankle,” she said. “Nothing broken.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Still hurts like hell. Why are you sleeping on the ground in your office?”

  “Uh, just…catching up on emails and paperwork last night and it got late.”

  She popped her eyebrows and looked at the pile of paper inside the wire basket marked “inbox” and the overflow stack next to it. The layers of reports and forms looked denser and taller than the sedimentary layers up in Glenwood Canyon.

  “I see you made some good headway.”

  He reached into a cabinet behind his desk, pulled out his overnight bag and dropped it onto his desk, sending a sheet fluttering to the floor.

  Patterson picked it up and slapped it onto one of the stacks.

  “Geez.” She thumbed one of the piles. “Wilson’s gone for two days and you’re this swamped? Wait. These are from last month. I thought Wilson was going to have a talk with you about the RS-10F reports.”

  “He did.” Wolf dug through his overnight bag, finding the tube of toothpaste and toothbrush. When he looked up, Patterson had her mouth open and her eyebrows in the W-T-F position.

  “I’m getting to them. And those are dated after the twentieth of last month, so they’re not late.”

  She opened her mouth to say something, then closed it.

  “What?” He pulled out his toothbrush and toothpaste.

  “What exactly did Wilson tell you about the reports?”

  Wolf screwed his face up in thought. The conversation with his undersheriff about various paperwork system implementations was nothing more than a garbled voicemail that replayed in his mind—most of the good stuff lost due to poor reception. “I remember something about the RS-10F reports, but the specifics are eluding me right now.”

  She nodded slowly, patiently. “It’s just that waiting so long to do these specific reports is causing some backup in other departments.”

  “Oh.” He looked past her, through the windows to the squad room. “Like what kind of backups, again?”

  “Like, when you’re late on these reports—”

  “But I’m not late.”

  “Okay, yes. But, when you’re, I should say, pushing the deadline limits of the reports, that pushes the deadline limits of everyone below you for the things they need to do that rely on the completion of these reports. Does that make sense?”

  “So the deadline is really for the last person in the chain,” Wolf said. “So shouldn’t my deadline be earlier?”

  “That was precisely what Wilson was supposed to talk to you about. Pushing up your deadline on these. Right now there are four or five days a month where people are scrambling late nights to catch up.”

  He stared at the reports. “Okay. Got it. I’ll get those done ASAP, thanks.”

  She nodded. “Good. And I’ll send you an email with the updated deadline.”

  “Great. Thanks.”

  He pulled out his towel and tucked it under his arm. Patterson remained in front of him.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  “We never got to talk about it yesterday,” she said. “You said that they didn’t like the budget?”

  Wolf put down his stuff. “Oh yeah.” He turned around and stretched his arms overhead. The exterior window blinds were drawn up, letting in subdued light that reflected off the western wall of the valley. A white strip of fog clung to the pines, tendrils swirling off of them like spiderwebs in a breeze. “They balked at the Deputy Leadership Training Fund.”

  “Helms balked at it.” Patterson said. It wasn’t a question.

  Wolf turned around and nodded.

  “The bastard,” she said. “He’s in town two years and he thinks he’s king shit of Rocky Points. Why? Because he’s the county accountant?”

  “Treasurer.”

  “Asshole.”

  Wolf turned back to the window again and gazed outside, thinking of their push to train many of their staff. Back in March Wolf had witnessed the annual performance reviews for the first time sitting in the Sheriff’s office, which had given him access to all the results throughout the entire department.

  Every year since the SBCSD resided in the new, larger building, every March something called a Three-sixty Peer Review had been conducted within the department. Three-sixty, meaning three-hundred-sixty degrees, meant department heads rated their subordinates on performance, while staff rated their managers at the same time.

  This time around the results had been anything but impressive. The data showed over ninety percent of deputies were sub-optimal at their jobs according to managers, and eighty percent of managers were failing abysmally at their own jobs according to their subordinates.

  Sheriff Will M
acLean had found the same numbers being reported over his last two years in office, but he’d written it off as fluke anomalies, ignoring the stats. Bullshit surveys, as Wilson had said he’d called them.

  When Wolf had shown curiosity at the latest review results, Undersheriff Wilson had pointed out the drop-in performance closely matched a re-shuffling of much of the staff positions two and a half years ago. MacLean had put seven new managers into positions they’d never had before, and apparently now everyone in the entire department sucked at their jobs.

  If Wolf’s time in the Army had shown him one thing, it was that if you didn’t trust the man next to you in battle, you might as well count yourself dead. As far as he was concerned, these numbers showed the department was a sinking ship.

  Wolf sought Patterson’s and Wilson’s help finding the solution to the problem, and after a couple months of deliberation and outside counsel from Dr. Hawkwood and other experts, they came to the conclusion that leadership training across the board for managers and high-level staff was desperately needed.

  The decision did not come lightly, as that would mean Wolf, Wilson, and Patterson would be among those taking classes. But if it meant the place’s morale lifted, if everyone trusted each other even half as much as they did now, Wolf counted it well worth the effort.

  Or, at least, that was the plan.

  Wolf turned around to find a ponderous Patterson.

  “What’s Helms’s problem?” she asked. “You showed them the peer review results, right?”

  “Yeah. But …”

  “But what?”

  “I might have pissed him off when I mentioned his roof repair budget was a hundred grand over, and that the construction firm he approved was suspiciously close to his family.”

  “You said that?” She exhaled. “I thought our plan was for you to go in with your nice face.”

  “He’s an asshole, what can I say?”

  Patterson hopped to the couch and sat heavily. “If we don’t get anything approved by the council before MacLean’s back, you know he’s just going to take fifty-grand and upgrade his boat house up on Cold Lake.”