had originally expected.
We got home about the same time, and as we put together a supper of leftovers, he told me about the killing.
I was surprised, but not really shocked to hear that J.D.
Rouse had been shot. He was a couple of years ahead of me in school and his reputation was already unsavory back then. As a teenager, I may have flirted around with 1 a lot of pot-smoking, beer-drinking boys—the wild boys who drove too fast, sassed the teachers, and cared more about carburetors and carom shots than physics and phi- losophy, but they were basically good-hearted slackers, loyal to their friends.
Wild is one thing, mean is a whole ’nother ball game.
J.D. was one of those guys who would get a pal drunk and then use him for a urinal. He was a bully and a sex-ual predator who loved to brag about the girls he’d gone down on, but he had a quick tongue that his buddies found funny when it was turned on someone else and he was good-looking enough that the mirror didn’t crack every time he combed his hair.
When I wouldn’t go out with him, he tried to hassle me, but I just stared him down and he suddenly remembered whose daughter I was. With several older brothers still living at home and a father who had a reputation for taking care of those who crossed him, my firepower was a lot stronger than his. I think he managed to scrape through high school, and someone said he joined the Army. That was the last time I gave him a thought till he turned up on a speeding charge in my courtroom a couple of years ago. It was not old home week but I did grant the prayer for judgment continued he asked for.
He still wasn’t high on my radar screen until this past Thanksgiving when he was charged for beating up on his wife. Despite the bruises on her face and the testimony of the officer who had responded to the 911 call, the woman, a pretty young Mexican with almost no English, refused to testify against him. There was a time when a battered woman could be swayed by her man’s sweet talk and “take up the charges,” which meant that she would be fined court costs for her “frivolous prosecution” while he walked free.
No more. If an officer charges a man with assault on a female, that man
The arresting officer testified that there were two little girls in the home and that Rouse appeared to be their only support. In broken English, his wife begged me not to send him to jail, that it was all a misunderstanding.
You never know if a stern sentence and sizable fine will get someone’s attention or whether it’ll simply stress him out so that he hammers on his family even more. Because this was Rouse’s first documented offense, I lowballed it and gave him thirty days suspended for a year, fined him a hundred dollars and court costs (another hundred), and required him to complete an anger management program at the mental health clinic there in Dobbs.
“Big waste of time,” I told Dwight. “A person has to want to change for the program to do any good and I figured J.D. was going to have to piss off somebody a whole lot meaner than himself for that to happen.” I put the skin and bones of the leftover roast chicken in a pot with celery and onions to boil up for stock, and shredded the rest of the meat. “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to hear his shooting was no accident.”
“Be awfully coincidental for a hunter’s stray bullet,”
Dwight said as he put bread into the four-slice toaster someone had given us as a wedding present. “One slice or two?”
“One,” I said virtuously.
“I’ll get people out walking along the woods and the pasture first thing tomorrow, but we’ll have to wait for 1 the ME to tell us if the track of the bullet veers to the left or right enough to indicate which side of the road the shot came from. I’m betting on the woods.”
“Because that woman picking up litter didn’t see him?”
“And he must not’ve seen her. Or else didn’t care because he was so well hidden.” He shook his head pes- simistically. “Damn good shooting if it was intentional.
Back of the head. Twilight. Moving target.”
I added the shredded chicken to the rich gravy I had heated in one of Mother’s old black iron skillets while Dwight told me that J.D.’s sister said that he was a roofer with one of the local contractors and that they usually knocked off about the same time every evening so someone who knew his habits could have been lying in wait.
“It’s almost like last month, isn’t it?” I said, recalling the death of a colleague shortly before our wedding.
“Only this time, the shooter wasn’t driving alongside, talking through their open windows. Not on that two-lane road.”
Dwight frowned. “Actually,
Not all the way.” He measured four or five inches with his hands to illustrate.
“Did your witness see another vehicle?”
Friends or neighbors who meet on backcountry roads often stop and talk until the appearance of another car or pickup makes them move on.
Dwight shook his head. “Anyhow, it was his right window that was open,” he said, following my line of thought.
“Was he a smoker?”
“Yeah. Cigarettes in his shirt pocket. Stubs in the ashtray. Burn marks on the seat.”
“There you go, then.” Except that even as I said it, I thought back to my own brief fling with cigarettes. It was always my left window that I kept cracked so I could flick the ashes out and blow the smoke away, not the right one.
I started smoking about the time I got my driver’s license. It seemed to go with my sporty little white T- Bird.
