“Of course,” Rhonda said. She wanted to scream at the stupid man. Red tape! Her husband, Sheriff Rick Mears, had died at the Galaxy Farm Massacre, as the town had inflated it to. He was killed in uniform, on an investigation. The state simply couldn’t figure out whom to blame for the whole thing. The delayed report finally blamed Doug, the crazy writer.
Mr. Wilcox rose and slipped all the signed-and-notarized documents into a narrow leather folder. He straightened his red bow tie. Rhonda escorted him to the door. He turned halfway through the threshold.
“Everyone at the office expresses their most deep sympathy for your loss,” he said. “And don’t forget that we are all here for any future insurance needs you may have.”
“How good of you,” Rhonda said. It took all her self-control to not slam the door on his piggy nose. She closed it soft as falling leaves.
She needed coffee, a lot of it. Sleep had been its usual elusive self last night, and she needed a kick-start. She headed for the kitchen.
In the hall, she passed the end table with the coconut-shell bowl on it, the bowl they bought on their Hawaiian honeymoon. Rick’s keys sat in it. Right where he’d left them the night he took his police cruiser out to Galaxy Farm. She hadn’t touched them, hadn’t moved his car. She did sit inside of it a few times, just to catch the waning scent of him that still clung to the leather seats. She dreaded the day that smell would follow him off into that netherworld on the other side.
In the kitchen, she put on a full pot of coffee. She wiped her hands on her black pants. Black pants, black sweater. She hadn’t been out of black since the day he died, and didn’t imagine being out of black anytime in the future. She would never forget him. Anytime anyone saw her, she hoped the black would remind them, lest they try to forget the man who squandered his life for them.
She pulled a cigarette from a box on the counter as the coffee dripped into the pot. She lit the tip and exhaled the smoke up at the ceiling. She’d restarted smoking while waiting to identify her husband’s body at the coroner’s office. She kept it up to keep off the weight from the comfort food she’d been mainlining since then. It didn’t do the trick. She’d comforted herself into an extra forty pounds these last few months. Good thing black was a slimming color.
She caught her reflection in the door of the microwave. She still wasn’t used to her short hair or the dye job to black. She’d cut her long blonde tresses the day of the funeral and snuck them into her husband’s casket. Something of her physically needed to be buried with him, not just psychologically, and he had so loved her hair.
She incinerated half the cigarette in one long pull and tossed the remnant into the sink with a pile of other spent filters. Sitting at the kitchen table, she upended a shoebox, the Death Box, she called it. A sheaf of papers fluttered out. She laid her head in one hand and picked through the pile with her index finger.
Newspaper clippings dominated the collection, with headlines like “Triple Homicide at Galaxy Farm”, “Sheriff Slain”, an editorial titled “Galaxy Farm Burns; Good Riddance”. There were a few pictures of Rick, the receipt for his coffin, the stupid bookmark someone gave her at the funeral that said God Answers All Prayers. Her stomach knotted in despair.
She pulled one clipping from the pile, a one-paragraph piece announcing a few new teachers last year at Moultrie Elementary. Laura Locke’s name was circled.
That bitch. Her husband was also dead. She wasn’t in mourning, not one day. She shipped her husband’s corpse back to New York for burial and didn’t even attend his funeral. She didn’t attend Rick’s funeral either. She didn’t give Rhonda the opportunity to bitch-slap her for whatever role she’d had in Rick’s death.
And Rhonda knew she’d had a role in it. Some rumors about ghosts and possession and people skinned alive didn’t fool her. The police only had half the story, the half they wanted to believe. Laura knew the rest. Laura knew why her husband had been baited into his death.
Laura would never tell the truth. Rhonda was as sure of that as that the sun would rise. Laura would need some persuasion, delivered, as her late sheriff-husband used to say, “with extreme prejudice”.
She sifted through the pile and poked one piece of notepad paper with her fingernail. She dragged it out and it left a trail of torn spiral-binding flakes. On the note was written 5768 ANU, Laura’s license plate number. Rhonda had jotted it down when she saw her, well, followed her to the Piggly Wiggly one day. She slid another one out of the pile, a downtown address, the house Laura was staying at with that bizarre woman with the junk shop, Theresa Grissom. Theresa probably had a hand in the whole mess too, but first things first meant dealing with Laura. An eye for an eye. A life for a life.
She poured herself a cup of coffee and ladled in some slimming sugar. The java burned her tongue when she sipped it. She didn’t notice. The wheels had started to spin. She was not going to have to suffer alone anymore. She was going to share her pain. Her husband had connections, some good, some bad. She’d start with the bad.
She brushed a stray hair from her sweater.
Black sweater on a widow, she thought. Black widow. Ready to spin a web to catch some prey. She chuckled at the wordplay. The sound came out more like sandpaper on steel than laughter.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“Wait right in there, Rhonda,” the corrections officer said. He opened the door to the visiting room for her. “We’ll go get him.”
Her husband had been well respected here at the county jail. Laura Locke might not have shown up at Rick’s funeral, but the corrections officers had, every one who wasn’t on duty and a few who should have been. Rhonda had their sympathy, and that translated to a prisoner visit after visiting hours. Her private passage behind the walls was happening when society’s bottom 10 percent wouldn’t be there to spread the word that the dead sheriff’s wife had been consorting with a prisoner.
Rhonda wore dark glasses and a headscarf for plausible deniability if someone ever searched the security camera footage. She took a seat in the hard-plastic chair in front of the reinforced glass at the first visitor’s station. The cold seeped right through the seat of her pants. The neon lighting gave the already bland room a washed-out, surreal texture. Only the echoed buzz and clank of distant doorlocks broke the silence.
She’d feared she’d be nervous in here. She always had been when she was around Rick’s work, whether amidst the bustle at the Moultrie sheriff’s station or sitting alone in the front seat of Rick’s cruiser. The law enforcement world had always been alien to her, a world where Rick disappeared and Sheriff Mears took his place, a world where the criminal minority became the majority, where optimistic trust in strangers wasn’t a virtue, it was suicidal.
But she was cool as iced coffee sitting in the county jail. She’d seen the light, or the dark, really. Good people didn’t win. God did not dispense proper justice. The system that killed her husband, delayed her benefits and buried the truth really wasn’t her system. That system had failed her. The prisoners might be on the other side of inch-thick, wire-reinforced glass, but she and they now saw the world from the same point of view.
A muffled buzzer sounded on the other side of the glass. A brown-shirted corrections officer led a shackled man in an orange jumpsuit to the chair opposite Rhonda. The guard shoved him down into the seat and whispered something threatening into the prisoner’s ear as he pointed to Rhonda. The prisoner grinned. The officer slapped him on the side of the head. The grin vanished.
Rhonda barely recognized Bobby Grissom. She only knew him from his pictures in the newspaper. He’d grown a Fu Manchu mustache that trailed down to bracket his weak chin. His head was shaved clean. He’d lost about twenty pounds and his deflated cheeks sagged. He had a few new bruises around his neck and on one side of his face. The poor boy apparently had some unpleasant jail time awaiting trial for destroying his ex-wife Theresa’s store.
Rhonda picked up the heavy, black-plastic telephone handset from the wall. The shackles
forced Bobby to pick up his with both hands.
“You know who I am?” she said.
“Sure, you’re—”
“Excellent.” Rhonda cut him off before he confirmed her identity on the ever-running audiotape. The guards had promised the system would be off, but taking chances wasn’t part of this plan. “You were friends with Vern Pugh before the Galaxy Farm incident.” Massacre was too coarse a word for it.
“We was acquainted,” Bobby said. “Friends is a stretch. Son of a bitch’s prodding got me locked up in here.”
“He talked to you about the Lockes. Your wife is a friend of Laura Locke. Tell me about her.”
“What’s in it for me?”
“Here’s a better question, what’s in it for you if you don’t answer my questions? Your silence, or lies, will earn you something special. Looks like the guards are giving you some minor workovers, or perhaps looking the other way while other inmates do. Those will double as soon as they know how terribly disrespectful you have been during our conversation.”
The smirk withered on Bobby’s lips. Fear crept into his eyes. The bad-boy bluster evaporated and left just the boy behind.
“Now there ain’t no need to get like that,” he said. “I’m happy to oblige.”
“Tell me about Laura Locke,” Rhonda repeated.
Bobby looked straight up at the surveillance camera, unaware it was sleeping the night away. “Now, first off, Vern Pugh framed me for bashing up my ex-wife’s store. My lawyer was right specific about me making that clear as often as I can.”
Rhonda stared daggers at him through the wire mesh.
“Okay, okay,” he continued. “Vern said her husband, Doug, was stepping out on her, told me it was with Theresa.” He looked up at the camera again. “But I didn’t believe him.” Back to Rhonda. “Like she’d stoop from me to doing some outsider. Word is that Laura turned her lesbian before that.”
Rhonda sighed at the idiot’s vampire-like view of sexual orientation.
“I seen her spend the night at Theresa’s,” he offered as proof. “Drove by and her car was there. Anyways, Doug was doing somebody other than his wife. You want my theory?”
“Enlighten me, Sherlock.”
“Vern was going to leverage that indiscretion to get his house back from the Lockes. Doug killed him for it. Laura already knew about his affair, and killed him in revenge. Sheriff Mears, good man that he was, rest his soul, well, he walks in on it all and she took his life as well.”
Bobby sat back with the self-satisfied look of a man who’d just solved the mysteries of Machu Picchu.
Rhonda pondered it a moment. Official story: Sheriff finds murderer Doug, Doug kills sheriff with his own gun, wife kills Doug with a fireplace poker. New story: Wife kills Doug with poker, sheriff arrives, wife kills sheriff with his gun. Who was more likely to get the drop on and disarm her well-trained cop-husband—a scrawny writer/murder suspect or a supposed female victim? Which story would the department be more likely to cover up?
“Thanks, Bobby.”
“You gonna tell them guards to go easy on me now, since I was such a help, right?”
“I’ll make sure that you are treated properly.”
“Some extra privileges wouldn’t hurt none.”
She hung up the phone, stood and went to the visitor’s room door. Some muffled plea sounded from Bobby’s side of the dense glass that separated the evil from the good. She rapped on the door and the corrections officer let her out.
“Was he cooperative?” the guard asked.
“Not at all,” she said with exaggerated disappointment. “The man knows no respect.”
“We teach respect in here. We’ll accelerate his education.”
“I’d be so grateful,” she said in her best widow’s sigh.
On the way to her car, she reviewed her mental checklist. She’d tapped the bad contact her husband’s position provided. Next she’d tap some of the good.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The doorbell rang the next morning and Rhonda Mears opened her front door to the sight of Deputy “Big Mac” Chalmers on her front porch. He held his sheriff’s department cap to his chest like some man come a-courting. She put on her inviting, appreciative widow’s face.
“Mac,” she said, knowing he disliked the pejorative big. “Thanks for dropping by.”
“My pleasure,” he said as she guided him on to the living room. They sat in opposite chairs across a coffee table. A small, polished wood box sat closed on the tabletop. “I’m right sorry about your husband’s death. We’re still broken up about it in the department.”
“I wanted to get some information from you about that,” she said. “I just don’t understand some of the official report. It’s all cop-speak, so maybe you can translate.”
Big Mac sat back in the chair. He hooked his thumbs in his gun belt and it creaked. “Happy to help.”
“Now they were sure my husband’s gun was the one used in his killing?”
“Yes, ma’am. No other weapons on-site and a perfect ballistics match.”
“And you buy that Doug overpowered my husband?”
Big Mac shifted in his chair. “That’s what the report said.”
Rhonda read that as a no. Question 1, answered.
“And that poor Mrs. Locke. I mean to talk with her about our shared tragedy. Since her house burned, do you know where she’s living?”
“She just moved into an apartment downtown. My cousin manages the building.”
Two questions down, one to go.
“Just one other thing,” she said. “Something only someone like you can help me with. It’s a big transition, going from having Rick in the house to being alone.”
A lascivious look crept across Big Mac’s face. She needed to put that down like a rabid dog. She’d put on some pounds, but her standards hadn’t changed. She slid the wooden box closer to him and opened the lid to reveal a matte-black 9 mm pistol and two empty magazines. Big Mac frowned.
“This was Rick’s personal gun,” Rhonda said. “I think of it as personal protection now. I just need a little help using it. Can you show me?”
Disappointment covered Big Mac’s face. “Uh, sure.” He removed the gun from the box. “This here’s the safety. That’s always on unless you’re shooting.” He slid the empty magazine into the handle base. “Magazine loads like this. Holds twenty rounds. Clicks when it locks in.”
Click.
“Rick said the last round usually jams in this mag for some reason, always loaded him eleven for ten rounds of practice. Pull back the slide.” The top of the gun retracted and exposed the phallic tube beneath. He released the slide and it sprang back into place. “And that chambers a round. After that, it’s aim and pull the trigger.”
He passed the gun to Rhonda. It was heavier than Rick made it look. He’d handled it with such professional ease. The cold steel warmed in her hand, as if forming a symbiotic bond. She tightened her hand around the grip and placed her finger inside the trigger guard. The gun swerved in Big Mac’s direction.
His eyes went wide. He pushed the weapon away and plucked her finger from the trigger.
“Never point it at no one you don’t intend to shoot. Only put your finger on the trigger when you need to fire. In fact, don’t pull this out unless you know you’ll use it. Otherwise it ends up in the bad guy’s hands.”
Question 3, answered. She placed the gun on the table and stood.
“Thanks so much, Mac. I feel better now. Safer.”
She moved to the front door. He took the hint and followed.
On the porch he stopped and turned. “You should go down to the range at the Hunting Hut and practice some. Gun like that has a kick and it takes some getting used to for hitting a target at any distance.”
Rhonda didn’t plan on using the gun at a distance. She wanted to see terror in the whites of Laura Locke’s eyes when the gun’s hammer fell.
“Thanks, Mac. I’ll do just that.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The floor of the auction warehouse lay before Theresa like a dream come true.
Individual lots of household goods sat piled in painted squares on the concrete floor. Bankruptcies, deaths and repossessions had swelled the supply, and this centralized auction let supply meet demand. This warehouse on the south side of Nashville near the fairgrounds had become a clearinghouse for smaller towns around the state capital. The auction was an invitation-only affair for people who could move merchandise in bulk. Ruby Broadway had an invitation. Theresa was her plus-one.
On the way here, the two women had a short, uncomfortable conversation about Laura’s moving out. Ruby asked a little. Theresa answered less. The conversation veered elsewhere. That was one of the reasons Theresa considered Ruby such a good friend.
Ruby led Theresa down one row of estates. Ruby wore a bright-yellow dress with white sunflowers. The flowers around her hips swayed back and forth like they were in a tornado with each shift of her stride. It was laughable how she always wore arresting colors, claiming that somehow a woman of her size and personality had trouble being seen. The posted-paper lot numbers for each estate fluttered as she passed.
“Ruby, this is wonderful,” Theresa said.
And it was. Getting out of town was a relief. The burden of the prophecies, and the dread of the next one’s arrival, were draining, familiar weights to bear. A day away from the source was a miniature mental vacation.
“Now, Lady T, the auction don’t start for an hour,” Ruby said. “You hunt up what you think looks good. If I can move the rest of the lot, we’ll play Let’s Make A Deal with the auctioneer. Don’t talk to no strange men while you’re here, as if there’s any other kind.”
Ruby headed down the aisle like some great golden rhino trampling a field of flowers.
Dark Vengeance Page 9
