Wrecked (Josie Gray Mysteries #3)
Tricia Fields
It is very hard to live with silence. The real silence is death and this is terrible. To approach this silence, it is necessary to journey to the desert. You do not go to the desert to find identity, but to lose it, to lose your personality, to be anonymous. You make yourself void. You become silence. You become more silent than the silence around you. And then something extraordinary happens: you hear silence speak.
—EDMOND JABèS
ONE
Peering out her sidelight window, unnoticed by her boss, Josie tried to imagine what could possess him to visit her at home at 6:30 A.M., over an hour before her shift started. Josie checked the safety on her Beretta with her thumb and tucked the gun into the back of her uniform pants.
Mayor Steve Moss knocked again on Josie’s door, looking as if he’d rather be anywhere else in the world but on her front porch.
Under normal circumstances, if Moss wanted her assistance he would have called and summoned her to his office: he would have never given up home-turf advantage. Their mutual distrust had started long before Josie’s appointment to chief of police six years ago, and their animosity for each other had only grown.
“Dammit.” Her bloodhound sniffed at the door and whined softly at the early morning intrusion. Josie snapped her fingers so Chester would lie down and then opened the front door. “Morning, Mayor. Come in.” She pushed the screen door open and stepped back.
He cleared his throat, took off his cowboy hat, and stepped inside. The mayor would have been a couple of inches shorter than Josie, who was a trim five foot seven, but he wore custom cowboy boots with three-inch heels that put him at eye level. He was built like a bulldog, with wide shoulders and narrow hips, but Josie noticed he’d begun to add some weight around his midsection as well. Top-heavy was the term that came to mind.
Standing uncomfortably close to him in the small entryway, Josie motioned toward the living room.
“I know you have to get to work. Just need a minute. Off the record,” he said as he took a seat on the edge of the couch.
As she pushed back the room’s curtains to let in the bright morning sun, Josie knew her wariness at the early morning visit was going to be justified. She imagined off the record probably meant off the books. She was inclined to tell him they should move the conversation to the police department, but she was a firm believer in choosing one’s battles, and it wasn’t yet clear if this was one.
Looking around the cream-colored room, anywhere but at her, the mayor pointed to a large red and black wool rug that hung on one of the stucco walls. “That Navajo?” he asked.
Josie took a seat on the bench below the window and smiled. “No, but it’s a good fake.”
He nodded, his expression unchanging.
As the chief of police in a small town, Josie knew how difficult it was to approach a local officer. Family turmoil was hard enough without getting the cops involved. In the heat of a late-night domestic dispute, intimate details were often shared with the police: violence, bankruptcy filings, late child support, papers served, and on and on. Regret came the next morning like a bad hangover. As a kid, Josie had weathered the humiliation of a mother too occupied by the grief of her husband’s death to worry about raising a child. Josie had watched the cops enter her home on several occasions, trying to straighten out the problems her mother had created but couldn’t solve. As much as she disliked the mayor, she realized how difficult it was for him to approach her, and she stayed quiet.
The mayor leaned his forearms on his knees and stared down at his clasped hands. “I heard through a reliable source that Roxanne Spar went to Officer Cruz last night and filed a complaint.”
Roxanne was a thirty-something waitress at Mickey’s Bar and Grill who dressed like a hooker, but her sharp tongue and short temper typically kept potential gropers at arm’s length. Roxanne had also taken on a second job this past year at Whistler’s Pub in nearby Marfa, which Josie had heard through the grapevine was the mayor’s weekend spot.
“About what?” Josie kept her voice level, free of judgment, though she already suspected sex was involved.
“She says I’m harassing her. Stalking her, for god’s sake! The whole thing is ridiculous.” His voice got louder.
In his midforties, Moss still had a thick head of brown hair, and he ran his hands through it when under stress. Josie watched him as he did it now. She hadn’t remembered such deep-set wrinkles around his eyes and the corners of his mouth. His eyes were puffy and red and he looked as if he hadn’t slept well in days. She wondered if his wife figured into the drama. Rumors floated around town that she was ready to take her money and move on to a more lucrative investment.
“Why don’t you tell me how all of this got started?”
“It started with me trying to do the lady a favor.” He sighed heavily. Josie couldn’t help feeling that his reticence was part of a calculated act.
“I went to Marfa last week with some guys to celebrate Joey Gunther’s birthday,” he finally went on. “You know him?”
She tilted her head. “Vaguely. I know who he is.”
“There were eight of us. We went to Whistler’s Pub. That old-man dive bar in downtown Marfa?”
She nodded. She had visited Whistler’s to interview the bartender for an investigation about a year ago: dimly lit, sticky floor, tired waitresses, and a jaded bartender. She figured Roxanne had been hired to breathe some life into the place, and it sounded like she had.