Lisa Gardner - Gone

A deputy’s pay didn’t go that far in these parts. Like a few other members of her staff, Dan also worked part-time at a local dairy. He handled the evening milking before showing up for the graveyard shift. Sometimes she wondered how he stayed awake night after night, keeping those kinds of hours. She didn’t want to ask. Truth was, Bakersville was mostly a quiet place. If her deputies dozed off every now and then in the early morning hours, no one had ever noticed or complained.

She needed to start thinking about staffing. Thus far, she’d had everyone up and at it since three this morning, not unusual for a critical incident, where a life might be on the line. Now, however, the case felt like it was slowing down, settling in. Kincaid had pushed back the four p.m. ransom drop. She had a feeling come evening, he’d stall again. If the situation entered a second day, or even a third, she couldn’t continue to have all her men working 24/7. The combined sleep deprivation would turn them into a bunch of armed zombies.

She’d split them into two twelve-hour shifts, she determined. Send Dan, Marshall, and probably herself home first; they’d been up the longest. ’Course, she had a hard time seeing herself sitting things out for a full twelve hours. Three or four might not be bad. Get enough shut-eye to recharge the gray matter, then get up and at ’em again.

She stifled another yawn and turned left down a long, winding road. Locals liked to say that Tillamook County existed due to three things: cheese, trees, and ocean breeze. The cheese factory kept the dairy farms thriving, the neighboring forests kept the loggers busy, and the beautiful beaches kept the tourists coming back for more. The people tended the land, and the land tended the people, as her father would put it.

But as with any community, even one famous for its quaint, rolling green pastures, the county had its seedy side. Shelly and Dan had left behind the tidy, modernized dairies, with their freshly painted barns, shiny green tractors, and “Dairy of Honor” signs. Now they were looping through skinny back roads, passing trailer parks, crumbling cabins, and the other dairy farms-small, poorly equipped, with barns that looked like they’d disintegrate in the next windstorm.

Shelly knew the kind of folks who lived here. The men were stubble-faced and rangy, with the lean cheeks and soft middles that came from drinking most of their meals out of a beer can. The women were equally thin and hunched, with stringy hair and a propensity to bruise. The kids traveled in packs, generally accompanied by one or two mangy dogs. None of them trusted strangers, and all of them could explain to you why it was not their fault that their farm was failing. The price of milk was down, the price of dairy cattle was down. Too much debt given too readily by greedy banks, looking to squeeze out the little guy. The government didn’t do enough to help them, the community wanted to pretend they didn’t exist.

Shelly knew all about it. She’d heard all the same stories growing up in La Grande. As her father liked to point out, successful farmers worked more and talked less, whereas some of these farmers never seemed to have much to do, but always had plenty to say.

Visits like these were still the toughest part of Shelly’s job. Walking into worn kitchens with peeling linoleum and water-stained ceilings. Trying to explain for the second or third time to some forty-year-old-looking twenty-two-year-old, with her third baby planted on her hip, that she did have options. That she didn’t have to stay.

Knowing she’d be back again. Like the sheriff before her had probably done for this girl’s mama so many years before. Life was full of cycles, and the older Shelly got, the less she believed she had all the answers. Her parents had certainly never been rich, and God knows there’d been long stretches where their daily supper had contained more potatoes and less meat, but she’d never been forced to see her father bowed and broken. She’d never watched her mother apply makeup to cover a bruise. She’d never heard her parents blame anyone else for their struggles. We just need to work a little harder, her father had always said, so that’s what Shelly and her brothers had learned to do.

Now she turned into a dirt driveway. She hit a pothole, her right tire spun shrilly in the muck, and for a second, she thought she was stuck. Then the SUV lurched forward, jostling Dan out of his slumber.

“What the-”

Dan came to his senses just in time to realize he was sitting next to his boss, and bit off the last of that sentence. Shelly grinned at him.

“Good nap?”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be. One of us needs to be refreshed. We’re here.”

She pulled up in front of a small farmhouse with a hole in the front porch the size of a boulder. The property boasted four pickup trucks, three rusted-out Chevys, and what looked like might have been a combine. Not to be outdone, various appliances also competed for real estate-old stoves, ovens, freezer units just waiting for summer to swallow some poor unsuspecting kid.

Hal Jenkins owned this property. It had been a farm in his father’s day, and according to what Shelly had heard, a decent one. Small, but well run, tidily equipped. Hal hadn’t wanted to be a farmer. He’d decided his calling was in automotive repair, hence the cars. He hadn’t been bad at it. No, what had tripped up Hal was stripping car parts off of unsuspecting owners and recycling them into other people’s vehicles-while charging them full price for the part, of course. Couple of country boys, not bad with engines themselves, had figured it out.

Calling cops wasn’t much appreciated in these parts, so they’d beaten the snot out of Hal instead, then taken a baseball bat to his house. Most of the first-story windows still hadn’t been replaced, hence the sheets of MDF nailed over the exterior.

After spending four months in the hospital, Hal decided maybe the automotive industry wasn’t for him. He turned his attentions toward oven repair. Not so much money in appliances, however. In this day and age, people bought new instead of repairing old.

Exactly how Hal continued to make a living was subject to much debate. Shelly’s best guess was that Hal had finally figured out the true value of a small, backwoods farm with plenty of outbuildings and few neighbors: a meth lab. The state chopper had taken a pass several times, but had yet to detect the heat signature they needed for a warrant. And so far, Hal wasn’t big on letting Shelly or her deputies wander the property. Hal would never be a rocket scientist, but he was smart in his own survivalist sort of way.

Shelly stepped out first. Her boots sank deep into the marsh. Shit, they would be lucky to get the truck out. Dan got out a little slower, glancing at his watch. That irked her and she sent him a sharp glance.

“Now’s not the time to worry about the evening milking, Deputy.”

“Sorry.” He was immediately abashed.

Inside the house, they heard a voice. It was the official Hal Jenkins greeting. No open door. Not even a look through a shattered glass window. “What?” he boomed from somewhere in the interior.

“Hey, Hal. It’s Sheriff Atkins and Deputy Mitchell. We were wondering if we could have a minute of your time.”

“No.”

“For crying out loud, Hal. It’s pouring down rain and we’re covered in mud. Least you could do is offer us a cup of coffee.”

“No.”

“Well, I got some bad news then. Our truck is stuck-” Dan gave her a startled glance. She shushed him with her hand. “Looks like we’re gonna have to dig through that pile of appliances and car parts over there to find something to get us out. Won’t take but a minute, though.”