“Jeff,” Margaret said, “I really think you ought to take this call.”

“Oh, Christ,” Jeffrey Tidsworth, the Spearfish County Prosecutor, said to his secretary. “Do I really have to talk to him?” It was a rhetorical question and he knew it; before Margaret could reply he’d picked up the phone, where Tom Feekings, the commander of the Regional Drug Task Force, was waiting. “Tidsworth,” he said into it.

“What the hell do you people think you’re doing up there?” Feekings said angrily. “This is an active investigation you’re interfering with. That could be considered obstruction of justice. Can’t you just let this slide?”

“Bullshit,” Tidsworth replied. “In case you haven’t gotten the message, your people were caught breaking into a residence trying to plant false evidence. What with everything else going on, it’s going to produce a list of felonies as long as my arm.”

“Come on,” Feekings said. “You don’t believe that shit, do you? Our guys were just doing their job!”

“If that’s doing their job it’s damn good that they’re locked up where they can’t do any more jobs,” the prosecutor replied, having just about had his fill of this joker already. “Do you have any idea of what they fucked up around here?”

“They were just trying to make the connections a little more clear, that’s all,” Feekings replied, still pretty angry. “I mean, hell, that Archer kid, that was a drug-related shooting and we both know it!”

“Like shit it was drug related, other than the fact that the two guys he shot were higher than kites on their own meth,” Tidsworth snorted. “Have you even bothered to find out the details of what went down? No, of course you haven’t or you wouldn’t have called. The simple fact of the matter is that he broke up an aggravated assault and rape, and possibly murder, and shot those two punks in self-defense.”

“I don’t know where you get off thinking that,” Feekings snarled. “My people tell me that it had to be drug related. Hell, it took place in a meth lab.”

“Then your people are full of shit, but we already knew that. Look, I’d already made up my mind not to even try to prosecute him, partly because it was clear-cut justifiable homicide, but I decided to sit on it a little bit, just to make sure your people didn’t turn up any connections. Hell, even if I’d tried to prosecute him for something, there’s no chance of a conviction. News gets around this town pretty fast. People know what happened, and there’s not a chance in hell I could have gotten a jury to convict him anyway. But now, even if I did prosecute him, your people fucked this thing up so badly that a jury would probably vote him a medal and I’d get laughed out of court.”

“You could go for a change of venue,” Feekings replied, backpedaling now that he saw that he was not going to be able to bullshit his way through this one.

“And what good would that do? I might not get laughed out of court quite as badly, that’s all. You jokers have pulled that cowboy stuff one too many times, and this time it was really blatant. If I had any question over whether I was going to issue the certification to drop the charges and not prosecute the Archer kid for the shooting, you’ve settled my doubts. What’s more, don’t bother trying to bring me any other kind of charges as a result of your so-called investigation, because that horse shit yesterday made your credibility absolutely worthless. I couldn’t get a conviction on a parking ticket if your guys wrote it.”

“Oh, come on! Can’t you at least cut my guys a little slack? A quarter million in bail, that’s a little excessive! These are police officers, after all!”

“To tell you the truth, I was just a little upset that Judge Dieball didn’t go for the full million like I requested. These guys are police officers, and that’s the point. Any officer who flouts the rule of law like they did doesn’t deserve to be out on bail at any price. I heard enough of that ‘police officers like these deserve the trust of the court’ shit from that joker of an attorney you sent up from Camden. These guys just have to consider themselves lucky that they didn’t try breaking into the house when the Archer kid was at home, and under the circumstances if he’d shot all three of them I don’t think I’d have minded very much. Now, quit wasting my time. Your people have already made more work than I needed today.”

With that, Tidsworth slammed the phone down. “Fucking cowboys think they’re a law unto themselves,” he snarled. He stopped, taking several deep breaths, trying to get his temper under control, then called out to his secretary, “Margaret, you’ve already got the nol pros certification for the Archer kid made out, don’t you?”

“All ready to sign,” she called from the front office.

“Bring it here,” he said. “Let’s at least get the kid off the hook and get that out of our hair. Can you get Matt Schindenwulfe on the phone for me?”

What with one thing and another, Candice decided that she’d better go to work, but John decided to stay home with the kids, just in case. He had work to be done at the office, but it wasn’t something that he couldn’t put off for a day or two. Besides, he felt like he needed to spend some time downstairs, just to try to clean up and salvage some of the mess that had been made on the model Camden and Spearfish Lake.

While he was down messing with that, Cody and Janice were sitting on the couch, where Cody was trying to do a little tutoring in geometry. It was clear that she had a lot of catching up to do, but they had several weeks before they’d be back in school, so the time would be well spent. Cody’s mother had arranged for assignments and homework to be brought over from the school, so neither of them stood the chance of falling too far behind in their work.

It seemed to Cody that Janice had a pretty good understanding of the basics of the material, but just hadn’t quite pulled it all together. She didn’t have to be told something or shown a concept more than once to get it. From what she had told him, her grades this semester were abysmal, but with plenty of time to study there was a chance that she could pull them up somewhat before the semester break in January.

They were interrupted by a knocking on the door. Not knowing who it was, Cody went to the basement stairs, called for his father, and then went to the door, to discover Mr. Schindenwulfe and another man. “Hi, Cody,” the attorney said. “Are your folks home?”

“Dad’s coming, he should be up here in a minute.”

In a few minutes the five of them were gathered in the living room. Schindenwulfe introduced Tidsworth, who said, “What with all that’s happened with you people in the last few days, I thought it would be best if I brought this over to you myself rather than just drop it in the mail. What I have here is a certification that no prosecution is planned in the shooting of Jack and Bobby Lufkin.”

“Thank you,” Cody said. “I have to admit that I’ve been worried about that more than a little.”

“Well, things have gotten a little complicated,” the prosecuting attorney admitted, “and yesterday made them more complicated than most, so I thought maybe we’d better get this out of the way. Now, a couple things about this. First, while this states that no prosecution is planned at this time, that doesn’t mean I might not change my mind if some new evidence were to come up. However, I doubt that it will, and as far as I know the incident isn’t under active investigation any longer, but you should be aware that the possibility exists. Cody, no matter how much in the right or the wrong you may have been, this is something that’s going to hang over you for a long time to come. While I doubt that it will ever be re-opened, you never know for sure. So what I’m saying is that you’d better not do anything that might cause someone, either me or one of my successors, to re-think that decision.”

“I understand,” Cody said. “I think I knew that this was something I was going to have to live with for a long time.”

“Yes, you will,” Tidsworth said. “It’s not a nice thing to say, but it’s something you’re going to have to live with. Cody, as long as you live in Spearfish Lake, there’s going to be whispering about you, that you’re the person who shot and killed two people and walked away without even a slap on the wrist. The worst of it will die out in time, but there’ll always be some of that hanging over you.”

“I guess that’s to be expected,” Cody said. “This is a small town and people talk.”

“They do indeed,” Tidsworth told him. “Now, the majority of people I’ve talked to pretty much seem to think that you did the right thing. Miss Lufkin, I hate to say this, but most people in this town didn’t have a very good opinion of your father and your brother, and virtually everyone I’ve talked to thinks that Cody did the community a service when he rescued you.”

“I’m right at the head of that list,” Janice told him. “I know what kind of people my father and brother were, and Cody shooting them was the best thing that ever happened to me. I’ve just been worried that Cody was going to have to go to jail or something for freeing me from them.”

“I have to say that if anyone had a real idea of what was going on with you that something would have happened a long time ago,” Tidsworth told her. “It would have been nicer for all of us if things hadn’t gone that far, but they did, and what’s done is done.”

“I know I should have told someone a long time ago,” Janice shook her head. “But I was scared to. I was scared they were going to kill me, so I didn’t dare. As it was, they almost killed me anyway, they told me they were going to, and they might have if Cody hadn’t showed up and saved me from them.”

“Well, it was good that he did, but, Cody, there’s something I have to tell you, and it’s very important. Thanks to a number of things, including some good luck, you’re not going to have to face charges for shooting those two, but don’t let this make you think that you can do something like that again. This does not mean that you have a license to kill.” He stopped for a second, trying to figure out how to phrase what he wanted to say. “At the same time, if a similar situation were to arise, I hope that you’d do the right thing.”

“That makes it just a little harder to figure out what the right thing is, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, it does,” the prosecutor smiled. “Ignoring the law for a moment, I happen to think you did the right thing morally. But if a situation like this comes up again, I hope you will be able to deal with it with measures that are a little less extreme.”

“I’ve thought about it an awful lot,” Cody admitted. “I feel that the weak should be protected from the strong, and that’s all I was doing. Even knowing what’s happened, if the same thing came up again I don’t think I’d do anything much different.”

“Somehow I don’t think you would,” the prosecutor smiled. “Oh, while I’m thinking about it, since your pistol isn’t needed as evidence any longer, I’ve brought it back to you, and I’ll need a receipt for it.” He opened his briefcase, and pulled out the P226, all wrapped in a plastic bag. “Keep shooting, Cody,” he added. “They tell me you’re awful good, and you don’t want to let that skill go to waste. You might need it again someday.”

“Thank you, sir,” Cody said. “I hope I’ll never have to use it again except on the range.”

“You never know,” the prosecutor smiled. “Now, speaking to the both of you: From what I’ve been told you seem to be handling all of this pretty well, but I’d suggest that you get some counseling, just to make sure that you get your lives back on track all right. Remorse and some of the other issues can really cloud up your lives.”

“I’ve had some counseling,” Cody said. “I think I’ve managed to put things in their place.”

“We probably ought to think about that,” John interjected from the chair where he’d been monitoring the exchange. That’s an issue that Candice and I really haven’t ever had to deal with, what with everything else that’s been going on. I think it’s going to be especially necessary for Janice.”

“I don’t know,” Janice replied. “When I think of how different things are this week from what they were last week, I think I’m doing pretty good.”

“No, Janice,” Tidsworth said. “Mr. Archer is probably right. You may have been able to make peace with the shooting, but there’s probably plenty of residual things left over from the way you were treated that you should have some help dealing with.”

“You could be right,” she nodded, “but Cody went a long way toward solving most of my problems last Thursday night, and he’s been doing pretty good so far at solving the ones left over, too.”

The council chambers in Spearfish Lake City Hall are relatively small; on the odd occasions that a large crowd is expected for a council meeting the meeting is moved to a larger location, such as the fire barn. That hadn’t happened for a while, and a large crowd was not expected for this meeting in spite of everything that had happened the last few days.

Still, there was a pretty good turnout. As interim Police Chief, Charlie Wexler was expected to attend the meeting, and of course he did since it was clear that the police department was going to be a major topic of discussion. The room wasn’t packed to capacity, but there were few empty chairs available.

Most of the items on the agenda were rubber-stamp items, where the members of the Spearfish Lake City Council mostly had to approve decisions already made by City Manager Steve Batchelor. It didn’t take long to get through them and down to the fifth item on the agenda, titled, “Police Department Interim Chief.”

“You are probably already aware that yesterday I had to put Police Chief William Abernathy on indefinite unpaid suspension,” Batchelor told the Council. “I don’t want to get into the details of the incident, because it’s still under investigation. However, I’m asking the Council to confirm the appointment of Charles Wexler as Interim Police Chief until such time as the matter with Abernathy is resolved.”

“Just as a point of information,” Councilman Aaron Messer asked, “do you have any idea how long it’s going to take to get this straightened out?”

“No idea,” Batchelor said. “All I can tell you is that it’s probably not going to be soon, and from what I understand there’s a good chance that Abernathy isn’t going to be back at all.”

“That would be just fine with me,” Councilman John Dickerson said. “I always thought he was a pretty poor excuse for a police chief, anyway.”

“If it’s going to take months, even years, for this to get settled, I don’t think it’s a good idea for the department to be left in limbo while we’re waiting,” Messer pointed out. “I could support a motion for Abernathy’s termination once the suspension is resolved, whichever way it’s resolved.”

“That would have my vote,” Dickerson agreed. “Charlie,” he asked the chief directly, “having Abernathy gone is going to leave you short-handed for the foreseeable future again, isn’t it?”

“It is,” Charlie agreed. “We can fill in with part-timers, but it would be better if we could have someone in that post on a regular basis. Getting coverage with part-timers can be a little iffy, since it involves who’s available and when. Having someone full time would clear up most of that problem.”

The question was discussed among the Council for several minutes, and by the time it was done it was pretty clear to everyone in the room which way the wind was blowing.

“All right,” Messer said, “I don’t want to do this in a single complicated motion. First, I move the termination of William Abernathy as Police Chief.”

“We can’t really do that until the matter of the suspension is resolved,” Batchelor pointed out. “Otherwise it’s going to be a policy and contract issue.”

“All right,” Messer said. “Let me retract my motion and start again. I move the termination of William Abernathy as Police Chief once the matter of his suspension is resolved. Is that going to work, Steve?”

“It should,” the city manager agreed. “Since Abernathy is already on unpaid suspension, it really isn’t going to matter.”

“Fine, second the motion,” Dickerson agreed. The motion was voted on and approved unanimously within thirty seconds.

“All right,” Messer said. “With that cleared up, I’d like to move to confirm the city manager’s appointment of Charles Wexler as Interim Police Chief, with the stipulation that he receive the job on a regular basis once the Abernathy suspension is resolved. Do you have any problem with that, Steve?”

“No, that’s fine with me. That was going to be my intention once the suspension was resolved, anyway.”

It took the council less time, if anything, to second, vote on, and approve the measure.

“Now that we have that cleared up,” Messer said, “I have a question for Chief Wexler. Charlie, do we support the Regional Drug Task Force?”

“We don’t have any personnel assigned, but we provide a financial contribution.”

“Are we getting anything out of it?”

“Well, yes we are,” Charlie admitted. “The HAZMAT cleanup of the meth lab we found last week would have been a little beyond the capabilities of the department. However, I’ve not been impressed with how they’ve handled the investigation, and I really shouldn’t say much more than that since an active investigation is involved.”

“Could you support withdrawing support from the task force?”

“To tell you the truth, I’d have to think about it,” Charlie said. “We haven’t really gotten a lot from them in the past, but it’s sort of like buying insurance. Sometimes you pay and pay for a long time without any benefit, but you’re glad you paid for it when it’s needed. Believe me, after what happened yesterday I’m not altogether happy that I called them in on the incident last week.”

“We’re really getting away from the agenda,” Batchelor pointed out.

“Fine,” Messer said. “We probably can’t settle the issue tonight without a recommendation from the chief, anyway. Let’s get it on the agenda for the next meeting, and maybe by then Chief Wexler can have an opinion for us.”

Mike McMahon wasn’t surprised to hear the phone ring a little after eight. After all, he’d already talked to Steve Batchelor and had a pretty good idea of what was going to happen – after thirty years of covering Spearfish Lake directly or indirectly, he had his sources, but he’d kept quiet about them around Colby. After all, the junior reporter position was supposed to be something where a rookie could learn about community journalism, and to have stuff handed to the kids on a silver platter didn’t help with their development.

As expected, the call was from Colby. “The council meeting proved to be a little more than I expected,” he reported. “For practical purposes they canned Abernathy and named Wexler as the new police chief, but nothing’s permanent until the suspension is settled. That could take a while.”

“Yeah, until a verdict comes in,” Mike agreed. “That could take a year or more, unless some plea bargaining gets done.”

“That’s what Wexler told me after the meeting. Anyway, what with everything that’s come down, I think we need to give the council story a little bigger play than we intended.”

Mike had pretty well figured that was going to be the case. Colby had proved himself capable of handling routine council meetings, so long as he didn’t run over the space allotted on the front page, but again, it was something the kid needed to learn. “Would you like me to come down and help you with it?”

“Yeah, I don’t know what I should rip up,” the junior reporter said, “and a couple things that came out at the council meeting will affect some of the other stories. Wexler gave me the straight scoop on several things that have come down, including confirmation that they’re not going to prosecute the Archer kid.”

“Yeah, we need to get that in,” Mike agreed. “We don’t need to make a big deal about it, but it should be on record, probably in the shooting story. Why don’t you get to writing? I’ll get my shoes on and be down at the shop in a few minutes.”

It wasn’t like it was unexpected, Mike thought as he hung up the phone. Colby was a good kid but he was still getting his feet under him, and on a collection of big stories like this it was probably good to give things a final check. In a couple minutes, Mike was out the door, heading toward town from his house out in the country. He already had a good mental picture of the front page and it was pretty full already. Well, there was that picture of the kids doing Christmas decorations over at the elementary school, that didn’t have to run this week if it ran at all. Mike had mostly decided to have the picture on the front to be able to have something to rip up if something happened at the last minute, like he’d expected it would.

But it was a big picture, and that would leave some space to fill. He could cut down the size; it probably wouldn’t matter much, but that space could have a better use. He’d already been pretty upset by the police break-in on Monday – it was just utterly stupid and arrogant and if the facts were anything like what he’d heard, someone needed to be called out on it. Mike had made up his mind that he was going to let a week go by before he editorialized about it. On the other hand, letting a week go by wouldn’t change what he wanted to say. Maybe it was better to call a spade a spade right from the beginning, he thought. If I rip up that picture, I’d probably have the space to work with . . .

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