Rude Awakening (4 page)

‘Okey-dokey,' DeSandra said, then hung up on me.

It was a real shame DeSandra was so stupid – excuse me, intellectually challenged. Otherwise, I'd be introducing her to every single man I knew – which wasn't a lot, mostly just Dalton and a couple of guys at the Baptist Church and one or two at Jean's Catholic Church. Because, despite her, ah, intellectually challenged state, she was a real looker. Short black hair in a pixy-like cut, big blue eyes, freckles on her nose, under thirty, tall and thin, with a very nice and very real-looking rack – excuse me, bosom. But all of that faded if you had to listen to her for more than a minute.

With a deep sigh, I got up to go and have my last cup of coffee of the day with the Longbranch police chief, Charlie Smith. We meet at the Longbranch Inn every day, either for lunch or a late afternoon snack. It's usually me, Charlie and my second-in-command, Emmett. Emmett used to have Charlie's job before Emmett had his troubles. But even with that history, Emmett and Charlie get along just fine. Today, though, it was just me and Charlie. It was Emmett's day off, but usually that wouldn't matter – he'd come meet us for some chicken-fried steak and country gravy, whether he was on or not. Or in the afternoon, he'd meet us for one of the Longbranch Inn's famous brownie sundaes that could put a diabetic in a coma in a New York minute. But right now, Emmett's wife Jasmine, another one of my deputies, was on leave – due to the fact that she had just had them a baby girl. These days Emmett had a hard enough time getting out of the house to come to work, much less just to come eat lunch or have an afternoon break with his buds; I'm sure you've heard all about those postpartum things. Hormonal craziness. But please don't tell a lady in that situation that I said so. They tend to be mean.

Charlie and me like to talk about our cases – when we have any – pick each other's brains, so to speak, see if it helps. Since I didn't have anything going except Dalton Pettigrew's mama's lame complaint, it was Charlie's turn.

‘Poor woman,' he was saying. ‘I felt so sorry for her. Laid up in bed with a lame arm, and her hubby goes and does something nice for her, just helping her out, and it kills him.'

‘What'd he do?' I asked.

‘Cleaned the bathroom,' Charlie answered.

‘Ha!' I said. ‘Now if that ain't a reason to leave women's work alone!'

‘No shit,' Charlie agreed.

‘But I gotta ask, Charlie,' I said. ‘How did cleaning the bathroom kill the poor bastard?'

‘Got to mixin' his chemicals,' Charlie explained. ‘Mixed bleach and ammonia, knocked him right out. Window was shut, vent wasn't on, wife was asleep and he just laid there ‘til he died.'

‘Man,' I said. ‘Rough.'

‘How you doin' on your speech for the commissioners?' he asked.

‘They're not gonna pay any more attention to this one than they did to the one last year. They just ain't gonna put out the money for that light until there's a dead body.'

‘You got a petition?' he asked.

I looked at him.

‘A petition, Milt! Hell, when I was in the City, we'd get shit done a lot with the signatures of a couple hundred thousand citizens!'

‘We don't have a couple hundred thousand citizens,' I reminded him.

‘No, but you got what you got. You get three quarters or even half the voting population of the county to sign a petition, you just watch the commission sit up and take notice.'

A petition, I thought. I could do that.

No pants meant no pockets, and no pockets, Dalton thought as he patted his new Jockey undershorts, meant no wallet, no keys, no cell phone, no nothing. He got to his knees; putting his left hand up for support on the wall of the red brick building. It took a moment for the slime his hand landed in to register in his brain. Then he yanked his hand away and almost fell down. He looked around for somewhere to wipe his hand; finding nothing, he opted for his new Jockey undershorts, knowing his mama would throw a wall-eyed fit when she saw whatever it was.

Dalton stood for a moment, looking around the alley. The sky was dusky looking, but he didn't know if that meant sundown or sunup. Looking at his wrist, he realized his watch was gone; the good watch he'd inherited from his daddy, who'd gotten it from his daddy, who got it upon his retirement from the railroad. Well, Dalton hadn't really
inherited
it from his daddy; his mama just gave it to him one day when he noticed it, saying his daddy must not have been wearing a watch when he abandoned his family.

Dalton sorta wanted to walk to the end of the alley, where he saw the occasional person walk by, maybe ask one of 'em what time it was. But he was afraid the next person to walk by could be a woman with a child, or something like that, and here he was without his pants. I'm certainly in a pickle, Dalton thought.

He put a hand to his head to scratch it, and felt a big bump and crusty dampness. Bringing his hand back down, he saw blood under his fingernails. Thinking things were now getting serious – blood
and
no pants – Dalton decided he needed to try to figure out what was going on. There was a wooden crate by the Dumpster, with a couple of bags of garbage on top of it. Dalton walked over and lifted one of the bags. A large rat ran from between the bags and over his bare feet. He made a screaming noise, not unlike a thirteen-year-old girl seeing her teen rock idol for the first time, and realized simultaneously that not only had a rat just run over his feet, but that his shoes and socks were missing, along with his pants.

Dalton moved the second garbage bag without the help of any rodents, large or small, and sat down, sinking his head into his hands and propping his elbows on his knees. This, he thought to himself, is indeed a pickle.

Unfortunately, much as he would have liked to, Emil Hawthorne could not carry out his plan alone. He needed an assistant – a helper, a gofer, an Igor, if you will. He rented a storefront in a soon-to-be-torn-down strip mall in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the closest, well, city, you could say, to Jean MacDonnell's hideout, and he set out to hire such an entity.

This entity came in the form of one Holly Humphries, the first and only applicant to answer his posting on ‘Craig's List'. She was a twenty-five-year-old former video store employee who had been fired for reasons unknown. Holly was tall and thin (although she preferred the term ‘svelte'). She smiled a lot, sometimes inappropriately, and Emil considered her stupid enough to do his bidding without question. Especially since she declared that she ‘really, really, really' needed the money.

Holly, whose résumé listed her occupation as ‘actress' (she'd auditioned for a cable TV show filmed in the area and, although she ultimately didn't get the job, she
had
been called back for a second interview; the closest she'd ever been to an acting job and, therefore, according to Holly, worthy of mention on her résumé), was told by Emil that this
was
an acting gig. Since some of the equipment necessary for Emil's plan included a video camera on a tripod, Holly had not questioned the validity of her new job.

It had taken Emil a while to find the place for his ‘location shots'. It had to be near his prey, but far enough away that he wouldn't be found. After his first drive past Jean MacDonnell's house, he had a fairly good lay of the land. Mountain Falls Road was a 5.8-mile stretch from Highway-5 at mile marker seventeen, up Mountain Falls Road, where MacDonnell's house sat nearly at the apex, then down Mountain Falls Road back to Highway-5, just short of mile marker twenty-one. There was an open area near the mile marker twenty-one side, with a dilapidated old building and what looked like trailer hook-ups rusting away. A barely legible sign at the bottom of a path leading back up the mountain into what Emil took to be nothing but a bunch of trees, said, ‘
TO MOUNTAIN FALLS
.'

So, Emil thought, this was actually named
after
something. Although his healing body didn't really feel like it, he took the path leading up the hill. Breathing hard, Emil reached the falls in about twenty minutes of hard hiking. It was nice, he thought, but he'd seen better in his travels. Before his troubles. He could see all of Highway-5 from here. He could also see two other roads: one leading up the mountain just shy of the mile marker twenty-one side, and one leading up about half a mile from the mile marker seventeen side. It looked like some rough country: plenty of hills, rocky outcrops and all of it covered with trees. But on the mile marker seventeen side, he saw something that looked suspiciously like what he was looking for. A piece of land not as overgrown with trees as the rest, with a barn at the back. No house. Not another house in sight, actually. All the houses he'd seen had been on Mountain Falls Road itself; none on either of the roads cutting through the lower part of the mountain.

He hurriedly took the path back to his rented van and got on Highway-5 at the mile marker twenty-one side, turning left toward Longbranch, in the opposite direction of Tulsa. He took it slow, almost missing the road he'd seen from atop the mountain. It didn't have a name, just a number: County Road 450. It was a gravel road which lead him between heavily forested patches on both sides before he finally found the fence that enclosed the piece of land he'd seen from above. It looked pretty overgrown to him, but he remembered that, from a bird's eye view, you could tell it had once been a farmer's field. Finding the entrance, a mere break between the barbed wire fencing, he saw a faded sign: ‘
FOR SALE BY OWNER: CALL
', and a number so blurred that it was impossible to read.

Emil Hawthorne smiled as he turned his van onto the rutted driveway, heading for the old barn. This is the place, he thought. An old barn, apparently once painted red, but now mostly weathered wood, sat about a quarter of a mile back from the county road. The potholed driveway leading to the barn had high weeds growing up between the two weather-beaten tracks. Weeds grew high all around the barn, including at the entrance to the half-open barn door.

Emil got out of his van and walked up to the barn door. Pushing and pulling, he finally managed to open the other half of the door – that is, if you consider the door falling off its track and landing on the ground as ‘open'. He dragged the door so that it was inside the barn, against the wall, and went back to his van for a flashlight. Now armed with a flashlight, he could see that the inside of the barn was a good space. A large, open space with a couple of rotting bales of hay. He just needed a few accessories and it would be perfect.

The next day was Friday, and Emil told his new assistant, Holly, ‘We start filming tomorrow.' Holly was a little taken aback. There had been no rehearsal. She worried her improv skills just weren't what they should be. But when he told her they would be leaving for location shots early in the morning, she packed without question.

Sarah. It had all been about Sarah. His mind was a little mushy, but he could remember Sarah. How could he not? The love of his life.

On Thursday evening Dalton had driven from Longbranch to Tulsa, excited about seeing Sarah. They were to meet in a coffee shop, a Starbucks, at noon on Friday. He was pretty excited about that. He'd never been to a Starbucks, and it seemed pretty sophisticated to him. Meeting at the Starbucks. Like out of a movie or something. But tonight he was going to stay at a Motel 6. He'd requested a king-sized bed in a no-smoking room on the top floor. It would be his first time alone in a motel room. He'd traveled with his mama and sister and brother to visit his grandparents in Omaha for Christmas, where they'd had to stay at a motel because the house was full once they got there (which pissed off Mama Clovis so much that the next time she'd gone to visit her parents was for the funeral of one, then the other). Once just he and his big brother Hawke had gone to Branson, Missouri for two days as a kind of bachelor party right before Hawke got married, and once he and Anthony Dobbins, another deputy at the sheriff's department, had gone together to Oklahoma City for a conference and stayed three days in a real life hotel, with elevators and restaurants and meeting rooms. It had been the greatest weekend of his life – until this one.

Friday morning he got up and shaved closely, showered, did all those things a man does to impress a lady with his neatness, and was finished and ready to go by nine o'clock.

At eleven, he shaved again, packed his bags, checked out of the motel, got into his car and headed to the Starbucks. He got there early, of course, but it took him a good five minutes to figure out what he wanted to drink. Those drinks were plenty confusing and he had to ask a lot of questions. He knew the people behind him were getting antsy about all his questions, but he wanted to be sure of what he was getting. There were gonna be enough surprises this day, he thought, without having his coffee be a surprise as well.

He finally chose an African blend with a shot of vanilla, heavy steamed cream and put in three sugars himself. He found a table for two, sat down and proceeded to blow on his coffee until it cooled off some. Taking a sip, he decided it was probably the best drink he'd ever put in his mouth. He smiled, thinking this was just the way it was supposed to be – sitting in a Starbucks, waiting for his girlfriend, a fancy coffee drink going smooth down his gullet.

Of course, she wasn't his girlfriend yet, but she was gonna be. He knew that in his heart. This was the real thing, finally. He had almost decided against even looking at his prospective mates after signing up and paying for his ‘Mate-Match.' But finally he'd just closed his eyes and hit the button. They'd sent him five profiles with pictures of the ladies. Sarah's picture had stuck out like a rose in a field of dandelions. And her profile was perfect: twenty-five years old, never married, kindergarten teacher, with hobbies that included reading, riding horses, taking long walks and gourmet cooking.