Dead of Night

She cursed a lot louder and with real bile as she danced under the icy spray trying to rinse her hair. Rempel had sworn to her—sworn on his own children—that he had fixed that water tank. Dez hated him most days, but today she was pretty sure that she could put a bullet into his brainpan without a flicker of regret.

As she toweled off, Dez tried to remember the name of the beefcake sprawled on her floor.

Billy? Bart? Brad?

Something with a B.

Not Brad, though. Brad was the guitar player she’d nailed last week. Played with a cover band. Retro stuff. Green Day and Nirvana. Lousy band. Guitar player had a face like Channing Tatum and a body like—

The phone rang. Not the house phone. Her cell.

“Damn it,” she growled and wrapped the towel around her as she ran back to the bedroom. What’shisname—Burt? Brian? She was sure it started with a B—had rolled onto his side and his right cheek was in the puke. Charming. Her whole life in a single memorable picture.

Dez dove onto the bed but mistimed her momentum so that her outstretched hand hit the phone instead of grabbing it, and the cell, the clock, her badge case, and her holstered Glock fell off of the night table onto the far side of the bed.

“Shit!”

She hung over the bed and fished for the cell underneath, then punched the button with her thumbnail.

“What?” she snarled.

“And good morning to you, Miss Sunshine.”

Sergeant JT Hammond. He was her partner on the eight-to-four, her longtime friend, and a frequent addition to the list of people she was sure that right now she could shoot while laughing about it. Though, admittedly, she would feel bad about it afterward. JT was the closest thing to family she had, and the only one she didn’t seem able to scare off.

“Fuck you,” she said, but without venom.

“Rough night, Dez?”

“And the horse you rode in on.”

JT chuckled softly.

“Why the hell are you calling me so goddamn early?” grumbled Dez.

“Two reasons,” he said brightly. “Work and—”

“We’re not on until eight o’clock.”

“—and it’s not as early as you think. My watch says that it’s eight-oh-two.”

“Oh … shitballs.”

“We didn’t set out clock last night, did we? Little much to dri—”

Dez hung up.

She lay there, hanging over the edge of the bed, her ass in the air, her weight resting on one elbow.

“Oh, man!” said a slurry voice behind her. “Now that’s something to wake up to.”

Dez didn’t move, didn’t turn around.

“Here’s the morning news, dickhead,” she said very loudly and clearly. “You’re going to grab your shit and be out of here in ten seconds, or I’m going to kick your nuts up between your shoulder blades.”

“Damn … you wake up on the wrong side of—”

“Ten. Three. Two…”

“I’m out.”

There was a scuffling sound as Brandon or Blake or whoever the hell he was snatched up his stuff. Then the screen door opened and banged shut. An engine roared and the wheels of a Harley kicked gravel against the aluminum skin of the trailer.

Dez shimmied back onto the bed, turned over, and sat up. The room took a seasick sideways turn and then settled down. She looked around at her bedroom. Stark, cheerless, undecorated, and sparsely furnished. So much of it reminded her of herself. She closed her eyes. Insights like that she didn’t need on her best days. Today it was just mean.

She opened her eyes, took a breath, and stood up.

Love God had left a trail of puke droplets all the way to the front door, and she didn’t have time to clean them off the carpet. Rempel would be delighted—he hated returning a security deposit.

“Fuck it,” Dez said to the empty room. Her eyes stung with unshed tears. She got dressed in her last clean uniform, twisted her blond hair into an ugly approximation of a French braid, and buckled on the gun belt with all the junk and doodads required by the regs. She grabbed her hat and keys, locked the trailer, and stepped into the driveway.

The parking slip was empty.

She screamed “Shit!” loud enough to scare the crows from the trees.

Buck or Biff or whoever had driven her home from the bar. Her car was four miles down a dirt road and she was already late for work.

Some days only got worse.

CHAPTER FIVE

PINKY’S DONUT HEAVEN

STEBBINS COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA

Sergeant JT Hammond’s first name was really JT. His father’s idea. JT had a sister named CJ and a younger brother named DJ. Their father thought it was hilarious. JT had not sent him a Father’s Day card in eleven years.

JT sat in his cruiser and waited for Dez to come out of Pinky’s with coffee. After he’d picked her up at her place and dropped her so she could retrieve her car, they arranged to meet at the gas station convenience store on Doll Factory Road to have some coffee and go over the patrol patterns for the day. Stebbins was a small town, but they shared patrol duties with the three other towns that made up all of Stebbins County. The county was the size of Manhattan but 95 percent of it was farmland, with only seven thousand residents. JT preferred to start each shift with a “game plan” for patrol, backup, and tasks. That way, if all that went on the duty log was parking tickets, a couple of DUIs, and accident reports, then at least all the i’s would be dotted and t’s crossed.

However, today was likely to be the kind of day when attention to detail was going to matter. If the storm was anything like the weather service was predicting, then all of the officers would be working well into the night, shepherding people to shelters, closing the schools early, coordinating with fire-rescue and other emergency services to pull people out of flooded areas, and who knew what else.

Their cruisers were parked in a V, front bumpers almost touching. JT’s unit was a seven-year-old Police Interceptor with 220,000 miles on the original engine. The vehicle was spotless, however, and was the only car in the department’s fleet of six that did not smell of stale beer, dried blood, and fresh urine. JT was fastidious about that. He had to be in the thing eight hours a day and sometimes double that, and tidiness mattered to him. His house was just as clean and had been ever since Lakisha had died. JT’s kids were grown and gone—LaVonda was saving the world with Doctors Without Borders and Trey was a state trooper over in Ohio. Living neatly was the only way that living alone was bearable.

By contrast, Dez’s cruiser was newer and uglier. Mud-spattered, dented, and tired-looking even though it was less than two years old. She drove it hard and ached for high-speed chases. If it was up to her she’d be driving a stripped-down monster truck with a front-mounted minigun and a couple of rocket pods.

At least three times a year JT offered to help Dez detail her car and also clean and decorate her trailer, but that suggestion was invariably met with the kind of enthusiastic vulgarities usually reserved for root canals and tax audits.

JT looked at his watch and tooted the horn lightly. Dez peered out of the dirty store window. He tapped his watch and she gave him the finger.

JT smiled, settled back, and opened the copy of JET he had been reading. He was halfway through an article on black superheroes in comics and wanted to finish it before Dez came out. Not that she would jab him for reading such an ethnic-specific magazine—after all, she had every one of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour DVDs, and there was nothing whiter than that stuff—it’s just that Dez tended to bust on JT for his love of comics. JT was pretty sure that Dez had never been a kid.

Donny Sampson, who owned a tractor parts store on Mason Street, came out of the store with a blueberry Slurpee in one hand and a Coke Slurpee in the other. He was laughing out loud, and JT guessed that it was one of Dez’s jokes. Donny always liked a filthy story, and Dez was a walking encyclopedia of them. Donny saw JT and saluted with a Slurpee cup; JT gave him a nod.

Dez was taking her damn time, so he settled back, but instead of reading the magazine he laid it in his lap and stared through the windshield at the closed door of Pinky’s, thinking about Dez. They were often paired for patrol and, since neither of them had family living close, they usually did Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the Super Bowl together. Nothing romantic, of course; JT was old enough to be her father, and she was very much like a niece to him. Maybe a daughter if she would pull the goddamn Democratic voting-booth lever at least once before the world went all to hell. In his way, JT loved her. Felt protective of her. She was tough, though. She laid a pretty comprehensive minefield between her and the rest of the world. The rest of the guys in the department hated and feared her in equal measures.

Dez was a very good cop, better than a small-town police department deserved, but she wasn’t a very nice person. Well, maybe that was unfair. She was damaged goods, which isn’t the same thing as being bad natured. That, and she was way too deeply entrenched in the nihilistic and often self-defeating mentality of rural small town America. She cursed like a pirate, drank like a Viking, and screwed the kind of people the two of them usually arrested—providing they were well built, well hung, and in no way interested in any species of “committed relationship,” especially since the last time she broke up with Billy Trout.

That was a damn shame, too. Billy Trout and Dez had grown up together and had been a hot item more times than JT could count. They were never able to make it work, which frustrated JT because he knew—even if they were both too damaged to see—that the two of them had real magic together. JT never liked to use a phrase like “soul mates,” but he couldn’t find a better label. Shame they were like gasoline and matches whenever they were together. All of the guys Dez dragged to her lair were clones of Billy; but saying so to Dez would be exactly the same as saying “Shoot me.”

So, instead of a lover, Dez Fox had a partner. A middle-aged black man from Pittsburgh with a college degree in criminal justice and a set of well-used manners that had been hardwired into him by his librarian mother. Dez, on the other hand, was pure backcountry Pennsylvania; a blue-eyed blonde who could have been a model for fitness equipment if not for what JT personally viewed as an overactive redneck gene.