“Fuck it,” Dez said to the empty room. Her eyes stung with unshed tears. She got dressed in her last clean uniform, twisted her blond hair into an ugly approximation of a French braid, and buckled on the gun belt with all the junk and doodads required by the regs. She grabbed her hat and keys, locked the trailer, and stepped into the driveway.
The parking slip was empty.
She screamed “Shit!” loud enough to scare the crows from the trees.
Buck or Biff or whoever had driven her home from the bar. Her car was four miles down a dirt road and she was already late for work.
Some days only got worse.
CHAPTER FIVE
PINKY’S DONUT HEAVEN
STEBBINS COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA
Sergeant JT Hammond’s first name was really JT. His father’s idea. JT had a sister named CJ and a younger brother named DJ. Their father thought it was hilarious. JT had not sent him a Father’s Day card in eleven years.
JT sat in his cruiser and waited for Dez to come out of Pinky’s with coffee. After he’d picked her up at her place and dropped her so she could retrieve her car, they arranged to meet at the gas station convenience store on Doll Factory Road to have some coffee and go over the patrol patterns for the day. Stebbins was a small town, but they shared patrol duties with the three other towns that made up all of Stebbins County. The county was the size of Manhattan but 95 percent of it was farmland, with only seven thousand residents. JT preferred to start each shift with a “game plan” for patrol, backup, and tasks. That way, if all that went on the duty log was parking tickets, a couple of DUIs, and accident reports, then at least all the i’s would be dotted and t’s crossed.
However, today was likely to be the kind of day when attention to detail was going to matter. If the storm was anything like the weather service was predicting, then all of the officers would be working well into the night, shepherding people to shelters, closing the schools early, coordinating with fire-rescue and other emergency services to pull people out of flooded areas, and who knew what else.
Their cruisers were parked in a V, front bumpers almost touching. JT’s unit was a seven-year-old Police Interceptor with 220,000 miles on the original engine. The vehicle was spotless, however, and was the only car in the department’s fleet of six that did not smell of stale beer, dried blood, and fresh urine. JT was fastidious about that. He had to be in the thing eight hours a day and sometimes double that, and tidiness mattered to him. His house was just as clean and had been ever since Lakisha had died. JT’s kids were grown and gone—LaVonda was saving the world with Doctors Without Borders and Trey was a state trooper over in Ohio. Living neatly was the only way that living alone was bearable.
By contrast, Dez’s cruiser was newer and uglier. Mud-spattered, dented, and tired-looking even though it was less than two years old. She drove it hard and ached for high-speed chases. If it was up to her she’d be driving a stripped-down monster truck with a front-mounted minigun and a couple of rocket pods.
At least three times a year JT offered to help Dez detail her car and also clean and decorate her trailer, but that suggestion was invariably met with the kind of enthusiastic vulgarities usually reserved for root canals and tax audits.
JT looked at his watch and tooted the horn lightly. Dez peered out of the dirty store window. He tapped his watch and she gave him the finger.
JT smiled, settled back, and opened the copy of JET he had been reading. He was halfway through an article on black superheroes in comics and wanted to finish it before Dez came out. Not that she would jab him for reading such an ethnic-specific magazine—after all, she had every one of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour DVDs, and there was nothing whiter than that stuff—it’s just that Dez tended to bust on JT for his love of comics. JT was pretty sure that Dez had never been a kid.
Donny Sampson, who owned a tractor parts store on Mason Street, came out of the store with a blueberry Slurpee in one hand and a Coke Slurpee in the other. He was laughing out loud, and JT guessed that it was one of Dez’s jokes. Donny always liked a filthy stor
y, and Dez was a walking encyclopedia of them. Donny saw JT and saluted with a Slurpee cup; JT gave him a nod.
Dez was taking her damn time, so he settled back, but instead of reading the magazine he laid it in his lap and stared through the windshield at the closed door of Pinky’s, thinking about Dez. They were often paired for patrol and, since neither of them had family living close, they usually did Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the Super Bowl together. Nothing romantic, of course; JT was old enough to be her father, and she was very much like a niece to him. Maybe a daughter if she would pull the goddamn Democratic voting-booth lever at least once before the world went all to hell. In his way, JT loved her. Felt protective of her. She was tough, though. She laid a pretty comprehensive minefield between her and the rest of the world. The rest of the guys in the department hated and feared her in equal measures.
Dez was a very good cop, better than a small-town police department deserved, but she wasn’t a very nice person. Well, maybe that was unfair. She was damaged goods, which isn’t the same thing as being bad natured. That, and she was way too deeply entrenched in the nihilistic and often self-defeating mentality of rural small town America. She cursed like a pirate, drank like a Viking, and screwed the kind of people the two of them usually arrested—providing they were well built, well hung, and in no way interested in any species of “committed relationship,” especially since the last time she broke up with Billy Trout.
That was a damn shame, too. Billy Trout and Dez had grown up together and had been a hot item more times than JT could count. They were never able to make it work, which frustrated JT because he knew—even if they were both too damaged to see—that the two of them had real magic together. JT never liked to use a phrase like “soul mates,” but he couldn’t find a better label. Shame they were like gasoline and matches whenever they were together. All of the guys Dez dragged to her lair were clones of Billy; but saying so to Dez would be exactly the same as saying “Shoot me. ”
So, instead of a lover, Dez Fox had a partner. A middle-aged black man from Pittsburgh with a college degree in criminal justice and a set of well-used manners that had been hardwired into him by his librarian mother. Dez, on the other hand, was pure backcountry Pennsylvania; a blue-eyed blonde who could have been a model for fitness equipment if not for what JT personally viewed as an overactive redneck gene.
The radio buzzed. “Unit Four, what’s your status?”
JT lifted the handset and clicked the Send key. “Dispatch, I’m code six at Pinky’s. You got something for me, Flower?”
Flower Martini, twenty-eight-year-old daughter of love generation boomers, was the dispatcher, secretary, booking photographer, and court stenographer for the Stebbins County Department of Public Safety. She looked like Taylor Swift might look if her career took a sharp downward turn past a long line of seedy country and western bars. She was still cute as a button, and JT was pretty sure she had her eye on him, age and race differences notwithstanding.
“Yeah,” said Flower, “Looks like a possible break-in at Hartnup’s Transition Estate. ”
She overpronounced the name, giving it a nice blend of wry appreciation and tacit disapproval. The Hartnup family had been morticians in town for generations, but in the mideighties, during the New Age inrush, the son, Lee, had given the place a makeover. Changed the name from Hartnup’s Funeral Home to the trendier “Transition Estate. ” Nondenominational services and a lot of Enya music. It actually sparked a rise in business that drew families from as far as Pittsburgh. Now, with the New Age covered in dust, the name was a local punch line. People still died, though, and the Hartnups still prettied them up and put them in the ground.
“Cleaning lady called from the mortuary office,” said Flower. “Witness is a non-English speaker. All I could get was the location and that something was wrong with the back door. No other details, sorry. You want backup?”
“Dez is with me. ”
“Copy that. ”