Colt

COLT

When I was elected sheriff of Devil’s Ditch and the surrounding county, I hadn’t expected it to be like the TV town Mayberry, where the town drunk was one of my friends who slept off his benders in an unlocked jail cell. Or that the only bad stuff that would happen was helping an old lady locked out of her house or scaring some kids straight about drinking and driving.

Not murder.

I pulled into a cleared spot at the ER entrance for the county hospital. The snow had been plowed from the recent huge spring blizzard. Mounds of it. But it was April and the weather would–hopefully–start to warm. The facility was small, but had competent and qualified professionals who took care of the community. Alive and dead.

Besides enforcing the law, I was also the county coroner. I responded when someone, like Mr. Caternary last month, died in his sleep at the age of ninety-three. I also responded when someone fell down the stairs under suspicious circumstances like Lance Mann.

While I attended the death, crime or not, it was absolutely not my job to be the medical examiner. Thank fuck. I’d seen some gruesome, unpleasant shit in my time, but I had no interest–nor was remotely qualified–to cut a corpse open and find the cause of death.

We had a new medical examiner, who acquired that role when she became Chief of Emergency Medicine, a fancy title for head of the ER in a small town hospital. I entered through the sliding glass door and got hit with warm air. I spoke briefly with Sarah, the triage nurse, to ask where to find the new doc. She directed me to cut through the ER and down the hallway to the morgue where Dr. Molly Simon, who’d performed the autopsy on Lance Mann, was waiting for me.

The past two days, I–and the local newspaper–was running with the notion that Mann’s fall had been intentional, that someone had helped him tumble to the bottom of his stairs and die. In my mind, that person was Conrad Trout, the fucker who’d paid off Mann’s debts in exchange for marrying his daughter.

A modern day arranged marriage.

Except Ellie had fled before the nuptials and ended up being rescued from the snowstorm by my brother, Trig. While technically they wed so Trout’s plan was ruined, Trig would’ve married her anyway. One look, he’d said, and she knew she belonged to him.

That was great and all, but it was my job to keep the town safe. Especially with the town reading about a possible murderer on the loose. If Trout was murdering people when they crossed him, then I wanted him–or whoever did it–behind bars. Ellie was nervous, which meant Trig was pissed, which meant I had to find out who the fuck killed her father, Lance Mann.

Until then, Trig was keeping Ellie close. They’d also only married last week, so he was keeping her very close for completely different reasons. I wasn’t sure if they’d even left the house.
My radio squawked at my hip, so I adjusted the volume as I pushed open the heavy door to the morgue. This wasn’t my first rodeo in this part of the hospital, but I still didn’t like it. It was made of three rooms. The autopsy room, the refrigerator room where the bodies were stored, and a basic office area with a desk and computer. I was content remaining in this space to wait for the doctor. I’d received a message through dispatch to meet her at one. Glancing at the clock on the wall, I was two minutes early.

The door from the autopsy suite swung open and a woman in blue scrubs and a white doctor’s coat came out. On her head was a surgical cap. She had black hair, cut to chin length so it peeked out the bottom and skimmed straight along her jawline. Her eyes–

Holy fucking hell.

She looked up from a file she was holding and met my gaze. Those dark eyes widened in recognition. Quick and startling. She remembered me, too.

“It’s you,” I breathed. My heart thrummed. My dick instantly hardened.

The one who got away.