The Branson Beauty (23 page)

He slowly reached for his gun as he began to turn. He got about halfway around, hand on his gun, before he realized it was only a dog. About the stupidest-looking dog he'd ever seen. It sat in the middle of the road, its head tilted to the side and an extremely long tongue lolling in the same direction. It appeared to have the body of a basset hound and the head of, well, the head of something else. It was too small for the body, with a squat snout and mismatched ears. One was the loose, floppy ear of a Lab, but the other stuck straight up, cropped and pointy.

They looked at each other for a minute. Then Ugly got up, trotted over to the snowbank, and lifted his leg. As he was doing his business, Hank saw the collar and sighed. Now he'd have to find the stupid dog's stupid owners. He whistled and Ugly obediently loped on over. Hank caught his collar and then had to take the flashlight off his belt in order to read the tag. He gave thanks that along with the required rabies tag, there was a cute bone-shaped one with a name and address. Two streets over. He moved to get the dog into the backseat of the squad car, but that only got Ugly excited, and he started piddling all over. Fantastic. That meant a two-block walk hunched down to keep a hand on the collar of a wiggly, bladder-challenged, mutt-tastic monstrosity. Oh, and he nipped, too. Hank was about out of swear words.

Fifteen minutes later, he pounded on Ugly's door. Eventually, the lights inside came on and a beefy guy with blond hair sticking out in all directions came to the door. He saw Ugly and turned purple. “How…” He sputtered. “How … did you get out again?” Hank let go of the collar and shoved the dog across the threshold with his foot. Ugly disappeared inside just before his owner's own foot connected with the dog's backside. The man turned back to Hank.

“I'm sorry. He was locked in the kitchen. He must have gotten the dog door undone. He's … he's absolutely impossible. He was supposed to be a purebred Lab. We ordered him from a breeder. And we got … that.” Hank had spent the walk over getting as ticked off at the owner as he was with the dog, but now he had to admit the guy deserved some sympathy. He bet that breeder had charged a pretty penny, too.

“Well, sir, just make sure you always keep that collar on him. Maybe get him microchipped, too.”

The man's eyebrows raised. “That would imply that I want him back.” He sighed. “But thank you, Officer, for your help. It is nice to know that you guys patrol out here. You're with animal control?”

Hank, who was wearing his uniform, pointed to the sheriff's star on his chest and bit back a sigh. “No. Sir. I am the Branson County Sheriff. ‘Working for your safety and security.' Sir.”

The guy looked sheepish as he apologized and shook Hank's hand. Then a crash and a howl from inside had him turning purple again. Hank headed back to his car, glad—for once—to be the one out in the cold.

*   *   *

Pleased that his Ugly skid had resulted in only a slight dent to the front left fender, Hank decided to head farther north and cruise the country lanes. He had dubbed this homestead country—old houses on several acres. Many were completely tucked out of sight at the end of long, winding driveways. This drove him crazy. How was he supposed to keep an eye on things if he couldn't see what was going on? He had always been a firm believer in the broken windows approach—crack down on the people committing minor crimes, and they wouldn't progress to the big stuff. But then, he'd always worked in cities, where broken windows were a lot easier to spot. Out here, you couldn't see a damn thing.

He completed a very boring loop and started to head back south. By now it was about three o'clock, and he was starting to crash. He decided to head out east, maybe check out near the county line. And that would take him past Lakefront Manors, which—naturally—had no lake, and no manners. Instead, it had a ramshackle accumulation of mobile homes that made the term “trailer park” seem upscale.

He drove at almost a walking pace through the middle of the park, avoiding the bigger ruts in the road, which was just dirt covered with snow. His headlights were the only illumination, except for one light nailed halfway up a power pole. And it kept flickering on and off, like the bulb couldn't decide whether it was ready to just give up.

Everything else in the place seemed to have already made that decision. Trailers tilted on sinking supports. Several windows were broken. One had a hole stuffed with what looked like socks. One set of steps up to a front door had been replaced by an overturned five-gallon bucket. Another place had an end that looked as if it had blown out and someone had tried to seal it up with plywood.

Hank stopped the car. That had to have been quite an explosion. He was mighty curious about what that resident had been cooking to cause such a blast. He got out of the car to take a look around, and then he heard it. Much farther down, two from the end. One hell of a fight. At least two people screaming and then glass shattering. Hank took off at a flat run.

The woman's screams got louder and longer as he neared the trailer. Another crash. He leapt over the rotten bottom step, hit the top one, and threw his shoulder into the door. It flew open, he skidded to a halt in the middle of someone's living room, and the screaming stopped.

The three of them stood there. The silence felt like the instant before a static electricity shock. Crackling, and sure to be painful. The man's grip on a chair leg tightened. The woman had a knife in her right hand and a plate in her left. Hank had a stitch in his side and a hand moving toward his gun.

The place was completely torn apart. The couch sat on its side in the middle of the narrow room, half of it knifed and in shreds. Dinner dripped down the far wall. Broken dishes carpeted the floor. There was an enormous dent in the refrigerator and a chunk taken out of the Formica bar. The chair with the missing leg lay at the guy's feet.

The woman had a huge red welt on her cheek and an eye starting to swell shut. The man, a wiry little guy, had a torn sleeve and nasty red slice down his arm. Hank honestly wasn't quite sure who was winning. But he couldn't very well call it a draw and just leave. He held out his left hand, keeping his right one on his gun. He slowly identified himself and asked them to put down what they were holding. Nobody moved.

“You in my house,” the man growled. The chair leg inched higher.

“Yeah, and I'm here to stop an assault,” Hank said.

“You trespassin'.” The woman this time.

So
now
they were in agreement? Apparently so, because they both started to advance. The woman began to swear at him.

“This
my
job, bitch,” the man snarled as he took a step closer to Hank. “I'm the man. This my house, I defend it.”

“Fuck you,” the woman screamed, and she let loose the plate. Hank dropped to the floor as it cut through the air just where his head had been. It stabbed right into the middle of the flat-screen TV, the one previously undamaged thing in the whole trailer, and the front cracked into a hundred pieces.

The man hesitated, unsure of who he should take his rage out on. He chose Hank. The chair leg whizzed past his ear as he rolled to the side, praying that the woman and her knife would not be waiting when he popped up onto his feet. She wasn't, and he dodged to the right as the chair leg came at him again. It hit him in the left shoulder and knocked him into the trailer wall next to the sagging front door. He grabbed the door, yanked it the rest of the way off its hinges, and got it in front of him just in time for the man's next swing. The chair leg hit the door and splintered in half. Less reach, more sharpness.

Hank held the door like a shield as he unholstered his gun. He steadied his hand, pushed away the door, and aimed for the spaghetti on the wall. The shot tore easily through the ridiculously thin shell of the trailer. And froze its occupants. The woman gawked at him from behind the Formica bar. The man stared at Hank with his jaw hanging open. Hank moved the gun until it was pointed quite clearly at his pasty face.

“The next one gets you in the head.”

 

CHAPTER

20

Apparently, the law in these parts did not typically open fire. No deputy in his department had discharged his or her weapon in six years—in a county that included places like Lakefront Manors. Hank, after experiencing that neighborhood's particular charms firsthand, found this very hard to believe until he reviewed enough patrol records and dispatch logs to figure out that the law rarely left the squad car. There was a lot to patrol, and not a lot of deputies to do it. Heck, he almost hadn't gotten out of the car, either.

But every once in a while, it did seem that deputies stumbled upon some law-breaking in their cruises through Lakefront Manors. They had to find it themselves, though. All of the incident reports Hank sat looking at before dawn that morning were deputy-initiated. No one in that trailer park ever called the police. For anything. One man there had shot his wife to death in their trailer several years before. With a shotgun. A big, loud, twelve-gauge. And no one had called it in. It wasn't until the woman's employer reported her missing that the sheriff's office knew anything was wrong. They'd found her buried five feet from the back door.

Certainly no one had bothered to call in the Mocklers and their volcanic fight. No one had even come out of their trailers to see them taken away in handcuffs. In Hank's experience, that action always drew a crowd, even if it was only to jeer the cops. But not here. There were absolutely no signs of life as he drove away. But they were there. He could feel the eyes on him as he backed slowly down the one road out of there.

Now Jay and Jean Mockler sat in separate sections of the county jail. He filled up his travel mug—there were still several hours to go on his patrol shift—and decided to make a pass through the jail on his way out. He regretted it as soon as he stepped into the women's section. The Lady Mockler's screeching bounced off the walls and pierced the sides of his skull. Man, could that woman yell. And she had the whole wing yelling back as Hank walked down to her cell.

“Shut her up, will ya, Sheriff?”

“That man of hers shoulda finished her off.”

“Lemme out. I'll do it.”

That one drew laughter from the others. Hank hid a smile and stopped in front of Jean's cell. Her screeching hit new highs.

“You can't hold me. I ain't pressing charges. You hear? You got to let me out. I ain't gonna press charges and neither is he.”

Her eye was now completely swollen shut. Stringy hair that might have been blond when clean hung over her face. She was as little and wiry as her husband. But he doubted they were evenly matched as he caught a glimpse of the cauliflower ear underneath her dirty hair. The holes in her sweatpants showed bruises in various stages of healing. And the fingers she was currently using for obscene gestures were twisted in the kinds of positions that only came from broken bones that hadn't been set properly.

“I don't care if you don't want to press charges,” he said, leaning toward her cell door and speaking softly, which forced her to stop yelling so she could hear him. “In the morning, I'm going to put you in touch with the domestic violence crisis center. You'll have to at least listen to them, because they're going to visit you here in jail. And this is where you're going to be for a very long time. You tried to assault a police officer.” He smiled. “And I do press charges.”

He left her screaming after him and walked out and over to the men's side, which was delightfully quiet. Jay Mockler was passed out in his cell, snoring away the drunkenness that had become obvious once Hank had gotten him handcuffed in the trailer. He stared at Mockler and rotated his left shoulder. The pain was really starting to kick in, and he could feel the welt rising in a straight line where the chair leg had landed. It was going to be a monster of a bruise. The only good thing, he supposed, was that it certainly took the focus off his aching feet.

He left the snoring drunk and walked two cells down the row. Chad Sorenson had fallen asleep sitting up. He slumped against the wall, looking quite uncomfortable and out of place. He'd have to have a bail hearing in the morning. Hank had initially been worried about that. Judges usually let nice well-off boys like that out on bail, but the airplane ticket the jail search had found in the inside pocket of that nice leather jacket—Springfield to New York's LaGuardia via Dallas–Fort Worth—would go a long way toward proving that Chad was a flight risk.

He purposefully left through the jail lobby. His feet hurt, his shoulder hurt, his tired eyes hurt, and he felt like picking a fight. The intake desk was empty. He walked outside. Gerald Tucker was standing with his back to the wind, trying to light a cigarette with a match.

“Hello.” GOB spun around. The match went out. Hank smiled. “I'd like a rundown of the inmate roster.”

GOB struck another match, slowly lit his cigarette, and shrugged. “It's inside.”

“You should be, too,” Hank said. “You seem to have a habit of abandoning your post.”

GOB glared at him. Hank looked at the book of matches in his hand. “No lighter?”

“I lost it,” GOB growled. He stuffed the matches in his breast pocket. “And I got a right to a smoke break.”

Hank held open the door into the jail lobby.

“Break's over.”

GOB didn't move. The two men stared at each other. Hank could practically see the guy's thought process play across his face, trying to decide whether it was worth challenging his new boss. He looked Hank, who was almost a head taller, up and down. Hank waited patiently with a blank look on his face. After about thirty very chilly seconds, Tucker grunted and walked inside. Hank smiled as he let the door slam shut behind him.

*   *   *

He had come into Forsyth, a town of about 2,500 people about fourteen miles east of Branson, from the north. As he left, he decided to head south, taking Highway 76 over Bull Shoals Lake and then looping west through tiny Kirbyville to Branson. It wasn't the patrol area assigned to his shift, but at this point, he didn't care. He was patrolling, and that was good enough. And since he was now the boss, he could make that call without having to justify it to anybody. That was nice.