Page 4

Emmy pushed open the door to the Porta Potty and sucked in a mouthful of hot, humid air.

Her ears were still ringing. The fireworks display had ended with enough explosions to fill a war zone.

She could smell the gunpowder and sulfur mingling with the stench of acrid sweat and stale alcohol as the revelers began the slow process of gathering blankets and coolers and searching for toddlers and trying to remember where they’d parked.

Flashlights came out. The overhead lights started popping on.

First at the parking lots down by the ballfields.

Then the parking lot at the top of the hill.

Then the lights behind the bleachers. Then down by the lake.

Then the mood shifted as people realized that the Fourth of July falling on a Wednesday meant they all had to get up and go to work tomorrow morning.

“’Night, Emmy,” someone called.

“You take care,” another said.

Emmy forced herself to smile as she snapped the door closed behind her.

In retrospect, hiding out in a piss- and shit-filled plastic box that had baked under a hateful sun for twelve hours hadn’t been one of her better ideas.

It was still better than her idea to trust Jonah Lang to do something as simple as watch their eleven-year-old child.

“I know that look.” Brett Temple was grinning as he twirled his hat between his hands. The back of his neck had pinked up into a classic redneck tan. “What’d he do now?”

“Said he wasn’t gonna babysit Cole.” Brett looked clueless, so she clarified, “It’s not babysitting when it’s your own kid.”

“Seriously.” Vanna, Brett’s smugly pregnant wife, inserted herself into the conversation. Her sweat-stained purple dress sagged across her belly like a fitted sheet at a whorehouse. “You won’t be like that, will you baby?”

Brett looked down at Vanna and lied through his teeth. “’Course not, honey.”

Emmy had to look away while they kissed. She studied the crowd. She felt a niggling guilt for blowing off Madison earlier. The girl had clearly wanted to talk. “Have either of you seen Madison Dalrymple?”

Brett asked, “Which one is she?”

Vanna supplied, “The fat one.”

Emmy felt her jaw set. “She’s not fat.”

“Well, nobody would call her skinny.” Vanna laughed as she ogled Brett like a lovestruck basset hound. “Madison runs around with that filthy-mouthed little hellion, Cheyenne Baker. Remember, you dragged her into the station last week.”

“Cheyenne Baker.” Brett started nodding. “Stole a bag of Hershey’s Kisses from the Good Dollar. She ditched ’em before I got to her, though.”

“Little psychopath was probably lacing them with fentanyl,” Vanna said with great authority. “Might as well send her to prison now. She’s gonna end up there anyway.”

“Hey.” Emmy tried to keep her tone even. “She’s still a kid.”

“A kid with the evil already baked in,” Vanna said.

“I’ll tell you another thing, Hannah’s a saint for putting up with Madison.

She oughtta send her to one of those schools where they snatch the kid in the middle of the night and drop them in a desert somewhere in Utah.

Get her out from under the sphere of dark influences. ”

Emmy was stunned by the casual cruelty. “Hannah loves Madison like a daughter.”

“Which is why she should do it. Tough love.” Vanna rubbed her round belly like her child would never cause trouble. “Lord, I’m about to pop. Emmy, were Cole’s last few weeks this trying for you?”

“Not really. I felt great.” Emmy figured the insomnia, back pain, four cavities in her teeth, and having to carry around an extra pair of pants for when she inevitably pissed herself were a walk in the park compared to dislocating her pelvis, losing two liters of blood and projectile vomiting from the pain during delivery. “I barely even remember it.”

Vanna gave an annoyingly beatific smile. “Babies are a miracle from God.”

“They’re something.”

Brett asked Emmy, “Where’d you see this Madison last? I can help you look for her.”

“No need.” Emmy assumed whatever urgent event had made Madison desperate enough to actually talk had likely passed by now. “I’ll catch up with her later.”

Brett gave her a careful look. Emmy shrugged him off, mostly because they didn’t have the time or resources to handle a fifteen-year-old in a fit of pique.

Hundreds of people were trying to leave at the same time and there was only one road in and out of the park.

The cars up on the hill were squeezed in like sardines.

The two small lots by the baseball diamonds were double parked.

Add to that the heat and alcohol, and the odds were high that someone was going to need a ride to the hospital before their shifts ended.

The time for standing around and talking was over.

She asked Brett, “Which one do you want: traffic cop or referee?”

Brett groaned out a thinking noise. “Traffic. Got punched in the face last time I refereed.”

Vanna pinched his cheek. “You got him back good, didn’t you, baby?”

Emmy ignored the way Vanna cooed at him in a silly, breathy voice.

The woman was only five years younger than Emmy, but she still acted like a teenager.

That would change in a few months when she was operating on zero sleep and Brett was taking double shifts because the risk of being shot during a traffic stop was still better than dealing with a screaming baby.

Emmy told him, “Radio if you need me.”

She stuck her hat back on her head as she walked into the lurching mass of people, heading down the hill while everybody else was trying to go up.

Emmy studied the faces, tried to figure out who’d had too much to drink, who would cause trouble, who needed an escort back to their car, and who was just irritated that it was taking too long to get to the parking lot.

This predictive part of policing was something they couldn’t teach at the academy.

Emmy had been on the job six years and had finally developed a cop’s instinct.

Sometimes it was triggered by a sudden burst of sound or even absolute silence, but most times it was nothing more than a subtle change in the air, a sort of static charge she felt on the surface of her skin that told her something terrible was about to happen.

Her father called it the tickle , and Emmy figured a man who’d served in the sheriff’s office since Eisenhower was in the White House could call it whatever he wanted.

If Emmy knew the town like the back of her hand, her father knew it like the arteries inside of his heart.

Clifton County was in the south-western part of Georgia, with a population of nearly 20,000 people.

Fewer than a thousand of them lived in the county seat of North Falls.

The largest of the four cities was Verona, where the auto parts factory was located.

Ocmulgee was known for its outlet stores along US 19, and Clayville had one of the biggest vocational schools in the state, mainly because it fed skilled labor into the factory.

Both North Falls and Verona were bordered by the Flint River, which started below the Atlanta airport, then flowed through the bottom part of the state into the Florida panhandle, where it eventually drained into the Gulf.

The three larger cities were big enough to have their own police services, but the sixteen-person sheriff’s office serviced North Falls, which made sense.

The courthouse was downtown. Deputies were in charge of the jail and prisoner transport.

They also placed resource officers in the schools, performed patrol duties, assisted with investigations throughout the county, and did crowd control during public events, which was why Emmy and Brett were at the park.

There was a much bigger Fourth celebration on the banks of the Flint, but North Falls had always done its own thing.

The money was here. The people who ran the county were here.

In a region where outsiders were suspect, North Falls had a particular distrust for anything that wasn’t born and bred within the 190-acre city limits of North Falls.

Which was why most of the faces Emmy saw in the crowd were familiar.

From the grocery store from downtown from the gym from the diner from the hair salon in Peggy Ingram’s basement.

Some of them smiled when they saw her. Others scowled.

Then there were the busybodies who stared openly because they’d seen the fight with Jonah and they wanted more gossip.

Emmy looked down at her phone as if she’d just gotten a very important message.

The stupid thing had been vibrating in her pocket for the last hour, but she’d been blissfully ignorant of the goings on.

There were six missed calls from her crazy aunt, most likely complaining about winos swimming in her pond or hobos stealing wild blackberries off her fencerow.

Her cousin Taybee had sent all the girl-cousins a text suggesting a Sunday potluck hosted at her sprawling family farm.

She had written no boys allowed , which had resulted in one cousin immediately accusing her of reverse sexism.

Three cousins had bypassed the potential spat and asked what to bring.

A fourth had privately texted Emmy to say she wasn’t going because she still wasn’t talking to Taybee.

Another cousin had texted privately to suggest an alternative dinner at a restaurant where people waited on you, and nobody had to cook.

And then Taybee had privately texted Emmy to ask if she’d heard about this alternative dinner .

A fat drop of sweat rolled off the tip of her nose and hit the screen.