Hix lifted his hand.
“Listen to me, Hal, and listen good. Your balls are so big you can’t bring coffee to your team and you got a problem handling orders or doin’ the job you’re paid to do for this county, then we have a bigger problem and that’s to do with your continued employment. From the very beginning, you wanted to blow this off. When my hunch this was serious played out, you’ve questioned nearly everything that’s come out of my mouth. Just now, Bets had an idea that, frankly, mired in the utter lack of shit that surrounds Nat Calloway, didn’t occur to me. She’s now workin’ that, and who knows, it might help us catch a killer. I can’t believe with your years on the job I gotta tell you this, but you’re either with us or you’re against us, and that us includes your superior officer and the two females we have in this department. My advice is, make your choice. Don’t make me make it for you.”
“I want this guy found much as you, Hix.”
“Then welcome back to the team.”
Hal glared at him a beat before he asked, “We done, boss?”
Since they were into it, he wasn’t.
“No,” he answered.
“What else?” Hal bit out.
“I gotta partner you with Larry because he’s the only one who can work with you without lettin’ his feelings for you get in the way of that work. That doesn’t say anything about Bets and Donna. Watchin’ you alienate yourself from your colleagues, that says a lot about you and none of it is good. We need to find who killed Nat Calloway and we need to work as a functioning, healthy unit to do it. Again, with your time on the job, thought you’d sort yourself out with your fellow deputies, but you didn’t do dick to do that. So now I’m forced to share with you, you need to expend some effort, Hal. You razz Bets and you take it too far. You avoid Donna because she gave you some honesty you didn’t like to hear and you need to get over it. They don’t have to like you so much they ask you to Sunday dinner. But they do have to like you enough, trust you, know you got their back, to work with you on a job that in this place may seem like it don’t matter much, but we’ve got a dead man in the morgue proves that wrong.”
Hal didn’t reply.
So Hix asked, “Are you understanding me?”
“Yeah,” Hal gritted.
“Good.”
“Now we done?” he asked.
“I hope so, Hal.”
Hix would swear he could hear the man actually grinding his teeth before he stalked out.
He drew in a big breath and went back behind his desk.
He put Hal out of his mind and picked up his phone in order to start first with park rangers to make certain they’d seen the BOLO and maybe motivate them to get some of their rangers out in their vehicles to search their parks for Calloway’s truck.
He’d graduated to calling county sheriffs when his cell on his desk beeped and he looked to the screen to see it was from Reva, who was just across the way.
It said, Terra Guide.
His eyes went out the window and he saw Terra Snyder, editor of the town’s paper, the Glossop Guide.
He lifted a one-minute finger to her through the window, noted she’d caught it and then set about tying up his phone call.
He did this trying to think of Terra’s arrival as a boon. Their paper came out only once a week, on a Tuesday, that day had passed, and Hix hoped they had this solved by that day next week.
However, they also had a website and if she could get word out that they were looking for anyone who saw anything on that stretch of road around six o’clock on Monday night, maybe they’d catch a break.
In reality, this would probably just buy them a bunch of phone calls from people giving them crap they couldn’t use in an effort to be helpful or insinuate themselves into the situation in order to find out what was going on.
But Terra was a good woman. She ran the paper practically by herself, was serious about her job even if it was mostly reporting on bridge club tournaments and high school sports, getting student interns from the high school or home for summers from college, and that was mostly it.
So Hix pushed up from his desk, exited his office and walked out, calling a greeting to her when he entered the aisle between his deputies’ desks on the way to reception where she was standing, watching him.
“Hey, Terra.”
“Hix,” she replied, studying him closely.
He didn’t talk to her over the reception desk. He moved through the swinging half door and went to stand close to her, resting a hand on the desk.
“Heard you came by, sorry, been busy,” he remarked.
“I bet,” she said. “Got anything for me?”
Openly, he gave her what she needed to know, only what she needed to know. The victim’s name. Age. His occupation. The fact he was a family man. And that he was now sadly dead.
“Got any suspects?” she asked, her head down, the fingers of one hand tapping away on the screen keyboard of a tablet she held in the other.
“I can’t comment on an ongoing investigation, Terra,” he told her.
She lifted her eyes to him. “Come on, Hix. Don’t shut me down like that. This isn’t Indianapolis. But it is the juiciest piece of news Glossop has had in near on two centuries.”
All of a sudden he didn’t feel like this was a boon.
“How about you go to Nathan Calloway’s widow and describe it like that?” he suggested.
She looked instantly contrite and Hix was relieved he hadn’t been wrong that she might be a reporter, but she was a good one as well as a good woman.
“That was out of line,” she muttered. “Sorry.”
“Forgotten,” he replied. “Now you could do us a favor, you’re willin’ to help out.”
She perked up and asked, “What’s that?”
“Anyone who saw anything on County Road 56 from Glossop to the Grady ranch down in Grant County. Broken-down car. Hitchhiker. Sometime between the hours of five and seven Monday night. They saw something, they can call this department. Also lookin’ for a truck, it’s Nathan Calloway’s. White Ford F150, can shoot you the details on that through email.”
“I can put somethin’ up on the website, Hix.”
“We’d be obliged, Terra.”
She stared hard at him, remarking, “Could read from that you don’t got a lot.”
“Read whatever you want,” he returned. “But I’ll tell you we’ve got all our resources at work on this, and we’re doin’ everything we can to find out who did this to the Calloway family.”
She nodded, dropping her head to tap on her tablet before she looked back up at him. “Gotta know, citizens of this county have anything to worry about?”
Hix shook his head. “Nothin’ leads us to believe that’s the case. Everything points to this being a random, one-time incident. But that doesn’t mean I won’t say what I say when I do my yearly talk at the middle school. Always be alert. Lock your doors. Let loved ones know where you’re at and when to expect you home. Though, again, sayin’ that only because it’s smart and should be routine for every citizen of this county.”