Part I
CALLIE
September 2023
Callie’s uniform chafes, even after six weeks of filling in on patrol. She can’t stop scratching at the place where her collar hits the back of her neck. She thinks of the suits she amassed while she was working her way up as a narcotics detective in North Jersey. Dark fabrics and crisp lines, garments that helped her feel neat and orderly and in control in the face of whatever came her way on any given week. Seizing tens of thousands of dollars of Mexican heroin from a warehouse outside of Newark. Prepping an undercover unit for a buy-and-bust on a big mafia-run cocaine operation. Now, in her patrol car parked along a sandy stretch of shoulder on Route 206 in the Jersey Pine Barrens, rashes blooming at her wrist and collar, she longs for those suits, the cool, silky linings of the jackets and the way they slipped along her skin.
Frank told her it was a good idea to wear her uniform every day, a gesture to show the guys she considered herself one of them. And she’s needed on patrol: The Pine Lakes squad is down an officer now that Sergeant Jimmy Nichols resigned when Callie was named Chief of Police. According to Jimmy the job should have been his. Callie had been out of the area too long, only got the job because she’s in with Frank Caputo, her best friend’s father-in-law who served as chief until he retired in 2011. On her bad days she’s not sure Jimmy is wrong.
But, until she hires a new guy, every Monday she takes the oldest patrol vehicle with the shrieking brakes and spends her hours answering calls, completing her reports from parking lots between trafficstops, doing her best to enforce order among the endless trees, the circuits of dirt roads, in a place that she knows from her girlhood has a secretive, untamable heart.
Her shift has been quiet so far. A broken taillight on someone’s boat trailer. A few speeding tickets. She staked out a convenience store for an hour, acting on a tip from a kid they arrested last week for possession. The biggest problem she’s inherited: a local drug ring that has been trading in dirty heroin, packages everything in green glassine baggies stamped with pine boughs. Overdoses ticking up and up and up, and with the hospitals so far away, long drives for EMTs, and patchy cell service, many of them are fatal. One of Callie’s first initiatives as chief was distributing Narcan to every officer on her squad and setting up a pickup spot outside the station. But still, it hasn’t been enough. Not by a long shot.
She’s restless, hungry, scratches again at the back of her neck. It’s that time of night when the sun is setting but she can’t make it out other than in the way the light shifts from behind the trees. She rolls her windows down, dials the radio low. It’s so quiet that she can hear the brush of pine boughs against her roof, stirred in the breeze.Shhh shhh shhhh.
Ten minutes pass that way, then the silence is cut through by the grumble of a muffler-less engine from around the bend. A white Nissan Altima comes into view and Callie sits up. The car swerves over the centerline, overcorrects and veers onto the shoulder, straightens out again. No headlights, despite the way the daylight is draining swiftly toward the ground. A drunk.
Callie clocks a wide dent in the vehicle’s left front bumper as it approaches, consistent with striking something large head-on. A deer. A tree. A person. A thirty-year-old woman with a three-year-old at home.
“You bastard,” Callie says. A second later, her siren screams through the quiet and her lights send blasts of red into the dark.
As she approachesthe Altima, Callie spots a six-pack of Budweiser in the back seat, two cans short. She raises her eyes to the driver, a woman with a matted nest of a bun at the nape of her neck.
It takes Callie a second to feel it, that chime of recognition. Proof of how long they have been strangers to one another. The red hair less vivid than the last time Callie saw her five years ago. It was once so similar to Callie’s own, but now its streaked through with much more gray.
She takes a breath. Straightens the nameplate on her uniform.
As she approaches the car, Nirvana’s “You Know You’re Right” wails from the speakers. Callie clears her throat. “Would you mind turning that down?”
The driver holds a finger up to Callie. “Hold on, hold on. You know this is the best part!” She leans over and cranks the volume higher.
Callie has to shout to hear her own voice. “Turn the music off.”
She gets a peal of laughter in response.
“Jesus Christ, Mom! I said turn it down!”
Jenna shrugs, does as she’s told. “My god. You’ve always been so uptight, Calliope.” There’s a glassiness to her eyes and a looseness to her speech. More than two beers in, then. And the use of Callie’s full name always riles her. Jenna, nineteen years old when Callie was born and still hanging on to her hopes for a music career, had saddled her infant with the name of the muse of music and song.
Callie widens her stance, puts her hand on her holster.
“Whose car is this? What happened to the Trans Am?”
Jenna waves her hand. “Got rid of that thing years ago. Marcus traded me this one for it, lots of miles on it but you know me, don’t need to go far. So tell me, my girl. What did you do to get tossed back here in the woods?”
She digs her nails into her palm. Before Jane’s accident she had been a few months shy of being named commander in the drug trafficking unit. It was as good as hers, she had been assured, once Greg Holloway retired.
“I called you. Left you a voicemail. Twice. I told you I was coming back. You know why I’m here. I’m chief of police, Mom.”
She leaves out the rest: the eight-man team who can’t stand her, a drug ring ratcheting up business while her budget is slated to getslashed, and days filled with that tired old litany she thought she left behind in her rookie years. “License and registration, please.”
Jenna rifles through a mess of receipts in the center console and produces a driver’s license that expired two years ago. “Don’t know where the registration is.” Callie catches the hot waft of cheap beer on her breath, and something else that is all Jenna. Aussie-brand hairspray, sickly sweet, with notes of grape Jolly Rancher. Underneath that, the scent of her body metabolizing the booze, an ineffable smell but one that Callie would know anywhere. One that triggers alarm bells in her body, and even all these years later, makes the muscles in the back of her neck go tight.
Callie walks back to the patrol car, willing herself to take deep breaths. She runs the license and can’t help thinking how Jenna looks a decade older than her forty-nine years. Cheeks sunken, mottled with bright bursts of spider veins. Stained teeth, one of them chipped, bumped too many times on the lip of a beer bottle.
The license number is attached to a laundry list of infractions, everything from disorderly conduct to urinating in public, petty larceny, another DUI last year. Some Callie already knows about, some are new to her, but none of them are particularly surprising. This is the woman who, the year Callie turned fourteen, said she was cooking them a big Thanksgiving dinner, went out to shop, disappeared, and returned three days later, a rotting turkey carcass in her trunk.
When Callie returns to the Altima she takes her time walking around the front bumper, crouches to touch her finger to the dent.
