Full Circle (3 page)

Jack chuckled. "How long have you been back in Rawlings?"

"A little over a year," Josie said, taking a deep breath.

"Are you bored?"

She laughed. "I haven't had time to be bored. I came back and started clearing out this place while I was deciding what to do with it. For a while there, I thought I was going to have to bring in a Haz-Mat company to get it cleaned out. Two months after I got here, Sheriff Bowles had a massive heart attack and died. It was awful; no one suspected he had heart problems.

"The town has three deputies. Two of them are young and inexperienced, and the third one doesn't want the job of sheriff. The mayor and town council asked me to takeover as sheriff temporarily. I took the job because they were a little desperate at the time, but I'm only the acting sheriff. The town council is supposed to be looking for someone qualified to replace me. Since it's been almost ten months, I don't think they've been looking real hard, but I keep refusing to take the full job title."

"It's not exactly a fit for an ex-CIA undercover field agent," Jack said.

Josie lifted an eyebrow. "What kind of a job does my training make me a match for, exactly?"

"Good question, but I have my sources, so I ran a search on you—ex-police officer, ex-CIA agent, three commendations, and two citations in eight years. You were on a fast track to promotion."

"I was on a fast track to die young," Josie said matter-of-factly.

"So you had an epiphany or something and bailed?"

"Yeah, I did," Josie admitted with a hint of a smile. "It was a big 'ta da' moment in my life so far and it was life changing."

"So tell me," Jack said. "I'm sure a lot has happened in the last twenty years."

"You want my life story?" Josie laughed.

"Yeah, at least the highlights. You went from town hellion to town sheriff. I want to know how," Jack admitted. "I was invested in your life for a lot of years. I'd like to take a little credit for keeping you on the straight and narrow at least for a short time."

Josie nodded, picked up her coffee cup and pointed him to the family room where she curled up in the corner of one of the sofas. "Some of the credit is yours. Not long after you left town, I set some lofty goals and became obsessed and determined to meet them as only a teenager can obsess. My obsession lasted over ten years.

"Being who you are, what your family was to this town, you have no idea what it was like to grow up as the kid of the town drunk. People looked down on me and didn't expect anything of me. Kids made fun of me and my cast-off clothes. I was picked on and bullied for no other reason than I was Mason Raintree's throwaway niece. Being a target for ridicule when you're a kid hurts, and I'm not talking about the physical. I was an angry little monster who walked around with a lot of bitter stuff inside. You kept me straight, pretty much, although your reasons weren't exactly altruistic. You were just plain pissed most of the time because you were my target for a lot of that anger.

"That last time, when you yanked me out of Jimmy's car, you yelled at me. Before that, you'd talked to me, you'd stuck my nose into corners, you'd spanked me, but you never yelled at me. That time, you yelled at me, and you said I was better than that. You said you expected more of me than acting like a whore in the backseat of a car. You were angry, and those words hurt. You left town a couple of weeks later. You have no idea what your words and Kitty Cartwright's words set in motion."

Jack held up his hand, looking perplexed.

"Oh, sorry," Josie exclaimed. "About a week after my big date with Jimmy, I overheard Kitty gossiping with some of her friends in the girls' bathroom at school. She said I'd let Jimmy fuck me. Those were her exact words. She said I was a trashy whore, and I'd be pregnant and wouldn't know who the father was before the year was out."

"I take it you didn't?"

"Not with Jimmy or anyone else for many years after that," Josie admitted. "You have no idea how much it hurt to hear her say those things. I ditched school and cried for hours. You had said I was better than that, but the rest of this town had a different opinion and much lower expectations. That realization hurt, but it finally sank in that no one was ever going to expect anything of me. If I didn't want Kitty to be right, I had to do something.

"I got mad and used all that anger to buckle down. I decided that I'd show her; I'd show this whole damn town that I wasn't trash. I got an after-school job, and I studied like a demon. Up until that point, I had regularly gotten C's and B's without any effort. After that, I became the best student at Victor Rawlings High. I put the teachers into a state of shock. A couple of them even accused me of cheating, but they got used to it. I took on extra assignments and shot to the top of my classes.

"By the following year, Mrs. Freeman had me in an accelerated program where I was bussed over to Wayland Baptist University for college courses in the afternoons. I did that during my junior and senior years. I didn't know it at the time, but the whole program was being paid for by a scholarship Mrs. Freeman arranged for me. After high school, I moved to Altus and took every course I could get at Wayland Baptist. Tuition costs are considerably lower there than at the university. Later, I transferred those credits to the University of Oklahoma and picked up some decent scholarships. From there, I went to the police academy. A couple years later, I was accepted into the CIA. Eight years after that, I was fast-tracking my way to an early demise."

"Is this where the "ta da" moment comes in?" Jack asked.

"Almost," Josie admitted, but her eyes took on a faded, haunted, dullness. "I worked undercover—deep undercover. I fit the profile and was able to work my way into a lot of dicey situations. I was often the bait, the hook, and the takedown."

"Because you're beautiful," Jack said matter-of-factly.

"Thank you," Josie said, acknowledging the compliment, but she moved on unfazed. "Yes, and I got the job done. Polish and dress me up, and my target usually took the bait. I took acting lessons in addition to self-defense and marksmanship. I can play the part of a ditzy, dumb bimbo with a killer body or the helpless female, whatever was needed. I was trained long and hard to never break character. It got me into a lot of situations where I was privy to information that could help our cases."

"It also put you in danger," Jack said frowning.

"Yes, it did," she agreed. "On my last sting operation, something went sour. In the aftermath, I figured it was probably a tip-off from inside the agency. Someone took a payoff. I got a feeling something was going wrong, and I requested to be pulled out, but it was denied. No one has that power! When an agent asks to be removed—they are to be removed immediately. Someone made a bad decision, and I wasn't extracted. A woman died along with her two-year-old child.

"The bad guys, serious drug kingpins, beat the hell out of me, but they didn't kill me. They had other plans to use me—horrible, disgusting plans. However, one of them screwed up and underestimated me. Where he's spending the rest of his life, he doesn't need his balls. I escaped, but I left a lot of damage behind me on my way out. The Agency called it
excessively violent behavior
. I called it survival. The end of that mission was too close to the edge for me not to reevaluate what was important in my life."

"Shit!"

"Exactly," Josie agreed, as she looked into her cup. "I was supposed to shake it off since that's what a good operative would do. I'd done it before. But I couldn't, not that time. We're not living in a time where the good guys wear the white hats. Sometimes the guys that are supposed to have your back are as corrupt as the criminals. I don't regret what I did to those three men that were holding me. I didn't then, and I never will. I fight to survive. The only thing that mattered to me was that two innocents died. I kept trying to change the scenario of those events in my head, trying to figure out what I could have done to prevent those casualties."

"You can't change it. The result will always be the same," Jack said seriously. "Unless you were negligent in doing your job, it will always end the same."

"I wasn't negligent, and I know you're right, that's standard procedure by the manual," Josie admitted. "It's still hard to accept."

"So, you had your epiphany and walked."

Josie smiled, again. "Yeah, it was my
or something
. A couple of weeks later while still on medical leave, I was taking a walk trying to get my head screwed back on straight. I stopped into a sub shop for a bottle of water. For once, there wasn't a long line to the cashier register and I ended up buying a lottery ticket. I tucked my ticket into a jacket pocket and forgot about it."

"You won?"

"This is my story and I get to tell it my way!" Josie chided, but she was smiling. "As I said, I forgot about the ticket. I had things that were more important on my mind. I had to make a decision to go back to work or quit the job I'd worked hard at getting and keeping for years. A month later, I stopped in at the same place to buy another bottle of water, and I remembered the lottery ticket in my pocket. I fished it out and asked the clerk to run the numbers."

"You're killing me, here."

Josie gave Jack a serious look, and smiled. "It's not a secret, but it's not something I broadcast, either. It wasn't one of the major jackpots, but I did win. I took the payout—three-and-half million dollars after taxes."

"Holy shit," Jack laughed.

"Exactly," Josie agreed. "Chump change compared to the big mega-lottery payoffs they announce on the news, but more than I'll ever spend in my lifetime. This is where the epiphany or my 'ta da' moment came into play. I could do anything, go anywhere and have anything I wanted. Only, I didn't know what I wanted. The only thing that was crystal clear in my head was that I did not want to go back into deep cover, ever again."

"So you came home to Rawlings?"

"Not right away. The thing about working in the government is that it's basically a massive corporation with a corporation mentality. The thing about working in the CIA is that what they did to me was a corporate mentality screw-up, and initially they were trying to drop the blame on me to protect their big-time bonuses. I wasn't having any part of it. The decision to leave me out there stranded on my own was a calculated decision by one desk jockey in a position of power who had never worked in the field. A dead agent would have solved his problem. I didn't die, but two innocents did, and I was pissed. Someone was going to pay for his decision. The higher-ups closed ranks to protect him, but a court order to release taped phone calls, and e-mails changed their tunes real fast."

"You took them down," Jack said with admiration in his voice.

"Not exactly," Josie said. "I wanted to, I intended to, but I'm not an idiot. When something goes that wrong, and you're on the inside of it, you feel powerless to fight back. Suddenly, with several millions of dollars backing me up, I didn't feel so defenseless. I quit my job and got myself a very shrewd lawyer.

"I didn't want to play their game, but I wasn't about to let them throw me to the dogs either. Ultimately, my lawyer was better at playing their games than they were. Three idiots lost their jobs, and at least I know that their bad decisions won't put any more agents at risk. I got a nice retirement fund out of it, and they even paid my lawyer fees which I must say would have been costly but well worth it. The Agency got to play the good guys in the press after I signed about three million affidavits promising not to be a whistle blower and rat them out to the press along with their promises to protect my record of employment. I refused the last commendation they offered me. I felt like they offered it as part of the payoff, not because I earned it, which I did.

"After all that, I needed a breath of fresh air and I took a trip. I visited England, Ireland and Scotland, and roamed around Europe for a while. There's a lot over there to enjoy. Each country has something special and unique, but I was a visitor—a tourist, and I didn't belong there. I did enjoy backpacking, staying in little hostels, catching busses and trains. I even booked myself onto a fancy cruise ship that visited a lot of islands. But I very quickly realized I didn't fit on that cruise. I guess I wasn't meant to live a rich and pampered lifestyle. I left the ship in mid-cruise, and I realized that I didn't need or want a rich lifestyle. Instead, I needed real, honest, hard-working, normal people in my life.

"You can't get any more real than Rawlings. I had a house here, but Uncle Mason's Trust, which had been paying the taxes for all those years, was about gone. I had to make a decision to get rid of the place and move on, or move in and make something out of it and stick. I decided to stick. By the way, neither my lottery win nor my legal settlement is public knowledge. If I didn't trust you not to spread it around I wouldn't have told you about it. If someone wants to dig deep enough, they will find the information, but it's no one's business."

"No one has questioned where you came up with a chunk of money?" Jack asked.

Josie shook her head and shrugged. "It's not all in one place. The rumor is that I was married and fleeced my ex-husband in the divorce settlement."

"Doesn't that bother you?"

"Not really. It's a small town, Jack. Some people are never going to change their minds about me and will always think the worst. I know what I've accomplished. My record speaks for itself, and that's enough for me."