This Is What I Want by Craig Lancaster

end of the call, back in Cass County, her mentor and former commanding officer, Jim Fuquay, took it all in and dispensed questions and advice in equal measures.
    “What do you think caused the explosion, Underwood?” It made her smile, even now, to hear him call her that. Not just because it was reminiscent of another time, but because from the start Fuquay had inspired memories of her father, and hearing her last name bantered about injected just enough dissonance into that association to keep her grief at bay. In her own head, though, a raspy, barked “Underwood” followed the same path as Linus Underwood’s “darling girl.” It went straight to the most sentimental part of her.
    “I don’t know, Cap. Not my area. I’ve heard some stuff about him, though. Selling moonshine and things like that.”
    “So that’s why they call it Montucky, I guess.” Fuquay chortled at his own joke. “You check it out?”
    “Of course. Nothing to it, that I can find out.”
    “Doesn’t surprise me. And nobody talked, I’m guessing.”
    “Cap, I’m not exactly rolling in informants here. I’m an outsider. I’m a curiosity, the chick cop.” Just that afternoon, in fact, some smart-ass kid who couldn’t have been north of fourteen looked at her and slipped a tongue between his two fingers, as if that were something original. Little fucker.
    “I don’t know, then,” Fuquay said. “You might have some obstruction of justice there—or you might just have a mayor who wanted a clean town to show off when the big party started. Do you like this guy?”
    “Does it matter?”
    He cleared his throat, then dealt with a full-on coughing attack. “Sorry about that. No, I don’t suppose it does. But if you like him and you’re worried, that tells me you’re keeping an even keel. That’s good. I don’t have to tell you to be careful.”
    “No.”
    Another coughing fit busted in.
    “You all right, Cap?”
    “As the one-eyed man said, I am what I am.” At once, Adair wished she were there. “I know this much for sure,” he said. “You’ve got a deputy who’s talking out of turn. You need to stomp a mudhole in his ass for that, and make it stick, or you’re going to have bigger problems.”
    “I know.”
    “Then what’d you call me for?” That rasp again, a laugh, and then another coughing fit. She knew not to press her luck by asking about his health again. She’d just have to worry silently.
    “I guess to get backup on being right,” she said. “It’s lonely sometimes.”
    “Well, Underwood, you said a mouthful there, didn’t you?”
     
    About twenty minutes later, Sakota’s voice came bounding across the radio as Adair made her downward run off Telegraph Hill.
    “Adair, you better get down here.”
    “Where?”
    “Grandview bridge.”
    Jesus on a palomino. “You’re out of jurisdiction, Officer.”
    “McKenzie County sheriff called, asked for us to go out there until they could spring somebody loose. Joe took the call, and he called me.”
    Adair’s cauldron tilted again and spilled a few more gallons. “We’re going to have to do a refresher on chain of command, you know that?”
    At that, LaMer broke in. “Just come, Adair.”
    Adair threw on the lights and challenged the cruiser by pushing her foot to the floor. The bile, the nausea, rose up in her. Her officers hadn’t been willing to talk freely on open air. That meant that whatever it was would be bad. She tightened her grip on the wheel and began putting her concentration on dispassion. She’d seen some depravity. In North Dakota, that first year on the job, she’d worked the scene of a dismemberment, a young woman’s arms and legs and fingers and toes seemingly plucked from her body like ripened fruit. You can’t get used to something like that. You just tighten up and you get on with it. Dispassion. That was the key. You could cry in solitude later if you needed to.
    Two miles past the state line, she whipped the cruiser off the