Page 89 of The Last Straw

“Check your email. I just sent you satellite photos of a car parked inside a barn on the property, and the GPS location. I also got the make, model and license plate number of the car. It belongs to Burch. And I have satellite photos of him coming outside and standing on the porch.”

“Okay... I’m not even asking you how you have access to a satellite you can manipulate to suit yourself. We’ll contact the Dallas County Sheriff’s office, and ask them to pick him up for questioning. But we’re already on the way to Detter House. Are you coming?”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” Charlie said.

“Then we’ll see you there. And once more, thank you, Wyrick. If you ever want a job with—”

“Everybody always asks, but she’s mine, so no poaching,” Charlie said.

Floyd was still laughing when Charlie ended the call.

Then Wyrick stood up, and Charlie’s gaze went from her face to the dragon’s eyes staring at him, and then back to her face again. He pointed at the visible dragon beneath her shirt.

“He glared at me. Tell it I’m on your side,” Charlie said.

“Don’t be so touchy. She already knows that, and I’m ready when you are.”

Charlie felt as if the ground had just gone out from beneath his feet. Ready when I am? Am I ready for you?

“Uh...ready to...?”

“To leave,” Wyrick said. “Do you want me to drive?”

Charlie hit the earth with an emotional thump.

“We’ve already had this conversation,” he said. “Let’s hustle.”

Minutes later they were in his Jeep and leaving the property. Wyrick set the security alarm as the gate swung shut behind them, and then they were gone.

While Charlie and Wyrick were on their way to meet the detectives, Floyd had already sent a request to the Dallas County Sheriff to pick J.J. Burch up for questioning in the abduction of Rachel Dean, and the attempted abduction of Jade Wyrick. He readily agreed and sent two officers to the farm.

Sonny was spending his last hours as a free man and didn’t know it. Part of him knew the possibility was inevitable, but he had yet to accept it.

He’d spent the night on a dusty bare mattress and missed the irony of how dirty bare mattresses were playing out in his life. Then he spent the morning outside, visiting with the girls before the weather had driven him back indoors.

The wind was picking up and when he went out to check the sky, it was clouding up in the north. He’d heard weather reports earlier of a storm moving south through Oklahoma, and guessed Texas might get some of that down the road.

He’d brought some food from his apartment, but it wasn’t going to last forever. And he was going to have to make a decision as to where to go from here. He could have just kept driving, but he’d had a need to say goodbye. Now that he was here, he was second-guessing his decision.

The house was nearly bare, and there was a layer of dust all over everything. In addition to the one and only bed, which he’d slept in last night, there was an old table and two chairs still in the kitchen. But that was it. Normally, the dirt would have mattered, but not this time. Cleanliness was the least of his troubles.

The scabs on the front of his chest were beginning to itch, but he didn’t dare scratch. And his belly was complaining of a lack of food, so he dug through the sack, opened a can of tuna and a sleeve of saltines and sat down to eat.

Back in the day, the lights would have been on, and good things to eat would have been cooking on the stove. His mother and grandmother would have been laughing and talking, and his dad and grandpa would have been outside doing chores. But that was before the fantasies began.

He didn’t remember when he first started thinking about hurting women. But as he moved through his teen years, the thoughts became all-consuming. As he got older, prostitutes suffered the indignities of his fantasies, until he caught an STD, and after that the rage to hurt them more kicked in.

But this time there would be no more hookers. He went for the nice girls. The good girls. And got rejected.

Sonny had never dealt well with rejection, so one thing led to another, and now he was here, on the run, eating tuna on crackers in the shadows of his past.

He was scooping out the last bit of tuna on a cracker when he thought he heard vehicles approaching. He swallowed the final bite and got up to look out. When he realized the vehicles were from the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department, his heart began to hammer.

He watched the two officers get out, their hands resting lightly on their weapons as they headed to the front door. He gave the inside of the old house one last look, then went back into the kitchen and cleaned up his trash, tossing it into the sack with his other food.

He heard the knock and closed his eyes, trying to pull the silence of the old house around him like a hug, but the cops ruined the moment when one of them shouted.

“J.J. Burch! This is the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department.”

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