I Shall Not Want (14 page)

In her rearview mirror, she saw the flash of red and whites.

Oh, God, thank you, God, thank you!

The cruiser rolled in tight behind her vehicle, flooding her interior with the brilliant white light of the kliegs. She couldn’t tell if it was a state trooper or the MKPD, but whoever it was, she prayed he was big, hairy, and heavily armed. Stud Boy and his ferret friend stepped away from her window, and the guy on the far side vanished toward the front of her car. A moment later, her hood thunked into place.

Through the glass, she heard the crunch of boots on gravel. “What’s going on here?” a man said, his voice hard with suspicion and authority. She could see him outlined in her rearview mirror, tall, big, one hand resting on the butt of his service weapon.

Stud Boy raised his hands placatingly. “
Nada, nada
. We were just stopping to see if the lady needed any help.”

“Yeah? Well, she’s got help now. Clear off.”

The smaller, weaselly guy scuttled across the road, but Stud Boy hesitated.

“Either you’re in your vehicle, or you’re facedown in the dirt with my boot in your back. Your choice. You got ten seconds.”

Stud Boy glanced at the guy who was still hovering just out of reach at the front of her car, then gestured toward the Hummer. “We don’t want any trouble,” he said, smiling. His lip piercings glittered in the cruiser’s cold white light. He glanced down at Hadley. “Later, pretty girl.”

She wrenched her eyes from his and focused on her hands. Holding her keys. Her knuckles were white. She heard the thudding of overengineered doors, and then the Hummer roared to life and, in a spatter of gravel, pulled into the road and vanished.

The boots crunched toward her. The officer squatted down. “Hey,” Kevin Flynn said. “Are you all right?”

“Your granddad called the station.” They were sitting in Flynn’s cruiser with the heater on high. Flynn had complained of the cold when he snapped it on, but she knew it was because she was shaking. She couldn’t seem to stop. He had kept up a steady flow of chatter, walking her to the cruiser, grabbing her notebook and her criminal justice text, toting the two bags of groceries she had picked up at the Sam’s Club down in Albany. It was almost like the way she’d hear him rattling on at the station, except he kept sneaking glances at her when he thought she wasn’t looking. Taking her emotional temperature.

“Of course, dispatch isn’t manned, most nights. Womanned? I bet Harlene would like
womanned
. Anyway, his call shot off to the Glens Falls board, and they gave me a squawk, and here I am.”

“Thank you.” She sounded like Hudson, when she made him thank his little sister. She took a deep breath—it was getting easier the longer she sat in the self-contained world that was the squad car—and tried again. “I mean it. Thank you. They… I was…” She shook her head.

His hand touched her shoulder, so tentatively she might have imagined it. “You don’t have to say anything,” he said. “And you don’t have to thank me.”

“You don’t understand,” she said. “I didn’t—I just sat there. Like a victim. Like a babysitter in a horror movie.”

“Naw. They scream and run around a lot.”

She looked at him.

“Sorry,” he said.

“I’m used to taking shit from men, you know? They trash-talk at me, and I flip it right back to them. But these guys… I didn’t even tell them I was a cop. You know why? Because I’m not. I’m just a woman who gets dressed up in a costume five days a week and pretends to be one.” She leaned forward, bracing her arms on her knees, and his hand fell away instantly. “I am such a failure at this. A failure and a fake.”

“What, because you didn’t get out of your car and mix it up with four bad dudes? That’s just being smart. Hell, if it’d been me in that car with no weapon and no radio, I would’ve done just what you did. Stay put and keep my mouth shut.”

She shook her head again. “You don’t need a gun. You have that thing, you know, that cop thing going on. With the hard voice and the take-no-shit attitude.” She looked at him again. Eyeing his frame. “You looked huge. I mean, you’re tall, but you’re not—” She curled her fists and shook her arms in an iron-man pose.

He grinned. “It’s a trick I learned from Lyle MacAuley. He leaves his bomber jacket unzipped and kind of spreads his arms out. Makes him look twice as wide as he really is.”

She let her mind wrap around that one. “There are tricks to it? As in, performing?”

He twisted in his seat so he could face her. “Sure. Like what you were just talking about. The voice? And the attitude? I just copy the chief. Nobody gives him shit.” He paused. “Well, nobody except for Reverend Fergusson.” He smiled a little. “Look, when I started at the MKPD, I felt exactly the same way you do now. It was, like, the day after I turned twenty-one. I was sworn in before I’d had my first legal drink.
And
I was even skinnier than I am now, if you can believe that.” He held his arms open, inviting her to gaze upon his skeletal thinness. She didn’t see it. He was lean, all right, but in a good way, the way of a healthy young man who hasn’t quite finished fleshing out.

“I felt like somebody’s little brother, getting to tag along with the big boys. I kept waiting for… I dunno, some TV moment, when I would suddenly stop being Skinny Flynnie and start being bad-ass Officer Flynn.”

“Skinny Flynnie?”

He blushed. “That’s what they called me in high school.”

“Hah. They called me—” She stopped. “Never mind. High school sucks.”

“Oh, yeah.” He reached out to turn the blower down a few notches, and the way his wrist bones poked out of his shirt cuff did make him look like a teenaged boy. “Anyway, I was working this case last year, interviewing a witness, and she lied to me. She and her husband. I had to go back with the dep and reinterview her. I was really pissed off, thinking about how she’d played me, but then, it suddenly struck me; it was my own fault. Because up here”—he tapped his temple—“I was still Skinny Flynnie. I knew the rules and regs, I had learned the tricks, but I didn’t
believe
.”

“Believe.” This was starting to sound very California. “In what, yourself?”

He shook his head. “In the power of the suit.”

“Okay, you’ve lost me.”

“You know that movie where the dad puts on the Santa suit and he turns into Kris Kringle?”

“
The Santa Clause
? Oh, yeah. I know it.” Hudson and Genny had watched it approximately eight hundred times last December.

“Okay. All this”—he waved his arm around, taking in the computer and the mic and the racked and locked shotgun and his hat balanced on the dashboard—“is the suit. You put on the suit, and you become The Man.”

She thought about that for a moment. “I don’t know. I’ve got the uniform and all that, and I still feel like a fraud.”

“Just give it time.”

Her mouth crooked up. Words of wisdom from a—“Flynn,” she said, “how old are you?”

“Twenty-four.”

From a kid who was eight years younger than her. She curled into the seat. “I think you may have more time than I do.”

Spinning yellow lights appeared on the road ahead of them, resolving into a tow truck. She stirred, ready to get up, but Flynn’s hand was in the way. “Gimme your key,” he said. “I’ll take care of it.”

She stripped the key off her ring and dropped it onto his open palm. She watched through the windshield as he spoke with the tow truck operator, handed over the key, and shook the man’s hand. Weird. Considering what almost happened with the freaks in the Hummer, she should still be jangling, jumpy, coked up. Instead, she felt as relaxed and boneless as she did in the shampoo girl’s chair at the salon.

Letting someone else take care of her.

Huh.

Kevin climbed back into the cruiser and tossed his hat back on the dash. “All set.” He turned off his light bar and shifted into gear. “He’s taking it to Ron Tucker’s garage. Best mechanic in town. He’ll do you right.” He pulled onto the road. She let the rolling fields and farms slip past them, almost invisible in the darkness.

“Flynn.” The question popped into her head from nowhere. “Did you run the plates on those guys?”

He grinned.

“What?”

“There you go. That’s thinking like a cop.”

“Did you?”

“Of course I did. When I pulled in behind you. The truck’s registered to Josefina Feliciano, DOB 7-25-61, POR Brooklyn, New York. Three points down for passing a school bus, no record.”

She shook her head. “Did you see the guy who was hassling me? With three studs in his upper lip? He looked like he escaped from an S and M convention.”

“Maybe Ms. Feliciano likes to hang out with rough trade.”

“You sure the vehicle wasn’t stolen?”

“It hasn’t been reported. Maybe one of them was Feliciano’s son?”

“God. Can you imagine? If my son ever gets anything other than his earlobe pierced—” She pictured the pumped-up SUV and the young men in their city clothes. “What were they doing up here, anyway? It’s a little far for a ride in the country. And it’s too early for people coming up to do Lake George.”

“Hikers? White rafting? Bird-watchers?”

She opened her mouth to shoot him down, then noticed his grin.

“Mexicans and Jamaicans control the pot trade up through the North Country,” he said. “Mexicans, for the most part. They bring it up out of the Caribbean and Central America, funnel it through New York City, and distribute it up here.”

“You think maybe they were here on business?”

“What do you think?”

“I think we should flag the car. Send out its plate and description to area law enforcement.”

“I think you’re right, Officer Knox.” He grinned again.

“What?”

“Who’s The Man? You’re The Man. Say it with me now. Who’s The Man?”

She mumbled.

“I didn’t hear you!”

“I’m The Man! Idiot.” She shook her head and looked out the window. Her own reflection, limned by the computer lights, looked back at her. She thought it might be smiling.

Amado Esfuentes wiped the sweat from his forehead before tugging his work gloves back on. He reshouldered the spool of electrical cable he had set against the fence post. “Ready?” he asked Raul. Raul groaned as he picked up the buckets of porcelain conductors and screw plates.

“If this was barbed wire, we’d have been done by now,” Raul said.

“If you worked as hard as you complain, we’d be done by now.” Amado wished, as he had every day in the month since the accident, that his little brother was toiling beside him. Octavio worked more and talked less than any other man on the crew, and when he did have something to say, he didn’t whine like Raul. But Octavio was in town, sweeping and polishing for a lady minister and answering to the name “Amado.” Meanwhile, Amado was the McGeochs’ foreman “Octavio,” always partnering Raul because he couldn’t, in good conscience, stick any of the others with the laziest guy on the farm.

“Cheer up.” Amado let the electrical cable slip off the wooden spool as he walked over the uneven ground toward the next fence post. “We’ll be finished and back before lunch,” he said. “And this is better for the cows than barbed wire.”

Raul gave a detailed suggestion of what Amado might like to do to the cows.

“Oh, I would,” Amado said, “but I’m afraid I might hurt them, on account of being so large.”

Raul roared with laughter. They reached the next post, and Amado clipped off the cable while Raul screwed an insulating plate into the wood and attached the conductor. Amado threaded the cable through, untwisted the wires, and fastened them around the conductors. Then he did the same thing in the opposite direction for the next length of cable.

Amado tied off the insulated black wire, and they picked up and moved down the line. This portion of the property was divided from the mountain by a swiftly churning stream that cut a hollow almost deep enough to call a gorge in places: an irresistible lure that would mean lost and trapped cows, in the best cases, and broken legs and drowned carcasses in the worst. Amado had no problem taking a little extra time and fencing it off nice and tight.

“Mark my words, they’re going to have us back here next month, hauling in watering troughs and throwing hoses into that creek.”

Amado, tugging the cable taut, grunted. “It splits, maybe a kilometer from here. One branch runs into the McGeochs’ land. The cows can water from that.”

Raul stared. “How do you know? We haven’t worked this section before.”

Amado knew because he had crossed this stream several times in the past weeks, headed up the mountain to meet with Isobel Christie in a high, sheltered meadow that straddled Christie and McGeoch land. Not that he was going to tell Raul that. “I followed the stream that runs past our bunkhouse one evening. I was curious.”

Raul shaded his eyes against the strong rays of the morning sun as he followed the path of the water. “You’re crazy. I wouldn’t get off my bed if I weren’t getting—” He took a step forward, then another.

“Hello there. Aren’t you forgetting your buckets?”

“What’s that?” Raul’s voice sounded different. Amado holstered his wire cutters and walked over to where the other man stood, a scant foot away from the crumbling edge of the stream gully. Raul pointed. “There. You see that?”

Amado nodded. It was an odd shape, soft amid the sharp angles of rock and tree and spiky fern. Half hidden in a cluster of bushes and sucker vine. White and red against the brown and gray and green. He stooped, picked up a rock, and lobbed it as hard as he could toward the thing. A cloud of furious flies rose into the air. Something dead.

Raul’s lips thinned. “A cow?”

“I don’t think so.” Amado stepped over the grassy edge, taking a moment to let his boot find a good firm hold in the gully’s soil.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going to take a look.”

“Forget it! Whatever it is, it has nothing to do with us! Leave it alone!”

Amado ignored him, making his way down the steeply angled slope step by step, pausing when too much earth crumbled beneath his boots. He reached the water and walked downstream a few yards, until he reached a wide and shallow spot. He forded the stream the same way he descended into the wash, slowly and carefully.