“A complaint!” I said.
“That’s enough out of you, mister!” Slim said. “Come have a seat in the cruiser. I need to get some information from you.”
Half an hour later, I sat in the Prosperity Police Station. The cop, Slim Tackett, hadn’t cuffed me, but neither did he seem interested in letting me go.
The front door to the station opened, and another officer stepped inside. He was tall and barrel-chested and athletic. He wore a gray Stetson over close-cropped dark hair going slowly silver at the temples. His eyes were blue and penetrating.
“This him?” he asked Tackett.
“Name’s Gallegher, Chief. Roy Patrick Gallegher. He’s from New Orleans.”
“New Orleans?” the chief said, as he glanced over the report. “You’re a long way from home.”
“I can’t wait to get back,” I said.
“You can go on,” the chief told Tackett.
“Thanks, Chief,” Tackett said. He left without saluting.
The chief told me to sit tight. He walked to the back of the station and returned with two cups of coffee.
“You take sugar or cream?” he asked.
“Beer,” I said.
He grinned, for just a second, reached into his shirt pocket and handed me a couple of paper packets of sweetener. Then he sat behind the desk.
“Judd Wheeler,” he said. “I’m the chief of police here in Prosperity. We aren’t accustomed to riots in the shopping-center parking lot.”
“As I told the other officer, I had just finished dinner and was heading for my car when these kids decided to hit me up for cash.”
“So you assaulted them.”
“The kid with the broken arm threatened me with a knife. I tried to leave. He decided to press the issue.”
Wheeler nodded. “Rooster Broome. You tie fifteen Bliss County Broomes together and you might get a triple-digit IQ. Between you and me, I’ve kind of hoped for some time now that someone would clean Rooster’s clock.”
“So we’re jake?”
“No, Mr. Gallegher. We are not ‘jake.’ I got two Prosperity kids in the ER over in Morgan, and you don’t have a scratch on you. I’m not certain how to explain that. You some kind of tough guy?”
“Yes,” I said.
I thought Wheeler’s eyes might have widened a bit.
“Honest, too,” I said.
“Are you so honest that if I send to New Orleans for your arrest record they’re gonna come up empty?”
“I’ve been arrested in New Orleans,” I said. “Several times. All the charges were dropped. If you want, you can check with Detective Farley Nuckolls in Robbery-Homicide, at the Rampart Street station in the French Quarter.”
“Friend of yours?”
“We go back a few years. He can tell you anything you want to know.”
Wheeler drew a few circles on his desktop with his index finger, and then took a sip of his coffee.
“What I want to know,” he said, finally, “is what you’re doing in Prosperity.”
“I work in a bar in the French Quarter. There was a girl who waited tables there for a while. She was murdered several days ago. I’m trying to find her family.”
“What was this girl’s name?”
“Katie Costner.”
Wheeler nodded, and took another sip of his coffee.
“Katie Costner left Prosperity about five years ago,” he said.
“So you knew her?”
“We crossed paths. Gave her folks no end of grief. Broke their hearts, though, when she blew town.”
“Maybe you can help me track them down. My boss in New Orleans wants me to inform them of her death, make arrangements for the funeral.”
“Well,” Wheeler said. “Now, that’s going to be a problem.”
“They’ve moved away?”
“No. They’re still here. Will be forever, I reckon.”
It took me a moment to catch his drift.
“Oh,” I said.
“Katie’s father died about three years ago. Cancer. Got it working in the textile dye mill over in Mica Wells. Her mother passed about a year later. Ate herself to death after her husband died. Diabetes.”
“Tough deal,” I said.
“It seems to me that the person you need to talk to is Quincy Pressley. He’s the preacher at the Lutheran church over off Ebenezer Road. The Costners are buried in his churchyard.”
I glanced at my watch.
“It’s a little late to call on him now. Is there a motel nearby I could flop for the night?”
“Sorry. Nearest motel is over in Morgan, about fifteen miles. Why don’t you stay here?”
“In the jail?”
“Sure. The beds in the cells are plenty comfortable. We serve a first-class breakfast in the morning, from over at the Piggly Wiggly in the shopping center. It’ll be nice and quiet.”
“Am I under arrest, Chief?”
He shook his head.
“Let’s call it protective custody. The Broomes are a clannish bunch — you know, with a capital ‘K.’ They aren’t going to be very happy that some out-of-towner maimed one of their own, no matter how much he may have deserved it. They won’t come anywhere near the jail, though. They seem to be allergic to it. If it makes you feel any better, I’ll leave the cell door unlocked.”
And that’s how I came to spend the night in the Prosperity jail.
Chief Wheeler hadn’t lied. The breakfast carted in from the Piggly Wiggly was top shelf. Market-cut pepper bacon, scrambled eggs, grits, and two biscuits, which I washed down with coffee from the pot in the back of the station. It wasn’t Café du Monde, but as country breakfasts go, it hit the spot.
Chief Wheeler had kept his word also about unlocking the cell door.
I was just finishing my second biscuit when he walked in the front door of the station and headed straight back to the holding cells. He carried a thick sheaf of fax paper.
“Your buddy Nuckolls gets to work early,” he said. “You failed to mention last night that you used to be a cop.”
“I was a consultant. Nashua PD in New Hampshire. Forensic psychologist. I did their profiling.”
“Says here you killed a suspect named Ed Hix.”
“I don’t like to talk about that,” I said.
“I can imagine why.”
“Read the report, Chief. Hix killed the detective working the case, and it was down to Hix or me. I decided that it was a lot better for everyone in the long run if Hix didn’t walk out of those woods.”
“You emptied an automatic into him. Fourteen shots.”
“That was all the gun held. I’m not going to apologize for what I did, and I’m not going to minimize it either. Either Hix was going to die, or I was. I can’t complain about the way things worked out.”
“It seems you’ve had a very interesting life down in New Orleans. Detective Nuckolls seems to think that you’ve killed as many as six people over the last decade.”
“He’s entitled to his opinion.”
Wheeler set the sheaf of faxes down on his desk.
“Besides the fact that you seem to be some sort of walking Angel of Death, Detective Nuckolls says you’re generally dependable, probably honest, and even says you were responsible for stopping a serial murderer down there a couple of years ago.”
“It could have gone the other way very easily.”
“Here’s my problem, Gallegher. I keep the peace here in Prosperity. This is a quiet little town. We like it that way. I would be very appreciative if you’d complete your business here and then go home, preferably without littering the landscape with bodies I’d have to bury.”
We talked for a while longer, as he vetted me by way of the reports he had received from New Orleans, and then he offered to drive me over to meet Reverend Pressley.
“I have a car, over in the shopping-center lot.”