by Scott Blade
She clicked the button and answered.
“Hello.”
“Are you on your way?” he asked. She could hear grogginess in his voice as if he had been fast asleep only minutes before.
“Yes, sir. I’m gassing up now.”
“Get there as fast as you can.”
“So, what’s going on? You didn’t tell me much earlier.”
“The sheriff’s office down in Lawrence County phoned the office earlier. Told us they had something of interest. But I was just called by the local sheriff. He was woken up by a deputy and didn’t sound too happy about it.”
“What did he say?”
“They found a guy. A strange guy,” he said and paused a beat like it was for dramatic effect.
“They found a guy? What’s so strange about him?”
“This guy walked into a bar down there four hours ago carrying a half-dead, naked woman. She’s unconscious. The staff at the bar says he walked in with no shirt, no jacket on. They said he looked like something terrible had come out of the forest. He carried her and then dropped and blacked out.”
“That sounds exaggerated.”
“I agree.”
“So some guy carries a half-dead woman into a bar? What’s that got to do with us?”
“They said she looked like she had been strangled.”
“So?”
“So, the bar is on Interstate Ninety, which makes it our jurisdiction if we want it.”
“Pardon me, but I’d like more of a reason than a non-murder, possibly on the interstate to validate driving five hours in the middle of the night.”
Her SAC was quiet a beat. And she knew he wasn’t telling her everything. He seemed to be relishing whatever he wasn’t telling her. Which was a part of his personality. Often, Rower thought that he must’ve wanted to be an actor in a previous life.
He said, “I’m glad you ask. Because the other thing that puts this on our radar is that the girl just had major surgery. I don’t know the timeframe, but recent.”
Another dramatic pause.
Rower popped open the Taurus driver’s side door and sat down, kept her feet out on the concrete and waited.
Her SAC said, “Rower, her kidney was extracted.”
“What?”
“Yep.”
“Where?”
“From her body.”
“I know that. What geographical location?”
“That I don’t know. That’s why you’re going.”
“Who’s the girl?”
“The sheriff will have all the details that you need.”
Rower paused a beat and asked, “You think it’s them?”
“I don’t know. But I sure hope so. I hope the girl can give you some answers.”
“Thanks, John.”
She called him by his first name instead of sir or boss or chief or Bukowski, which was his last name and the normal way she addressed him.
Bukowski said, “Don’t thank me. I didn’t take the girl’s kidney. This guy did. I suppose.”
“Or he’s another carrier.”
“Possibly. The whole thing sounds strange.”
“Did the sheriff give you a name?”
“Not yet. He’s not met the guy yet.”
“Why not?”
“It’s the middle of the night.”
You woke me up, she thought.
“He’s got a big rural county. I don’t think he lives anywhere near where they got the guy. But don’t worry. He’ll meet you in Reznor in the morning.”
“Okay,” she said.
“Call me tomorrow when you have details,” Bukowski said and he clicked off the call with no goodbye.
Rower tossed the phone into the empty cup holder and slid her legs into the footwell and shut the door.
She started the engine, gassed the car, and drove off.
Chapter 10
G YPSY MOTHS SLAMMED into a dull yellow bulb plugged into a bare white ceiling over Widow’s head. He stared and squinted and blinked and came to, but he stayed where he was.
He didn’t sit up. He didn’t move. He assumed he was in a local hospital bed since he’d walked into a haberdashery, biker bar complex and passed out from exhaustion.
Widow figured the bartender had called the sheriff or the police, or whatever they had there. In turn, the ambulance was called for the girl and probably Widow too.
The first thing he wanted to do was recon his current situation without making big movements because he felt that he wasn’t alone. He could feel someone else in the room.
Widow had learned from experience to trust his first instincts. It’s the cognitive mind that you must doubt because afterthoughts and doubt and calculating, the gray areas always came right after the first instinct has already accessed the situation. It is when the mind makes you question things after you first see them, where hesitation is born.
Widow stared at the ceiling until it came into normal focus. Casually, slowly, he looked left, looked right. He looked above him, then down toward his feet. He was lying down on a bed small enough to be a hospital in a place with no budget. But the bed felt more like the bed in a mental hospital than it did a hospital room. It reminded him of the small cots they had back in boot camp, the kind with metal springs and a metal frame and never provided a good night’s sleep for any sailor ever. But that was one of the advantages that sailors had over the rest of the armed forces; they could sleep anywhere.
Considering sailors sleep at sea for months and months on end, dealing with crashing waves, the ship rocking violently, sudden swells, and surging storms that magnified it all by a hundred, all of this while always maintaining ready alertness that enemy states could fire on their vessel and sink it at any moment, they learn to sleep anywhere under any conditions. No problem.
Widow was no different. He could sleep on boulders. He could sleep on a bed of nails and manage to wake up rested with a crick in his neck and still be ready to go.
Above him, he saw nothing but a bare white, tiled ceiling too high to reach and too dirty to be a major hospital that passes annual state inspections. He saw a wall made of big cement blocks, painted the dullest gray he’d ever seen.
Widow turned his head, slowly and slightly to the left until he was sure no one was watching and then he turned it completely.
There was nothing to see but another wall, nothing special, nothing different, just another brick wall with the same cement blocks and the same dull gray paint.
His head backtracked and turned to the right. There were no hospital machines or staff or anything else that could be found in a normal hospital room.
Instead, there was an empty, narrow space and then there was another wall with a door hole cut out of it. But there was no regular door plugged into the hole, where a door should be.
Instead, there was a door made of thick, iron bars. It hung on rusty hinges, painted over in black.
Refurbished cell bars, Widow thought.
The bars, the hinges, everything but the rust on the hinges were painted black to hide the ailing quality of the iron.
This was no hospital. This was a jail cell. This was the last place Widow wanted to be. This was the first place he always seemed to end up.
He couldn’t help but crack a smile. His life had been a good one. His life’s luck had been all over the map in terms of good and bad.
He chuckled, not to himself so much.
No reason to remain quiet.
He sat up as well. He was lying on a jail cot, not a boot camp cot, not much difference.
He was all alone. No cellmate. No bunk cots. No neighbors either.
The cell wasn’t meant to be shared. It was exclusive and narrow and barebones. All it had was the cot, a steel panel with a crude reflective surface like the surface of a butter knife, screwed to the wall above a metal sink with metal knobs. The panel was meant to replace a regular mirror. No glass so there would be no glass shards if broken.
The faucet knobs were push-do
wn-and-hold for water only. No turn-on-and-leave-running. American jails were barebones and designed to be run as cheap as possible.
There was a toilet next to the unpolished sink. It was also metal, with no lid and no visible tank. The tank was embedded into the wall so prisoners couldn’t get to it and sabotage the pipes or dig tunnels or hide contraband in the tank.
Widow was wrapped up in extra blankets, more than the standard single blanket, a single sheet that he had seen in most jails. Probably because when he had been taken into custody, his body temperature had dropped below normal.
Can’t have him die from hypothermia before the local cops charge him for whatever it was they thought he did.
How generous, Widow thought.
He swung his feet out and planted them on a concrete floor and stood up off the bed.
He was fully clothed, not shirtless as they had found him. He wore his own boots. His own jeans. But not his Henley or his jacket. Someone had dressed him in someone else’s white thermal shirt. It was tight but fit in the chest and stomach. The sleeves were a different story. They reached halfway down to his forearms and stopped dead. That was it. They had no more fabric to give.
Widow couldn’t believe he’d slept through someone arresting him, if he was under arrest, and dressing him too. He must’ve been pushed to his max carrying a half-dead girl for miles and miles in the coldness of a November, South Dakota night.
Widow walked through the narrow cell to the bars and grabbed them. He pushed forward and pressed his face between two bars, right in the center.
He tried to look out.
Beyond the bars was a long, narrow hallway that jetted to the right.
The hall was shady, not dark, but not well lit either, as if the lights were dimmed to help the occupants sleep which made no sense because his cell was lit up. Then again, maybe they couldn’t control the lights in his cell. Or maybe they didn’t know what to do because they didn’t get a lot of overnight visitors.
Widow saw faint lights coming from down the hallway at the very end. The light came from around a corner.
There were two other cells to the left and none on the right, just another block wall, same dull gray as his cell.
The two cells were empty. The bars were all closed and locked, but there were no sounds of breathing or snoring or movement and, unlike his cell, they were dark.
Widow waited a beat and listened.
Beyond the corner, he could hear faint mumbling like a radio chatter or maybe a television set turned down low.
No reason to stay quiet. He called out.
“Hello?”
No answer.
He called out again, louder this time. He put bass in behind his voice, a cop trick.
“HELLO! ANYONE THERE?”
His voice BOOMED! in the silence and the natural acoustics from the barren, cement block walls.
The last word echoed for a moment. All the words carried to the outer rooms; he knew that. Whoever was there heard him just fine, unless they wore sound-canceling gun muffs.
Widow waited.
Then, he heard someone. They didn’t answer him back. Instead, he heard an office chair’s roller wheels on tile, just the one set. He heard shoes shuffling and footsteps and then floorboards squeaking.
After listening to the footsteps get closer, a man turned the corner. Widow saw his face first because it was at eye level. The guy was big, tall like Widow, but had a different body type, about as different as he could.
The guy was tall, but had short legs and a long, thick torso, like a former bodybuilder. His shoulders were wide, his chest round like an oil drum. He had a gut, nothing to be considered overweight, but there was some early bulge developing.
He’d probably played football in college or high school.
The policeman was younger than Widow, but over the threshold of thirty, barely. He wore a brown police uniform and a department coat that looked warm. His hair was brown, darker than his uniform, but lighter than his coat.
A .38 Police Special was strapped into a hip holster on a scuffed-up leather belt—brown, not black. It didn’t match his shoes, grave violation of the United States Navy uniform code. It was probably a violation of the South Dakota Sheriffs’ uniform section of a manual that the guy probably never read, or read ten years in the past so that he could pass his police test, but has since used the manual as kindling for a campfire.
The guy’s face was flat and clean-shaven as if he’d just done the act five minutes ago. He smelled of cheap aftershave, bought in a green bottle at a drugstore, probably jammed into a clearance bin.
The scent wafted down the corridor, announcing his approach only a second after he turned the corner. It didn’t smell bad, just overpowering.
The guy held a hot cup of coffee, full and black and steaming and just poured.
He said, “Mister. You awake.”
He said it as a statement, an out loud observation of the obvious, not a question.
Widow stayed quiet.
“Want some coffee?”
Widow nodded, like an automatic, preprogrammed response. His body answered without his consent.
The policeman stopped short of the bars and held the coffee in his view, taunting him with it.
The guy’s eyes were big—large pupils. He fidgeted with the cuff of one of his sleeves like a nervous habit.
He said, “Step back. Middle of the cell.”
Widow stepped back, one long back-step.
The policeman set the coffee on the middle, chest-high rung of the bars. It was set horizontal and flat on the top, but it was thin, so he braced the mug against the cross-section of the nearest vertical bar. After it was stable, the policeman retreated into the hallway. Took him two extra back-steps to cover the same distance as Widow had.
Widow noticed dark circles under the policeman’s eyes like he hadn’t slept in a long while.
The nightshift, Widow thought. He had done it many times himself, lost quite a lot of sleep because it messes up your days.
“Go ahead. Take it.”
Widow stepped forward and took it.
He sniffed it before making any decision on drinking it. He was curious if the policeman’s gesture was authentic or a trap. A cup of coffee offered from a cop as a peace offering wasn’t crossing the line of entrapment, but it could be a gateway breadcrumb.
“It’s not poisoned.”
Widow nodded and took a pull from it. He was right. It wasn’t poisoned. It was far worse than that. It was delicious, which was not what Widow was expecting from coffee brewed in a middle-of-nowhere police station. Maybe one of his only prejudices was coffee. The best coffees in the world were brewed right at home, with love. That was his opinion. The closer coffee was to being brewed in the family kitchen, the closer it was to perfection. Thus, why coffee brewed in greasy spoons or family roadside diners was the best. And coffee brewed in the company breakroom was the worst, with coffee brewed in a nowhere police station being somewhere in the middle, but closer to the bad side than the good.
Even though Widow wasn’t aware of the time or how long he had been unconscious, he knew that he had passed out from exhaustion. Carrying a naked, one-hundred-ten-pound woman over miles of snow and for a little over an hour would do that to a man.
Being passed out for longer than twenty minutes was often the result of medical issues. A doctor in Quantico told him that once, after he’d knocked out a guy, sparring practice that got out of hand.
Years later, Widow blacked out in the field, but off duty, from a head injury, all his fault from an accident involving not wearing a helmet on a motorcycle.
That story became exaggerated by his teammates. It was a basic story.
Widow was in New Zealand, some half undercover mission and half babysitting gig. The point was that technically they weren’t supposed to be there.
The mission itself turned out to be a waste of tax dollars, but not a waste of time for Widow, personally.
On shore leave, Widow had a brief affair with a woman he had met there. It went on for a couple of weekends—no big deal. But it turned out that the woman was going through a divorce, but technically still married. The husband found out. He’d been stalking her. One night, the husband and three of his friends tried to fight Widow. They ambushed him. And took four broken ribs, two broken noses, five broken fingers, and one fractured skull for the ambush. It was a hefty price for them.
One guy got lucky. He had hit Widow in the head with a pipe or a wrench. Widow couldn’t remember which.
After Widow took them all down, the head injury got him. He blacked out for nearly an hour and woke up in a CIA safe house. One of his guys was a medic. He told Widow that being blacked out from a head injury was always unwanted. Twenty minutes of blackout time was no different from four hours. None of it was good.
He lived.
The policeman asked, “You got a name, sir?”
“You got a name?”
“I asked you first.”
“You’re the cop. Aren’t you supposed to identify yourself?”
The policeman stood still and folded his arms across his chest, but only for a moment, then he fidgeted with the sleeve of his cuff again.
Widow stayed quiet.
The cop stretched his index finger out, right hand and tapped it on a nameplate tacked over his left breast shirt pocket.
Widow didn’t look.
“My name’s Rousey. I’m sheriff’s deputy.”
“Deputy? Where’s the sheriff?”
“Probably home in bed. Or at his station.”
“This isn’t his station?”
“He’s the county sheriff. Sheriffs are for counties. We’re in Reznor.”
“Reznor?”
“It’s the name of the town. The one you’re in right now.”
“Never heard of it.”
Rousey said, “Lawrence is the county. It’s big. The sheriff’s station is in Deadwood. This is my post.”
“You alone here?”
“No there are other deputies, but I’m the main one here.”
“And where’s this?”
Rousey shifted his weight away from his gun hip, folded his arms again, stared at Widow like he was a lunatic.
