Now, almost three weeks later, I’d just fallen off to sleep and was dreaming about fighting with Robert Godsey when I was awakened by an unfamiliar sound. I lifted my head from the pillow and looked around. Caroline was sitting up on the other side of the bed with her back to me. She’d pulled a sheet over her head. I reached over and touched her back.
“Are you all right?” I said.
Her response was a stifled sob.
“What’s wrong?” I said. “What hurts? What can I do?”
She continued to cry, so I pulled my feet up under me and slid over to sit beside her on the bed. I put my arm around her and pulled her towards me. As I did so, I reached up with my right hand to stroke her hair, but she’d pulled the sheet tightly across her scalp. I touched her cheek and could feel the wetness of tears.
“What is it, baby? What’s wrong?” I said.
Slowly, she lifted the sheet, and as I ran my fingers beneath it, I realized what was going on. She dropped her head onto my shoulder and continued to sob.
“It’s all right, Caroline,” I said, trying unsuccessfully to comfort her. “It’s all right. We knew this was going to happen.”
“It isn’t happening to you,” she whispered.
“I know, baby,” I said. “I wish it were. I wish it were me instead of you.”
I held her in the darkened room, listening alternately to the sounds of her sorrow and the wind whistling outside the window. After several minutes, she loosened her grip on my shoulders, took a deep breath, and lifted her head. “I have to use the bathroom,” she said. “Would you take care of it for me and then come back and help me?”
“I’ll be right there.”
She rose and shuffled slowly out of the room like a ghost, still shrouded in the sheet. As soon as I heard the bathroom door close, I stood up, turned on the light, and walked back and stood over the bed. There, on her pillow, fanned out in the shape of a halo, was her beautiful auburn hair. It had apparently freed itself all at once while she slept.
I went into the kitchen and found a plastic bag, returned to the bedroom, and gathered the long strands. She and her mother had discussed what she should do with her hair if it fell out, and they’d decided to donate it to Locks of Love, a company that made wigs for children with cancer. My job was to preserve it, package it, and deliver it to her mother.
After picking the hair up and carefully placing it in the bag, I changed the sheet and her pillowcase and walked back to the bathroom. She was sitting on a stool, looking at herself in the mirror. The sheet she’d been wearing had been replaced by a pink bathrobe. Small patches of hair remained on her scalp. She was tending to them with a pair of scissors. As I entered the room, she glanced up at me in the mirror, her eyes glistening.
“I’m hideous,” she said.
“No. You’re beautiful.” Choking back my own tears, I walked up behind her and began to stroke her scalp with my fingers. The remaining hair on her head felt like soft down. “I’ve always thought you were the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen. I still do.”
“Will you finish it for me, like we talked about? I don’t think I can bear to do it myself.”
“Sure, baby.”
I dipped a washcloth in warm water and ran it across her scalp. I took a bar of soap, lathered it in my palms, and rubbed it softly up the nape of her neck, back from her forehead, and around her temples and ears. I held her gaze in the mirror as tears streamed down her face.
“It’s okay,” I whispered. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
And then, still stroking her head, I reached into the medicine cabinet for my razor.
Sheriff Leon Bates shivered as he sat alone inside the Dodge Dakota he used for surveillance. Nothing glamorous about this part of the job. Bates was parked inside a barn less than a hundred yards from his informant’s house. The temperature outside had dipped to near freezing, and even though Bates was out of the wind, he was colder than a witch’s titty in a brass bra. He looked down at his watch. The target was supposed to show up at ten p.m. Almost time.
Above him, Bates knew there was a large room filled with gaming tables, video slot and poker machines, even a roulette wheel. Bates had busted the man who owned the property less than a week ago. After a few hours of interrogation and a threat to call in the feds, the man had revealed something that Bates had suspected for several months but hadn’t been able to prove. Now was the time.
Five minutes later, Bates saw headlights coming over the ridge to the east. The car slowed as it reached the driveway, turned in, and crawled slowly along over the rutted clay.
“That’s it,” Bates whispered. “Come to Papa.”
The lens of an infrared digital camera was positioned in a hole in the barn wall and trained on the front of the house. Yet another tiny lens was in the ceiling above the kitchen table inside the house. The informant inside was wired for sound. All of Bates’s brand-new high-tech toys had been purchased with money his department had seized from drug dealers over the past year and a half. Bates got out of the vehicle and turned on the camera. Once he was sure it was working property, he reached back into the Dakota, flipped the switch on the recorder, donned the headphones, and moved to a spot where he could peek through the slats and watch.
The car parked in front of the house and a man got out. Bates shook his head slowly as the man walked up the front steps and knocked on the door.
“Son of a bitch,” he whispered. “My boy wasn’t lying.”
“What’s going on, playah?” Bates heard his informant say. The equipment was working perfectly. “C’mon in out of the cold.”
Bates heard muffled breathing and the sound of footsteps as the two men walked through the house. When the footsteps stopped, Bates heard the target’s voice.
“Put your hands on the table and spread your legs,” the target said.
Bates immediately recognized the voice. He wasn’t worried about the target frisking his informant. The listening device was wireless and undetectable.
“Where’s your wife?” the target said.
“Went to a movie with her sister,” the informant said. “She won’t be back for a while. Have a seat there; take a load off. How ’bout a beer?”
“No time. I just need to make my pickup and go.”
“So you’re just gonna fuck me and run, huh? Shove it up my ass without even bothering to give me a reach- around? You got no manners at all.”
Bates squirmed in his seat. “C’mon, Lacy,” he whispered to himself. “Get him to say something about his boss.”
“This is business,” the target said. “It’s not a social call.”
“Well, business ain’t what it used to be with that damned sheriff running around arresting folks. Y’all’s monthly payment is starting to cut a little deep.”
“You just make the payment and keep your mouth shut. Let me worry about the sheriff.”
Bates heard a beer can pop. “How much are y’all taking in on this little venture of yours?” the informant said.
“None of your goddamned business.”
“Yeah, well, I reckon it’s a pretty good lick or you wouldn’t be taking the risk. What’s your boss’s cut?”
“When did you get so damned nosy?”
“Just like to know where my hard-earned money’s going. Besides, it looks to me like you’re the one doing all the work.”
“Hard-earned, my ass,” the target said. “You make your money by stacking the odds and skimming the juice. There’s nothing hard about it.”
“So what’s his cut?”
“Half. You satisfied? He gets half.”
