Garrett Mason, the Bison’s safety and one of the biggest players on the team by a wide margin, took the halfback down at the waist. The slap of the two players colliding set Clark’s teeth on edge. The play had been a very long, very illegal flying tackle, and as the Rattichville halfback struggled to his feet, his body shaking as he held in a retch, Clark was certain the Bison had just earned themselves a penalty.
From somewhere behind her, she heard an odd scraping noise. Heard it again: a rustle, a hush. There, in the dark, she saw a man shuffle between two trucks, his crooked left foot trailing through the gravel behind him like a dead dog on a short leash.
“Do my eyes deceive me,” Clark said softly. “Or is Mr. Ovelle back in town?”
The deputies turned. Jason Ovelle, the man in the shadows, had been a miscreant since before he’d crossed the graduation stage of Bentley High, a few steps ahead of Clark herself. Unaware he was being watched, the man tugged on a truck’s door handle.
“And he brought some burglary with him.” Browder smiled.
Clark stubbed her half-smoked cigarette on the fence rail and tucked it behind her ear. She would have to be a cop tonight after all.
Ovelle, apparently still oblivious to their attention, limped into the shadows as the officers made their way across the parking lot—a galling cheer rose from the stands the moment they turned away, of course—but as Clark drew near she spotted the man digging beneath the seat of KT Staler’s rusted Tacoma. She started to run.
Ovelle froze at the sound, turned his head slowly to face her. He made no effort to escape.
“Evening, Officer.” He smiled. “Those boys is something, ain’t they?”
“They are indeed. Why ain’t you watching the game with us, Jason?”
The last decade had not been kind to Ovelle. A milky scar ran from his brow to the crown of his buzzed scalp. He was skinny, almost frail, and he stood with a permanent stoop. According to one story, an angry con had taken a folding chair to Jason’s ankle when he was serving a dime up in Huntsville on drug charges, but there was no telling if this was the truth. Jason had the sort of reputation that attracted stories the way a wound attracts flies.
He made a show of patting his pockets and turned back to KT Staler’s open Tacoma. “I would enjoy it, Clark, ma’am,” Jason said. “But I’m a little short. These bag boys owe me, see, and I—”
This was quite strange. Jason was a fuckup, a small-time hood, but Clark had never seen him do something so brazen as rooting through the door well of a star Bison player in plain view of an officer. She wondered what sort of wolf was pawing at his door tonight.
And then she saw the weapon on his hip: a nasty-looking hunting knife, a good eight inches long.
Clark’s hand hovered over her gun. Another cheer rose up from the field, the marching band boomed to life: the half had ended. If she and the other officers didn’t hurry they were about to have an audience, and God help them then. The men that ran Bentley could not abide a single joule of the spotlight being stolen from their Bison on a Friday night.
“Let’s talk about this at the station, eh, Jason?” Clark said.
“The station?” Ovelle stared at her, horror in his eyes. “But they’d kill me if I went to the station. I ain’t even supposed to be here.”
“No, you surely ain’t.” She nodded at the Tacoma. “We would normally consider this breaking and entering.”
Panic fell over Jason’s face. He finally made to dash past Clark, his bad foot throwing up a little cloud of dust in his wake, but the moment he was within reach she tossed him against the rusted hood of the Tacoma. The air flew from his gut with a soft pfft. Clark pinned his wrists against his shoulder blades, slid the knife from his belt, tossed it in the grass. “That’s enough now.” She shushed him like she would a child.
“You’ve killed me, Clark.” Jason gasped. “You’ve killed me.”
“Wrists, Jason. Please.”
Officer Jones appeared from the other side of the Tacoma and picked up the knife, glanced at the rust on its serrated edge, shook his head. “You alright?”
Browder appeared from behind a Jeep. “Audience incoming.”
Sure enough, there was a rumble of voices in the parking lot. Clark clicked home the second cuff.
“You’re as bad as your brother,” Jason whispered.
Clark went cold. She felt a sudden urge to slam the man into the truck again. “What did you just say?”
Deputy Jones patted her shoulder. “Want me to book him?” he asked her.
Her mind shifted gears. With the sheriff’s department’s small staff the general rule with booking paperwork was you caught it, you clean it.
“You’ll miss the second half,” Clark said.
Jones shrugged and slid the knife’s sheath off Jason’s belt. He squeezed Jason’s scrawny arm until the little man yelped in pain. Jones’s flat face didn’t register the sound. “I seen enough of these games.”
Clark hesitated, but only for a moment. Whatever Jason had to say about her brother she could pry out of him at the station. She thanked Jones. She let go of Jason’s arm.
When she and the two other deputies stepped into the glare of the parking lot’s sodium lamps they were greeted with polite applause. A small crowd—housewives in baggy Bison T-shirts, men under ball caps and Stetsons—watched as Jason was loaded, shouting and cursing, into the back of Jones’s cruiser. Clark wore her most stoic face.
You’re as bad as your brother.
Pulling the dented cigarette from behind her ear, Clark finally regarded her audience. She saw that their faces were turned not toward Jones’s departing police cruiser but to something over her shoulder. A little charge of anticipation still hung in the air, as if everyone were expecting some kind of encore.
She spotted the black convertible first, a sleek little Mustang she had never seen around town. A man stood next to it, watching her. He was implacably urban: tall, well built, sharply dressed in dark clothes of the sort no one in Bentley ever wore.
Clark recognized the man’s bashful smile. Only one man in her life had ever smiled at her that way.
Her lighter froze on its way to the cigarette. “Son of a bitch.”
JAMAL
Jamal Reynolds, the Bison’s second-string quarterback, followed the rest of the team into the locker room and kept his head down. Deputy Clark might not have remembered the last time Jamal had played in a game but he certainly did. He knew, down to the minute, the total length of time he’d ever had the good fortune to strap on his helmet and step onto the field: forty-six minutes. Forty-six minutes after almost four years on the team. And that number didn’t look likely to go up tonight.