Chapter 20
Ghost With a Badge
Jacob
The road is quiet when I dump Benny’s carcass on the shoulder. The headlights bleach him pale, every bruise a dark brand across his face.
“Crawl if you want to live,” I mutter. Then I spit on the gravel, slide back behind the wheel, and dial.
It takes two rings before I hear the voice I want. “Sheriff.”
“Carter.” My tone is iron. He’s the only one I call when I need things handled. My right hand. My clean-up man. He’s been with me long enough to know what I need.
“Where are you?” he asks, low, cautious.
“I’ve got a problem.” My knuckles ache on the wheel. I flex them, feel the split skin stretch, the sting of exposed flesh. A reminder of how close I came to killing Harrow right there in the dirt. “I had to make an example tonight. Kid won’t be walking straight for months. You understand me?”
A beat of silence, then a sigh. “Yeah…. You want me to make it disappear.”
“I want it buried,” I correct him. “I want it stitched so tight no one ever finds the thread. You’re going to say you saw him drunk, got into a bar fight, wandered into the wrong end of town. I don’t care. Just make it stick.”
“I can do that Sheriff, where do I need to be?” Carter asks. His tone is steady, the way it always is when he’s locking away his conscience.
That’s why I trust him. He doesn’t waste time on right and wrong. He knows the only laws that matters are mine.
“Good,” I rasp. “I’m on Herringhorn Highway, about… 3 miles past the trailer park. Now tell me something. Other than me, you, and the two boys who stood in that living room, who else knows Elaine and Michael Miller are dead?”
“Got it boss,” Carter answers instantly. “Not a chance anyone knows jack shit. We locked it down. No reports filed yet, no chatter on the wire. Just us.”
“Then explain to me,” I bite out, leaning into the wheel, “how dipshit Benny Harrow showed up at my fucking house tonight with the news in his mouth.”
Carter goes quiet. I hear him breathing, slow and measured, like he’s running every possibility through his head. Finally: “I don’t know, Sheriff. If he knows, it didn’t come from us. I’d bet my badge on it.”
My jaw locks. That’s not good enough.
“You’d better be right,” I growl. “Because if there’s a leak in my department, I’ll find it. And when I do, there won’t be enough left of them to require a coffin.”
“Understood,” Carter says, clipped. He’s not stupid—he knows a promise when he hears it.
I hang up, slam the phone down, and sit there for a moment, fists tightening around the wheel until the leather groans. Fury claws up my throat, mixes with confusion until it’s poison. I could wait for Carter, but Summer is alone, and with everything that’s happened, I need to be home with her.
Fuck Benny. He can rot out here waiting for Carter. Maybe he’ll crawl into the road and get taken out by one of the HGV’s that frequent this road.
Hell, I would pay a year’s salary to watch this son of a bitch be mowed down by one of Mr. McGallie’s wagons.
I start my engine, pressing the pedal to speed back onto the dirt road. The shoulder swallows my headlights as I pull away, leaving Harrow to bleed into the ditch and bargain with whatever God has planned for him. The road opens like a vein. I ride it hard.
No one should’ve known. No one. And yet Benny did. Which means either Carter’s wrong—or there’s something far worse in play.
Carter’s last words grind in my skull: Not a chance anyone knows jack shit.
Then how the hell did Benny?
The wheel creaks under my grip. My knuckles complain—split skin stretching, heat flaring. I flex, slow, until the sting spikes and settles, a clean pain I can stack others on. The truck smells like gun oil and iron and her—shampoo and salt and that small, wild thing she turned into when she bit me.
At the next turn, I catch myself in the rearview.
The bite is already blooming—violet bruising under crescent teeth marks, a map of her fury pressed into me.
I roll my shoulder, and it answers with a pulse that says remember what you did to make her do this.
Good. I deserve the reminder. I deserve every brand she gives me.
The rearview throws another gift: my face. Blood dried along my jaw like I shaved with a knife. Eyes gone dark enough to be animals. I look like what I am. A man who put his hands where the law won’t. A man who came home to find his girl held by another and decided to make an example.
If no one else could have known about Elaine and Michael, then that leaves two options: a leak I’ll cut out of my department with pliers, or Benny knew it was going to happen.
I don’t like either.
Gravel pops when I rip into the drive. The porch light stares. The house feels like it’s bracing. I kill the engine and sit one breath longer. Then I climb out of my truck and go straight in.
The air inside is warm, steam heavy—as if the walls have lungs. Water runs somewhere deeper in the house. I follow the sound. The bathroom door is closed. The handle is warm under my palm. It’s locked.
I shoulder the door, busting the lock on my way through.
Steam punches out into the hall, thick with the smell of soap and heat. The mirror is a smeared moon, the old tile slick with condensation. Summer is a pale shape in the claw-foot tub, knees up, arms wrapped tight over them, hair sticking to the sides of her face.
She jerks when the door bangs, green eyes flashing like a trap’s teeth.
“Get out—”
“No.” The word is a flat blade. “We’re not doing locked doors.”
Her chin snaps up. “Then get out and learn how to knock and I’ll let you in when I’m ready”
“I need you to answer a question.”
“I don’t care what you need.” Her voice goes brittle. She reaches for the towel on the rim of the tub, drags it against her chest like armor. “Get. Out.”
“One question, Summer. And so help me God, you will answer me,” I say, and the mirror clears enough to give me my eyes again—black, unblinking. “How did he know?”
Her lashes flickers. Confusion, then wariness, then anger bathing up through both. “Jacob—”
“Tell me… Benny.” I take another step, and the tile whispers under my boot. The heat in here makes the bruised bite throb. “How did he know about your parents before anyone else? Who told him?”
She sucks in a breath that’s more a gasp than air. Tears jump back into eyes that were dry for half a minute, and I hate that I put them there.
“His cousin,” she says, quick, as if speed makes it truer. “Deputy Thompson. He called Benny. He came straight here.”
I stare at her, and for a beat, I don’t hear the water at all. Only my pulse.
“There is no Deputy Thompson,” I say.
Her face cracks, not with grief—something uglier. Disbelief, offended. “Don’t—don’t do that. Don’t pretend you don’t know your own damn department just because you can’t stand the idea of someone else being decent.”
“I know every badge in this county.” My voice is quiet now, deeper, more dangerous. “I know the shape of their signatures and the weight of their mistakes. There is no Thompson wearing a star under me.”
She shakes her head, fast, water darkening the towel. “But—he said—”
“He lied.”
“No,” she says it like a curse. “why would he—”
I move, and the steam parts in my approach.
I stop an arm’s reach from the tub. I can see the tremor in her fingers where they clutch the towel hanging off the side of the tub.
I can see the ring of pink where hot water has kissed her skin.
I can see the place on her shin where the woods put a new cut in her.
Every detail is a violence I can’t unsee.
“I got the call from Carter,” I cut her off. “Two men went to meet him at the scene. Me and Wyatt. No reports were made up to me leaving. No calls. No chatter.” I let the absence hang. “No Thompson.”
“Look at me.” It comes out rougher than I intend. I tame it with effort. “Summer. Look at me.”
She says nothing. The drip of condensation ticks on porcelain. The hot tap hisses a little, empty threat.
“I will find out,” I tell her. “I’ll put my ear to every door he’s opened in his life until one of them gives. And when I find the mouth that fed him, I’m taking the teeth too.”
Her throat moves. The first tear falls again, not a sob—just surrender. “He said… he said he got the call. He said Thompson was family. He said he thought—” She swallows. The next words scrape. “He said he thought you would have already told me. He said… he couldn’t believe you left me.”
“Did he name where Thompson works?” I ask.
“No.” She drags another breath. “He said deputy. He said cousin. He said you left. I promise you Jacob. I—I’m not keeping anything from you. This is the truth. Yes, I was upset… yes, I was angry… but I heard what I heard. And after he said you’d left me—”
I do the worst thing I can do when she’s shaking in hot water and tears. I laugh. It’s short and humorless, and I hate that it comes out sounding like relief because it’s not. It’s clarity.
“He wanted that part to land,” I say. “And it did. He made sure of it.”
Her head jerks, eyes flaring. “Because it’s true.”
“I know.” The words grate. “I know it’s true.”
“Then don’t act like I’m stupid for believing the rest.”
I step back because the temptation to touch her forearms—to slide my hands over the points of her elbows and hold her until she stops shaking—is a danger to both of us. I put my shoulder to the door instead, the bite mark erupts pain, a brand mark still hot from the fire.
“You’re not stupid,” I say. “You’re grieving, you’re in shock. And he knows how to dress a lie in a grief coat.”
Her chin lifts in a defiant angle I recognize from the day she first walked into my station and spit in my coffee.
“You almost killed him, Jacob. Hell, you might have succeeded… and all out of jealousy.”
I shake my head, a slow smile tugging at my lips. I won’t even give her the satisfaction of an answer.
This isn’t jealousy—it’s possession.
She watches me, unblinking, steam curling around her face like smoke rising from a fire I lit.