“No buts. You can’t play this what-if game with yourself, Truman. You’ll make yourself sick. What’s done is done. You can’t bring those officers back.”
He faced her in the dim light. “I should have arrived a good ten minutes earlier. It might have made all the difference.”
“Are you saying there’s a reason you didn’t? You can’t tell me there was heavy traffic at that time of night.”
“I wasn’t at home.”
There was a long moment of silence. “Where were you?” Dread filled her voice.
“I slept at your cabin.”
She exhaled and her spine relaxed. “How come?”
“I slept there the last few nights. The fire at the prepper shed made me worry that maybe more prepper properties might be targeted.”
She wrapped an arm around him and rested her head on his shoulder. “You were protecting my work. Is it weird that I think that’s the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me?” she asked softly with a catch in her voice.
He didn’t answer. He hadn’t done it to be nice; he’d done it because he cared. Besides representing years of hard work, he knew the rural cabin and its contents were part of Mercy’s core. They kept her sane and balanced. He didn’t think sleeping there for a few nights was any big deal. Before her trip they’d been working to transfer some of the stores from his uncle’s old home. Upon his death, Truman’s uncle Jefferson had left him a wealth of supplies, but he and Mercy had agreed her location was better. Remote and off the grid.
The average home had enough food for a week. Mercy’s cabin could keep them fed and warm for months.
Beans, bullets, and Band-Aids.
The three Bs of prepping.
But there was more to Mercy. She also believed in charity, helping those who were less fortunate. Many of his uncle’s supplies had gone to families in town. Mercy could mend a fence, build a shed, and even do some engine repair. Her cabin was stuffed with books that taught medical skills, electronics, tactical skills . . . subjects he assumed could always be looked up on the web. But what if the web was gone?
He even kept a GOOD bag in his truck now. Get Out of Dodge.
Small changes.
“You couldn’t have stopped the shooter, Truman. Don’t drive yourself crazy imagining what you would have done differently. I know you totally exposed yourself to check on those two men. You went above and beyond what is expected of anyone.”
Then why don’t I feel any better?
“Am I too cautious? Does it affect my work?” he asked.
“Too cautious? You?”
“I ran back to get the fire extinguisher the night Officer Madero died instead of getting her away—”
“Stop it!” she ordered, and he slammed the door on the horrific memory of responding to a car fire nearly two years ago. The guilt had nearly ended his career in law enforcement.
She put both hands on his cheeks and pulled his face close to hers. Her pupils were huge, and anger hovered around her. “You know you’re exhausted and not thinking straight. You need sleep. Your perspective will be better tomorrow.”
His mind had started to slide down a pessimistic narrow tunnel. One where he second-guessed every decision he’d ever made. He recognized the dreaded slippery path but still struggled to break out. She’d seen his spiraling mind-set and knew he needed to snap out of it.
“Sleep,” she ordered. “No more discussions. We’ll talk about it all you want tomorrow. Now come to bed.”
She didn’t need to ask twice. He shed his jeans and shirt as she lay down and then slid in beside her. At the touch of her cool skin, every cell in his body relaxed. She snuggled up to him and rested her hand against his cheek. More stress evaporated.
He closed his eyes and felt himself drifting away. “I needed to be next to you.”
“Then you got your wish,” she said against his neck. Her lips pressed into his skin.
“I missed you, Mercy.”
“I missed you too.”
“Don’t leave town for a while, okay?” he muttered, struggling to form words as he felt himself sucked deeper into sleep.
“I’ve got no vacation plans.” Humor filled her words. “Are you sure you don’t need something for the pain?”
“Absolutely. Everything’s perfect now.”
FOUR
Officer Ben Cooley was covering the night shift.
To be fair, it wasn’t a night shift in the true sense. Usually that meant actually driving to a job with a crappy shift from 11:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. Eagle’s Nest simply had one officer on call from midnight to 8:00 a.m. He didn’t mind taking the shift—they all had to cover it at least once a week—but usually he got to sleep in peace. Not much happened in the middle of the night in his quiet town, and getting paid for sleeping in his bed wasn’t a bad deal, but lately fires had been on everyone’s mind.
Sure enough, at 4:00 a.m., a little more than twenty-four hours after the fire and shooting on Tilda Brass’s property, he got a call that suspicious persons were snooping around Jackson Hill’s outbuildings. Hill was out of town, but a neighbor had seen someone where there shouldn’t be any people. Nothing was on fire, but knowing a young prepper family had already lost supplies and that Jackson was a known prepper, Ben pulled his old bones out of bed.
His wife of fifty years was still sound asleep. As was his custom when leaving to work, Ben kissed her tenderly on the cheek and told her he loved her. Then he got dressed and wished there were a coffee drive-through between him and the call. Instead he heated up the leftover coffee in the pot, poured it into a travel mug, and got into his patrol vehicle. He blinked hard as he headed out of town, trying to get the sleep out of his eyes. He called the dispatch center and flirted with Denise for a few seconds as he let her know he was en route to the call. He knew all the dispatchers at the Deschutes County 911 center. Over the years they’d come and gone, but Denise had been around for a good five years and always laughed at his jokes.
“Busy night?” he asked.
“We’ve taken just over five hundred calls in the last twenty-four hours, so technically that’s a slow day for us.”
Ben couldn’t imagine. Feeling guilty, he quickly got off the call so she could help someone else and turned his concentration to the dark road. He’d been a cop in Eagle’s Nest for over thirty years. In that time a lot of things had changed, and a lot were still exactly the same.
Fights between spouses? Exactly the same. Couples still got drunk and tried to beat the hell out of each other.
Drug abuse? Not much change. The only change was in which drug was popular at the moment.
Drunk driving? Not much change. Even with the big push for awareness over the last several decades, he still pulled over too many drunks each week. Although he’d noticed they were older than they used to be. Perhaps the younger generations were getting the message not to drink and drive.