by Gregory Ashe
“Guys can be assholes in wheelchairs just as well as they can on two feet.” Bouncing the casings in one hand, Moraes started back to the kitchen. “You guys have a good day; Hazard, I’ll call if we need to follow up with your CI.”
“Fuck,” Hazard said. “This is fucking bullshit. He was at Slick’s?”
“Dozens of witnesses. And then here the rest of the night. No chance he got out, found a handicap-accessible truck, stole it, and took potshots at Hoffmeister.”
“Fuck,” Hazard said again.
“Maybe your CI can—”
“Don’t, John. I’m not in the mood.”
Over Hazard’s shoulder, Somers saw Dulac emerge from the men’s room, drying his hands with a paper towel. Wadding up the paper, Dulac jinked a few steps right, jumped, and shot the improvised ball into a wastebasket. He cheered as he landed, pumping his arms in the air, pretending to give fist bumps and high fives to an invisible crowd. When Ruthie Bates, who burned coffee and brought crullers and was eighty-seven years old, with as much substance as a piece of dandelion fluff, walked by, Dulac grabbed her hand and waltzed with her for two silent measures. Ruthie was laughing when Dulac released her and kissed her on the cheek, and then she was blushing so hard Somers thought she might be having a stroke.
“Oh Christ,” Hazard said, his eyes still fixed on Somers.
“I don’t know why you don’t like him.”
“He’s a self-absorbed, puerile asshole. He’s—”
“Emery, bro, this is so fucking unreal. I was just thinking about you.” Dulac grinned, holding out his fist for a bump.
Hazard ignored him, still looking at Somers.
“Guys,” Dulac said, dropping his fist a beat later, “this is awesome. Look at us. Dream team, right?”
“Go away. I’m talking to my boyfriend.”
“Oh my God,” Dulac said with a laugh, dropping into his chair. “You guys are fucking adorable. See, Somers, this is the kind of stuff I was talking about. You guys are so goddamn cute. I mean, I don’t want the rest of it. Like the creepy old man stuff you guys have where you, like, sit at the window all day and shoot birds or tell little kids to get off your lawn. And I definitely don’t want that weird documentary fetish you guys have where you can’t get a boner unless you’re watching something like The Pharaoh’s Curse or whatever, but—”
“John.”
“I know. Hold on. Dulac, stop antagonizing him.”
“I’m not antagonizing him, man. Emery and I are best buds, right?”
Hazard’s eyes narrowed like a man contemplating murder.
“He even invited me to dinner tonight,” Dulac said with a huge, shit-kicking grin.
Somers turned to Hazard. Now Hazard looked like a man contemplating a particularly bloody murder.
“Uh, Ree? Did you invite him for dinner?”
“Yeah, he totally did,” Dulac said, still with that grin. “He’s just like you said. All gruff and swearing and acting like he wanted to rip me apart with his bare hands, but he said it was, you know, like an apology. For that stuff with the knife this morning.”
Somers stared at Hazard, watching the dark red slashes run up Hazard’s cheekbones. “Really?”
“Really,” Hazard finally said.
“You?” Somers asked again.
“Him,” Dulac said.
“When?”
“Just a little while ago.”
Somers wanted to ask why, but he thought it might sound insulting, so he settled for: “How?”
“Drop the Abbott and Costello act,” Hazard said. “I have to talk to Peterson, and then we’re going.”
He strode away without waiting for a response.
“Dude,” Dulac said, pretending to pant and fan himself. “Holy fuck.”
“Ok.”
“I just need to catch my breath.”
“Ok, enough.”
“I’m serious, dude. A hundred percent serious. If you like, die, or something. Like you get shot in the line of duty.”
Somers turned his attention back to the screen and started pulling up the information Skalman had sent over from the campus IT security department.
“Like, maybe there’s a bank robbery, and you go in alone to try to negotiate the hostage situation, which you could totally do because you’re badass as fuck, but then something goes wrong and you get gunned down in front of everybody, on national TV—”
“Jesus Christ, Dulac.”
“—I would totally, definitely, grief-bone Hazard. Like, it would be the funeral fuck to end all funeral fucks.”
“What the hell is a funeral fuck?”
“It’s when you—”
“No. I don’t want to know.”
“I just thought it’d make you feel better. Like, there might even be some chemistry there. Like, maybe it would turn into something serious.”
“Enough. He’s my boyfriend, Dulac. Hands off.”
“I thought you’d find it comforting.”
Somers leaned back from the keyboard, allowing himself the pleasure of imagining the first time Gray Dulac got into an argument with Emery Hazard. One of the really memorable ones. Like the time Hazard had kicked an aluminum trashcan into a pancake because Somers was, as Hazard later explained, being deliberately obtuse about the various incarnations of national park systems in the British Commonwealth.
“See?” Dulac said, slapping the desk. “You’re smiling. I knew you’d find it comforting.”
“Oh yes. Now shut up and look at this with me.”
“What?”
“Dennis Tonda’s social media accounts.”
Side by side in front of Somers’s computer, they logged in to each of the various accounts that Skalman’s IT team had captured at the public terminal. One of the accounts, thank God, was Tonda’s email; as Somers logged in to other accounts, he deleted the notification emails that were intended to inform Tonda that someone had accessed his account from a new location.
“All right. Let’s see what this asshole is up to.”
But things were slow for Dennis Tonda, it looked like.
“He’s already got another one on the hook,” Somers said, scrolling through a conversation. “She’s fifteen, a student at Wahredua High, lives with her mom.”
“Who works nights,” Dulac muttered, tapping the screen. “She says tomorrow she’ll be all by herself. Wants Dennis to come over and split her open with his big—”
“I can read too.”
“Oh, man. Is that, like, a trigger? Because of Emery? I mean, do you think about him every time you hear about someone getting roasted on a huge—”
“Ok,” Somers said, pushing back from the desk. “She wants to talk again tomorrow. Let’s keep an eye on them, wait for them set something up. If they make a plan, we’ll stop by and see how things are going for them. We can pick up Dennis before he gets a chance to slip something to this girl.” Somers heard his choice of phrasing. “Don’t even go there.”
“I just thought maybe you were thinking about Emery slipping you—”
Somers walked off to find his boyfriend before things got bad enough that he was officially required to kill his partner.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
DECEMBER 18
TUESDAY
3:47 PM
HAZARD FOUND PETERSON IN THE Wahredua PD’s parking lot, a pile of trash near his feet as he cleaned out a police cruiser.
Roy Peterson, thin and black and turning the corner on old age, had been a uniformed officer in Wahredua when Hazard had been in high school. Hazard hadn’t really known anything about Peterson, but Peterson had still stood out: the only black man on the police force. That was before Moraes, of course. In a small town in Missouri, Peterson had made waves just by being who he was. But he had stuck it out, and Hazard guessed the patrol officer was nearing retirement. Twenty years of being a black police officer in rural Missouri. That said more about Peterson than an
ything else.
As Hazard approached, Peterson glanced up, and then he went back to what he’d been doing: scrubbing at the vinyl upholstery with a cloth, spraying now and then with Scrubbing Bubbles.
Hazard waited.
Maybe five minutes passed before Peterson pulled himself out of the cruiser, cracked his back, and looked up at Hazard. “How’s life on the other side?”
“Not as bad as it was.”
Peterson nodded. “You need something?”
“Hoffmeister.”
Pulling a face, Peterson spat on the blacktop.
“That bad?”
“Deepest horse shit I’ve ever had to swim through. In this town, that’s saying something.”
“Tell me about it.”
Peterson frowned, moving around Hazard, stowing the cleaning supplies in the cruiser’s trunk. Then he crouched, gathering up a flattened Cheetos bag, the cellophane wrap from a pack of smokes, a pigtail that might have come from a child’s doll or a cheap weave. Hazard joined him, dropping into a squat to sweep up an armful of the garbage that Peterson had extracted from the cruiser’s back seat. Together, they carried it to the dumpster, and then they stood there.
After what felt like another minute, Peterson rapped on the dumpster, the metal booming hollowly. “You know Hoffmeister?”
“Worked together almost a year.”
“You don’t really know him, then.”
“No, I guess not.”
“I don’t either. He’s not my kind, you know? I know a lot of men like him. They bred them here by the dozen for a long time.”
“Racist,” Hazard said.
“Oh sure. But that’s like saying cream floats. Small minded. Provincial. Maybe a little angry. Like the world was just fine; no need for it to keep moving on. No need for anything bigger than this little corner of it, the way he knows and understands.”
“Like the Ozark Volunteers. Or their new little spin-off group, Bright Lights.”
“Sort of. I think he could have ended up there, if he hadn’t become a cop. People like Hoffmeister, they need to be in control. They need to be the top dog—even if they’re the top dog of a small pack.”
“But Hoffmeister wasn’t top dog. Not of anything.”
“Could have fooled me,” Peterson said with a dry quirk of his lips. “You ever seen him with just the patrol guys, when he doesn’t think anybody else is around? You ever seen him with Lloyd, just the two of them?”
“No.”
“You remember high school? You remember the boy who couldn’t walk into a classroom without clapping the erasers or shoving a desk or shouting at his friends across the room?”
“Sure. You’re talking about John.”
Peterson made a thoughtful noise. “Maybe. Hoffmeister, when he thinks it’s just the patrol boys, he gets a loud mouth.”
“He likes to think he’s in charge?”
“Oh, yeah. But it’s more than that. Couple of weeks ago, when we all thought Carlson was due to drop that baby, he started in on her. Really rough. ‘Boot, pick up your fucking shit.’ ‘Boot, your locker is fucking disgusting.’ ‘Boot, if you can’t fit into uniform and look halfway decent, why the fuck are you even here today?’ Stuff like that. He just kept going and going.”
“And Carlson?”
“She took it for a while. Then she got right back in his face. Told him he was the equivalent of a used tampon. When she finally turned on him, you should have seen Hoffmeister. Looked like he was going to shit himself.”
“Why boot?” Hazard said.
“Like rookie. Means the same thing.”
“I know what it means. But I’ve never heard anyone here use it. And nobody used it in St. Louis, either.”
Peterson shrugged.
“And Lloyd?” Hazard asked.
“He gets it worse than anybody. That man is like a whipped dog. I’ve never seen anybody who will lick ass as fast and as hard as he does, no matter how bad Hoffmeister gives it to him.”
“What about you?”
“What about me?”
“I mean I’m not stupid. You tell me Hoffmeister is an asshole when nobody is around to take him down a peg or two. You two have been on the force for about the same amount of time. And I know what it’s like to be different. When you’re different, you’ve got a target painted on your back.”
Peterson shivered, pulling his coat around him as the December wind whipped across the parking lot. His eyes crinkled with amusement. “He called me an uppity nigger the first day I was on the job. We’re talking the late 90s. I thought I’d gone back in time. Even a place like this, I thought, even a place like this has got to move forward eventually.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“What happened?”
Peterson just grinned and shivered again. “If that’s all, Mr. Hazard, I’ve got some paperwork to finish before the end of my shift.”
“Just a few more questions.” When Peterson nodded, Hazard asked, “What have you found? With Hoffmeister’s complaints, I mean. Is there anything solid?”
“What’s to find? No forced entry. No fingerprints. Lot of people who hate his ass, but nobody sees anything, nobody can tell me anything. I figured maybe an ex, a copy of a key, a lot of years of resentment, but I can’t make that work no matter how I turn it. His last divorce was eleven years ago, and if he’s had a woman since then, I can’t find her.”
“When it all started, did you talk to Andy-Jack?”
“I did. I drove out there after the shit on the door. Andy-Jack was still in a pretty bad state back then. He was in the wheelchair and back home, but they hadn’t installed the lift. Son of a bitch couldn’t fit through half the doorways in his own trailer. He talked to me. When I told him, he just started laughing, this real ugly laugh, like he was half out of his head. He pointed to his legs and asked how he was supposed to do the stairs.”
“That’s it?”
“What the fuck else, man? Hoffmeister had it all pinned on Andy-Jack from day one, but I can’t see it. I went out there again, a week or two later, when Hoffmeister got that note. The one about the rope. We couldn’t get any prints off it except Hoffmeister’s, and I thought maybe it would rattle Andy-Jack a little. Maybe I could get a reaction out of him. By then, he had the lift installed, and they’d cut out the doors. He seemed like he was doing a little better. When I showed him the note, he just looked at it and asked me what it meant.” Peterson shrugged. “You know what Hoffmeister wanted me to do? Get a couple of hotheads, drive over there one night, and beat the hell out of that dumb white boy. He said that would put a stop to all of it. I told Hoffmeister he could be a dumbass twenty-four hours a day if he wanted to, but I wasn’t clocking in with him.”
“You think Andy-Jack has nothing to do with this.”
“He’s in a chair. What’s he going to do?”
“He could have asked someone else to do it for him. Hoffmeister claims two men tried to grab him at Slick’s. Nothing to stop Andy-Jack from calling in a few favors.”
“Well, Mr. Hazard, I never thought of that.”
Hazard gritted his teeth. “It was just a statement.”
“You’re such a brilliant detective. That’s why I never could have thought of something like that myself.”
“Ok.”
“You know that Bright Lights group?”
“The Ozark Volunteers reboot? Just a little touch-up paint to make them more palatable to the electorate?”
Peterson made a noncommittal noise. “I talked to their boss. Sackeman. When I sat down in that little trailer he’s got in Paradise Valley, you’d think I tracked dog shit across a Persian rug. But he talked. A little. Told me Andy-Jack, he’s got nobody. Bright Lights doesn’t want anything to do with a cripple. Ozark Volunteers, even less. Especially not a cripple who goes straight to the government titties—that’s how Sackeman put it. Especially not a cripple who wants the g-men
to fight his battles. Especially not a cripple who thinks he can get rich by taking advantage of an illegitimate court system designed to legislate from the bench in an effort to exclude the white man from justice. Those were his words too, in case you were wondering. Sackeman had a whole song and dance about a war coming, and I’m sure he wanted me to ask him all about it. But I just got the hell out. I deal with enough crazy in one day.”
“Andy-Jack told us his friends helped pay for the lift. He said they helped with refitting the trailer for his wheelchair.”
“Well, I’m just a simple man, Mr. Hazard—”
“Jesus Christ.”
“—but it seems to me that sometimes a guy like Andy-Jack Strout might lie, even to a big, smart private investigator like yourself.”
Hazard ignored the jab, still turning over Peterson’s statement. “You believe him? Sackeman, I mean.”
“I watched Andy-Jack’s trailer for a few days. Got Cravens to sign off on it. You know who goes in and out?”
Hazard shrugged.
“Andy-Jack. That’s all. Nobody else. No friends. No deliveries. He’s got a little van rigged up so he can drive it, and he goes off to the grocery store. One night he went to a bar, got wasted, tried to start a fight. Whole thing’s sad.”
Something about that tickled the back of Hazard’s mind, where a piece of the puzzle was out of place, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.
“You want my opinion?”
“That depends. Is it about me?”
Peterson cracked a small grin. “Hoffmeister’s got an axe to grind. He doesn’t like Andy-Jack because of the lawsuits. He wants to pin this whole mess on him because then it makes sense.”
“So who took a few shots at him last night?” Hazard asked. “Who’s going to fucking pay for my new front door?”
“I already told you: I couldn’t get anywhere with it. That’s why we dropped it. Now I guess I’m back on it because of those damn shots.” He sighed. “Jesus Christ. What a fucking mess. At least I can cross off Andy-Jack for good. I don’t need any more reasons to spend time around those Ozark Volunteer assholes.”
“You’ll let me know if there’s anything you want me to check out?” Hazard said. “Cravens has me on retainer. If you need anything, just give me a call.”
