Chapter 11
Paul Madsen Back in his college days, before he hit the academy, Paul Madsen had played defensive end. Having grown up in rural Utah, there wasn't a lot else to do for a boy whose body became the size of a man before his brain caught up, except get into trouble with the law. He'd tried that on occasion, but once he'd found football, he hadn't really needed the adrenaline release of shoplifting anymore. Not only did football give him an outlet for his energy, it also did a great job of feeding his largest addiction: Anger. He'd heard the phrase rageoholic once (in the context of Westboro Baptist Church leader Fred Phelps, as it turned out) and thought that fit him pretty well. Nothing felt quite as sweet, nor as spicy, as an honest-to-god righteous rage. It purified, it consumed the dross of the soul, he always thought. It made him cleaner. Never, in all his years as a police officer and then--after paying his dues, taking his knocks, making his concessions--with his time in the sheriff's office, had Paul Madsen been so angry. He was beyond "seeing red", beyond the throbbing vein in his forehead, beyond wanting to punch something. He wanted to kill. He wanted to grab that prissy son of a bitch and shove his revolver right down Dane's throat and blow the kid's brains out through his stupid-ass manbun. "Paul?" Clawson powered off the phone, which was fine; the image on the screen had said Feedback Error: Please Check Camera for the past minute or two, having gone dark when Dane started firing the gun. They stood at the edge of Huntington Reservoir, on a rock that jutted into the water--the only place with a steady 4G connection--the cold wind whipping across the water doing nothing to cool off Paul's face. "You okay?" "I will be soon." Paul clambered off the rock and began stomping toward the SUV. "Hey! Wait!" Behind him, he could hear Clawson scramble down. Paul didn't care. He groped for his keys, the tackle and rods abandoned. He needed blood; he needed vengeance. Clawson huffed up next to him. "Paul, what do you think you're going to do?" "I'm going to kill him." "You can't." "Did you see what he did to my daughter? To the sheriff's daughter?" Clawson grabbed him, which was the wrong thing to do. Paul shrugged Clawson's hand free, then swung at him, connecting his fist against the rancher's cheekbone. A dull thump echoed through the cold air--nothing loud, nothing as dramatic as what he always saw in movies. Just the sound of flesh smacking into flesh. A flash of pain rippled through his knuckles and into his forearm, but he hadn't punched as hard as he possibly could or anything. And he knew it was stupid to punch a face--mostly bone, with almost as much a chance of hurting himself as injuring Clawson--but he wasn't really interested in thinking things through. Now wasn't the time to sit and navel-gaze; he was a man of action, and act he was going to do. Clawson stumbled backward, but Paul didn't see how he recovered. He had already resumed his trek back to the SUV. The rapid sound of Clawson gaining ground didn't register as an attack until he took the hit. The force of the tackle rocked Paul's head backward painfully, and the air flew from his lungs. Of course, he knew how to land when tackled, how to turn just-so to prevent breaking something. Some tricks became instinct with enough practice: This was one of them. Part of his mind--an old one, dusty from disuse and neglect--flared a moment's rage at the fact that someone had just horse-collar tackled him. As he fell into the gravel, a small flurry of individual pains spiking into him, the shock at being hit and of crunching into the parking area's stone-strewn lot combined to wake him up, if only a bit. Struggling to get up, to get his breath back, the pain helped cut through his fog of rage and pull him into reality. Reality? What was going on? He realized that he was thrashing, kicking up small clouds of dust and stone, grinding his arm and hip into the ground, screeching obscenities in clouds of spittle. Clawson held him tightly, pinning him and keeping him from getting back up. He stopped fighting, though his heart still thundered and his breath never seemed deep enough. "Okay," he said at last, "okay. You can let me go." "Can I really?" "Yeah." He nodded. His throat hurt. Hell, everything hurt. He was too old for this kind of thing. Maybe in his early days as a cop he could have taken a hit like this and bounced back up, but he had expanded his borders, as it were, and though he liked to think there was still a wall of muscle behind the soft exterior, he knew better; he'd be feeling this trip to the ground for the next couple of days. "You sure?" "Yeah." Clawson released him, groaning as he rolled onto his back. Paul pushed himself onto one knee, then looked around. A couple, dressed in fleece jackets and woolen hats, stared at them from a good thirty yards away. "What are you looking at?" Paul snapped at them. The apoplexy of the moment may have left, but that didn't mean residual rage wasn't available. The couple took it as a cue to find a different path to walk romantically down. "The hell was that, man?" "You saw." He grunted as he leveraged his way to his feet. "You saw what happened." "Yeah." "So?" He extended a hand, helping Clawson to his feet. "You think that I'm just going to see that and leave it be?" "Naw," said Clawson, wincing as he dusted himself off. "But you clearly weren't thinking." "Yeah? And you were?" "Not at all. I'd like to smack the kid upside the head for daring to touch my gun." Paul snorted. "Yeah. Sure. That's his great crime." "I didn't say that. I'm mad as hell about what he did to your daughter." Those words sent a spike of anger through Paul, who managed to set aside the rage long enough remember that he didn't need to lose control. After all, he was the authority here, not Clawson, not Dane…him. Sheriff Paul Madsen. He was the authority in this town. Thinking that made him feel slightly better…but only slightly. "But that doesn't mean I think we can go storming in and assaulting it." "I'm within my rights to split his face in half." Clawson held up a hand, as if yielding the point. "When it comes to rights, I'll defer to you, Sheriff." Paul sniffed, then hocked a loogy onto the gravel. "Do you have some sort of plan?" "Plan? Not really. I think we should head back to town, let me get my car, and then we'll go sort this all out." "You're awfully calm." Clawson's voice lowered, and Paul could sense a dangerous edge. "People act differently than how they feel all of the time." He eased himself into the passenger's seat. "Come on. We're burning daylight." Paul took one last glance at Huntington Reservoir. He should probably snag the fishing gear before he left. Who knew when he'd be able to come back for it? After stowing his equipment, he hauled himself into the SUV and fired up the engine. "You're a pissant, did you know that?" he asked as he slammed the gearshift into Drive. "Why? 'Cuz I kept you from doing something stupid?" "You tackled from behind. Only pussies do that." "I'm not particularly fast, Paul," said Clawson, massaging his arm where he'd fallen. "Or as young as I used to be." Paul snorted at that, which effectively ended their conversation as they worked they way out of the canyon and toward civilization. Once they'd reached Fairview, both his and Clawson's phones chirped. They were back within cell range. Paul pulled his out and read the text from his daughter: Where are you? He dropped the phone into the center console and focused on the road. He toyed with the idea of running his lights to get them there quicker, but the two-lane road was essentially empty; he could go as fast as he wanted. "Hi, honey," said Clawson, which struck Paul as strange. He glanced over, then saw that Clawson had put his Bluetooth headset in his ear, the small device glowing a soft blue into the silver streaks of his hair. Paul had always thought that hands-free devices were stupid, but Clawson loved his. "No, we were in the canyon. Where are…Really?" He looked at Paul, who glanced from his friend's slightly worried face to the road in front of him. Twilight was slipping away rapidly by now--it had to do with the damn daylight savings time, always screwing up the time it got dark--and Paul knew better than to be distracted by anything on the roads right now. Deer were known to spontaneously jump out of the scrub oak on the side of the lightless street and throw themselves into the cars. More than one person Paul had personally known had struck a deer at that time of night, and a neighbor of his had been impaled by antlers when the deer's head broke through the windshield and stabbed him in the shoulder. "What?" asked Paul, twitching the wheel a bit to keep the SUV between the mustard and the mayonnaise. "You're almost back to the Lodge? Well, I'm still a ways out. What was that? Yeah, I'm with Paul. Yeah, I'll tell him. Look…I think Dane isn't feeling very good." Clawson paused for a long moment, then said, "Well, he just was acting kind of weird today when Paul stopped by to check on him. No, I've been working with Marshal all day. Yeah, it's fine…not really, no. But, yeah, just…take care, okay? I don't know what's bugging him, necessarily." Paul's peripheral vision caught Clawson grimace. "Yeah, it's a real mystery why your stepson might be acting like a prissy little bitch, isn't it?" he mumbled to himself. It was important to feed the flames of his anger only samples of his true wrath, he knew; he had to keep it kindled, and throwing a swear on the fire was as good a tactic as any. He tightened his grip on the steering wheel, not at all appalled that he wished it were Dane's neck he throttled. Soon. He'd be there soon enough. His foot pressed down a bit more on the accelerator. The landscape blurred by as Clawson fumbled through the final throes of the conversation with his fiancé. Paul entertained dark thoughts and nursed his grudge. It felt good. Before he expected it, the faint-but-familiar outline of Noah grew on the horizon. He glanced down, then immediately eased off the gas; he was going almost a hundred miles an hour. "Damn, man!" said Clawson, stiffening in his seat while checking the seatbelt's clasp. "Good thing you're a cop!" "Yeah, I got a bit distracted," said Paul. He pressed on the brakes until he settled into a safer seventy-five. Technically, that was still ten over the posted, and was asking for a deer to step out into the road and get greased. But they were still a solid fifteen minutes from the Lodge, and he worried about his daughter. He thought of calling her, but before he could reach out and pick up the phone, Clawson said, "You know, you haven't apologized for punching me in the face." "You haven't apologized for grinding me into the dirt." Clawson snorted. "As if they're comparable. I fell down too, you know." It was Paul's turn to snort. "Well, you shouldn't have hit me from behind." Their conversation remained at this level of superficiality until he arrived at Roman Realities, LLC. The light on the outside of the tiny office building was on--as were the lights inside--when Paul pulled into the same parking spot he'd used earlier that day, before they'd headed out to go fishing. And, now that he thought about it, they hadn't even tried to fish. They'd sent his daughter over to the Lodge, then stood on that rock and watched that train wreck of a conversation. For some reason, that pissed him off even more. And that felt good. Clawson popped the door open, turning on the cabin light. Holding it ajar with one hand, he said, "Okay, I'll follow you up to the Lodge. We'll talk to Dane together…" Clawson trailed off as the Roman girl came running around to his side of the car. Paul watched in mute dismay as she said to Clawson, "I'm glad you're here. Dad said that he needed you to see something." "See what?" asked Clawson, his voice sharp. The girl shrugged, then glanced nervously at Paul. He stared back, carefully considering what she looked like beneath her black turtleneck and skinny jeans. A white knit-cap framed her dark hair and the Asian tilt of her eyes was definitely a turn on. "He was trying to call you, but you didn't answer." "I was talking to my fiancé," said Clawson irritably. "All right. I'm here, may as well do what he needs. How long will it take? Hello? Harmony!" The girl had been staring back at Paul's gaze with a mixture of fear and dismay--at least, so far as Paul could tell (and he could usually tell these things; it was part of being a sheriff, reading people was)--and hadn't heard Clawson's call. She shook herself and said, "Um, I'm not sure. Fifteen, twenty minutes." "I'm going to go ahead," said Paul. "If it's all the same to you." Clawson chewed his lip, then nodded. "Yeah. Yeah, go find Gwendolyn. Leave the rest to me." Paul gritted his teeth, but decided that his friend was probably right. Besides, if Paul saw Dane by himself, he'd probably do something that he would only claim to regret. "Okay. I'll call you before you go to bed, tell you what's up." Clawson nodded, then swung himself out of the SUV. He followed Harmony into the office, leaving Paul in the quiet, idling peace of his car. A moment later, he dropped the SUV into reverse, edged out of the parking spot, and then spun his tires as he gunned it onto the main road. He drove up the street that led to the lengthy slalom to the Lodge, blowing past the stop sign next to the school. The likelihood of hitting a deer was higher on this road than on State Road 85, but staring at the Roman girl had given him a horny flash that fed in to his anger. And though he wanted to take it out on Dane, it was better if he could just find his daughter and get her back home. The car made a gentle chiming sound, which drew his attention to the dashboard--and immediately back up to the road. Almost standing on his brakes, Paul's SUV sent up a shriek of rubbery smoke as he forced the SUV to a stop as an entire herd of deer pranced their way across the pavement. Two of them had had to leap to one side just to prevent getting hit. Three, four, five…a grand total of eight deer ran away, their legs flickering tree-like shadows in his headlights. Paul sat with his heart thundering and adrenaline coursing through him. This was different than the anger-adrenaline he'd felt at the Reservoir. This was the realization that he'd almost run over a deer. It fed into his anger, yes, but the stupid animals didn't know how close they'd come to being roadkill. Wiping his face, he eased off the brakes and, at a more temperate pace, headed toward the Lodge. As he neared the house, he scoured the long driveway for any sign of his daughter's car. Gritting his teeth, he rolled on, not bothering to stop. He supposed she could have driven back home--logically, that's where he should have gone. But there was something about thinking that the last time he'd seen her--albeit on a phone's tiny screen--she'd been at the Lodge, that she'd been in danger. It was natural to start there. Pulling off the road, he fished free his cell phone, then swiped until he got to his daughter's number. The phone thought for a moment, then started the call. A few moments later, her voicemail picked up. Grimacing, he punched the End Call spot on the screen and dropped the phone back into the console. Fifty-fifty that she had gone somewhere other than home. She'd just been through a trying experience…maybe she'd wanted to blow off some steam? Paul decided to trust his sheriff's instincts and, since he was already in the foothills, he decided to check some of the places nearby where she could have driven to. With a screech of the abused tires and a flare of pebbles, Paul Madsen pulled back onto the main road and headed toward the mountains. |