Take One With You (4 page)

For a long while JT was as ignorant of Mister Tee’s history as Charlie Sanderson was of Melissa and her sister and Big Max, but it would not be long before the lives of them all would be forever entwined, and their secrets revealed to all.

In spite of what the world would later discover they all had in common, it would be JT who would come to be known as the Pioneer. The very first TOWY.

Though he would never know that, if he had, JT would have also known that his father, and his grandfather before him, would have been proud he had taken his stand.

1 YEAR, 9 MONTHS AFTER TOWY WEBSITE

Grand Jury Exhibit ‘G
’
Officer Anita Hellstrom’s Notebook From Vehicle Console

Notebook Details
(from top): Flowers??, Clairebear – AKA?, Charlie – Sarah, JT, El Culo, 21 Smithfield, (phone # eligible), Who’s Address?, Max Cody, LAX, (scratches eligible)

It was getting harder and harder for Sarah’s mother to keep her daughter out of jail.

Sarah herself wasn’t particularly concerned. She had always been very good at figuring people out, especially when it came to the line between sympathy and exasperation and exactly how far she could use the former to delay or completely forestall the latter.

But even Sarah understood a lot of that changed when she turned eighteen.

Men were easiest, of course. Ironically, the older they were, the better. A lot of the grandpas were just that, grandfatherly, although she suspected, and she would have been right, that the perv never dies within the loins of man. She was pretty sure more than a few of those geezers went home to pop a pill and give it to grandma hard and heavy while imagining her face in their lap, an image that never failed to both fascinate and repulse her.

It always made her think of her cherry-popper, a British exchange student almost five years her senior who’d taken one look at the fifteen year-old state senator’s daughter and pronounced her “flat out bangin’” and then proceeded to do just that as often as he could sneak past the dogs at her parents’ estate.

She’d quickly grown tired of his inane blather, which seemed to revolve almost exclusively around her “tight box and rock n roll tits”, another of his rude expressions whose charm eluded her.

Sarah found men tiresome after that, and in spite of her somewhat slutty reputation at school, due mainly to a small, jealous clique of equally wealthy but much less intelligent fashionistas, she would not do the deed for several more years.

Which didn’t mean her charms went to waste.

The younger cops were next behind the grandpas, still easy because they were usually arrogant enough that they thought they could actually get her. But like the envious heathers from the private academy her father insisted she attend, their IQs were usually in the range of room temperature.

If you lived in the Yukon.

Worst of all, naturally, were the ladies. No amount of guile ever seemed enough to completely erase her long, chestnut hair and perfect teeth, along with an athletic figure most of them would have given their career for. Indeed, had they looked like Sarah, they would have never gone into law enforcement at all. A thought that crossed more than one mind as reports were being written in vain before the inevitable call from the senator’s chief of staff reminding them there was even more to resent the little bitch for.

Had just one of them actually taken an interest in what Sarah had to say, they would have discovered a preternaturally mature young woman who was, to put it simply, too smart for her own good.

She’d been obsessed with suicide ever since she was a child, after finding old albums filled with newspaper clippings, letters, and other evidence that some serious mental illness flowed through the females on her mother’s side of the family.

Her great-great grandmother Alice lost her husband not to the Great War, but to the influenza pandemic that swept through the ranks of the newly mobilized as they geared up for the battlefields of Europe. He died on Armistice Day as the rest of the country celebrated, breathing his last to a first year medical student in a tent city near Boston Harbor, still waiting to ship out.

Alice checked into the honeymoon suite of the Waldorf Astoria in New York City on Christmas Eve, threw wide the casement windows and lay down on the bed to await her wintry dissolution, which came mercifully quickly. Her infant child was found under a coat in the closet by a chambermaid several hours after her mother’s body had been removed, the baby girl still sleeping and warm as toast.

That baby grew up to birth sixteen children, seven of whom were killed in a fire their mother was suspected of setting; nothing was ever proved, and she lived to the ripe old age of ninety-seven, as dotty as a shithouse rat to the end.

Sarah’s grandmother was also long-lived, and the only one of the ancients Sarah met personally. She was also the sanest, and Sarah loved her dearly. As a child she spent several summers at the old woman’s house, which smelled of oatmeal cookies and baby oil, and Granny Slaton would regale her with stories of her days with Sarah’s grandfather after World War II.

Sarah loved the old woman so much that she became terrified her grandmother would die right under her nose, and so used to sneak into her bedroom after she’d gone to sleep and listen in the doorway until she made sure the old woman was still breathing. Sometimes she’d wait for hours until she was absolutely certain, and then trudge back to bed as the sun rose.

She didn’t find out until much later that Granny Slaton almost never slept through the night, and had very likely been wide-awake as her granddaughter worried over her.

Perhaps the old woman wasn’t as sane as all that.

By the time Granny Slaton actually got a good night’s sleep, she never woke up, and while Sarah could never be sure if she had actually been standing in her grandmother’s doorway just watching the woman at the moment of her death, she certainly blamed herself as if she had.

It was the summer of her sixth year, the summer all her nightmares and obsessions were born. The summer of ideas, ideas that would eventually impact the world.

After that first sexual relationship, Sarah forgot all about boys and focused on computer science, then coding, and then hacking, which is why her father was constantly risking his career to try and keep his daughter out of jail. She started small, poking around into various state agencies’ email systems to see what people were saying about her father (he was almost universally liked and respected) and finally branching out into the lives and bank accounts of her neighbors.

She stole passport numbers and sold them to Ukrainians, dabbled in hardware virtualization, and even traveled to Europe for the weekend at the age of sixteen for a Black Hat security conference on the county dime, not that the county knew about it. Most of the time she left no traces of her work, but it was always with the neighbors that she got sloppy.

Even so, none of this really engaged her; Sarah had developed the attention span of a five year-old with ADHD.

Speaking of which, she also sold Oxycontin prescriptions for a while.

Not all of her pastimes were illegal. She took to trolling the Internet to embarrass guys who preyed on vulnerable women, allowing them to do most of the work as she watched with bemusement.

Sarah idolized her father, who was incredibly busy except for when she was in trouble, and she resented her mother those crazy and often suicidal ancestors who she couldn’t seem to rid from her mind. She knew she was troubled and didn’t care; she knew her crimes were cries for attention, but it didn’t matter.

She would usually cooperate up to a certain point when caught, just to get a feel for police procedure in case she decided to continue her malfeasance into her adult years, but she always held back just enough to provide both herself and any others she’d managed to drag into her crimes a certain level of plausible deniability that even the cops had to respect.

And of course, when she crossed into exasperation territory, she could always bat her eyes and wiggle her ass.

Except with the women.

“Sugar, don’t pull that crap with me.”

Margaret Swanson, the assistant chief of police since old man Perry retired and everyone got promoted up, sat across her desk from the snotty Crane bitch and smiled. She knew the little cunt hated to be called Sugar or Sweetie or Honey or Baby or anything that smelled chauvinistic or condescending in any way.

No, being condescending is your job, isn’t it Sweetie?

“Mister Deauville is going to press charges this time,” she added smugly.

Sarah shrugged. Large Marge wasn’t worth wasting her breath on and was almost as irritating as those stupid guys that tried to pick her up online.
Yeah, like I’m really going to fly out and meet some unemployed mechanic with BO and grease under his fingernails or some hipster doofus writing his thesis on the Exigency of Celebrity Gossip in a Post-Recessionary Economy.

“And your daddy won’t be able to give me any headaches, neither.”

Sarah’s eyes flashed in anger for the first time. Too bad her father would have never actually harassed anyone just for doing their job; he was so much better than that.

That was half the problem, really. Sarah could never measure up, not in her own mind.

But most cops would have known better than to even mention such a possibility.

Especially since her father died only a few short months prior, as Sarah sat in the exact same seat.

***

It had been a very long legislative session, and a very late night at the state capital building on the night the senator died. He staggered back to his office with nary an aide in sight, as he’d been working his staff incredibly hard for weeks, and as the light at the end of the tunnel was now in view, he figured he could coast the rest of the way under his own steam, for a change.

That had always been his least favorite part of the job; depending on staff who basically gave up their lives in the service of his career. Oh sure, they loved their jobs and many had gone on to careers in politics themselves, but he could see the toll it took on their families even if they couldn’t, which was ironic given the fact that he’d only recently begun to notice the toll it was taking on his own family.

It had been so easy in the beginning, to make excuses and soldier on “for the people”, but he’d been kidding himself. It was a selfish game the way he’d played it, and he’d finally decided to do something about it.

The senator was going to retire.

He hadn’t told a soul, especially since there had been so much talk about running for governor in two years. If he’d breathed a word to anyone, all hell would have broken loose in the party, and his final, meager achievements before the recess would have been scuttled for those legislators whose ambitions were still corruptible. He wasn’t even sure his family would want him to quit, and they were the ones who suffered the most from his work, if living in luxury could be described in any known universe as remotely resembling suffering.

Except for Sarah. Sarah would understand. Oh, he could imagine her tough exterior hanging together for a while as she assessed his seriousness, but once she understood exactly what was going to happen, she’d crumble. The hard façade she had built around herself over the years would melt away and reveal his little girl once more. At least, that was his hope. 

She was actually the catalyst of his change of heart, something he was sure she’d find supremely hilarious when he told her.

High-larious, Dad,
she’d say in that sarcastic tone she seemed to reserve for all things related to her father. If they spoke at all, that is. It seemed like the only time they communicated the last couple of years was at some local constabulary, as he was bailing or talking or threatening or cajoling or promising her way out of one bit of trouble or another. He didn’t know where she got all of that anger, but he wasn’t so blind as to think himself innocent or unaware that his child was spiraling out of control.

Still, it was easy to solve the immediate crisis and then move on, basking in the relative quiet between storms and losing himself in his work. It was simply
the way things were,
and it was an awfully hard path to turn back.

Until one of his colleagues had come home to find his son hanging from a hook in the back of his wife’s closet, inches above her thousand dollar Manolo Blahnik pumps.

It was the shoes that got him. He wasn’t even sure how he’d heard that detail; it certainly wasn’t his colleague. Probably a staffer’s gossip had crossed some invisible line between poor taste and downright venom, but it didn’t matter. He couldn’t get that image out of his head. The juxtaposition was perfectly horrendous. Perfectly apt. Perfect.

On the night he died, the senator was looking forward to catching some shut-eye on the overstuffed couch in his outer office before the final vote in the morning, after which he was going to begin some important legislating back home. Putting his family back together.

Sarah had been a real handful lately, and in spite of her weekly tantrum about him not paying attention to her, or because of it, really, he couldn’t wait to give lie to that particular complaint as his first order of business.

It was this excitement that probably killed him, as he was actually awake when the text came in. His aide had shut down the phones and the senator was so tired that he probably wouldn’t have heard his cell if he’d made it into REM sleep, but he was going over the conversation with Sarah in his mind when the familiar text tone interrupted his reverie.

He looked at his phone.

assholes giving me shit again

He had to laugh at those words next to the picture of his little girl. Sarah’s avatar was from when she was four years old. Such a beautiful child. Such a potty mouth.

He looked at the time. He could make it upstate in a couple of hours, do whatever needed to be done, and then just hop a morning puddle jumper in for the early session. Sarah would be completely shocked he didn’t let her stew until tomorrow evening, given the calendar. Maybe she’d even take the flight back with him. It would be nice to show her around one last time and then tell her his plans.