CHAPTER 1
Late Friday night and Zachary County Deputy Harvey DeGarmo, badge 217, watched the oncoming car. The guy’s brights were on and with any luck at all, he’d forget to dim, DeGarmo would pull him over, and he’d be wildly drunk, ensuring yet another DWI notched in DeGarmo’s duty belt.
DeGarmo loved DWIs.
He hated that people drove drunk because his mother had been hit by a drunk, but he loved arresting drunk drivers. It was good to get them off the road, sure, but also it was just plain fun dealing with drunks. He’d had a guy once, babbled after he was cuffed and sitting in the back of the squad. “You’d…better…uh…cop…if you were…uh…you know…a doctor.”
“Yeah?” DeGarmo had answered. “Cuff ’em, stuff ’em, and slice ’em?”
The drunk had stared at him for a minute, his eyes spinning counter-clockwise. “Hey, man, that shit ain’t funny.”
DeGarmo had laughed.
“Dude, stop laughing…I know the sheriff.”
“Me, too. Maybe the three of us can go to a strip club sometime.”
“Yeah, that’d be great. But…no…uh…offense but you ain’t gonna get no…uh…chicks.” The guy had rubbed his head against the backseat. “Man, you be a better cop you shaved your head.”
DeGarmo laughed at the memory as he continued to watch the car come toward him. “Hang on, Brad, lemme check this guy.”
DeGarmo set his cell phone down. He was talking to his best friend from high school, but wanted to focus full attention on the on-coming car. He clicked his radar and the tiny red eyes showed him the guy was going thirty-four in a forty zone.
“Drat.”
As the car got within about a half mile, the driver clicked off his high beams.
“Damn.”
The car passed with no violations. The driver, an old man, waved as he passed. DeGarmo gave his red and blues a quick flash as a hello, turned onto a county road, and grabbed his phone.
“Man, tonight’s been crap boring.”
“Don’t say that,” Brad said. “Every time you do, things get crazy.”
“Yeah, well, I could use a little crazy right now.”
DeGarmo liked the back roads, though they weren’t as empty as they used to be. When he’d started on the road ten years ago, before this particular oil and gas boom, before the desert filled up with people looking for work and housing and their early twenty-first century slice of the American Dream, these roads had been hidden in the west Texas darkness. This was where people did crazy stuff, thinking they were anonymous, but anymore, the backroads were full of cars and pickups and oilrig cowboys and service industry trucks, but there wasn’t much action.
“Brad? Hang on.”
DeGarmo pulled up alongside the fence. He was on East County Road 160 and had seen something on the other side of one of the metal fences. Rags or trash, something tossed from a car or a ranch truck. He trained his spotlight on a point about twenty feet beyond the fence. His window was down and all around him, pump jacks banged and clacked, filling the air with the industrial sound of money.
Frowning, he climbed from his cruiser, slipped through the cattle fence, and went about five steps when he saw it. He went back to his car. “Uh…Brad…I gotta go.”
He hung up and grabbed his radio mic. “Zachary County from 217.”
—217 from Zachary County…go ahead—
“Get Sergeant Lawrence out here. Now. I’m on East County Road 160, just a little east of South County Road 1030.”
—10-4…what do you have—
He took a deep breath and realized his hands were shaking. He’d wanted some crazy—maybe a bar fight or a foot chase after a burglary—but this he could have done without.
“Zachary…call Major Jakob’s team, too. And somebody better call a Justice of the Peace. I’ve got two bodies, a male and a female.” He swallowed. “Pretty fresh, too.”
—got it, 217. Hang on—
DeGarmo looked back toward the bodies. “Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere.”