Like Lions

by Brian Panowich

  He gave a “thumbs-up” to his buddies and sucked his belly in a little. “Hell, yeah, I knew it. I did. I knew it. But you know what?” Teddy held his arms up in front of him, palms out and stepped back. “That’s as far as I’m going to go with all this. I know you don’t know me from Adam, and I don’t want you thinking anything weird. I’m just buyin’ your food because that’s the kinda fella I am. I don’t have any expectations.”

  “Well, thank you, Teddy.”

  “I just like doing nice things for nice people who happen to be passing through our little piece of paradise. I’m not looking for anything in return.”

  “That’s very kind, Teddy.”

  “I ain’t even gonna ask for a hug or nothing.”

  “Great. Thanks again, Teddy.” She beamed a gorgeous fake smile at him and held it there until he realized that the jig was up. He tipped his hat and smiled, knowing he had lost the real bet he made with his friends that he could get a hug from the hot blonde. “Well, you enjoy the rest of your evening, ma’am.”

  “Thank you, Teddy, I will.”

  Teddy slumped back into his seat and took the ribbing. He looked over at her just in time to see Jeremie sit three Styrofoam clamshells of Edmund’s finest on the table. Teddy’s disappointment increased. Jeremie walked off.

  Still no fucking pie.

  Vanessa stared at the orange vinyl seat across from her and practiced her breathing until Jeremie returned with a cup of coffee. “I gave the check to Teddy over there. He insisted.”

  “Nice fella, that Teddy.”

  Jeremie leaned in. “I don’t think he knew what he was getting into with that bill, but whatever, right?” She held her fist out and Vanessa assumed she was supposed to bump it. She didn’t. Her phone buzzed inside her clutch. Chon was giving her the five-minute heads-up. They were heading out.

  Thank God.

  “Listen, Jeremie, can I ask you something?”

  “Sure, I guess.”

  “Have you ever thought about going to college?”

  “Sure, I guess.”

  Vanessa waited, but that was the entirety of her answer.

  “Okay, then let me ask you something else. If you had five hundred dollars in cash right now, what would you do with it?”

  “That’s easy. I’d get my damn car title back, before I lose my ride. Those people are the absolute worst.”

  Vanessa stood up. She took five hundred-dollar bills out of her wallet, folded them in half, and then pressed the money into Jeremie’s hand.

  “Here,” she said. “Go pay off your title, and use the rest to apply at a tech school somewhere. Let today change everything for you.”

  Jeremie beamed. “Thank you, ma’am.”

  Vanessa held a finger to her lips, and tilted her head toward the other table of customers.

  Jeremie gave her an animated wink and traced the shape of a heart in the air with a finger. Vanessa put her glasses on, and tucked her clutch under her arm. “Where is your trash can, Jeremie?”

  “Over there,” she pointed, “right by the front door.”

  “Thanks.” Vanessa picked up the twenty-five-pound stack of deep-fried Southern take-out and walked to the door. She turned and looked directly at Teddy, who was, of course, watching her every move. She smiled and dumped all three boxes into the trash. The dumbfounded look on his fat face was worth every bit of the time she’d wasted in this place. She gave him a flirty little wave, and pushed open the door with her hip.

  “Dyke!” someone inside yelled before the door closed.

  That was the best he could come up with? Sad.

  Vanessa was several feet from her car when she heard the front door to Edmund’s open again and a voice yell, “Hey!” Her heart instantly started racing. She didn’t respond and kept walking. “Hey, hold up. For real!” Vanessa felt her palms get sweaty, and the skin on the back of her neck get cold.

  She stopped between her car and a red Chevy Silverado. She set her clutch on the roof of the BMW and slid her jacket sleeves up to her elbows. The voice behind her was practically in her ear now. “Damn, lady, you can’t hear good?” Based on the approximate location of his voice, Vanessa swung around and came seconds away from shoving the handful of keys she’d arranged between her fingers like little razor blades into the face of the good-looking kid with the gold glasses. She pulled her punch and the kid jumped back.

  “Whoa, lady, take it easy. You forgot this. I was just tryin’ to catch you before you left.” The boy held up the tattered copy of East of Eden Vanessa had left on the table inside.

  “Oh. I’m—sorry. I thought...”

  “No, it’s cool. It’s dark. You’re alone. I get it. I just thought this might be important to you.”

  “You have no idea.” Vanessa went to extreme pains to keep her identity under the radar during these trips. The wig and glasses, the wet-wipes in her bag, they were all there for a reason, but she’d allowed herself to get so caught up with embarrassing fat-boy back there, she forgot all about the book she’d been trying to read that was covered in her fingerprints.

  That was sloppy, she thought. Sloppy and stupid. Bless this kid.

  “It’s a great book. I read it a few years ago. Here—” He held it out and Vanessa took it, letting her keys fall back around the ring. “Steinbeck is one of my favorites,” the kid said.

  “Well, I’m truly thankful. And again, I’m sorry for the knee-jerk reaction a minute ago. I thought it might have been your friend back there. I wasn’t very nice to him. I’m sorry for that, too.”

  “Teddy?” The kid looked back at the diner. “Nah, don’t worry about it. He’s harmless anyway. He’d never have the balls to follow a woman to her car. Especially one who embarrassed him like that.”

  “Yeah, well, that wasn’t my finest moment for sure, and I’m glad you did.”

  “No problem, ma’am. Have a good night.”

  “You, too.”

  The kid turned to walk back inside and Vanessa grabbed her clutch from the roof of the car. She needed some sleep. She was getting careless. She’d never allowed herself to be exposed like that before. She didn’t even think about the book. She still mustn’t have been thinking straight, because she also didn’t hear the kid turn back toward her, or the swing he took that caught Vanessa right in the spine, between her shoulder blades. The force of the punch knocked her down to all fours, and the pain of it shot through her entire body in all directions. Her glasses flew off her face and landed on the pavement.

  “That’s not my friend in there, bitch. He’s my cousin. He’s kin, and he’s a good guy.”

  She tried to get up, but the kid kicked her in the ribs. She hit the side of the Silverado and fell flat on the ground by the back tire. She could feel herself blacking out. The unassuming kid with the kind eyes and the gold glasses squatted in front of her.

  “How you like that shit, princess? You get off on treating people like shit? You think you’re better than us country folk? Teddy wasn’t tryin’ to do any wrong by you. He was just looking to get a hug from a pretty girl. No big deal. You could’a just said no and left it at that, but no, you had to go and make an ass of him like that for no reason. Just because bitches like you think you can do whatever the hell you please just ’cause you got a set a fake titties and mall clothes. Well, guess what, princess? That shit ain’t gonna fly out here. This is our town. We live here. My cousin lives here, and you don’t get to come through and cut the man’s balls off like that just because you think your shit don’t stink. It’s about time somebody taught your skinny ass a lesson.” The kid drew back to punch her again.

  “Wait,” she grunted, and held her hands up to protect her face.

  The kid slapped her open palmed but mostly just connected with the backs of her hands. “Stop,” she said.

  “Stop, hell. Maybe if you got your ass kicked one good time, Your Highness, next time you’ll think twice before you piss all over us peasants.” He stood up and grabbed a handful of blon
de hair. He yanked hard, but all that came up was the wig. “What the hell?” He looked at it, confused, and that was all the distraction Vanessa needed. She swung her left foot wide across the pavement and swept the kid off balance. He fell hard onto his hipbone and Vanessa’s training took over. She wrapped her thighs around his neck and locked her ankles. She twisted onto her belly and tensed her whole body.

  Sleep, motherfucker.

  She let him go when she felt the pop. When she lifted her leg off him, his head wobbled all wrong before it fell off her other leg and slapped down hard on the asphalt.

  What the fuck just happened? Was this kid that fragile? Vanessa was heaving and rolled over on her back.

  Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Her head was spinning. She meant to put him to sleep, not snap his neck. She didn’t even think she could that.

  But you did. Now deal with it.

  Her back still hurt from the initial sucker punch he gave her, but she came off it quickly and looked around the side of the truck. No one else had come out of Edmund’s—yet. She checked the spongy flesh of the kid’s neck for a pulse she knew wouldn’t be there, and then tried to lift him up by the shoulders. Vanessa gauged him to be around two hundred pounds. Defense training was one thing, but moving dead weight was another. Trying to get this idiot into the car was going to take too long. She needed to leave him. “Goddammit,” she huffed, and dropped him flat. She checked his hands for any scratches and his fingernails for any sign that he might’ve scratched her. There was no sign of any fight, not even any bruising on his knuckles, just a kid in a parking lot with a snapped neck. She searched his pockets and found a folding knife, some loose change, a sealed condom, and finally his wallet—that contained thirty bucks in cash and a scratch-off ticket.

  A robbery. The kid just got robbed. Control your breathing. Slow it down. Just slow it down. You can contain this. Just slow it down. Leave nothing behind. Just like Chon taught you. Remember your training. You’ve got this.

  Vanessa stayed low and gathered up her things—her glasses, the book, the wig, her clutch, and her keys. She loaded the mesh liner of the blonde wig with the contents of the dead kid’s pockets, and then picked up one of her shoes that had come off during the struggle. She did a final scan of the lot for anything else that could implicate her—nothing. She was shaking.

  Stay calm, girl.

  Vanessa hit the button on the keyless entry and slid inside. Once she was behind the wheel, she ran through it all again, replaying the events. She looked at herself in the rearview. Her black hair was slicked back in a tight bun, held in place with bobby pins, but there was no damage done to her face—no cuts and no blood. Her hands were shaking, but there were no cuts or scratches on them either. She was whole. There wasn’t any trace of her on him or him on her. She was right. This could be contained. She exhaled slow and crept the BMW out of the lot through the back drive by a row of dumpsters and disappeared on to the highway. Within ten miles, she was laughing. Within fifteen, she was howling out the open window. She had invited it on, and she’d held her own. She might not have known what she was doing as she was doing it, but somewhere deep down inside the girl named Bessie May Viner, there was her new persona, there was Vanessa, and Vanessa had something to prove. And she just did. She was nobody’s victim. Not anymore. Not Coot’s, not anybody’s. By the time she hit McFalls County, Vanessa’s biggest concern was whether or not her clothes actually looked like they’d come from a fucking mall.

  18

  COOPER’S FIELD

  Clayton had spent most of the day out by Cooper’s Field. He hadn’t been out that way in a while, and with no one to maintain the overgrowth, most of the grave markers that covered the left corner were impossible to read or even see from the road. Halford normally had someone out here handling things like that, but without a whip being cracked, no one felt the need to get out here and take care of the place. Clayton supposed he should be the one to do it and he would—eventually. Part of him was glad the field had remained untouched for so long, because it meant not only the weeds and hay grass were tall, but all the wildflowers that usually got mowed down were growing in bright-colored clumps scattered across the hillside. The orange-and-yellow blossoms Kate loved were everywhere. She called them firewheels, and he spent a great deal of time pulling them up by the handful. He couldn’t remember the last time he brought her flowers. He also couldn’t remember the last time she’d ever lied to him. Until the other night, he didn’t think she ever had.

  They’d showered together the night before, and while he washed her hair, she said she was out late with Charmaine Squire catching up on girl shit. She said she’d had a few glasses of wine and waited out her buzz before driving home, and there wasn’t much else to it. That was what she said, but around ten o’clock that night, about two hours before she made it home, Darby had called him from the hospital to ask him about the reporting system software on the station computer. With him laid up and recovering from the lab explosion out on White Bluff Road, there was no one to cover the night shift but Clayton’s new hire, Woodson Squire, and the boy just wasn’t catching on to the computer system. He also told Clayton how nice it was having the new guy’s mom comin’ around all the time to bring them food. She was an amazing cook. In fact, he said Woodson was at the station that very night eating some monkey bread she’d dropped off just a few minutes before he called. He said he hated being at the hospital because Woody’s mom’s monkey bread was to die for. He said she baked it special since it was the first official night her son was manning the McFalls County Sheriff’s office by himself. She was so proud. For one brief, panic-filled moment Clayton thought Kate might be having an affair, but Kate was nothing if not fiercely loyal. She’d leave him before she’d do anything like that to him—or herself, and then she made it perfectly clear by the way she practically attacked him when she got home that an affair wasn’t the case. That’s how they ended up in the shower, but still—she’d lied.

  Something was off.

  Clayton wandered around Cooper’s Field pulling up handfuls of firewheels until he felt a buzzing on his leg and pulled out his phone. The name on the display was one he hadn’t seen in quite some time. He smiled, tapped accept, and put the phone to his ear.

  “If it ain’t Charles Finnegan. How is Georgia’s finest junior G-man?”

  “Well, my doctor says I need to lose fifty pounds, my prostate is inflamed for some reason, and the AC is broke in my office so I’m battling the worst case of swamp-ass I’ve had in ages. How ’bout yourself?”

  “Yeah, well, until you painted that lovely picture for me, I was doing just fine standing out in my grandfather’s pasture picking flowers for the wife.”

  “You in the doghouse?”

  “Man, I live in the doghouse.”

  “I can relate.”

  “So, did you just call me to talk about the various conditions of your ass, or did you actually need something?”

  “Believe it or not, as important as it is, my ass does indeed come in secondary this afternoon. I’m calling for a favor.”

  “Well, that’s a first.”

  “I know, right? It’s normally your country ass that needs my vast superior knowledge and experience, but for once, I’ve got a case that might benefit from talking to a bumpkin.”

  “Well, since you asked so nicely.”

  “Okay, like I said, I’m looking at a case up around your area and—”

  “Hang on, Charles. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but I’m semi-retired. I’m a little slow-moving these days. My Deputy Darby is handling most of the casework and will most likely be taking over for me come the next election.”

  “Yeah, I did hear. That’s another reason why I’m calling. I’ll get to that. But this case I’m looking at doesn’t require much; it just needs a few more sets of eyes up there around McFalls County, and the GBI is a little short on manpower.”

  “All right, then. Whatcha’ got?”

  “Do you know the sheriff
over in Fannin County? He’s another hayseed like you. A fella named Dane Kirby.”

  “I know Dane. He’s a good guy. I campaigned for him in 2010. What happened?”

  “He caught himself a homicide.”

  “No shit.”

  “Nope. Some local kid got his neck broke—nearly snapped clean off—in the parking lot of a chicken joint called Edmund’s Kuntry Kitchen.”

  “Witnesses?”

  “Not anyone reliable, just a drunk across the street who remembered a fancy car in the parking lot before it happened. He said the only reason he even remembered that much was because there is never any fancy cars parked at a shit-hole like Edmund’s.”

  “He get a plate?”

  “Yes and no. He couldn’t remember any numbers but said the last two letters were ED. That, and the plate had a peach on it.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yup.”

  “That ain’t much.”

  “I know, but I let the guy look at some photos of different cars and got it narrowed down to a late-model BMW—black in color. I know that’s not much to work with but I don’t reckon there are too many eighty-thousand-dollar BMWs driving around those foothills, and if someone was to be looking, it would stick out like a sore thumb.”

  “Yeah, I suppose it would.”

  “So you’ll pass the word around?”

  “Sure, Charles. We’re a little understaffed ourselves lately. Darby got himself hurt the other day at a meth-lab explosion, but I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Jesus, Clayton, is the boy okay?”

  “Yeah. He’s gonna be all right. He’s as tough as an ox, but I’ll tell him you were asking about him, and tell Dane I hope he gets his man. I know nothing much happens around Fannin and he could use the win.”

  “I’ll pass that along. Now about that other thing I mentioned.”

  “What thing?”

  “The thing about you not being hayseed law enforcement for much longer.”

  “What about it?”

  “Is that a decision you’re dead set on?”

  “It’s not really a decision, Charles. I feel like I need to step down. I can’t get around like I used to. If that had been me out on White Bluff Road the other day instead of Darby, I don’t think I’d be talking to you right now.”