No Ordinary Sheriff

“Looks like he isn’t going to make it.”

Shannon gasped. Dave had a habit of being socially inept. Wrong response, wrong time. Not the best trait in a cop.

“For God’s sake, Dunlop,” one of the paramedics said. “Show some humanity.”

Dave grimaced. “Sorry, Shannon.”

Within seconds the paramedics had Tom on the gurney and wheeled out the door.

Dave stared at Tom as he passed. “Poor bugger. I wouldn’t have recognized him.”

Shannon tried to follow but Dave wrapped his fingers around her arm.

“Let me go. I need to get to the hospital.”

“Shannon, I can help you with this. I can take care of you.” Trust Dave to use a time like this to try to ease his own conscience.

In her experience, women handled things, not men. Men had their uses—brute strength, fun in bed, pillow talk—but she was better off on her own.

“Give it a rest. It’s too late to make things up to me.”

She pulled out of his grasp and he let go easily enough. He wasn’t cruel. Just clueless.

“If you really want to help,” she said, “call the cops in Ordinary. Someone there is cooking meth. That’s where Tom got it.”

“They’ve got cops. They’ll deal with it.”

“I need you to notify them. They’ll take a call from you more seriously than if I just show up to ask.”

“Okay. I’ll call today.”

She glanced around. What should she bring to the hospital? Tom owned nothing of value. His days were populated by despair, cravings and addictions.

Nothing else in his life meant anything to him anymore.

A glint of silver on the filthy carpet caught her attention. Tom had dropped the photo of his family. This mattered. Only this. When he awoke in the hospital, he would want it.

She picked it up and left the apartment. Dave followed her down the stairs, his presence like a weight on her back.

“What are you doing in the old neighborhood?” he asked. “You said nothing could drag you back here.”

She didn’t answer. Of course she would come back for her brother.

Shannon ran to her car. She didn’t expect Dave to have much luck with the cops in Ordinary. She relied more on herself than on the local cops. They’d never found Janey’s rapist, had they? She’d had to do that herself once she was old enough.

She sped to the hospital. By the time she got there, Tom had slipped into a coma.

There was nothing they could do for him but keep him on life support and wait for a change, the doctors said. What did that mean? Were they waiting for his death?

She stood by his bedside. The terrifying image of him with tubes running everywhere was burned onto her retinas.

Slipping the photo under his limp hand, she gave instructions for it to stay near him, either on his body or on the bedside table.

She brushed too-long hair from his sweaty forehead and willed her tears away. Better to be angry. Furious.

“I’ll get whoever did this to you,” she whispered with an intensity she hadn’t felt since Janey’s rape. “I’ll crush them.”

“Shannon?”

She turned around. Dad. Who had called him? Dave? Good. He’d done something right.

“Tom’s bad.” Her voice cracked and she moved into her father’s arms. As usual, though, she ended up comforting him more than receiving comfort. Dad had fallen apart after Mom’s death, too, but that time it had been Janey who’d held the family together. These days, with Janey living in Ordinary raising her own family, the job had fallen to Shannon.

She called the twins to tell them what had happened and then held her father while he cried. She’d deal with her own grief later.

* * *

“FRANK?” SHERIFF CASH KAVENAGH stood behind his desk in the Sheriff’s office in Ordinary, Montana, and stared at the man who was technically his father. “What the hell are you doing here?”

Francis Kavenagh might have shared his DNA with Cash, but he hadn’t given much else of himself to his son.

Autumn sunlight streaming through the office’s open door limned Frank’s once-broad shoulders. He was shorter than Cash remembered.

Behind him, cars drove by on Main Street. A junker Cash didn’t recognize sat at the curb. Frank’s?

One of Main Street’s shop owners walked along the sidewalk, but didn’t glance at the stranger. Thank God. A brisk November wind blew in. Another ordinary day in Ordinary. Or not. Cash’s father was here.

Cash’s eyes weren’t deceiving him, though. Nor was his nose. It was Frank, all right. He still wore the same old lady-killer cologne—Kanøn—applied with a heavy hand. It had been popular thirty or more years ago.

“Why are you here?” Cash asked again, the belligerence in his tone unintentional. He came by his attitude toward Frank honestly. Life had taught him to distrust the man.

“I wanted to see you.” Frank’s voice had weakened, didn’t have the authority it used to.

Pushing sixty, he looked closer to seventy. He’d been vain about his thick head of hair, but most of it was gone, the remaining yellow-gray like an old bedsheet. Sort of matched the tone of his skin.

“I told you to never come to Ordinary,” Cash said.

“I know.”

“Get in here and close the door before someone sees you.”

Frank did.

Broken veins dotted his cheeks and the creases of his nostrils.

“You look like hell. I guess the hard living finally caught up.”

Frank winced. “Yeah.” He stepped toward the desk. “Can I sit?”