18. Penny #2
“Everything in this town is about funding.” He’s on his feet now, hands flat on the desk, leaning toward me and glaring at me.
“You want to talk to me about how this town works? Fine. Douglas Pemberton keeps three-quarters of Main Street afloat. He funds the volunteer fire department. He put a new roof on the elementary school two years ago out of his own pocket because the county wouldn’t.
You go after a man like that with nothing but a feeling, and you don’t just end your career, Penny.
You end this whole department’s ability to function in this county. ”
I stand there and let it hit me, wave after wave, and somewhere under the anger in his voice I catch something else. Something that isn’t just fear of lawyers or budgets.
“You know something,” I say, quiet now myself. “Don’t you.”
His jaw works. For a second—just a second—something flickers behind his eyes that looks less like fury and more like a man standing at the edge of a hole he’s spent years avoiding looking into.
“I know this town,” he says quietly. “I know what happens to good officers who go poking at things that should stay buried. We will both be replaced by some pen pushers who don’t give a shit about helping anyone if we poke around the wrong people.
It’s safer to drop it. Focus on the sedan, focus on the renter two houses down, focus on anything that isn’t Douglas Pemberton’s name, or I will personally see to it you’re off this case entirely. I can’t lose you on this force, Penny.”
I don’t answer right away. I can’t, because if I open my mouth right now, I’m going to say something that ends this conversation somewhere neither of us can walk back from.
“Are we clear?” he asks.
“Crystal,” I reply.
I walk out before either of us can make it worse.
Back at my desk, Thunder’s sitting up now, alert in that way dogs get when they can smell something’s wrong even if they can’t name it. I sink into my chair and stare at the Miller file until the school photo blurs at the edges.
Morris didn’t say Pemberton’s innocent. He didn’t say the pattern’s nothing.
He said stay away, and there’s a version of that sentence that means there’s nothing there, and there’s a version that means there’s something there and I need you nowhere near it, and after a year of watching that man run this department, I know exactly which version I just heard.
He’s protecting something. Maybe Pemberton. Maybe himself, some old debt or favor or silence he agreed to keep years back and never found a way out of since. Maybe both.
And Addison Miller’s still out there somewhere, day five, wearing God knows what, being told God knows what about why she can’t go home yet.
I think about the two options sitting in front of me the way I’d think about a suspect’s alibi, turning it over for holes.
Option one: I follow orders. I focus on the sedan, the renter, every lead that isn’t Pemberton, and if it turns out I was right and nobody ever finds out, a little girl either comes home in a week wearing a new dress and gets asked to forget everything, or she doesn’t come home at all, and I live with having known and done nothing because a badge told me to.
Option two: I keep pulling the thread, knowing exactly what it’ll cost me if I’m wrong, knowing exactly what it might cost the department if I’m right and can’t prove it fast enough to matter.
I look at Thunder. He looks back at me like he already knows which one I’m going to pick.
I open my laptop and start copying. Property records.
The old case files, scanned page by page on my phone since I can’t exactly print confidential case files on a county copier without somebody asking questions.
Financial filings, employment cross-references, the three interviews whose notes read like frightened parents being hurried out the door.
It takes almost an hour. By the end of it, I’ve got a flash drive in my palm that weighs about as much as a stick of gum and feels heavier than my service weapon.
I slide it into the inside pocket of my bag, and I sit there a long moment just breathing.
This is the part where a smarter version of me stops. Where a decade and a half of building a career on the right side of every line tells me to delete the files, forget the pattern, trust that somebody above me will eventually do the right thing if I just wait long enough.
I don’t delete anything.
The parking lot’s empty except for my cruiser and one sad security light flickering over by the dumpsters.
Thunder climbs into the passenger seat like he owns it, which by this point in the week he basically does, and I sit there with the engine off, keys in my lap, staring at the dark building behind me like it might have answers if I look long enough.
It doesn’t.
I think about Morris’s face when he said that man’s lawyers.
I think about the three closed files, the vague language, the relief that read more like fear.
I think about a system built to protect people exactly like Douglas Pemberton, layer after layer of money and favors and friendships, and how a badge doesn’t mean a damn thing against a wall built that tall.
If I want to get anywhere near that mansion out past the quarry road, I need eyes I don’t have. I need somebody who doesn’t answer to Morris, doesn’t need a warrant, doesn’t care about litigation or grant funding or the county council’s feelings about upsetting the wealthiest man in Graves County.
I need somebody who already lives outside every line I’ve spent my whole career staying inside.
The thought sits there in my chest, ugly and obvious and impossible to unthink once it’s arrived, the same way Evan’s name used to sit there before I let myself say it out loud again.
I pull out my phone before I can talk myself out of it, and I scroll to Sasha’s name, thumb hovering over the call button while Thunder watches me from the passenger seat with his head tilted, patient, waiting to see what kind of person I’m about to decide to be.
She picks up on the second ring, voice warm even though it’s late enough that most people would let it go to voicemail.
“Penny? Everything okay?”
“Yeah.” I close my eyes, and for a second I almost hang up, almost let this whole idea die right here in a parking lot with a dead security light and a dog who doesn’t judge me nearly as much as I judge myself. “Actually, no. I need to see you. Soon, if you can.”
“Of course. Is it about the case? The little girl?”
“Kind of.” I breathe out slowly. “I need to ask you some things about the club. About Havoc. About what they actually know regarding this town. Especially Douglas Pemberton.”
A pause on the other end, short but real. “Okay,” Sasha says, careful now, like she’s already sensing the shape of what I’m about to ask even before I ask it. “When?”
“Tomorrow. Wherever’s easiest.”
“Alright. Come to the clubhouse.”
I hang up and sit there a moment longer, phone warm in my palm, Thunder’s breathing steady beside me, the dead security light flickering once more before it gives up entirely and leaves me sitting in the dark.
Seventeen years I’ve spent building a life on one side of a line I used to think was simple. Law on one side. Everything Evan Cole became on the other.
I just asked his club’s newest bride to help me figure out how to investigate the most powerful man in Briar Fork, because the law I swore an oath to won’t touch him, and somewhere out past the quarry road, a six-year-old girl could be running out of days.
I start the engine.
I don’t feel like a cop anymore, driving home in the dark. I feel like somebody standing at the edge of a line she’s about to cross for good, and the strangest part of all of it is how little that scares me compared to the alternative.