Tami Hoag - Deeper Than the Dead

The shaking wasn’t just on the inside now. She was genuinely scared. There was no one on the street. They were in the middle of the block-where the corner streetlights didn’t quite reach.

He was holding a gun on her.

“Walk!”

She put one foot in front of the other. As she went to take the second step, Farman tripped her from behind and she fell to the pavement, scraping her hands as she tried to break her fall.

A car turned the corner from Via Colinas and the headlights splashed over her. Anne looked up at it, putting every bit of the fear she was feeling into her expression.

Please stop.

“It’s Miss Navarre!” Tommy called out.

His father pulled to the curb in front of her Volkswagen.

“Tommy, stay in the car.”

“But Dad!”

“Stay in the car!”

Anne scraped herself up off the pavement.

Farman turned away. “Sir, stay in your vehicle.”

“What’s going on here?”

Peter Crane. Relief ran through Anne like water.

“You’re interfering in a traffic stop,” Farman said. “This woman is intoxicated.”

“No, she isn’t. My son and I just had dinner with her. I can vouch for her. She drank a soda.” He looked past Farman. “Are you all right, Miss Navarre?”

“No,” Anne said. “I’m not.”

“I have a phone in my car. I can call 9-1- 1.”

If Farman had been angry before, the fury rolled off him now in waves. Anne could feel it vibrate in the air around him. She thought he might explode with it, but he abruptly walked back to his cruiser, got in it, and drove away.

“Oh my God,” Anne said, leaning against her car for support as her knees went weak.

“What the hell was that about?” Crane asked. “Is he out of his mind?”

“I think there might be a chance of that, yes,” Anne said, breathless. Her heart was racing.

“What can I do for you?”

“I think you just did it,” Anne said.

I think you just might have saved my life.

They escorted Miss Navarre home, which Tommy found both highly exciting and very important. He didn’t understand exactly what had happened. From inside the car, he couldn’t hear what everyone was saying. And his dad wouldn’t explain it to him, but Tommy could tell he was upset about it, which meant it must have had something to do with Mr. Farman. But Miss Navarre was very grateful, and she must have thanked them ten times.

“You guys are my heroes,” she said before she went inside her house.

Tommy could have floated on air.

He chattered on the rest of the way home, saying what a great team he and his dad made. What a cool night it had been-having had almost a date, and then being a hero. Wait until he told Wendy. She wasn’t the only one with a story to tell now. He was a hero.

His mom’s car was in the driveway when they pulled in, but even that couldn’t spoil Tommy’s mood. Of course he wouldn’t be able to tell her what all had happened. He and his dad had gone out for pizza, that was all. The rest was their secret.

What a great night.

He had to have followed her, Anne thought as she went into the house. She sat down at the dining room table-the nearest chair. She was still shaking.

Frank Farman had to have been following her. The odds of him randomly stopping her, of all people, were too long. He had to have followed her out of the parking lot downtown. And in order for him to follow her out of that parking lot, he had to have known she would be there. He had to have followed her from home hours before.

He shouldn’t have even been on the street. She couldn’t imagine Dixon hadn’t taken him off duty after everything that had happened.

“You forgot the ice cream,” her father announced.

Anne looked up at him as he came in from down the hall, wheeling his slender oxygen tank out in front of him as if it were a dapper accessory to his ensemble of burgundy pajamas and black silk robe.

“I put it on the list, but you didn’t get it,” he complained. “Butter pecan. I wrote it right at the top.”

“Are you kidding me?” Anne said. “I had one student try to murder another student today, and you’re complaining that I forgot the ice cream?”

“I don’t see what one thing has to do with the other.”

“No. You wouldn’t.”

“A deputy stopped by here looking for you after you left for your dinner,” he said disapprovingly. “I didn’t raise you to be a criminal.”

“You didn’t raise me at all.”

“He wanted to know where you had gone.”

“So you told him.”

“Of course. And he thanked me profusely for my annual contributions to the sheriff’s fund,” he added smugly.

“That’s great. You might be interested to know that deputy is suspected of killing his wife last night.”

“That’s nonsense.”

“Why am I arguing with you? You haven’t even bothered to ask me why I look the way I do,” Anne said, taking in her scraped and dirty hands, the dirt and a tear at the knee of her black slacks. She got up and looked at herself in the mirror over the buffet. She was as white as a sheet.

She could see her father get a face behind her.

“Because you take after your mother,” he said, completely missing the point. “I’m going to bed. Without my ice cream.”

Anne went into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of cabernet to steady her nerves. At least the one mystery was solved: Frank Farman had known where to find her because her own father had set him on her.

She dug Vince’s pager number out of her purse and dialed it. He called her back immediately.

“How’s my favorite fifth-grade teacher?”

“I’m okay.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I went to dinner tonight with Peter Crane and Tommy.”

“How did that go?”

“It went well. Tommy and I are squared away,” she said. “But on my way home something really scary happened with Frank Farman.”

“Yes,” he said, the tone of his voice suddenly different, cold, businesslike. Something wasn’t right.

“Yes? What do you mean, yes?”

“Yes,” he said again. “Frank is here right now at the sheriff’s office with a gun to Cal Dixon’s head.”

Farman had Dixon in a chokehold, the nose of his.38 pressed to the sheriff’s temple.

It had happened so quickly, so easily. No one had seen it coming-but they should have, Vince thought.

Frank Farman defined himself by his career, by his uniform. More than a decade in law enforcement with a sterling record, he could have worked in any area he chose. He could have made detective. He could have worked narcotics. As straight an arrow as he was, he was tailor-made for the Bureau or even Secret Service. But Frank Farman chose to remain in a uniform because he was the uniform.

Vince had known plenty of Frank Farmans over the years, going back to his days in the Marine Corps. Rigid. By the book. Humorless. It wasn’t difficult for guys like that to grow a chip on their shoulder. It was almost inevitable that they became hyperfocused on every tiny aspect of the job, right down to the nuances of speech of their coworkers and superiors.

If the job was everything, then everything in their lives was about the job. And if the job was threatened, the sense of self was threatened, and guys like Frank Farman ended up in watchtowers with sniper rifles, or holding a gun to someone’s head.

In a matter of a few days, Frank Farman’s carefully structured world had begun to fall apart, and that buck stopped-in Farman’s mind-with his old friend, Cal Dixon.

They must have arrived one right after the other, coming in the side door down the hall from the war room-Dixon first, Farman behind him. Dixon, just returning from what had to have been a taxing few hours at the hospital with Jane Thomas and Karly Vickers’s mother, wouldn’t have been paying attention. He was tired, preoccupied. He wouldn’t have even glanced over his shoulder as he walked into the building, but Farman had to have been just a few steps behind him.