Rufie slipped out when they found T's body. "That Roman guy fucking bit him in the throat! How'd he get out of those ropes? And how'd he get the jump on someone like T?" Rufie flapped his hands in the air, his eyes bulging.
Colin knelt by T's body, trying to get a look at the wound, but it was a bloody mess. A chunk of it had been ripped out by nails or teeth or something. "Well, he didn't have a fucking weapon on him, did he? We took his gun."
"So he just, what? Used his teeth? How come T didn't shoot him?"
"Maybe he did. For all we know Roman has a couple more bullets in him now. T's got a silencer, so we wouldn't have heard it upstairs. Just shut the fuck up for a minute, would you?"
Colin looked at all the blood. There were big pools of it around the chair—no doubt from the shot he'd put in the deputy's shoulder. And it seemed like there were gallons of it around T. Colin followed a trail of blood down the hall to the sliding glass doors that went out to the deck. There was no sign of a body.
"Colin, we need to get out of here! We need to pack our shit and go!"
"Shut up! I'm thinking."
He tended to get calm in emergencies, slow and wary and dangerous. That’s what a real villain did. He peered into the darkness outside. "First things first—you're going to go get the deputy's truck. T said it was parked down by one of the other cabins. I've got the keys."
"But what if he's down there waiting, Colin? Huh?" Rufie had timidity down to a fine art.
"Why the fuck would he do that? If he made it to his truck, he'd use the radio or maybe drive it off if he had an extra key stashed somewhere. So that's the first thing we need to check—is his truck there. Ergo, you go get the truck. If you don't see any sign of him, drive it back here and put it in the garage. I'll move the Caddy out of the way."
Rufie was still nervous. He glanced back down the hall toward T's body.
"Fuck sake, Rufie, the guy’s got at least one bullet in him, probably more. Look at all this blood! I bet he’s somewhere unconscious. Take T's gun and go get the fucking truck and hurry your ass up about it!" Colin took Roman’s keys out of his pocket and tossed them to Rufie.
"Okay, okay." Rufie went down the hall to get T's gun and then silently went upstairs.
He drove the Sheriff’s Department truck over, and they put it in the garage. The garage light was bright, and Colin was able to look the truck over real good. There was no blood in it. The deputy, Roman, had not been back to the truck since they'd caught him. Colin was sure of that at least.
He let out a sigh of relief, crawling back out of the truck's front seat. "Right. He didn't make it back to his truck to use the radio, so probably he's out there passed out or dead. That means no one else knows he was here."
"What if he went to one of the other cabins, huh? Asked to use a phone?"
"If he'd done that, dipshit, we'd be hip deep in cops by now, or at least an ambulance."
"I still think we should get out of here," Rufie grumbled, rubbing his arms with his hands like he was cold. "That guy, Roman, he’s fucking insane. He got out of the ropes and past T and everything."
"You're such a pussy! I'm not running away unless there's a damned good reason to. Now go get some flashlights from the storage truck. We'll go out and see if we can find the fucker's body."
They didn’t find a body, not around the house, not at the lake, and not in the woods. Colin thought he saw blood in the flashlight's beams. But there wasn't a solid trail, and he wasn't going to spend hours thrashing around with branches in the dark. Besides, the woods at night were stinking creepy.
"Okay, fuck this," Colin said. "Let's leave it ’til tomorrow."
"But we have to make sure he's dead!"
"No, we have to clean up the fucking house of all that blood and dump T's body. You want to keep crawling around here in the dark alone, be my guest."
Of course, Rufie didn’t stay outside in the dark alone. They pulled up all the bloody plastic in the house, rolled T's body in a tarp, stashed it in the storage truck, and cleaned everything with bleach. Then they drove the deputy's truck down to the end of the hill and rolled it into a ditch. They stashed their storage truck off a fire road just in case anyone came to the cabin. The truck was full of shit for the farm, and it was incriminating as hell, even without T’s body. By the time dawn came, there was nothing illegal on the rental property, and Colin's fear and adrenaline crashed. At this point, without Roman himself as an eyewitness, nobody could pin anything on him.
Now Rufie was asleep on the couch, fully clothed and snoring. Colin watched out the window as dawn lit up the mountain scenery. The fucking country, man. It was just plain wrong for anyplace to be so dark at night.
Colin's eyes scanned the brightening gloom, then he went to the front of the cabin to check that side. He didn't see anything—no body, no obvious signs of disturbance, no cops. He tensed at the front window, his ears perked for sirens. There were only two possibilities as he saw it: Either Roman had made it far enough to get picked up and rescued and he'd blabbed, in which case the cops should already be here. Or, he was lying out there dead or dying, in which case he wasn't saying shit to nobody.
But other than a flock of geese that landed on the pond, a fat raccoon that crossed the yard, and a rangy hound dog that was sniffing around, the dawn was quiet.
By then, Colin knew for certain he wasn't going to run. He wanted this. He needed this fresh start more than he'd even realized, and Mad Creek was the place to do it. Now that Deputy Roman Charsguard was out of the picture, problem solved, right? There might still be a few cops left in town, but they probably weren't anywhere near as persistent as Roman had been. Colin "Kingpin" Clery wasn't gonna run away from shadows. He would, however, call L.A. later in the day and replace T with two more wet men he could trust, real ballbreakers. And Rufie had been asking for some more labor for the farm too. Run away? No, Colin Fucking Clery was expanding.
Colin left Rufie asleep on the couch and went to his room to crash.
Lance and Charlie stood in the woods near the small lake on Piney Top Drive. Lance watched the large cabin with binoculars while Charlie, now human again, thrummed with eager interest beside him.
It was the evening after Roman had been shot, and the lights were on in the cabin. Through the binoculars, Lance could see a skinny dark-haired man sitting at the kitchen table. He had a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. His head was back in a slouched pose. Food containers from Lucky Dog Chinese on Main Street littered the table. A red-haired man was pacing in the kitchen, talking animatedly on a cell phone.
"You’re sure those two are the men we smelled on the trail today?" Lance asked quietly.
"Yes, boss!" Charlie said, annoyed. "Come on, there's only two of them. We can take 'em!"
Charlie was still caught up in a scent-lust, ready to attack his quarry. Lance made a downward motion with his free hand—calm down—and didn't bother to voice a reply.
Before dawn this morning, Charlie had tracked Roman's blood trail through the woods to the small lake, Lance following behind on foot. Lance had warned Charlie not to get close to any humans, but he'd been lost in the scent, and he'd left the woods and followed his nose to the large cabin, to a sliding glass back door. Lance had had to wait in the trees, gun drawn and cursing. Fortunately, either the men in the cabin had been asleep, or they hadn't been alarmed by the sight of a bloodhound, because Charlie ran back into the woods without incident.
That had been only this morning, unbelievably. It had been a very long day.
Lance knew Roman had been shot in that cabin—while in human form—and had escaped it as a wounded dog and made his way to Matt's place. Lance couldn't imagine the courage that took—the pain and terror of shifting when so badly wounded. Bill was right. It should have killed him.
But Roman's sheer bravery aside, Lance had been left with many questions. Why had Roman been shot? Who was in that cabin? Had they seen Roman shift? Did they know about the quickened now?
And soon as Matt had gotten into the office, Lance cornered him by the front door. "How's, um, Paco?"
"He's all right," Matt said, looking tired. "He's resting. Luci's going to be with him all day. She'll text me if anything changes."
Lance nodded. "I need you to take Charlie and me to the places where you and Roman found those broken fishing lines yesterday."
Matt's eyes narrowed in confusion, but he slowly nodded. "Sure. If you want. What about Roman? Is he coming?" Matt looked over Lance's shoulder as if hoping to see him.
"Roman called in sick," piped Charlie. He was lingering near Leesa's desk.
"He did?" asked Leesa worriedly. "Oh my gosh! What's the matter with him?"
Lance glared at Charlie. "No, Roman did not call in sick." He sighed and turned to Matt. "Roman had a family thing come up. He's going to be out of the office for a few weeks."
"Family? He told me he didn't have any family."
"Well, maybe it's distant family." Lance scratched his jaw awkwardly, hoping Matt would buy the lie. He clearly knew more about Roman than Lance had hoped. "Anyway, he had plenty of vacation time accrued, so I guess it's his business how he wants to use it."
Matt didn't look happy. His brow furrowed.
"Can you show us right now?" Lance prompted.
Matt nodded, and the three of them left the station.
It had taken a while for Charlie to find the strangers' scents out in the woods. Another day had passed since Roman had smelled them, and there were Roman and Matt's scents to filter out too. Lance kept Matt busy chatting while Charlie sniffed around, but Matt still caught Charlie a few times—once sniffing the bark of a tree at its base and another time on all fours, sniffing at the road.
"Doesn't Charlie need a dog for that? I thought you said he had a sniffer dog?"
Lance had groaned inwardly. This whole situation was challenging enough without having to string Matt Barclay along at the same time.
He’d pretended to be embarrassed and spoke low. "It's a bit of an idiosyncrasy. Charlie says he can tell if it would be worthwhile to bring the dogs out or not."
Matt had said nothing, but his mouth had pursed suspiciously. As long as he had no proof, Lance figured, what could he really do about it?
Now it was nearing eleven that night, and he and Charlie were back watching the cabin from the woods. The men were still inside it.
"Definitely," Charlie said with furor. "The men in that cabin are the same ones that broke those lines Roman put up. There's no doubt. That's the vehicle they were using too." He pointed to the expensive white Cadillac SUV in the driveway.
"So somehow," Lance said, lowering the binoculars, "Roman figured out where they were staying and was here looking around last night. Only they caught him." Shot him. Anger burned in his chest and gut. He'd never been so angry in his life. How dare strangers come into his territory and try to murder his people!
"There's only two of them," Charlie repeated. "And we have guns! Maybe if I went up to the door like I was just checkin' out the neighborhood, and you went around the back—"
"No."
"But they shot Roman!" Charlie wasn't Roman's biggest fan, ordinarily. He was a bit jealous of him, truth be told. Roman was a newer deputy, but he was smarter and more capable, and Charlie knew it. But pack was pack and Lance understood Charlie's outrage.
"We don't have a body or any proof of what they did," Lance explained with a shake of his head. "All we have is Roman, and he can't testify until he can shift back, and that's gonna be weeks, Bill said."
"We could just, you know, kill 'em." They were bold words, but Charlie's voice was unsure.
"No, we're not going to do some gangland-style execution." Lance huffed. "Christ, Charlie, we're the law, not vigilantes. Besides, we don't know how much they know, or what they're up to. Not for sure. We don't even know exactly what happened. Roman can't talk."
Charlie rubbed his very large nose with one hand. "So whaddya wanna do, Boss?"
"We're going to keep an eye on them, that's what. Call in Jake, Bowser, and Gus. I want a man watching these guys 24/7."
"Me too! I want to watch them too."
"Yes, you too. We'll assign shifts. And when they drive, we'll need an unmarked car to follow them. That'll be you, Charlie. You can trade trucks with Tim for a few days. The sheriff's truck would be too obvious."
Lance suddenly felt very keenly the loss of Roman. Roman had become his go-to guy. He'd have been able to trust Roman completely to handle an operation like this one without any direction at all. But Roman was down, purposefully and almost fatally hurt by those men in that cabin. Lance bared his teeth and took one last look through the binoculars, memorizing the sight of the two men.
He was sure of one thing: They'd never get out of Sherriff Lance Beaufort's territory, not without paying for what they'd done.