Jeffery Deaver - The Lesson of Her Death

"Equipment? But I told you I was having trouble getting money for the walkie-talkies. And I was going to buy us all Glocks. They cost over four hundred each."

"Glocks? Jim, we don't need fifteen-round automatics."

Slocum didn't speak for a minute then he said quietly, "I'm the sheriff, Bill. I said I'd consider your request but I can't promise anything."

Corde dropped the sheet on the desk. "Okay, Jim, there's no nice way to say what I'm about to." He paused while he honestly tried to think of one. "The only thing I'll add to take the sting out of it is that whether it was you or Steve or Jack Treadle himself sitting where you are, I'd say exactly the same thing. Which is: You got yourself a plum job and you know it and I know it and I'm happy for you. But you got appointed because I turned it down. And the price for that is me getting the Cebben case and all of the travel and equipment budget, every penny of it. After this is over I'd be glad to help you with all this administrative stuff and I'll even learn your radio codes but until then what I just said is the way it is."

Corde looked back at the shock on Slocum's face, which froze slowly to a chill. Corde wondered if this talk might actually do some good, toughening the man's flaccid way.

"You don't have to be like that, Bill."

The buffoonery was gone and Corde now saw in Slocum's eyes the too-vivid knowledge that he had advanced by default and he saw too the man's depleted hope, which could have very well been Corde's own broken ambition had life moved just a little different. This stung him – for his own sake as well as Slocum's – but he did not apologize. He stood and walked to the door. "I'm counting on you to leave that money just where it is until I need it."

What Wynton Kresge owed: $132.80 to GMAC. $78.00 to Visa. $892.30 to Union Bank and Trust (the mortgage). $156.90 to Union Bank and Trust (the bill consolidation loan). $98.13 to Consolidated Edison. $57.82 to Midwestern Bell. $122.78 to Duds 'n Things for Kids. $120.00 to Corissa Hanley Duke, the housekeeper. $245.47 to American Express. $88.91 to Mobil (goddamn Texans, goddamn Arabs). $34.70 to Sears.

And that was just for the month of May.

He didn't have the heart to tally the numbers up for the year and he didn't dare calculate the brood's budget for makeup, burgers, ninja outfits, skateboards, air pump Nikes, gloves, basketballs, piano lessons, potato chips, Apple software, Spike Lee and Bart Simpson T-shirts, Run DMC tapes, Ice-T tapes, Janet Jackson, Paula Abdul, The Winnans tapes, gummy bears, white cheddar, popcorn, Diet Pepsi and whatever else got sucked into the black hole of childhood capitalism.

Darla came to the door of his den and told him the plumber had just finished.

"Oh, good," Kresge said. "How much?" He opened the checkbook and tore off a check. He left it blank and handed it to her.

"It's a hundred twenty-four, doll."

" How much?"

"You can't take a bath in cold water." She was gone.

He marked down: Check 2025. Amount $124. For SOB, MF'ing Plumber. Why, he wondered, was it that the more you get the more you spend? When he and Darla had first been married they'd lived in a trailer park south of the Business Loop in Columbia, Missouri. He'd been an assistant security director for the university, making nineteen thousand dollars a year.

They'd had a savings account. A real savings account that paid you interest – not very much, true, but something. You could look at the long line of entries and feel that you were getting somewhere in life. Now, zip. Now, debt.

This was too much. Thinking about the bills, about hungry children, about a wife, about his lack of employment, his palms began to sweat and his stomach was doing 180s. He recalled the time he talked a failing student down from the Auden Chancellory Building. Sixty feet above a slate walk. Kresge, calm as could be. No rope. Standing on a ledge fourteen inches wide. Like he was out looking for a couple buddies to shoot pool with. Talking the boy in by inches. Kresge had felt none of the terror that assaulted him now as he lined up the fat white envelopes of bills and pulled toward him his blue-backed plastic checkbook, soon to be emasculated.

The telephone rang. He answered it. He listened then looked at his watch. Wynton Kresge said, "Well, I don't know." He listened some more. "Well, I guess." He hung up.

"Wynton, come on, get the lead out of your cheeks. You look like a walking tombstone."

Corde spun the squad car around the corner and pressed the accelerator down. The four-barrel engine, factory-goosed so it could catch 'Vettes and Irocs, pushed both men back in the vinyl seat. Come on Wynton cheer up cheer up cheer up.

"What you got there?" Kresge looked at the seat under Corde's butt. "What you're sitting on?"

A backrest of round wooden balls strung together. It looked like a doormat "Good for the back," Corde said. "It's like it massages you."

Kresge looked away as if he'd already forgotten he'd asked the question.

"You like to fish?" Corde asked him.

"I don't want to today."

"You don't what?"

After a moment Kresge resumed the conversation. "Want to go fishing."

"We're not going fishing," Corde said. "But do you like to?"

"I like to hunt."

"I like to fish," Corde said. "Hunting's good too."

They drove past the pond where Jennie Gebben and Emily Rossiter had died. Corde didn't slow down and neither of them said a word as they sped on toward the Fredericksberg Highway.

After ten minutes Kresge touched the barrel of the riot gun lock-clamped muzzle-up between them.

"What's this loaded with?"

"Double-ought."

"I thought maybe it was rock salt or plastic bullets or something."

"Nope. Lead pellets."

"You don't have to use steel? I thought with the wetlands and everything you had to use steel."

Corde said, "It's not like we shoot that much buckshot at people 'round here."

"Yeah, I guess not. You ever used it?"

"Drew a target a couple times. Never pulled the trigger, I'm mighty pleased to say. You got a pretty wife."

"Yep."

"How many kids you got, all told?"

"Seven. Where we going?"

"Fredericksberg."

"Oh. How come?"

"Because," Corde said.

"Oh."

Twenty minutes later they pulled into a large parking lot and walked into the County Building. They passed the County Sheriffs Department. Corde noticed an empty office being painted. It was T.T.'s old one. There was no name on the plate next to the door. He could picture a nameplate that said S.A. Ribbon. Corde and Kresge continued on, to the office at the end of the hall. Painted in gold on rippled glass a sign read, County Clerk.

Kresge stopped to study a Wanted poster in the hall. He said to Corde, "You got business, Detective, I can wait out here."

"Naw, naw, come on in."

Corde walked through a swinging gate and into a dark, woody old office presided over by a dusty oil painting of a judge who looked like he'd spent the entire portrait session thinking up cruel and unusual punishments.

From a desk under the window, a grizzled bald man, wearing a wrinkled white shirt, bow tie and suspenders, waved them over.

"Rest your bones, gentlemen." The county clerk dug through the stacks of papers on his desk. "What've we got here, what've we got here… Okay. Here we go." He found a couple of sheets of paper, dense with tiny type. He set them in front of him. "You're a crazy son of a bitch, Corde, to pass up that chance."

Corde said, "I probably am."

"They were good and pissed, I'll tell you. Nobody wanted it this way."

"Uh-huh."

"In case you hadn't guessed."

"I had."

"What's he mean?" Kresge asked Corde.