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.”
At that moment Sonny gave up the fight. He was too big of a coward to kill himself. He didn’t know what prison was like, but he was guessing he was about to find out. If it had not been for Charlie Dodge and that Wyrick woman, his game could have gone on forever.
The officers knocked again.
He glanced out the kitchen windows one last time and then walked through the house and opened the front door.
One officer asked, “Are you J.J. Burch?”
He nodded. “What’s all the ruckus about?”
“You’re wanted for questioning by the Dallas PD.”
“What on earth for?” Sonny asked.
“Regarding the assault and kidnapping of Rachel Dean, and for the attempted kidnapping of Jade Wyrick. Put your hands behind your back.”
And so he did. Without argument. Without demanding a lawyer, or to see a warrant for his arrest. Rachel Dean had taken away his power, and Wyrick had defeated him.
The cuffs were hard and a little tight on his wrists. After he was cuffed, they began to pat him down for weapons.
He cried out when they roughed up his chest and cried out again when they patted him down below the waist, checking the inside of his legs for concealed weapons.
“Be careful,” he yelled. “I’m hurt.”
One of the officers pulled up his shirt and saw the scratches.
“A friend’s cat,” he said.
“Your friend has fingernails,” the officer said.
“Would you