Chapter 8 - The Price of Treason
Richard looked at his wife kneeling in the mud, then looked back at me.
His eyes hardened into something feral. The desperation of a man who sees the prison cell or the grave waiting for him stripped away the last shred of his humanity. He gripped the iron crowbar with both hands, his knuckles turning white as he shifted his weight onto his back foot.
"You aren't going to shoot me, Clara," he whispered, his voice shaking with a terrifying, ragged certainty. "You’re an old man's girl. You read books at the library. You plant flowers. You don't have the stomach to pull that trigger. You give me that deed box, or I will take it out of your hands and leave you in that cellar until your skin turns grey."
He lunged.
He didn't take two steps.
I pulled the Colt .38 from the flannel pocket and fired once into the oak sill two inches to the left of his front boot.
The roar of the revolver in the enclosed, narrow mudroom was deafening—a hammer blow of sound that shattered the glass in the exterior door and filled the hallway with the sharp, sulfuric stench of burnt powder and vaporized lead. A shower of oak splinters exploded across Richard’s trousers.
Richard screamed—a high, womanish shriek of pure, unadulterated terror—and dropped the iron crowbar. He fell backward onto his hands and knees in the doorway, scrambling across the wet porch boards like a crab, his ears ringing, his face spattered with grey dust.
Mom threw herself flat against the floor, her hands covering her head, wailing in hysterical, incoherent screams that sounded like a dying animal.
Buster surged past me, eighty pounds of muscle and teeth, his jaws snapping three inches from Richard’s face, his barking deep, concussive, and merciless.
"Get up," I said.
My voice wasn't loud, but it cut through the hound's barking and the ringing in their ears with absolute clarity. The barrel of the revolver was smoking faintly, steady as an iron bar in my grip, leveled directly at the center of Richard Sterling’s chest.
"Get up, Richard. Both of you."
Richard scrambled to his feet, his hands raised in the air, his trousers wet where he had lost control of his bladder in the dirt. He was shaking so violently his teeth clicked together like dice in a cup. "Don't... don't shoot! God, Clara, don't shoot! We're leaving! We're leaving right now!"
"You're not leaving through the orchard," I said. "You're walking out the front door, down the gravel lane, all the way to the state road."
"My car... our car is down by the hay barn!" Mom sobbed, pulling herself up by the doorframe, her face gray, her hair plastered to her skull by the rain.
"Your car is on my land," I told her. "And as of right now, it is being impounded as evidence in a felony burglary."
I didn't have to call anyone.
Through the broken window, the blue and red lights of Deputy Miller’s cruiser were already sweeping across the front pasture, reflecting off the wet trunks of the sugar maples. Behind him came the heavy halogen spotlights of Pete Holloway’s logging truck, cutting through the rain like two white spears.
The sound of the gunshot had carried across the valley. In Blackwood County, a shot fired after dark didn't go unnoticed; it brought every neighbor within three miles out of their kitchens with their boots laced and their engines running.
By the time Deputy Miller stepped onto the front porch with his service pistol drawn, Richard and Evelyn Sterling were standing in the middle of the driveway, their hands above their heads, illuminated by fifty thousand candlepower of truck headlights.
Pete Holloway and his two sons climbed out of their cab, their shotguns held loosely across their chests, their faces dark and unreadable.
"You folks just don't know when you aren't wanted, do you?" Pete said, his voice flat as a spade.
Deputy Miller didn't ask questions. He pushed Richard against the hood of the patrol car with a professional, practiced efficiency that told me he had done this a hundred times. The handcuffs clicked shut around Richard’s wrists with two sharp, metallic snaps.
"Richard Sterling," Deputy Miller recited into the rain, his voice calm and rhythmic. "You are under arrest for first-degree attempted burglary, criminal trespass, and violation of an emergency protective injunction."
"She shot at me!" Richard screamed, twisting his neck against the cold hood of the cruiser, spitting rain and gravel. "The crazy bitch tried to murder me! Look at the porch! The bullet is in the floor! Arrest her!"
Deputy Miller didn't even look back at the porch. He pulled Richard’s wallet from his coat, checked the driver’s license, and tossed it onto the dashboard. "Miss Cole discharged a firearm inside her own home while defending herself against an intruder carrying a burglary tool. In this county, Richard, that’s not a crime. That’s just good sense."
Mom collapsed onto the wet gravel by the front bumper, weeping into her hands as the rain soaked through her ruined cashmere. "Please... somebody call Chloe... she’s at the motel in town... she doesn't know where we are..."
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"Miss Chloe Sterling has already checked out of the Oak Creek Motor Lodge, ma'am," Marcus Reed said, stepping out from the passenger side of Arthur Vance’s Buick, which had just pulled into the circle. He adjusted his raincoat, holding a carbon-copy document in a plastic sleeve. "She took the commercial bus to Chicago forty minutes ago. She used your emergency corporate card to buy the ticket. The clerk said she had three matching leather suitcases and told him she was never coming back to this filthy county."
Mom looked up, the rain washing the last of her vanity into the gravel, her eyes wide, empty, and completely broken.
