Sheriff Adams had SportsCenter on when headlights splashed into the gravel parking lot of the police station. His office, and the rest of station, comprised the first floor of a converted house. He only had two part-time deputies and one full-time office worker, so they didn’t need much space.
His feet were up on his desk, a coffee mug resting on his ample belly. Brown rings had already soaked into his snug uniform.
He couldn’t have cared less.
Most of the town hadn’t woken up yet, so he was surprised to see a car drive into the station’s parking lot at all, let alone at a high rate of speed. Still, he didn’t bother getting up. They would come in and tell him what was wrong.
No point in getting up just yet.
Not when the Top 10 was about to start.
The vehicle slid to a stop in front of the house, the lights obscuring most of Adams’ view of it. He thought it was some kind of a white van, but he couldn’t see any markings that would indicate whose it was.
“What is that moron doing?” he asked the empty office. “Better not be here to toss their trash in my dumpster again. I’ll have their asses.”
Adams sipped from his mug and winced. He’d never been good at making coffee. His employee, Mel, knew how to do it best, but she didn’t get in until eight in the morning. The sheriff hadn’t slept well in the past few years, so he came in early every day, preferring to spend his time at the office.
They had cable there. He was too damned cheap to spend that kind of money at home. Better to have the taxpayers foot the bill, he figured. When he retired in a few years, he’d have to break down and subscribe to something, but that was down the road a piece.
Kobe sank a game-winning three on the television, the top play of the day before.
Adams grunted. “A decent shot, I ’spose, but you ain’t no Jordan.”
The set of headlights stayed in front of the windows, the driver still not getting out. Adams squinted at it, hoping he could recognize who was hidden behind the wheel. His eyes weren’t what they once were though, and he gave up after a few seconds.
He raised his coffee mug to whoever it was, assuming they could see him because the office was lit up like a Christmas tree.
The vehicle spun around in a tight circle, merged onto the road, and disappeared a moment later. He’d been right—it was a white van. It didn’t have any markings on it, so he still had no idea who’d been driving.
“Morons,” Adams mumbled. He took another sip and grimaced. “Gotta get Mel in here earlier from now on. This tastes like hot oil.”
The screen door at the back of the house banged open.
Coffee sloshed from the sheriff’s cup as he jolted upright. The hot liquid burned his belly as he stood from the chair. “Son of a bitch!”
“Sheriff?” a voice called from down the hall.
“Who the hell is that? What are you doing coming in the back? You trying to give an old man a heart attack?” Adams had just crossed sixty a few months prior. He didn’t like giving his heart a jump like that, especially after drinking some of the high test he’d just brewed.
“It’s Allison.” Footsteps clomped on the hardwood floor of the hallway, moving closer.
Adams dabbed at his shirt with a paper towel. “Allison Henley?”
“Yeah.” She stuck her head around the corner, her eyes searching the room before settling on the window in the front. Strands of her auburn hair matted against her sweaty forehead. “Did a van drive by?”
“What do you think you’re doing, coming in—?”
“Did a van drive by just now?”
Adams stopped blotting his shirt and cocked an eyebrow. “Yeah, why? You commit a hit-and-run?”
“Oh, thank god.” Allison sighed and stepped into the office, her shoulders slumping. She wore the same blue shirt and purple shorts she always did to work during the hot summer months. They clung to her like a second set of skin. Sweat dripped from the tip of her nose.
She breathed heavily, her shoulders rising and falling several inches with each one. “They were chasing me.”
“Who was ch—?”
“They wrecked my car with spikes and then tried to find my body and then heard me and chased me through the woods, but I lost them and they ran back to their van, but I was too far ahead so I made it here first and then hid in the woods while they drove around looking for me!” Allison gulped in air at the end of her rambling, almost incoherent sentence. Her voice trailed off as she finished, her face growing redder.
“Hold on now.” Adams held up a hand. “Slow down and run that by me again. You said they wrecked your car with spikes? The hell does that mean?”
Adams cast a weary glance back at the window again, wondering how far up the road the van had gone.
Allison closed her eyes for a moment. “Can we turn the lights off? If they come back, I don’t want them to know I’m in here.”
“You tell me what’s going on first, then I’ll decide what we’re going to do.” The sheriff stayed by his desk, where his pistol sat. He never wore it inside the station because he hated the damn thing. The law required that he keep it on him at all times, but he didn’t bother wearing it too often.
“I was driving to work,” Allison said. Her color had returned to semi-normalcy. “My shift was about to start and I was running late, so I was driving a little faster than I should have been.” She paused for a second, gauging the sheriff’s reaction to her admission. When he didn’t respond, she continued. “I looked down at my radio for a split second, and that’s when all four of my tires blew at the same time.”
Adam’s whistled. “All four? What did you hit?”
Allison continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “I tried to keep the car on the road, but I hit that stupid pothole I keep telling you about. My car flipped and rolled a few times.” Lines formed between her eyebrows. “I think it did a few times anyway. It’s hard to remember exactly. I was upside down when it finally stopped in the drainage ditch.”
Her speech had begun to speed up again, so Adams motioned for her to slow down.
“Sorry,” she said. “That’s when I climbed out and saw that all the tires had blown. I walked up the road a piece and saw one of those spike strips the police use to stop high-speed chases in movies.”
“Spike strips?” Adams grunted. “You take Crescent Road to work, right? Why would someone have spike strips out on the road? Hell, we don’t even have any here at the station.”
Several summers before, one of Sheriff Adams’ deputies had taken their strip out for a drunken bonfire party. He’d used it on a few cars of women he wanted to sleep with so they would need rides home.
The spikes had been bent and Adams hadn’t bothered to order new ones. He’d canned the moron deputy, thrown him in jail for three days, and then had made his life a living hell with tickets until the idiot had moved to another town.
“They were right there, Sheriff. Right in the middle of the road.”
Adams rubbed his protruding stomach absentmindedly. “Why would someone do that?”
“If you’d let me finish my damn story, you might find out.”
The words made Adams flush with anger, but he held his tongue. It seemed that the Henley woman had suffered a real fright, and he didn’t see the need to fight with her.
Yet.
He made a twirling motion with his finger for her to continue.
“I started walking down the road so I could get you when I saw some headlights coming my way. It didn’t feel right, so I ran behind a tree and hid. A van came by and two men started looking around for me. They were saying they needed to find me because their boss would get mad or something.”
Allison’s shirt was tucked into the waistband of her shorts. She pulled it out and used the bottom portion to wipe sweat from her brow.
Adam’s noticed her toned stomach. He forced his eyes back to her face just as she lowered her shirt again.
“They said that they’d been ordered not to let anyone leave the town. I tried to sneak away, but they heard me and chased me the whole way here.”
When she didn’t say anything else for several seconds, Adams said, “Is that it? You done?”
“I’m done.”
“You’re saying that a couple of men in a van put spike strips on the road so that no one could leave the town. You hit those strips, flipped over, and then were chased here?”
“That’s exactly what happened.”
“I’m sorry, Allison, but that just sounds stupid. Why would they do this to you?”
Allison sneered. “How should I know? It happened, that’s all I can tell you. How about you go and arrest them so we can find out?”
The sheriff inspected her visually again. Her knees were cut up. Tiny red spots covered her forehead. Bits of glass glinted in her hair.
He moved closer and leaned forward, getting a better look. They stood at roughly the same height of five feet, eight inches, though Adams had a solid seventy pounds on her and a whole lot more gray hair.
Abrasions covered her knuckles and the back of one her hands.
The old lawman had seen a lot of people in car accidents in his day and this one surely fit the bill. He still wasn’t buying the spiked strips story. His nostrils flared as he sniffed by her mouth. Allison had a reputation as a bit of a boozer and he couldn’t help but figure that she’d hit the sauce all night and wrapped her car around a tree.
The story about the men chasing her was probably just a cover story.
But then again, a van had stopped in front of his station and shined its headlights into the front windows. That was mighty peculiar, all right.
“What are you doing?” Allison leaned away from him, her eyes narrowing. “You think I’m drunk?”
“Just making sure.” The sheriff took a second sniff, but he didn’t catch the scent of alcohol. “Don’t get all pissy about it.”
“I know what everyone around here thinks about me, but I don’t drink before work. Ever.” Allison folded her arms over her chest and winced. “My chest is killing me from the seat belt.”
“Let’s get you looked at.” Adams walked over to Mel’s desk and reached for the phone. His hand hovered over it for a moment as he realized that he didn’t know the number of the hospital. The county had discussed installing a 911 system for the past few years, but funds had been scarce due to the lagging economy. He walked around the desk and flipped through Mel’s rolodex, searching for the number.
How many times had he told her to put her records in the goddamned computer? He cursed himself for hiring a Luddite to run his filing system.
“Who are you calling?” Allison asked.
“The hospital. We need to get an ambulance over here for you. You might have a concussion. Maybe some broken ribs.” Adams found the number and punched it into the phone.
They answered on the second ring.
He explained the situation, and they agreed to get an ambulance en route. They would be there in twenty minutes. Arthur’s Creek only had a clinic that closed after eight in the evening. The closest hospital was the next town over, and it often took the paramedics damn near half an hour to get there.
When old man Howey up the mountain had suffered a heart attack last year, the paramedics had found him flat on his back on the floor, clutching the phone to his chest. The man had been dead for a quarter of an hour before they finally wound their way up to his trailer.
After hanging up, Adams went over to the coffee pot and filled two more cups, handing one to Allison. “They won’t be too long. Just relax until they get here.”
“What about the men in the van? The strips? George, I know how stupid this sounds. But what if someone else drives over them? They might not be as lucky as I was.”
Adams grunted. If what she’d said was accurate, then she had a point. “Tell you what, I’ll ring Deputy Roberts and see if he can find the van. As soon as the ambulance gets here, I’ll run on out and see if I can find those spikes. How’s that sound?”
“Better. Tell Alan to be careful, all right?”
“Of course.” The sheriff tried to hide the tension that settled in his shoulders at the mention of Deputy Roberts’ first name. He hadn’t known they knew each other well enough to be using their given names. Allison had another reputation around town beyond that of a drunk—people called her a slut.
He reached for the phone again and punched in Roberts’ number.
He put it against his ear and waited.
There was no dial tone.
“Huh,” he said as he pulled the receiver from the side of his head.
“What?”
“No signal.”
The color drained from Allison’s face. “Do you think it was them?”
“Them who? The men in the van?”
“Of course!”
“Come on now, Allison. You think those men are running around town, trying to kill people and taking out our phone lines? What good would that do anyway?” Adams tapped the cell phone clipped to his belt. “Everybody has one of these nowadays.”
Allison frowned at him, but didn’t say anything else.
That suited the old man just fine because, truth be told, he was a lot more nervous about the phone not working than he wanted to let on.
In the twenty years he’d been manning his post, he couldn’t remember a single time that he hadn’t been able to make a call.
The odds of that happening at the same time Allison ran into the station felt just a hair better than a lightning strike.