HOMETOWN SECURITY

FOR YOUR CONVENIENCE...

2008-01-28T13:02:00.000-08:00

Hometown Security starts HERE.

CODA

2008-01-26T19:19:00.000-08:00

.....Some months later...

.....Doc Taylor snapped his fingers and the magic was back.
.....Finally.
.....He dipped his smoke into the blue flame that danced on his thumb and the cherry crackled a welcome, the straight dope.
.....The V-10 rumbled under the hood of his new RV, the Fleetwood Tioga idling but impatient to hit the road.
.....Doc had gone and went and sold off his sister's house, traded in the Lexus. Over the weekend he had held a yard sale for road money. What crap didn't sell, he left on the yard overnight. Most of what was left was gone in the morning, and he paid to have the rest taken to the dump.
.....The Fleetwood had run him dear over at the dealership out by the Mall, damn near what he had got out of the house, but Doc had been in no mood to barter. He was getting the hell out of Dodge himself. Crawford had had the right idea, a man smart enough to see what was coming up on the road ahead.
.....Doc didn't much like what was going down. He was running out of future fast, and didn't want to waste what was left waiting around for something worse to happen.
.....He exhaled a burst of sweet-smelling smoke, turned his gaze to consider the officer manning the entry control gate of the new and improved high school.
.....The officer looked back at him with atavistic slits for eyes, an M4A1 cradled in his arms.
.....Doc didn't like the look.
.....He'd been around Dave McShane's entire life, and now here the boy was eyeballing him like something that had just crawled out from under a rock with sticks of dynamite strapped around his middle. Or worse. He'd been used to that look a long time ago, and wasn't in all that much of a hurry to get used to it again.

.....A nine-foot high line of reinforced cinderblock runs about Harding High School, rimmed with sullen-looking wrought iron spikes. The arch of the entry gate is embraced by the unadorned gray walls that surround the fortress.
.....Motion detectors monitor the off-limits green. The grass is perfect, untouched by anyone but the maintenance crew.
.....The former bell tower is now a guard tower. Bell removed and put into storage to wait until more secure times, the tower now houses a two-man team.
.....Kyle has finally found his calling, and he is very proficient at handling the tower's Barrett M107 .50 Caliber sniper rifle. His only abiding frustration is that he isn't allowed to take the armament out into the boonies to blow shit up.
.....He'd heard that the Barrett M107 blows shit up real good.

.....Doc wondered what ol' Roy Crawford was up to these days. Last he'd talked to Julia, she mentioned that she had received an e-mail from the former sheriff, and that he'd finally settled down on a isolated stretch of Mexican beach.
.....Maybe there had been more than a few e-mails exchanged, because Julia had just up and disappeared on Harding a few months back. Not so much as a good-bye or heads up to anyone.
.....Not that anyone but him had seemed to noticed.
.....It was getting to the point that there was no one left to talk to these days.

.....Inside the school more armed guards patrol the halls.
.....German Shepherds sniff at lockers, and students pass through a metal detector locked down in the main lobby.
.....For the students, it is the only entrance permitted. The only exit. They punch in when they enter, punch out when they leave. A GPS chip implanted in their student ID's track their whereabouts at any given time, their paths traced by a bank of monitors installed in a special office on the second floor.
.....It is an arrestable offense to not carry the ID at all times, or to tamper with same. Despite that, first offenses are usually only cited, the transgression noted on the offender's permanent record. A first offense citation carries a $1700 price tag for the parents of the offender, and the ubiquitous school permanent record is no longer something to be laughed about.
.....A second offense is exceedingly rare.

.....He didn't see much of Tanya these days. After she'd come down pregnant, she'd handed the Teacup over to Lolita to manage. Doc thought that Lolita was a swell kid, but he didn't feel comfortable talking to her the way he did Tanya.
.....Tanya still might have been only half his age, but Lolita was barely a scratch on the calendar. He liked the kid, but could never read what was going on in her head. Couldn't read any of the kids the way he used to. The new crop made him uneasy, with gazes as odd as blue eyes on a pitbull.
.....They seemed soft, like shaved puppies and just as goofy looking, but with a biting on tinfoil taste. These were the kids who were eleven and younger when the Twin Towers fell, the first ones finally on the verge of being set loose on their own after being hardwired in the aftermath.
.....Going from shellshocked preteen on the day of the world changed and getting buffeted with the sensory overload of propaganda over the next several years must make for some seriously stirred brain soup.
.....He would have liked to talk about it some more with Wolfe, now that he was spending every weekday down in the lion's den. But then, these days Wolfe didn't seem to have much to say. And even if he did, he wasn't saying it.

.....The in-house security detail is courtesy of a sweetheart deal set up through one of the local beneficiaries of the Homeland Security Department. The representative for Natrona County is now doing more than very well.
.....The company that handles security for the high school is now the largest employer in the county, with officers and technicians also driving in from Lumbeck to report for work. More often than not, at any given time there can be found more security employees than students in the cafeteria, now referred to as the Dining Hall. On the plus side, the food served is now noticeably better.
.....At lunchtime, the students are issued with their meals a red or blue half-pint milk container, the colors denoting Prozac or Ritalin. The daily requirement to be dispensed according to matching badge color, issued according to temperament. A Texas-based pharmaceutical company now handles the dispensing. As a side-benefit, studies are ran.
.....May we introduce Generation Big Pharma. Nothing matters and so what if it did.

.....Dan had taken on a teaching position at the school. But as the days following the shooting had led to months, Doc had found that their conversations had gradually become less than satisfying. And now that Dan and Tanya had a second one on the way, even more less.
.....Not that they didn't talk as much, but that what they talked about was less important. Big matters had been taken over by sports talk, television shows.
.....And he seriously didn't like the new look in Wolfe's eyes...

.....Occasionally, Chief of Security Clyde Kehoe makes an appearance in the hallways. More often than not, it is to make his way to his office, where he puts in his day surrounded by a bank of flickering monitors. Anything and everything that he needs to know about what's going on and down in the hallways and classrooms, even the bathroom stalls, is right there in front of him.
.....Sometimes, he even glances at them.
.....He's put the crystal meth habit long behind him, after seeing what the stuff had done to his buddy. Who would have thought that the shit would addle the man's mind like that, driving him on into becoming some suicide bomber?
.....Sometimes he wonders if the man had still been paid off in virgins in the afterlife, despite failing his mission.
.....To get them through the day, he and his big-titted Chief of Staff crack capsules of Ritalin and snort the rails off of a mirror. Just for old times sake. He likes the burn.
.....His medical covers all the Ritalin he and his friend can handle. On those rare occasions that they run dry, he has the master key to the dispensary.
.....The American flag still flies proudly from the pole standing tall on the green.

.....Now that he thought about it, he really didn't have all that much to say to Dan Wolfe, either. Didn't know why he'd even bothered to stop by the school before putting the town in his rearview mirror. The effort of navigating the security gauntlet didn't seem all that worth it for what would probably be a "Goodbye" and "Good luck" exchange.
.....He dropped the RV into gear and rolled for wherever the road led.
.....Maybe north. He'd always sort of felt like he was a Canadian trapped in a Yankee's body.

.....Officer Dave McShane watches the RV pull from the curb across the street and rumble off towards the town limits. He relaxes a little, but keeps the assault rifle cradled. The M4A1 is always to be held ready, never slung over the shoulder. It rests in his arms like a lethal baby.
.....The RV finally out of his line of sight, McShane turns his steely gaze back to the world in front of him.

.....Down the hallway of the school, a hand paused just above the green surface of the chalkboard, then continued to write:
.....THE ORIGIN OF LIFE.
.....Wolfe turned to face his class. Clean-shaven, hair neatly trimmed. Nicely pressed light blue shirt, sleeves rolled up to mid-forearm, tie. The beginnings of a paunch. A mustache.
.....Tamed.
.....Dometicus Americanus.
.....A framed portrait of Pierce looks down on the classroom:
.....HE DIED, THAT YOU MAY LIVE.
.....Debbie still in black, although the outfit was nicely accessorized. She caught sight of the binder of a young man a few seats down, the glossy cover featuring a ramrod stiff plank-faced man/boy in Marine dress uniform, at attention. Ceremonial M-1 rifle over shoulder. Your tax dollars at work, providing a doodling pad for bored teens.
.....The Gold Stars began to gleam in her eyes again.
.....“Welcome back, everyone,” Wolfe addressed his new class. “As I’m sure you all should have assumed by now, I am your new science teacher, Mr. Wolfe...”
.....He paused, glanced out the window.
.....On the pathway running below the classroom window, Tanya was strolling by in a maternity sundress. She met his eye and waved. He waved back, gold wedding band glinting from a spare ray of Wyoming sun that streamed into the classroom.
.....She looked away to continue her conversation with Mrs. Prescott, and Wolfe turned back to his class.
.....“Please open your textbooks to Chapter One...”
.....Lolita caught his eye. After a moment, she offered her Mona Lisa smile.
.....Her thighs separated slightly beneath her desk.
.....“...Verse One.”
.....His eyes burn with a newly kindled flame.
.....He is finally back home.
.....For good.

THE END

CHAPTER 31

2008-01-26T00:46:00.001-08:00

.....Wednesday.

.....The cry of a red-tailed hawk cut through the air.
.....Sheriff Roy Crawford sat on the hood on the Humvee and looked down on the only life he had ever known. He took a pull from the bottle of Rolling Rock in his hand and considered his realm, his domain.
.....Far below the bluff that he had parked the vehicle on, he could see the movement of people and vehicles making their way about the avenues of the town, on their way to something or away from something, big things that seemed so damned important from where they were looking.
.....Things that now seemed so utterly insignificant from where he perched. That’s it, that’s been my world for the last forty years? he wondered. He shook his head at the damned shame of it, the failure of forty years spent not doing one whole hell of a lot with the years.
.....Under the wide, Wyoming sky the town seemed to be nothing more than the patch it was on the rolling tapestry of indifferent landscape.
.....The hawk spiraled overhead in a widening gyre.
.....He finished off the beer and drew back, hurling the empty green bottle high towards the blue sky so that it arced and fell down towards the town.
.....The hawk appeared indifferent. To the bottle, to him, to the town.
.....It took a very long time before he heard the bottle shatter on the rocks below. He sighed and pulled another one from the half-empty six-pack parked beside him, and cracked it open with the key to the Humvee.
.....He was done.
.....All it came down to now was whether he drove back down into the town and set his affairs in order before he left, or just say fuck-all and keep driving.
.....His possessions were never really his and he wouldn’t miss them, toys bought on someone else’s dime. He’d unload the Humvee before anyone would even realize he was gone. He knew a guy in Cheyenne that would take it off his hands, no questions asked.
.....At this point, only the stragglers from the media were looking for him; everyone else, and even those that he had called friend, considered him a pariah.
.....He supposed he was.
.....Hell, even before he became one he was one. The good folk of Harding, Wyoming had smiled at him on the streets, but he was finally realizing just how much effort those smiles took. Of the hidden uneasiness of how much he and his crew knew about their hidden lives.
.....He knew even more than they were afraid to suspect, more damned dark secrets than he even wanted to know. The shit he knew that was behind the smiles he met on a day to day basis made him tired, weary of humanity in general.
.....Weltschmertz, the Germans called it, and he was in a world of it.
.....He was sick of being behind the cameras, seeing everything but missing what was important.
.....He still wanted that Ziegler boy dead, of course. But in a way that was struggling to his forebrain, he understood the why of what happened. Small shit that builds on up into big shit, like the experiment where they drop a little froggie in a pot of water, then slowly turn up the heat until the critter boils alive... never knowing what the hell was in the process of happening until it was too late.
.....Harding was in a world of shit, shit you would never notice until it was also too late.
.....He’d miss the damned town, of course. The comfort of seeming to know the who and the why of any given moment. He’d miss his friends, despite them being the bastards they were being now, and he’d miss Tanya. He’d miss Pierce, but he could take that ache with him anywhere in the world he went.
.....The only regret he held was that he didn’t tap Julia when he had a chance.
.....There was no need to go back. Eventually the friends would understand and everyone else could just go to hell.
.....There was nothing more he needed from Harding, Wyoming.
.....Of course, the $750,000 that he had skimmed from the Homeland Security annuities and squirreled away in the Grand Caymon bank account would do more than its share of soothing any homesickness that might arise.
.....He slid off of the hood, grabbed what was left of the six-pack and climbed into the Humvee. All roads led to the rest of the world.
.....He turned the key and the beast roared to life. Maybe his old man was on to something, bastard that he was.
.....The only thing you have to fear is fear itself...
........ and bad luck, of course.
.....He threw the former battlewagon into gear and set about putting that behind him.

CHAPTER 30

2008-01-25T00:18:00.000-08:00

.....Tuesday.

.....Dogs barked and children played. Adults set out for work or went shopping. Harding fell comfortably back into the routine of being a living postcard.
.....Off to the side of the picture loomed the Elysian Fields Funeral Chapel. The gray lady had once been a grand Victorian mansion, built on the bones of being the only game in town. For over a hundred years the dead of Harding had been wheeled through the corridors of the chapel, but when a cruelly efficient Texas-based chain opened its embalming room just off of the Mall, tradition had slowly but inexorably been laid to rest.
.....It didn't help the bottom line any when Wal-Mart began selling a line of budget caskets, and the diminished returns began to eat away the once proud estate. The steady signs of budgetary decay peeled from the sunleeched exterior.
.....The interior was only slightly less seedy, dim and moth-eaten. Faded plush, purple velvet gone dull. Swirls of dust played in the spears of light that leaked in through the weary curtains.
.....Muzak played gently over the audio system. "Seasons in the Sun".
.....Only the cold tile of the embalming room continued on without distress. Cool and clinical, the room gleamed white and porcelain as bared teeth. The solitary slab bolted to the center of the floor was the center of focus for the three men crowded in the room. In one last dance with tradition, the Elysian Fields Funeral Chapel continued to serve as the official Coroner's Office.
.....Doc slid open the zipper of the dusty black body bag. Roy and Wolfe took a step back from the released funk of stale blood and excrement. The sheriff sighed as he snagged a handkerchief from a hip pocket and propped it under his nose.
.....Wolfe slapped a hand over his mouth, couching his nostrils. He had never been exposed to what a man smells like when his insides are opened up for all to see. It was all he could do from adding part of his own insides to the general stink of the occasion.
.....It took a minute, but finally he was able to step back to look down at the dead man. His stomach roiled a bit more just from looking: they hadn’t spared the ammo on this one.
.....The sheriff turned on the portable cassette player and held it towards Wolfe.
.....“Is this the person that you saw in the school?” he asked from behind the handkerchief.
.....Wolfe looked into the bag and blinked. “Why is there a towel around his head?”
.....The sheriff turned to the doctor. “Doc, why is there a towel around his head?”
.....Doc gave him a cold stare. “You told me to make him look like a—”
.....“It’s to keep his brains from spilling out,” the sheriff muttered, turning back to Wolfe. “Is this the shooter?”
.....They looked at each other, and Wolfe sighed.
.....He didn't recognize what was left of whoever it was in the bag. But then, the tweaker from the Kwickie-Stop hadn't been all that social since Wolfe had rolled back into town.
.....What with being dead and all that.
.....“Yeah.” Wolfe nodded. “That's him, alright.”
.....“Thanks.” Roy turned off his tape recorder, nodded to Doc.
.....“That'll be it.”
.....Doc zipped the bag back up.

.....Roy and Wolfe paused on the landing. From the look of things on the main drag, things were almost getting back to normal in Harding.
.....Almost.
.....Cars drove by and pedestrians passed, but all went by without acknowledging the sheriff. Crawford ducked his head down as he lit up one of his Marlboros. He regarded the activity that flowed past their vantage point with an expression that Wolfe found hard to fathom. Hard lines set, but eyes that seemed... betrayed.
.....“So that’s it?” Wolfe finally asked the sheriff.
.....“Yeah, pretty much,” Roy confirmed. “It’s almost all over.”
.....“What about justice?” Wolfe demanded. “Putting away the real killer...”
.....“There was no real killer, just a big ol’ FUBAR.” Roy reminded him. As much as the truth of the matter was tearing him apart, there wasn't a whole hell of a lot Crawford could do about it. When what was done was done, sometimes all you could hope to do is spin it in a way that might set things right down the road.
.....He didn't have all that much faith in that, but added for Wolfe's benefit: “But justice will be served... my way. That’s the best I can do for this town.”
.....His mouth twitched. “For Pierce.”
.....“How...”
.....Roy’s knuckles were white as he clenched the rail of the landing. He just wanted the man to shut up and go back to fucking... “With no two-year-fucking-trial, no media circus, no defense attorney pissing all over...”
.....He swallowed. “Pierce was a hero, remember that.”
.....“I know.”
.....“That’s what we all need right now. He was a good boy, and he didn’t deserve what happened to him...but at least we can give him what he deserves.”
.....An Army sedan rolled by, the recruiter behind the wheel. In the passenger seat, Mike stared straight ahead.
.....Roy’s eyes were cold as he watched the vehicle continue on down Main Street, heading out of town.
.....“And that little fucker... if he doesn’t come back in a body bag, I’m gonna have one waiting for him.”
.....He turned back to consider Wolfe. A long, steady look that made Wolfe's mouth go dry. Finally, the sheriff nodded. “Now that Pierce is gone, there’s no need for me to keep an eye out for Tanya.”
.....Wolfe glanced over, then looked back down Main Street.
.....“Don’t disappoint me.” Roy kept his gaze steady. “Understand?”
.....“Yeah,” Wolfe finally matched his gaze. “I understand.”
.....The sheriff nodded, then dismounted the stairs and headed to his Humvee, climbed in and merged with traffic.
.....Wolfe turned at the sound of the door of the funeral home closing behind him, as Doc stepped out to join him.
.....“They got ya’, huh?” Doc observed. “Part and parcel of the One True Official Story.”
.....“Yeah,” Wolfe nodded. “The truth was found to be sucking. You?”
.....“If America was a John Wayne movie being made today, the Duke would be sending in some punk teenager to meet the bad guys at High Noon.”
.....“That was Gary Cooper, and what does that have to do with...”
.....“I’m a little too old to take up learning how to make license plates.” Doc grimaced, dragging out a pack of cigarettes.
.....“They don’t do that anymore. Now they have the cons doing phone sales or making jeans for some multinational...”
.....“Whatever, Dan. We both had a price.”
.....Wolfe sighed. “Mine was a lot lower than I thought it’d be.”
.....“No one ever gets their asking price.”
.....Doc offered him a smoke.
.....Wolfe eyed the deck dubiously. “Umm...”
.....“It’s a Marlboro Light.”
.....Doc batted one out and lit it for him with a kitchen match, then lit one of his own. He inhaled, then frowned, considering the cigarette. “Shit... this is like smoking a tampon.”
.....“For a doctor, you sure do have a lot of bad habits,” Wolfe observed.
.....“At my age, now’s the time to give ‘em a try.” Doc chuckled. “I’ve been thinking about finally giving heroin a run, see what all the fuss is about.”
.....They fell off into their own thoughts, watching but not seeing as the gentle townfolk scurried about beneath the blameless Wyoming sky.
.....Doc stubbed out the cigarette. He frowned his dissatisfaction of the smoking experience he found lacking, a look that spread to take in the whole town. “You remember that old fable ’bout Br’er Rabbit and the Tar Baby?”
.....“Yeah, well... sorta.” The storybook had been removed from the bookshelves of schools just a little before Wolfe’s tenure. He made a mental note to Google it when he had the time.
.....“This town is sorta like the Tar Baby... the more you fight against it, the more it sucks you in.”

.....The high school parking lot was still packed with news vans and RVs crowded together, side by side, bumper to bumper. It was a slow news week and there hadn’t been a school shooting in a couple of cycles.
.....The stragglers were still cooling their heels, waiting impatiently for the story behind the big explosion. Although all indications pointed to a failed suicide bomber, they still needed confirmation of the driver's nationality to confidently state it as such over the air. Until then, they had to settle for allusions.
.....After the fire had burned itself down, not much had been left of the lead vehicle. Just a swaybacked chassis and forlorn engine block smoking in a cradle of melted asphalt. Crumpled steel skin seared clean of paint. Although welded to the rear bumper, the Metro had still weathered the mayhem slightly better, enough that the rear license could be traced back to the owner of the Watergate Motel.
.....There wasn't much left of the driver, but in his absence it was assumed that Omkar Singh had been behind the wheel. Since Singh had apparently left no next of kin, Delores the cleaning lady was beginning to think that if she played her common law cards right, she just might have inherited a motel.
.....As for the other driver, there wasn't much left at all to be retrieved from the ruins of the Econoline. At the last press briefing, liaison Clyde Kehoe had reported that the identity of the driver was at that point unknown, as the vehicle had went unregistered since passing through more than a few hands over the past year.
.....All they had to work with to trace the driver's identity was a platinum HHS school ring, Class of 1986.

.....The FOX reporter had her Asian face back on and had assumed her turn in the prime spot, facing the nomadic encampment. She was framed by the camera so that the high school appeared over her right shoulder, American flag snapping proudly.
.....“... the shooter has been identified as a Twyla Wayne Gomez of...”

.....Several miles away, one Twyla W. Gomez of Lumbeck, Wyoming was in the process of realizing just how much damage can be done with a stolen MasterCard. Especially if one fails to report it stolen because it was their brother behind the filching and it was already pretty much maxed out. But as Ms. Gomez was finding out, there is no credit limit on a squad of Homeland Security troopers kicking down the door just before sunrise.
.....Waking up naked with a circle of lock-and-loaded assault weapons pointed in your face: Priceless.

.....Back at the motel, Wolfe had finally managed to bat the remote control into submission. His bag still packed beside him, he sat on the edge of the bed facing the television. He pointed the remote and clicked, a flash of snow as the channel changed. Grainy footage of the Mexican students being led from the jail by uniformed FBI agents to a waiting van.
.....“...a suspected sleeper cell of Islamic terrorists...”
.....CLICK. He changed the channel again.
.....“...this is Paris Hilton on scene reporting Live for E!...”
.....CLICK.
.....A high school portrait of Pierce Crawford came up on the screen behind the talking head as the anchor conveyed stoic empathy, a gleam in the eye that could also be read as a tear welling up.
.....“... out of the sketchy reports coming in at this point, the portrait of one true hero is emerging...”
.....There was a knock at the door. Wolfe stood to get it as the news nattered on behind him.
.....“... of a young man who gave his life so that others might live...”
.....He opened the door and Tanya stood outside, eyes wide, lip trembling.
.....“... who while receiving mortal injuries still managed to grapple with the terrorist in order to give his friends time to flee...”
.....With a sob, Tanya threw herself into his arms.

CHAPTER 29

2008-01-24T10:11:00.000-08:00

.....The media circus wound down as the sun settled behind the Teapot Dome, shadows lengthening and the stone faces of the bluffs turning blood red before they faded off into the darkness.
.....The circus may have wound down, but it sure stayed in town. Night fell on everywhere else for miles, but in Harding the lights of the town blazed for one night like a supernova in post-event activity. And like a dying star, the brightness would be short-lived.
.....Although the grounds surrounding the high school were now dark and silent, the rest of the town was a-crackle with activity. The phone lines hummed with speculation and innuendo. Televisions were for the first time in five years locked in all day on the cable news networks, with TiVOs armed and VCRs set on pause/record as channels were surfed, residents looking for mementos of their fifteen seconds of fame as they were interviewed LIVE for their views on the tragedy, or looking for familiar faces in the crowds on the other side of the police lines.
.....With the sole exception of the Teapot Cafe, every business in town stayed open into the late of the night. The rhubarb surrounding the events of the day an unexpected boon to the merchants of the community.
.....Even the chain restaurants went briefly from being a corporate write-off to providing a short-lived burst of revenue to be funneled out of town. Quarter Pounders and McNuggets and trans fat-saturated fries flew across competing counters before they could even be spared a moment to wilt beneath the heat lamps. No quarter was given, no breaks were taken.
.....The employees made the same amount of money as they would have on any other sleepy night, but were tortured for their efforts. Bambi burned off an easy five pounds before she was cut loose at ten.
.....Overtime wasn't for part-timers, and there were no full-timers at the chain eateries. It didn't help that you don’t get tipped at McDonald’s no matter how much you bust your ass.

.....Colby Elkhart didn’t have to care about minimum wage any more.
.....Springing him from his cell, Sheriff Crawford had taken him up to his office and set him down. A deal was reached. The sheriff guided him through the paperwork, explaining that POST was an acronym for Police Officer’s Standards and Training, and that while he didn’t really need the certificate to become a Harding police officer, it would still look good on his resume if he ever decided to move on to other bluer pastures.
.....The department was more than happy to foot the bill for the training, the sheriff explained, and Elkhart was more than happy to accept the $35,000-a-year position that waited for him on the department after completing the training. He signed off on the paperwork. Part of the papers he signed included a vetted statement of the events involving the terrorist plot that had begun at the Kwickie-Stop before being ultimately foiled by the savvy groundwork of the Harding Police Department, ably thwarted with the cooperation of the observant teen.
.....Crawford also filled him in on the police code of silence, and that there was nothing lower than a cop that ratted out on other cops. Colby didn’t see anything he needed to be a rat about, so he was all good. He’d be even more than good when he was finally allowed to slap on his rod and begin to extract a little payback from that asshole Dave McShane, who had been fucking with him religiously since ninth grade...

.....The Greyhound bus pulled out of the Harding depot as just plain ol' Scott Aaron Greenway eased himself down into a travel-worn seat among a handful of unfamiliar faces.
.....He was down with that.
.....Scott had left his superfluous T and his wigger gear behind in his bedroom. His travelin' threads were a pair of jeans, a plain white shirt and a fading denim jacket that was two summers past too small. He packed lightly and withdrew a handful of bills from the family rainy stash. The family was over at the Pentecostal church that evening, praying with that fruity reverend for Pierce’s immortal soul.
.....The empty jar went back the top shelf of the kitchen cupboard, light nearly three hundred bucks.
.....The first bus departing Harding was bound for San Francisco, and forty-five minutes later Scott was leaving his shame behind him. He left no note, and didn’t feel one was needed. Deal.
.....No one in Harding ever heard from him again.

.....The television remained off in the Ziegler house as the family gathered about the dining room table. Takeout from KFC remained uneaten, serving only as something to toy with. Even under the best of circumstances, the KFC Famous Bowl would be an intimidating concoction of instant mashed potatoes, corn, cheese-like goo and battered bits of chicken too suspicious to be served by themselves, but now the bowls stewed dangerously in pools of congealed grease.
.....Uneasy glances were spared towards the young man, his wrist set in a fresh-looking cast.
.....When the boy had been set loose from the police station, the looks thrown his way as the Zieglers had led him past the cops didn’t set well, narrowed eyes and barely concealed emotion. They felt as if they were part of a perp walk, not leading a victim off to the familial bosom. Mike had remained closed-mouthed through it all.
.....The shock of the events, perhaps. But still...
.....Headlights flashed through the open space in the curtains as the sound of a vehicle pulled up and parked. The engine was cut off and a door opened. Slammed shut. Footsteps approached the house and the unease in the dining room took on an almost primal weight.
.....They waited for the knock.

.....Sgt. Gary Hutchins stepped up onto the welcome mat and paused, hand poised to knock. He indulged in a quick smile, then sheathed it. In his other hand, he carried a video tape.
.....Surprisingly, the receptionist had been good for more than only one thing. The VHS had been in a deck separate from the regular feed that led back to the police station, and she had relieved the tape from behind the Main Desk at the high school.
.....And unlike all the data that had been pulled from the department’s state of the art digital equipment that had still failed to deliver a usable image of the face of the intruder, the old school video tape had captured a more than satisfactory moment of the boy in the hallway looking straight up into the camera, rifle cradled in his arms.
.....Sgt. Hutchins knocked on the door.

.....Three blocks away Sheriff Crawford sat on Pierce’s bed, a cigarette in one hand and a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniels in the other. The bed was still made and would remain in his mind that way forever. You could bounce a quarter off of it, a trick of the trade that Bryce had passed on to his son during his last and unknowingly final leave. Photos of two dead men looked back at him from where he placed them on the night table.
.....He drank deep and chased it with another drag from the Marlboro.

.....On the other side of town, the lights were out in Tanya’s cottage. The phone was unplugged and occasional knocks went unanswered.

.....At 2:45 The Larkspur kicked out the last remaining straggler, who checked his bevnap with bleary eyes and climbed behind the wheel of his patrol vehicle. The driver made a short detour by the station before heading down the road to The Watergate Motel. The afterhours party was in full swing.
.....The parking lot of the motel was packed. Vehicles filled every slot and more vehicles blocked them in. It was going to be a long night. The news agencies couldn’t be bothered to provide RVs for the folks that made the broadcasts possible, and so every window of the Watergate was ablaze.
.....At his knock, the door opened wide. The townies partying it up with the familiar faces of their nightly news and their support teams roared his name.
.....“Clyde!”
.....Whipping off his mirrored aviator shades with a wide grin, Clyde held up and waggled a small baggy containing about seventeen-hundred bucks worth of the finest crystal meth that he could score from the department’s evidence locker on short notice.
.....Three-time loser Roger Santoro had been given twenty-to-life for holding the same bag three months back, but tonight the media was more than appreciative for his sacrifice.
.....The crowd roared their pleasure and the FOX reporter slithered up to make his acquaintance. Odd, Clyde noted...with her camera face wiped off, the reporter looked more Black Irish than Asian.
.....She was finally over her sniffles from the teargas. The recovery didn’t last long.

.....Four doors down, in what Clyde would have considered one of the motel’s two Room 2s, Daniel Wolfe lay fully clothed on the uncomfortable bed, staring up at the ceiling. Even if every room of the motel wasn't rocking with the activity of the off-duty media blowing it up, he still couldn’t have slept.
.....He had the nagging feeling that despite everything seeming to be over, he was still in a world of shit. His calls to Tanya went unanswered, and when he drove by her house the windows were dark. There was no response to his knocks, no sign of movement within. The Teapot had closed when Tanya had left. No one had the slightest idea where she was.
.....His bag was still unpacked, parked by the door.
.....But he couldn’t leave. Earlier, before being sequestered by newly-arrived members from the alphabet soup of federal agencies, the sheriff taken a moment to pass on that he wanted... needed one more thing from him.
.....There had been the implied promise of a trade-off.

CHAPTER 28

2008-01-23T10:33:00.000-08:00

.....Tanya didn’t take her time dressing. She pulled up her jeans quietly, buttoned her blouse with efficiency.
.....She paused by the door, looking back to where Crawford lay on the bed. The sheet was pulled up to his bare chest and he stared up at the ceiling.
.....“This was an only time, Roy,” she murmured. “We have to live in this town together, you, me... and Dan, and we don’t need the complications.”
.....She waited, and finally he nodded. The door closed quietly behind her. The scent of Sand and Sable remained.
.....He could hear the faint sounds of her retrieving her bicycle from the side of the house, and the faint purr of the chain as she pedaled away.
.....He rolled over and grabbed the cigarettes and lit one up, eyeing the answering machine idly as he did so.
.....No messages.
.....He paused in mid drag, looking at the machine. There was never no messages. Every time he walked through the door and keyed the machine, he would have to sit through minutes of trivial bullshit, from asinine complications at the station to even more asinine complaints from the citizenry.
.....He vaguely remembered fumbling to turn the ringer of the telephone off, but...
.....He grabbed the cord from the machine and it trailed up easily, the mount hanging loose as he pulled it free.
.....“Fuck me.”
.....He turned on the ringer to the telephone and it immediately began to scream at him.

.....The milling mass of the news crews turned as the black-and-white Humvee roared across the football field, emergency lights flashing and siren wailing. Sod flew, rudely uprooted from the lovingly tended green and flung from the tires in its wake. Cameras swung around to capture the department brand on the side as it careened by to slide to a halt near the ambulance.
.....The sheriff swung out of the vehicle and bolted towards the crime scene, leaving the door open behind him and lights still spinning.
.....Cops moved in to meet him.
.....The news jackals grabbed their equipment and followed.
.....Clyde met him first. “Jesus, Roy! Where the fuck have...”
.....Crawford’s gaze was locked on the school. “Where’s Pierce?”
.....“...you been?”
.....“Is Pierce okay?” Crawford demanded as Clyde fell in beside him, matching the sheriff’s pace towards the rear of the building.
.....“He’s not here.”
.....Crawford stopped and swung around on the deputy. “Not here? Are you sure?”
.....Clyde’s brow furrowed as he concentrated. “Yeah. He was here, but after we did a body count...”
.....“Body count?” Crawford held up a palm, eyes closed. “How many?”
.....“Just one... the shooter.” Clyde smiled. He was on the ball again, or rather, on the eightball that he had managed to sneak in just before the sheriff arrived. “We nailed the son-a-bitch just as he was gettin’ ready to shoot the Ziegler boy.”
.....Crawford sighed in relief, then eyed the school. “Was Pierce here at all?”
.....“Yeah,” the deputy nodded. “But he must have got out once the shooting started. He got his girlfriend out and then he just disappeared.”
.....“Disappeared? What...”
.....That was all he managed before the media fell on him.

.....“How many are dead?”
.....“Did the shooter have a history of violence?”
.....“Were any of the victims sexually molested?”
.....“Is there anything that could have been done to prevent this?”

.....A chopper emblazoned with a FOX News logo roared past overhead, swinging around to get another shot of the high school as the bustle of the hectic Crime Scene continued below. Another wave of dust blew across any evidence that might have been found.
.....Parked behind the school, the rear doors of the ambulance hung open. The two EMTs gripped the gurney on either side as they rattled it down the stair leading from the exit. No delicacy was needed and none given as they rolled it up to the vehicle. A zipper was slid shut over a blood-stained sheet, and the gurney was manhandled in. The doors slammed shut and the paramedics rounded the vehicle and climbed in.
.....The ambulance took off, the sirens left untouched.
.....There was no rush.
.....As Roy watched the vehicle pull away, he turned at the sound of his name. Kyle was moving hurriedly towards him with a plastic bag in hand. Despite the exertion, the man seemed pleased about his delivery.
.....“Sheriff?” he gasped. “We got the shooter’s wallet.”
.....Roy nodded and took the package from the deputy. He snapped on a pair of rubber gloves, opened the baggie and pulled out the wallet.
.....He slid out the driver’s license.
.....He looked at it and took a breath, held it, and then exhaled. The corner of his mouth twitched, but otherwise his face revealed nothing.
.....He slid the ID back in its slot and tucked the wallet inside his jacket.
.....“Uh, Sheriff? That’s...”
.....Roy slugged him and Kyle’s ass hit the dirt for the second time in as many days. As the cop sat up again, rubbing his chin and regarding Roy with kicked puppy dog eyes, the sheriff stared off at nothing in particular, the wheels turning...
........and turning...
.....He didn't notice the brief wash of breeze from the shockwave that ruffled his hair, snapped at his clothes...
........ but the dull WHUP of the explosion that followed a millisecond later caught his attention. Every car alarm in a five block radius began to wail, a cacophony of various electronic cries that someone was trying to steal goodies, each trying to drown the others out.
.....Kyle's puppy eyes went wider as he looked across the football field and Crawford followed his gaze.
.....A small mushroom cloud was uncurling up into the air, roots concealed by the buckled cyclone fence that ran along Pine Street on the other side of the field. The plastic slats that had been wove between the links in school colors fluttered in the backwash of the freshly stoked furnace.
.....Kyle was already off his feet and bolting towards the new source of aggravation, making good time for a man packing fifty pounds excess weight. His waddling sprint would have looked pretty silly if the situation wasn't so damned dire.
.....Whatever he'd done wrong in the sheriff's eyes, the man was full on intent in rectifying it.
.....All Sheriff Roy Crawford had left to summon up was a tired sigh. Now what?

.....Straw Hat had slowed the white Econoline down as he cruised Pine Street, eyeing the avenue for Clyde's Humvee.
.....Whatever kind of hell was going down in the high school, at least he was making some amount of bank out of it. Clyde was already down for almost a grand in crystal meth for the day, and the day was nowhere near over.
.....Five minutes before, his "Achy Breaky Heart" ringtone had alerted him that Clyde was up for another bindle. Maybe two or three. Business was good. Maybe he'd get one of those new plasma screens out of the day. That'd be nice... football was just around the corner.
.....Just around the corner on Second Street, Omkar Singh paused his Metro at the stop sign, glanced both ways and hung a left onto Pine.
.....After the swarm of media had locked up every free room at the Watergate, he'd been idling in frustration up until Room 22 had dropped by to let him know that he'd be checking out the next morning. The man hadn't met his gaze and he had walked funny as he exited the lobby.
.....Singh was piqued. A assistant producer for MSNBC had just left the lobby, leaving behind a standing offer for a bed, any bed. With 22 staying on until 11am the next day, that was $480.01 out of his pocket.
.....He sighed. That was that, then. Done with handling the money for the day, he posted his cleaning girl at the desk to handle any complaints about television reception or lack of towels and headed out to the school for a look-see himself.
.....He took the back way to avoid traffic.
.....Singh glanced at the radio dial as he twisted the knob in search of better coverage. The speakers hissed and spat at him, the reception no better in the Metro than it had been at the motel.
.....Parked at the intersection of Fifth and Pine, Clyde dropped the Humvee in gear as he saw the Econoline near, slow down for the hand-off.
.....As he pulled onto Pine, the thought crossed his mind that with the chaotic events of the day distracting everyone from the small stuff, he might use the window to do something about his accomplice in the matter of that asshole from the night before. Not that he didn't trust the man to keep his lips shut, but on the quiet ride back he'd dropped a hint that for services rendered, his own services might be running a little dearer from then on.
.....Asshole. It wasn't as if it were all that hard to find another source—
.....Singh looked up from the radio to see the ass-end of the suddenly parked Econoline rushing up at him through the windshield. The first thing that went through his mind was a signal to his foot to hit the brakes. His knuckles whitened on the steering wheel, but the signal didn't make it the rest of the way.
.....At twenty miles an hour, the impact wasn't much of a jolt. But it was enough to set the rolling meth lab off like a small blockbuster bomb.
.....The last thing that went through Singh's mind was a million tiny beads of white hot glass as the windshield of the Metro vaporized in the fireball.
.....Three blocks from the epicenter, the blast knocked the Humvee sideways and dropped a rear wheel in the gutter. There was shattered safety glass in Clyde's lap and his ears were ringing. Mouth dry, he watched the fireball eat itself and then settle back down into the remains of the van. The mushroom cloud belched up from what was left of the vehicle, sides flayed out and down like a scorched banana peel. The roof fluttering off to settle onto the playing field.
.....The only thing on Clyde's mind was the question of where he was going to get more lines to get him through the rest of the day.

CHAPTER 27

2008-01-22T10:33:00.000-08:00

.....Mike turns a corner...
..... ... the beat pounds louder...
.....BAM... BAM... BAM...
........spies the bathroom door at the end of the corridor...
.....Smiles.
........ jacks another round through the chamber, just for effect....
.....WHAM!
.....A classroom door slams open behind him.
........Mike rolls to the side and swings the Mini-14 around...
.....Wild-eyed jocks spill from the room capping even wilder rounds.
.....Bullets ricochet about, unzipping the air.
........Mike lays down return fire and backs down the hall...
.....Fucking jocks.

.....The gathering mob in the parking lot scattered at the eruption of gunfire. Whitenoise light strobed from the windows with each shot. Stray rounds snapped like bullwhips over their heads as the thin yellow ribbons that announced POLICE LINE were ignored.
.....A windshield of a news van coughed and rear window exploded in a blizard of safety glass, showering the hawks and vultures alike as they flew to safety. Everyone but a fool ducked for cover.
.....The one fool stood like Patton at parade rest, jutting his chin for the camera. Deputy Clyde Kehoe couldn’t be bothered to look around and notice that all cameras were focused on the school instead of him.
.....From a safe position, of course.

.....BAM! BAM! BAM!
.....Bullets scream and zip through the air like metallic hornets around Mike as he ducks and barrels the other direction...
........as the door to the ESL lab slams open and a bunch of Mexican guys spill out and start throwing firepower the other way.
.....BANG! BANG! BANG!
.....Mike throws himself down another hall and leaves the firefight behind.

.....Clyde grabbed up a bullhorn, and began to pace about bellowing.
....."Alright, you guys... start lobbing in the tear gas."
.....The team stumbled about awkwardly, suffering a stagefright of sorts under the unblinking gaze of the news cameras that had swung around at the response from the SWAT team. Finally, the troopers got their act together and knelt, raising their M-16s with teargas cannons into firing positions...
....."FIRE!"
.....The cannons barked and canisters arced across the yard to punch holes in the windows. Gas began to swirl out.
.....Clyde stood back and watched happily, although he realized that he sure could use a nice frosty soft drink. His cottonmouth was killing him. He started making an odd clicking sound, tongue snapping against the roof of his mouth, the back of his teeth.
.....SNAP!
.....The windshield of one of the students cars made a popping noise beside him, a bullethole abruptly appearing in the center of the glass. The dark eye looked up at him threateningly. As wired as he was, Clyde finally realized that taking cover was most likely a good idea.

.....The smell of cordite seared noses and the haze of burnt gunpowder began to cloud the cramped corridors of the high school. The Anglos and Mexicans continued to pop rounds at each other, but the gunfire began to taper off as the hall filled with teargas.
.....Handkerchief over his mouth and coughing, Dave McShane eyed a canister rolling across the floor, gas streaming in its wake.
.....One of the girls ran by, hunched over and gagging. He wasn’t sure which one she was but he was sure he had already done her, soooo...
.....His hand shot out, darted down the back of her sweater and grabbed the back of her bra and yanked. The sweater came off with the bra as he pulled it over her head and past her arms.
.....Eyes the size of saucers, she shrieked, covered her breasts and scurried to her friends, gas forgotten. It was Molly, and he realized that he hadn’t already tapped that well.
.....Oh, well.
.....He turned, bra dangling in his hand.
....."A hand here?" he called out to the other teens scurrying around him. "As in now?"
.....Differences forgotten, Javier stepped up as Dave demonstrated; a fist over each clamp, a makeshift double-barreled slingshot. As Javier knelt into position, Dave swept up the rolling canister with his handkerchief and dropped it into one off the cups...
........ drew it back and aimed...
........ and let fly.

.....All eyes turned back to the school at the sound of shattering of glass. The gas canister arced towards them, hit the pavement and rolled, vapor trailing behind.
.....The shell landed near the FOX News Team and rolled up to them hissing. They scattered, indulging in a fair and balanced amount of coughing and gagging.
.....One of the troopers looked perplexed as he watched a familiar talking head scurry by, her TV face falling off in a spill of mascara as she vomited up her morning latte. Later, with her face firmly back in place, she’d smile inscrutably as she signed an autograph for him.
.....He eyed the canister and then swiveled around to yelp at Clyde incredulously. "Can they do that?"
.....The SWAT leader drew himself up as much as his cover would allow.
....."Oh, they wanna play rough, do they?" Clyde snarled. He turned to his men. "Get your ass over here, Carlssen!"
.....The ranks pulled aside as Carlssen staggered up under the weight of the M-60 he was lugging, a seriously gone-to-pot Rambo with bands of .50 rounds wrapped about his frame.
.....He drew up, sweating. The M-60 isn’t a lightweight piece of armament, especially for someone whose only exercise was twelve-ounce curls. The cameras were watching though, so he did his best.
....."Yo."
....."Okay, Carlssen." Clyde jerked his head back at the high school. "Show ’em who’s the boss."
.....Carlssen smiled. Striking a Soldier of Fortune coverboy pose, he allowed another member of his team to be his wingman and feed the belt. He jacked back the handle and slapped it forward. The show went live as he braced himself and pulled the trigger, unleashing some hellaciously superior firepower on the dinks.
.....Empty shells arced smoking from the bucking machinegun as it threw a stream of rounds, each the size of a child’s finger, towards the school with a throaty roar. One-hundred-rounds-per-minute’s worth. The concrete facade of the school began to crack and emit small farts of vaporized building material as the stream of fire swept across before locking in on the windows.

.....The windows exploded inwards in a blizzard of flying glass as the teens forgot their squabbling and hit the floor, trying to disappear into their own crotches as the hallway was torn apart above them. Plaster and pulverized sheet rock showered down around them, the dust creating a haze of its own.

....."Yee-fucking-haw!" Carlssen grinned like a foolish boy as he chewed the front of the school apart. Finally out of ammo, he spun around, shaking the machine gun at the heavens. The barrel of the weapon was fucked. Eighteen hundred bucks worth of taxpayer money burned up in less than two minutes.
.....It made for good television, though. The news crews were as excited as a little girl getting a pony on her birthday. And they wanted more.
.....A white handkerchief was waved through a shattered window. There was a quiet hiss of disappointment from the crowd. Hands were withdrawn from ears. The media exchanged worried glances: not yet, already?
.....The students began to stagger out through the shattered front doors. Dave McShane in the lead still waving his handkerchief.
.....Tear gas billowed out after them as they spilled down the stairs, gagging and trying not to puke as they made their way towards the parking lot, hands clasped behind their necks just the way they had learned they were supposed to do it on C*O*P*S.
.....As more feet landed around him, moved along, Scot T figured it was safe enough to finally stand. None of the other students paid him any mind. Their suddenly fucked up world was already too much to deal with.
.....The SWAT leader turned to one of his men, who was scanning the exiting students with a pair of binoculars.
....."Any of them wearing a school jacket?"
.....The trooper watched as the last student exited, puking on her shoes and the stairs as she stumbled down them.
.....He shook his head. "Nope."
.....Media ears perked up.
....."Alrighty, then. We’re goin’ in after that bastard."
.....The cameras leaned in.

.....The school has fallen silent again, save for the echoes of smashing down the hall. Mike resumes his hunt...

.....SMASH. SMASH...CRUNCH.
.....The reinforced window crumpled and fell free, leaving open window space and the cool breeze sigh wafting in of sanctuary beyond.
.....Pierce grabbed Debbie and lifted her up to the sink, feeding her through the open gap. With a kick of her shapely legs and a flash of cotton panties, she was through. Pierce looked down through the window as Debbie stood up on a sea of welcome green, brushed grass stains off of her ass.
.....She looked back up at him and hissed, "C’mon, you asshole."
.....As he moved to follow, he froze. He turned his head listening, as the sound of footsteps neared the door and paused...

.....He pauses by the bathroom door, reaches to push it open...
........and the door slams open, heavy mass smashing into his reaching hand...
........wrist SNAP! and he grunts...
.....He loses some serious Health Points.

.....Pierce rolled in low and leapt up, swinging a wild right-handed haymaker that nonetheless connected solidly with Mike’s face. Eyes gone glassy, the boy crumpled to his knees. The Mini-14 fell from his grasp and clattered across the tile.
.....Pierce snarled in recognition. In recognition of his gun, and of his nemesis. "You motherfucking faggot..."
.....He grabbed the collar of the jacket to yank Mike up, but the boy went limp, the jacket slipping over his head as arms slipped through...

........his broken wrist snags in the jacket.
.....A white-hot pulse of pain and he vomits a moan, falls the rest of the way to the floor.
.....He loses a few more Health Points...
........GAME OVER...

.....Pierce threw the jacket aside, knelt and picked up the rifle. Breathing heavily, he aimed it as Mike struggled up onto his elbows...
........chambered a round...
........as the door behind him exploded inwards and SWAT members charged through, their gas masks sparking with the reflected fluorescent lights.
....."Drop the weapon!" a voice barked, muffled by the gas mask.
.....Pierce swung around, the rifle inadvertently following.
....."Don’t..." Pierce started to-
.....The SWAT members cut loose. Clips emptied as scores of .223 rounds were unleashed.
.....Mike fell back to the floor, the pain of his broken wrist forgotten as he clasped himself into a tight ball.
.....Most of the rounds snapped past their target and pocked the wall behind Pierce, but a handful found their mark. They slammed into him and punched on through; blood, chucks of flesh and a loop of small intestine erupting from Pierce’s back as a couple of the rounds took him low, the rifle flying from his grip.
.....As he was spun by the barrage, another round caught him in the jaw; the lower half of his face disintegrated into a mist of fleshy shrapnel. The impact flipped him back and another round took off a sizely chunk of his brain pan on its way through his skull. He slammed the floor, the heels of his boots drumming against the tile.
.....Gray matter is actually light pink when spattered liberally across a beige wall. Blood spread across the floor in a widening pool.
.....The team moved in to cover the downed target, who drew up huddled in a fetal position as he tried to hold his entrails in. A long loop extended from the exit wound in his back to lay uncoiled in the dust. It doesn’t take much brains to die, and Pierce wasn’t left with much. He was still taking his long, painful time going about it, though.
.....The blood found purchase in a drainage grate, and began to trickle off. Ears still ringing from the burst of gunfire, the cops pulled back their gas masks and eyed the area suspiciously. There had been reports of only one shooter, but they still remained wary.
.....One of the team helped Mike to his feet as others moved in to cover the perp with their M-16s, smoke still curling from the barrels.
....."You okay?" the cop asked Mike.
.....The boy pointed at Pierce unsteadily, his eyes wide. "He was gonna kill me..."
....."It’s over now." Kyle nodded reassuringly as he led the boy away. "Get outside, have yourself checked out by an EMT."
.....Mike paused as they moved to pass Pierce. ...I didn’t mean... just wanted to fuck with them... show ‘em how it felt...
.....Kyle shook his head. "Don’t look at that..."
.....He put his arm over Mike’s shoulders and eased him from the crime scene. The smell of shit and ruptured organs began to fill the hallway, and the cops eased their gas masks back on.
.....Eyes wide, a keening wail gargled from the wreckage of Pierce’s mouth.
.....The pool of blood stilled as the source ran out. His eyes blinked one final time. It would be almost an hour until a paramedic would close them for eternity.
.....A fly began to buzz over the blood, and then another.

CHAPTER 26

2008-01-21T13:09:00.000-08:00

.....Behind the sanctuary of the Main Desk, the recruiter held the sobbing receptionist tightly. Over the honk of alarms, Wolfe could feel the thud of rotors approaching the school before he finally heard the angry CHUP CHUP CHUP.
.....The cavalry was on its way.
.....Wolfe wasn't reassured. He realized that they would probably get about setting up perimeters, communication posts and other war game postures before actually attempting to storm the school.
.....His ass was puckered enough as it was, and he wasn't all that eager for the storming part of being rescued. He had an uneasy feeling about how these things tend to work out. And he hadn't exactly been given a reason to think that the Harding police department was all that up to handling something like this without collecting a little collateral damage along the way.
.....Wolfe didn't have a problem with his mortality, even though it seemed more impending than ever before, but when the end came he sure as hell didn't want it to happen because of some fool couldn't tell his black from the white.
.....He glanced over at the recruiter. The man's lips were locked over the receptionist's, and her hand was moving up a sharply creased pants leg towards...
.....“Hey!” Wolfe hissed. The red-nailed claw twitched, stopped. A tongue throbbing in his cheek, the recruiter opened his eyes, balefully considering Wolfe. The tongues kept tangling.
.....Wolfe threw up his hands. Well? “Aren’t you gonna do something?”
.....Hutchins broke the lock, a strand of saliva keeping him and his date connected. “Like what?”
.....The receptionist inhaled sharply, exhaled raggedly. Her hand started to crawl upwards again.
.....Wolfe rolled his eyes in exasperation. “You’re a soldier, right? You’re trained for this kind of shit!”
.....“Right,” the recruiter snarled. “And if I wanted to get shot at, I wouldn’t be a fucking recruiter now, would I?”
.....He gasped. The hand suddenly had his complete attention. He forgot about Wolfe and went back to sucking on the receptionist's face.

.....Outside the high school, the thunder of rotors rattled the glass of the cars parked below. The nose of the chopper reared up as it paused to hover, a burst of feedback shrieking from the squawkbox. A cloud of grit began to churn below, a rising virtual dust storm that obscured everything in the parking lot.
.....Black-suited forms rappelled from the sides of the beast and disappeared into the maelstrom. From the squawkbox of the chopper poured a keening guitar riff, followed by a bass line that throbbed like bad blood.
.....Out of the roiling dust the SWAT team approached the high school in slo-motion, Jerry Bruckheimer blockbuster-style.
.....Their pace was perfect, their poise dead-on...
........ until one of them staggered, grabbed on to the arm of a team member to recover. The formation splintered, and the moment was broken.
.....They looked at each other: they were just a bunch of slobs in expensive gear, with very expensive toys. They glared at the schmuck who shattered the delusion.
.....It was Kyle, of course. Asshole.
.....Kyle blushed. “When’s the National Guard gonna arrive?”
.....Clyde puffed up his chest as he stood tall in the parking lot, considering the front of the high school. It looked quiet enough...
.....He spat and sneered. “We don’t need the fucking National Guard.”
.....Because of his cottonmouth, it wasn’t a very convincing spit. Still, lack of saliva aside, he was feeling particularly badassed at the moment, having managed to put away a couple of rails in Doc’s bathroom before joining back up with his team. Clyde was humming like a tuning fork. He sniffed and wiped his runny nose with the back of his hand.
.....Damned dust.

.....Wolfe was done with sitting around waiting to die.
.....When the final tally came, he didn't want to be marked down as having just sat there and taken it. That, and he didn't want to go out watching other people dry-humping. It hadn't reached that point between the two yet, but he decided not to wait until it did.
.....In the words of Admin, it was time to be proactive. He was taking some comfort in the softball bat he had retrieved from beneath the receptionist's post, but not a whole hell of a lot. Like taking a knife to a gunfight, but sort of less cool, he thought.
.....He eased up to eye the line of sight over the desk. Beneath the wail of approaching sirens and the continued honk of alarms, the popping of his protesting joints was barely audible.
.....They sounded like gunshots to Wolfe.
.....The coast seemed clear. Crouching, he eased one of the batwing doors to the desk open. Well-oiled, it glid through silence...
........ but the silence was sliced open by the metallic rattle of an belt buckle being unclasped, the hiss of a fabric belt impatiently whipped through belt loops.
.....Oh, gawd...
.....Wolfe didn't look back. He eyed the front doors, daylight spilling in bright as a mother's promise. What's it gonna be, boy?
.....He eased around the desk, the bat in hands as he moved in a spiderwalk batting position. Hallway to the left, freedom to the right. Fight or flight?
.....He tried to swallow, but there was nothing left to swallow.
.....Wolfe turned left and stepped around to face the hallway...
........ and found himself staring down the barrel of one nasty-looking monster rifle. The unblinking eyes that looked back at him over the gun looked as deadly as the depthless open bore. Wolfe did what any rational man would do when looking sudden, senseless death in the face.
.....He wet his pants.

.....Mike stares down the barrel of the Mini-14 at the interloper, finger whiteknuckled on the trigger. Despite the bat in the man's hands, he doesn't seem like much of a threat. The bat slides through the man's hands and clatters to the floor.
.....Make that no threat. He smells piss, glances down at the puddle around the soles of the man's Doc Martens.
.....Ew.
.....His finger eases on the trigger.

.....Hands free, Wolfe slowly raised them up, palms out towards the gunman. The kid from the parking lot, gone postal. He felt like sobbing, the warmth of urine soaking his Dockers, burning like a badge of dishonor.
.....He didn't hear the slap of sneakers on linoleum until the kids were almost on him, moving from the opposite hallway in a break towards the front doors.

.....His eyes dart from the shaking old man as two bodies enter his line of sight, two silhouettes with linked hands, suddenly frozen against the daylight blazing through the two glass doors.

.....Too late to warn them, too scared to turn his head, Wolfe took in the two kids from the corner of his eye. It was that Lolita girl and her idiot wigger boyfriend. Behind them, he could see the other two kids playing statues just out of sight of the gunman. Wide, unblinking eyes for everyone.
.....The barrel of the assault weapon eased away from Wolfe and he almost cried with relief, almost cried in shame for feeling relief at someone else about to take his bullet.
.....The wigger wasn't about to take anyone's bullet standing still. He dropped Lolita's hand and spun on his heel, lunging towards the door with adrenaline-fueled grace.
.....The gunshot was a thunderclap. Glass exploding, a young girl's scream.
.....Wolfe took the opportunity to run the other way.

.....The troopers jumped at the gunshot, then crouched. They eyed the school, each other, their fingers tight on the triggers of the M-16A1s. But not too tight: they didn’t need a repeat of Saturday night.
.....A fine mist of dust swirled about the bullet hole that had appeared at just above head level in the front door, the safety glass glazed with cracks. Then Scot T exploded through, arms over his head against the released glass swirling about him.
.....The SWAT team ducked for cover, skittering off behind the student’s vehicles as Scot T hit the landing and launched himself over the stairs. In mid flight, his baggy pants finally dropped south and tangled up around his ankles. He arced forward...
........and hit the pavement with his chin. He lay sprawled on the sidewalk like a soggy towel, unmoving.

.....In through the shattered glass of the front door and frozen where she stood in the center of the high school foyer, Lolita was looking over her shoulder at Scot T’s exit.
.....Debbie and Pierce backpedaled from the branch in the hallway, turned and ran back the other way. Pierce glanced back as Lolita slowly turned and faced the unseen shooter, gunsmoke curling around the corner from his position.

.....The SWAT team looked up from their positions of safety as Clyde screamed into his radio to Dispatch:
.....“Where’s the fucking National Guard?”

.....Back at the Dispatch Desk, Julia checked the logs.
.....“Fullajah again, this week.” She finished off the McMuffin, then keyed the mike again. “They might take awhile to arrive.”
.....She was finally able to get a sense of order to her environment for the first time since setting off the Code Red. It had helped immeasurably when she had disabled the phone bank. It wasn’t as if she could tell anyone calling what the hell was going on in the high school. It wasn’t because she didn’t know, because she did. The monitors were giving her a front row seat in the biggest thing to hit Harding since Primus had played at the 1990 Senior Prom.
.....She just couldn’t tell anyone what was going on.
.....Department regulations.

.....Clyde sighed, considering the high school.
.....“How long?” one of his troopers asked. A distant roar answered for him.
.....The thunder from an approaching battalion of helicopters built to a roar and Clyde smiled, finally. His smile faded as the helicopters grew near enough to read the insignia on the sides.
.....It was the media: CNN, FOX, choppers sporting all sorts of newsworthy initials. Their crews leapt from open doors and secured their perimeters with paramilitary precision.

.....With the shattered glass of the doorway behind her, Lolita remained frozen, a deer in the headlights.

.....She looks like a teenybopper Lara Croft, all boobs-n-legs in that formfitting cheerleader outfit.

.....All Lolita could see was the silhouette of the shooter, a stray ray of afternoon light gleaming off of the school jacket.
.....He lowered the rifle and nodded. Lolita blinked up at him, and he gestured: Scoot!
.....Lolita didn’t need any encouragement. She bolted through the shattered glass, bounded down the stairs.
.....She paused, dropping to a knee by Scot T. With a sob, she touched his shoulder. Without opening his eyes, he snarled from the corner of his mouth.
.....“Keep moving, you stupid bitch.”
.....Her back was to the parking lot, so the SWAT team and the news crews setting up could only see Lolita’s back as she knelt closer to the fallen boy. Cameras zoomed in on the scene, the lucky ones getting the shot that was guaranteed to be the iconic image of this particular event: The Last Kiss.
.....Her back to the onlookers, they didn’t see Lolita spit in Scott T’s face. He winced, but didn’t twitch. Her last kiss was a hiss in his ear:
.....“Fag.”
.....She stood and threw a look back to the school, then kept moving.

.....He follows the sound of the remainder of fleeing teens. Screams echo distant from outer reaches of the school.

.....Pierce backslapped the screaming girl and she shut off like he had hit mute. She fired off a dropkick at his nuts and he brushed her foot aside.
.....“Don't get us killed, you idiot.”
.....She looked back at him silently, eyes cold. If we live through this, you are so dead.
.....Being that it was the only door that wouldn't lock, Pierce and Debbie found themselves back in the dubious shelter of the bathroom again. Pierce hoped that whatever was happening to Scott T and Lolita was going to take some time. At least enough time for him to...
.....Suddenly, the chickenwire-laced window looked like a workable exit. Pierce grabbed the trashcan and began to smash the heavy base of it against the reinforced glass.
.....BANG. BANG. BANG.
.....The glass spiderwebbed, but held firm. Pierce increased his efforts.

.....The smashing echoes down the hall, and he moves to follow...

.....SWAT leader Clyde interviewed Lolita, enjoying his turn in the spotlight as a circle of news cameras swarmed in and fed hungrily on her statement.
.....“I didn’t see his face, but he was wearing a school jacket...” she sniffled, then added: “It was one of ours...”
.....Clyde nodded and stepped back to address his boys, M-16A1 over his shoulder and presenting his best authoritative posture and voice for the benefit of the home viewers.
.....“The perp was observed wearing a Harding school jacket, which doesn’t mean start shooting anyone wearing...”
.....Ignoring the cop and free of his interference, the news jackals jostled each other and tried their best to ruin the others shots as they swept in on Lolita, cameras and microphones shoved into her face to record every reaction, every sob, every tear. Images and sounds to be analyzed back at the editing docks and then restructured for maximum emotional impact.
.....Virtual verité.

.....“Were you scared?”
.....“Will you ever feel safe again?”
.....“How did it feel when you saw your boyfriend shot?”
.....“Laying dead on the sidewalk?”
.....“Did you love him?”
.....“Are you still a virgin?”

.....In the hubbub, no one saw Wolfe steal away from the side exit of the school, a painful duckwalk back towards the motel. It was best that no one saw him, as urine shows dark on gray cotton slacks. But cotton dries out, the stain washes away.
.....It was the indelible stain of his shame that was going to take some getting used to.

CHAPTER 25

2008-01-20T10:51:00.000-08:00

.....The neighbors who had no other plans than to be home on a Monday set up their lawn chairs and were gabbing away on their portable phones. They settled in comfortably to watch the Comanche hover over Doc’s house like an angry black wasp. Cracked their choice of cool beverages.
.....It was a slow day for television, the laundry could wait, and it wasn’t every day that set up an episode of C*O*P*S across from your own front yard. This would be a yarn that could be played out over fences or drinks for days. Months. Years maybe, if something really interesting happened.
.....Caught up in acting oblivious to his audience, Team Leader Clyde Kehoe almost didn’t hear the call on his walkie-talkie over the pounding of the rotors.
.....Finally, one of the men ransacking the house stepped out and pointed at him to catch his attention, then mimed talking on the radio.
.....Clyde pulled the walkie-talkie from his utility belt and put it to his ear. Officially it was called a Personal Combat Communications Device, and had dinged the department budget twelve large. A unit. He jerked the speaker away as Julia’s squawking almost took his head off.
.....He looked up at the chopper as he took the call, then swallowed as he finally made out what she was yelling about.
.....“You gotta be fucking...”
.....He slapped the antenna down, then grabbed his bullhorn from hip and strode towards the house:
.....“Abort mission, rally Point One!” he bellowed. “Move it, move it, move it!”
.....SWAT members boiled from the house and stumbled about blinking at the change in routine. This wasn't the way it went as practiced.
....."Move it, god damn it!"
.....The troopers grabbed onto the lines that still hung down from the helicopter, and were sucked up into its belly.
..... “What about the Doc?” one of the remaining deputies who was poised over the old man asked.
.....Kehoe looked down at the Doc. Doc looked back up at him. Their gazes locked. Backwash from the rotors of the Commanche ruffled the old man's hair, and finally he blinked. Shoulders slumping as he looked down at the torn sod of his lawn.
.....Kehoe nodded. “Uncuff him.”
.....The men looked down at their trophy, looked back to their team leader.
.....He sighed. “We may just need him down at the high school.”

.....As Mike continues down the hallways, the sounds of doors locking proceeds him.

.....Pierce jumped at the sound of the first whoop of the alarm, coughing in the middle of a drag.
.....“What the...?”
.....He threw the cigarette into the toilet and flushed, waving the smoke aside.
.....“Shit.” Scot T struggled to cut off his stream of piss.
.....They looked to Lolita, who cracked open the door.
.....“Everything’s gone all Code Red,” she announced in her best baby doll voice.
.....Debbie grabbed Pierce’s arm. “Honey...”
.....“Lock the door.”
.....Lolita gave him a disgusted look.
.....“It’s a bathroom door.” She demonstrated, opening it in and out. “It don’t lock.”
.....“Fuck me.” Pierce turned and considered his options.
.....“What are we...?” Debbie keened, her blue eyes wide and unblinking.
.....He shrugged her hand off of his arm as he began to pace. The windows were reinforced with chicken wire, so that left the way they had came in as the only way out. “We get the fuck out of here until we can figure out what’s going down.”
.....He shouldered Lolita aside, looked out through the cracked door.
.....The coast seemed clear. Pierce turned back to his friends, his best action hero look in place.
.....“Let’s roll.”

.....As the coach maintained his post, the sound of carefully placed footsteps neared the door. A backlit silhouette paused by the window. Breathing in the room stopped, held. Finally the form moved on. The footsteps faded.
.....Held breaths were released.
.....Marsh quietly -- slowly -- unlocked the door. A girl moaned behind him and he turned, finger to lips. Her name was Shannon, he recalled.
.....“Shannon...?”
.....“Molly,” she corrected.
.....“Molly, lock this behind me...”
.....The girl nodded, eyes wide. Mascara ran like claw marks down her face.
.....“...and don’t open it for anyone unless we get an All Clear, alright?”
.....The girl nodded again, more enthusiastically this time.
.....He eased the door open and stepped quietly into the hall. Molly eased the door shut and twisted the lock.
.....With the coach gone, cellphones came out. Absent of adult supervision, roles were cast aside. The girls became proactive, speed dialing and text messaging away on their cellphones.
.....“Hello? 911?” Molly whispered into her phone. “There’s a psycho here with a gun...”
.....“CNN?” murmured the real Shannon into her Nokia. “We’re being attacked by a bunch of terrorists...”
.....“...I think it’s that creep, Charlie Bierce...”
.....“...they’re all running around going, ‘Allah is Cool! Fuck the Great Satan!’”
.....“...y’know, that Goth guy...”
.....“Bierce ain’t here,” another girl corrected. “His folks sent him to one of those church camps for reeducation...”
.....“Maybe he broke out, and he’s off his meds...”
.....The guys were getting ready in their own way: each had pulled a piece, and were checking their ammo.
.....“I bet it’s those damn Mexicans.” one snarled.
.....Dave McShane snapped the chamber of his hawgleg shut, just like he saw on TV.
.....They all waited...

.....Marsh frowned at the sudden hushed murmurs from behind the door, then began to tread lightly down the hall.
.....Although from all outward appearances, it would appear that Marsh was all steely resolve and Action Movie Star heroics. Appearances aside, the man was literally about to piss himself. He knew he should have relieved himself of those three cups of bad teacher’s lounge coffee before heading off to class. Of course, no one ever expected to go to homeroom and have it interrupted by some psycho teenager going all Columbine before lunch.
.....It also didn’t help that he was scared spitless.
....He couldn’t recall ever being so scared in his life. The thought that his life might come to a complete and random end at the age of thirty-eight would have been incomprehensible to him as he had driven on his way to the high school to go through the motions of what seemed to be shaping up as just another day.
.....Oddly enough, if he hadn’t have slowed down to allow a Coor’s truck to merge into traffic from out front of The Larkspur on his way to work, his route would have been bumped up by less than a minute. With the cosmic clock set ahead less than one minute, he would have been t-boned two intersections down by a battered white Ford van that was anticipating a green light. To his fortune, although he had no way of knowing it, the courtesy extended to the beer guy saved him from having two tons of tweaker-fueled vehicle slam into his driver’s side door at forty-miles-an-hour. He wouldn’t have even had time to have considered his impending death.
.....But in the hallway of the high school, he could hear that cosmic clock ticking.
.....Jesus God, he didn’t want to die, and he almost pissed himself thinking it. But there was no way he was going to allow one of his kids to die because of his inaction, and there was also no way in hell he was going to allow some god damned punk to diss his authority, as the kids said these days.
.....That didn’t make him any less frightened silly, however. He moved further down the hall. Occasionally he paused, listening.
.....Below the clicking of the lights turning in their cages and the steady honk of the alarm, there was no sign of movement in his line of vision.
.....He moved on, easing his way along the wall silently, alert. He paused at a branch in the hall and looked down. He inhaled sharply at the sight of waiting feet. He looked up: the descending butt of the rifle caught him just above the left eye.
.....THUD!
.....Marsh crumpled to the floor, unmoving.

.....Mike glances down as he steps over the still form. Marsh's eyes are open, expression locked halfway to horror. He looks almost silly, one eye knocked awry. A thread of blood winds its way down across his face, to the floor. He doesn't blink.
.....Mike looks back up and continues down the corridor. Moves to hang a left...
........ pauses at the slapping of running feet on linoleum floor, from the hall branch ahead.
.....Backs up against the first sentry in a bank of soft drink machines. Eases down and crosses the rifle across his lap, settling down on his heels. His silhouette just another pattern against the red, white and blue fluorescent glow of the Pepsi dispenser.
.....A halo reading "Generation Next" flickers above his head.

CHAPTER 24

2008-01-19T09:32:00.000-08:00

.....Mike grabbed onto the tire of the monster truck and started to pull himself up, barked at the sharp flare of pain in his side. His world pulsed red and he fought against the rise of bile in his throat.
.....He was a mess. His scalp was sweating but he felt cold, goosebumps skittering across his bare forearms.
.....Slowly, carefully he tottered the rest of the way up. Dragged Scot T’s jacket from the hood, used it to wipe the blood from his face.
.....He eyed the empty quad, a limp sheet of newspaper flapping along the grass.
..... “Daaaaamn, man...” a voice exclaimed behind him.
.....Mike creaked his head around as Wolfe broke from the sidewalk. The man approached him and paused, pulling back with a sympathetic look as he whistled at the damage that had been inflicted on Mike’s face.
.....“Looks like someone did a number on you. You should get that looked at.”
.....“Screw it.” Mike spit blood. “I’m okay.”
.....Wolfe looked down at the patch of blood on the pavement.
.....“You are definitely not okay...”
.....“Got a Band-aid?”
.....Wolfe didn’t like the look in the kid’s eyes, and he felt a chill creep up his spine. “I’ll tell you what... I’ll go get someone to take care of that for you.”
.....Wolfe headed off across the parking lot towards the high school. He disappeared inside.
.....Mike turned, hands on the hood for support. Breathing raggedly, he winced against the pain in his side.
....When he opened his eyes, he stared across the hood at the backyard assault rifle cradled in Pierce’s rear window gun rack. It was one of those pimped-out plinkers designed to make even a man with a thickening waistline and the skinniest legs feel like Rambo. Despite the promise of its Dogs of War packaging, only capable of delivering one round per trigger pull. Even so, still the perfect tool for plugging coyotes and other kinds of varmints.
.....Mike pulled on the letterman jacket, the H smeared with blood, then knelt gingerly by the side of the truck to pick up his skateboard.
.....He stepped back, took a deep breath and swung. No one else was around to hear the glass of the truck’s side window shatter.

.....Wolfe reached a branch in the hallway, and then hung a left at an indicator arrow reading the Main Desk. The recruiter from the arcade was leaning over the desk, flirting with the receptionist. She was a young lady on the verge of losing that distinction, her Paris Hilton knock-off wardrobe beginning to wear silly on her thickening frame.
.....Hutchins was in full charmer mode, flashing his expensive caps at the woman. “...it’s not as if anyone is going to notice that a couple of D’s and an F suddenly, somehow turn into a few C’s...”
....The receptionist was eating it up, a pleasant diversion from the day-to-day routine of the parade of snot-nosed teenagers and their occasional asshole parents. Not to mention the holier-than-thou staff that walked by her everyday as if she were something that they were afraid of stepping in.
.....Wolfe leaned in on the desk, interrupting the conversation. “Is there a school nurse here?”
.....Irked at the cockblock, the receptionist eyed him coldly. “Who the hell are you?”

.....The teacher clapped his hands, and the rag-tag assembly of summer school students fell quiet.
.....Relatively.
.....THE ORIGIN OF LIFE was scrawled on the chalkboard behind him.
.....Larry Marsh wasn’t happy to be there, but it was summer and in between seasons; the coach had to justify his teaching credential somehow. The whistle that hung from the lanyard around his neck swept briskly across the front of his Harding Broncos sweatshirt as he turned back to his desk.
.....“Look, folks... I don’t want to be here anymore than you do.”
.....Someone snickered, the "At least you're getting paid" left unsaid.
.....“Be that as it may,” Marsh sighed as he picked up the class roster and parked on the edge of the desk . “I can think of a few better ways to blow my summer than in a classroom, so let’s just get to work and make this as painless as possible. Okay?”
.....There was scattered muttering from the ranks.
.....Marsh nodded. “Thank you.”
.....He referred to his clipboard without looking up:
.....“Amberson?”
.....“Here.”
.....“Bucholder?
.....“Yo.”
.....“Crawford?”
.....No response. Marsh looked up.
.....“Crawford? Pierce Crawford?”
.....“He’s not here,” one of the students offered, stating the obvious.
.....“Thank you.” Marsh went back to the clipboard and made a note.
.....“Caymon?”

.....PHSST!
.....Foamed spewed from the mouth of the Coors Lighting as the bottle cap flew off. Parked on the commode within an open stall, Pierce took a healthy swig and offered it to Debbie.
.....Lolita stood sentinel at the door as Scot T pissed into the urinal. He sighed in pleasure as the stream went on... and on...
........ and on...
.....“Why do you bother to even zip your fly?” she observed, shaking her head in disgust as the smell of restructured beer filled the small room.
........ and on...
.....Debbie looked doubtfully at the beer. “Dude, we’re already late.”
.....“The key word there is 'already'.” Pierce waggled the bottle. “Drink up.”
.....She grabbed the beer, took a pull, and made a face. The shit tasted bad enough when it was cold. Warm, it tasted like monkey piss. She passed it on to Lolita.
.....Lolita was a little more thirsty, draining the bottle without a pause. She burped daintily and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, stepping from the door as she looked for a place to deposit the empty. Finally, she buried it beneath the soiled paper towels in the trashcan and returned to her post, cracking the door to see if the hallway was still clear. It was.
.....Pierce flexed his fingers and there was a distinct pop. “That fucker better not have broken my hand.”
.....“He broke your hand?” Debbie took injured hand and kissed the knuckles. Pierce winced and pulled it free.
.....“If he did and I can’t do basic training, I’m gonna sue his ass," Pierce muttered. He batted a cigarette from his deck and fired it up, his eyes narrowing through the smoke. "What's left of it."
.....Debbie contained an eye roll. “I suppose he broke your foot, too?”
.....“Of course not.” Pierce considered his boots and looked back up at her. “Why?”
........ as Scot T continued to piss an endless stream.

.....Mike mounted the stairs to the front entrance, rifle at port arms. He chambered a round, slid his finger through the trigger guard and pushed the door open with his foot...
.....In the foyer of the high school, the security camera paused in its rounds, swiveled back to consider Mike...

.....The camera’s lens zooms in, spins around the video version of Mike... his face remains unclear.
.....Beneath the image of his rifle is displayed text detailing the nomenclature of the Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic...
........ collapsible stock....
........ thirty-six round banana clip...
........ full... with .223 copper-jacketed rounds, one chambered.

.....Boo-yah.

.....Back at the Dispatch Desk, Julia glanced away from the jewelry being hawked on the Samsung, her attention caught by an unsettling image being displayed on one of the side monitors; the figure of someone walking down the hallway of the high school. Someone carrying what was unmistakenly an assault rifle. She threw down her half-finished Egg McMuffin and hit a button. The image of the high school hallway switched to the main screen.
.....“Holy shit!”
.....She swivelled in her chair and slapped the Panic Button.

.....Along the hallways of Harding High School, red lights began to spin within their cages as a siren commenced to honking.

.....In Mike’s mind, the interior of the school takes on the pixelated hyper-reality of a video game.
.....His health bar reads full red.
.....He continues on, hangs a right turn at the branch in the hallway moves on down the avenue...
........ listening...

.....Coach Marsh paused in the middle of his discourse, the sound of the siren muted behind the closed door. The students looked back at him, wide-eyed.
.....Even the hard cases looked uneasy.
.....A cold chill slithering down his spine like a bead of ice water, Marsh broke from his chair and pulled down the shade over the mesh-laced window of the door. He paused, putting on his face of authority.
.....In an urgent, hushed voice he turned to the students. “Everyone down, and get up against the wall away from the line of sight of the door.”
.....As they complied, the teacher snapped the lock shut, hunkered down beneath the window of the door.
.....Waiting. Listening. Sweating.

.....Having taken cover beneath the counter of the Main Desk, Wolfe, Hutchins, and the receptionist hunched as the siren honked on.
.....“What the hell is going on?” Wolfe asked the receptionist, sotto voce. “Is this one of those tests or something?”
.....“It’s called a drill,” the receptionist snapped.
.....“I know what the fuck it’s called,” Wolfe snapped back at her. “I’m... I was a teacher.”
.....The receptionist’s eyes narrowed. She knew there was a reason she disliked the dude on first sight, and then her eyes continued darting about to see if any terrorists were breaching the defenses.
.....“Well, this ain’t, and there ain’t any scheduled for today.”
.....“So what is it?” he demanded.
.....“It’s a Code Red,” she sighed in exasperation. “We don’t do Code Red drills.”
.....“Well, damn,” Wolfe muttered as if he knew what the woman was talking about. He didn’t, and gave up trying to fake it. “And what’s that mean?”
.....A starched crease sliced through the air as the recruiter put an arm around the young woman... protectively, of course.
.....“It means we keep doing what we’re doing until we get an All Clear,” she clarified, making herself more comfortable under the arm.
.....Hutchins winced as a hairspray-stiffened tuft poked him in the eye. He wondered distractedly if he would be eligible for a Purple Heart if his eye was poked out by a stray strand of hair wielded by a chunky receptionist, and how dashing he’d look in full dress uniform with an eye patch as a styling accessory.
.....Pretty damned dashing he acknowledged, as his hand stole down to cup a breast.
.....His aim was only a little off, but the receptionist helpfully corrected it.

CHAPTER 23

2008-01-18T09:57:00.000-08:00

.....Crawford opened the door and threw the keys to the Humvee in the tray, closing the door behind him. He paused, his back to the living room. It reeked of the night before, of stale cigarette smoke and spilled whiskey. He paused and sniffed, detecting a delicate smell underlying the funk.
.....He recognized the perfume. Sand and Sable.
.....“How’d you get in here, Tanya?” he asked as he turned to face the woman lounging in his leather chair. She had found one of his spare packs of Marlboros and smiled up at him as she lit the cigarette. She exhaled a greeting.
.....“Hi, Roy. Nice to see you, too.” Her jeans hissed across the surface of the chair as she crossed her legs and leaned back, her breasts pushing back against gravity through the sheer material of her blouse. She eyed him as she took another drag, her foot arching, bare ankle demanding attention.
.....He ignored it. He turned his back on her again and unbuckled his utility belt and rebuckled it, draping it across a peg on the coat rack.
.....Finally he turned and picked up the smokes, batting one out for himself.
.....“Have fun last night?” he asked, taking a deep drag. He let it out at the ceiling, avoiding her eyes.
.....“I could ask the same of you,” she chuckled. She eyed the empty bottle of Jack and the mess about the room. “I’d hope you didn’t do this kind of damage all by yourself.”
.....“It’s none of your business what...”
.....“But it’s your business what I do?” she interrupted. He finally met her gaze, a quizzical eyebrow cocked.
.....“If you’re gonna keep driving past someone’s window all night, you might want to use a quieter car. That damned Hummer isn’t exactly subtle-sounding.”
.....He shrugged. “I was worried.”
.....“Bullshit.”
.....He sat down, eyed the empty whiskey bottle and sighed. He felt like ants were crawling over his flesh and he was pretty sure it wasn’t a side effect of the hangover.
.....“Roy,” she said, her voice demanding his attention. He met her gaze. “I know what you feel, and while I truly do respect it, I can’t return it. You’re my brother.”
.....“I... ”
.....“Hush. You became my brother when I married Bryce,” she said softly. “Just because he’s dead doesn’t change that. I do love you...”
.....She caught the shift in his eyes. “Just not in that way.”
.....His face became neutral again and she continued.
.....“I appreciate all that you’ve done for Pierce, taking him in like your own and all that when I... when I needed you to.”
.....“He’s a good boy,” Roy muttered to his cigarette. “He needs a good father to become a good man.”
.....“And you’ve been one. Maybe even better than Bryce was...would have been.”
.....She shrugged. “But you’re it and I thank you for that. I know it’s not easy and I wish that there were something more that I could do for you.”
.....His gaze flicked to her legs and she sighed. “Just not that.”
.....“Tanya, why are you here?” He looked up, his throat dry for another taste of whiskey. “Did you just drop by to torture me, or something?”
.....“More along the lines of the something,” she nodded. “I want you to quit fucking with Dan.”
.....“What makes you think...”
.....“This is a small town, Roy. You don’t need cameras and microphones and phone taps and all other types of surveillance equipment to know what’s going on. I knew that you’d pulled in Dan before he was even at the station.”
.....“I didn’t...”
.....“I know, Clyde did. Spare me.” Her eyes went cold, the green sharper and more dangerous than he had ever seen them. “And that bullshit you pulled with Doc was...”
.....She shook her head. “Jesus, Roy. What the hell were you thinking?”
.....“He... I was just doing, you know...”
.....“He’s an old man, Roy. Your cheap power-tripping could have killed him. You want that on your conscience?”
.....“No. I wasn’t thinking.”
.....“Oh, you were thinking alright. You were thinking too much. The problem is, you’re not as smart as you think.”
.....She had more to say, and Roy took it like a man. One very miserable man, but a man.
.....Finally, she stood and made her way to the across the living room. He followed, and as she reached for the door he touched her arm.
.....“Do you love him?”
.....She paused, considering.
.....“I don’t know, Roy.” She turned, looking up at him. “All I know is that he’s the best thing I’ve had happen to me since...well, it’s been a while.”
.....“I don’t trust him,” Roy said. “There’s something about him. He’s weak, I think.”
.....Tanya chuckled. It wasn’t a pleasant chuckle. “And you’re so strong, right?”
.....“In most ways, yeah. In the important ways.”
.....“Maybe those aren’t the ways I need, Roy.”
.....Her green eyes had softened, and she stood on her toes to kiss him on the corner of the mouth. He shifted, and as their mouths met there was a sharp intake of breath. From both of them.
.....The lips stayed, and his hand cupped the small of her back and drew her to him.
.....Her eyes stayed open.

CHAPTER 22

2008-01-17T10:14:00.000-08:00

.....Wolfe paced the small motel room as the televangelist nattered on in the background.
.....“...but without your help, the Final Battle could be LOST! Imagine, the world in ruins, your children dismembered, DISEMBOWELLED by Satan’s minions...”
.....Wolfe blinked at the television and sat down on the bed. The dude was either touched by God, or just plain touched. The super beneath his image identified him as the right reverend Rev. Lamb. United States Air Force. Retired. He was still wearing his old uniform, insignia removed to meet federal laws.
.....Wolfe had heard about him at some point, most likely from a profile in one of the Time or Newsweek magazines left on the coffee table in the teacher’s lounge back in the day. The man was one of those End Time fundamentalists that took everything bad that occurred in the world as a Good Omen of the coming apocalypse.
.....What Wolfe had found most disturbing in the profile was the sidenote that Lamb maintained his own militia within the headquarters of his Florida-based media empire, all with the blessings and encouragement of the governor of the state.
.....“... hurled shrieking into the ABYSS, into the molten pits of HELL, their eternal howls of anguish an accusation: "Why did you not love me — LOVE CHRIST — enough to save me from this?”
.....He sighed. And this is the man that has the ear of the President of the United States? He imagined them huddled in an Oval Office prayer group, and the whispered calculations as to which current hot spots could be stoked into a conflagration, and fueled until the fire raged for the advent of Armageddon.
.....He shivered: he was giving himself the existential willies. The dufflebag was parked like a faithful dog beside him, packed and waiting to go for a walk. He wondered if there was really any point in going anywhere else, especially if the Rapture occurred and he and everyone else that was Left Behind were so left in a sea of suddenly vacated polyester.
.....He eyed the bag and considered unpacking it. Then he considered the scratches on his back, and left it packed. Reconsidered how he got those scratches and...
.....He remembered the roach of the joint he’d tucked in his pocket after Doc had left. It was a pleasant mix of tobacco and pot, and he had enjoyed the light buzz it had given him. The buzz was fading off so he pulled out his Zippo and lit it. He damn near singed his eyebrows off lighting the stub, but he got it going. Inhaling deep, the smoke went down wrong and he doubled over coughing.
.....Gagging, he fumbled the Zippo, which dropped from his hand to bounce off of the toe of his Doc Marten and careen under the bed.
.....“Fuck,” he exhaled, the smoke curling from his nose.
.....He dropped to a knee, lifted the blanket and looked under: a giant, organic-looking pod was wedged between the springs and the ratty carpet. It looked very unhealthy where it was.
.....He bolted upright: What the...?
.....There was a knock at the door. It was an official sounding knock.
.....He backed away from the bed and opened the door without turning to look through the peephole. He fumbled for the knob and turned it, swinging around as the door opened. A sneak peak wouldn’t have mattered anyway, as the sunlight was blocked by a very large silhouette that loomed on the threshold. The cop-shaped silhouette opened his mouth to speak, then sniffed.
.....A hand shot out, grabbed Wolfe by the collar and yanked him out of the room...

.....The wheels of the skateboard chewed up sidewalk as Mike kicked it along towards the school. Face pinched and shoulders hunched, he shivered against the early morning nip. His chill was more a reaction to the discomfort of going out without his ubiquitous trenchcoat than the actual balmy temperature. As he had prepped for getting ready to exit his room, he had found that some of the ballast from the beer bottle projectile had spilled across the green shoulder of the coat. The last thing he needed was a teacher sniffing him out for smelling of beer.
.....There was nothing he could do about the red half crescent tattoo the base of the bottle had left high on his cheek.
.....Wheeling a hard right into the parking lot of the school, he dismounted from the board and kicked it up, tucking it under his arm. He winnowed his way through the sparse parked cars...
........ and found his path abruptly blocked by Pierce. The rest of the Wrecking Crew flowed in behind him.
.....Pierce eyed the mark on Mike's face and the corner of his mouth curled into what might have been a grin, that is, if the boy had a sense of humor. He didn't.
....."Where's your blanky?" he asked, taking in Mike's exposed shirtsleeves.
.....Mike sighed. "My what?" He eyed the sanctuary of the school over Pierce and crew's shoulders. It was one long span and he knew that he wasn't going to make the distance in one piece. Again.
....."Your security blanket."
.....Mike wasn't in the mood for dancing. "Hey, Pierce... how many Iraqis did it take to bring down the towers?"
.....Pierce blinked, eyes narrowing at the non sequitur. "Nineteen. Why the...?"
.....Mike nodded at the answer. "You know, I take it back...you will make a good soldier."
.....If nothing else, he figured he'd get in the first blow, even if it were only verbal.
.....Still, he didn't see the fist coming. His world went red.

.....Clyde threw Wolfe in a holding cell. The door clanged shut, the sound echoing throughout the County lockup.
.....In the next cell, a still form laying on a bench woke up and removed the Field and Stream magazine that was tenting his face. The former clerk from the former convenience store sat up and rubbed his face to life, eyeing the sudden activity with interest.
.....It had been a very long and boring night. The cameras had watched him, but they had given him nothing to watch in return. The blinking red light beneath the lens had grown old and fast. The magazine was even more boring. He had given up on it after ten pages of gun ads. At least it had been good for blocking off most of the light.
.....The Sheriff sidled up and eyed the new resident, then turned his head to Clyde.
.....“Did you read him his rights?”
.....His fingers fluttering in disdain, Clyde frowned. “You know I can’t remember...”
.....“Did he say anything?”
.....The deputy shook his head. “Anytime he opened his mouth, I tol’ him to shut it.”
.....The sheriff turned back to Wolfe. “You have the right to remain silent, that is to say nothing at all.”
.....“It was just...” Wolfe protested.
.....From his cell, Cody piped up: “You might wanna say nothing at all.”
.....“Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.” He seemed bored as he recited the Miranda Rights, the words coming easily off his tongue. “You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford one, one will be appointed for you at no cost...”
.....“Hah!” Cody scoffed.
.....Clyde glared at the clerk in the next cell and after a night of trying, the clerk finally found something interesting in the hunting magazine in his lap.
.....Apparently, Paris Hilton had recently taken up hunting Kodiak bears in the Great White North, and the centerfold spread offered a pose of her straddling the corpse of a bear with a head the size of large disco ball, her saggy breasts dangling in the shadow of her gaping camouflage blouse. The photographer had caught her as she leaned towards the camera, finger on the trigger of the Winchester 30-06 cradled across her scrawny cervix couch.
.....Her eyes were as vacant as those of the dead bear.
.....Colby looked at the breasts and wished that he had found the photo fifteen minutes earlier. Cameras be damned.
.....The legal obligations recited, the sheriff set about closing the deal: “Do you understand your rights?”
.....“Why am I here?” Wolfe demanded.
.....“Do you understand your rights?” Crawford insisted.
.....“Yeah.”
.....“Yes or no?”
.....Wolfe rolled his eyes and exhaled deeply. “Yes.”
.....“Where’d you get the weed?”
.....Wolfe gave it some thought, then looked the sheriff in the eyes: “I brought it with me.”
.....“Uh, uh,” Clyde countered. “I checked your car, and then checked your room while you were out.”
.....Wolfe blinked up at the sheriff. “That’s... that's kinda unconstitutional,” he finally managed.
.....The sheriff shrugged. "Yeah. Kinda."
.....Wolfe was trying to figure out whether he was more disturbed that they had tossed his room, or that The Man was so unconcerned about accountability that he would freely admit it.
.....Clyde laughed, and Wolfe turned to eye him coldly. “Why do you hate America?”
.....The cop bristled. “Fuck you, man.”
.....“He’s being ironic,” Roy sighed.
.....“Irony’s dead,” Clyde responded. “I saw it on the news.”
.....Crawford turned his attention back to Wolfe.
.....“Where’d you get the joint?”
.....“It’s prescription,” Wolfe countered, and then realized that he may have given the sheriff a little bit of too much information. Damn, he didn’t like the look in The Man’s eyes.
.....A smile struggling to get out twitched at the corner of the Sheriff’s mouth.
.....“Thank you,” he acknowledged.
.....Wolfe’s eyes went wide as he realized what was about to go down. “Hey... that doesn’t mean...”
.....Roy threw a set of keys to the deputy.
.....“You know what to do...”
.....“I’m on it, Chief.”
.....“And leave the fucking SAM where it is.”
.....Clyde gave the sheriff a two-fingered salute off the brim of his hat and rolled.
.....“Damn it, Crawford!” Wolfe grabbed the bars of the cell, glaring out at the sheriff. “If there’s anything going down between you and me, let’s keep it that way. There’s no need to drag anyone else into this...”

.....On the roof in a cinder block shed set off from the landing pad, a small group of men bustled through a locker room, slim steel doors slamming shut and the heels of tightly-laced combat boots pounding the tiled floor.
.....Black jumpsuits were zipped up...
........ flack jackets were donned...
........ hands grabbed from a row of state-of-the-art assault weapons...
........ banana clips were slapped in, rounds jacked...
.....Boo-yah.

.....Crawford pulled up a chair. “Now... let’s talk some about Tanya...”

.....Dark-clad forms scurried towards the prototype RAH-66 Comanche helicopter, their shoulders hunched against the backwash as it fired up. The SWAT team hurried in, boarded. With a whine of two turbines fighting to lift over ten thousand pounds of metal, the matte black helicopter lifted up and hung a few feet above the landing pad, the sound of its ascent suppressed by the unique five-rotor design.
.....Added to the lift was the combined weight of six fully-equipped deputies in full SWAT fetish gear clinging wide-eyed to the side rails the motor pool had welded to the sides of the machine. The Comanche was designed for two crew members only, but that was of little use to the Sheriff’s Department, and so the after market addition.
.....Rotors a nearly invisible blur against the cloudless blue sky, the helicopter leaned to the side as it swung around over the side of the building and thudded its way over a few blocks of rooftops, drew up and hovered.

.....Doc paused in the middle of a bong rip as he heard the roar of the helicopter near. He looked up as the sound paused overhead. The CHUP of blades continued.
.....The center pane of his stained glass bay window shattered as a canister burst through, rolled to his feet, emitting tear gas. He dropped the bong and lurched up out of his easy chair, gagging as he fumbled towards the front door. He threw it open and staggered out, choking and gasping for air.
.....A SWAT team member rushed up and tackled him. The old man’s arms were pulled roughly behind him as his face ground into the lawn, forcing him to eat grass. As a cop slapped on the handcuffs, Doc yelped in pain. Old bones weren’t meant to be treated that way.
.....More cops rushed into his house and the sounds of a rhubarb began, as they would have said back in the day.

.....Wolfe listened as Roy listed what was wrong with Tanya. Colby the former mini-mart clerk listened in without seeming obvious about it.
.....“... she’s bipolar, you know,” The sheriff noted, nodding as he gauged Wolfe’s reaction.
.....“You don’t say...”
.....“Takes her medication, but still likes her booze... not a good mix.”
.....“Is there something going on between you two?”
.....Crawford’s eyes narrowed. “She’s my brother’s widow, you ass.”
.....“You just seem a little obsessed.”
.....“I’m just looking out for Pierce.”
.....“Who the hell is Pierce?”
.....“She didn’t tell you?”
.....“Apparently not.” Wolfe shook his head ruefully. "Seems like there's a whole lot of things we haven't talked about yet..."
.....“Pierce is my brother’s son. Her son.” Crawford looked at Wolfe without seeing him. “Although she’s never acted like it. Still, he’s a good boy... even though I ended up raising him myself. Someone had to teach the boy to be a man.”

.....Mike blinked, wobbly on his feet. There was a coppery taste in his mouth. He didn't get much time to think about it. Another fist thudded into his face and he hit the ground. A gathering crowd of the summer school attendees stood around, some silent, some shouting encouragement. The smell of blood was in the air, and it smelled good.
.....Pierce stepped back, shaking his fist in pain.

.....“Bryce felt his calling during the first Gulf War, went off and joined the Army. Must’ve liked it, or at least liked it more than here, ’cause he never came back ’til they shipped his casket in.”
.....The sheriff paused, a far-away look in his gaze.
.....When the flag-draped casket had been smuggled through Dover Air Force Base and dropped off by a DHL van at the Elysian Fields Funeral Chapel, he had at his mother’s request asked that the casket be opened. Unable to leave the homestead, she had charged her remaining son with a velvet-wrapped heirloom to place in Bryce’s casket. In the time-faded cloth rested his grandfather’s Bronze Star and Purple Heart, paid for at deadly cost in The War to End All Wars.
.....Quite a few official and unofficial wars later, Bryce’s casket had been opened to reveal the sun-bloated body of a young black woman.
.....What was left of some suddenly anonymous Staff Sergeant. They hadn’t even bothered to tidy her up.
.....Wolfe watched as Crawford wandered off into his own little world, the silence building to a degree that was starting to unnerve him.
.....He cleared his throat, and the sheriff blinked back at him.
.....Nodded.
.....“Tanya now, Tanya felt her calling too,” the sheriff finally continued. “It was pretty obvious that she sorta resented getting knocked up straight outta high school and settling into the whole Harding dead end. So, right after Bryce shipped out, she dropped Pierce off on me, set off to make her fortune in Hollywood.”
.....Wolfe began to wonder why he had cleared his throat.

.....Scot T shrugged off his school jacket. He threw it on the hood of Pierce’s monster truck and waded in. He pulled Mike halfway up, drew back a fist, and let fly: CRUNCH! A tooth spun through the air, hit the asphalt. Everyone paused, Scot T with his arm jacked back to deliver a second blow, frozen in tableau as they looked down at the bloody shard of white glistening on the blacktop among the pebbles. It definitely stood out.
.....Even through his pain, Mike was impressed.
.....The crowd sighed in appreciation. One of the onlookers called out a caution: “Hey, Dude... watch out. You might get the AIDS.”
.....Scot T blinked at his fist thoughtfully and dropped Mike, then stepped back. He was pushed aside by Pierce.
.....Pierce stepped up and smiled a smile wholly lacking in humor, then hauled back a pointy-toed cowboy boot and let fly, delivering a solid blow Mike’s side. The crowd sighed in a sound that could almost be taken for empathy, if the sound hadn’t have been exhaled through smiles.
.....Mike grunted as he felt something give in his side, with a muffled sound not unlike a No. 2 pencil being snapped in a deep bowl of water.
.....The school bell rang and heads turned to consider the school in resentment. They didn’t get to see a good ass kicking every day, and now the moment had to go and be over.
.....The crowd began to disperse, reluctantly. As the future of America headed off to class, a Mexican dude bumped shoulders with one of the Anglos. They stared each down, short hairs bristling.
.....The bell rang last call, and they parted to move on towards the school in two separate packs.
.....The resentment lingered after them.

.....As the sheriff droned on, Wolfe was aware of activity of the drug raid that could be heard squawking over the radio at the front desk. Wolfe tried to ignore it, but then that meant listening to the sheriff’s continued character assassination of Tanya. Issues, the dude has some serious fucking issues, Wolfe mused.
.....“She finally came back when her old man died,” Crawford finally finished. “Tail between her legs. I guess there’s not much room down there for aging former cheerleaders with stretch marks.”
.....The two men sat across from each other, the silence sharing space with the bars between them.
.....“You know, I don’t recall a big red hourglass tattooed on her stomach,” Wolfe finally responded. “Why are you telling me this? Trying to scare me off?”
.....Roy offered him the open pack of Marlboros. Wolfe shook his head. Roy batted one out for himself and lit it. He exhaled smoke from his nose and leaned back, unblinking as he considered Wolfe.
.....Wolfe met his gaze. “It won’t work... this has been a long time coming and...”
.....“What did you think of Bring It On?”
.....“Say what?” Wolfe blinked at the abrupt change of topic. He gave it some thought, anyhow. “I think that it was an irresponsible thing for the president to…”
.....“I mean the movie, the cheerleader movie. With Lindsay Lohan? Cute, wasn’t she?”
.....“It was Hillary Duff,” Wolfe corrected. “What’s your point?”
....He found he didn't like the sheriff's point. Wasn't much argument over it, either.

.....Over the sound of the hovering ’copter, the sound of smashing glass and the thud of overturned furniture came from the house as it was being ransacked...um, searched. Doc was on the ground, hands cuffed behind his back. Two SWAT members stood over the desperado, automatic weapons at the ready in case he tried to do something silly.
.....Doc was of no mind to try anything of the sort.
.....A SWAT member swaggered from around the side of the house. In one hand he held up his trophy, a half-assed pot plant. The clump of dirt surrounding the roots outweighed the thin plant itself. One of the SWAT members turned around so that his backpack could be rifled, and finally a scale was withdrawn. The plant dropped on the scale and the LED bars fluttered about distractedly until they finally settled upon a number: 4.5 pounds.
.....Including the dirt and roots.
.....Clyde smiled. “Looks like we have a solid case of Felony Cultivation here...”
.....The two cops who stood by Doc’s shiny Lexus looked at each other, nodded, then Rochambeau'd for the spoils.
.....The loser tossed the other the keys.

.....At the Front Desk, Roy gave Wolfe back his possessions, belt and shoelaces.
.....“Can you call me a cab back to the motel?” Wolfe asked wearily.
.....“No cabs ‘round here.”
.....“Can someone here give me a ride?”
.....All Roy gave him was a stony look.
.....Wolfe started walking, his silhouette framed on the threshold briefly before the heavy oak door sighed closed behind him.
.....Julia didn’t meet his gaze as Crawford passed the dispatch desk. Her face was blank.
.....“What?”
.....She looked up at him finally, eyes wide beneath the blue eyeshadow. “Sheriff, I know it’s not my place...”
.....“Yeah? Spill it.”
.....“What we did today,” she explained. “With the Doc, and even that Wolfe guy... it was, well...”
.....“Well, what?”
.....“Fucked up.” she finally managed. “It was really fucked up.”
.....Crawford nodded. “You’re right.”
.....Her face softened. “I am?”
.....“Yeah,” the sheriff agreed. “It’s not your place.”
.....He turned and headed back down the stairs. He climbed into the Humvee and slammed the door shut behind him. He almost screamed aloud at the sudden pain that speared into his eyes.
.....The hangover was back with a vengeance.

CHAPTER 21

2008-01-16T10:10:00.000-08:00

.....As Wolfe passed beneath the clock of the American Security Bank, he neared Mrs. Prescott and a matronly lady discussing the previous night’s television.
.....“Did you catch the Special last night?” The old woman was shaking her head in dismay at the recollection.
.....Mrs. Prescott sighed heavily. “Of course. Can you believe it? That... person actually won.”
.....“What do you expect?” the matronly lady nodded. “Those people don’t vote because of someone’s talent, they vote...”
.....She trailed off as Wolfe neared. He smiled a greeting as he passed, then continued on down the sidewalk.
.....“And Darren had the loveliest voice,” Mrs. Prescott continued. “They stole it from him...”
.....As he navigated Main Street, passerby gave him looks. Some appraising, some just the unblinking stink-eye. Ahead, a small crowd had their backs to him, gathered at the foot of a light pole. He moved up and craned his neck to look over the shoulder of one: it was a MISSING poster for a soulful-eyed Cocker Spaniel, taped over a flier for one of the missing teens.
.....“... it’s just so sad, that even...” one of the crowd murmured.
.....The voice trailed off as the small cluster became aware of Wolfe in their midst.
.....He ducked into the McDonald’s.
.....That stupid Bruce Hornsby song piped softly from the speakers. It seemed like every time that Wolfe wandered into one of these joints, that same stupid song was playing. Maybe someday the man would record another song and they could alternate the two.
.....At the register ahead of him, a small boy stood on his toes to put a dollar on the counter.
.....“A large Coke, please.”
.....The cashier smiled down at him, lifting a bucket branded with the Coca-Cola logo from behind the counter.
.....“For a quarter less, you can Super-size it this week!”
.....By the looks of what struggled to burst the seams of her polyester, the girl had spent more than her share of company time Super Sizing it. Her name tag read BAMBI.
.....The boy puzzled over the math, and then gave in to the sales pitch.
.....Sometimes adults knew what was best.
.....Sometimes.
.....This time seemed like one of those times. “'Kay.”
.....He collected his quarter change and hurried his vessel over to the child-sized fountain parked next to the adult version. Standing on his toes, he began the long task of filling it. Caramel-colored sugar water began to cascade down into the bottomless pit, empty calories that foamed up into a head of even emptier calories to be tossed aside to make room for more liquid glop.
.....Lather, rinse, repeat.
.....The girl called after him. “There’s free in-store refills on that, too!”
.....Wolfe shook his head as he stepped up to the counter. “Damn, that kid is gonna be spun.”
.....The cashier looked at him blankly. “Help you?”
.....“Yeah, I’ll take...”
.....He considered his options, none of them appetizing.
.....“... one of those McMuffin things. Sausage.” He dug into his pocket for his money, then scanned the menu. “Do you have bottled water?”
.....“Excuse me?” she said. Wolfe found it amazing how two words that sounded nothing at all like ‘Fuck You’ could still come out of someone’s mouth sounding that way.
.....“You know... water? In a bottle?”
.....He looked at her, she looked at him. Somewhere along the line, communication of a sort was reached.
.....She rolled her eyes without actually rolling them. She’d save that for later; belatedly she had realized that the asshole across the counter from her might actually be one of those Mystery Shoppers management sprung on them occasionally. “Do you want a complimentary water?”
.....“Sure.”
.....She dropped a Dixie cup on the counter and regarded him with blank eyes, just waiting for some smart-assed remark. In the House of Super Size, the cup seemed positively dainty.
.....He eyed it dubiously. “Could you Super-size that for me?”
.....“Might as well get a Coke,” she shrugged, the effort rippling down her body in an aftershock. “Same price.”
.....“Water’s fine. Do I get refills on that too?”
.....She shrugged again and Wolfe felt himself getting a little seasick.
.....Bambi handed him his McMuffin. It was fast, but it was sorry looking. Wolfe wasn’t sure he wanted to know how long it had been sitting under the heat lamp.
.....As he filled his branded bucket with water, the boy still toiled with his.

.....It was a pleasant afternoon to bide one’s time in the central park. Wolfe parked himself on a bench and finished off the oily McMuffin . Wiping his mouth on part of the fistful of napkins included with his order, he crumpled them up in the waxed sandwich wrapper, dropped it into the paper bag, and wadded the whole package up into a tight ball; banked it with a smooth overhand toss into the trash receptacle across the sidewalk.
.....He shoots, he scores. Rah!
.....“Hidden talents, m’boy,” observed Doc as he ambled up and parked his long frame on the other end of the bench. “When you going pro?”
.....“When burger joints start sponsoring the teams.”
.....Doc sniffed, and gave him a wry crinkle of the nose.
.....“Damn, son. You smell like you’ve been rode hard and put away wet.”
.....“I can’t even begin to tell you what part of my body hurts the worst.”
.....“I can guess.”
.....“No... that part’s just numb.”
.....Doc fired up one of his handrolled cigarettes. Wolfe sniffed suspiciously.
.....“It’s prescription,” Doc explained, passing the joint. “Doctor’s orders. It’ll take the edge off.”
.....Wolfe took a drag, held it, then exhaled. “Pardon my French, but when was the last time that girl got laid?”
.....Doc did the math. “Well, Bryce went over to Iraq ’bout two, two-and-a...”
.....“Who in the hell is Bryce?” That sharp pain behind his eye started to come back.
.....“She didn’t... hm.” Doc blinked at him. “Me and my big ol’ mouth.”
.....“She’s married?”
.....“Was,” Doc clarified. “Tanya’s been a Gold Star Widow for ’bout a little over a year now.”
.....“Wait a minute,” Wolfe winced. “Bryce...”
.....“Crawford.”
.....“That dead guy on the poster all over town?”
.....“Our hero.”
.....“And I...”
.....“Yep.”
.....“No wonder everybody’s been giving me the stink-eye today.”
.....“Naw, those are just their natural expressions,” Doc chuckled. “Didn’t make any new friends, though.”
.....“Damn, I remember him now,” Wolfe nodded. “He and his brother were a year ahead of me in high school. Roy. That fucker kicked the shit out of me on more than a few occasions. What happened with him?”
.....“He’s our sheriff.”
.....Well, damn.
.....“That makes sense.” Wolfe reflected on the sad reality that bullies and the people they picked on went on to make up police forces all the world over. “Is that a bad thing?”
.....“For the town? No... he’s a good enough sort, as far as cops go.” Doc eyed him doubtfully. “For you... eh.”
.....“C’mon, man. I need a whole lot more to work with than just an ‘eh’.”
.....Doc shook his head and leaned back, draping an arm across the back of the bench. He was torn between holding his tongue or indulging in gossip.
.....It wasn’t too much of a struggle. Most everyone in town already knew everything about anything he had to gossip about.
.....“Well, then... after his brother died, Roy sort of took it on himself to keep an eye out for Tanya.”
.....“Great... that would be a bad thing.” Wolfe sighed. “I suppose that explains all the tickets.”
.....Doc looked at him and blinked. “Tickets?”
.....“I keep getting tickets for flickering taillights and...”
.....“No, that’s just the town making money for itself. Business as usual.”
.....“Anything else I should know?”
.....“Sure.”
.....“Well?”
.....Doc shrugged. “Not my place.”
.....“Hey, you're the one who brought it up...”
.....“I just gave you the big picture.”
.....“Thanks.”
.....“It’s up to Tanya to fill in the details.” Doc eyed him pointedly. “That’s what getting to know someone is all about.”
.....A bell tolled off in the near distance. Wolfe looked around for a clock, but a tree obscured the one in front of the bank.
.....“Shit. What time is it?”
.....Doc consulted his bare wrist. “About eleven-thirty.”
.....“I forgot to check out of The Watergate.” Wolfe said.
.....“Check out?”
.....“I mean... renew. Whatever.”
.....Doc gave him a steady look. “One thing about Tanya... the girl is as good as gold, but she is a little high maintenance, bless her heart.”
.....Wolfe leaned back against the bench and looked at the doctor warily.
.....“Someone saying ‘Bless her heart’ is never a good sign,” Wolfe observed. “How high is the high maintenance?”
.....“All I know is that she’s a beautiful woman that owns her own house...”
.....Wolfe considered his hand and raised: “And a bar.”
.....Doc nodded his agreement. “... and a bar, all free and clear. Of course dead men paid for them, but you’re still alive. Am I right?”
.....“Last time I checked.” Wolfe made a show of feeling for a heartbeat, and smiled at Doc in mock relief. “Yep, still ticking.”
.....“And if I was fifteen years younger and she was fifteen older, you and me wouldn’t be having this conversation right now.”
.....Doc eased up off of the bench, waved without looking back as he made his way to his post.

.....There were two minutes left on the meter in front of the Valiant, and the two Boy Scouts were hunched over the car like vultures. There was an electronic ticket gizmo in one of their hands.
.....“Amazing what they hand out merit badges for these days...” observed Wolfe as he walked up behind them and unlocked the car door.
.....The two started, then looked about nonchalantly. Everywhere but at Wolfe seemed of particular interest.
.....He climbed into the Valiant and fired it up.
.....He backed out, waved, then drove off down the main drag back towards the motel. The yellow ribbon of the bumper sticker seemed to laugh at the scouts until the car faded off in the distance.
.....The scouts looked at each other.
.....“What do we have next?”
.....Number One looked left. “Number forty-two is all the way down there and expires in three minutes...”
.....He considered his BlackBerry, pointed the other direction:
.....“... but Fifty-five is closer, but goes red in six.”
.....Decisions, decisions.
.....Number One snapped his wrist from an imaginary cuff, flashing his new Pulsar watch as he checked the time: “And Rush Limbaugh is on in four.”
.....“Dookie!” Number Two muttered, darting an envious glance at the watch.
.....Someday...

CHAPTER 20

2008-01-15T10:49:00.000-08:00

.....Monday.
.....8:00 am.

.....The town began to wake. Dogs barked, morning papers flew. Sprinklers sprang to life.
.....In the kitchens, eggs landed sunnyside up in cast iron skillets handed down through the generations and began to sizzle in the bacon grease. The bacon chilled on folded sheets of Brawny paper towels, grease leeching out. The odors wafted out through open windows to help create the smell of morning in Harding, Wyoming.
.....That, and the funk of cow manure wafting in on the breeze from the pastures outside of town.
.....In front of the Ziegler house, eight rolls worth of toilet paper hung from the trees. The billowing addition to the otherwise well-manicured lawn added an anarchic festiveness to the milieu, the soggy ends of the tissue adding ballast in the breeze.
.....The sprinklers had clicked on earlier in the morning, quickly reducing the lower aspect of the display to a mush that had broke free to lie clumped in the grass.
.....Steve Ziegler was about to get very upset with his son, demanding to know what the boy had done to encourage the vandalism.
.....Television, video game and internet privileges would be revoked for a week.

.....Her back to the open window, Tanya’s bare skin took on a preternatural glow in the morning sun, as Wolfe propped himself up on an elbow to watch her slowly dress.
.....It wasn’t often that she took the time to dress that slowly.
.....Wolfe appreciated the effort. “For an old chick, you are in damned fine shape.”
.....She stepped into a tight pair of Guess? jeans, slid the denim up her legs and zipped them up. They fit perfect, no muffin-effect of overlapping flesh there. She posed for him, hand on cocked hip.
.....“Believe it or else, I still fit in my cheerleader outfit.”
.....He fell back to the pillow, hands behind his neck. He winced: livid claw marks ran down his back and the crumpled sheets weren’t as welcoming as they had been the night before.
.....He shifted uncomfortably as he leered up at her. “That I’d have to see...”
.....She circled to the bed and drew a hand across his chest, slid her other hand under his head. She leaned in to kiss him. Hungrily. Her left hand continued south, and her lips followed.
.....Eyes closed, he inhaled sharply.

.....Along the avenue outside the cottage, birds paused in their morning serenade as a sub-bass rumble began to build. Spreading an advance wave of unease as it approached the neighborhood, the Humvee rolled in and eased by Wolfe’s car, then moved on slowly.
.....Very slowly.
.....The driver had one very nasty hangover.

.....Tanya pulled the sheet aside and threw her leg over him, straddled him, eased down.
.....Sighed. Languidly at first, she began to ride.
.....His tenderized back forgotten, Wolfe slid his hands up the back of her thighs, cupped her ass. She paused, then reached back and took his wrists, pinned them above his head. Resumed her rhythm. Eyes back, eyes closed, she chuckled.
.....The rhythm became more urgent, her breath ragged...
.....Eyes closed, Wolfe inhaled deeply as he neared orgasm.
........ she moaned...
........ and with a sweep of hair fell forward and bit him on the shoulder...
........ HARD.
.....Skin broke.
.....His eyes shot open. Wide.
.....“Ahhhhhhh!”

.....At his cry, an old woman froze by her white picket fence, her eyes wide as she half turned to Tanya’s open bedroom window, roses momentarily forgotten. Her bony knuckles whitened across her grip on the pruning shears, the blades opened and erect in defensive mode.

.....Her jaws locked tight to his flesh, Wolfe bucked as Tanya pounded her hips against him in a race to match his climax. A whimper welled from deep in her throat and built, and she threw back her head and released a keening moan...

.....A succession of expressions fleeted across the old woman’s face:
........ fear...
........ recognition...
........ nostalgia...
........ and taking in the strange car parked out front... a vindictive smile.
.....SNIP.
.....She returned to her roses... but hurriedly.
.....SNIP.
.....Gossip awaited...
.....SNIP!

.....Gasping to reclaim her breath, Tanya pushed herself upright with a hand splayed against Wolfe’s sweaty chest. Her green eyes burned as she regarded him from beneath hooded lids, blonde hair tinged dark with sweat and hanging damply.
....Wolfe’s eyes moved to the livid slash of blood across her lips, and noting his gaze she wiped it away with the back of her hand like errant lipstick.
.....A bead of sweat hung from the tip of her nose. It broke free as she pulled back the tangle of her dank hair, falling to mingle with the patina of sweat on his chest. He looked up at her with the expression of one that had awoke from one dream to find themselves in another, even better dream.
.....She met his gaze, an uncertain smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.
.....“What are you doing this morning?” she murmured.
.....He blinked, choosing his words thoughtfully. “Recovering?”
.....There was a moist smack of uncoupling as she rolled off of him, swinging her legs over the side of the bed. She looked back at him over her shoulder. “Walk me to the restaurant.”
.....He made a show of his decrepitude, easing up to sit. He half-turned towards her to display his war-torn flesh. “If I can,” he sighed painfully, eyes gone all puppy dog.
.....She touched one of the gouges lightly and he winced.
.....“Whoops,” she giggled.

.....The dispatch room reeked of stale cigarette smoke and cheap perfume, with an undertone of bad sweat.
.....With a Starbucks Grande Double Latte gripped in his shaking hand, Crawford leaned over Julia as she typed away. He fought to keep from tasting for a second time the Jack Daniels he had abused the previous night. The room probably smelled like that all the time, he reckoned, but today was the first time he had considered how nasty it must seem to someone coming in from the fresh air.
.....He’d have supply put in an order for some industrial strength air freshener when he finally retreated to his office.
.....He eyed the data scrolling up on the screen, presenting the image of someone who knew what he was looking at, even if he didn’t. His slowly ebbing hangover didn’t help his concentration. His mouth tasted like he’d spent the night licking clean the floor of the Animal Shelter. The coffee didn’t taste much better, but the caffeine was clearing his head. Slowly.
.....He gave up trying to make any sense of what was on the screen. “Anything yet?”
.....“Typical day-to-day shit,” Julia replied, tapping the ash from her Virginia Slim menthol into the trash can. “Some late payments on his credit cards.”
.....Crawford considered the trash can loaded with discarded paperwork that was lightly dusted with cigarette ash. So much for the promised paper-free work environment the advent of the digital age had promised. He had mentioned the hazard before to her and apparently he needed to mention it again, but priorities were in line.
.....She looked up at him, taking another drag off of her smoke.
.....“He’s got an overdue video at Blockbuster.”
.....“How late?” he asked.
.....She exhaled the smoke and chuckled in grudging admiration.
.....“Thirty-two bucks worth of overdue.”
.....Crawford let out a low whistle. “He coulda bought the damn’ thing for that much...what the hell is it?”
.....“Bring It On.”
.....Crawford considered the title, trying to place it. He had never heard of it. “What’s that, a war movie?”
.....“It’s sort of like a comedy,” Julia replied, shaking her head. “I guess you’d call it a chick flick for teenyboppers. With Kirsten Dunst as a cheerleader.”
.....She shook her head at the memory of having endured part of it on late night TV. “It was lame, even as those things go.”
.....Crawford grunted and leaned back to the screen, trying to decipher the runes. “If need be, I want you to go as far back as grade school, dig through his Permanent Record...”
.....She straightened. “Huh...”
.....“What?”
.....“Looks like he defaulted on a loan in...”
.....“Fuck that, we’re not a collection agency.”
.....He massaged the bridge of his nose as Julia continued to tap away on the keys. It sounded like she was using her fists. Finally, blessed relief arrived as she paused and wheeled back from the desk.
.....“Here’s something... some petty-assed shit, but at least it’s something.”
.....“Hit me.”
.....Her eyes narrowed. “Don’t tempt me.”
.....Crawford took the comeback for a joke, but didn’t catch the edge of rancor left over from the night before. The least the man could have done was drop by my table just to say hello. Even if it was only coworker to coworker.
.....She leaned back in and tapped at the keyboard some more, then paused:
.....“How ’bout a Failure to Appear on a bench warrant in Yuba City, California. 1987.” She shrugged. “Unpaid parking tickets.” They’re not looking for him anymore, but...”
.....“He doesn’t know that.” Crawford frowned. Something about the man rubbed Roy the wrong way. Aside from him fucking Tanya. He sighed. “I guess...”
.....Julia paused in her typing and perked up. “Oh my.”
.....“What?”
.....“My, my, my...” she clucked.
.....“Jules...”
.....She held up a hand to silence him and hit a button on the keyboard. “It appears that our Mr. Wolfe didn’t leave the California School System on his own volition.”
.....He blinked at the last word. “His what?”
.....“They canned him.” She turned the monitor to Roy.
.....“Huh.” The information was in English finally, and he poured over the data. “They fired him for that?”
.....He had forgotten about his hangover.
.....“She was sixteen.” Julia eyed him sternly.
.....He looked at the .jpg supplied with the report. “Yeah, but she’s got the body of...”
.....Julia slugged him in the arm. Hard.
.....“Ow. Assaulting an officer of the law.” He rubbed his arm. “I’ll have you on bread and water.”
.....“At these wages, that’d be a promotion.”
.....He stepped around the dispatch desk and approached the wall occupied by the Sony industrial model plasma screen monitor.
.....From the image displayed on the monitor, not one whole hell of a lot was happening on the main drag of Harding at that moment. It may as well have been an sixty thousand dollar picture frame for all the movement it displayed. But by God, what detail. He could virtually read the license plate numbers from the cars left overnight in front of The Larkspur.
.....They were left overnight not out of fear of getting a deuce, he mused, just the left-behinds of folks pairing off at closing time. Even being as big of a motorhead that Crawford was, he couldn’t figure out the kind of folks that would drive less than eight blocks to hang out at a bar. Half the time, they’d have to walk back in the morning to collect the car, anyway.
.....Then they would come up to him in his off-time, acting chummy in an attempt to try and have him fix the resulting parking ticket. Or tickets. Some of them were damned lazy about walking to collect their vehicles.
.....Assholes.
.....He moved closer to the screen. Hell, he could damn near read the expiration dates on the tags.
.....He thought about cars left behind and the why and had a pretty good idea where Wolfe was at the moment. Legs apart and arms clasped behind his back in parade rest, he turned his profile to Julia:
.....“Bring up The Teapot. Interior Cam.”
.....With a casual tapping of the keyboard, Julia brought up the interior of the restaurant on the plasma screen. From a slight overhead angle, the camera eyed Tanya as she turned from the bar to the register. From the detail of the monitor, Crawford could tell by the tag on the curve of her buttocks that Tanya was wearing her faded Guess? jeans.
.....Wolfe was sitting at the bar.
.....Julia chuckled through a cloud of cigarette smoke. “Hey... he’s checking out her ass.”
.....“So he is,” Crawford agreed. “Damned pervert. You’d think she was a little too old for him.”

.....Tanya finished setting up the bank and turned from the register.
.....“What are you up to?”
.....“A Bloody Mary?” Wolfe offered hopefully.
.....“It’s too early,” Tanya countered with a smile. “Go get something to eat first.”
.....He eyed the kitchen. She caught the look and shook her head.
.....“I’m not cooking you breakfast, too...” she chided. “Maybe tomorrow.”
.....Casually.
.....“Sounds like a plan.” He could play that game.
.....“Scoot.”
.....Wolfe scooted.

CHAPTER 19

2008-01-14T09:06:00.000-08:00

.....After The Larkspur had closed its doors at 2:00 am, Crawford had left the Humvee parked in front of the station and found his way home. Alone, thankfully. The company pier covered a whole lot of waterfront, and he included all of Harding in that. For some reason, Julia seemed pissed at him, giving him the stink-eye all night as he kept to himself in the corner. He’d figure out what that was all about in the morning.
.....The door to Pierce’s room was open and the bed was still made.
.....Piled into the vintage leather armchair like the dirty clothes heaped on the floor, Crawford watched inconsequential fluff on the 42” Sony monitor. He had shuffled the television in with the order for its big sister at the station. Homeland Security had pretty much furnished his house.
.....The four-hundred-dollar Swiss-made clock on the wall across from him told pretty much the same time as an eight-dollar Chinese-made clock from WalMart would have: 3:30 in the morning.
.....American Movie Classics was between commercials, showing something that wasn’t American, wasn’t a Classic, and as far as he could tell, was barely a Movie.
.....Beachballs, bikinis and Aquabrite smiles. In Italian with English subtitles.
.....In contrast to his Jack Daniels, wifebeater/boxer combo, and current dour outlook on life.
.....What the fuck did Italians know about beach bunnies? he wondered.
.....A spiderweb of pink scar tissue sprawled from his knee and crawled up his thigh to disappear beneath the leg of his boxers. A chance memento from a youthful run-in with a galvanized fencepost strung with barbed wire that had kept him from joining the Army with his brother. Looking at what had happened to Bryce, he should have felt lucky to be where he was.
.....He didn’t feel all that lucky at the moment.
.....The bottle was near at hand as he took a sip from a large tumbler. He wasn’t drunk, just maintaining. On the television, a brunette with a hair-sprayed coif began to sing an insipid love song. Such fantastic reproduction to present such a load of crap.
.....It was the last thing he needed at that moment. He picked up the remote and changed the channel until he caught Dirty Harry halfway through torturing a suspect. As the torture passed and Harry’s supervisor began to yell at him for his rogue ways, Crawford picked up the phone that should have set him back eight-hundred bucks but didn’t and hit the button labeled HPD.
.....After several rings, Clyde answered. Probably chatting up the new night dispatcher.
.....Cynthia, her name was. More boobs than brains. They’d make a lovely couple.
.....To give the price tag on the phone its due, the man sounded like he was in the same room as Crawford. Problem was, Crawford wanted him in another room digging for some dirt.
.....“Clyde, I need you to head out to the Watergate and toss a room for me.” He paused, dredging up the number from memory. “Room 22. Don’t let the night clerk see you and be tidy...we don’t want him to guess that we’re on to him.”
.....“What is he, a dealer?”
.....“He’s from California, ain’t he?”
.....“Right, chief.”
.....Crawford hung up the phone and sat back. He took the bottle with him and freshened up the drink. He was most of the way through a third one when the phone rang.
.....“Yo.”
.....“Um...I went out to the motel but there isn’t a Room 22.”
.....“There’s gotta be...”
.....“Nope. I checked. Weird thing is, the joint has two Room 2s...”
.....Crawford hung up the phone and closed his eyes. He was getting a nasty stab of pain behind one of his eyes...
.....He turned off the ringer on the phone and proceeded to get very, very drunk.

.....On the other end of the line, Clyde placed the receiver back into its cradle. He’d have to get a memo tattooed on the back of his eyelids: never make a joke to Roy Crawford. The man just never seemed to get it when someone was foolin’ around.
.....Clyde wasn’t as big of an idiot as the sheriff seemed to think. Granted, he had been a little confused when he pulled up behind the Watergate Motel and ducked around the front to quietly gain entry to Room 22, only to find that there didn’t seem to be a Room 22 in the complex. Didn’t mean he was an idiot. Anyone would have been confused at first.
.....Finally, with the glow of his MagLite counting off the room numbers, he had reasoned that the room 2 between rooms 21 and 23 must just be missing the second numeral. Good enough for him.
.....He slid the master key they kept around for such occasions into the lock and eased into the room. Not that there was anything to find, he found. Just a bag full of stinky underwear and a ratty paperback book.
.....He read the back of the book with the light of his flashlight and then tossed it back on the nightstand. Not his cup of tea, and he wondered what the hell kind of guy would read something like that when you could get a real book four times the size by Tom Clancy for the same price. And there was actual stuff in those books, stuff that was going on in the world today that by the time you finished the last page you could turn the beside lamp off and rest secure in the knowledge that there was really people like Jack Ryan out there keeping the world safe for democracy. Stuff you could sink your teeth into. Not just ramblings by some dead tree hugger.
.....He was doubly disappointed by the lack of contraband in the man’s room. He had plans for the rest of the night and he could have used a little pick-me-up.
.....His hand still on the receiver of the phone, he smiled up at the new dispatcher. Cynthia.
.....“Still got a few hours until the end of your shift, huh?” he noted, glancing at the clock.
.....“Yep,” she allowed, following his gaze.
.....“Must be hard to stay awake,” he sniffed.
.....“I’ll find a way,” she sniffed back.
.....Sense of humor or not, the sheriff definitely knew how to pick ‘em when it came to hiring. Fifteen minutes later, the both of them were more than ready to greet the dawn, and were becoming more than a little creative. It was Cynthia’s idea to have him swing by the Playhouse and liberate a prop from the stage adaptation that the John Birch society had mounted a couple of months before. Jack Finney’s “The Body Snatchers”
.....Just before dawn, he was back in the room with the missing 2, sliding a special greeting under the bed. In the dark and away from the influence of Cynthia’s prodigious breasts, he didn’t quite get the humor of what he was doing anymore. He brushed off the knees of his trousers and stood, then shrugged. Back at the station Cynthia would have to remind him of why they thought the idea was so damned funny in the first place.

.....Using up nearly a tank’s worth of the Police Department gas as they trolled about the sleeping town, Pierce and Scott T had been very, very drunk for a while. Meanwhile, the two boys were getting still drunker.
.....Debbie had been right: those damned Coors Lightnings had wired them but good. So now the two teenagers were very, very drunk, very wired, and even worse, very bored. Pierce had dropped Debbie off in front of her house over an hour before, so bagging her at that point was out of the question.
.....Besides, he needed a break from her.
.....Ever since he had let her know that he was joining the Army, he couldn’t get any free time from the girl. She was all over him the minute she climbed in the truck when he picked her up in the morning, chattering in his ear during any free minute that she could corner him in the school, and then on and on into the night until he finally shook her off on the doorstep of her parent’s house.
.....Debbie was obviously crazy for him and that was nice and all, but now she was talking about them getting married before he went off to basic. Actually, it sort of made sense; that recruiter dude had said that the Army would kick down with some extra money to him for having a wife back stateside, which would be nice and all that, but would only be icing on his shit life.
.....All he wanted, all he needed, all he breathed was a shot at some of those Iraqi fuckers that had blown up the towers. The bastards that had killed his father. He’d wanted to go Marines like his old man, but he didn’t have the grades. Why the fuck you needed a diploma to point a gun and kill someone was beyond him, but then that was the deal. What the fuck.
.....Fortunately, he’d ran into that recruiter that had dropped by the school towards the end of the year. Sgt. Hutchins. He didn’t have the grades for the Army either, but Hutchins had told him that it wasn’t a problem. That there was some sort of legacy program he was qualified for because of his father. It sounded like bullshit and he was sure it was, he had heard that the Army was getting desperate for swinging dicks to send into the field.
.....What the hell the country was coming to when no one was willing to stand up and fight for freedom anymore, he just couldn’t wrap his head around.
.....All he knew is that he couldn’t care less how he got in just as long as he got in.
.....In less than six months, his combat boots were gonna be kicking up another desert storm. He could almost taste the blood in his mouth. Once he was out of summer school and went through basic training and that other bullshit, he was going to be unleashed on those Iraqis like some lean, mean killing machine the likes of which they never suspected would be set on them when they went and fucked around with America.
.....Up until then, there was only the waiting. And the beer. And the boredom.
.....“We could always go TP that Ziegler fag’s house.” Scott T offered.
.....There was always that. And that sounded like a very, very good idea.

CHAPTER 18

2008-01-13T09:16:00.000-08:00

.....Below the sea of stars, the monster truck perched on the butte overlooking the town, which sparkled below starlike in its own right. Scot T stood at the edge pissing into the darkness.
.....He took a final swig from his Coors Lightning and hurled the dead soldier off into the night.
.....In the bed of the truck with a sleeping bag rolled up behind their backs, Debbie shifted under Pierce’s arm. It was a perfect night, but even those have to end at some point. Preferably before the perfect night got ruined. Pierce had already tossed back a couple more than the amount of beers that she trusted him on. After one too many, he could turn into someone she could barely recognize.
.....The trick was catching him in that gray area in between just right and the evil one.
.....“Pierce, we gotta be heading back soon,” she prodded. “The first day of summer school is tomorrow.”
.....There was the faint sound of shattering glass as the beer bottle finally hit the rocks below.
.....From the darkness came a whistle. “Damn...that’s a ways,” Scot T’s voice observed.
.....Pierce remained silent. Eyes closed and breathing steady, he could have been asleep. She knew better. Pierce never slept easy.
.....“Pierce?”
.....Without opening his eyes, he finally answered her. “I don’t need...”
.....“You need the class if you wanna get your diploma.”
.....“Don’t need it.” He finally looked at her, eyes bright. “In six months I’ll be over in Baghdad capping towelheads.”
.....“You need to graduate an’ get your diploma to get into Basic Training...”
.....Pierce shook his head. “I’ve been talking to that recruiter, an’ he says he can fix it for me. For my ol’ man he can do it, he says.”
.....“Then I need to get back.” Her mind made up, she drew out from beneath his arm. “I’ll get kicked off the squad if I don’t pass.”
.....Arm finally free, Pierce lit himself a cigarette. Debbie waved the smoke out of her face and rose up, calling out to Scot T:
.....“Hey, asshole... you almost done?”
.....“Just a minute,” came his voice from the night. “I must have pissed half a case already, got another sixer to go...”

.....Gilmore’s only carried three flavors of ice cream at night: vanilla, chocolate, and the Flavor of the Day.
.....Today’s flavor was pistachio.
.....With a pistachio ice cream cone in hand, Wolfe opened the door as a fortyish woman moved to step inside.
.....She might have been attractive once and Wolfe could almost recognize her, but twenty years of being an adult had obviously done this woman wrong: harsh lines dragged her features into her mouth, and her eyes smoldered with spite ready to be spat in any direction. Every ounce of what could have been used for body fat seemed instead to be held in reserve for vitriol.
.....She drew up at the sight of Tanya, then glanced coldly at Wolfe. With an abrupt snap of her chin, she apparently changed her mind and continued on down the sidewalk.
.....“Wow,” Wolfe said. “Is it the ice cream, or did the temperature in here just suddenly drop?”
.....Tanya brushed past him and stepped into the night, then hung a turn in the opposite direction. They headed back towards Tanya’s house.
.....Wolfe picked up his pace to catch up. “Say, wasn’t that...uh, Nancy Shelton?”
.....“Prescott, now,” Tanya corrected absently. “Remember Joey Prescott?”
.....“That dork.” Wolfe laughed. Even among the bottom feeders, Joey Prescott had been a crawdad. “Yeah, that guy was a complete and total...”
.....“We call him Mayor Prescott these days.”
.....“Big whoo,” he shrugged, then remembered: “Didn’t you and her used to be best friends?”
.....She threw him a laughing look from beneath her locks. “Been a long time since high school, you know.”
.....“So what’s up with her?”
.....“She’s bitter.”
.....“No? I didn’t really get that.” They both laughed. “Towards you?”
.....“Some. Mostly about everything. She’s one of those folks that never got what she wanted, lost what she had.”
.....“Like what?”
.....“Well, a couple of years ago, her son,” she offered. “He got caught up by one of those car bombs.”
.....“Iraq?”
.....“No,” she countered, straightfaced. “Detroit.”
.....Wolfe blinked at her and she shook her head.
.....“Yeah, Iraq... one of those cities no one knows the name of yet.”
.....“That sucks.”
.....“Sucks would be a word for it, I suppose,” she replied. “It didn’t kill him right away, though. You remember that book they had us read back in English, Johnny Got His Gun?”
.....“Yeah, Dalton Trumbo.”
.....“It was sorta like the kid in that book, all fucked up. No arms, legs, I-have-no-mouth-and-I-must-scream shit. It took him a few weeks before...”
.....“Damn.”
.....“What sucks for Nancy is that he didn’t die immediately.”
.....“What?”
.....“Did you know that if you don’t die in-country, they don’t count you as killed in action? Even if you die right after, you’re only counted as a casualty.”
.....“I didn’t know that. But dead is dead, right?”
.....“Wives and mothers don’t get a Gold Star for a casualty.” Tanya noted. “Also, there’s the difference between what kind of stipend a survivor gets. Now she gets chump change that doesn’t even begin to cover the medical expenses he left behind. That, and now they want a refund on his signing bonus.”
.....“I don't believe...”
.....“Believe it.”
.....She slipped her arm through Wolfe’s and he put his free hand over hers, casually as he could. At least it felt casual.
.....“Not many people can get real ice cream like this anymore,” she noted, considering her ice cream cone seriously, more seriously than one should consider an ice cream cone. “Now it’s all those factory chains like Baskin Robbins and the like.”
.....Wolfe wasn’t sure whether it was the chill of the ice cream or the abrupt change in the topic of conversation that was causing the sudden sharp pain behind his eye.
.....“I definitely missed it,” he finally responded. “We’ve got Ben n’ Jerry’s back where I’m from, but it’s still all that corporate bullshit.”
.....She nodded. “Nobody even knows what real food tastes like anymore...and the ones that do remember are dying off. The Greatest Generation.”
.....Wolfe laughed.
.....“You think that’s funny?” Tanya eyed him curiously. “They lasted longer than these folks eating breakfast everyday at McDonald's will.”
.....“Anyone who eats breakfast at McDonald’s gets what they deserve.”
.....“My old man ate steak and eggs for breakfast till the day he...”
.....Wolfe filled in her pause with a nod. “At what age?”
.....“Sixty-eight.” She caught his look. “But it was a full sixty-eight.”
.....“Your point?”
.....“Tra la la la la, live for today.”
.....She paused at the gateway of the house. It took Wolfe a moment to realize that it was her house, and not just another well-maintained cottage that Harding seemed to collect and display like Hummel figurines.
.....“How’s your ice cream?” she asked.
.....“Pretty damned tasty.”
.....Somewhere along the walk she had finished her cone off. She eyed what was left of his.
.....“You mind?”
.....“It’s pistachio...”
.....“I like pistachio.”
.....“Well then, not at all.”
.....He offered the cone... and she took his wrist and pulled the cone to her, licked it. Her eyes not leaving his.
.....He indicated her lip. “You’ve got some on...”
.....Using his wrist as leverage, she pulled herself to him, her other arm circling his neck to pull his face down. They kissed.
.....The ice cream cone hit the pavement. It’s work was done.
.....It was a long kiss, building without breaths being taken, but exchanged.
.....She pulled back and shivered.
.....“It is chilly tonight.”
.....Still holding his wrist and eyes wide, she led him gently up her walkway.
.....Two houses down, the Humvee blended with the night. Inside, a face was lit by the flare of a Zippo as a cigarette was lit. The driver leaned back and watched as the couple entered and the lights went on. Before he was done with the cigarette the lights went off.
.....Sheriff Crawford flicked the half-smoked Marlboro away and gave the house one last glance. He fired up the engine and dropped the beast into gear. They rumbled off into the night together, taillights covering their retreat.
.....As the Humvee moved on, the end theme for Jay Leno spilled from the cathode-drenched windows. The lights blinked off one-by-one as televisions were turned off.
.....The electronic clock outside American Security Bank creaked as it turned.
.....THREAT LEVEL: YELLOW it flashed as it turned.
.....And turned: 12:30 PM.
.....And turned...
.....Across the town, locks were clicked, deadbolts were slid shut, and chains were secured.
.....A police helicopter continued to prowl, spotlight probing the dark niches of sleepy-eyed Harding, Wyoming.
.....The Humvees patrolled.
.....Crickets chirped. In the distance, a dog howled.

CHAPTER 17

2008-01-12T10:58:00.000-08:00

.....Tanya touched his arm and indicated ahead: “Take a left up here.”
.....Wolfe signaled left and started to turn, then changed his mind as the monster truck roared up behind them, the rearview mirror igniting with a blaze of light as the vehicle rode up on their ass, and then swerved out, around and passed them.
.....“That boy’s a little young to be working on the penis envy complex,” he observed.
.....Tanya gave him an odd look. “You know...”
.....He signaled left again. With a screech of rubber, a patrol Humvee pulled out behind them from a side street, lights flashing...
........Wolfe pulled aside to let him pass...
........but The Humvee pulled up behind him.
.....Wolfe glanced back and made an inarticulate gesture towards the fading taillights of the monster truck. “Hello?”
.....He turned off the engine and settled back with a sigh. “Shit.”
.....“What is it?” Tanya glanced back at the Humvee, then turned back to eye him curiously.
.....Wolfe glanced over at her as he dug out his papers. Again.
.....“This is the second time today.”
.....With a clink of over-accessorized Sam Browne belt, and the click of jackboot heels, the officer approached the Valiant.
.....Wolfe waited with papers in hand as the officer approached his vehicle. The cop leaned down, hand on the roof. He brought with him a wave of cheap cologne and Wolfe tried not to sneeze. It took an effort and his eyes began to water.
.....The cop’s mirrored aviator shades glinted in the headlights of the Hummer. He was the spitting image of the first cop...although this one sported a neatly-trimmed blond mustache.
.....A line from that stupid Corey Hart song began to play in Wolfe’s mind. “Cus you got it made with the guy in the shades, oh no...”
.....The guy who wore his sunglasses at night leaned down to his window. “License and regis...”
.....Wolfe handed them over.
.....The mustache twitched. “Hm. Been through this a lot, huh?”
.....He looked over the license at Tanya.
.....“Evening, Tanya.”
.....She nodded back. “Clyde.”
.....Wolfe kept his irritation at bay, voice level. “Today, yeah.”
.....“I noticed that your taillight was flickering.”
.....“I already got a ticket for that. A few hours ago.”
.....Clyde examined at the ticket, then handed it back. “Nope, you got a ticket for the right taillight. I pulled you over for the left one.”
.....“Then he put down the wrong one.”
.....“Could be.” He eyed Wolfe suspiciously and brought up his Mag-Light. Wolfe winced and turned his head away from the blast of light. “You been drinking?”
.....“No, why?”
.....“Your eyes are red.” The cop sniffed. “Been smoking the grass?”
.....“The what?”
.....“The reefer. The Mary Jane. The...”
.....Tanya sighed. “He’s okay, Clyde.”
.....Clyde paused dubiously. Wolfe sneezed. A big whopping one, followed quickly by two more. If he didn’t get some breeze going through the car and soon, the cop’s cologne was going to kill him.
.....“Allergies,” he offered after the bout had passed. Clyde nodded.
.....“You might wanna pick up something for that down at the Kwickie...” He paused thoughtfully. “Doc Taylor might get you something for that in the morning.”
.....He handed Wolfe the ticket and, after glancing through them one more time, the license and registration.
.....Wolfe looked at the ticket, then back up to the cop. “This is bullshit, you know.”
.....The cop shrugged. “Take it to court.”
.....“Let it go, Dan,” Tanya cautioned.
.....Dan ignored her. “When’s that?”
.....“The fifteenth of each month.”
.....“This is the seventeenth.”
.....Clyde checked his watch. “Yes, it is.”
.....“And if I don’t pay it?”
.....Clyde finally smiled. “Then we put out a bench warrant for your arrest, a failure-to-appear.”
.....He waited to see if Wolfe had anything to add. Wolfe sighed and tucked the ticket in the dashbox with his registration. He looked back to Clyde.
.....“All good?”
.....Clyde nodded. “All good.”
.....He headed back towards the Humvee, then paused at the sight of Mike approaching on the sidewalk.
.....The boy seemed a little wobbly.
.....“Hey!” Clyde called out to the boy. Mike turned to consider him.
.....“Curfew,” the cop noted, looking pointedly at his wristwatch.
.....“I’m almost there.”
.....“Is ‘there’ your home?”
.....“Yeah.”
.....“You been drinking?”
.....Mike looked at him like the man had just asked if he still believed in Santa Claus. “I’m not old enough to drink.”
.....Clyde considered that. “Oh... okay. Just get home or I’ll have to take you home. Capiche?”
.....Mike nodded tiredly and continued on. Clyde scaled the Hummer and slammed the door shut behind him and fired up the engine.
.....Wolfe watched in the rearview mirror as the emergency lights were doused. “Did he just give me a ticket for using my turn signal?”
.....“Nobody uses ’em around here. Everyone already knows where everyone else is going.”
.....The Humvee pulled away from the curve, passed them and roared on.

.....Tanya’s house was a demure cottage, straight out of a post-Victorian Americana housing catalog. Painted a soft cream with beige trim. Gables. Mandatory white picket fence with a row of roses included, of course.
.....The Valiant parked at the curb, Wolfe opened the door for Tanya, closed it behind her. She looked up to her house, then back to Wolfe with a lowered sidelong glance.
.....“Do you like ice cream?”
.....“Yeah,” he shrugged. Who doesn’t?
.....“It’s still early,” Tanya said, glancing at her watch. “Gilmore’s is still open. Let’s walk downtown.”

CHAPTER 16

2008-01-11T09:42:00.000-08:00

.....Looking down on the town from a distant bluff, KPAX-AM 610 was a squat stack of cinderblocks with a door.
.....Sprouting from its rear end was a tall, steel tower that reached high up into the cloudless Wyoming night, with guy wires holding it tight so that it didn’t just topple over one windy night. The light atop the tower blinked reassuringly like a Christmas tree ornament flashing from far, far across the room. A room with a really, really tall ceiling.
.....Crickets chirped and unseen things scurried about in the darkness. Wolfe waited, leaning against the front of the Valiant. He wasn’t all that interested in the scurrying things. The cooling engine ticked off the time for him.
.....The station door cracked open and Tanya stepped out, backpack slung over her shoulder. She turned and gasped at the sight of Wolfe.
.....“Sorry,” he offered with a shy grin, pushing himself off from the hood to meet her.
.....“It’s okay.” She recovered with a smile. “I didn’t expect...”
.....“It’s chilly,” he smiled back. “Doc thought that you might need a ride back tonight.”
.....“Well, if it’s doctor’s orders...”
.....They loaded her bike into the trunk and climbed in. As Wolfe fired up the engine, the radio sputtered to life. The aged speakers rattled with the bellowing of a man who insisted that the damned liberals were playing into the hands of the terrorists.
.....“Jesus Christ,” he muttered at the radio in amazement.
.....Tanya glanced at the radio. “No, it’s Michael Savage. We do a satellite link after my...”
.....“I mean, I drove all the way from California and the whole time the damned radio refused to work,” he explained. “Now it finally comes on for this shit. Pardon my French-sounding language.”
.....Wolfe turned it off. “I hope that isn’t what serves as the go-to news source around here.”
.....“I suppose it does. That and Fox News.”
.....“Damn,” he muttered. “Might as well wake up in the morning and get hit in the head with a shit shovel.”
.....Tanya laughed. “That’s why I sprung for satellite at the restaurant. No one likes the smell of shit while they’re eating.”
.....“Except for those that are used to it.”
.....“That’s also why I don’t leave on the news during dining hours.”
.....He turned the wheel and eased the vehicle towards the distant lights of the town. They traveled in the comfortable silence as sagebrush swept by in the night.
.....“So...” Tanya finally asked. “How ‘bout them cheerleaders?”
.....“Oh, gawd...” Wolfe sputtered, darting a glance at her. “You heard about that?”
.....“It’s a fine ol’ Harding tradition.” She laughed. “Every big reunion, for the tenth or twentieth, they drag out the current crop of hardbodies to torture everybody.”
.....She brought her legs up onto the bench seat as she turned towards him. “It’s kind of cruel, you know.”
.....“How so?”
.....“It reminds some folks that those were the best years of their lives, and that everything since has been a downward spiral.”
.....Wolfe nodded. “Sort of like those Olympic gold winners... they win the gold and then, well... that’s the peak of their lives? That nothing will ever top that moment.”
.....“I never really thought of it that way,” she reflected. “Well, not as extreme as that, but... sure.”
.....Wolfe considered the implications. “You think that it’s something that someone planned deliberately?”
.....“I wouldn’t put it past someone. No grudge holds like one held since high school.”
.....“Oh.”
.....“Especially by someone who never did get a shot at their own glory days.” She turned in her seat and eyed him steadily. “What about you?”
.....“Hm?” Wolfe mulled it over. “Oh, I’ve had my moments. High school wasn’t one of them.”
.....“The Lone Wolfe. That nickname wasn’t exactly a compliment, you know.”
.....“I know. I knew it then. I didn’t care... at least I tried not too. Y’know, I think I’ve had my fill of Memory Lane for tonight, already...”
.....She nodded as more sagebrush swept by. There was a lot of sagebrush between the radio station and the town. Finally, she spared him a sidelong glance.
.....“I used to wonder about you. Sometimes.”
.....“Really?” Wolfe was pleased.
.....“Not often, but sometimes.”
.....“Thanks.” Talk about a backhanded compliment... “Wow. I thought I was invisible to you guys.”
.....“No one is invisible in high school,” Tanya retorted. “Besides, it was my job to know exactly what made everyone tick. You never knew when that information might come in handy.”
.....“So what did you think made me tick?”
.....Tanya laughed. “I thought you were gay.”
.....“Great.”
.....“But it was just that you didn’t know it yet...”
.....She paused. Ahead, a flickering glow of red and blue pulsed on the other side of the rise they were mounting.
.....“Huh,” Wolfe observed as he slowed the vehicle. Cresting the rise, the source of the sweep of emergency lights became visible.
.....One of the police Humvees was parked to the side of the road, lights throwing off a wash of red and blue. A black scorch of treadmarks veered off from the direction of town, cutting across the berm and off into the night.
.....Beyond the tracks and bridged by darkness, dying flames illuminated the burned-out shell of a Monte Carlo sedan. The vehicle was crumpled nose-deep in an outcropping of rock. Far off down the road coming from Harding by way of Lumbeck, the red wash of an ambulance approached.
.....Wolfe slowed as he passed the sheriff standing next to the Humvee. He noted abstractly that the officer was their age, and more solidly built than the rest of the town cops.
.....Roy watched as the Valiant passed. As it rolled by, he recognized Tanya in the passenger seat, the cast of red and blue throwing her face into sharp relief. She stared straight ahead and didn’t meet his gaze.
.....Didn’t even acknowledge him.
.....A cop loomed out of the darkness from the wreck.
.....“Sheriff? This is all I could find from the wreckage.”
.....He handed Roy an Air Force officer’s beret. The bronze cluster of a Major’s insignia glinted in the headlights as the Sheriff turned it over in his hands.
.....“Must have been ejected from the trunk,” the cop noted helpfully.
.....Whatever had caused the car to go up had burned hot, burnt fast and left nothing behind but scorched metal and bare seat springs. There wasn’t enough left of the driver to pack into what was left of the glove box.
.....County forensics was going to have one hell of a job on their hands for the next few days, unless they got lazy and put down the registered owner of the car as the deceased, throwing a roll of the dice that the car didn’t come up stolen.
.....A lot of folks in the past had turned up dead that way without having to go through the bother of actually dying. For a lot of insurance companies, most of the time it just didn’t seem worth the energy to send out an investigator to double check on a claim, unless they had an agent on the deck that needed a little disciplining.
.....Roy couldn’t care one way or another. He didn’t say a word as he looked off to watch the taillights of the Valiant fade towards town. His knuckles whitened as he twisted the cloth cap in his hands.

.....The streetlights hummed and crickets chirped as Mike made his way down the empty sidewalk, skateboard under his arm.
.....It was a pleasant night and he was content to walk, to take his time and smell the dew settling on the lawns, to feel the soft summer breeze caress his flesh and to listen to the sounds of Harding settling in for the night.
.....Between the halogen lights that stood sentinel at the end of each block, the streets were dark along the way, lit only by the cathode blue flickers from each window. The tinny sounds of American Idol spilled from each house he passed.
.....His shadow lengthened as a car came up on him from behind, and he looked over and watched as the Valiant neared and passed.
.....He didn’t see the monster truck rolling in behind it, nor the cocked arm that let fly with a missile that homed in on the boy, a comet tail of foam behind it.
.....His vision exploded red and he gasped, his head rocked by the flying beer bottle. He fell to one knee as the glass careened off of his skull to shatter against the pavement. A hoarse voice snarled from the passenger widow as the vehicle passed him:
.....“Faggot!”
.....The truck roared off, laughter barking after it.

CHAPTER 15

2008-01-10T07:09:00.000-08:00

.....The dice game at The Larkspur had gone and went unfriendly at some point. No amount of buying rounds could ease the glares being thrown Cooper’s way by the Larkspur faithful that were looking at him as if he had just called the President of the United States a fag.
.....Which is pretty much was what he had done. Actually there was no pretty about it, he had. There was no going back, and so he plowed on.
.....“Look,” he explained patiently. “The man was a cheerleader in college, right?”
.....“Where in the hell are you pulling that one out from?” demanded the beefy one in the John Deere cap, his dice gathering dust. Vernon, he had offered up as his name when the first game had started.
.....When the point of game had ended with Cooper being the first to lose all of his dice, Vernon had been smiling when he and the boys were bought a round. Their Pabst and High Life bottles had been upgraded to shots of Jack Daniels and Jim Beam. They were taking to Cooper just fine after the first couple of games, and especially after the first couple of rounds.
.....They weren’t smiling now. Vernon was eyeing him like he was weighing out the amount of asswhupping he was going to lay down on this Cooper character. The scales were dipping pretty much towards a serious one.
.....Cooper could smell the thought on Vernon in the way a dog can smell fear, but truth be told he really didn’t much care. These good ol’ boys probably fought the way most civilized men shook hands, but there had been a time when trying that kind of shit with him would have resulted in more than a little unexpected blood and pain.
.....Granted, he was a little rusty but in his day he had been taught certain tricks, tricks of his trade that came in handy in a situation that required a man to throw away the rulebook and just walk away from the mess. But him walking away would also involve leaving some other men not being of much mind to try and follow.
.....The lessons had been of the deep-learned kind that a man like him never forgot.
.....It didn’t help that he had started in on the Cuervo. He knew better than to indulge in the tequila, but Cuervo wasn’t really tequila and they didn’t have a decent Irish whiskey in the house. If he was going to drink shit, then by god he was going to drink shit.
.....The problem was, tequila made him either a little horny or just plain antagonistic... and although the bartender was a faded prairie rose, giving him the eye and being generous with the pour, she was still not something he wanted to waste his traveling time on.
.....That left speaking his mind as the only option on hand.
.....All of which wasn’t exactly endearing him to Vernon and his friends. Mandy was their faded desert rose, the head cheerleader from back in the seventies who as time had passed become a little looser with her affections than she had been back in the day. But they weren’t about to sit around and watch those affections being wasted on some out-of-town liberal who was talking shit about their Commander in Chief.
.....To a one, none of them had ever been any closer to serving in the military than walking by the recruiter’s office on their way to the video store to rent a John Wayne war movie. Even though with that whole War on Terror thing going down, they had all been — to a one — tempted to finally step up and volunteer to show them Iraqis what for. Too bad they were — to a one — too old to be taken up on their patriotic offer. That is, if they — to a one — would have actually tried.
.....Cooper shook his head mournfully and slammed back his shot. No salt, no lime, there was no reason to bother trying to make the wicked nastiness taste like anything other than what it was.
.....“Shit,” he chuckled darkly. “Just Google his name along with the word ‘cheerleader’ and you’ll get back plenty of pictures. School photos of our boy with a bullhorn in his hand and him sucking on it like it was a giant --”
.....“Hey,” snarled the redneck in the FBI: Female Body Inspector tee-shirt. From his looks, he’d been pink-slipped from that job a long time ago. “There’s no call for that language with a lady present.”
.....“Sorry, Mandy.” Cooper offered the frowzy bartender a smile in apology as he slid his empty shot glass towards her.
.....“Thanks, Lyle.” Mandy nodded to the redneck, but her smile and the bat of her blue eyeshadow was thrown towards Cooper. She cocked the bottle and poured another generous shot of the amber nastiness. Actually, she sorta liked that kind of talk. It made her wonder what the stranger would have to say if he were to hang around until closing time...
.....Cooper nodded his thanks and turned back to the boys. “That, and have you ever actually ever listened to the man talk? He uses the word ‘fabulous’ way too much for a straight guy. Everything is fabulous to him. The guy should have been an interior decorator, not appointing the Secretary of the Interior.”
.....“You’d know, wouldn’t you?” muttered Lyle.
.....Cooper chuckled at the comeback and tossed back the shot. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand in Larkspur style and winked at Lyle. “Hell, he probably thought up until he became the president that the Secretary of the Interior was responsible for decorating the inside of the White House.”
.....Vernon and his boys bristled, their red necks all but disappearing as heads slowly buried themselves into their shoulders. They were getting pretty wound up. There was no going back to the Liar’s Dice game, and the skinny one with the straw cowboy hat was probably more than a little upset, just a bit more than his friends: he still had all his dice left under the cup.
.....They jumped as Cooper smacked the shot glass back down on the bar, upside down. He’d have to ease up on those puppies if he was going to hit the road anytime soon. But at the moment, he was having himself some fun with the boys.
.....“Could I get a Corona, Mandy?” he asked the bartender, tossing her a smile as a tip. She pulled him a cold one from the rear of the reach-in cooler, not one of the warm ones that she had just restocked with. Vernon noticed and his eyes narrowed.
.....There wasn’t much you could slip past Vernon.
.....“Well,” he countered. “He’s still one hell of a better man than Clinton.”
.....“Say what you will about the man, but Clinton earned my respect from the start.” Cooper snorted. “Not for anything he did in office, but for who he was. He was a guy who was born poor white trash and busted his ass to make something of himself, like he had something to prove to the world. And that white trash boy grew up and went on to become President of the United States. He proved that anyone could become president if they were to just set their mind to it.”
.....Cooper smiled around the mouth of the Corona as he tipped it back, then leaned in towards his new friends, his forefinger stabbing out at them from his grip on the bottle.
.....“Unlike your nepotistic buddy, who seems as if he were born with a silver coke spoon up his nose, who got elected and reelected by acting like he’s straight out of a trailer park. He had to go and reestablish that pretty much anyone could be president if their daddy had all the right connections.”
.....Vernon stiffened: what the hell was wrong with living in a trailer park? His old man had busted his ass in the oil fields outside Harding through the seventies and eighties, wearing himself down to almost nothing in order to pay for the single-wide 1984 Skyline Vernon now lived in while he tended for his widowed mother. He wasn’t of any real mind to move on either, after the day were to come around that his mother passed on. God forbid. Not that he could afford to: the resale value on the damned thing now being about the same as his five-year-old Dodge Dakota.
.....“He’s a moral man, doin' his best to lead us back to being a moral country.” Vernon noted softly. The thought of his mother passing on had taken some of the fire out of him. Vernon tended to get a little weepy when he’d had a few too many whiskies. He never had been much of the fighting type, anyway.
.....“Moral my ass,” Cooper rolled his eyes. He’d long forgot about the old adage about discussing religion or politics in a bar, and here he was moving in on wrapping the two up into one argument. “All that monkey has ever had to do is wave around a Bible and say he’s Born Again, and half of America thinks that means the man is saying that he’s a Christian. He’s a politician, fer christsakes. Politics and God always make for a bad match, in that most of what God wants from us runs counter to what a politician wants for himself. Any politician that says he’s a religious man is showing you right from the start that he’s a goddamned liar. Hell, for that matter your Deserter in Chief doesn’t even pretend he’s not lying anymore.”
.....Lyle blinked and looked at around at his friends. “What’s ‘nepotistic’ mean?”
.....The skinny good ol’ boy wearing the road-weary straw cowboy hat stood up and looked down at Cooper with a dark gaze. “It means our friend is saying that the president only got his job because of his daddy, right? That and that Christians are stupider than sheep.”
.....Cooper met his gaze and saluted him with his beer. “I wouldn’t exactly say stupider...”
.....Straw Hat nodded. “I gotta go drain the lizard,” he let the boys know. “Make sure there’s a little something left of him for me when I get back.”
.....He turned and wound his way back through the tables towards the bathroom. The door to The Larkspur opened into his path as Clyde ducked under the threshold and stepped in, his aviator shades left in place after he’d traded his uniform in for mufti.
.....Straw Hat nodded in greeting, laid his forefinger alongside his nose and sniffed. Cocked his head towards the bathroom. Clyde nodded back and the two disappeared behind the swinging door labeled ‘BULLS’.

.....It had taken two more rounds and changing the topic around to about what kind of chance the Colorado Rockies stood towards taking the pennant that fall (slim to fucking none, they had all finally reluctantly agreed, even if the team did have God on their side) before the boys had finally seen him off with a toast. Even the cranky dude in the silly straw hat had seemed chummy after the last round, along with his new friend in the sunglasses. Vernon had even bought him another shot for the road.
.....As Cooper climbed back into the Monte Carlo and fired it up, his attention was on the road that had been waiting patiently outside the bar. He didn’t see two dark forms ease out of The Larkspur as he pulled away from the curb, and he didn’t see them make their way to the battered Ford Econoline. He didn’t notice the headlights that followed the Monte Carlo past the town limits sign and had eased into following at a discreet distance, as the lights of Harding faded off behind them.
.....He didn’t think about the headlights that began to move up from behind until they roared up on his ass. He wasn’t thinking about anything but the long road that lay ahead, until the highbeams exploded through his rear window and reflected light from the rearview mirror shot him in the eye...
........ and in the space of a moment Cooper was beyond even thinking about dying.
.....It is a really good idea not to argue politics or religion in a bar. It's an even better idea not to argue both at the same time.

CHAPTER 14

2008-01-09T09:45:00.000-08:00

.....For the evening crowd of The Teapot, the background noise of jukebox had been replaced with slow tempo jazz. The crowd consisted of the Zieglers at a dining room table quietly toying with their meal and Doc holding down his end of the bar.
.....Wolfe realized that the ‘tender behind the bar was Lolita, apparently a young girl of some hidden talents. In the kitchen, Carlos was engrossed in a People magazine article on Paris Hilton and the genesis of her soon-to-be-published spy thriller, The Kinkade Code.
.....Wolfe slid onto the stool next to Doc, who eyed the clock.
.....“The festivities over already?”
.....“For me?” Wolfe chuckled. “Yeah, about twenty years ago. I didn’t much like them the first time around.”
.....He glanced around casually. “Tanya done for the evening?”
.....Doc glanced over at Wolfe neutrally. “She may own the joint, but she doesn’t live here.”
.....Lolita tossed down a bevnap in front of Wolfe. He turned a questioning eye to Doc, an unspoken judgment called for on her Bloody Mary skills.
.....The doctor shook his head and indicated the glass of cabernet in front of him.
.....“I’ll have what he’s having.” Wolfe eyed Doc’s near-empty glass. “You want another?”
.....“I’m okay,” Doc shook his head, hand over the glass. “This is my last for the night...I gotta be gettin’ home for American Idol.”
.....“Hate to break it to you, but American Idol was over a couple of hours ago.”
.....Doc squinted at the clock again.
.....“Oh-kay, then.” He threw up his hands in a what-can-you-do gesture. “In that case, why not?”
.....Doc was still more than a little tipsy.
.....Lolita smiled her enigmatic smile and headed over to the bottle of Sterling cabernet parked next to the register. Wolfe leaned in to the Doc.
.....“Is she old enough to be working here?”
.....“Who’s gonna complain?”
.....The girl returned with a glass and poured the red for Wolfe, set it before him.
.....“Might as well leave the bottle,” Wolfe noted, looking over at Doc with cocked eyebrow. Doc sighed and nodded. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do...and one of those things is not insulting another man by turning down another round.
.....Or two. He grabbed the bottle and topped off his glass. Wolfe watched the play of the girl’s ass beneath faded denim as she moved away. He leaned over to Doc as the man took a sip of the red and sighed his thanks.
.....“By the way,” he asked in a low voice. “Just what is that girl’s name?”
.....Doc smiled and offered his glass in a toast. “Here’s to Lolita.”
.....“Lolita?” Wolfe smiled doubtfully, and the doctor nodded.
.....Wolfe shook his head. “Who in the hell names their daughter Lolita?”
.....“Well, you just know that there’s gotta be more than a few Nabokov fans floating around this town.”
.....“Right.”
.....Behind them Steve Ziegler’s voice rose. “Have you ever even seriously given any though to what you’re gonna do with your life?”
.....The man didn’t sound too happy. Sons being sons and acting that way since before the era of recorded history, Mike wasn’t having anything to do with what his old man wanted him to do.
.....Of course, over the ensuing millennia times have changed enough that a father demanding that his son join the military during the cloud of war wasn’t exactly the inarguable demand that it used to be. Mike had responded with an inarguable ‘No fucking way.’
.....Although in his mother’s house, he had maintained decorum and had only used two of those three words. The middle one had come through loud and clear, however.
.....The negotiations had moved on over to The Teapot, where Mary could participate without having to do so from the kitchen.
.....Wolfe and Doc paused to listen in. At any given point in a bar environment, listening in is usually the true entertainment. The jukebox gets old after awhile.
.....“I’d like to spend the rest of my life figuring that one out,” Mike finally responded. “My long, long life.”
.....“Playing video games is not a life...”
.....“You’re just being selfish, Michael,” Mrs. Ziegler cut in.
.....“Selfish?” Mike scoffed. “Exactly how am I being selfish, here?”
.....“You have an obligation,” his father muttered into his beer. “You owe your country, at least. At least you owe us that much.”
.....“My country?” Mike shook his head. “This has never been my country, and the way things have been going it never will be. There’s nothing left. You people have bled it dry and left us nothing but your tab.”
.....“Us people? What the hell are you talking about?” Steve demanded. “You’re not turning into some kind of Commie, are you?”
.....Mary was horrified by a sudden thought. “Or a Muslim?”
.....Mike gave his father a long, appraising look. “Did you serve?”
.....“You know I didn’t.” Steve found a renewed interest in his steak. “Fortunately, I had other options.”
.....“Yeah,” Mike nodded. “Fortunately for you.”
.....“What the...” Steve glanced at Mary, then continued. “What is that sup...”
.....Mike cut him off. “Wouldn’t want to interrupt you guys eating up everything in sight and leaving us to eat the shit.”
.....“Mike!” Mary was shocked at the explicative, missing the sentiment. Mike looked around for service.
.....“I want a beer.”
.....“Mike...”
.....“I want a Coors,” Mike decided. “The commercials say the hot chicks’ll dig me if I drink Coors.”
.....“You’re not old enough,” his father muttered.
.....Bait laid down, bait taken.
.....“Bingo,” Mike stabbed the air with his forefinger, and his father jerked back like it had been poked in his eye. “I’m old enough to go die for your country, but not old enough to have a beer. Point/match. Fuck you very much.”
.....Mary cringed, on the verge of tears. Mike stood, threw down his napkin and headed for the door.
.....“You want a beer?” His father turned in his seat to follow. “You want a fucking beer? Hey, waitress! Get the big man a fucking beer over here.”
.....Lolita threw the man a dark look: she was a bartender, not a waitress. If someone wanted a fucking beer, they’d have to come to the bar to order it. Or wait until the waitress came back from her cigarette break. She turned her back and went back to dusting the bottles of the top shelf booze with the bar towel.
.....Mary put a hand on his arm, pulling him back as Mike paused at the door.
.....“No,” he shook his head. “No, I don’t want a beer. You don’t even get it, do you?”
.....He slammed the door shut behind him. The Zieglers stood, looking over at the bar in dismay. Steve snatched up the bill, did the math. He counted out the cash and threw it on the table. He paused to do more math, then added a tip.
.....As he turned to the door, Mary glanced at the bar, where the rest of the patrons were studiously not looking at them. Her hand darted out and snatched up the tip. She pocketed it and followed out after her husband.
.....The door eased closed behind them.
.....“Bitch,” Lolita muttered. There’s a mirror behind the bar for a reason, and it’s not just for primping. Next time she’d have to be quicker.
.....The floorshow over, Wolfe turned back to the doctor. “So... you a real doctor, Doc?”
..... It would have been considered bad form to acknowledge the conversation that they most certainly were not listening in on.
.....Doc grunted and shook his head. “Was.”
.....“Retired?”
.....“Not by choice.” Doc chuckled ruefully. “I called the wrong woman fat.”
.....“Was she?”
.....“Oh, yes. Morbidly so.” Doc took a measured sip off of his cabernet. “I told her that if she didn’t lose some weight and fast, she wouldn’t live to see sixty.”
.....“How old...”
.....“Fifty-nine.”
.....“So what happened?”
.....“She sued me.”
.....“Sued you? For what?”
.....“The silly old cow claimed that I lacked sensitivity and professionalism. She wanted to have my license yanked.”
.....Wolfe nodded sympathetically; he could see where this was going. “And she won.”
.....“What?” Doc shook his head. “No... she died.”
.....Oh.
.....Doc took his time with the end of the story, rolling up another cigarette. Wolfe abided.
.....“Now her son...” he lit up the cigarette and exhaled. “Her son the lawyer filed a follow-up suit. Claimed that the aforementioned proceedings had driven his dear mother to an early grave.”
.....He cast Wolfe a bemused sidelong glance. “That was the motherfucker that won.”
.....“Damn.” Wolfe glanced over. “He was actually fuc...”
.....“It’s a figure of speech, son.”
.....“That was a joke, old man.”
.....Doc nodded sourly. He wasn't much for humor at the moment. “Didn’t help that the judge was also her brother-in-law. Bastard ran for the bench on a tort reform platform.”
.....Wolfe shook his head at the injustice. “Sounds like you, my friend, picked the wrong woman to call fat.”
.....“Tell me about it.” The former doctor sighed, then waved his hand. “Actually, don’t bother.”
.....“So, how’s the retirement treating you?”
.....“Retirement?” Doc sighed. “Right. I’m the only GP the town has after Janssen died.”
.....“I remember Doc Janssen,” Wolfe nodded. “When did he die?”
.....“Going on about ten years now. Picked up a nasty habit of sampling his own supply somewhere along the line.”
.....“Oxycontin or something?”
.....“No, that stuff's for the tourists,” Doc noted. “Morphine. More fun.”
.....Wolfe nodded. That would do it.
.....“Overdose?”
.....“You’d think, wouldn’t you?” chuckled the doctor. “But no. A couple of speedfreaks broke into his office one night looking for whatever they could find. What they found was a hopped-up Janssen with his Smith & Wesson .38, all fired up and ready to protect his stash. There was a scuffle and they ended up plugging him with his own gun.”
.....“That’s fucked up.”
.....“Yep, that’s fucked up all over the place,” Doc agreed. He stubbed out his cigarette and began to roll another one thoughtfully. “Did you know that more Americans die every day from gunshot wounds than folks generally being shot the same day over in Iraq?”
.....“America’s a bigger country.”
.....“True,” Doc agreed. “But over in Iraq everyone has some damn’ reason or another to be shooting at each other. Here we just seem to like shooting each other.”
.....“What are you going to do?” Wolfe countered. “We like our guns. It’s not like you can stuff Pandora in the box and be done with it.”
.....“And you say you used to be a teacher?” Doc blinked.
.....“Art teacher,” Wolfe corrected. “And yes, I know that was a tortured metaphor.”
.....“Tortured? You done and went all Abu Ghraib on its ass.”
.....“But like I said, what are you going to do?” Wolfe continued. “It’s not like they’re going to outlaw guns anytime soon.”
.....“Especially in a country where they maintain their guns just in case someone comes and tries to take away their guns.” Doc made a circling motion with his forefinger and brought it up to his temple, thumb cocked. “Shoot me now with the logic.”
.....Wolfe chuckled and the former doctor looked up at him quizzically.
.....“Sorry...I was just amused at the sick irony of someone getting shot with their own gun.”
.....“Happens to cops all the time.” Doc shrugged. “Maybe Janssen got all tangled up in his Hippocratic Oath. I s’pose the moral here is to never pull a rod on another man unless you’re willing to watch him die.”
.....Wolfe looked at him for a minute. “I’ll remember that.”
.....“Anyway, he died and I was here,” Doc continued. “And so, here I am... I just have to order my supplies from an outfit in Mexico is all, not being licensed and all that anymore.”
.....A comfortable silence fell between them as they watched Lolita. She wasn’t doing anything special, other than just being Lolita. She finally moved out of sight to restock.
.....“Enough about me,” Doc finally encouraged. “You didn’t come back here out of some undying curiosity about some ol’ fart, right?”
.....“Well...”
.....The Doc held up a hand. “Listen.”
.....“What?”
.....The melancholy swing music faded as Tanya’s voice covered the segue.
.....“You’re listening to KPAX-AM 610.” She was wearing her radio voice now...controlled, seductive and smoky. “Where for two hours a night every Saturday and Sunday you can return to a halcyon time when things were simpler...more honest...”
.....The opening strains of Glen Miller’s ‘Londonderry Air’ began to fill the restaurant. “If any of you have any requests, you have another twenty-five minutes to call 343...”
.....“She rides a bike out there,” Doc mused aloud. “Gets kinda chilly ‘round these parts late in the evening.”
.....“I remember.”
.....Doc tapped his ash in the tray and continued, seeming otherwise absorbed with the television offering the spectacle of a bunch of grown men in shorts chasing a ball up and down a court.
.....“A gentleman might be waiting to offer her a ride when she signs off,” he finally noted.
.....“What kind of gentleman wouldn’t?” Wolfe agreed.

CHAPTER 13

2008-01-08T10:16:00.000-08:00

.....The neon of the motel sign crackled outside his window, an economic bug zapper of road-weary travelers. It sure was bugging Wolfe, that and a lingering, nasty aftertaste from the beer. The mattress lay beneath him harboring resentment.
.....A mosquito whined close enough to his ear to annoy him, but not near enough to swat.
.....Finally, he put aside the copy of Thoreau's Walden that for the first time in his reading experience was failing to engross him. He groaned and swung from beneath the sheets of the plank-like bed, massaged his face and then eyed the clock: 10:30.
.....Outside the halo of tired neon, the darkness abided.
.....Wolfe looked back at the clock and the clock looked back at Wolfe, both waiting for the other to make the first move.
.....The clock won.
.....He sighed and began to get dressed.

.....Wolfe shut the door behind him and one of the 2s fell off and landed at his feet. He stooped to retrieve it and paused as a trunk door slammed shut behind him.
.....He looked up.
.....Two doors down the barfly from the Teapot gave him a nod, opening the door to his dusty Monte Carlo. Wolfe stood with the number in his hand and returned the nod.
.....“Heading out?” he asked.
.....The man looked about warily, then nodded. “Yeah, too many damned cameras in a town this size, too damned many to suit my tastes.”
.....Despite his seemingly continued paranoia, the man appeared to have sobered up. He was clean-shaven and he’d given his hair a pass with the comb. In his off-the-rack dark suit and tie with the jacket over his arm, he could have been just another businessman getting back on the road to make an acquaintance of the next town. Except for the eyes.
.....“Yeah, I know what you mean,” Wolfe agreed. He eyed the darkness thoughtfully. “I’ve been thinking that this town might just be its own reality TV show.”
.....“Reality has nothing to do with this place, brother.” The man opened the door of his vehicle and paused. “You passing through here or staying?”
.....“I’m playing it by ear.”
.....“Yeah... well, be careful,” the man cautioned. “This is the kind of place sort of sucks you in. Like maybe Mayberry RFD with fangs.”
.....He looked at the lights of the town flickering down the road. “Some good people, though. If you see that Tanya again, could you tell her that Cooper said thanks, and sorry about being a downer tonight?”
.....Wolfe nodded.
.....Cooper climbed behind the wheel and closed the door behind him. The starter ground and then caught, the engine lumbering tiredly. It sounded as if it had been put through its share of American back roads, and wasn’t looking forward to more of the same.
.....“Be safe,” Wolfe offered.
.....“Yeah, you too.”
.....He dropped the Monte Carlo into gear and pulled out of the parking lot. Wyoming being Wyoming, even at night the dust swirled.
.....Wolfe considered the 2 in his hand, then eyed the vacant spot on the door behind the other 2. It had been glued on and he was fresh out of glue. Or bubble gum. He slid the number into his hip pocket and fished out the keys to the Valiant.

........ Tick... Tick... Tick...

.....Down the road, Cooper stared glumly through the dusty windshield of the Monte Carlo and reconsidered his options. The car was idling in the parking lot of where he had last seen the Kwickie-Stop, the headlights illuminating the rubble.
.....In the sprawl of light, a solitary tendril of smoke curled up but would soon be dead. There wasn’t a whole lot left for the embers to feed on.
.....When the hell did this happen, he wondered. He’d been there the day before to grab a couple of packs of Pall Malls and a sixer of Olympia cans.
.....Cooper had no idea where he was going but he knew that there was nowhere down the road to pick up cigarettes against a long, long nicotine-free drive no matter what direction he headed out of Harding. The Teapot didn’t sell cigarettes, which left The Larkspur.
.....He didn’t particularly like The Larkspur, where the regulars took it personally if you turned down an offer to play a round of Liar’s Dice. A friendly game, of course. For drinks.
.....Cooper sighed.
.....He supposed he was good for a couple of games, and then he really needed to hit the road. He’d been in Harding for too long as it was.
.....But at least whatever camera was in the Kwickie-Stop had burned down with the building.

.....As Julia shrugged on her Calvin Klein original leather jacket on her way to clock out, she eyed the monitor showing the activity in the parking lot of the former convenience store. The fool in the idling Monte Carlo had been parked there for at least five minutes.
.....It’s not like there’s gonna be another store popping up there soon, she thought. Move along, little doggie.
.....She shrugged and clocked out. “’Night, Cynthia.” she nodded to her relief. The new girl nodded back, a sharp-featured farm girl with a suspicious amount of rackage that her uniform fought valiantly to conceal.
.....Cynthia frowned and thumbed about on the keypad of the remote until American Idol sprang to life on the big screen of the Samsung, giving Ryan Seacrest an entire length of wall space to flounce around on.
.....Julia could care less: The Larkspur was just about to start swinging and she needed to get there in time to claim prime table space before the floorshow began. Maybe tonight was going to be her night, and the Sheriff just might walk in as just plain Roy Crawford.
.....And then...

CHAPTER 12

2008-01-07T10:29:00.000-08:00

.....The engine of the monster truck roared and the giant tires spun as Pierce wheeled a brody in the parking lot of The Teapot Cafe, leaving Lolita in a cloud of Wyoming dust.
.....She coughed and brushed the grit from her white blouse as she turned to complete the last day of her bartender training. As she stepped across the threshold, she was greeted by Bonnie Tyler’s ‘I’m looking Out for a Hero’ rasping from the jukebox.
.....Europe may be the place where forgotten pop stars go to live on forever, but the jukebox of the Teapot was their final American leg of the one-way tour. Not too many bars in the country could boast about offering Terry Jacks’ ‘Seasons in the Sun’ one selection above Kim Wilde’s ‘Kids in America’.
.....Even fewer bars would boast about something like that.
.....Tanya greeted her with a sour look that started with the clock over the bar, which noted without a word that Lolita was five minutes late. The look was all that needed to be said about the matter, and the final exam began. Tanya led off with a snap of the bar towel.
.....The only patron at the bar, Doc sat in as the budding mixologist’s crash test dummy. He was nursing a Sea Breeze at the moment.
.....“What are your Breezes?” Tanya prodded her new intern.
.....“Vodka and cranberry,” Lolita recited. “Topped off with grapefruit for the Sea Breeze, pineapple for the Bay, and OJ for the other one.”
.....“Madras,” Tanya clarified. “Substitute Southern Comfort for the vodka and throw in some Sloe Gin with that one and you have an Alabama Slammer. It’s not the exact recipe, we don’t have Amaretto, but anyone silly enough to order it won’t notice the difference.”
.....And so it went, and as it went Doc began to get more than a little loaded. Tanya slid him an occasional pint of ice water to help him maintain.
.....“Want a Long Island Iced Tea, Doc?” she asked. His eyes went wide and he shook his head.
.....“Good.” Tanya turned and explained to Lolita: “The thing about the Long Island is that anyone who orders one is a fucking idiot. They want to get drunk and drunk fast, which means that you have to keep an eye on them the rest of the night. You only have two eyes for all of the customers, so no one deserves that kind of attention. Especially the kind of fucking idiot that orders a Long Island Iced Tea.”
.....She eyed Lolita. “What’s in a Long Island Iced Tea?”
.....“All the white well boozes, topped off with Sweet ‘n Sour and Coke,” Lolita recalled without a beat. “A squeeze of lemon, and give it one shake.”
.....“The girl did all her homework,” Doc noted approvingly and Tanya nodded. The girl showed promise. She’d given Pierce’s girlfriend a run behind the bar a couple of weeks before, and both of them had ended the week in enthusiastic agreement that Debbie definitely did not have what it took to be a bartender. It was too sticky for Debbie’s taste, and Tanya just reckoned that the girl was an idiot.
.....Lolita wasn’t the latter, and seemed to have no problem with the former. And as Doc would have noted if Tanya had bothered to ask, the girl was more than a little easy on the eyes. Tanya didn’t need to ask. The approval was written all over Doc’s face.
.....Harding being small town Americana, the drink menu wasn’t all that hard to memorize. The Manhattan for the lawyers, and the Cosmopolitan for the ladies that had began to follow Sex and the City once it hit syndication. The occasional Old Fashioned for the random old school drinkers that might be seeking a break from The Larkspur, and that was about all the girl needed to know to fly solo.
.....Tanya peeled off and made her way to the other side of the bar and parked next to Doc. She pulled over his ashtray and lit up one of the pre-rolled smokes that Doc had placed aside in anticipation. She closed her eyes and inhaled deep, held the smoke, then let it out with a slow, long sigh. She eyed the clock; she still had a couple of hours before her shift at the radio station.
.....“I’ll try one of your Bloody Marys,” Tanya said, and eyed the Doc. “You want one?”
.....Lolita’s back was to him as she started the process, so Doc felt free to wince and shake his head in remembered pain. He’d had one of the girl’s trial attempts at mastering the drink the day before. She was showing promise in most other ways, but that particular drink wasn’t something that you master overnight. A bad Bloody Mary wasn’t something you could just drink through, and Lolita’s initial try had been just plain godawful.
.....“I’ll take a Mojito,” he smirked. Lolita eyed Tanya, who was mock glaring at Doc.
.....“What’s in a Mojito?” she asked.
.....“Don’t worry about it,” Tanya said, shaking her head. “Mojitos are one of those frou-frou drinks women order when they just want to fuck with the bartender.”
.....She turned back on Doc and gave him the evil eye. “Don’t fuck with my bartender.”
.....He threw up his hands in mock surrender as Lolita placed the Bloody Mary down before her. Tanya wasn’t as discerning as the Doc; the drink had plenty of booze in it and perhaps a bit too much Tabasco, but otherwise booze was booze. “The bar’s all yours when you’re on that side. It’s your bar and you are the law. Any questions?”
.....Lolita laughed as she eyed the drink: it was already half gone. “What if I have to cut you off?”
.....“I don’t get that drunk,” Tanya replied, and threw Doc a narrow-eyed look when he choked on his drink.
.....“Here,” she amended.
.....She wouldn’t do that to her employees. It was bad form. If she needed to cut loose, she did it over at The Larkspur. There, no one would really notice in the hubbub if she was starting to misbehave. She didn’t really misbehave all that much any more, but once a reputation was set in smalltown-minded Harding, it was hard to outlive.
.....Lolita spared Doc’s empty Collins glass an inquiring look.
.....“I’ll take a glass of the cabernet,” he finally responded after giving the matter some fuzzy thought. He could nurse the wine for a bit and get back on an even keel. It was still early and he had no desire to go to bed early. He had even less of a desire to wake up at five in the morning with nothing to do and no booze to do nothing with.
.....“Is there anyone I’m not supposed to serve, or just need to keep an eye on?” asked Lolita as she poured the wine. Tanya shrugged as she went through her mental Rolodex.
.....“Not really,” she finally said. “Most of your problem cases stay over at The Larkspur. Other than that, just always keep an eye out for the middle-aged men with mustaches.”
.....Lolita blinked. “Pretty much every middle-aged dude in this town has a mustache...even some of the women.”
.....Tanya waved her hand dismissively, the cigarette leaving a arc of smoke and ash in its wake. “I’m talking about the ones that you don’t know. Generally, they’re either trolls looking to score on the unescorted drunk females, an undercover cop from over in Lumbeck, rednecks looking for a fight, or some random gay dude that lost his way off of the highway. If you throw them all together in the same room, somewhere along the line the shit’ll hit the fan.”
.....“Do undercover cops really come in here?” Lolita asked, beginning to reevaluate her choice of a career move.
.....“It’s the ABC you need to watch out for,” Tanya said. “Alcoholic Beverage Control. They never drop by these parts, ‘cause it’s too far out in the boonies and they might miss that night’s episode of C*O*P*S. But if they do it’s an occupational hazard. They’ll try to get you to serve a minor, so always check the ID. Or if they’re really being assholes, they pop you for over-serving an obviously intoxicated patron.”
.....She gave Doc an evil look.
.....“Hey,” he protested. “Always let me know if I’m looking obviously intoxicated... it’ll mean I’m slipping.”
.....Tanya laughed, then turned back to the warning. “This is probably the only service industry job you’ll find where you can go to jail just because you didn’t do your job right, and lose a few months wages on top of that.”
.....Lolita had the fear properly installed in her. “How often do they come by?”
.....“Only when someone is looking to get re-elected over in the county seat,” Tanya explained. “Don’t worry, Jason will always have someone call and give us a heads up. They usually end up nailing one of the bartenders over at The Larkspur for over-serving a drunk. The charges always end up being dropped after the election passes.”
.....“It helps if your brother-in-law happens to be the District Attorney running for reelection,” Doc added.
.....Lolita looked perplexed. “Why even bother then?”
.....“Politics isn’t about solving a problem,” Doc explained. “It’s about looking like you’re solving the problem. If you solve the problem, then you have to go through the bother of finding another problem that it looks like you’re working on solving.”
.....Lolita nodded as if she understood. “And if the shit hits the fan?”
.....“Call the cops.” Tanya took another sip of the Bloody Mary and made a mental note to bring the girl in for a special Bloody Mary-making seminar. The drink wasn’t very good after all. It was pretty nasty, actually. “I don’t want you out on the floor if something bad is going down. Usually you’ll have some gentleman in the house that’ll have your back.”
.....Doc tried to keep the leer off of his face. “Shush, you,” Tanya cautioned.
.....“What if they come at me behind the bar?”
.....A dark look settled over Tanya’s face. Even the green of her eyes went a shade darker.
.....“Kill ‘em,” she replied. “I’m not joking, here. If someone comes at you from around the bar, don’t dance with them and don’t fuck around. Smash a bottle -- from the well, not top shelf -- and jam the fucker in their face. Go for the eyes.”
.....“Then kick the bastard in the nuts.” She took in the shocked look on Lolita’s face. “And then call the cops.”
.....Doc drew back from her. “Remind me to never to piss you off.”
.....“Don’t ever, ever piss me off,” Tanya reminded him, then considered what was left of her Bloody Mary. “Lolita, dear?”
.....Wide eyes looked up from beneath the bangs. “Hm?”
.....“You might wanna use a li’l less vodka in your pour.”