Rude Awakening (26 page)

‘Sit down on that hay bale!' Anne Louise said, pushing Jean. Jean didn't have her crutches and she fell, the top half of her landing on the bale, but her bottom half landing on the dirt floor of the barn. Anne Louise laughed. ‘Jesus, you're pathetic!' she said. She jerked Jean up by her arm, getting her into a sitting position.

‘Why couldn't you just leave it alone?' Anne Louise asked. ‘I had everything under control! I should have known, after what you did to Emil back in Chicago, that I couldn't trust you to leave anything alone!'

‘Anne Louise,' Jean said, keeping her voice even, ‘I don't understand.'

‘Oh, for God's sake, Jean, don't try playing shrink with me! I'm better at it than you've ever been!'

‘Annie,' Jean said. She looked up at her partner. ‘Is your maiden name Johnson?'

Anne Louise laughed. ‘Oh you are just so smart, aren't you, you big old gimp? Yes, I went by Annie for a while as an intern. I got tired of Anne Louise after medical school. But Annie's kind of a silly name. Not the name of an MD, know what I mean? Had to go back to Anne Louise and then I married the asshole and got stuck with Cursey. Noticed you didn't change your name when you married your hick.'

‘I already had a career established as MacDonnell,' Jean said.

‘And what a career, too, huh, Jeannie the crip? Head honcho at this stupid podunk hospital in the middle of fucking Oklahoma, of all places!' Anne Louise said.

‘Then why did you come here?' Jean asked. ‘Why did you want to be my partner?'

‘Chicago was getting a little too hot to handle,' Anne Louise said. ‘There are things people just don't understand . . .'

‘Like a multimillion-dollar practice supported by the sale of Oxycodone?' came a voice from the open barn door.

Anne Louise swung around with her gun and fired at DeSandra Logan, who fired back. Jean fell over backwards, using the hay bale as a shield.

Milt had checked out Anne Louise's house. No lights, no answer at the front or back door. Everything locked up tight. He had no idea where DeSandra lived, but he called her home and cell phone numbers again. She picked up on the second ring of her cell phone.

‘Mike! That you? Where the hell are you guys?' she said, her voice loud. Milt heard the crack of a gunfire.

‘DeSandra?' he shouted into the phone. ‘What the hell's going on? This is the sheriff!'

‘Milt? Where the hell's my backup?' DeSandra screamed.

‘What backup? What are you talking about? Who's shooting?'

Another shot rang out and DeSandra screamed. ‘The . . . barn,' she said, her voice haggard. ‘The barn!'

Milt figured she must have dropped the phone, because he could still hear background noises, but not DeSandra. ‘DeSandra?' he shouted into the phone. ‘DeSandra?'

There was no answer and he disconnected the call, picking up his police ban radio. ‘911!' he shouted into the radio.

‘Hello?' came the voice he knew to be Holly's. Unfortunately, she didn't know how to work the radio and didn't release the button so he could talk. Finally, Emmett's voice came over the radio. ‘Milt?'

‘Something's going down at the barn! I know DeSandra Logan's been shot! Jean's gotta be there! I'm on my way. Get your asses over there!' Milt said and turned off his radio. He didn't need the chatter. He just needed his bubble top light and a heavy foot on the accelerator.

‘Sweet Jesus, you killed her!' Jean said, looking at DeSandra's body lying in the open doorway of the barn.

‘Goddamn! Who would think that stupid woman was DEA?' Anne Louise said as she walked up to DeSandra's body. She attempted to kick her in the ribs, but DeSandra grabbed her leg and pulled Anne Louise to the ground.

Anne Louise still held the gun in her hand. DeSandra grabbed her wrist, trying to wrestle the gun away from her, or at least to move it away from her own body. DeSandra stuck a long fingernail in Anne Louise's wrist, numbing her hand and letting the gun drop to the ground. Anne Louise jumped up, heading for the gun.

Jean lifted herself up from the bale of hay, using a farm machine of some sort to help her stand. She wasn't sure where her crutches were, probably still in the car that was outside of the barn. Holding onto the one piece of machinery, she worked her way to a chain hanging from the ceiling. She pulled on it to see if it would hold her weight; instead, the entire chain came down in her hands. It wasn't a particularly long or heavy chain, but she thought it might do the trick.

Jean swung the chain around her head, letting it gather momentum, then let it go. The chain hit Anne Louise in the head and she dropped like a sack of rocks.

I tore up the side road on Mountain Falls, then down the driveway to the barn. My wife was on the ground, DeSandra Logan resting with her head in Jean's lap.

‘Hey,' Jean said smiling as I walked up. ‘You're late. I've already called an ambulance. But go look what I did.' She nodded her head back into the barn and I went in to find Anne Louise Cursey out cold, with a heavy metal chain wrapped halfway around her neck.

I walked back out to where Jean sat on the ground with DeSandra. ‘Logan, you OK?' I asked.

‘Two shots, one to my shoulder, the other a through-and-through on the side. Might have taken a rib with it,' she said.

All of a sudden we heard sirens screaming up the side road to the barn's driveway. The first two cars on the scene were my guys and an ambulance; the next four turned out to be DeSandra's backup.

Jumping out of a still moving car, a young African-American man, dressed in blue jeans and a DEA windbreaker, ran up to DeSandra.

‘Babe, you OK?' he said, kneeling down and pushing DeSandra's hair out of her face.

She hit him with an open hand. ‘What the hell took you so long, Mike? I had to get saved by a damned shrink!' she said.

‘We lost your GPS signal,' Mike said. ‘We had to go to the sheriff's office. We were just damned lucky they were already getting in their unit to come here. We just followed.'

DeSandra shook her head. ‘Jesus. As usual. The DEA – a day late and a dollar short.'

Charlie heard the commotion on the radio. He called Milt on his cell, asked if he needed backup. A very happy Milt Kovak reported that no, he didn't – all was well.

‘Great,' Charlie said. ‘Just a heads up, though, Milt. You know that ammonia/bleach case? Boy, we gotta talk.'

EPILOGUE

A
nne Louise Johnson Cursey had a very sore neck. She was seen in the emergency room while handcuffed to a gurney. The next gurney over was occupied by DeSandra Logan, but not for long. They took her up to surgery, an anxious DEA agent named Mike following beside her, holding her hand.

My wife was seen, too. She had scratches and bruises, and her paralyzed legs had taken a beating. She had a broken anklebone on the left and a dislocated knee on the right.

It took me a couple of days to get all the info and figure out what the hell had been going on. Old Emil Hawthorne was doing just what we thought he was doing: going after Jean for vengeance, plain and simple. He felt she'd ruined his life, and he decided to ruin hers.

But he'd needed more help than just that of Holly Humphries, wannabe actress. Emil had gone looking for his old flame – the only real love of his life – Anne Louise Cursey, the former Annie Johnson. Not only had they been lovers when she was his intern, but he had actually helped her start her side business, which was used to pay her way through internship and residency, pay for a beautiful wedding (after Emil was out of her hair and in a coma), buy a very nice house in mid-town Chicago, pay for the best schools for her son and buy some fairly decent jewelry for herself. Her husband had belonged to the best country club and their vacations had been to places like Venice, Tahiti and Greece.

The other Dr Cursey, Anne Louise's ex-husband, Ted, a dermatologist, had just assumed his wife's psychiatric practice was booming a little more than it actually was.

By the time Anne Louise ran into Jean at the convention in Las Vegas, she had already divorced a very confused Ted, who couldn't understand why there wasn't more money in the accounts of her private practice.

Anne Louise had never really changed her sideline, it was just too lucrative, and nobody seemed to notice. As an intern, she had a key to the drug closet and would take out the class-C narcotics, replacing them with placebos. She was very careful to take only a few out of each bottle, so that the placebos wouldn't be noticed.

She was caught her second year as an intern. By Emil Hawthorne. Who knew a guy, who knew a guy. And what had been Anne Louise's little sideline became a very lucrative business, laundered through a rather pedestrian psychiatric practice. By the time Emil Hawthorne went into his coma, Anne Louise had all the connections she needed and was rather happy to be rid of the fawning Emil.

The DEA became interested in Anne Louise almost a year before Emil Hawthorne came out of his coma. They just couldn't get any hard evidence and were unable to get anyone into her operation.

As luck would have it, Anne Louise's marriage, practice and side business all began to go south at about the same time as the convention Jean and I went to in Las Vegas. Anne Louise figured that laying low in ‘Podunk', Oklahoma would save her side business.

DeSandra Logan, who'd actually grown up in Bishop, ‘came home' to take care of her mama, supposedly, and, through some DEA shenanigans, was the only applicant for the job of receptionist at the new psychiatric practice of MacDonnell & Cursey. The DEA assumed that Jean was in on the Oxycodone business.

For Emil Hawthorne, it was sheer luck that the love of his life was in the same place as the person he blamed for all his problems. At his insistence, he and Anne Louise started up where they'd left off, and he enlisted her in his scheme to get back at my wife. The threat of exposure was enough to keep Anne Louise in line – at least until she shot him.

Charlie Smith and me had a long talk about the ‘accidental' death of Kevin Holcomb, and my jurisdiction's ‘accidental' death of what would have been, had he lived, Kevin's father-in-law, Albert Canfield. It didn't take a rocket scientist, thank God, to figure out this one. Both ladies backed up each other on the abuse each took from their husbands, which might have justified a gunshot to the gut in the middle of a beating, but both of these murders were so premeditated they were at the point of being diabolical.

Carolina had learned well from her mama. Having had enough, what with the broken arm, Carolina's mama came over and helped her set up the bathroom. She sealed the window with duct tape, poured ammonia in the tank of the toilet and bleach in the bowl, lit a strongly scented candle, and waited for her husband to go pee.

In a strange way, Carolina was luckier than her mama, who had to push her dresser up to the door and lean on it to keep her husband in. Carolina's husband had already put a bolt on the bathroom door. The master bathroom was Carolina's punishment for whenever Kevin got irritated with her. He locked her in there often, and for up to days at a time.

So when Kevin finally went to pee that evening, Carolina bolted the door, stuffed the crack beneath with a towel and waited for him to flush the toilet. When he did, the ammonia and bleach mixed, and there was no place for the gas to go, except into Kevin's lungs. He tried, of course, to get out of the bathroom, beating on the door to no avail. Carolina said she just sat on the bed and listened to him, and cried a lot. She really did love him, she said.

So Charlie Smith's got a trial coming up for murder one against Carolina Canfield Holcomb, and we got a similar trial coming up against her mama, Roberta Canfield.

A couple of days after we settled all the stuff with Anne Louise Cursey and Emil Hawthorne, Anthony Dobbins drove Dalton Pettigrew to Tulsa to pick up his car, which had been towed to police impound. There wasn't much left of it. It had been stripped of anything sellable, including the bumpers. Far as I know, he's still dealing with the insurance company.

There have been a few changes at the shop, too. Jasmine's back full time. Her mama's taking care of baby Lily and I try to make sure she and Emmett aren't doing overtime at the same time. We're family-friendly around here. Oh, and the big news: Gladys retired. Seems all the kidnapping stuff was just too much for her and she decided she was too old to handle it. The crying jag that started when Jean got kidnapped took two days to quiet down, what with Jean's talking to her and writing her a prescription and all.

We got a replacement for her right away, though. Holly Humphries is our new civilian clerk, although she insisted on a uniform for her job. She doesn't have a Sam Browne or a gun or anything, but she wears her khakis real proud. After two weeks on the job and Dalton not asking her out, Holly took that one into her own hands. They've been seeing each other now for about a month and Jean told me she advised Holly, strictly during girl talk and not in any way therapy (so it was OK for her to tell me), that if she wanted anything more out of Dalton anytime soon, Holly was going to have to do the seducing. I hate to say it, but I think Jean called that one right on the money.

Meanwhile, Holly's volunteering at the Main Street Playhouse in Bishop, right now helping to make props and painting stage backdrops, but they promised to let her keep auditioning for parts in their plays until she got it right.

Dalton's sister Mary Ellen is doing real well after her thirty days in the hospital and getting just the right meds to deal with her bipolar disorder. All her kids are doing fine and her husband Rodney is trying real hard to help out with the housework and the kids.