“Telling me how to do my job again?”
“Just asking you to get out from behind that desk,” I say, before adding, “or up from underneath it, where the Crocketts are concerned.”
He smiles at me now, as if he’s not going to give me the satisfaction of clapping back at the insult I’d just thrown across his desk at him. The smile makes me think of a horse showing its teeth.
Or, in Nash Hader’s case, a horse’s ass.
“You really do have a lot to say for a sorry has-been,” he says.
I get up out of my chair and give him a two-fingered salute.
“Better than being a sorry never-been, am I right, Sheriff?”
I leave the way I came in, no thought of stopping back at Sergeant Morecombe’s desk, just heading back outside and walking to where I’d parked the truck.
Singing to myself as I reach into the pocket of my jeans for my keys.
The words of Mr. Johnny Cash, the Man in Black himself.
There’s a man goin’ round takin’ names
And he decides who to free and who to blame…
THIRTY-NINE
THE TOWN SQUARE MALL is barely hanging on in Cross Rivers. Everybody in town can spot the signs: maybe only half the stores open for business; the red sea of “Retail Space for Rent” notices on the vacant ones—same way much bigger malls in much bigger cities are hanging on by their fingernails in the world of Amazon and online shopping.
But high school kids still cruise it in their free time, especially in the summer months, walking around and listening to the tacky and universal soundtrack of malls everywhere. Right next door is a fairly popular skate park, where some kids go to board and more show up looking for drugs, knowing they can score if they’re careful about picking their spots, and if both the buyers and sellers are discreet enough.
Burt Webb is on his morning patrol, less than a mile from the mall, when the 911 call about a possible OD at the skate park is patched in to him.
When the operator asks for his location, Burt tells her he’s not much more than a minute or two away.
“I’ve already called the EMTs,” she says. “But I suspect you’re going to beat them there.”
“On it,” he says, pressing the dedicated button on his dashboard to activate his siren, hoping he’s not too late this time, too late the way he’s been a couple of times in the past, both of those times haunting him still.
When he arrives, he sees four teenaged boys standing over a fifth boy only a few yards from the entrance to the park. Burt runs over to where they are and immediately recognizes the unconscious boy on the ground. Burt shoves the others out of his way and kneels next to Reggie Piersall, getting close enough to hear his shallow breathing and the kid choking slightly with what seems to be every other breath.
Burt knows the kid had been on the Cross Rivers football team until his junior year when he’d gotten kicked off for drugs. He’d managed to stay in school, mostly because his father, Ed, who’d been a bartender at Rowdy’s untilhe’dbeen fired for dealing drugs, had OD’d the previous year because of cocaine laced with fentanyl. The principal took pity on the kid because of that, getting a promise out of Reggie that he’d stay away from drugs going forward.
Which he clearly has not.
“Reggie!” Burt says, his mouth close to his ear.
Nothing.
The kid’s lips are starting to turn blue.
Burt looks up at the friends.
“How long has he been like this?”
No one answers right away.
“Are any of us going to get in trouble?” one of them asks. “We’re the ones who called it in.”
“How long?” Burt snaps.
