Necessary Ends Read online

  Necessary Ends

  A Tai Randolph Mystery

  Tina Whittle

  Poisoned Pen Press

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2018 by Tina Whittle

  First E-book Edition 2018

  ISBN: 9781464209864 ebook

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  The historical characters and events portrayed in this book are inventions of the author or used fictitiously.

  Poisoned Pen Press

  4014 N. Goldwater Boulevard, #201

  Scottsdale, Arizona 85251

  www.poisonedpenpress.com

  [email protected]

  Contents

  Necessary Ends

  Copyright

  Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Chapter Fifty-three

  Chapter Fifty-four

  Chapter Fifty-five

  Author’s Note

  More from this Author

  Contact Us

  Dedication

  To my writerly sisters in the Mojito Literary Society—Annie Hogsett, Susan Newman, Katrina Murphy, and Laura Valeri.

  May the words always be sweet to you.

  Acknowledgments

  Every time I sit down to the page, I am reminded of the enormous debt of gratitude I owe to so many. And even though I am supposedly a woman of words, I know that words can never truly demonstrate how much the people in my life support and encourage me.

  If you’ve ever answered a weird question about Civil War history, concussions, French grammar, legal procedure, the dirt in North Georgia, animal husbandry, police ten codes or the annual upkeep costs of a Ferrari…then you are my hero. Thank you.

  Special thanks to my fellow Sisters in Crime, especially the members of my home chapter, the Low Country Sisters in Crime, which wouldn’t exist without our officers Donna Kortes, Maggie Toussaint, and Rebecca Butler; my Lowcountry Crime co-authors Jonathan M. Bryant, Polly Iyer, and James M. Jackson (who is also our esteemed publisher); my patient friends Toni Deal, Sharon Hudson, Theresa Booker, and Robin White; the Friday Night Board Game crew—Lisa Abbott, Sean Devine, and Karen Sanders; and my fence neighbors, Danielle and Andy Walden and Sean Clarke.

  The debt of gratitude to my excellent and forbearing family just keeps getting greater: my parents, Dinah and Archie; my parents-in-law, Yvonne and Gene; my brother and three siblings-in-law, Tim and Lisa, and Patty and Rich; plus my ever-awesome niece and nephews—Connor, Sydney, Drew, and Hayden.

  They say it takes a village to publish a book, and my village is full of geniuses. Many thanks to the fine folks at Poisoned Pen Press—Barbara Peters, Annette Rogers, Diane DiBiase, Robert Rosenwald, Raj Dayal, Suzan Baroni, Beth Deveny, Holli Roach, and Kacie Blackburn. I am also grateful to my fellow PPPers—the Posse—for their warm camaraderie and generous smarts, and my agent Paige Wheeler, for her can-do encouragement and unfailing support.

  And—as always and forever—much love to my husband, James, and daughter, Kaley. Y’all provide the spin that keeps my world in motion.

  Chapter One

  The closet was narrow and dusty, with barely enough room for me to stand. Dead insects crunched under my sneakers, and spider webs glued themselves to my ponytail. Though empty of appliances and devoid of air conditioning, the foreclosed duplex was crammed with beat-up sofas and ratty mattresses, and it smelled like sawdust and old shoes. Faux suburban meth-dealer chic.

  Trey handed me a weapon. “Do you remember the plan?”

  I wrapped my hands around the gun, a semi-auto designed to shoot projectiles, not bullets. My palms were slick with sweat, and I had to concentrate to keep the thing from thudding to the floor.

  “Surrender,” I said.

  “Because?”

  “This scenario is designed to practice surrender protocol.”

  “And you are not to…?”

  “Fight. Not even a little bit.” I wiped my hands on my jeans one at a time. “What are their chances of getting past you?”

  “Not very good. These particular trainees haven’t yet grasped the concept of three-sixty periphery.”

  “But they will, after they tangle with you.”

  A ghost of a smile flickered at the edge of Trey’s mouth. “Yes.”

  He knelt and adjusted my protective vest. He was dressed for special ops—his black BDU pants paired with a long-sleeved tee, also black, plus his old service boots, the ones he’d shoved into storage almost four years ago. His orange-tipped training weapon was a ridiculous contrast, but it was the only thing keeping me in the moment. Otherwise, it would have been easy to get pulled back in time into his SWAT days, and to believe that the Trey on his knees in front of me was the Trey I’d never met, the man who’d existed before the car accident, before the frontal lobe damage, the Trey who really was a cop and not just volunteering at a training session.

  I brushed a stray cobweb from his dark hair. “If any of them do make it past you, I’m going to get pocked with paintballs.”

  Trey stood and double-checked my body camera, wiped a smudge from my eye protection with his sleeve. “If you surrender and drop your weapon, you’re supposed to come out unharmed. That’s the protocol.”

  I sneezed. He produced a bottle of allergy medicine from some hidden pocket, and I swallowed two tablets dry.

  “Does this really help?” I said.

  “For the dust, yes. The pigeons, however…”

  “Not the pills, these scenarios. Deliberately wading into a simulat
ion where people come after you. Does it really make the nightmares better?”

  Trey stopped messing with my gear, his blue eyes serious in the slanted light. “Yes. It does.”

  When my brother the psychologist had suggested moving Trey back into simulations training, I hadn’t been convinced. I still wasn’t. But I knew he needed something, some way to work out the part of him that sometimes sizzled like an overloaded circuit. There was only so much aggression he could exorcise through running, after all, and smothering it with routine and structure hadn’t worked either. He needed an outlet, and this one—one without actual bullets and bad guys—seemed a safe alternative.

  I adjusted my goggles and felt for the spare ammo on my belt. Training rounds, the SWAT version of paintballs. Each pellet contained a harmless green dye, though for actual combat, they came as capsaicin-filled pepperballs. Trey had assured me that the hot shots were banned for this scenario. Only green boxes on the training ground, only orange-marked weapons. It was an elaborately structured game of cops and robbers, and I was a robber. So was Trey.

  He gave me a searching evaluation. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “I’m sure.”

  He watched my mouth to make sure I was telling the truth. I was. Mostly.

  “Okay,” he said. “But remember, you can leave at any time. Tell the sentry you’re vacating the scenario.” He lowered his head to look me in the eye. “You’re not trapped here, Tai. Not at all.”

  It was the right thing to say. “Ten-four. I’m good. Let’s go.”

  Trey gave me one final looking-over. Then he closed the closet door, and I was alone in the darkness. I listened to his retreating footsteps, the sudden silence of his absence. Despite my best efforts, the first prickle of panic rose, and with it, the memories. The suffocating heat of the trunk. The gators bellowing on the banks. The green dot of the laser sight centered on my heart.

  I tilted my head back and closed my eyes. It’s just a simulation, I told myself. Nothing but fake guns and fake bad guys. The chemicals surging in my veins were real, though, and my body responded as if the threat were real too. That was the point, I knew, to stir up the adrenaline spike and then deconstruct it. Rewire the experience, my brother had explained, rewire the response.

  I wasn’t sure I was buying his theory.

  I heard it then, the light susurration of combat gear sliding against ripstop fabric, the unmistakable thump of police boots on the wooden floor. Not from the back, though, where the team was supposed to enter, but from the front. The sentry abandoning his post.

  I frowned. This wasn’t how things were supposed to play out.

  I could feel the slosh of my pulse, and as I wrapped my hands around the butt of the weapon, the nervousness peaked and swelled into…something else. Something darker. I recognized that sharp clean jolt, red at the edges. Red, like my nightmares, like kill or be killed. And in my dreams, I killed. I slashed and screamed and bit and…

  I pushed out of the closet, unable to take the confinement a second longer.

  The trainee stood in the door, fully turned out in riot gear, his eyes wide and bright behind the plastic visor. He switched his gun my way. “Hands up! Weapon down!”

  My vision narrowed to the barrel of the weapon, pointed straight at me, and I remembered in a flash all of the other times I’d stared down the wrong end of a firearm. My hands shook, and my finger itched to squeeze the trigger, but I forced myself to place the gun on the counter, orange muzzle pointing at the wall.

  I raised my hands to shoulder height. “I surrender.”

  The trainee came around the counter, rifle aimed at my heart, and the fight instinct sang in hot spiked surges. He tried to grab my arm, but I snatched it away. He cursed and popped two paintballs into my chest.

  The thud against the vest hurt like hell at that close proximity, and I gasped, partly from pain and partly from astonishment. “I just surrendered, you moron!”

  “You’re down. So get down.”

  “Screw you.”

  “I said—”

  “Touch me again, and I will rip your arm off!”

  I heard the opening of the back door at the other end of the house, the boots, the hushed voices. The covert entry team. And I could feel the panic rising. I was trapped, again, with a man with a gun, again. And I remembered what I was supposed to do—breathe and ground—but suddenly all I wanted to do was get out of there before I lost it, and in my mind, losing it looked like kicking the trainee’s kneecaps into jelly.

  Behind him, I saw movement at the door. Not Trey. This man wore the same clothes but was shorter, with red hair. Garrity. I was surprised to see him—as the supervisor of this particular training, he was supposed to be evaluating, not participating. He stayed in the threshold, orange-tipped carbine rifle in hand.

  The trainee was sharper than I’d expected, though, and he caught the motion too. He whirled around and aimed his weapon at Garrity, a satisfied smirk on his face. “Got you, sir. Nice try, sir.”

  Garrity pointed to the green splotches on my vest, the gun on the counter. “You shot an unarmed suspect.”

  The recruit had the decency to color red. “She was noncompliant, sir.”

  “Like hell. I watched the whole thing through her camera.”

  “But—”

  “There are no buts here. You had your orders. What were they?”

  The recruit swallowed hard. “Post up outside, guard the secondary entry point. Sir.”

  “Right. Which you did not do. You waited for sixty seconds and then started clearing rooms, alone. I could ambush your team right now, and they wouldn’t know what hit them because they think you’ve got the door.”

  The recruit clenched his teeth. He was wrong, and he knew it, and he blamed me. I could feel him wanting to shoot me again.

  “And then you fire on an unarmed subject!” Garrity said. “How will your wife feel when she sees that on the news?”

  The recruit straightened his spine. “Husband. Sir.”

  Garrity stared at him for two seconds. “Let me rephrase. How will it feel when your husband is visiting you in prison because you shot and killed an unarmed surrendering suspect with her goddamn hands in the air, and so help me, that’s where I would send you if you pulled such a fuck-up on my watch.”

  Then all hell broke loose in the back room. A cacophony of voices, a scuffle, a volley of gunfire.

  Garrity leaned backward slightly and stuck his head into the hallway “Seaver!”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “The count, please.”

  “Three down and one…make that four down, sir.”

  Garrity sighed. “They never look up.” He returned his attention to the trainee. “And there goes the rest of your team. Y’all some sad-ass police today. Now get outta here before I really lose my temper.”

  The trainee filed past Garrity, not even brushing shoulders, and Garrity focused his attention on me. Suddenly he wasn’t Special Agent in Charge anymore. He was my friend, his eyes tight with concern.

  He stepped closer. “Hey? You okay?”

  I nodded, but my hands were trembling. Not from fear. From pure thwarted anger. I wanted to hurt somebody, preferably the somebody who’d shot me in the chest, and I wanted it so bad I couldn’t stop shaking. Garrity knew the difference. He saw it clearly.

  “Ride it out, Tai. Breathe it down.” He folded his arms. “Whose idea was it to bring you here today, Trey’s?”

  I put my elbows to my knees and breathed, trying to get the blood back to my head. “Mine. I read it in one of those books my brother gave him. He said it worked for him. I thought it might work for me.”

  “Did it?”

  I unclenched my fists. There were half-moon indentions where my nails had cut into my skin, and my vision was still red at the edges. “I don’t think so.”

&nb
sp; Chapter Two

  I spent the rest of my Saturday at the gun shop, cursing the decrepit air conditioner. It had one job—keep the temperature below eighty degrees in the dinky one-room floor area—and it was failing. But that was early September in the South: good-bye summer, hello more summer.

  I untucked my shirt, rolled up my sleeves. Only one customer remained in the shop, a young woman with cut-off denim shorts and brittle blond hair. She wore a tee shirt with the word Moonshine emblazoned across the front. Ever since the TV series had started filming in Kennesaw, fans of the Prohibition-era werewolf drama had been showing up at my door in packs, desperate for Moonshine-themed hats and posters. I’d pegged her as one of those. But then I’d watched her leave and come back twice, both times visiting the black F150 with the tinted windows parked in front of my door, and I’d known exactly what she was up to.

  She was only my fourth customer of the afternoon. Except for my reenactor clientele and their steady appetite for black powder, business had been slow for months. The Civil War’s sesquicentennial was over. All the tourists wanted was Moonshine merchandise. All the locals wanted was guns and ammo and cheap Confederate flags, the larger the better, which they could get on almost any street corner since every Tom, Dick, and Bubba in town sold them from the back of his pickup truck.

  I checked the clock. Five-fifty. I locked the front counter and strolled up next to her. “Can I help you with something?”

  She pointed to a Smith and Wesson .45 in the display case. “I need that one.”

  “You sure? That thing’s heavy, with a trigger pull of eight pounds and a kick like a mule.”

  She twisted her mouth. “I can handle it.”

  I started to argue some more, but then I heard the unmistakable growl of Trey’s Ferrari. Sunshine glinted off the black metal as he pulled into his preferred parking spot next to the empty flower boxes.

  The woman’s eyes jerked toward the door as Trey came inside. He’d changed out of his special ops outfit into workout pants and a tee, his staying-in clothes. He paused in the threshold, curious, wary. I shook my head. After a second’s hesitation, he nodded and went behind the counter. This was his Saturday night routine, running the register while I closed up, and I was always happy to hand off the task. But this time he didn’t start sorting receipts. This time he watched the woman, who was getting antsy.