Fifty-One
I’VE JUST COME back from a short walk with Bumper when Taylor McCarter Webb calls and invites me to dinner. Their house. The next night.
“We doing takeout?” I ask.
“You’re not funny.”
“Bumper thinks I am.”
“She’s just humoring you,” Tay says.
“Humor,” I say. “I see what you did there.”
She pauses then, just briefly, and says, “Just you, Silas. No date.”
“I’m not dating Abby, if that’s who you’re referring to.”
“Whatever you say.”
I let it go, just because I know that tone, as infrequently as she uses it with me. Or on me.
“Any particular reason that I wouldn’t be getting a plus-one even if I wanted one, which I don’t?”
“You’ll see when you get here,” she says.
“Sounds mysterious.”
“Not so much,” she says. “Just some people Burt wants you to meet, Deputy Tucker.”
“Burt told you about our conversation.”
“Duh,” Taylor says.
“Whatever happened to the bro code?”
“The wife code supersedes it,” Taylor says. “Everybody knows that.” And then she says she’ll see me tomorrow night.
Taylor had invited EJ right before she called me, as it turned out. And our mayor, Claire Larson. Ted Boswell, the mayor of the neighboring town of Parsons, is on the guest list as well.
I only know Mayor Boswell because his son, Theo, who was a year behind me at Cross Rivers High, had made all-state quarterback the year after I graduated, before moving on to Wake Forest, where he’s getting ready to play his senior year. I remembered him being a good guy.
There is a woman named Helene Mayes, whom Burt introduces as a former senior detective on the Jacksonville, Florida, police force who’d moved from there to the Organized Crime Unit in Memphis before finally landing in her present job as a special agent for North Carolina governor David Henry, on his Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force.
“The OCDETF,” she tells me, shaking my hand with enough force to make me wince. “It just tells people they can stop after OCD, because when it comes to taking drugs off the street, I’m the one who acts as if she has obsessive-compulsive disorder.”
Helene Mayes is a formidable person in all ways, good-looking but tough-looking at the same time. Standing a couple of inches over six feet tall and speaking in a voice that commands the room, she carries herself like an athlete.
“You play some kind of ball?” I ask.
“Because I’m this tall?” she asks. “Are you suggesting you don’t run into a lot of woman piano players this size?”
“Maybe I am.”
“Played a couple of seasons of basketball at Georgetown back in the day, and don’t you dare ask me what day,” she says.
“Wasn’t much of a shooter once you pushed me away from the basket, but I got more than my share of rebounds.
” She smiles at me now, combing her fingers through her short red hair.
“It didn’t hurt—well, it didn’t hurt me—that I knew how to use my elbows if I had to. ”
“Good training for your current job?” I ask.
“Damn straight.”
“So how did you end up here tonight?”
“I’ll let our host explain that when he’s ready,” Helene Mayes says.
Just then I feel Burt slap me on the shoulder. My left one. He knows me well enough to remember where the broken parts are.
“Helene will be the one explaining herself later,” he says. He lowers his voice. “For now, just know that we’re about to put together our own little task force inside of hers.”
“Think of it as the Briar Crockett Task Force,” Helene says, somehow managing to lower her own big voice. “We’re going to take him down once and for all.”
I look at both of them.
“How’s Sheriff Hader going to feel about that?” I ask them.
She leans up, but not all that much, to get close to my ear.
“We’re going to slam dunk that asshole, too,” she whispers.