by BJ Bourg
“Hey, my little rat. There you are.”
Dawn jumped in her skin at the sudden and unexpected sound of her dad’s hoarse voice. “Shit! You scared me,” she blurted, looking up at the man who used to be her hero and who used to affectionately call her his little rat. He no longer looked young and strong. His dark brown hair had faded to white and his skin had lost its color. She didn’t know what to do, so she just sat there looking up at him.
“Can I sit with you?” he asked.
Dawn nodded and scooted to one side to make more room for him. When he was seated beside her, he stared out at the distant mountains, not saying anything for a while. Finally, he pointed to a hole in the rock at the top of one of the peaks. “Remember when you were a little girl and you’d say you wished you were a bird so you could fly through that hole?”
She remembered—like it was yesterday. Her hair had been blowing in the wind and she could smell fresh coffee from the open kitchen door. It had been peaceful for a moment—just a father and his daughter enjoying some quality time on the front porch—but then everything changed in an instant. Priscilla had walked out and said they’d run out of rice, and asked if Evan could go to town and get more. They began arguing about whose fault it was that they had run out, and the next thing Dawn knew, her mom was on the porch bleeding from a busted nose and a cut lip. After her dad had stormed off, she tried to help her mom up, but she refused to move. She just lay there on the ground crying for a long time. It had probably been minutes, but it seemed like hours to a small girl.
Dawn looked over when her dad shifted beside her. He had reached a hand behind his back and pulled out something covered in wrapping paper. “Here, this is for your birthday,” he said.
“My birthday’s not until December.”
“It’s not for this year. It’s for the year you left.” He lowered his eyes. “I got it printed up hoping you’d come back home. I held on to it every year, hoping that would be the year you’d return.”
There appeared to be real hurt in his voice and eyes, but Dawn wasn’t sure if she was buying it. She took the package from him and slowly tore away the paper. It was a picture frame and there were three pictures in it. One was of Evan and Priscilla Luke on their wedding day—all smiles and sunshine, looking forward to a bright future. The second was of Evan pushing Darby and Dawn down a snow-covered mountain in a sled. And the third…it was the last picture Dawn had ever taken with her dad. It was an action shot of him belaying her as she climbed up the side of a mountain, and it was her mom who had taken the picture.
Dawn bit away the burning in her jaw as she remembered that day. How could a man so caring one minute turn into such a monster the next? Why had he felt the need to beat his wife every time something didn’t quite go his way? Before Dawn could say anything, her dad cleared his throat.
“Dawn, the man you see in those pictures…that’s the real me. I love you, your mom, and your brother more than I love my own life.”
“If that’s true, then why’d you beat her?” Dawn challenged. “Why’d you beat the shit out of the woman you’re supposed to protect?”
“While I did do those things, it wasn’t really me acting—it was the whiskey. Whiskey makes me mean. It makes me do things I would never do otherwise, and I’ve finally realized that. I was a sick man, Dawn. I had a disease, but now I’m better. I’m off the booze and I can see clearly now what’s important.”
“You know, you’re the reason I became a cop.”
Evan’s expression was quizzical. “Me?”
“Yeah…you. I figured if I could become a cop, I’d be strong enough and tough enough to kill any man who ever tried to lay his hands on me.” Dawn’s eyes narrowed. “I never wanted to become like mom. Do you know how horrible of a thing that is to say? Thanks to you, I never wanted to grow up to be weak like my mother. I wanted to be strong and independent and I didn’t want to rely on a man for anything.”
He frowned and lowered his head in shame, tears flowing freely from his eyes. It was the first time Dawn had ever seen him cry. She squeezed back her own tears, turned away so he wouldn’t notice.
After a long moment, Evan said, “You have every right to hate me and to never want to see me again. I deserve all of it. But, if you’ll let me, I’m going to spend the rest of my life showing you how wrong I’ve been and proving to you that I’m a better man.”
Dawn grunted. She wanted to say he was too late and that the damage had already been done—both to her mom and to her—but she didn’t. He didn’t need to know he was the reason she’d never gotten close to a man. He didn’t need to know he was the reason she had trust issues. He didn’t need to know she never wanted kids because she was scared to death she’d marry a man like him and her kids would suffer for it.
The roar of an engine laboring up the steep driveway got Dawn’s attention and she turned to see Darby pulling up from his run to the store. He jumped out of his four-by-four pickup and lumbered up the steps carrying a big package of grits—the homemade kind, not the instant type that you throw in the microwave for thirty seconds.
“What’s going on here?” he asked, staring from Dawn to Evan, who was still weeping silently. His face suddenly twisted in panic. “Is Mom okay?”
“Yes…yes, Mom’s fine.” Dawn frowned and placed an arm around her dad’s shoulders, causing him to cry even more. “We were just catching up. It’s an emotional time for all of us.”
Darby nodded and lowered his eyes. “When you guys are done here, we need to eat and head to the hospital.”
Dawn glanced up at him, feeling mixed emotions. “She decided to go forward with the treatments, then?”
“Yeah.” Darby’s eyes were troubled. “I found her standing in the bathroom early this morning staring at her reflection in the mirror. She said it was strange knowing that today might be her last day on earth. I told her not to think that way, but to think of this as the first day of the rest of her life.”
“I’m so scared,” Evan said, shaking uncontrollably. Tears filled Darby’s eyes as he shifted the grits to his right hand and placed his left hand on his dad’s shoulder.
“We’re all scared,” Dawn said quietly, trying not to break down as she watched her dad and brother weep like small children.
CHAPTER 16
Magnolia Parish Shooting Range
“Okay, gang,” I said after we’d run the last drill. “Time to clean our rifles and shut it down for the day.” It was four o’clock in the afternoon and I’d run them nearly nonstop through exercise after exercise, stopping only long enough to give them new sets of instruction. I’d thrown a lot of information at them in a short period of time, but they seemed to be soaking it up and retaining it.
“Wow,” Andrew said, rubbing his tired eyes. “I didn’t realize how hard it was to be a sniper.”
“We have a saying,” Jerry commented from where he was setting up his rifle for cleaning. “If sniping would be easy, the entry team would do it.”
Andrew laughed. “I won’t lie—I used to wonder what it was y’all did at training. Buster would always joke that y’all were laying down on the job when he’d see y’all in the prone position at a situation.”
“Speaking of Buster,” Rachael called from where she was checking her phone, “he’s been transferred to the detention center effective immediately. He’s been ordered to report to the jail first thing tomorrow morning.”
“Who’re you texting?” Andrew asked, singing the words in a teasing manner. “Your boyfriend?”
Rachael glared at him. “Shut your mouth before you have an accident.”
We all laughed—except for Rachael and Andrew—and Jerry said, “No shit? Is Buster really being sent to the jail?”
“Yep,” Rachael said.
Jerry’s eyes grew wide. “For what?”
Rachael explained what she’d heard, which was the same that I had been told. “Best case scenario for him is just a lawsuit for wrongful death,” she said. “But
my guess is he’ll be brought up on murder charges.”
I eyed Andrew closely, measuring his expression. “Were you there that night? When the shooting happened?”
He nodded, scanned our faces one at a time. “Can I trust y’all?”
“You’re family now,” I said. “We’d die for you, but never lie for you…and we’d expect you to do the same for us.”
“Fair enough.” He paused and licked his lips, as though not sure he should be telling us what he knew. “I went to internal affairs the day after the raid and told them what I heard. I know the difference between a submachine gun and a forty-four magnum, and I know for a fact our guys fired first. I was on the opposite side of the house, but I could hear it plain as day. Buster and all fired several shots before the suspect got off a single shot from his revolver.” He paused, licked his lips again. “We were outside the house after the shooting, waiting for the investigators to arrive, and Buster mentioned the suspect had fired first. I stepped forward and told him what I’d heard.”
“That couldn’t have gone over well,” Jerry said.
Andrew shook his head. “When I first said it, a few of the other operators nodded that they agreed with me, but when Buster started going off about how he was in the room and only he knows what happened, well, they changed their tune right quick. He accused me of having tunnel vision and being a coward. I would’ve knocked him on his ass, but I was in the military and you’re taught to respect rank, so I just shut my mouth.”
“What happened when you went to IA?” I asked. “Did they do anything?”
He shook his head. “There were sixteen of us out there that night and I was the only one saying something different, so the IA guy told me there wasn’t enough evidence to refute what Buster was saying.”
“What changed since then?” Jerry asked. “Apparently, they have enough information to rock his world now.”
“There was a rumor going around that someone else came forward,” Andrew said. “I’m not sure who it was, but I was contacted by IA again and asked if I stood by my earlier statement, so I assumed the rumor was true.”
“It took courage to stand up to the whole team like that,” I said, impressed.
“My pops always taught me to do the right thing no matter how bad it hurt.” Andrew grunted. “Now, I ain’t going to lie, I grew eyes behind my head when we went on SWAT missions after that, because everyone knows how crazy Buster is, and I figured he wouldn’t think twice about killing me to shut me up.”
“You really think he’d resort to murder?” I asked.
“To keep himself out of jail?” He nodded. “I do.”
“Well, it didn’t work, because he’s going to jail tomorrow,” Rachael said, snickering.
Before anyone could comment, tires squealed from the highway as an unmarked dark blue Charger turned onto the road that led to the shooting range. It was the only dark blue Charger in the department and we all knew it was assigned to Melvin Ford. He sped down the gravel road and turned left, heading in our direction. He must’ve just gotten back from the crime lab. As I walked to the parking area to wait for him, I was hoping he had found something we could work with.
CHAPTER 17
“Damn, London,” Melvin said, pointing to the mud on my coveralls. “It looks like somebody tied you to the back of your own truck and dragged you through every swamp hole between here and Seasville.”
I grunted, held out my hand for the ballistics report. “Stop stalling—tell me the good news.”
Melvin scratched his swollen belly and held the file folder in the air, like an adult teasing a child with a toy. “If you were looking for a quick fix, it’s not good news. The gun you recovered from Rory—it didn’t match the bullets at the scene.”
“Are you kidding?” I snatched the file from his hand and dug out the report. My fingers flew across the page as I read the results of the ballistics test. He was right. The bullets weren’t fired from the stolen pistol I’d recovered from Rory. “Of course not. Nothing’s ever that easy.” I sighed. “I guess we’re right back to the starting line.”
“Maybe not.” Melvin reached over and thumbed through the report until he got to the last page. He slid his index finger down to the last paragraph. “Read that nugget.”
I did, and as I read, my heart began to race. They had processed the bag of marijuana and located a fingerprint on the inside of the bag. Upon running it through AFIS, Melvin discovered the print belonged to the left thumb of someone named Zach Bailey.
“Who’s Zach Bailey?” I asked. “Did you run a—”
“Rap sheet?” Melvin smiled. “Of course, I did.”
He handed me a rap sheet. It was three pages long—mostly drug arrests, with a lot of resisting arrest charges. His last charge was possession with intent to distribute marijuana, aggravated flight from an officer, and resisting arrest. “What happened with his latest arrest? The one from last year?”
“Seems he was driving through Chateau at night and ran a stop sign. When the deputies tried to stop him, he led them on a high speed chase south on Highway Three all the way to Seasville. They had to use spike strips to stop him and he crashed into a tree. When they got to the car, he came out swinging. They shot him with a TASER and dropped him like a tree.”
“What was the deal with the drugs?”
“Patrol called out narcotics and they found a pound of weed taped under the spare tire in the trunk. Apparently, that’s why he ran.”
“Do we know what happened to the charges? I doubt he’s been tried yet, so there may be a hearing coming up.”
“No, but I’ll call the district attorney’s office first thing in the morning and find out.”
“If we’re lucky, he failed to appear and there’s a warrant for his arrest.” I thanked him and, keeping the reports, returned to where the snipers were cleaning their rifles. Jerry and Ray were coaching Rachael and Andrew through the cleaning process, teaching them to be consistent in everything they do—from using the same type of solvents to running the brush through the muzzle the same number of times to using the same amount of patches to cleaning in the same order each time and so on.
I nodded my approval, sat beside Rachael. “Are you busy tomorrow?”
She shook her head. “Why?”
“The lab located a print on the inside of the marijuana bag we recovered off of Denny, and Melvin matched it to a kid named Zach Bailey from Seasville.”
“Wow! That was quick work.”
“I called in a favor from my buddy at the NOPD lab. Want to come with me to find him?”
“Sure! I want everything to do with this case.”
“Okay, good. Meet me at the Seasville Substation at eight.”
After we were done, I packed up my gear and drove off. I frowned as I thought of meeting Rachael at the substation in the morning. I wished it would be Dawn instead. I glanced at the clock on the dash. It was almost six and too early for anyone to be asleep, so I called Dawn’s cell, said hello when she answered.
“London! It’s so good to hear your voice! How the hell are you?”
“Good, but busy.” I filled her in on the case and then asked about her mom.
“We’re in the hospital now. Been waiting all day.” She sighed. “They’re giving her the first round of the new treatments, but we don’t know how things are going yet. No one will tell us anything.”
“So, she decided to go through with them?”
“Yes—thank God. After my talk with her last night, I thought she was going to just give up, but I think my dad convinced her to keep fighting. He wouldn’t know what to do with himself if she was gone.”
I drove in silence, not sure what to say, but it seemed to be the right call. She started talking about her day and how she and her father had started to make amends.
“He’s trying really hard,” she said. “And he cried in front of me for the first time ever. That was hard to watch, even though I did hate him.”
“I think i
t’s good that you forgave him,” I said. “Hate can be exhausting.”
“What makes you think I forgave him?”
“You used the word hate in the past tense.”
She was silent for a second and then laughed. “Well, detective, I guess you’re right.”
I turned down Pasture Wood and told Dawn I had to go. “I need to check in on Uma real quick, update her on what we know so far.”
“God, I feel so bad for her. That boy was all she had.”
“Really? I thought she was seeing someone.”
“The way I understand it, Denny’s dad ran off when he was a baby. In fact, it was not long after he was born. The dude didn’t waste any time at all. He just up and split, leaving Uma to take care of the baby. As far as I know, she isn’t seeing anyone.”
I pulled to the shoulder of the road and talked a little longer to Dawn. I didn’t want to end the call, and I said as much.
“I don’t want you to go either, but you have to check on Uma before it gets too late.” She paused for a second, then asked, “Will you call me again tonight? I liked that your voice was the last thing I heard last night before I fell asleep.”
It made me feel good to hear her say that. “I sure will.”
After we ended the call, I drove to Uma’s house and knocked softly on the door. If she was sleeping, I didn’t want to disturb her. I waited for a few seconds and then turned to leave. I was halfway to my truck when I heard a noise behind me. It was Uma. She stood leaning against the door jamb, her face drained of life.
“Hey, London, come in.”
I followed her inside and watched as she plopped onto her sofa, slouching on the thick cushion. I apologized for bothering her, but told her I wanted to keep her up-to-date on the case.
