Emmy didn’t look for Tommy. She looked for her father. She easily spotted Gerald. He was standing about ten yards away, his head meerkatting above the crowd. Someone was talking to him. Or at least trying to. Gerald Clifton didn’t speak unless he felt something was worth saying. Even at home, he preferred to let Myrna fill the silence.
She took off her hat again, hoping to feel the slightest breeze coming off the lake. Her phone buzzed in her pocket. Probably another cousin asking for a third secret dinner or her crazy aunt reporting a raccoon for vagrancy.
As Emmy got closer to her father, she realized that he wasn’t paying attention to the man standing right in front of him. He was looking at Emmy. Their eyes locked. Something was wrong. His cop radar was so much better than hers, but she felt it now, that electrical current in the air that made the fine hairs on the back of her neck stand up.
The tickle.
Emmy called it a bad feeling. She’d heard other cops refer to it as a hunch or, instinct or, if the officer was a woman, intuition. No matter the name, what it meant was that either something really bad had happened or something really bad was about to happen.
She cut through a group of stragglers, clicking the radio mic on her shoulder. “Brett, check in?”
“Check.” Brett’s voice crackled through the static. “I’m on Long Street. Truck rear-ended a Prius. Prius smacked into a telephone pole. Road’s blocked both ways. Tow’s twenty minutes out. ’Sup?”
Emmy didn’t think a traffic accident a quarter mile away was responsible for her bad feeling. She started to ask, “Can you—”
Gerald gently took the mic out of her hand. He held it to his mouth, pressed the button. “Call in backup for the accident. Meet us on the upper lot. Eyes peeled. Right?”
There was a hiss of static, then Brett responded, “Yes, Boss.”
Gerald handed Emmy back the mic. They didn’t need a big discussion because you didn’t talk about a bad feeling, you checked it out, and if you were wrong, you were relieved, but if you were right, the feeling put you where you needed to be.
Emmy clipped the mic back onto her shoulder and followed Gerald up the hill. People moved out of his way, but not only because he was the sheriff. Her father was a big man, six feet two inches, and carrying more weight than he should around his middle. His breathing was labored by the time they passed the empty bleachers and climbed the concrete stairs. Emmy had to look down so that she didn’t step on the back of his shoes. He wasn’t on duty, but he still had the bearing of a cop, even in a pair of old Keds with black ankle socks, gray nylon coach’s shorts, and a faded black T-shirt from a 2005 Reba McEntire concert.
Gerald didn’t stop to catch his breath until they’d reached the top of the stairs. Emmy scanned the parking lot, her head swiveling in tandem with her father’s. Cars were angled like toothpicks thrown onto the asphalt. She could see brake lights glowing, people hanging out of car windows, hands being thrown up in the air. The tension was so tight that she felt it in her back teeth.
Gerald looked down at her. “DFR?”
Emmy nodded. “Yep.”
Don’t Feel Right.
Gerald left the sidewalk. Emmy followed him down the first row, which was like an obstacle course packed with stopped cars and irritated drivers. She silently checked in with her body, tried to keep her heartbeat steady and her mind clear. Policing was about weighing the odds, and the odds of something horrific like a mass shooting were very low. They were more likely to come up on another fender bender or a squabble over who got to merge first.
“Sheriff?” Sylvia Wrigley, the editor of the local paper, was standing with her car door open. “What’s going on?”
Gerald held up his finger, telling her to give him a minute, as he threaded his way between vehicles. They spotted the problem soon enough.
Emmy felt the tension leave her body like water swirling down a drain.
Last month, the fence around the soccer pitch had been taken down so that the field could be sodded with fresh grass. Several rows of yellow caution tape had been strung up to keep people off the new sod until the roots took hold, but apparently, the driver of a red Miata had decided to ignore the warning. Or tried to, at least. The low-slung sports car had wound up stuck mid-teetertotter on the steep concrete curb. The front end jutted into the air like the bow of the Titanic.
“Jackass,” Emmy mumbled. She recognized Lance Culpepper’s car. He worked as a clerk at the courthouse. He should’ve known better.
Emmy looked up at her father, but Gerald wasn’t interested in the Miata. He was staring out into the field. Emmy squinted, trying to force her eyes to adjust. Lance hadn’t been the first genius looking for a shortcut to the main road. A white Chevy Equinox was stopped in the middle of the pitch, sidelong to the parking lot, all four doors closed, windows up, lights off. The tension swirled back up. Her cop brain spun through with worst-case scenarios— Mass shooter, domestic violence, road rage, murder-suicide.
Emmy unsnapped the safety strap over her Glock. She slipped the heavy flashlight off her belt and rested it on her shoulder. The reach of the parking lot lights stopped shy of the penalty line. Her police-issue Maglite had four D-cell batteries that put out 800 lumens, enough to show them the path to midfield. The glass in the SUV was tinted dark. From this distance, there was no way to tell who was inside.
