BAD DECISIONS
Agent Juliet – Episode One
By E. M. Smith
E. M. Smith
Copyright 2014 by E. M. Smith
For Officer Mary
You arrested my heart.
Table of Contents
Bad Decisions
The Author’s Soapbox
About the Author
Bad Decisions
I was in the shower when they broke down my trailer door. Officer Harris dragged me out of the bathtub, screaming at me to “Get on the floor! Get on the floor!” like she was trying out for the next Cops series, and doing her best to get in a payback shot at my nuts. Caleb Ritchie, a guy I’d gone to school with, was pointing his gun at me with one hand and reading off of a little laminated index card in his other.
“Jamie Kendrick, you have the right to remain—”
“This is bullshit,” I yelled. All I could think was that something in my ankle bracelet had short-circuited and started spitting out screwed-up figures at the station that said I’d been drinking or smoking pot. “I’m clean! Test me—right now, test me!”
Caleb tried hollering over me. “—in connection with the homicides of Owen and Talia Kendrick and the disappearance of—”
“What? Owen?” I quit fighting. “What’d you say about Owen?”
Harris kicked me in the back of the head and everything went black.
*****
I’d been perp-walked into Ouachita Hollow’s little two-cruiser police department enough times in my life that I should’ve been used to it, but this was my first time stone cold sober and buck-ass naked. Apparently, guys on probation—and Harris’s bad side—didn’t warrant a couple extra seconds to put on pants.
Of course Cherry Ann was working the desk that morning. I tried to twist so she wouldn’t get an eyeful of my package. Not that my backside is a lot better view, but Cherry Ann had always been so nice to me—even after the night I got blackout drunk, wrecked Harris’s squad car, and woke up on probation with a minimum of six months electronic monitoring. An effort at some modesty seemed like the least I could do. Cherry Ann was too sweet to be a cop, which was probably why they kept her on desk duty. And why the delusional part of my brain held out hope that I might have a shot with her someday.
Except this morning she was looking at me like I’d just ripped off her grandma’s head and shit down her neck.
“The bracelet’s misfiring,” I told her. “I ain’t been drinking. I was in the shower. Maybe shampoo got into it or something.”
Cherry Ann winced and shook her head at me.
“Keep walking, Kendrick,” Harris said. She shoved me past the desk and down the hall to the conference/file room. “Sit your ass down.”
I sat in one of the rolling chairs and Harris locked my cuffs around the arm. Then she stepped back and perched on the edge of the conference table.
“Getting a good look?” I asked her. “Need me to do a turn?”
I probably should’ve been freaked out, but I was still pretty sure this was Harris’s way of paying me back for ankle-bracelet-night. Hell hath no fury like a butch lady-cop scorned. I kept expecting her to whip out her cell phone, take a picture of me flapping in the breeze, then say I was free to go. Chalk one more up to the long-term consequences of decision-making while shotgunning beer with vodka chasers.
Not that Harris and I had been on the best of terms before I got drunk and jacked her cruiser. Kendricks—with the exception of Owen—were the kind of white trash the Holler’s PD wished they could sweep up and lock away forever. Our parents finally took care of each other in a twelve-gauge domestic dispute a few years back and I’d been working on topping that until I woke up wearing the ankle bracelet.
I don’t remember most of ankle-bracelet-night, but word around town was when Harris wrestled me out of the twisted wreck of what used to be a cop car, I head-butted her. Then when the head-butt didn’t take her down, I tried to kick her in the nuts. I couldn’t say how much of that story is true, but if you’d ever seen Officer “Hairy” Mary Harris, then you’d know the concept holds water.
But Harris didn’t bust out a camera and holler, “Gotcha!”
“Should’ve shot your ass,” she said.
“Go for it,” I said.
“You know what’d be poetic justice?” she said. “If those same lawyers your brother got to weasel you out of doing time before turn out to be the ones who make sure you never step foot outside a prison again.”
*****
The conference/file room door opened and Caleb, Sheriff Tomlinson, and a couple county deputies I didn’t recognize came in.
Tomlinson sighed and dropped his fat ass into a chair at the conference table.
“What happened, son?” he asked. “Did Owen find out about you and Talia?”
“Huh?”
“Your sister-in-law, son. Did she tell Owen the two of you were having an affair? What about the girls?”
“Me and Talia?” It was like he was speaking a different language. I understood the names, but I couldn’t get my head around anything else he said. “Y’all brought me in because you think I’m sleeping with her?”
Sheriff Tomlinson leaned forward.
“The GPS in your ankle bracelet puts you with Talia every day of the last three months—even after your house arrest ended.” He tapped the table with one finger. “Now, son, a jury’s going to be a little more lenient if you thought she was in love with you. They’d understand how that first month maybe Owen was off doing book stuff a little too much, maybe Talia got lonely and, hell, a man with the family resemblance to the man she loved was better’n some stranger—”
“No! Fuck, no.” The cuffs jerked my hands back down when I tried to move. “Talia’s helping me prepare for the army fitness test. She used to be a personal trainer.”
“You’re telling me y’all trained four hours a day to do a couple sit-ups and run a mile?”
“She said I need to stand out from the rest of the recruits.” I shrugged. “After what happened the first time.”
Over Tomlinson’s shoulder, I saw Harris nudge one of the deputies.
“He failed the piss test. Enough THC to put a horse down.”
“Trace amounts,” I yelled. “And I ain’t screwing around with Talia! That’d be like fucking my sister.”
“And that’s never happened before in the Kendrick clan,” Harris said.
“Be still,” Sheriff Tomlinson snapped. Then he looked back at me. “I’m trying to help you, son, but you got to give me something. Did Owen come at you? Or was Talia fixing to break it off? Tell me what happened last night.”
“I was home last night. All night.”
“Well, somebody was over at your brother’s place.” Tomlinson tossed some photos across the table. They slid to a stop right in front of me. “And whoever it was made an awful mess.”
It took me a while to figure out that the picture on top was the back of somebody’s head. The hair was the same dirty blond as mine, the same as Owen’s. And those sharp-looking white pieces—that bloody pink stuff—that was—
r /> My stomach heaved. I gagged and threw up yellowish foam. A little of it hit the edge of the monitor on the ankle bracelet and oozed down the side of my bare foot.
“Jesus. That ain’t Owen.” I shook my head. “He’s fine. I seen him yesterday. He biked the girls along with Talia and me when we went running. Owen’s fine.”
“Son, Owen’s brains had to be scooped up with a shovel. He ain’t fine. Talia ain’t fine.” Papers shuffled and Tomlinson stuck another picture in front of my face. I couldn’t even tell what it was. Just different colors of red. “Did the girls hear the screams and wake up? Come down and see what Uncle Jamie was doing to Mama? Did you panic? Where they at, son?”
“I didn’t—” Then it hit me what he was saying. They didn’t know where Della or Eva was. Somebody had murdered my brother and sister-in-law and now my little nieces were gone.
“What’d you do with the girls, son?”
Owen had told me once that his girls were the best thing in his life. I’d laughed because how fucking pathetic was it that at twenty-five years old somebody else’s kids were the best thing in my life, too? But I loved those girls. Babygirl Eva wasn’t even three yet. And Della—four years old and bossy as all hell—Little Miss Too Big for Her Britches. Gone. Maybe dead.
The room swam. I was hyperventilating. I bent over and put my head between my knees like Talia had taught me back when we first started training and I was still sweating pure grain alcohol.
“He don’t act guilty,” one of the deputies mumbled.
“Remorse,” Harris said like she knew. “Crimes of passion bring it on heavy. ’Least his mama had the decency to blow her head off once she seen what she’d done.”
“Y’all,” Sheriff Tomlinson said. He looked back at me. “What’d you do with the girls, son? We just need to know where they are. Make it easy on yourself. Cooperate.”
My family—my only family—was just a bunch of blood and guts in some crime scene pictures.
“I didn’t stay.” My voice broke. “Owen asked me if I wanted to hang out, stay for supper, but—but—” But Eva’d been hanging on me all damn day and she’d just started this annoying phase where she threw a screaming tantrum every time you told her no. “I should’ve— Fuck.”
I’d been so hell-bent on getting home to waste time looking up porn and dirt bike parts that I blew off Owen’s invitation. Made some shitty joke about needing a break from parenting their kids for them. Everything him and Talia had done for me and I couldn’t stay one more fucking hour.
Harris shoved her way over to my side. “Where’d you ditch the girls’ bodies, Kendrick? Or are you one of those sick fucks who’s keeping them for later?”
“I didn’t do this—any of this! I swear to Jesus I was home last night. Check the ankle bracelet. It’ll—”
Harris laughed and shook her head.
“How stupid do you think we are? We checked already. The readouts put you at your brother’s place when their alarm system was tripped.”
“I wasn’t there!”
“Just tell us if the girls are still alive,” Tomlinson said. “We won’t record it as a confession. We’ve got to know so we can help them.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
When Sheriff Tomlinson stood up, he groaned and his knees cracked. He put his hands on the conference table and leaned over so he could look me in the eye.
“When that ol’ colored boy raped that kid? You remember what happened to him, don’t you, son? I’m giving you one more chance. If you don’t answer me, dying in a house fire is going to look pretty desirable in comparison. Now, where’re the girls at?”
*****
After a while, I wasn’t even trying to protect myself anymore. My arms were numb. They had twisted up overtop my head when Caleb kicked my chair over backwards and the cuffs had cut off the circulation in my hands. After a while, the whole arms just kind of quit feeling. Probably a good thing, considering the way the rest of me felt.
You know when you hurt so much that your brain starts just going off on its own? Talia called it drifting. She said she ran a seventy-eight mile race in Japan once and she drifted the last fifty miles.
I started drifting in the first ten minutes of the ass-whooping.
It made sense. Even if they hadn’t thought I’d done something to the girls, Owen was a big deal around here. The hometown boy who made it big, overcome his raising, went off to college in New York City, and started writing books—and not just books, but books smart people thought were really something. They even made a movie out of one and it won all kinds of awards. Then he married Talia and settled down back here.
“So they can choke on it,” he told me once while we were drinking a beer and watching the construction crew work on his big-ass mansion.
But everybody in Ouachita Hollow loved him. Enough that they let Talia in all their hoity-toity church cliques and nobody ever called the girls cocoa babies.
Life isn’t fucking fair. Good guys like Owen with families and wives get murdered. Little innocent baby girls get stolen and dumped Jesus knew where—or worse. Little baby girls like Eva. She could pitch a fit that would make your ears bleed, but if you were hunched over in the bushes throwing up last week’s tequila, she’d kiss you on the back and say, “It okay, Uncle Jamie. It okay.”
Even though I was drifting, I could hear myself sobbing. Not manly sobs, either.
“Hold off a second.” Sheriff Tomlinson.
A steel-toed boot slammed into me one more time, right under the ribs. Three guesses which dyke was wearing it.
“Son, are you ready to tell us where the girls are?”
There was blood in my mouth, snot and tears on my face, and I either had to piss or I had some kind of internal bleeding.
“I didn’t do it,” I said. I tried to say. Well, I think I tried to say it.
“A’ight, boys,” Sheriff Tomlinson said.
The boots started coming down again.
This time when my brain went off drifting, I appreciated the fact that Tomlinson had said “boys.” Not “officers,” not “men and one woman,” not even “guys,” which could’ve been taken as gender neutral. Choke on that, Harris.
*****
I woke up facedown on the floor of the county’s only holding cell. Somebody had thrown an orange jumpsuit in after me. I couldn’t move enough to get it on yet, so I just spread it out over my crotch. My right hand was throbbing. Only one of my eyes would open, so I let them both shut. I think maybe I blacked out again for a little while.
The sound of metal clanging brought me back around. Harris stepped into the cell with what looked like a professional weightlifter crammed into an Arkansas state trooper uniform.
“What the fuck happened?” the trooper asked.
“Resisting arrest,” Harris said.
“Why’s he naked?”
“You try forcing a wackjob who’s resisting arrest to put some clothes on. We gave him the jumpsuit, but he’s been refusing to put it on.”
I laughed. What else could I do?
The trooper stepped into the cell.
“Jamie Kendrick?”
“Most of him,” I croaked. It felt like I’d left all the body parts that weren’t broken back in the conference/file room.
“I’m Trooper Donovan. My partner and I are transporting you to the state holding facility in Little Rock until such a time as the investigation is completed and your bail is set. Do you understand?”
I tried to nod. Didn’t work.
“Yes,” I said instead.
“If you resist in any way, I will take you down. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Get your ass dressed.”
I did. The jumpsuit felt stiff and unused, but smelled like it’d been in an old lady’s closet for the last fifty years. The way Donovan was glaring at me, I must’ve taken too long to get it on. Not having had the shit beat out of him recently, I guess he couldn’t appreciate what kind of miracle
it was that I’d managed to get the jumpsuit on at all.
“Sit on the cot, hands and feet out,” he said.
I tried to ease down, but my legs gave out halfway. A million boot-shaped bruises all flared up at the same time.
Donovan ratcheted the cuffs shut on my wrists, then did the same with a pair of shackles around my ankles. That’s when I noticed the ankle bracelet was gone.
“Hey, are they going to check my bracelet?” I asked. “Can they see if everything was working right?”
“Give it a rest, Kendrick,” Harris said.
“Fuck you,” I said. Then I looked at Donovan, “Tell them to check it. They’ll see I wasn’t at Owen’s last night. Something went wrong with the bracelet.”
“Where were you, then?” Harris butted in.
“Home.” Another idea dawned on me. “They can check my computer. The browsing history. What time— When did it happen? I was on the internet until one. I submit to a computer test or search or whatever the CSI people do.”
“The investigators already seized your possessions,” Donovan said. “You might as well save your breath.”
“But it’ll show—”
Harris snorted. “That you spend too much time watching porn?”
I was really sick of her shit. This was my fucking life circling the drain while she made jokes and whoever killed my family just went on living like the whole damn world hadn’t broke into a million pieces.
So I said, “Guess you wouldn’t know anything about that, huh, Harris? Women probably love a man in uniform.”
Harris lunged at me, but Donovan stopped her. Even for a weightlifter, stopping a woman with Harris’s size and mustache was impressive.
“Get him out of here,” Donovan yelled over his shoulder.
Up until that second, I hadn’t realized another state trooper had been hanging back. With only one eye open, my vision wasn’t great.
The other trooper hauled me up by the arm, then caught me when I almost did a face plant.
“What about the girls? Della and Eva?” I asked when Donovan grabbed my other arm and steered me toward the front of the police department. “Is someone looking for them? Did they find out anything?”
“You ever hear of a spitter’s hood?” Donovan growled in my ear. “If you don’t keep your mouth shut, I will be forced to put one on you.”
“Fuck you, asshole, I want to know what the hell happened to my nieces.”
*****
Having a black hood over your head can make a squad car ride feel like it’s taking ten times longer than it is.
I couldn’t look around, so I couldn’t focus on anything but the soapy smell of my bile-breath inside the hood and the various pains shooting through my body. Everything hurt. I couldn’t think about Owen or Talia without feeling sick. And dammit, the girls. What if it’d been just like Harris said? What if some sicko had taken them after he killed Owen and Talia? They could be alone with this guy right now and all I could do was hope and pray this shit would sort itself out before he started cutting them up or molesting them or something.