“Run. Don’t stop. Don’t look back. Out the window. Now.”
He waited for her to reach it. “Count to three,” he ordered as he crawled for the door. “Then go. I’ll keep them off you.”
“John.”
“Make me proud, Liz. Count.”
She counted, slid out. She gripped the gutter as rainlashed against her face. She didn’t know if it would hold her, didn’t think it mattered. Then she heard the volley of gunfire, and shimmied down like a monkey.
Get help, she told herself, and began to run.
She was less than fifty yards away when the house exploded behindher.
Brooks
This above all—to thine own self be true.
And it must follow, as the night the day.
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
WilliamShakespeare
7
Arkansas, 2012
Sometimes being the chief ofpolice in a little town tucked into the Ozarks like a sleepy cat in the crook of an elbow just sucked right out loud.
As a for instance, arresting a guy you played ball with in high school because he grew up to be an asshole. Though Brooks considered being an asshole a God-given right rather than a criminal offense, Tybal Crew was currently sleeping off several more than one too many shots of Rebel Yell.
Brooks considered overindulging in whiskey, on occasion, another God-given right. But when that indulgence invariably caused a man to stumble home and give his wife a couple of good, solid pops in the face, it crossed the line to criminal offense.
And it sucked. Out loud.
And it sucked louder yet as sure as daisies bloomed in the spring, Missy Crew—former co-captain of the Bickford Senior High School cheerleading squad—would rush into the station before noon, claiming Ty hadn’t clocked her, oh no. She’d run into a door, a wall, tripped on the stairs.
No amount of talk, sympathy, annoyance, charm, threatswould persuade her—or him—they needed some help. They’d kiss and make up as if Ty had been off to war for a year, likely go home and fuck like rabid minks.
In a week or two, Ty would get his hands on another bottle of Rebel Yell, and they’d all go around again.
Brooks sat in his preferred booth at Lindy’s Café and Emporium, stewing over the situation as he ate breakfast.
Nobody fried up eggs and bacon and home fries like Lindy, but the fat and grease and crunch just didn’t cheer Brooks up.
He’d come back to Bickford six months before to take on the job as chief after his father’s heart attack. Loren Gleason—who’d tried to teach Ty Crew and just about every other high-schooler the mysteries of algebra—bounced back. And with the nutrition and exercise regimen Brooks’s mother had put the poor guy on, he was healthier than he’d likely been in his life.
But still, the incident had left Brooks shaken, and needing home. So after a decade in Little Rock, a decade on the Little Rock PD, the last five as a detective, he’d turned in his papers and scooped up the recently open position of chief.
Mostly, it was good to be home. He hadn’t known how much he’d missed it until he’d moved back full-time. It occurred to him that he’d probably say the same about Little Rock, should he ever go back, but for now, Bickford suited him just fine. Just dandy.
Even when the job sucked.
He liked having breakfast once or twice a week at Lindy’s, liked the view of the hills outside his office window and the steadiness of the job. He liked the town, the artists, the potters, weavers, musicians—the yogis, the psychics, and all the shops and restaurants and inns that drew the tourists in to sample the wares.
The hippies had come and settled in the sixties—God knew why his mother, who’d changed her name from Mary Ellen to Sunshine and still went by Sunny, wandered down from Pennsylvania about a decade later. And so Sunshinehad charmed or corrupted—depending on who was telling the story—a young, first-year math teacher.
They’d exchanged personal vows on the banks of the river, and set up house. A few years and two babies later, Sunny had bowed to the gentle, consistent pressure only his father could exert, and had made it legal.
