Caught
It was a cold Virginia day. Early in the rainy season. The reason we were all standing here. The wash down from West Virginia had stirred
up a corpse. Darrell Sheffield. At least that’s what we were all hoping.
Sheffield’d been missing since last
October. Right after his wife left
him. Went on a bender and never came
back. Still, his son was a star football
player for the Westerville High Panthers.
Sheffield never missed a game.
Not that we wished him dead. We only wished closure for his son. Mom left. Dad disappeared. His senior
year. A cold way to start
adulthood. Thinking his Dad had left too
might have been too much. Not that
Dakota thought that. Still, everything
looked like Darrell’d split. Gotten
drunk in a bar. Bought another bottle at
Tooley’s drive-through, and that was the last anyone seen of him til now.
“You think it’s him?” grunted
Slater coming up on my elbow.
I grunted back.
“Got the perimeter all put up. Thompson and Brooks got the lookie-loos back
up on the road. You want us to do a grid
search, Chief?”
Shadows moved around near the trees on the
river’s edge, higher now with the spring thaw.
The ground was marshy underneath;
it squished when I shifted my weight and narrowed my glance.
“You think I should do it, Slater?” My growl was worse than my bite, but Slater
was just green enough not to know that.
He turned three shades of red before stopping at heart-attack. I softened my voice, made it low, “Round up
Smith and Lopez. Then get Thompson to
help. Brooks can hold the perimeter.
…and, Slater –“ I paused to be sure I had his attention. “Pick up everything. And use gloves.”
I’d already made them all put
rubber bands on their shoes – a trick I picked up from some CSI tech I’d dated
a while back. Best part of living in
Virginia was the access to good labs, and seminars where you could learn a
thing or two, and maybe even get laid, all on the man’s dime. Pay as a cop, even a Chief, was piss-poor
unless you worked in a burg of any size, and I was done with burgs. Thank you, but your t-shirt no longer fits me
and my tired-ass attitude. Nice and
quiet. That’s what I thought I’d find
out here in the po-dunk western hills of Virginia. But truth doesn’t always meet its hype.
I expected a little drunkenness, a
little hell-raising, not the good ol’ boys gone bad with meth labs and
such. So, quiet it wasn’t, and
occasionally we had pieces of meth lab geniuses to be scraped together and sent
to the labs for unscrambling, but nothing sinister. Nothing evil.
Nothing that made you suspicious of your neighbor.
The body wagon finally showed up,
and our prize for the day was hauled up the hill for its ride to the funeral
home, where Westerville used space for its morgue. Identity would come later.
I nodded
to the boys as they passed, feeling like I had to justify my presence. Not that it needed justifying, I was the
Chief of Westerville Police. But, then
again, not everyone in town knew that me and Jennifer Sheffield had had a thing
for a while, but enough knew. If she hadn’t
run off from her old man and slipped into my house, this wouldn’t have been a
problem. As it was, I probably shouldn’t
have been there. Then again, I felt I
owed the kid.
Inspired by
3WW's Three-word Wednesdays and the words Growl, Justify, and Hype. Check out
this link to read more of the works inspired by these three words.
