When Ghosts Come Home(48)



“And I heard he’s an FBI man.”

“You heard right again,” he said. He looked down at Vicki. He had no idea how old she was, but he knew she was past middle age, her chin-length brown hair too dark not to be dyed, the skin around her eyes and lips papery and spiderwebbed with wrinkles from decades of smoking. He’d known her for more than twenty years, knew her husband, Clint, her high school sweetheart. He’d worked over at the munitions depot at Sunny Point before going on disability after a back injury and eventually retiring. Winston knew Vicki’s kids too, one of whom lived in Charlotte and another, a son with kids of his own, who lived here in Brunswick County. Winston’s relationship with her was built on gentle teasing and the unspoken understanding that he needed her to play the role of den mother for him and his deputies and staff, and he, in return, would make her job as easy as possible by always trusting her to run her administrative ship efficiently. She was the keeper of schedules and reports, messages and requests, and all she asked for in return was to be left to her solitary work while being allowed the freedom to rib her boss at any opportunity she could find.

“This is a mess, Sheriff,” she said. She lowered her voice and leaned forward. “We’re lucky the FBI’s taking over.” She smiled again, sat up, went back to shuffling the papers on her desk. “Marie called. She’s looking for you. The way she talked, she might be looking for your pilot too.”

“He’s out at the airport if she needs to get ahold of him,” Winston said. “He’s all hers.”

“How’s she doing?” Vicki asked.

“She’s doing good,” Winston said. “She’s good.”

“Well, let me know if y’all need anything. You know I can bake.”

“I do know that,” Winston said. He smiled. “Any other messages?”

“No, sir,” Vicki said.

Winston tapped on the door frame by way of goodbye, his wedding ring pinging against the metal with a tinny report.

He turned right and walked toward his office, which sat at the end of the hallway past the restrooms, the water fountain, the deputies’ shared offices, and the break room. He unlocked his door and tossed the papers onto his desk, and then he slid his holstered weapon from his belt and hung it from the coatrack. Winston closed his door and sat down at his desk. He looked around his office for a moment, his mind trying to decide exactly where to begin.

On the wall to his left hung a dozen or so framed photographs that Marie had carefully placed not long after he’d moved into the office almost thirteen years ago. There was a photo of him in Korea and another photo of him in his dress blues—his first uniform—just a few years later when he was back in Gastonia and a young, fresh-faced police officer. In the photograph he is standing outside his mother and father’s house, Crowder’s Mountain looming in the background, the canopy of trees above him broken just enough for the slash of sunlight coming through the leaves to cause him to narrow his eyes against the brightness at the exact moment the photograph was taken. In another photograph he is a few years older, wearing a white jacket and black bow tie, standing at a car wash and spraying the shaving cream off the back windshield of his Mercury. Marie, still in her wedding dress, her hair pinned up in an immaculate platinum beehive apparent even in the grainy black-and-white photograph, is sitting in the front seat. Beyond those pictures, there were framed photographs that traced Colleen’s childhood from newborn to high school, her face and eyes appearing the same to Winston in each photograph.

He turned his eyes from the wall of framed pictures to the pile of papers and envelopes on his desk, and he spent an hour or so listening to the muffled sounds of Vicki answering the phone at her desk while he leafed through the reports Glenn and a couple of other deputies had put together, all of them containing detailed accounts of leased storage facilities and rented trucks, vans, and trailers. All the information began to blur together, and Winston knew his exhaustion was affecting his concentration.

Other reports waited on his desk as well: a domestic assault at a trailer home somewhere out in the woods near Winnabow; a stolen car found burned in the woods on Highway 133 by Orton Plantation; a fourteen-year-old boy missing from Shallotte whose parents thought he had run away to Wilmington or Fayetteville.

The phone rang on his desk, and Winston picked it up. The call was from Sheriff Oren Petty, just across the border down in Horry County, South Carolina.

“You sitting down?”

“I sit down when I can,” Winston said.

“Well, I hope you’re sitting down right now.”

“I am.”

“Good,” Petty said, “because I think we found your cargo, some of it anyway.”

Winston leaned forward and picked up a pen and flipped to a clean page in the notebook that sat on his desk. “Go ahead,” he said.

“We just had us a big bust,” Petty said. “It’s a house way out in the county that we’d been watching for a while. We moved on it this morning and found the mother lode.”

“What was it?”

“About twenty kilos of cocaine so far,” Petty said. “They were packaging it up to move.”

“Tell me you found some suspects.”

“Oh, we found plenty of those, Sheriff. Made four arrests so far.”

“And tell me you found some weapons.”

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