Bittersweet (14 page)

“I know. It's really, really cruel, but that's the IRS for you. If he's been stealing and hasn't declared his ill-gotten gains on your joint return, they can come after you, divorced or not. There's a provision called Innocent Spouse Relief, but it's not easy to qualify.”

“Damn.” Her eyes were big. And scared. “I had no idea . . .” Her voice trailed off.

I was swept by a wave of sympathy. She was a sweet kid who could find herself in big trouble if she didn't watch out. “I get that, Sue Ellen. That's why the more information you give me, the more help I can give you.”

She picked up the soft drink can and turned it in her fingers. “Well, maybe I'd better ask you what the cops would do to somebody who knew—” She stopped, not looking at me, and swallowed hard.

“You're asking what would happen to
Sue Ellen
if the authorities found out that
she
knew what her husband and his pals were up to and didn't tell them.” It wasn't a question.

Her pretty mouth dropped open. “Well, yes,” she managed. “But how did you know what I—”

“Because you're not the first person who's asked me that.” I sat forward and propped my folded arms on my knees. “The answer is, ‘It depends.'”

“On . . . on what?” Her voice had gotten squeaky.

“On how much you know and how willing you are to cooperate. If
you know a
lot
and what you know is important and if you offer it and yourself up voluntarily,
your clever and wily defense attorney will use it like a crowbar to pry you out of the hole you've already dug for yourself by obstructing justice and being an accessory before and after the fact.”

Her eyes widened and she pulled in her breath. “But I
haven't
obstructed . . . what you said.”

“Yes, you have. Anybody who knows of a crime and fails to report it is an accessory—before, after, or both. And by definition, an accessory obstructs justice.” I hardened my tone. “If, on the other hand, you know only a little, or the district attorney already knows what you know, or you wait until they track you down and haul you off to jail, you won't have any leverage at all, and your clever and wily defense attorney will be reduced to getting down on his or her knees and begging for crumbs—crawling, even.”

She swallowed and tried to say something, but nothing came out.

“So the moral of this story,” I added crisply, “is that the sooner you rat these guys out, the more kindly you'll be treated in the DA's office. I would suggest taking a lawyer with you when you go. And if I were you, I'd go soon. Maybe not on Thanksgiving. But the day after that.”

I wasn't being very nice now. Sometimes it takes a little shock to shake people into an awareness of their vulnerability. Sometimes it takes an earthquake. Sue Ellen needed to understand the consequences of withholding whatever she was withholding. DAs like to use a little extra muscle on the spouse (metaphorically speaking), since it is assumed that she is privy to all the marital secrets, including where her husband put the money he'd been shoving into his pockets.

She finally got the words out. “Could you . . . would you be my lawyer, if I needed one?”

I shook my head. “I can't. But I can give you a name or two.” At the top of the list would be Justine Wyzinski, a.k.a the Whiz, an old friend from law school at the University of Texas. She is tough, mean, and abrasive, but she has a heart, especially for women in trouble. She sometimes does pro bono work, especially if it doesn't involve going to trial. I thought this situation could be handled with a visit or two to the Uvalde County DA's office—if Sue Ellen would cooperate.

Sue Ellen chewed on that for a moment, then came to a conclusion. “Okay, if that's what you think I have to do. Let me get a pencil out of my purse and you can write down her name and number.”

I couldn't help feeling relieved. I liked Sue Ellen, and it sounded as if her husband had backed her into a corner. The divorce was the way out of the marriage, but if he was involved in something criminal, it might not take her off the hook. And she couldn't just sit around and wait to see what happened, either.

“Here,” she said, coming back into the room with a pencil and a scrap of paper.

I took out my cell phone, pulled up Justine's number. I wrote it down, with her name, as well as my own. “You're going to have to tell Ms. Wyzinski everything,” I said, giving her the paper. “She can't help if you're holding back—if you're holding
anything
back.” I paused to let that sink in. “Want me to let her know you'll be calling?”

She wrinkled her nose, thinking about that. “I guess,” she said finally. “Yeah, sure.” But she didn't sound positive.

“Tell you what,” I said. “Give me your cell number. I'll talk to Ms. Wyzinski. Then I'll call you and let you know if she's able to take you on. She's good, so she's pretty busy. We might need to look for somebody else.” I slid her a glance. “As long as you're really serious about this. Are you?”

She sounded chastened. “I kind of feel like I don't have any choice. If I do it and Jack goes to jail, I'll feel like crap. If I don't, I'm in trouble.” She bit her lip. “I guess I gotta just bite the damn bullet and do it.”

“Atta girl,” I said approvingly. She gave me her cell number and I keyed it into my phone, then drained my soft drink and stood up. “I hope I haven't made life harder for you, but I always think it's better to know where you're going than grope around in the dark. Could be some really bad stuff out there that you don't know about. It could bite you.” Of course, it could bite her even if she knew it was there, but that was another story.

“I guess I was hoping I didn't have to be involved. It's all so ugly.”

“We all wish that every so often.” I smiled crookedly.

She nodded, resigned. “Anyway, thanks for your help, China. I really appreciate it.”

“Tit for tat,” I said. “I need to thank you for being helpful to my mother. I can see how much she depends on you. And with Sam in the hospital—” I broke off. “I know I should do more to help them, but I'm pretty far away. I'm relieved that you're willing to give them a hand for a few weeks.”

“Don't beat yourself up about it,” she said in a practical tone. “Leatha understands that you have your own life. She doesn't expect you to spend time here, except when you can. Like on holidays.” She frowned. “I'm sure she's aware that she and Sam have bitten off more than they can chew right now.”

“You think?” I sighed. “She's always so damned cheerful, it's hard to guess just what she knows.”

“I think,” Sue Ellen replied firmly. “But anyway, that's not your problem. I can help out for a few weeks, and after that, I know of somebody else who can pitch in.”

“Oh, really?” I asked eagerly. “Somebody who can move in here and help?”

“I don't know about moving in,” she said, “but she can help. She's my baby sister, Patsy Wilbur. She lives with our mom and dad in Utopia and works at Jennie's Kitchen. She's full-time there right now, because Jennie's cook is out having a baby. But she'll go back to part-time at the first of the year, and she says she'd be glad to come and help your mom maybe three days a week.”

“This is great, Sue Ellen. As it happens, I know Jennie. She's expanding her herb garden at the restaurant, and I'm helping. I've brought the plants with me. We're going to put them in on Friday.” I was feeling a huge relief. Maybe things weren't as dark as I'd feared. “Have you mentioned Patsy to Leatha yet?”

Sue Ellen shook her head. “Haven't had a chance. I'll tell her tomorrow. It would be good if she could come out so the three of you—you and Leatha and Patsy—can get acquainted. How long are you staying?”

“Until Sunday, I think. McQuaid and Brian—my husband and our son—are coming tomorrow, but they have to go home on Friday morning. Caitie's going back with them.” I smiled. “She can't bear to be parted from her chickens for more than a day or two. She's totally dedicated to her girls.”

“Maybe Patsy can come over on one day this weekend, then. I'll check with Leatha and find out when would be a good time.” Sue Ellen paused. “Your Caitie is such a little doll. Smart, too.” She gave a wistful sigh. “I wanted to start a family when Jack and I got married. But living over there at Three Gates, it just didn't feel right. And then—” Another sigh. “Well, after that rodeo queen, I got to thinking he wasn't the man I wanted to be a father to my kids.”

“But someday,” I said, “after you've got your degree and you're settled in the kind of work you want to do, there'll be time. And you never know what the future might bring. When I was in my thirties, I figured I'd never have children, and now I have Brian and Caitie. So you never can tell.”

“You've said a true thing, China.” She smiled, and the dimples in her cheeks flashed. “You just never know. Once I manage to get past this bad patch, there'll be plenty of time.”

But she wouldn't—and there
wasn't.

Mack went out on patrol at seven on Wednesday night, thinking that it might be a busy time, since the next day was Thanksgiving. But the only call came in at eight, an Operation Game Thief tip that somebody phoned in. A guy who lived in Concan, a village on Route 83 south of the state park, had posted a really dumb question on his Facebook page that afternoon. “I'm new around here, and I just got me a nice big buck. Anybody know where I can get an illegal deer processed in Uvalde County?”

Mack thought about that as she drove to the address the dispatcher had found after cross-checking the local records. People did some pretty stupid things and then bragged about them on Facebook. The previous year, a guy down in South Texas had put up a photo of himself proudly holding a very large redfish, a good three feet long, with eight others of equal size on display on the back of the pickup beside him. The daily bag limit on redfish is three, with a twenty-eight-inch size limit. Other anglers saw the online photo and were understandably outraged, and the Game Thief tips poured in. When the wardens caught up with the guy a couple of days later, they charged him with nine counts of possession of oversize redfish and fishing without a saltwater license. “Greedy and disgusting,”
the judge said when he sentenced him to nearly $6,000 in fines and civil restitution. Stupid, too, Mack thought—not just to take all those fish but to post them on Facebook. Like leaving a trail of crumbs to his door.

She had no trouble finding the house in Concan. When she knocked, asked for the shooter by name, and told him she wanted to see his illegal buck, the guy was so astonished that he blurted another dumb question. “How the
hell
did you find out?”

“Some of your Facebook friends don't like the idea of taking game illegally,” she said. She charged him and photographed the animal, then confiscated it and took it back to Utopia, to a volunteer who would dress the deer and process the meat for the Uvalde Food Pantry. There were plenty of hungry people who would be glad to get it.

And that was it for the evening, for the illegal hunters had apparently decided to stay home where it was warm. The cold front had blown in, dropping the temperature into the thirties, with gusty winds, brief spurts of hard rain, and thick clouds that obscured the moon. As Mack drove along the road, everything was dark and quiet, except for a few deer darting in front of the truck and the occasional gleam of a pair of eyes in the brush along a fence. It was an easy night across the county, too, with only a couple of convenience store robberies and a single car wreck, down south on Route 90 near the fish hatchery. Occasionally one of the deputies checked in with a 10-20 to let Dispatch know where he was, but otherwise there wasn't much radio traffic. Everybody was taking a holiday, she thought, even the evildoers. The idea was reassuring.

It was nearly midnight when Mack pulled off at one of her regular spots, a vantage point that gave her a view of a wide swath of landscape, allowing her to see the headlights of anybody who might be jacklighting or shooting from the ranch roads below. She rolled down her window a
couple of inches to catch the sound of gunshots, always a clue to illegal night hunting, then tuned the truck FM radio, low, to an all-night country music station playing songs from the eighties. But the first song was Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton's “I Will Always Love You,” the song she and Lanny had danced to at their wedding. Bittersweet, the lyrics stung, reminding her of how much they had promised to each other, and how each of them had come up short.

She switched the radio off, brushed away the tears, and pushed the seat back so she could stretch out her legs, forcing herself to stop thinking of Lanny. Instead, she thought back over the day—the
long
day. She was glad that she and Karen had been able to give the mountain lion a few more years of wilderness freedom and wondered whether he had found a good meal and a dry place to sleep. And Doc Masters. She had enjoyed meeting the old vet and hoped he would be able to put aside his worry—whatever it was—and give her the name of the rancher who was harboring the fawns with the doctored tattoos. There was obviously something illegal going on. If the situation was allowed to continue, more animals would be involved and more people—inevitably—drawn into it. In the end, there could be a lot worse trouble.

And Derek. She was sorry for what had happened at his ranch that afternoon. The dead deer weren't his fault, even though the bulldozing may have uncovered the anthrax spores that killed them. And she couldn't blame him for feeling that she was pushing him. She
had
pushed him. That was her job. Burning the carcasses, unpleasant as it was, had to be done without delay, and she had offered to help. She had the tools and the knowledge and the skills to do what needed to be done. And if Derek had a problem with that—well, heck. That was
his
problem, not hers.

Except. Except that it was her problem, too, she thought, feeling a kind
of bubbling, baffling despair. Men might find her attractive, an interesting companion, even good in bed. But they had a problem with what she did for a living. You'd think she would have learned that lesson, after her marriage to Lanny had foundered on the reef of her career.
It's going to take a really special guy to love you and love what you do—because you very much are what you do
, Karen had said. Did she love what she did well enough to accept the fact that her job was the only love in her life? The way things were headed, that was where she was going to end up—and that would have to be okay.

But was it okay, for the long haul? She thought of something else Karen had said.
And now you've got Molly and Cheyenne and your house in Utopia and the dream territory you always wanted, and you think everything's perfect. You think you don't need a guy in your life. And you're wrong.

Well, maybe. Or maybe not. Karen could be wrong. Mack sat with that until the momentary despair subsided. The world was uncertain, and a lot of people had to settle for a lot less than she had. Being able to do what you loved and earn a living doing it was a privilege to be cherished and protected. And anyway, just because you loved somebody, there was no guarantee that it would go on forever. Or if it did, that the loving would go on being
right
forever. What was right at one point in your life could be wrong in another. People changed, situations changed, times changed. She knew that from her marriage to Lanny. You had to take things as they came. You couldn't count on—

A pair of headlights bounced into Mack's field of vision a couple of hundred feet below, and she sat up straight, reaching for the night-vision binoculars stowed in the console. Steadying her forearms on the steering wheel, she peered out into the dark. A white pickup with a light bar on top, a county insignia on the passenger door. A Uvalde County deputy sheriff. She watched it slow to a crawl, then stop, and a spotlight came on,
aimed toward her, flaring off her windshield. She reached for the headlight switch, flicked it on and off twice, and put the binoculars back in the console. And waited.

Five minutes later, the truck had climbed the hill and pulled to a stop beside her, driver's side to driver's side. The window went down. “How's it going, Mack?” a deep voice asked. She recognized Ethan Conroy, the new deputy sheriff whom she and Karen had seen in Utopia earlier that day, going into the café. The hunky deputy sheriff.

“Nothing much happening,” she said. The light from his dash instruments shadowed the planes of his face. A rugged face, not movie-star handsome but lived-in, firm jaw, cleft chin, easy smile. “How about you?”

“Same here. Quiet night, except for a speeder this side of Sabinal. Clocked him at ninety-five on that two-lane.” He turned off his ignition, leaned an elbow on the door, and brushed a shock of dark hair out of his eyes. “Say, are you really the one who collared the guy who was stealing the copper wire?”

“Yeah, that's me,” she said, wondering where this was going.

He grinned. “I saw him down at the jail. He's big as a house. You must have some moves.”

“Just doin' my job,” she replied lightly, but she was pleased by the unexpected compliment.

“And I heard on the radio tonight that you cited that jerk over in Concan who bragged about his nice big illegal buck on Facebook. He give you any trouble?”

She shook her head, grinning. “Meek as a lamb. He'd already admitted it was an illegal kill—in writing, to everybody on the Internet. Didn't leave himself any room for denials. Dumb.”

“Dumb,” Ethan agreed. Their two radios squawked in unison, another deputy with a 10-20 at the intersection of 187 and 90, working a
minor collision. When the transmission was over, he remarked, “Was that your Toyota you were driving in Utopia today? I have one of those. Nice trucks. The long bed comes in handy when you're hauling fence posts, brush, that kind of stuff.”

“It's mine,” she said. “It's a '95 with nearly 200,000 miles on it. It's been good to me, but—” She shook her head with a sigh. “It's running rough, and when it's idling, the RPM will all of a sudden crank up. I'm afraid it's going to need some work, but you know how it is. One of those intermittent things—easy to put off until all of a sudden it quits on you.”

“Really? I had a similar problem with mine. Took me a while to figure it out.” He paused. “If you want, I'd be glad to take a look at it for you. I mean, I'm no mechanic, but I might be able to spot the problem. Save you a trip to the shop.”

“Well, hey, sure,” she said, surprised and pleased. “Ask me anything about Parks and Wildlife regs and I'll give you chapter and verse. But open the hood of a truck and I don't have a clue. If you want to take a look, by all means, be my guest.”

He chuckled, deep and solid, a nice sound that set off an unexpected tingle somewhere deep inside her. “I'm off tomorrow. One of the girls at the café told me you live in Utopia. That right?”

He had asked at the café? Mack nodded, bemused, not quite sure what was happening because it was happening so fast—but liking it anyway.

“I'm down in Sabinal,” he went on. “How about if I drive up in the morning and take a look at the truck? You hard to find?”

“In Utopia? You've got to be kidding.” She laughed. “I'm on Oak, second block east of Main, between Lee and Jackson. You'll see the state truck parked out front.”

He frowned, tapping his finger on the steering wheel. “No, wait, sorry. I forgot. Tomorrow's Thanksgiving. You've probably got plans.”

“I'm having dinner with friends,” she said, “but not until late in the afternoon. If you've got the time in the morning, well, sure, come ahead. I'd be grateful for any advice on the truck. I'd like to keep it, but I don't have a lot of dollars to dump into it.”

“Understand,” he said, with emphasis. “Is nine too early? Or were you planning to sleep in?”

“Nine's good for me.” She paused uncertainly. Would he think she was being pushy if she suggested breakfast? Probably, but she went ahead anyway. “I'll cook breakfast, if you don't mind settling for pancakes and eggs.” She might not be much of a cook, but her dad had taught her to make killer pancakes, and her next-door neighbor—Mrs. Cook, the owner of the early-rising rooster—had just given her a dozen very fresh eggs. “It's hunting season,” she added, “and I haven't had time to stop at the store for bacon and stuff. And it's a holiday, so the café is closed.”

“Yeah, hunting season,” he said sympathetically. “Parks and Wildlife has probably had you on the road from dawn to dark, every day. But I've got a pound of bacon. And there might be a package of sausages in the fridge freezer. Want me to scrounge around and see what I can come up with?”

“That sounds great,” she said, and then hastily added, “Of course, it
is
hunting season, and I never know what might come up.” She felt apologetic. “If I get a call and have to go out, how do I reach you?”

“We'd better trade cards,” he said.

“Good idea,” she replied.

Then, as if it had been choreographed, both of them turned away to fish in their consoles and turned back to hand their business cards through the open windows. As his fingers brushed hers, she was startled
to feel—yes, there it was, definitely—a tingle, a tiny jolt of electricity, almost a spark.

If he felt it, he didn't say. “My cell number's on there,” he remarked. “If tomorrow doesn't work, we'll give it a try later. Not on the weekend, though. I've pulled both Saturday and Sunday shifts.” His smile was crooked, rueful. “Drove my wife crazy. Totally bananas. Always complaining that she couldn't count on me for anything.” He added, in a lower voice, “It's hard on the partner.”

Mack caught her breath. She heard the past tense, but still— “It was hard on Lanny, too,” she said. “My husband.”