The Devil's Right Hand - J. D. Rhoades [42]
Keller heard Marie reenter the room. He continued looking at the pictures. “This your dad?” he said over his shoulder, pointing at the picture of her with the gray-haired man.
“Yeah,” she said around a hair clip held in her teeth as she pinned her hair up.
“He was a cop, too.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Thirty years. He’s retired now.”
Keller turned around. Marie had changed into a baggy sweatshirt and a pair of running shorts. Her face was drawn and pale and there were dark circles under her eyes.
“Where you from?” he asked.
“Portland, Oregon,” she said.
“Miss it?”
She shrugged. “Sometimes.”
Keller gestured back at the picture. “Bet your dad loved the idea of his little girl joining the force.”
“I’m not a little..” she began, then caught herself and grinned. “Sorry. Conditioned reflex. But yeah, he nearly had a stroke. He got over it.”
He looked again at the picture of Marie in her class-A’s. He noticed another, smaller frame hanging next to it. Instead of a photograph, the frame held a small badge. It was a wreath surrounding an iron cross with a target in the center of it.
“Expert rifleman,” he said. “Impressive.”
“Thanks,” she said. “Dad always wanted a boy to take hunting with him, but he only got daughters. So he taught me to shoot.” She grimaced. “For all the good it did me. I ended up in the MP’s. Germany.” she walked back over to the easy chair and sat down. Keller tried not to stare at her legs. “You were in Saudi, I hear.”
“Yeah. And points north.”
She smiled a little sadly. “Closest I ever got to a war was directing traffic at Oktoberfest.”
“You were lucky,” he said. She looked strangely at him and he realized that he had spoken with a bit more heat than he had intended. He looked back at the wall. “Cute kid.”
“Thanks,” she said. “He’s with his grandparents for the weekend.”
“Not with your ex?”
Her lips tightened. “You didn’t come here to talk about my kid.”
“Right.” Keller sat down on the couch.
“You said I didn’t have to go quietly,” she said. “What did you mean?” she said.
“Has anyone come to you and actually said, 'keep your mouth shut, let it blow over, and we’ll take care of you'?’”
She shook her head and looked at the floor. “No.”
“They need someone to blame for Wesson getting killed. Good cops don’t let punks like DeWayne Puryear gun them down.”
Her voice was bitter. “Good cops don’t let punks take their guns away, either.”
“You didn’t want to get close to him. You tried to argue Wesson out of it. He pulled rank. He did it to show me he was the boss and if I said black, he could say white and that was that. If he hadn’t let that blind him, you wouldn’t have gotten near enough to Puryear for him to have been able to get your gun.”
She shrugged. “So?”
“So right now, Wesson’s being treated like a goddamn hero and a good cop can’t even get the time of day from the people who are supposed to be her backup. I don’t like it. I bet you don’t either.”
“How do you know so much about it?”
“Like I said. I’ve been there. I’ve had the people I trusted to be watching my back turn on me.”
She stood up suddenly. “I need a drink,” she said. “You want one?”
“Yeah, okay,” Keller said. “Whatever you’ve got.”
She went into the kitchen and came back with a pair of rock glasses half-filled with ice and a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s. She set the glasses on the coffee table in front of Keller and poured each one half-full. Keller noticed that her hand shook slightly as she poured. She sat back down in the recliner and drained off half of her glass before Keller had gotten his to his lips. He took a sip. Marie raised the glass again and he heard the edge of it rattle against her teeth as her hand shook again. He set his glass down.
“It’s not going to help,” he said.
She looked at him. He could see the whites