Officer out of Uniform (Lock and Key Book 2)

by Ranae Rose

  And there’d been a third person in the way. A little old lady – Dryden’s nearest neighbor – who’d taken her sweet time shuffling down her driveway to fetch her morning paper. She’d barely made it back inside by the time Dryden had climbed into his truck.

  Of course, Randy could’ve taken them all out in a flat minute. Popped a bullet into Dryden and his girlfriend, then done the same to the old woman. But he wasn’t too keen on the idea of killing a little old lady if he didn’t have to. He wasn’t a goddamned monster.

  She reminded him of his granny, who’d kept Randy and Troy on Sunday afternoons back when they’d been kids. Sundays had been the best day of the week back then – sitting around at her place eating pie had been a sweet deal compared to being at home with his old man.

  Back then, Randy had spent a lot of time fantasizing about his parents dying in some sort of accident, so that he and Troy would have to go live with their granny. But the opposite had happened when Randy had been nine – his granny had dropped dead after a stroke.

  He couldn’t remember ever being sorrier about anything else, before or since then.

  Besides, with the warden’s death all over the news, a triple-homicide committed via rifle in broad daylight would likely have everyone within a mile’s radius calling the police as soon as the shots were fired. And the dog would pitch a fit loud enough to raise the dead, unless he spent a fourth bullet on it. Taking those three out that morning would’ve been Randy’s grand finale, his last act before it was all over.

  He had much bigger plans than that.

  He’d kill Dryden when the time was right. Quietly and slowly, if he could.

  Maybe he’d even take out the blonde and let Dryden stew in his misery for a little while. She wasn’t Dryden’s kin, but he cared about her – he’d made that obvious when he’d walked her to the car. He’d moved like he’d had a splintery stick up his ass, always looking over his shoulder, keeping one hand on her like a little flesh and bone could stop a threat he couldn’t even see coming.

  Dryden was one of Riley’s PERT officers – part of the team of COs that’d shot Troy on the day of the escape. Randy had searched his name on Reynolds’ ancient computer after tearing open the utility bill payment he’d taken from the mailbox the night before and had found a local news article mentioning that an Officer Dryden had been injured during the search.

  There was no question about it – Randy was gonna take what Dryden cared about away from him before he killed him. Now that he and his girlfriend were gone and the old woman was back inside her house, he’d start with the dog.

  Reaching into the same pocket he’d carried the stolen water bill in the night before, he pulled out a plastic baggy. Inside, there was a bologna sandwich marinating in lime green liquid. As quickly and quietly as he could, he emerged from the woods and approached the chain link fence that surrounded the little back yard. There, he dumped the soggy sandwich in the grass and turned on his heel, high tailing it back into the pines.

  The dog would wander out into the yard eventually and find the treat waiting by the fence. The bread had soaked up plenty of the green stuff, and he’d slathered the meat with it like mayonnaise. Next time he came back, he wouldn’t have to worry about the dog getting in his way.

  * * * * *

  “This coffee tastes like shit,” Grey declared. “I’m going to buy a metric ton of decent quality grounds for the break room this Christmas. You’re all welcome.”

  Henry couldn’t have cared less what the coffee tasted like. After a tense night spent protecting and – barely – resisting Sasha, he was dead on his feet. As he waited for roll call, he gulped down the contents of a Styrofoam cup like it was bitter, liquid gold.

  Henry had already filled Liam and Grey in on what’d happened at his place the night before.

  “You’ve got an elderly neighbor, right?” Liam said. “She have any cats? Those things love to tear into garbage.”

  Henry shook his head. “No, no cats. Besides, my trashcan wasn’t touched.”

  That was the weird thing: nothing appeared to have been touched. It’d been eating away at him all morning.

  “Could’ve been raccoons,” Grey said. “Those little bastards are more trouble than cats. Maybe Wolf scared ‘em away.”

  “Maybe. I can’t afford to just assume it was something cute and fluffy though.” Henry downed the rest of his coffee, even the grounds left at the bottom of the cup. Grey was right – they sucked. He chewed the acidic grit anyway, knowing he’d need the energy for his shift.

  The prison was on lockdown. No surprise, after the warden’s death. Most of the inmates had wedged their heads firmly up their asses in celebration. In order to prevent riots, the whole place had been put on lockdown, and there was no end in sight.

  Every little thing had to be handled individually by an officer, from personally handing each prisoner their food tray to dealing with their requests for toilet paper. And cleaning up after would-be hoarder inmates, apparently. Just minutes ago, a sergeant had pulled Henry, Liam and Grey aside and given them a special assignment.

  After roll call, they headed to D Block together, where they counted the inmates, including the half a dozen or so who pretended to be asleep even though the place was buzzing with echoing voices, inmates talking shit, crowing from inside their locked cells about what’d happened to the warden.

  “Here we go,” Grey said when it was finally done. “Good old Whitby. Remember the time he punched McCraw’s lights out over half a roll of toilet paper?”

  Henry remembered, all right. It had been asinine, but it was far from the stupidest inmate fight he’d ever broken up inside Riley.

  “He’s never given me any trouble,” Liam said. “Always seems pretty quiet. Keeps to himself.”

  “He tries to fly under the radar,” Grey said, “until somebody gets between him and the useless shit he’s always collecting. Trust me, he’s going to go ballistic.”

  “Maybe one of us should take him aside then,” Liam said. “Have a talk with him while the other two clear out the cell.”

  “Be my guest,” Grey said.

  When they reached Whitby’s cell, he was sitting on the edge of his bed. About 50, he was short, wiry and had some of the worst posture Henry had ever seen. He was currently between cellmates, and apparently, without anyone to keep him in check, his hoarding tendencies had spiraled out of control.

  It wasn’t unusual for inmates to engage in at least a little hoarding. From newspapers to toothpaste, most of them liked to stock up on whatever items they were permitted to keep, whether they needed all of them or not. But Whitby had taken it to a whole new level.

  Liam whistled. “This is ridiculous. How’d it get this bad without anyone stopping it?”

  Newspapers were stacked in knee-high columns, and there was a pyramid of toilet paper that King Tut would’ve envied in one corner. From where he was standing, Henry could count three separate tubes of toothpaste.

  “Looks like he’s auditioning for an episode of Hoarders,” Grey said. “That what you’ve got going on here, Whitby?”

  Whitby made a face like he’d just bitten into a crabapple. “This is all stuff I’m allowed to have!”

  “I need to have a talk with you,” Liam said. “Come on.”

  “I didn’t do nothin’, CO.”

  “Come on.”

  Whitby cast a glare over his shoulder at Henry and Grey as Liam led him away.

  “So you know there could be anything in here, right?” Grey said.

  Henry pulled his cell searching gloves out of a pocket and put them on. They were supposed to protect him from things like hypodermic needles, blades and bodily fluids. Just like every time he cleaned out a cell, he hoped the task wouldn’t test their effectiveness. When he was gloved he broke out a bag for all the junk. “Better get started.”

  Grey started with the newspapers. “Think he’ll want to keep the latest edition?”

  Henry glanced at the headline
and rolled his eyes. “Probably.”

  Grey tossed it onto the cot and started putting older papers into the bag.

  “Holy shit,” he said a minute later, “look at this.”

  Henry stared down at the toilet paper pyramid. “I thought it was weird that he only had three tubes of toothpaste.”

  In the center of each roll of toilet paper, there was a tube of toothpaste. Altogether, about a dozen.

  “It’s surprising how bad his teeth are,” Grey said. “You’d think that with all this, they’d be minty fresh and sparkling.”

  “Just because he hoards it doesn’t mean he actually uses it,” Henry said. One by one, he collected the tubes and tossed them into the bag. He left one out. Maybe – hopefully – Whitby would actually use it.

  “Don’t forget about this.” Grey motioned toward a small box he’d set in the middle of the cot.

  Henry tossed the single tube of toothpaste into it. The box was what measured the amount of personal belongings Whitby was allowed to have in his cell – since there was no way Whitby would whittle his possessions down to a selection small enough to fit in the box, Henry and Grey would just have to choose for him.

  They filled the box with one or two of everything. Toothpaste, toilet paper, some snack cakes they’d found wedged under the cot mattress and the latest edition of the damned newspaper.

  “I’m actually sweating,” Grey said when they were done.

  They’d filled two bags completely full of junk.

  They’d barely hefted them out of the cell when Liam appeared with Whitby.

  Whitby froze like a deer in headlights. His mouth dropped open as he stared at his clean cell, and for a few seconds, he didn’t say anything. He stood rigidly, and his face turned a darker shade of red with each passing second. When he finally spoke, it was like an explosion. “God damn it! God fucking damn it! I’m allowed to have all this. You can’t take it from me!”

  “Relax,” Grey said, “we filled a box with stuff you can keep.”

  Whitby shook like a baby palm caught in a hurricane wind. “God damn it! You can’t take anything from me! I’m allowed to have it!”

  He went on like that, building steam, for several seconds.

  “Whitby!” Liam grimaced. “I just told you why you can’t keep all that crap. Throwing a fit isn’t going to change anything.”

  Whitby glared daggers at Henry and Grey, then ground his teeth, practically frothing at the mouth. “I’m not—”

  “If you don’t want what we’ve chosen for you, it can all be trashed,” Henry said.

  “I don’t want what you picked!” Whitby grabbed the box and stared down at its contents. “There’s only one roll of toilet paper! What the fuck am I supposed to do with one roll?”

  Grey offered a reasonable suggestion, which didn’t go over very well with Whitby.

  “I want another roll!” He picked a snack cake out of the box and dropped it on the floor. “I want it instead.”

  Grey made Whitby pick up the cake, then handed him a second roll of toilet paper in exchange.

  Whitby looked at it like it was gum peeled off the bottom of someone’s shoe. “Not this one.”

  Jesus. It was going to be a long day.

  “They’re all the same,” Liam said.

  “That’s all you know! Fucking thief.”

  “Negotiations are over,” Liam said. “You have what you have. No more hoarding – we’re going to be inspecting your cell carefully every day.”

  Whitby bared his teeth. “Fuck you!”

  As soon as they’d closed and locked the cell door, Whitby started going off again.

  “You’re all a bunch of fucking thieves! Fucking pussies. Stealing my shit. You belong in here too, only you have badges so you think you can just go and take other people’s personal shit whenever you feel like it!” He picked the newspaper out of his box and threw it against the bars of his cell door.

  It slid to the floor and flew apart, shedding pages.

  Henry looked down at the front page. The full-color headliner image showed a familiar scene: the warden’s house and its row of sentinel pines, with crime scene tape strung around their trunks. Riley Prison Warden Killed, the headline read. Murderer Still at Large.

  “I hope you’re all next,” Whitby shrieked. “I hope you all get shot and strung up in fuckin’ trees!”

  CHAPTER 10

  “Hi, mom.” Sasha stepped over the threshold of the familiar yellow house. With just two bedrooms, it was small but still provided more space than her mother really needed, living alone.

  Sasha’s sandal hit something soft and she pitched forward, catching herself on the nearest kitchen counter. “Watch it, Oscar! Mom, I think he’s making a break for it.”

  Sasha’s mother – basically an older, red-haired version of her – hurried forward and scooped up the grey tabby cat. “Sorry. I don’t know what’s gotten into him. Maybe he’s just excited to have a visitor.”

  Sasha fought the frown she felt creeping up on her and reached out to scratch Oscar between the ears. “Have you had many others, lately?”

  Her mother shrugged and waved a hand. “Not really, no.”

  A twinge of guilt hit Sasha in the center of her chest. It’d been months since she’d visited her mom. She should make it a point to do so more often. The drive wasn’t that long.

  She hated the thought of her mom feeling lonely, and the occasion reminded her that that was likely.

  “There’s just no point in inviting the girls from the watercolor club over this time of year,” her mother continued, depositing Oscar on the kitchen floor. “Not when Anna has a pool at her place. I think I’ve been over there every week since summer started.”

  “You’re still doing the watercolor club?” Sasha breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Yes.” Her mother nodded. “I’d show you some of my artwork, but then you’d have blackmail material. Anyway, I may not be the next Georgia O’Keeffe, but it’s still fun.”

  “Oh, come on. Your paintings can’t be that bad.”

  Actually, if Sasha had inherited her artistic skills – or lack thereof – from her mother, they could very well be that bad. But she wasn’t about to say that out loud. She was just relieved that her mom hadn’t spent the summer holed up in the house with Oscar.

  Her mother just waved a hand. “They really are, but never mind. How was your drive?”

  Sasha averted her gaze to the counter, where a beautiful memorial wreath had been propped up. It was bursting with flowers and she reached out to touch one, fingertips brushing the edge of an ivory petal. She didn’t know what the bloom was called – that was something her friend Alicia would know.

  “It was fine,” she said as reality hit her again, driving away thoughts of watercolors and summertime dips in the pool. “I hit the road early enough that traffic wasn’t too bad.”

  She never got any better at this: dealing with this day, trying to be stable, mature and strong for her mom while letting the appropriate amount of grief show through. As a teenager, it had never occurred to her to try to rein in her emotions, to tuck her heart beneath her sleeve and give her mom a chance to grieve and face her own emotions without having to constantly worry about her daughter’s.

  Now, as a 30 year old woman, she felt the guilt of having added to her mother’s burden, selfishly demanding emotional energy she hadn’t had to spare. She longed to make up for it now – to shoulder the weight of her father’s death and be a strong shoulder her mother could cry on.

  The problem was, her mother never cried. She had at the time, of course, though in retrospect, she’d probably shed most of her tears alone, saving them for when she wasn’t around her daughter. The times she’d cried in front of Sasha had probably been occasions when she hadn’t been able to help it, when it’d just been too much to take.

  The last time Sasha had seen her mother shed a tear had been on the first anniversary of her father’s death – fourteen years ago. Now, she wan
ted to let her mother know she didn’t need to keep up the strong front anymore, but she didn’t know how.

  “Are you ready to leave now,” her mother asked, “or do you need to unwind a little after all that time on the road?”

  “I’m ready. Don’t worry about me.” Sasha picked up the wreath, careful not to damage the blossoms. It had probably cost hundreds of dollars.

  “I’ll drive,” she added, silently vowing to provide the flowers next year.

  The small town her mother called home flashed by in a blur as they headed for the cemetery. Sasha gripped the wheel a little more tightly than necessary and drew a deep breath. She knew she wasn’t exactly the most reserved woman to ever walk the face of the planet. She liked to talk and her thoughts had a tendency to fly right out of her mouth.

  Not all of them, though. Not the important ones – the kind of words that bridged gaps between hearts and built bonds didn’t come easily.

  “You know mom,” she finally said when the memorial gardens were within sight, “I can’t help thinking of how hard it was for you, losing dad and having to deal with an emotional teenager at the same time. It just doesn’t seem fair that you had to put my feelings before your own during a time like that. I feel bad about it.”

  There, it was out. She breathed a little sigh of relief, then held her breath as she waited for a reply.

  “You feel bad about what – that your father died, or that you had strong feelings about it?”

  “Well.” She made it sound so simple. “Both and neither. What I’m trying to say is that I’m sorry you had to invest so much energy in me when you’d just lost the love of your life.”

  Her mother shook her head. “I lost one of them. I love you just as much as I loved your father, Sasha. Do you really think I would’ve been happier or healthier grieving alone?”