The Territory (Josie Gray Mysteries #1)(15)
“I’m living in West Texas. You still in the old house?” Josie asked.
“It’s falling in around me, but I’m still here. Nowhere else to go.”
Josie’s mom lived in a small bungalow with a postage stamp–sized lot. Josie figured she had done little to maintain the house, and if she didn’t currently have a man around to take care of her, she was in trouble, either physically or financially.
“I’ve been looking for my long-lost daughter for years. I finally tracked you down, and I aim to visit. That’s why I’m calling.”
Her words slurred together, and Josie could only hope her mother would lose the phone number before she was sober enough to use it again.
“How about Aunt Jean? Is she still in town?”
“Nope. She got married and moved to Florida.”
Beverly gave a rambling update on the few distant family members she still spoke to.
“Are you working anywhere?” Josie asked.
There was silence.
Josie’s mother had no pride. She was a pro at manipulating men: neighbors, teachers, preachers, gas station attendants, anyone who could help her through her current predicament. In her prime, she had been a good-looking woman who could fabricate charm or despair at will. While Josie was growing up, life in their Indiana town was built on lies and deceit: her mother did whatever was necessary, aside from a nine-to-five job, to get food on the table and the rent paid before the eviction notice arrived in the mail. Josie wondered, with her mother turning fifty-five, if she struggled now to stay afloat.
“There’s no work to be had. Jobs are all dried up. You got work out there an old woman could get?”
Josie’s stomach knotted. “Unemployment’s worse out here. There’s no work to find.”
“You going to invite me down for a visit, or do I have to invite myself?”
She hesitated, tried to come up with a decent excuse, and gave up. “Now isn’t a great time.”
“You don’t visit in how long? Now you can’t be bothered to see me when I need you?” Her words were getting louder.
“You know it will end in a fight. You might as well save yourself the money and the grief.”
“You don’t want to invite me? That’s fine, Josie Jean. But you are my daughter, and I aim to find you. I got the area code. How hard can it be to track down a policewoman named Josie Gray in Texas?”
The line went dead.
*
Josie woke with a terrible headache brought on by sleeping pills that hadn’t done their job and bourbon that had made the room spin. She stumbled out of bed to shut off the second alarm clock on the dresser and cursed all the way to the shower. She put her uniform on and, at the small table in her kitchen, doused a bowl of canned fruit cocktail with Tabasco sauce. An old Mexican man told her years ago that hot sauce for breakfast burned off the toxins from alcohol the night before, and she had bought into the theory. She had begun to crave the burn in the small of her stomach, and while she figured her stomach lining was disintegrating, she didn’t care enough to change her habits.
The fifteen-minute drive to Artemis did not improve her mood. The traffic, normally nonexistent in the dead-end border town, was backed up at the one stoplight. A small group of people was gathered around the ten-foot-high set of bleachers in back of the courthouse. Mayor Moss had them erected when he came to office ten years ago. He liked to gather community members once a month for a Rally Round the Square. It was his opportunity to boast about his service and ensure reelection. Roughly twenty people had gathered this morning, and Josie wondered what Moss had done to gather a group so quickly and so early. She watched him approach the bleachers holding a portable microphone.
Josie parked her car in the chief’s reserved spot in front of the Artemis Police Department. She started to head inside to tell Dispatcher Lou Hagerty that she would be a few minutes late until she saw Lou walking across the road to stand with the crowd.
Josie spotted Sheriff Martínez’s brown sheriff’s uniform standing twenty feet away from the bleachers and the gathering townspeople, and she walked over to stand beside him. “What’s going on?”
He turned to face her, and she noticed a light stubble of beard on his jaw and the bags under his eyes. He had black hair and a mustache and what Josie thought of as cop’s eyes.
“How the hell should I know? We’re just supposed to protect this town. Why should Moss bother to fill us in?”
They turned to watch the mayor’s performance. Moss wore Wrangler jeans, a plaid shirt, bolo tie, and fancy stitched cowboy boots that had cost a good seven hundred dollars and would never see a field or a cow.
For the next thirty minutes, the mayor discussed the horrors of the day prior and the fact that he was organizing an investigative team to tackle the problems on the border, as if what they were facing could be reduced to a checklist, a prioritized to-do list. Josie felt her neck and face flush hot with anger.
“You know anything about this team?” Martínez asked Josie.
“Nothing.”
“In closing,” Moss was saying, “I want each and every one of you to rest assured that I will do everything humanly possible to stop these criminals from further terrorizing our town. This will stop on my watch.”
There was a smattering of polite applause, and then a few pockets of people formed to rehash the speech before rushing to work. Old Man Collier appeared out of nowhere, his face puckered, and planted himself in front of Josie. He craned his neck up in an awkward position and stooped so far forward that his head barely reached Josie’s chest.