But he hadn’t fallen and he wasn’t unconscious.
He’d been tossed and he was dead.
Maybe the person carrying him had Nat Calloway’s right wrist held by his hand, which was why it was flung out.
He couldn’t know unless he had the man who did it in front of him to ask.
And if he had that man, that wouldn’t be a question he’d ask.
“Know pictures like that tell stories to men like you,” Ida said quietly from the door, and Hix lifted his gaze to her. “But you been in here an hour, Hix, so I reckon, they aren’t talkin’, maybe you need to give them some time, look at ’em in the morning, and maybe they’ll be ready to tell their tale.”
“That’s my hope, Ida, but my concern is they wanna keep their secrets and I gotta find some way to pull them loose.”
“Maybe you should do it when you don’t look like you’ve been hit by a truck,” she suggested.
More good advice from Ida.
“Yeah,” he replied.
She tipped her head toward the bullpen. “Gotta get back.”
“Before you go,” he called as she made her start to turn. “Town talking?”
She nodded. “Word’s definitely out. Shock. Whispers. Sadness, even if they don’t know the family. We’re not used to this here in Glossop. Terra from the Guide called, twice. Me and Reva been puttin’ her off. Blatt came and went this afternoon. Said he’d catch you later.”
The editor of the paper and the ex-sheriff sniffing around was not a surprise and town talk was unavoidable.
Even so.
“We gotta do our best to keep gossip contained,” he told her. “They can and will talk, but my team needs to be free to do the work they gotta do, not deal with people flipping out. Nothing indicates this is anything but random. Nothing fitting this MO has happened anywhere in the state. What we know right now, we got a one-time deal and we gotta figure out who did it. That’s all.”
“I’ll do my part in that, Hix, that’s a promise,” she assured.
She would. You didn’t work dispatch that included suicide and sexual assault hotlines, which meant the training to do all of that, without having a head on your shoulders.
“Let you get back to it,” Hix replied. “And I’ll say my goodnight now.”
“Right. ’Night, Hix. Try to get some rest.”
He doubted that would happen.
He still gave her what he hoped was a reassuring smile.
She went back to her desk. He shut down and headed out to his Bronco.
He needed answers.
He needed bourbon.
But as he drove, what he gave himself was not heading to his apartment.
He headed to Greta’s house.
It was after nine at night, but as he pulled up to the curb in front, he saw she wasn’t inside, watching TV or painting her nails or shit like that. She was sitting on her porch, the porch light on, and she had a laptop in her lap.
She also had her eyes on the Bronco.
She shifted them to Hix as he rounded the hood, made his way up her walk, the steps to her house, her porch, and as he moved to stand in front of the wicker chair beside her.
But once he’d stopped, her eyes dropped to the chair and then came back up to him.
He took her invitation and rested his weight in the chair, slouching right into it because he didn’t have the energy to do otherwise, aiming his gaze to the quiet street.
“You need a beer, darlin’?” she asked quietly.
“You got bourbon?” he asked the street.
“Yeah.”
He didn’t say anything else but he didn’t need to.
He heard her setting her laptop to the side and he saw her walk across his line of vision as she went into the house.
He stared at the street and then lifted both hands, rubbing them over his face.
Damn.
He was tired.
He had his arms resting on the arms of the chair when she came back out.
He lifted one hand to take the healthy dose of bourbon she held in front of him.
He took his gaze from the street to see she had a big, stylishly-shaped wineglass in her hand filled with red wine and she was folding herself in the chair next to him, legs crossed under her.
As he was noting, this seemed like pure Greta. Courtesy so ingrained, she wasn’t even going to make him drink alone.
Once she’d settled, her attention came right to him.
“Faith is one of my clients,” she said softly.
“Right,” he muttered.
“So, I’ve seen some cop shows, and my guess is you can’t talk about it,” she noted, still giving him the soft.
“No, Greta, I can’t talk about it.”
“Don’t need to, baby,” she whispered. “Written all over you that you’ve had the definition of a really, really bad day.”
“Yeah, sweetheart,” he confirmed. “I’ve had a really, really bad day.”
She leaned toward him, reaching out and wrapping her fingers around his biceps, giving them a comforting squeeze before she let him go and sat back.
When she moved away from him, abruptly, he announced, “Told you I didn’t wanna move from Indy.”
“Yeah, you told me that,” she replied.
“This is a good place to raise kids,” he shared.
“I can totally see that.”
“Man like me, the job I do, though, it doesn’t offer much.”
She twisted in her seat so she was faced more his way, kept her gaze on him, all this telling him she was listening.
“I don’t want crime. No one wants crime,” he stated.
“No,” she said. “No one wants that.”
“But this is what I do. It’s what I know. It’s what I wanted to do since I was a kid.”
She nodded encouragingly.
“And here, it didn’t feel like I was doin’ much to help. Not anybody. Not anything that was worthwhile. ’Cause I gotta admit, I don’t really give a shit who graffitied the Mortimers’ barn. They aren’t gang tags. Those two make a habit outta pissin’ people off. They’re mean as snakes. Hell, coupla months ago, Louella shot her neighbor’s dog when he got loose and made his way on their land.”
“Oh my God,” she breathed.
“Dog survived,” he told her. “But the vet bills were astronomical. They refused to pay ’em. Nothin’ I could do about that. Their land. They got chickens. That coop is more fortified than Fort Knox and the dog was nowhere near it when she shot it, but she defends herself by sayin’ she’s defendin’ part of their livelihood by discharging a firearm, I got no recourse. But that’s who they are, and you’re like that people in these parts aren’t gonna feel a lot of kindness for you. What they’re gonna do is maybe get up the nerve to piss you off right back by spray painting unflattering stick figures of you on the side of your barn while you’re away for the weekend.”
“Mm-hmm,” she murmured.
“But that’s my job in these parts,” he told her. “Finding who did it and takin’ it as far as the Mortimers use the law to make me take it, which with those two will be as far as the law will allow me to go.”
“Hix,” she whispered, but said no more.
So Hix kept right on talking.
“Felt now for years that I was irrelevant. Experience I had. Skills I got. And my job is about bein’ up in some man’s face for spendin’ too much time with his bottle of Jim Beam and not enough keepin’ track of his cows.”