(II)
Chief Sutter had felt
not quite right all day. This morning, for instance, he’d wakened
with a grand erection—rare for a man his age—but when he took a
look at his wife snoring next to him, he realized he’d sooner
attempt to copulate with a grounded manatee. The box of
jelly-filled doughnuts he’d picked up for breakfast at the
Qwik-Mart was stale. He’d had a headache and a half since morning,
which turned into a headache and seven-eights by noon from the
pollen and the heat. All kinds of shit was going down in his town,
none of which Sutter could reckon, and the only thing he had to
look forward to all day was the Squatter cookout, which had kicked
off just fine, and then he got a call from Trey on the radio.
Something happened at the station. Jesus.
“What are all the
damn lights doin’ off?” were the first words to exit Sutter’s mouth
when he came in.
Trey looked up from
his desk with an expression like bewilderment. The younger man
rubbed his face. “Things are startin’ to get really fucked-up
’round here, Chief. I don’t know where to start.”
Sutter looked at his
watch, his patience ticking away with it. “Why’d you call me down
here at midnight, Trey? And why’d you turn off the lights? Start
talkin’. Now.”
“Ricky Caudill’s
dead, Chief,” Trey blurted.
“Bullshit.” Sutter
bulled past Trey’s desk to the cells. The only light that remained
on was the hall light, which bled into Caudill’s unit. The cell
door stood unlocked.
“Fuck!” Sutter
shouted.
Eventually Trey came
down the hall. He was edgy, fidgeting. “That’s how I found him,
Chief. Looks like . . .”
Sutter was leaning
over the cot. “It looks like all his blood’s gone is what‘choo were
about to say.” The wizened face looked pale as old candle wax.
There was no blood on the floor, none on Caudill’s clothes, no
evidence of a wound. “It’s fuckin’ crazy,” Sutter murmured,
staring.
Trey turned on the
cell light. Sutter unbuttoned Cauldill’s shirt to reveal a
sheet-white chest underscored with blue veins. The lack of color in
the flesh made Ricky’s chest hairs look like jet-black wires. The
nipples were purple. Sutter lifted up the arm that dangled off the
cot, then pushed Caudill’s body on its side. “No lividity,” he
said.
“What’s that,
Chief?”
“We’ve seen corpses
before, Trey. After they’re dead an hour or two, the blood settles
to the low points a’ the body and turns blue. But not here. It’s
impossible.”
“I know, Chief,” Trey
agreed wearily. “Lotta impossible shit been goin’ on lately, and
you know what folks’re sayin’.”
Sutter turned and
bellowed, “I ain’t believin’ no shit about Everd Stanherd hexin’
people! Ain’t no reason for Everd to hex Ricky or Junior
anyway!”
Trey shrugged where
he stood. “There is if it was Ricky ‘n’ Junior who killed the Hilds
and the Ealds.”
Sutter’s face was
reddening. “Why would they do that? You’re sayin’ the Caudills were
into selling crystal meth, too?”
“I don’t know, Chief.
Gimme another explanation, then. Somebody killed Ricky in his cell,
drained all his blood without spillin’ a drop? You tell
me.”
“There ain’t no
fuckin’ such thing as hexes ’n’ curses ’n’ magic! We’re
cops, for God’s sake!” Sutter yelled.
“You hear me?”
Trey waited through a
moment of silence. “Roger that, Chief. I don’t believe the shit
either, but then again . . . I don’t know what to make of any a’
this.”
“Did you call the
coroner’s office?”
“No.”
“Why?”
Trey let out a breath
at the same time he took an inadvertent glance at Ricky Caudill’s
grub-white corpse. “This place is givin’ me the creeps, Chief.
Let’s go back out front and talk.”
Sutter’s temper was
ranging up and down. He didn’t like not knowing things, and right
now the only thing he did know was that
something was seriously offkilter. “Turn some fuckin’ lights on,”
he griped in the station lobby. “It’s dark as a fuckin’ tomb in
here.”
There was a click.
Suddenly a cone of light blossomed at Chief Sutter’s very own desk.
But Trey was standing beside him.
Then who the hell was
sitting at Sutter’s desk?
“Good evening, Chief
Sutter,” Gordon Felps greeted him. Only the bottom half of his face
could be seen in the light. “We were going to talk to you
eventually, but certain events have expedited that
need.”
“Mr. Felps? What are
you—”
“It’s best if we just
begin as openly as possible,” the blond man said. “You are the law,
after all. But sometimes the law is malleable, for the greater
good. The Squatters, for instance.”
Confusion immediately
swept Sutter. He looked to Trey, who remained standing beside him.
“What’s going on, Trey?”
Trey sighed. “Chief,
it’s like last week, when we shook down those shitheads in the
Hummer. Common drug dealers. We fucked ‘em up and took their cash,
and booted ’em out of town, right?”
The reference threw
Sutter for a big loop. That had been private police business, the details of which he
didn’t particularly want to admit in front of Felps or any citizen.
“Trey, you better level with me about what’s goin’ on
here.”
Trey nodded, crossing
his arms. “That’s what I’m doin’, boss. And you are the boss; don’t get me wrong. We want you in
with us.”
“I’m not likin’ the
sound of this.”
Trey held up a finger
to make a point. “Lemme put it this way. Those scumbags in the
Hummer, okay? What if we’d gone a step further, Chief? I mean, what
we did was illegal. You weren’t exactly keepin’ the Constitution in
mind when you knocked that black dealer’s teeth out and busted his
leg—”
Sutter was enraged.
“You were part a’ that, too, so don’t ya go sayin’
that—”
“Chief, Chief, that’s
not what I mean, so listen to me. We both fucked those guys up, and we took their
watches and their cash—you and me. And
we’ve done stuff like that before because—let’s face it—the common
man don’t give a shit if the police steal from criminals and bust
their faces in. Forget about the letter a’ the law—this is
commonsense stuff we’re talkin’ ‘bout, stuff that all cops do, ’cos if we don’t take the law into our
own hands when we can get away with it, criminals’ ll drag this
great country of ours right down the shitter. You agree with that,
Chief. We’ve talked about it. What it all boils down to is this: so
what? We fucked up a coupla criminals. We stole from a coupla
thieves. And in doin’ so, we did help make the world a teeny bit
better, didn’t we? ’Cos those two assholes are probably
still in the hospital. They ain’t never
gonna sell drugs here again, right?”
Sutter’s blood
pressure was starting to creep. “Right, Trey, so stop dickin’ with
me and tell me what this is really all
about.”
Trey nodded again,
sticking to analogies. “Let’s go one further, okay? Let’s just say
we’d killed those two losers in the
Hummer. They kill innocent people with the drugs they sell. We know
they’re guilty. Sure, the Constitution ‘n’ all says they’re
innocent until proven guilty in court, but—shit, Chief—we saw it
with our own eyes. We don’t need no judge to tell us. Those guys
sell hard drugs, and folks eventually die from those same drugs. So
say we killed ‘em to boot. That’s against the letter a’ the law,
too. But what about the common man’s law? It ain’t that big a deal,
right? We killed a couple of killers and the world’s a better place
for it. Right?”
Sutter’s eyes shone
hard on Trey. “What the fuck are you tryin’ to tell
me?”
“What Trey’s trying
to relate to you, Chief,” Gordon Felps stood up and said, “is that
we’re all trying to make Agan’s Point a better place, while we’re
serving our own better interests at the same time.”
“The Squatters,”
Sutter croaked.
“Yes, Chief. They’re
a negative element, and they need to go. I won’t lie to you. I want
them gone so that I can make a lot of money by turning Agan’s Point
into the clean, upscale community it deserves to be. Trey wants
them gone so that he can benefit financially as well. The Squatters
are slowly sliding away from acceptable levels of morality. They’re
getting Into the drug trade themselves, which can only be bad for
Agan’s Point. If the Squatters leave, then Judy Parker will sell
the land to me and we can get on with the business of
progress.”
“What Mr. Felps is
sayin’, Chief,” Trey spoke up, “is that we want the Squatters gone
. . . so we’re helpin’ ’em along.”
The silence seemed to
tick along with the darkness, and with Sutter’s contemplations.
“Helping ’em . . . along.”
“That’s right,” Felps
continued in a monotone. “We knew that the Hilds were selling hard
drugs, so I paid Junior Caudill to kill them, and to make it appear
to be part of a turf-war scenario.”
“He jazzed up the
facts,” Trey added. “To make it look more convincing to the state
cops.”
“And then I paid
Ricky Caudill to burn down the Ealds’ shack, because we also had it
on good authority that they were running a meth lab out of it.
Dwayne, too, by the way. He was the first contractor on my payroll.
He killed about a half dozen Squatters who we also knew were
working drugs.”
Sutter stood
stock-still. Now it was all unfolding before his face and his very
life. “Ah, and you say you knew that these Squatters were into
drugs, so you were takin’ the law into your own hands by killin’
’em. To make Agan’s Point a better place.”
“Yes,” Felps said.
“And to serve our own gain.”
“So how did you
know the Hilds ‘n’ the Ealds were into
meth?”
“Street intelligence,
Chief Sutter. The best kind, which, as a police officer yourself,
you already know.”
“I’d been hearin’
about it for a while, Chief,” Trey said.
“Hearin’ about it
from who?”
“State cops here ‘n’
there, and county. Plus just bits ‘n’ pieces I’d been hearin’ on
the job. It’s all legit, boss. We wouldn’t have done it if we
hadn’t known it was rock-solid.”
“So what do you
think, Chief?” Felps asked outright. “Are you going to join us? It
will change your life if you do. Your financial problems will be
over, and you will get to be chief of police in a much, much better
place—the kind of job you deserve.”
Sutter
stared.
“So what do you
think, Chief?” Felps repeated.
The cards all fell
down. Sutter turned straight to Felps and stared at him. “I think
that you murdered them Squatters in cold blood. I don’t believe for
a minute that the Hilds ‘n’ the Ealds or any other Squatters had
anything to do with crystal meth. I think ya killed ‘em and flaked
’em with dope to make it look like they did. Just to get rich off
the land.”
Felps’s lips could
barely be seen in the darkness hovering over the desk. “That’s
regrettable, Chief.”
Sutter reached for
his gun, but—
Click.
—Trey already had his
own revolver cocked against Sutter’s head. “Damn it, Chief. Ya done
buggered everything up.” He reached around and hit his boss’s thumb
snap, then took his gun.
“I can’t believe
this,” Sutter said, remarkably stable. “You growed up white trash,
Trey. I pulled ya out, gave ya work, trusted ya, and now after all
that, you got a gun to my head? Are you really gonna kill me after
all I done for ya?”
Bam!
Muzzle flash lit the
station up for a split second when Trey’s piece bucked in his hand.
A chunk of skull blew out of Chief Sutter’s head in a way that
reminded Trey of the old JFK assassination footage he caught every
now and then on the History Channel—the old melon shot. Sutter’s
last act in life was to collapse before his own desk with a
considerable thud.
At least he got to
die with a bellyful of food.
“Good job,” Felps
said. “An unfortunate happenstance, but there was no other option
available. I need his body buried deep. Will that be a
problem?”
“Naw. Won’t be the
first time I been up all night.”
“Bury him and Ricky
in the foundation trenches at my construction site. I’ll see to it
that they’re cemented over. It’ll look like Ricky and Sutter were
part of the meth network, too. Sutter let Ricky out of jail and
then they fled. Be sure to plant some crystal in Sutter’s personal
vehicle and Ricky Caudill’s house. In addition, that other job we
discussed—the pier. I’d planned to have Ricky and Junior do that
too.”
“But now they’re
dead, so you need me to do it,” Trey finished what he already
knew.
“Correct.” Felps
looked blankly yet confidently to Trey. “Do you foresee any of this
presenting a problem?”
“Nope.”
“Here’s something to
tide you over for the time being.” Felps handed Trey a very fat
envelope. “I’ll talk to you soon. And congratulations . . .
Chief Trey.”
Yeah, Chief Trey. Trey rolled the title over in his
head. I really like the sound of
that.
Felps left the
station through the rear exit. Trey pocketed the sheaf of cash,
then began to mop up Sutter’s blood.
It would be a long
night, but a productive one.