Titus put the handset back in the cradle. There was going to be more of that. A lot more. He was prepared to take it, but that didn’t mean he liked it.
He opened up the reports tab and started detailing the shooting from his perspective. Roger and Tom would have to write their own reports. In an effort to encourage more accountability he’d instituted a rule that deputies couldn’t discuss the details of any ongoing investigations, including deputy-involved shootings. He didn’t want to give the appearance of impropriety or give anyone a chance to get their stories straight.
When he finished, he went back into the dispatch area. Cam was still juggling calls. Titus pointed to his ear again.
“Yes, ma’am, the message is correct. That’s all the information we have at this time. ’Bye, now,” Cam said. He removed the headset and let out a sigh.
“The message might have saved us from maybe two less calls,” Cam said.
“I’m going over to Calvin and Dorothy’s place. Do you still have Tom’s number? I got it in my phone if you don’t,” Titus said.
“Yeah. He gave it to me when we had that cookout at his place in June.”
“Give him a call. Tell him I need to see him by four today. Tell him to bring the gun he used at the school,” Titus said.
Cam looked down at his desk, then raised his eyes. “It was a good shoot, right? I mean, you said he killed Mr. Spearman,” Cam said. The statement hung in the air between them, ensconced within Cam’s unspoken assumptions. There had been a bad man who had shot a good man, then other good men had killed the bad man. What more was there to talk about?
Titus wished it were that simple. He really did.
“I need to talk to him, Cam. Pass the message along,” Titus said. It was no longer a favor.
* * *
Titus got in his SUV and slipped out of the parking lot of the sheriff’s office and onto the road that wound its way through downtown Charon County, past the Safeway and the Dollar General, past what used to be Herndon’s Furniture and Appliances. The road took him by the county library and Gilby’s Southern Dining, then past the courthouse building and the Confederate War Memorial that stood not ten feet from the front door. Past the high school, the parking lot a ghost town after this morning.
Past Soapy Suds Car Wash, the third most profitable business in Charon County. Lots of boys liked to take their jacked-up trucks mudding on Friday night and drove through Soapy Suds Saturday morning to cruise the back roads and tear up and down Route 15 Saturday night. Finally, Titus drove past what was once Sommers Pharmacy. Titus had arrested Billy Sommers for prescription fraud six months ago. When he’d gone to the house with Davy and Carla, they’d found Billy sitting in his den with his wrists slit down to the bone. A pearl-handled straight razor was in his lap and a picture of his wife and two boys was in his hands. His café au lait carpet looked like someone had spilled a carafe of merlot. They’d tied him up with tourniquets and ferried him to the hospital in Newport News, then arrested him proper two weeks later.
A new pharmacist had tried to take over the Sommers building but Billy’s cousins, still stinging from his arrest and subsequent conviction, started a rumor she didn’t really have a degree, and within a month the rumor was an immutable fact, and by the fall the young woman who’d tried to help the good people of Charon with their medicinal needs soon lit out for greener pastures. Titus thought the fact that she’d been a Black woman hadn’t helped to endear her to the white citizens in the county. Normally the Black folks in Charon would have tried to rally around a sister taking on a new venture, but the young lady wasn’t a native of Charon. She was a come-here, and people in Charon were loath to cotton to new faces. In this the citizens, both Black and white, were united.
Titus escaped the bonds of the thirty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit in town and stepped on the gas as he turned onto Route 15. The road sliced through most of the teardrop-shaped county like an incision, with side roads that broke off from the main highway like asphalt stitches.
Titus passed First Corinthian Methodist Church. A sprawling edifice encased in bright red bricks, First Corinthian was where a lot of the white folks on this side of the county went for Sunday service. A few miles down the road he passed Second Corinthian Methodist Church. The result of a schism in the First Corinthian congregation, Second Corinthian was not as large as her mother, but what she lacked in square footage she made up for in garishness. Stained-glass windows stretched from the foundation to the steeple. A fountain large enough to swim laps in dominated the green space in the front of the building. The church sign, a billboard framed in stonework that advertised salvation with clever quips and pithy proverbs, was a good ten feet tall and festooned with golden cherubs.
Titus thought the members of Second Corinthian missed the part about the meek inheriting the earth.
First and Second Corinthian and the New Wave Temple were three of the twenty-one churches in Charon County. When he was growing up there had been nineteen churches in the county. His mother had been a member of Emmanuel Baptist Church. She’d taught Sunday school until her illness forced her to step down, then it forced her to lie down, then it made her go still. Before it took her speech, she would say that a place like Charon didn’t need such an overabundance of salvation.
“God can be everywhere at the same time if he wants, but he ain’t in every building that calls itself a church. You can stand in a pulpit and call yourself a minister. I can roll around in mud and call myself a pig too. Don’t mean you was called to preach, and it don’t mean I was meant to be pork chops,” he’d heard her say on more than one occasion.
Then she’d laugh and laugh.
When he was a boy, he’d thought his mother’s laugh was full of the prettiest notes he’d ever heard. It had been a high and sparkling sound, like something Mozart might riff on a harpsichord. All these years later, nothing had come along to change his opinion.
After fifteen more minutes of driving, Titus turned onto Salt Lick Lane and headed down to Calvin and Dorothy’s double-wide. When he’d first come back, before he announced he was running for sheriff, he’d come down here in his father’s truck and sat on the back deck with Calvin and passed a mason jar back and forth and spoken of people they’d known and memories they’d shared. Of good times they’d had that seemed in Titus’s mind to be bathed in a sepia tone as they faded bit by agonizing bit. Once he’d put on the star, the invites had faded away as well. Titus couldn’t say he hadn’t expected it, but he was hoping this was one time he was wrong.
Titus saw Calvin’s truck parked at a haphazard angle as he pulled into their yard. Dorothy’s little two-door sedan was parked in much the same way. Titus could see them pulling in hard, slamming on the brakes, and rushing toward the house. The grapevine being what it was, they’d heard fifteen different versions of how their son had died. None of them correct and all of them sickening.
Titus walked up to the door and knocked hard three times. Calvin had bricked in the double-wide a few years ago, turning the mobile home into an actual house with four pallets of baked red clay. Footsteps came to the door in frantic rhythms. Calvin tore open the door and locked eyes with Titus.
“Say it. Say it to my face, motherfucker,” Calvin croaked.
“Calvin, can I come in?” Titus asked. Calvin was a few inches shorter than Titus but twice as wide, with a wide head on a bull’s neck. He still held the Jefferson Davis High dead-lift record. His dark brown face had a few more wrinkles around the eyes, but for the most part he still looked like the foulmouthed, irreverent kid Titus had known since first grade.
“You can stand on that step and tell me you killed my boy. I already know, Titus. I just want to hear you say it. I want you to look me in the eyes and say…” Calvin trailed off. For a half second he just went quiet. The light in his eyes dimmed and Titus could tell he was somewhere else. Some place where one of his best friends hadn’t killed his child. Then he came back with a vengeance. Tears streamed down his face. He grabbed his head with both his hands. Sobbing, he stepped backward away from Titus and bumped against the wall. His legs gave way and he slid to the floor.
Dorothy appeared like an apparition and went to his side while keeping her gaze on Titus.
“What happened, Titus?” she asked. Her jaw was set in a rigid line. Dorothy was a slim woman, but she put her arm around Calvin and helped him to his feet. A sentiment passed between her and Titus, as invisible as electricity but just as powerful. She wore the expression of a person who has prepared themselves for the most awful thing they could imagine every day of their life.