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Authors: Susan Rogers Cooper

Rude Awakening

BOOK: Rude Awakening
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The E J Pugh Mysteries
ONE TWO WHAT DID DADDY DO?
HICKORY DICKORY STALK
HOME AGAIN, HOME AGAIN
THERE WAS A LITTLE GIRL
A CROOKED LITTLE HOUSE
NOT IN MY BACK YARD
DON'T DRINK THE WATER
ROMANCED TO DEATH *
The Milt Kovak Series
THE MAN IN THE GREEN CHEVY
HOUSTON IN THE REARVIEW MIRROR
OTHER PEOPLE'S HOUSES
CHASING AWAY THE DEVIL
DEAD MOON ON THE RISE
DOCTORS AND LAWYERS AND SUCH
LYING WONDERS
VEGAS NERVE
SHOTGUN WEDDING *
RUDE AWAKENING *
The Kimmey Kruse Series
FUNNY AS A DEAD COMIC
FUNNY AS A DEAD RELATIVE
*available from Severn House
RUDE AWAKENING
A Milt Kovak Mystery
Susan Rogers Cooper
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
  
This first world edition published 2009
in Great Britain and in the USA by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of
9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF
Copyright © 2009 by Susan Rogers Cooper.
All rights reserved.
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Cooper, Susan Rogers.
Rude Awakening.
1. Kovak, Milton (Fictitious character) – Fiction.
2. Sheriffs – Oklahoma – Fiction. 3. Detective and mystery stories.
I. Title
813.5'4-dc22
ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-031-9   (ePub)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-6741-4   (cased)
ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-160-7   (trade paper)
Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.
To intrepid fan and sometime contributor Joe Burkholder and to Tristan Cooper-Brooks, the new man in my life
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank my readers and fellow writers, Jan Grape, Nancy Bell, and Evin Cooper for their insight and courage, and, as always, Vicky Bijur, my friend and agent. I would also like to thank Anna and Amanda from Severn House for their encouragement and insightful editing.
PROLOGUE
EMIL HAWTHORNE
D
r Emil Hawthorne woke up in a very bad mood. That he woke up at all was a medical miracle; one of those incidents desperate family members point to in an attempt to delay pulling the plug on a loved one. For Dr Emil Hawthorne had woken up after eight years in a coma. Another unusual thing about Dr Hawthorne was that he awoke with total recall of the accident that had caused the head injury, putting his life on hold for eight years. He was on his way to have a chat with a colleague, and he was traveling at eighty miles per hour in a fifty-five-mile-an-hour zone. He barely saw the large pickup truck perched atop its monster-truck tires as it slammed into him – after he ran the red light.
The good news, I suppose you could say, was that Dr Emil Hawthorne woke at all. The bad news was that he woke up to the fact that his medical license had been revoked and his fully restored, 1963 classic Corvette, that he'd been driving during the accident, had been totaled, long ago having been smashed flat at the junk yard. His penthouse apartment on Chicago's Michigan Avenue had been sold, along with his very small Cézanne, his Shaker sideboard, the antique Oriental rug in his den and anything else of value; all in order to pay for the exorbitant medical bills produced by eight years of a coma. Everything else had been either sold at a garage sale or given to Good Will.
When Dr Emil Hawthorne woke up that morning, he owned exactly nothing; even the gown covering his body belonged to the hospital.
The one thing he did own, as those in his former profession would say, was his anger. The anger that had led him to the high-speed romp that ended in his current situation. The anger those eight years in a coma could not sway. The anger directed at one person, and one person alone. His betrayer.
Dr Jean MacDonnell.
That had been six months ago – a very long six months. When you have no further to fall, the only option is up, and Dr Emil Hawthorne was able to pull in a few favors still owed, take advantage of a little guilt here and there, gather up sufficient funds to finance his venture. It wasn't a money-making venture, per se. If he saw a profit, then so be it. The venture was, in and of itself, revenge, plain and simple.
Dr Emil Hawthorne was going to get some of his own back, come hell, high water or a hick sheriff – who just happened to be his betrayer's husband.
PART I
REVENGE
ONE
DALTON PETTIGREW
D
alton Pettigrew was in love. It was the first time since Sally Jeffries in the ninth grade, and he'd never gotten up the courage to speak to her, much less to ask her out. But here he was now, in a three-month-old relationship, and with a girl as pretty as a postcard: golden hair, big blue eyes and a smile so sweet it could take your breath away. Her name was Sarah and she lived in Tulsa. She was kind and gentle, a little bit shy, and Dalton knew in his heart that they would be together forever.
All he had to do was to actually meet her.
Dalton knew that people – mainly his boss, Sheriff Milt Kovak – thought of him as kind of stupid, but he wasn't really. Dalton just didn't have a lot of confidence, which is why he asked so many questions. He just wanted to make sure that he had everything absolutely straight in his head before he attempted something. He didn't like making mistakes, and if asking a lot of what people called ‘fool questions' kept him from making mistakes, then so be it. ‘Better to look a fool than be a fool,' his mama always said. And in Dalton's line of work, a mistake could cost somebody his life. A few years back Dalton had done something that made him a hero in the eyes of the town, and he'd gloried in that – but not for long. As his mama often said, ‘The real question is: what have you done lately?' Meaning: Don't rely on the praise of past glories; nobody'll remember them, except for you.
Not being stupid, Dalton hadn't told anyone – not even his mama – about Sarah. He'd told a friend back in the ninth grade about Sally Jeffries, and it had gotten all over school and made him look a fool. ‘Better to look a fool than be a fool' always ended with his mama adding, ‘But never look a fool if you can help it.' So he emailed Sarah every night, sometimes three or four times if she kept answering him, from the privacy of his bedroom computer. Sometimes they'd IM each other, just like having a phone conversation, except without awkward silences or stuttered words on his part.
But now Sarah wanted to meet him. Wanted him to come to Tulsa. Just the thought made his palms sweat and ears ring. What if she didn't like him? She said she thought he was handsome in his picture, but that only showed his face, with his gray-green eyes, blond hair in standard military cut and lopsided smile with one dimple. He always thought that one dimple and the crooked smile made him look a little stupid, but she had said she thought he looked handsome. But what if she didn't realize he was a ‘big old boy'? Maybe she didn't like 'em real tall or real big. Not that Dalton was fat: most of it was muscle, but sometimes that put off some girls. Or so his mama said.
Sarah – what a sweet, old-fashioned name. He thought it went well with her picture. In it, she wore a pale pink sweater set and a strand of pearls, her hair to her shoulders and slightly flipped out at the ends. No piercings, no tattoos. They'd talked about that, and she'd been adamant that it was a sacrilege to deface one's body in such a way. ‘Your body is your temple,' she'd written, ‘created by God in his image. Would you stick holes in God? Put a picture of a butterfly on God?'
Dalton had agreed with her 100 per cent. He wasn't a particularly religious person, although he went with his mama to the Church of Christ every Sunday. He mostly daydreamed or slept during the sermon, and he hadn't read the Bible since he was a boy. But he agreed that piercing or tattooing one's body was somehow offensive to God.
Dalton very much wanted to meet Sarah, but he wanted that part to be over. He wanted them to just move on to the part where they loved each other and wanted to get married and have babies. At thirty-four, Dalton was definitely ready for that part of his life to begin. He was tired of just being ‘Uncle Dalton' to his sister's three kids and his brother's four. He wanted his own. And he wanted Sarah.
In his daydreams, he saw Sarah in their kitchen, all white and yellow, with her in that pink sweater set, feeding their baby at the kitchen table, the baby – a boy, of course – in his high chair, laughing and gurgling as his mama spooned in the food. In his daydreams, Dalton stood watching them, a smile on his face, content with his lot in life. Sometimes he saw the two of them, he and Sarah, at the zoo in Tulsa on a Sunday: Sarah with a little girl in a stroller, he with his son riding on his shoulders. They were laughing and pointing at the animals; the children excited, and he and Sarah looking on with good-humored indulgence.
One of his favorite daydreams was being in Sheriff Kovak's backyard, with the sheriff's young son Johnny Mac teaching Dalton's boy how to throw a ball, and Sarah and Jean talking women's talk, Dalton's baby girl sitting on his lap as he listened to the sheriff talk about this or that as he barbecued steaks for the grown-ups and hot dogs for the kids. This could be Dalton's life.
If he'd just go to Tulsa and meet Sarah.
MILT KOVAK
If somebody ever suggests to you to move to a small town and run for sheriff, shoot 'em. It's not the glory job you might think. I was sitting in my office writing out a report to the county commissioners on why I thought it would be a good thing to have a traffic light on the corner of Mitchem Road and Highway-5. The fact that we've had fourteen accidents there in the past ten years wasn't enough to sway them, since not one was a fatality.
It was three o'clock in the afternoon and it had not been a good day. Hell, it was Friday, and it hadn't been a good
week
. In the wee hours of Monday morning, Dale Davies got his foot stuck in a culvert grate over on Hayes Street and was too drunk to figure out how to get it out and just started screaming. Now, Dale lives on Hayes Street and it woulda been all right if Marlene, Dale's wife, had been the first one to hear him screaming, but that wasn't the case. Four other households on Hayes Street heard him before Marlene – who'd been up late watching Dave Letterman – even woke up. Three of those other households were on to the sheriff's department right away; the fourth, having just moved to Hayes Street from inside the city limits of Longbranch and not remembering they were in the county now, called the police department.
Anthony Dobbins, Prophesy County's first and only African-American deputy, was first on the scene, but then he got into a jurisdictional dispute with Vern Neuman, the police officer on call for the city. Now, Vern's not a card-carrying member of the Ku Klux Klan or anything like that, but he's not what you'd call enlightened either. He made a rude remark to Anthony, who made a rude remark back; all the time both of 'em forgetting poor old Dale Davies, whose foot was still stuck in the culvert grate and was still screaming fit to beat the band. So the three households who'd called the sheriff's department, and the one household who'd called the police department, all hit redial and eventually me and Charlie Smith, the Longbranch Police Chief, had to get out of our separate beds, pull on our separate britches and go the hell down to Hayes Street and figure out the mess.
BOOK: Rude Awakening
2.54Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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