Page 16 of Overkill

I wished I could say that I knew who this was, but my extended stepfamily was a malicious group. The Grays. My stepdad’s family. The people everyone in this town was related to, somehow. And every single one of the seemed to hate me.

If I listed all the people who would send me anonymous threats, I would likely name a dozen in this county alone. Even more if we included out-of-state members.

When a mighty house crumbled, everyone was in danger of getting buried alive.

They used punctuation, though. So that certainly narrowed it down.

Chapter 5

Cassette

Vedder

I parked on a small trail with the windshield facing the highway and left the windows down, waiting to see the police car pull out of her potholed, concrete driveway.

I couldn’t see her house through the arching alpine trees.

The rain had let up a little today. What was a fucking downpour had dispersed into the slightest drizzle that often gave way to mist and fog when the sun heated the soaked ground. I found it quite romantic. Mist blanketing a river, crawling over the earth. There was something about how it looked—or maybe it was the thought of a day reading indoors by a yellow fire as the gray clouds cast the rest of the world in darkness, making everything outside the house seem like a distant, different place.

I ashed my lit cigarette out of the window. My other hand tapped nervously on the steering wheel.

I didn’t have to do this. I didn’t have to stalk her. Braun hadn’t told me to. But I wanted to see her.

I wanted to see how she would take the news. Was she hurt? Was she angry? Would she let me hold her as she worked through whatever she’d go through? Wouldn’t that be a right peachy thing if she did? Two birds with one stone. I’d get the girl, solve the case, and be a big small-town hero.

Whitlaw already said the body had to be identified, and as his eldest kin, his next of kin, in fact, the gruesome task would fall on her.

Meditation after meditation blasted through my staticky speakers. I had a cassette player hooked to an iPhone, because this vehicle was too old to have any kind of USB or cable port. There was something nice about the way the cassette squeaked in the tape player. Like listening to something in vinyl. There was a texture to it. As if the sound itself could be touched and felt like a wrinkled fabric.

The Vipassana meditation was interrupted by the standard ringtone. I looked down and saw Trinity’s name and face flash across my screen.

“Yeah?” I said when I picked up.

“Yeah? Not hello? How are you doing?” Her voice always had an edge to it. Sharp like a razor blade. Which was not that different from her personality. “No, hi Taz, my dearest, bestest, and awesomest friend ever?”

“Nope.” I obnoxiously popped the p.

Jury was out on who my best friend was…if I had one at all.

We’d gotten close over the last year, since she lived in the guest cabin while I lived in the barn just a stone’s throw across the drive. Both of us were squatting on First Sergeant McClanahan’s—who we sometimes called Top—retirement farm.

“Mamma Mack wants to know if you’re coming for dinner tonight?”

This was a trap. They wanted something, and they were going around the elbow to get to the asshole on this.

“Is Griff going to be there?” Her new husband was staying with her in the guest cabin on Mack’s farm. I’d put distance between us by bunking in the barn and staying in a dirty loft in my old Gore-Tex sleeping bag.

The barn was a fucking wreck. The red thing tilted to one side and was one light breeze from toppling over. For two years now, it had been my mission to fix the 150-year-old farm and turn it into something liveable. It didn’t make up for what I’d done to my team, to my friend, to everyone who’d ever relied on me. But it was a start.

I’d learned not to believe in apologies. I believed in making amends through action. Like helping Mack renovate the farm he’d bought to forget the love of his life. Then she came back, and he still had an old ass house in need of repairs, but had less of a fire in his gut to finish them. And God bless him, but Mack wasn’t a contractor or carpenter despite having spent a ton of time on “the YouTube” seeing how to work a table saw.

So that’s where I stepped in.

“He is, but—”

“I’ll make myself scarce,” I interrupted her.

Griff and I were three seconds from coming to blows in the best of times. I didn’t feel like brawling in the middle of Top’s kitchen.