“What are all the damn lights doin’ off?” were the first words to exit Sutter’s mouth when he came in.
Trey looked up from his desk with an expression like bewilderment. The younger man rubbed his face. “Things are startin’ to get really fucked-up ’round here, Chief. I don’t know where to start.”
Sutter looked at his watch, his patience ticking away with it. “Why’d you call me down here at midnight, Trey? And why’d you turn off the lights? Start talkin’. Now.”
“Ricky Caudill’s dead, Chief,” Trey blurted.
“Bullshit.” Sutter bulled past Trey’s desk to the cells. The only light that remained on was the hall light, which bled into Caudill’s unit. The cell door stood unlocked.
“Fuck!” Sutter shouted.
Eventually Trey came down the hall. He was edgy, fidgeting. “That’s how I found him, Chief. Looks like . . .”
Sutter was leaning over the cot. “It looks like all his blood’s gone is what‘choo were about to say.” The wizened face looked pale as old candle wax. There was no blood on the floor, none on Caudill’s clothes, no evidence of a wound. “It’s fuckin’ crazy,” Sutter murmured, staring.
Trey turned on the cell light. Sutter unbuttoned Cauldill’s shirt to reveal a sheet-white chest underscored with blue veins. The lack of color in the flesh made Ricky’s chest hairs look like jet-black wires. The nipples were purple. Sutter lifted up the arm that dangled off the cot, then pushed Caudill’s body on its side. “No lividity,” he said.
“What’s that, Chief?”
“We’ve seen corpses before, Trey. After they’re dead an hour or two, the blood settles to the low points a’ the body and turns blue. But not here. It’s impossible.”
“I know, Chief,” Trey agreed wearily. “Lotta impossible shit been goin’ on lately, and you know what folks’re sayin’.”
Sutter turned and bellowed, “I ain’t believin’ no shit about Everd Stanherd hexin’ people! Ain’t no reason for Everd to hex Ricky or Junior anyway!”
Trey shrugged where he stood. “There is if it was Ricky ‘n’ Junior who killed the Hilds and the Ealds.”
Sutter’s face was reddening. “Why would they do that? You’re sayin’ the Caudills were into selling crystal meth, too?”
“I don’t know, Chief. Gimme another explanation, then. Somebody killed Ricky in his cell, drained all his blood without spillin’ a drop? You tell me.”
“There ain’t no fuckin’ such thing as hexes ’n’ curses ’n’ magic! We’re cops, for God’s sake!” Sutter yelled. “You hear me?”
Trey waited through a moment of silence. “Roger that, Chief. I don’t believe the shit either, but then again . . . I don’t know what to make of any a’ this.”
“Did you call the coroner’s office?”
“No.”
“Why?”
Trey let out a breath at the same time he took an inadvertent glance at Ricky Caudill’s grub-white corpse. “This place is givin’ me the creeps, Chief. Let’s go back out front and talk.”
Sutter’s temper was ranging up and down. He didn’t like not knowing things, and right now the only thing he did know was that something was seriously offkilter. “Turn some fuckin’ lights on,” he griped in the station lobby. “It’s dark as a fuckin’ tomb in here.”
There was a click. Suddenly a cone of light blossomed at Chief Sutter’s very own desk. But Trey was standing beside him.
Then who the hell was sitting at Sutter’s desk?
“Good evening, Chief Sutter,” Gordon Felps greeted him. Only the bottom half of his face could be seen in the light. “We were going to talk to you eventually, but certain events have expedited that need.”
“Mr. Felps? What are you—”
“It’s best if we just begin as openly as possible,” the blond man said. “You are the law, after all. But sometimes the law is malleable, for the greater good. The Squatters, for instance.”
Confusion immediately swept Sutter. He looked to Trey, who remained standing beside him. “What’s going on, Trey?”
Trey sighed. “Chief, it’s like last week, when we shook down those shitheads in the Hummer. Common drug dealers. We fucked ‘em up and took their cash, and booted ’em out of town, right?”
The reference threw Sutter for a big loop. That had been private police business, the details of which he didn’t particularly want to admit in front of Felps or any citizen. “Trey, you better level with me about what’s goin’ on here.”
Trey nodded, crossing his arms. “That’s what I’m doin’, boss. And you are the boss; don’t get me wrong. We want you in with us.”
“I’m not likin’ the sound of this.”
Trey held up a finger to make a point. “Lemme put it this way. Those scumbags in the Hummer, okay? What if we’d gone a step further, Chief? I mean, what we did was illegal. You weren’t exactly keepin’ the Constitution in mind when you knocked that black dealer’s teeth out and busted his leg—”
Sutter was enraged. “You were part a’ that, too, so don’t ya go sayin’ that—”
“Chief, Chief, that’s not what I mean, so listen to me. We both fucked those guys up, and we took their watches and their cash—you and me. And we’ve done stuff like that before because—let’s face it—the common man don’t give a shit if the police steal from criminals and bust their faces in. Forget about the letter a’ the law—this is commonsense stuff we’re talkin’ ‘bout, stuff that all cops do, ’cos if we don’t take the law into our own hands when we can get away with it, criminals’ ll drag this great country of ours right down the shitter. You agree with that, Chief. We’ve talked about it. What it all boils down to is this: so what? We fucked up a coupla criminals. We stole from a coupla thieves. And in doin’ so, we did help make the world a teeny bit better, didn’t we? ’Cos those two assholes are probably still in the hospital. They ain’t never gonna sell drugs here again, right?”
Sutter’s blood pressure was starting to creep. “Right, Trey, so stop dickin’ with me and tell me what this is really all about.”
Trey nodded again, sticking to analogies. “Let’s go one further, okay? Let’s just say we’d killed those two losers in the Hummer. They kill innocent people with the drugs they sell. We know they’re guilty. Sure, the Constitution ‘n’ all says they’re innocent until proven guilty in court, but—shit, Chief—we saw it with our own eyes. We don’t need no judge to tell us. Those guys sell hard drugs, and folks eventually die from those same drugs. So say we killed ‘em to boot. That’s against the letter a’ the law, too. But what about the common man’s law? It ain’t that big a deal, right? We killed a couple of killers and the world’s a better place for it. Right?”
Sutter’s eyes shone hard on Trey. “What the fuck are you tryin’ to tell me?”
“What Trey’s trying to relate to you, Chief,” Gordon Felps stood up and said, “is that we’re all trying to make Agan’s Point a better place, while we’re serving our own better interests at the same time.”