"Well! Since Mr. Morrison thinks he's in charge, we can all line up and follow him back to class. And you can all thank him for missing your chance to run the race."
Just like some wack job to blame her ineptitude on someone else. Put it on him because she was too weak to just get the lames to shut up and run.
Now the patrol car was blowing up on the taillights of another car on the two-lane. He reached over and hit the switch for the light bar and sent swirls of blue strobes out into the dark. The beams swept the open tree lines back off the edge of the highway and then exploded in blobs of color when they hit the white front wall of the feed store past Boynton Beach Boulevard. The car in front tapped its brake lights and started to slow and he moved out over the double yellow and punched it past. He caught a glimpse of the woman driver's face, tinted blue in his lights, eyes big and startled and helpless. Just like the old teacher. Just like his mother. The same face she wore that night when he was fourteen.
The old man had been making it a habit of coming home late in the night, drunk with the thick tissue of his eyes swollen with drink and his jowls flaccid. He woke up the house with the noise of the aluminum screen door slamming and everyone knew the routine was on. Upstairs he would hear the clumping of his father's greasy work boots, blackened from the oil and metal shavings of the tool and die shop, on the kitchen floor. His mother was anal about keeping that floor clean, always making everyone take their shoes off in the mudroom, scrubbing and even waxing the cheap linoleum on her hands and knees. And he wondered if the old man recognized that and tracked across it on purpose or was just too drunk to realize it. Then the thumping would start. The grunting, guttural barking of one voice against the high whine that started off demanding and brave but would lose that battle against a meaty hand smacking against thin skin and light bone. Before that final night he'd dealt with it by cowering. Pull the cover over your head. Stick your fingers in your ears. But that night he was tired of rules being repeated over and over. He went to the gun rack that hung on the basement wall. The.22 rifle was for rabbits. The big British.303 was for larger animals. He took the gun down and was surprised that the weight did not overwhelm him as it had in the past. He loaded the receiver with ammunition from the small wooden drawers on the rack. He'd never really been taught, he'd just learned by watching his father and other men from the shop prepare for deer hunting season up north. The only thing he had been taught was never to point a gun at anything you weren't prepared to kill. He slid a round into the chamber with the bolt action, locked it down and went upstairs.
In the hallway he heard the command and the sharp wet slap and went into their bedroom unannounced. The barrel of the.303 came up and centered on his father's chest. The old man's hooded eyes went almost comically wide. His mother's were pleading.
He slowly circled the room where his mother had been slapped to the bed and held the gun amazingly steady and weightless. He put himself between them, giving his back to his mother so he would not have to see her weakness. Each time his father tried to slur some useless attempt at apology, he could remember his own steady, mechanical response: "Shut up!" and took another step forward, raising the rifle site to his father's face. If the old man still thought he had any dominance over him, it leaked away, replaced by the knowledge that his son was capable of blowing his brain matter all over his own bedroom wall.
He backed his father out of the room, down the stairs and over the once pristine kitchen floor. Through the screen door he forced him, stumbling, down the steps and out into the night and it was the last he saw of him, and from that time on, he, Kyle, was the man of the house.
He'd crossed Forest Hill Boulevard and was coming up to Southern by now and had lost track of time. He was not on duty and had turned off all the radios in the patrol car that would have been updating the hours in military time. He looked at his watch and it was past two so he turned around in a construction area at the roadside. He killed the headlights and sat there in the dark with the engine running.
Why couldn't she just do what he asked her to do? He shook his head, now looking back south. And then she'd gone and hung up on him in the bar and that was just over the fucking line. He'd give her one more chance, but it was becoming all too familiar. Don't test me, Marci. Nobody's going to love you out in those cold dark weeds with the rest of them. You'll be out there all alone.
CHAPTER 20
The moon was high and dusty white, mottled by its features, but still its reflected light put a pale sheen on the acres of Everglades sawgrass that lay out before me.
I was on the berm that formed the northern back of the L-10 canal. I'd come back to my shack and spent my time reading in silence and pretending to fish and paddling my river. I was still grinding the rocks of O'Shea's innocence, Richards's vendetta against him and the possibility of a stalker still working the bars. I was pissed that O'Shea refused to talk about the Faith Hamlin case, even while I was sticking my neck and Billy's out for him. What the hell was he hiding? He didn't owe those other three cops. Was I way off base on the bartender drug theory? Was there really someone stalking the girls, or were they just working the trade and then moving on while a drug pimp recruited his next one? Richards said she'd done backgrounds on all the girls without a sign of drug use or involvement. But if that was all it was, she was going to be kicking herself around worse than her superiors. I was turning the ideas in my head, trying to rub them smooth with logic and the sandpaper of "What if?" But I knew I was waiting for someone else to act, make a mistake, uncover a body, wound instead of kill. The anxious feeling that crawled just under the muscles in my back and shoulders had sent me out in my canoe paddling hard up the river in the middle of the night.
I'd pushed myself all the way to the culvert that the water management district had opened to divert canal water into the river. The natural slough of hundreds of wet acres that spread north and west had been the river's water source for thousands of years before men had started re-plumbing the Glades to fit their needs. Thirsty cities along the coast, a desire-no, a need-to lower the naturally high water table to create dry farmland for the sugarcane and winter vegetables and dry plots for yet more suburban housing. It was homo erectus in control of something as natural as the flow of rainwater.
At the berm I pulled the canoe up into a clump of marsh fern and climbed eight feet to the top. My night vision had returned to me after too long a dose of electric light in the city. In the moonlight I could even pick up the tiny white nodes of snail pods clinging to the razor-sharp strands of sawgrass like short strings of pearls. To the east I could see the false dawn of the city lights, but to the west only the shimmer of moving grass when the wind picked up and blew a pattern over the Glades. That's the direction I was facing when the chattering of my cell phone sounded in such a foreign way out here that it nearly made me duck. My reaction puzzled me and I let the phone ring again and then realized how on edge I had been waiting for someone else to pull the trigger on this case. On the third ring I punched the talk button.