Criminal Past

  CRIMINAL PAST

  A HAZARD AND SOMERSET MYSTERY

  GREGORY ASHE

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright 2018 Gregory Ashe

  All Rights Reserved

  THE DORE COUNTY INDEPENDENCE FAIR was already in full swing. At the perimeter of the fairgrounds, the biggest rides hulked: the Octopods, the Flying Kite, the Free-Swings, and the carousel. Then, moving deeper, the complex machinery gave way to shops, where men and women from four surrounding states sold kettle corn and taffy and carved wooden ducks and the same gag t-shirts you could find at any state fair in three hundred miles. At the center, the games of skill and chance marched along the midway. The air smelled like sawdust and cotton candy, and the summer sun hit like an angry hammer. It wasn’t even noon, but Emery Hazard was sweating. And he was, to his own surprise, having a good time.

  In his good arm, Hazard carried Evie. The toddler was a blue mess, a controlled experiment of child and spun sugar that had gone terribly wrong, but she was having a grand time licking at the cottony puff and shrieking with excitement. Her blue, sticky hands left a trail up Hazard’s shirt, across his collar, and along one side of his face, where he’d fallen into the habit of letting scruff grow. Not a beard; a beard wasn’t allowed per department policy. But the scruff came pretty damn close some days.

  At Hazard’s side walked his boyfriend and fellow detective, Evie’s father, John-Henry Somerset. In a linen shirt open at the throat and khaki shorts, Somers looked like a rich boy who might have wandered away from his yacht just long enough to explore the fair. It was a combination of things: golden good looks, mussed hair, and a body like he swam five miles a day. He and Hazard had both grown up in Wahredua, had gone to the same high school, had been in the same classes. But Somers looked comfortable here—out of place, yes, but comfortable. Hazard didn’t know if he’d ever been comfortable in the whole county. He’d only come back to save his career, and although some good had come of it—Somers was the best example of that—this part of the world still carried too many unpleasant memories.

  “I can carry her for a while.”

  It was maybe the hundredth time Somers had said that. Hazard ignored him, adjusting Evie’s weight, wincing at the sugary glue on her fingers as she clutched at his face to balance herself. He’d have to scrub, really goddamn scrub, when he got home. And pour himself a drink, yes. And check the mail.

  He shoved that last thought away. “God, it’s hot.”

  Ahead, at the center of the fair, a children’s section was roped off. Although it wasn’t yet noon, children swarmed the inflatable jungle gyms, the sandboxes, and the trampolines. Already a line snaked away from an electric train as parents and children waited for their turn. Sweat slicked Hazard’s neck, his back, his arm. He shifted Evie again.

  Somers frowned, but at least he didn’t say anything. This time.

  “Here you go,” Hazard said, bending over the ropes to set Evie down inside the children’s section. “Let me just—yep, I’ll take that.” He passed the gooey ball, all that remained of the cotton candy, to Somers, and wiped Evie’s hands and face with a wipe he produced from his pocket. “All right. Go have fun.”

  She stared at him with dark, serious eyes for a moment. She had her mother’s coloring, but the features were all Somers, and she was a beautiful child. Then, turning slowly, she studied her surroundings: a blow-up castle, a padded plastic see-saw, a fort with a pair of slides. Glancing back at the two men, she took a careful step, and then another. She halted.

  “We’ll be right here,” Somers said.

  “Go on,” Hazard said.

  Her caution broke, and she charged towards the blow-up castle.

  “She’s going to get trampled,” Hazard said.

  “Look at you.”

  “I’m just stating a fact, Somers.”

  “But you wouldn’t have said that two months ago.”

  “It’s a statement. It’s obvious.”

  “You wouldn’t have carried wipes in your pocket two months ago.”

  “It was a practical decision. I was tired of being sticky.” He swiped at his own hands, rubbing off the worst of the stick.

  Laughing, Somers took the wipe from him, turned Hazard by the chin, and scrubbed at the cotton candy matting Hazard’s scruff. Then he kissed him. “There. Better.”

  A gagging noise from nearby cut through the crowd’s hum, and then a long, hocking loogie followed. It hit the grass near Hazard’s sneakers.

  The picture of an envelope, a simple white envelope, flashed in Hazard’s mind. Like the envelopes that had started arriving in the mail a few weeks before. Not today. He wasn’t going to think about that today. But it was there anyway, the white rectangle. He blinked, trying to clear the hovering white from his vision.

  “Ignore them,” Somers said. “It’s a beautiful day. It’s a holiday. We’re spending it together as a family, so just ignore them.” And he kissed him again.

  There was that word: family. A few months before, that word would have sheared through Hazard. Now, though, it was like pressing on an old wound. It hurt, but there was almost something pleasurable about the hurt, a kind of satisfaction in how the pain had diminished. Family. Always before, family had been a way of trimming Hazard from something larger. Never in his life had he imagined the word might someday include him, that it might mean proximity and intimacy, that it could mean this tangle of emotion in his gut like a ball of twine he was afraid to unravel. He’d never imagined—literally never, not even in the steamiest fantasies he’d conjured as a teenager—that John-Henry Somerset might form such a permanent part of his life.

  They stood there, two men taking in the scene before them. Along this portion of the midway, games of skill predominated: shooting galleries with bows and arrows; air pellet rifles and air pellet pistols, modified to be safe—or relatively—for the fair; pitching games; ring-toss; even the crane-operator games that occupied the back corners of family restaurants. The air was full of noises, with the shrieks of delighted girls, the war-whoops of a tribe of boys trying to claim the jungle gym, the calliope music, the groan and grind and rattle of the big rides, and all of it mixed with the late morning heat, the cotton clinging to the small of Hazard’s back, the smell of Somers’s sweat, the wafting aroma of turkey legs on a spit.

  They were, in a way, childhood smells. The Dore County Independence Fair was a tradition, and Hazard had experienced it every year until—well, until the cost of being the town faggot outweighed the pleasure of attending the fair. He hadn’t expected to come back here. Maybe he had thought about it, once or twice, when he had been living in Columbia or St. Louis and the Fourth of July rolled around. Maybe he’d thought about it when the fireworks popped, went bright, and the smell of sulfur and black powder and burnt cardboard came in like an invisible tide. But even when he thought about it, he’d never thought he’d be here as part of a couple. He never thought he’d be here as a dad.

  And that was stretching things. Hazard knew that. He knew that Somers was being kind and generous, the way Somers was always kind and generous, by including Hazard in Evie’s life. He knew that, in the normal course of things, with any other guy it would have gone the other way: Evie might have remained on the other side of an invisible barrier, to be seen but not touched, a way of excluding Hazard while maintaining the fiction of togetherness. Not with Somers though. Somers had let his daughter become part of Hazard’s life. And over the last months that fact had gone through Hazard like a world-class thunderstorm: some wo
nderful, beautiful flashes, while the rest was just about the scariest thing he’d ever faced.

  In his head, though, he knew that last part was a lie. He thought about the mailbox, with its little brass door in the mail room. He thought about walking to it today, tonight, his fingers tingling where they gripped the key, breathing the stale cardboard air. He thought about opening the mailbox and seeing another of those envelopes, and he wondered if that was scarier than raising a child. Maybe. Just maybe.

  Somers nudged Hazard out of his thoughts. “Look at that.”

  “You’ve got to be shitting me,” Hazard muttered.

  A few yards down the ropes, a woman opened her mouth in shock. “Excuse me. There are children, you know.”

  Hazard ignored her. His attention fixed on the scene unfolding down the midway. A pack of men was shouting, pressing up against a pair in khaki clothing. The two in khaki were sheriff’s deputies, although even from a distance, one of them looked too old to still be pulling fairground duty. The men butting up against them were a type that Hazard had seen all too often: cotton wife beaters, ratty jeans, their wallets clipped to chains that rattled with every step they took. There were four of them, and all four had their hair buzzed short, with the same bad teeth and squashed noses. Brothers. Or cousins. Or both, which was possible the farther out you went in Dore County. Two of them had swastika tattoos low on their necks, which meant they were part of Dore County’s own precious little gang of white supremacists: the Ozark Volunteers.

  “There are four of them,” Somers said.

  “I can count.”

  “It looks like it’s getting rough.”

  “I’ve got eyes in my damn head, Somers.”

  The woman at the next fence post, her eyes bulging, said, “Excuse me. Excuse me. Children.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re going to get involved in it,” Hazard said.

  “Nope. You are. I’m going to watch our daughter.”

  Hazard was suddenly painfully aware of his bad arm. It hung at his side. He could bend it—stiffly and slowly—at the elbow, and he had almost ninety degrees of movement there. He could raise that arm, with a lot of swearing, almost even with his shoulder. But he couldn’t throw a punch, couldn’t grab a guy, couldn’t do anything that took speed and coordination.

  For a moment, he was back in the suffocating blackness: the electricity had gone out, and then the door crashed inwards, and the man was there. The man with the knife. And Evie had been there. And there had been nothing Hazard could do. Nothing. And the knife kept coming down, slashing deep across his arm, biting through skin and muscle and nerve. Hazard took a steadying breath. He wasn’t going to use the arm as an excuse. Not a goddamn chance.

  Down the midway, one of the squash-nosed brothers shouted something and pushed one of the deputies.

  “I’ll watch Evie,” Hazard said.

  “No way. I called it.”

  Another, slower breath. He wasn’t going to mention his arm. Not after he’d carried Evie all day, not after ignoring all the times Somers offered to take her, not after the hours and days and weeks of rehab, not after all of that. He wasn’t going to do it.

  “You called it? This isn’t some fucking game, Somers—”

  With a loud exhalation, the woman marched towards them. “I can’t believe that you would use that kind of language around children. You need to leave, mister. Right now. My brother works for the city, and I’ll—”

  “For Christ’s sake,” Hazard growled.

  Somers was trying not to laugh, but it was shining in his eyes, and he gave Hazard a little shove. “Better go before she calls her brother.”

  With a scowl for Somers, and another for the indignant woman, Hazard stalked down the midway. The war-whoops of the boys on the jungle gym had risen in intensity; they were engaged in a full on a battle now, pelting a second group of boys with handfuls of mulch and dirt. One boy, a porker who couldn’t have been more than eight and was approximately the size of a beer keg, raised a rock over his head, howling as he rushed at a group of boys. The boys scattered, giggling and screeching in equal parts, and the porker made it about five feet before, red-faced and panting, he stumbled, stopped, and dropped the rock. The boys had never been in any danger from him; Hazard could have told them that from the beginning. But they hadn’t known that. They had—

  They had been too shocked and afraid by the boy’s sudden, violent rush.

  Twenty yards down the stretch of grass, the cousin-brothers were face to face with the two deputies now. From this distance, Hazard could make out their features more closely. He saw that one of the deputies wasn’t a man. Neecie Weiss carried her weight with a limp and looked like she could have carried anything else you wanted to put on her ox-like shoulders. The other deputy, though, Hazard hadn’t seen before. He was an older man who would probably never see fifty again, beefy, with trim white mustaches and silver hair shining with pomade. Between the two of them, they looked like they should have been able to handle the situation.

  Except that those inbred Aryan bastards weren’t backing down. In most situations, that was law enforcement’s trump card: most people respected cops. Or were afraid of them. If you held your ground, most people would cut the shit. Normally. But the Ozark guys were just getting angrier, and now Hazard could hear them.

  “—fat motherfucker—”

  “—pig—”

  “—stupid piece of shit—”

  “—dyke bitch—”

  That last one must have cut Deputy Weiss a little too deep because she grabbed at the closest of the men. He got lucky; he managed to twist free of her grip because he was a little faster and because Weiss was pissed, but instead of falling back, he caught a handful of Weiss’s short hair and jerked her to the side.

  Down the stretch of grass, everything was unfolding quickly. Weiss had gotten in a punch, and blood was running from the squashed nose of the guy who held her hair, and now he was dragging her along the midway. The older deputy had already dropped one of the Ozark boys—Hazard hadn’t seen how—but now he was retreating, hands held warily in front of himself as the other two approached with knives.

  One thing Emery Hazard had learned growing up in Dore County: bullies never fought fair.

  Hazard cut sideways across the midway, moving to the closest tent, a shooting gallery. It had plastic ducks lined up at one end, and the carnie working the tent wore a trucker hat with the words Crack My Lid printed on it. He was approaching Hazard, ready to launch into his spiel, but Hazard ignored him. He brought up one of the air rifles, checked it, and set it against his shoulder. His bad arm pinged with the strain, and he ignored that too.

  Hazard lined up the rifle and fired. The first shot went too far left; it snapped against a white commercial tent. Hazard had expected the first shot to be crap. That was one of the ways they rigged these games. He calculated the difference, adjusted, and shot again.

  Advancing on the older deputy, one of the squash-nosed Ozark boys howled and clapped a hand to his neck. He staggered and spun. Hazard fired again. The man shrieked. It was a high note, and surprisingly feminine, and he flattened a hand over his face.

  “My eye, my motherfucking eye.”

  Hazard fired again. By this point, the second man with a knife had turned too. The pellet got him in the cheek; even from a distance, Hazard could see the impact ripple through the corn-fed flesh. Hazard squeezed off another shot. The man keened, dropped the knife, and wobbled sideways. Blood trickled from his ear, and he wobbled again and fell over. Neecie Weiss took advantage of the distraction to plant her boot in her attacker’s crotch, and the last of the Ozark Volunteers hit the ground.

  The hub of voices in the midway had evaporated, and the calliope music was gratingly loud in the silence. Neecie Weiss, service weapon in hand, flashed Hazard a look and a grateful nod. The older man, though, simply stared at Hazard without acknowledgment.

  But Hazard saw what the big, inbre
d Ozark boys had hidden before: the brass star shining on the man’s chest. So. This was Wahredua’s new sheriff. After another heartbeat, the sheriff said something to Weiss, and they began cuffing the fallen Ozark boys. One of them was still screaming about his eye. The one that had taken a pellet in the ear was vomiting. Hazard settled the rifle back on the counter of the shooting gallery.

  “It’s five bucks for ten shots—” the man in the trucker hat began, but he wilted under Hazard’s stare, and Hazard walked back to the children’s area. Voices resumed. Children, for the most part, seemed to realize that the excitement had passed, and their shouts and laughter eased the transition back to normalcy. Then the adults began to murmur in low, excited voices.

  “My hero,” Somers said, kissing Hazard.

  “You’re an asshole.”

  The bug-eyed woman opened her mouth, and Hazard shot her a dark glare. She swallowed whatever she had been about to say, scooped up a bug-eyed daughter, and scurried down the midway.

  “Just like Prince Charming,” Somers said with a sigh, and then he laughed and kissed Hazard again.

  This time, the gagging noise was louder, drawn out and exaggerated until it was almost comical, but Hazard only partially heard it. He was more focused on Somers and on the kiss. It had been one hell of a kiss.

  “Faggots,” a high-pitched, carnie voice called. “Step right up, ladies and gentlemen. Step right up and see two world-class faggots. We’ve scoured the globe, searched high and low, and we never found a pair of ass-eating pussies to match the two you see before you. That’s right, folks, you’re looking at bona fide, genuine, grade A faggots. Two dollars a ticket, no children under the age of ten for propriety’s sake.”

  The words snaked through the crowd like smoke off burning garbage. Men and women turned and then turned again, their faces set with distaste as they hurried their children away. Some of those disgusted looks were for the carnie calling out his hateful spiel. But some were for Hazard and Somers.