Sheriff's Shadow

Sheriff Brody wasn’t the kind of man who kicked down doors or shouted threats. His style was more like a slow-moving Mississippi river, carving its path through the land with quiet, relentless force. He’d seen enough shootouts and car chases in his forty-odd years patrolling these dusty backroads to know that sometimes, the most effective weapon was patience. And Brody had patience in spades, a virtue forged in the crucible of a past he kept locked tighter than a drum.

He sat in his cruiser, the cracked vinyl seat warm beneath him, a half-eaten biscuit and a lukewarm coffee his only companions. The sun, a molten orb in the hazy sky, beat down on the parched earth of the county. Brody wasn’t looking for a dramatic bust; he was looking for a pattern, a loose thread, a whisper that could unravel Maya and Caleb’s whole damn operation. The botched deal had been a messy affair, too much heat for too little payoff, and it had put them squarely on his radar. He didn’t care much for the drug trade itself, but he cared about the chaos it sowed, the lives it trampled. And Maya and Caleb, with their reckless abandon and seemingly endless supply of bad decisions, were sowing a particularly virulent strain of it.

He tapped a thick finger against the worn steering wheel, his gaze sweeping over the faded sign for a roadside barbecue joint. He’d been here an hour ago, talking to Earl, the owner with a belly like a prize-winning hog and an ear for gossip that could rival any radio station. Earl had seen a beat-up pickup, not unlike the one Silas Thorne’s boys sometimes used, speeding away from the vicinity of the deal gone south. He’d also mentioned seeing Maya and Caleb’s familiar, if slightly dented, sedan parked down by the old abandoned mill a few days prior. “Looked like they were havin’ themselves a time,” Earl had drawled, wiping grease from his chin with the back of his hand. “Laughin’ and carryin’ on like school kids.”