Savage Reckoning Read online

  Savage Reckoning is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  An Alibi Ebook Original

  Copyright © 2016 by Richard Ridley

  Excerpt from Savage Rising by C. Hoyt Caldwell copyright © 2016 by Richard Ridley

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Alibi, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  ALIBI is a registered trademark and the ALIBI colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book Savage Rising by C. Hoyt Caldwell. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

  Ebook ISBN 9780425284049

  Cover design: Tatiana Sayig

  randomhousebooks.com

  v4.1

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Epilogue

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By C. Hoyt Caldwell

  About the Author

  Excerpt from Savage Rising

  Chapter 1

  Deputy Dani Savage’s life was full of people she wanted to shoot. They ranged from backwoods crackers who excelled at druggin’, drinkin’, and stabbin’ the shit out of one another to bulbous-bellied husbands who slapped their wives around for marital infractions, which included such offenses as not cooking the catfish up right and letting their man’s beer get warm. She policed in a community that had no desire to be policed by any man, and they damn sure didn’t want a woman telling them when they stepped outside of the law.

  To the unscrupulous folks of Baptist Flats, Tennessee, the legality of a thing was a fluid proposition that could only be defined once the heritage of the parties involved was taken into consideration. Those with battle flag blood thought themselves on the right side of any violation of a written ordinance. Birthright has its privileges. Dani spent a lot of energy convincing them otherwise when such violations occurred. She was constantly engaged in a delicate dance of redneck diplomacy that forced her to reason with the unreasonable, a gaggle of primordial misfits and dumb shits that she felt were better suited for bullets than conversation. She had no real desire to treat them like human beings, much less with respect, but she did both because that’s what her job required.

  That’s not to say there weren’t good people in Baptist Flats. There were, but as they were good, they didn’t go foul of the law nearly as much as the assholes who saw the business end of Dani’s badge, and as a result, she was left with a warped view of the people she served.

  The citizenry of the town she served called her the “little deputy,” some as a sign of affection, but most as a sign of disrespect. It was the latter’s way of letting her know that she wasn’t man enough to be a cop—that the law she was trying to keep was too big for a woman her size. It bugged the shit out of her, but she never let on because she felt like if she did, it would prove them right. She was big enough to keep the law, and she was big enough to handle being called the little deputy.

  When she found herself wound up by a day filled with “little deputy” taunts, she ended up in the back of the station beating the hell out of a heavy bag that matched her size. Nearly three years into the job and she had developed a left hook that could crack concrete.

  Still, it was a job she loved. She was good at it, wanted to be good at it. Her uniform was a barrier that hid her smallness—not her physical stature, but the small parts of her spirit that made her afraid that she wasn’t good enough. Not in the eyes of the people of Baptist Flats, and not in the eyes of God. With a badge pinned to her chest, she didn’t give a shit what the town or God thought of her. She was the law.

  “I’m the law,” is a phrase she said to herself frequently as she drove to various calls. Anytime someone is desperate enough to call a cop, shit has gone wrong. You don’t want the authorities showing up with a decided lack of authority, so she spent her travel time puffing herself up and putting her game face on.

  In the early A.M. of the day her law-keeping life got spun upside down. She was sent out on a 10-16: domestic disturbance. They were the worst calls because they usually involved a good bit of liquor, a firearm or two, and a near complete absence of rational thought. Dani left the station muttering, “I’m the law,” and didn’t stop until she rapped her knuckles against Erwin and Willow Clancy’s door.

  “A knock come,” Willow said in a whispered slur, loud enough for Dani to hear through the closed door.

  Erwin answered his wife in a somewhat more impaired slur, “What the fuck’s a knock’um?”

  “To the door, dumbass. Someone’s a knocking.”

  Dani shook her head and fought back a chuckle. “It’s Deputy Savage with the BFSD. Y’all called in a disturbance.”

  “We ain’t disturbing nobody,” Erwin answered.

  “No, the call come from y�
�all, Erwin. You and Willow get into a tussle about something tonight?”

  “Didn’t nobody call,” he replied.

  “Willow, that true? Didn’t nobody in your house put in a call to the police?”

  There was a long pause before Willow answered. “I may’ve called, but things circled around since then.”

  “You called the cops?” Erwin asked with a whimper. “Ain’t enough you busted the shit out of my hand, you called the law on me to boot?”

  “What’s that about your hand?” Dani asked, testing the doorknob.

  “Hush,” Willow said to her drunkard husband. “You’ll get me in trouble.”

  “Y’all want to open this door. I got probable cause enough to come in without your permission, but I’d like to keep this friendly.”

  There was another long pause before the knob turned and the door creaked open. Willow Clancy stood in the doorway in a robe that she made no attempt to close, exposing the parts of her that had given way to gravity long ago. Her face, pickled by cheap over-the-counter anti-aging creams, was set in an expression of soused wonder. “C’mon in. Arrest me if’n you have to, but he had it coming. If’n you’d got here sooner, I would’ve been able to avoid dealing with it my own self, so this is on you if anything.”

  Dani entered the house and noted to herself the fist-sized holes in the wall and a sea of busted furniture. There was no weapon in sight. Erwin was sprawled out on the couch, still wearing a pair of work boots. His jeans were caked in dirt and his tattered bowling shirt was covered in blood. His swollen, mutilated face gave an indication of where the blood came from. “What the hell happened here?”

  Erwin held up his right hand. His fingers were turned and twisted in directions not supported by their joints, and his knuckles were buried under a mound of distended flesh. “She took a hammer to my hand.”

  “Had to. He come home from Son’s drunker than shit. Ain’t but one thing that happens when he gets in that kind of mind. He takes to pounding on me. I busted up his hand before he could take his first swing.”

  “She’s a lie, is what she is,” Erwin said, pointing a mangled finger her way. “She snuck up on me when I was taking a piss and beat my hand broke with a framing hammer.”

  “That’s what I just said, dumbass! I ain’t a lie!”

  “Settle down. The both of you,” Dani said. “What’s going on with your face, Erwin? How’d you bust that up?”

  “I didn’t have nothing to do with that,” Willow said.

  “You a lie again,” Erwin said, mumbling through broken teeth and a lacerated tongue. “She tripped me up in the kitchen on purpose, and I fell through the sliding glass door.”

  “I didn’t trip nothing up. You drunk yourself stupid at Son’s and tripped over your own goddamn feet.” Willow covered her mouth as she giggled. “Barreled headfirst through the glass door.”

  “You’re a spiteful fucking lie is what you is,” Erwin said. “I was having a good night before I come home. Should’ve stayed at Son’s and got more of them free drinks is what I should’ve done, but I come home to be with my wife, my fucking lie for a wife.”

  “I ain’t a lie. You a lie saying you got free drinks at Son’s. Son don’t give drinks away for free.”

  “He weren’t giving them away. Some fella was buying them—”

  “Ain’t no fella buying shit! You was off spending our money on booze—”

  “Okay,” Dani said. “Okay. Everyone just calm down.”

  The ringing from the shouting dissipated, and Dani instructed Willow to close her robe and wait outside by the cruiser.

  “I’m to be arrested?”

  “You did take a hammer to the man’s hand.”

  “That ain’t no reason to arrest her,” Erwin said.

  “You ain’t pressing charges?”

  “What the hell for?”

  Exasperated, Dani sighed and rolled her eyes. She wasn’t surprised, just frustrated. More times than not spouses didn’t press charges in domestic disturbance cases.

  “It weren’t nothing but a disagreement,” Willow said. “Nothing to get worked up about.”

  “Bound to happen,” Erwin said. “Especially when your wife is a lie.”

  “I ain’t a lie.”

  Dani extracted herself from the escalating verbal assault between two more people she wanted to shoot and pulled out her cellphone to put in a call to 911 for an ambulance. A souped-up truck rumbled down the street, but she took little notice other than to smirk at the roar coming from the custom-built engine. Inside, the driver sucked on a cigarette while the passenger fiddled with the bill of his hat. The deputy didn’t know it at the time, but the closeout kings had arrived to do business in her town.

  Chapter 2

  “You know what I can’t figure? I can’t figure why that gal with the big ass is famous.” Kenny Fable squeezed the bill of his crud-covered hat, shifted his gaze out the passenger-side window of the truck, then returned his focus to his bill-shaping efforts.

  “Which gal with the big ass?” Step Crawford asked with his hand out the driver-side window, flicking ashes from his Porter 100 cigarette on the damp pavement below.

  “You know, kind of pretty, thick as she is, married that rapper fella, had that baby they named Sandwich or Peanut or some silly shit like that.”

  Step hocked up a chunk of mucus and spit it out the window. “Oh, that one. She’s famous for having a big ass.”

  Kenny nodded as if that made sense. “What other big-assed gal is there?”

  “Huh?”

  “You asked which one. Means there must be a couple to choose from.”

  Step shrugged. “I don’t know. There’s a few of them running around out there. Don’t really give a shit.”

  “Why do you reckon that is?” Kenny asked, still trying to get his cap just right. His thick fingers clasped the stiff bill on either side and flexed slowly as he molded it into a piece of art.

  “Why do I reckon what is?” Step asked rubbing his sharp, scratchy jawline with his dirty, callused fingers.

  “There’s so many of those plump-bottomed girls now?”

  “There’s always been plump-bottomed girls.”

  Kenny rolled his eyes. “I know that, but didn’t none of them make a living off it before. They did just about all they could to rid themselves of it, matter of fact.”

  The door to Son Crow’s Tavern opened and Step stretched his skinny neck forward and squinted. A short, fat man stood under the glow of the light above the entrance and lit up a cigarette. “That him?”

  Kenny looked up and quickly said, “Nope. Too short.”

  Step sucked on the filter of his Porter 100.

  “Well, what’s your theory?” Kenny asked, back to toying with his hat.

  “About what?”

  “The gals, Step. The ones with the big asses. How come they’re so popular now?”

  Step huffed out a stream of smoke and frowned. “Christ, you ain’t gonna let up on this, are you? If I had to guess, I’d say it’s because that anal sex has become so popular. One’s got to do with the other, most likely.”

  Kenny snarled and shook his head. “That don’t make sense. Gals with small asses do butt sex, too.”

  “Yeah,” Step said with a nod, “but they probably get picked at the end of the night. It’s the order of things. Big-assed gals go first. Then the skinny-assed ones are picked.”

  “Picked where?”

  “I don’t know, at a party or bar or any such social situation.”

  Kenny gave the bill of his hat one last squeeze and then studied it. “So you’re saying that fellas that like butt sex like big-assed women?”

  “I am saying that, yes,” Step said before he took another drag from his cigarette.

  Satisfied the bill was just right, Kenny stuck his hat on his head. “But there ain’t no particular kind of woman a biblical-sex fella likes, so why are butt-sex fellas so fixed on the big asses?”

  Step swallowed his s
moke. “Why the fuck does it matter?”

  “It’s just a curious thing is all.”

  Rolling his eyes, Step decided his partner wasn’t going to give up on the topic. “Think about it. The back of a woman ain’t got a whole lot going on. You saddle a man with a skinny gal with a bony ass, and he’s liable to go out of his mind trying to figure out what to do with his hands. A big ass gives a fella something to occupy himself with and get his mind off the fact that he’s got his dick in a place that cranks out shit…”

  Another man came out of the bar. Kenny stuck his head out the window and looked him over. “That’s him.” He leaned forward, opened the glove compartment, and pulled out a 9mm pistol. After checking the magazine, he exited the vehicle. Before heading toward Son’s, he hoisted himself up on the running board and stuck his head back in the truck. “What about fella-on-fella?”

  “What about it?”

  “Does that whole big ass thing go on with them?”

  Step stopped short of sticking the cigarette in his mouth as he considered Kenny’s question. “Nah, fellas got more going on back-wise.”