Troublemaker

  CHAPTER 18

  SHE STEPPED OUT INTO THE BRIGHT SPRING DAY WITH Morgan close behind her, Tricks’s leash in his hand. Tricks had lapped up some water, then refused to let Bo leave the hardware store without her, as if she knew how upset Bo was.

  Once again, because of Kyle Gooding, she heard the sirens of multiple patrol cars and medics racing to Hamrickville. This time there wouldn’t be any dropping of charges, at least not on her part. She intended to nail him with every possible charge and let the district attorney sort it out.

  The street was clogged with people milling around, and the parade floats were blocking traffic in every direction. The VFW guys and the Shriners were trying to clear the street by moving the floats out of the way, which met with some difficulty because in several cases the men who had been driving the tractors had left their vehicles to go see what was going on. But the front end of the parade was beginning to move, so the clearing out had started.

  There was a concentrated group around the end of the float where Kyle was, and another one across the street, presumably where the gunshot victim was. With Morgan and Tricks beside her, she started across. She didn’t want to see Kyle’s face now because if she did she might snap. Not only that, she didn’t care if the son of a bitch died.

  She waded into the crowd, aided by Morgan’s strong arm reaching out ahead of her and moving people aside. Some people glanced at her and said, “Sorry, Chief,” as they moved. Some of them glanced at Morgan, then their eyes widened and they muttered, “Sorry,” as they too moved away. She didn’t have to imagine what his eyes looked like because she’d seen that lethal iciness before. She didn’t know if she actually needed his interference, but she was glad to have it.

  A man was lying on the ground, his face and shirt a bloody mess. Several people were kneeling beside him, and one woman was pressing some cloth to his head. The man’s eyes were open and he was talking, which was good.

  She did what she knew to do: she moved the crowd back, she crouched down and got the man’s name—Jeff Simmons. She didn’t know him, but his wife, the woman who was holding the cloth to his head, looked familiar. In short order, she discovered that Mrs. Simmons was a teacher at the local school, which explained her familiarity.

  Mrs. Simmons was holding it together and began giving Bo a coherent statement, but then she lifted the soaked cloth, and her husband’s head wound immediately started pouring blood again. She made an inarticulate sound of distress and burst into tears.

  “Let me take over,” Morgan said, crouching down beside the wife and angling his body between Tricks and the wounded man. “I have some medic training.” He slapped the bloody cloth back over the wound and in about thirty seconds had commandeered someone’s tank top to cover that, which he held in place with someone else’s tie. Who had worn a tie to a parade?

  Bo shoved the errant thought aside and concentrated on the task of getting a statement. Mr. Simmons was remarkably calm. “I don’t think I’m shot,” he said. “I mean, we all heard the shot, but there was a kind of sharp ping, then something hit my head.”

  Still holding the makeshift bandage firmly in place, Morgan looked around. “Were you standing beside that light pole?”

  “Yeah,” Mr. Simmons affirmed.

  “I think the bullet hit the pole and a big splinter of wood tagged you in the head. Maybe not. The bullet could have ricocheted and grazed you. Either way, this isn’t a penetrating wound.”

  “Oh, thank the Lord,” sobbed Mrs. Simmons. She wiped her eyes and face, which was a waste of time because she was still crying. Someone passed her a handful of tissues.

  Then the real medics arrived; they’d parked on a side street and run the rest of the way. Bo and Morgan stepped back. Tricks pawed Bo’s leg and whined; the atmosphere was far different from the parade, and she didn’t like it. Either that, or she needed to pee. Looking down at her, Bo broke into a wobbly smile; it was a definite “I need to pee” signal because if a dog could be said to be squirming, Tricks was.

  “You need some time alone with her,” Morgan said, having followed the unspoken communication. “Take her to the side of that building. I need to see about something. Where will you be?”

  “Right here,” she said, stepping up onto the sidewalk. “I figure I should stay far away from Kyle.”

  “I’ll be right back. Fifteen minutes, tops.” He hooked his hand around the back of her neck and pressed a quick kiss to her forehead, regardless of who might be watching. At this point she didn’t care, and she didn’t think he ever had. All she wanted to do was what had to be done so she could go home.

  Morgan threaded his way through the crowd; Hamrickville wasn’t a big town, but most of the population seemed to be standing in the street. That slowed him down some, but not by much. He had something to take care of, and he wanted to do it now. The look on his face had some of the more perceptive citizens moving out of his path. He could feel the ice settling in his veins, the hyperawareness of all his senses, the way he always reacted when things went to shit and it was fight or die.

  Jesse and Patrick were still at the float, though Kyle Gooding was now sitting on the ground with blood dripping from his nose and chin. Morgan eyed him dispassionately, wishing he’d put more force into slamming the asshole’s head against the pavement. If he had, this would be finished already, so that had been a slight miscalculation on his part.

  Patrick had pulled up his patrol car, easing through the crowd with his blues flashing and occasionally tapping the horn. Morgan waited while they hauled Kyle to his feet and opened the back door of the cruiser, easing him into it even though Morgan suspected they both would have liked to drop-kick him into the seat. Kyle sat sullenly, staring down at his feet.

  Morgan approached Jesse. “I need a private word with the asshole. Okay for me to get in the car?”

  Jesse turned, eyed him, studied his face. “You can’t kill him.”

  “Don’t intend to.” Not yet anyway.

  “You can’t even touch him. I’m not giving him any avenue to get off the hook this time.”

  “Don’t intend to touch him either.”

  “Okay, then.” A faint wintry smile touched Jesse’s face. “I would say record everything on your phone, but I probably don’t need to know. Tap on the window when you want out.” He nodded; Morgan opened the back passenger door on the other side and slid onto the seat beside Gooding. He closed the door with a controlled thud.

  Kyle lifted his bloody face and snarled at him, “Who the fuck are you?”

  I’m your worst nightmare. The line from the movie popped into Morgan’s head, but he resisted the temptation. Looking out the window instead of at Kyle, he said offhandedly, “I’m the man who plans to kill you.”

  “What? Who—?” The words were kind of blubbered thanks to the swelling of Kyle’s mouth, which gave Morgan a great deal of pleasure.

  Now Morgan looked at him and smiled. He knew it wasn’t a pretty smile because Kyle visibly recoiled. “You tried to kill the chief. I happen to be in love with her.” He was distantly astonished at the words coming out of his mouth but went with it anyway. He’d think about it later.

  “Wasn’t trying to kill her,” Kyle mush-mouthed sullenly. “The dog. I was gonna shoot the fucking dog. This was all her fault; if she hadn’t jumped me, I never would have hit her, and my family wouldn’t have made me sign those fucking divorce papers to keep from being arrested. I lost my house, she should lose her dog. Nobody cares about a dog, you can’t even sue for ‘emotional harm,’ or anything like that. I looked it up.”

  “Well, see, that’s the law—but I don’t give a fuck about the law. I happen to be real fond of the dog myself. She’s smarter than you are. Better looking, too.”

  “Fuck the damn dog. You’re threatening me. That’s against the law.” Blood and spittle dripped down Kyle’s chin. “I’ll have you arrested.”

  “Good. I can arrange to be in the same cell with you.” Casually, Morgan looked back out the w
indow. “Here’s how it’s going to be. You’re not going to say a word about aiming for the dog, you’re going to say you were trying to kill the chief—”

  “Bullshit!”

  “—and you’re going to plead guilty,” Morgan continued as if Kyle hadn’t interrupted. “You’re going to go to prison. And that’s the only way you’re going to stay alive. You don’t make bail, you sit your sorry ass in a jail cell until you’re sentenced, and you serve your time. When you get out, you move far away from here and never come back to this area again.”

  “Do you know who I am? My father—”

  “Fuck your father. The problem is, you don’t know who I am. I’m a man who knows how to kill you seven ways from Sunday, and I’m just itching to try all those ways out on you, you motherfucker. You set foot outside the jail, you’re dead. Remember that. You want to know how I plan to kill you? I think skinning you alive would give me a lot of pleasure. I can make it last a long time, and you’d be alive and screaming right up until the end. Yeah, I like the idea of that.” He thought of Bo’s white face and wild eyes, the inhuman sounds coming from her throat as she lunged toward Tricks, and the truth of what he was saying was plain in his savage expression.

  Kyle jerked back so hard he banged the back of his head against the window. His eyes were wide with fear, whites showing all around the irises. “You’re crazy as hell!”

  Morgan considered that, then shrugged. “Possible,” he said casually. “But I’m also a man of my word. The only place you’re safe from me is in jail—and you’d better pray nothing bad ever happens to the chief or her dog because if it does, I’m going to assume you paid for it to happen, and I’m coming after you, jail or not. There’s no place you can go that I can’t get to you, no way you can hide even if you change your name. And I know how to get away with it, even if you tell a hundred people to look at me if anything happens to you.”

  Kyle’s eye were all but bugging out. The stupid fool couldn’t back down though, had to cling to the idea that he was smarter and badder than everyone else. He sputtered, “I don’t believe you.”

  “Your funeral,” Morgan said. “I look forward to attending.” He tapped on the window. Jesse opened the door, and Morgan gave Kyle another chilling smile before he got out of the patrol car.

  “If he says I threatened him, he’s lying,” Morgan told Jesse.

  “I figured as much.”

  Morgan reappeared well within the fifteen minutes he’d allotted. Bo had let Tricks pee, then simply knelt beside the dog and hugged and petted her for several minutes, so grateful to still have her that she almost broke down and let loose the flood tide of tears that were threatening to overflow the dam of her control. She was still there when he circled the building to find her.

  “We can go home,” he said, putting his hand on the small of her back when she stood.

  “No, we can’t, not yet. We have to give statements.”

  “Fuck that. Jesse can come out to the house.” He looked hard and implacable and as if he didn’t give a damn whether or not they gave statements.

  Thank God he’d been here. If he hadn’t been—she couldn’t even think the thought. Even afterward, he’d been a rock she could lean on, capable of acting when she herself had been almost frozen by that debilitating sense of horror that lingered deep in her bones.

  “It’s my job,” she said, and braced herself to get through the coming ordeal. It wouldn’t be traumatic, just exhausting, when she wanted nothing more than to curl up and not think for a day or two.

  “Just let me know when you’ve had enough, and I’ll get us out.”

  He would, too; regardless of how many questions still needed to be asked and answered, if she said she had to go home, he’d take her there.

  A little buoyed by that knowledge, she waded in to what had to be done. Police work was always much slower than people thought it was; television had given the nation a false idea of how long it took to process a crime scene, to interview witnesses—in this case, a lot of witnesses, upward of fifty people who had actually seen something as opposed to the couple of hundred who only thought they’d seen something. Going home wasn’t on the books for several hours—the rest of the day, in fact.

  Jesse took her statement, and Morgan’s, and that of everyone else who had seen anything. Of all the kids who had been on the float, Christa’s statement was the most coherent and thorough, but then she’d been the one kneeling with her arm around Tricks, staring at the pistol in Kyle’s hand.

  No mention was made of Morgan banging Kyle’s head against the pavement, and if Kyle had made any such accusation, Bo hadn’t heard about it. Kyle wasn’t there; he’d been taken to the county lockup—again. But the police station was as crowded as it had been the day of the Melody/Miss Doris incident, with people coming and going. The parade had been aborted, of course, but the picnic in the park was happening. Once the snarled traffic had been straightened out, there was nothing the townsfolk wanted to do more than gather in the park where everyone could talk about what had happened or what they thought had happened.

  Someone brought her some food from the picnic, and a cold beer. Bo really wanted the beer, but she was too tired and on edge to decide if she was on duty or not, so she settled for water. Morgan drank the beer and smirked at her while he did it. She didn’t care if he smirked. He’d saved Tricks, so as far as she was concerned, he could smirk at the world.

  Daina came to take care of Tricks; Bo let her go even though every cell in her body protested letting the dog out of her sight. Tricks liked the crowd and people, but she was getting tired and needed a nap.

  Finally the day wound down. Jeff Simmons was being kept hospitalized overnight for observation; the word came in that he had indeed been hit by the ricochet, but he’d be okay. Daina arrived back with a refreshed Tricks, who bounced from person to person to announce her presence, with repeated trips back to Bo to touch base with her center of security.

  And enough was, finally, enough. “I’m going home,” she announced tiredly.

  Mayor Buddy, unusually solemn, had been there through all the aftermath. He patted her shoulder. “You’ve had a hard day. I think you should take off a couple of days, get everything inside calm again. Unless all hell breaks loose at the park tonight, Jesse and the rest of the men can handle everything, and call you if all hell does break loose. I mean it. Stay home.”

  Normally she’d have soldiered on, but this wasn’t normal. She gave a brief nod. “At least one day.” She’d take that one, then reevaluate. She was exhausted. She felt hollow, and frighteningly fragile, as if she might shatter without warning. She needed to just be home.

  “I’ll go get the truck,” Morgan said, and only then did she remember that he’d parked at the other end of town, where the parade began.

  “No need for that,” Mayor Buddy said, evidently realizing exactly where they had parked that morning. “My car is here, hop in and I’ll take you to it.”

  “Thanks, but we have Tricks,” Bo pointed out. A lot of people didn’t want a dog in their car; she’d been one of them, until Tricks.

  Mayor Buddy looked down at Tricks, who was lying with her muzzle resting on Bo’s foot, and a spasm crossed his face. The official word going around was that Kyle had been about to shoot Bo, but she knew differently, and evidently some other people did too. “She can ride in my car any time,” he said. “In the front seat, if she wants.”

  Bo managed a smile. It was weak, but it was a smile. “Don’t give her any ideas.”

  The ride to the park was a matter of a few minutes; the park was filled with people finishing the day the way they’d planned it, with picnics, food trucks, balloons, games, and fireworks to close out the festivities after dark. For most of them, the morning’s excitement had been a momentary distraction that hadn’t touched them at all other than giving them something to talk about while they ate their grilled burgers and hot dogs. No one paid any attention to them when Mayor Buddy stopped beside Morg
an’s big black SUV.

  “I’m riding in back with her,” Bo said when Morgan opened the back door for Tricks to leap into her seat. He gave a brief nod and opened the other door for her.

  He started the engine so the air conditioning would run, then said, “I’ll be right back,” and strode across the green to one of the food trucks. When he returned, the brown paper sack he carried filled the Tahoe with the smell of grilled hamburgers and onions. With vague surprise, she looked at the clock on the dash and saw that it was well after their normal time for eating dinner. She’d eaten about half of what had been brought to her at lunch, too gut-punched to manage more, but now she was actually a little hungry. The funny thing was, if he hadn’t thought of it, she probably wouldn’t have eaten at all.

  Tricks had great interest in the smells coming from that paper sack, but the seat harness prevented her from jumping into the front seat to check it out. Nevertheless, she leaned forward as far as she could go, her dark eyes focused on the sack. Bo put her hand on Tricks, sinking her fingers into the soft fur, needing to feel the warmth and life still there. She needed to touch her.

  Morgan glanced at her in the rearview mirror. “Gooding will probably plead guilty.”

  She stirred herself, made a small scoffing sound. “Kyle? His father is probably in touch with every judge and lawyer he knows right now, trying to make it go away.”

  “I’m fairly certain that won’t happen this time.” He didn’t say any more, but she wasn’t stupid, and she definitely remembered his expression—as well as the fifteen minutes when he’d had “something to do.” She could see an echo of that expression on his face now, in the iciness of his eyes. She was fairly certain that if Kyle did plead guilty, it would be because he was afraid not to. She was good with that, and she didn’t intend to ask any questions.