Twenty-two
Sheriff Gene Packerson caught a few hours sleep in
the afternoon and returned to the substation before midnight. A cold rain
fell. The forecast had promised rain would continue through the night.
His new dispatcher, too, was working the graveyard
shift this particular night. She eyed him as he came in and rose in
silence to her feet. Gene watched in utter amazement as she filled his
mug with coffee at the machine and followed him into his office. "Black
and strong," she said with a smile. "And hot."
Gene accepted his mug. "I have daughters who would
never allow this. I’d have to get my own coffee, and they’d probably make
you wear an overcoat.”
Sheila perched her hourglass body on the edge of his
desk and eyed him with her big brown eyes. “Tell your daughters that I,
too, would kill to protect my father’s virginity.”
Gene burst out laughing, all but spilling his coffee.
"Deputies Reeves and Langton said they'd be in at
midnight like you asked. They finished delivering those court papers, but
got tied up with an accident out on Fairlane Road."
"Thank you, Sheila."
She slipped off his desk and pulled the wrinkles from
her dress. Casually, she turned and sauntered away.
Ben arrived first at ten after midnight. "Jim's on
his way." He fetched coffee and sat in Gene's cubicle with his back to
the office window. Noticing Gene's frequent glance toward the outer
office, he looked around and with a knowing smile moved his chair out of
his superior's line of sight.
"Ask her out," Ben
suggested.
Gene was horrified. "She's what, twenty-four? For
God's sake, man, she's younger than either of my daughters!"
"Twenty-two," Ben said sadistically. "Try to picture
that hot little number in the buff."
Gene's heart hammered at the thought. "What use
would she have for an old fart like me?”
"Hey, Gene, twice the age, twice the man. You’re the
Wyatt Earp of the county, one lean, mean, aging machine. You don't think
she's playing up to you the way she swings those ball-bearing hips and
fetches your coffee? Lots of girls that age got a thing for older men."
Gene sighed. "Shit. I wouldn't know what to do with
her. She'd kill me."
"Okay, so she kills you. You get buried with a grin
on your face, your coffee mug in your right hand, and a hard-on. What
more do you want out of life?"
Gene feigned a suspicious look. "You and Jim are
putting her up to it. You're after my badge."
Ben chuckled and raised an eyebrow. "Fair trade?"
"Yeah, now that I think about it."
Jim came into the office wearing an intense frown,
seldom noticing that the rest of the world managed to function in better
spirits than himself.
"So," Gene said, looking between the two. "How's our
prime suspect behaving?"
Ben looked to Jim to do the talking, which was a
shame. Ben was the bigger and easier going of the two, a tad slow, but
thoughtful, and ultimately more reliable and accurate than his
hyperkinetic partner.
"He's an asshole," Jim muttered.
"Yeah, but you don't disrespect the man," Ben said,
"even when he's been drinking. He's got those martial arts of his
hard-wired into his brain."
"He wouldn't have taken us down so easy had we cut
him less slack," Jim Langton said, visibly irked by their run-in with John
Hartman.
Gene studied Langton with displeasure. "If an
experience teaches a valuable lesson, I don't mind an analysis of the
screw-up, but I'm not interested in hearing excuses for getting your ass
kicked. Did either of you see anything that would lend you to believe
that John Hartman is not the man we knew and worked with a few short years
back?"
Jim stared at the front of the desk and refused an
opinion. He had never liked John and refused to volunteer a kind word.
"He's still drinking," Ben offered.
"The drinking got him canned," Gene said. "It cost
him his wife's life. It doesn't make him a murderer."
Ben shrugged after a careful moment's consideration.
"He's clean as far as I can see."
Gene eyed the
two men unhappily. "The state prison got back to me real quick on the
surgical pin and dentures. They have x-rays that show identical hardware
in Julian Ackorage's right leg. The fact that he would have had to have
been butchered in order for the parts to have been removed from the body
means that we have a practiced and seriously twisted killer on our hands,
and a mass murderer to boot considering how fast these disappearances are
going down. The community is going to want a quick arrest. They'll
settle for John Hartman, if anything of our investigation to date leaks to
the press. And if John thinks his son's life is endangered by the
publicity, he may try to run."
"We'll catch him if he runs," Jim Langton said with
lingering bitterness.
Gene slammed his fist against his desk in a surge of
anger. Both deputies winced.
"I don't want to arrest the wrong man to satisfy a
witch hunt! If we waste time on Hartman, we're letting our man run free
and risking God only knows how many more lives!"
Gene took a deep breath to calm himself. "What I
want you two to do is to watch the Ridge. Stake out the slope where these
disappearances have taken place. Twenty-four hours a day."
The two deputies glanced at one another in surprise.
"That's quite a job for two men, Gene," Ben said carefully.
"I'll bring in help, but you two know the Ridge
better than anyone. Coordinate the effort. We have another few days to
wrap this case up before Orville Kahl gets around to making his move.
When that happens, if we're in his way, we're going to get flattened by
money and political power and find ourselves wallowing on the sidelines of
this investigation. Do we want that to happen?"
"No, sir," Ben said.
"How about you, Jim? Do you want to collect
unemployment?"
Jim shook his head in abject misery.
"These disappearances have occurred in an area of
hardly more than a few square acres. We may be dealing with stealth, but
not necessarily a great amount of forethought. The next time a potential
victim stands in the way of harm, I want one of you two or one your
subordinates on hand to save their ass and take the perpetuator down. Can
you handle it, do you think?"
"Sir, surveillance is likely to scare off the
perpetuator," Jim said in a tone of voice than sounded dangerously
condescending.
Packerson sighed. "Do you have an IQ. higher than
the caliber of your service revolver, Jim?"
Jim glanced up with fire in his eyes. They all knew
he had completed his law enforcement training at the top of his class.
"Yes, sir. Somewhat."
"Then put the excess to good use. If John Hartman is
not our man, then the perpetuator can't be all that familiar with the
layout of the slope. He can't be a local. We'll have access to
state-of-the-art surveillance equipment. Considering the severity of the
problem, I can get what I need on loan. If we're inadequate to putting
the resources of the state to good use, our careers are in big trouble.
Are we inadequate, gentleman?"
"No, sir," Jim said. Ben shook his head, but with a
doubtful frown.
Gene eyed each man hard. "I'm taking you off your
usual schedules until you find me the bastard that hurt Orville Kahl's
little girl. Please be quick about it."
Jim paused on the way out of the office.
"And if he is our man?"
Gene had given the possibility some thought. "If we
find out he is, we don't let him know. We call in outside help. The
three of us, with drawn guns, could not take that man down."
