Badge of Dishonor

Passion In James County X

Badge of Dishonor

By D.C. Roi

Chapter twenty-three

Rod Billingham, unaware that the police were looking for him, had spent the night driving all over Jamestown in his pickup truck, looking for Lise. He finally found her car at the diner. He checked, but he found no sign of her. He found a place in the parking lot behind the diner where he could park his truck without being seen. Then he sat there, watching Lise's car, waiting for her to return.

Rod always hated stakeouts. He had little patience, a commodity absolutely necessary for stakeout duty. That lack made what he was doing extremely difficult. "That bitch!" he thought, while anger churned inside him. "She's going to pay! She's mine! If she thinks she's getting away from me, she better think again! If I can't have her, nobody will!" He grabbed another beer from the case he'd purchased during his nighttime wandering, opened it, and sucked it down, then he opened another one and drank that down without stopping. The more he drank, the angrier he got at his wife. How dare she even think about leaving him? Who did she think she was? She was his property. It was none of her damn business what he did with other women. Men could do sleep around, but good women weren't supposed to.

As he sat there, drinking beer and fuming, he saw a sheriff's department cruiser swing into the diner parking lot. He ducked down and, in doing so, bumped his head on the half-full case of beer on the seat next to him. His truck was in the back of the parking lot, in a shadowy area next to a dumpster and was hidden well enough that the deputy in the car didn't see him and pulled back out onto the highway.

After a while, Rod sat back up, rubbing his forehead. In his beer-fogged brain, the fact that he'd bumped his head was somehow his wife's fault, too. After all, if she had stayed home where she was supposed to be, he wouldn't be sitting here now. He'd totally forgotten about raping Eileen Frenette. Actually, he didn't consider what he'd done to her rape. In his opinion, she'd gotten exactly what she'd asked for. The way he looked at it, her resistance was just her way of making herself feel less guilty about trading her body for getting out of a speeding ticket. As he recalled what had happened in the motel room, a crooked smile formed on the drunken officer's face. "Yeah," he thought, "it was kinda nice havin' sex that way."

A half-hour later, a State Patrol unit made a pass through the parking lot. "Must be they're looking for some scumbag," Rod thought as he half-emptied yet another beer can in one swallow. He had no idea he was the "scumbag" his fellow officers were looking for. As far as he was concerned, he had done nothing wrong. He had always seen himself as the center of the universe, as a person who deserved everything he had.

"I wonder who that bitch is fucking tonight?" he thought as he sat in his truck, staring at his wife's car. "Doesn't really matter. Whoever she's screwing is dead meat!" He reached for another beer.

He continued to drink and grow angrier through the night. At some point the beer exceeded his capacity to handle it and he nodded off. The half-empty can he held in his hand fell to the floor of the truck. The beer emptying from it made a growing stain on the pickup's carpet.

The rising sun woke Rod. Stiff and sore from sleeping slumped over his steering wheel, he straightened up and tried to stretch. Movement immediately made him feel the effects of the terrible hangover he had. He smelled beer and looked around the cab of his truck, which he'd always kept immaculate. "Damn, I gotta get Lise to clean this thing out," he thought. It didn't occur to him that he should clean up his truck, that kind of work was, in his opinion, women's work, and once he found Lise and got her thinking straightened out, he'd get her to work on the truck. He glanced out the window, not exactly sure where he was, and saw his wife's car sitting there.

"Where the fuck is that bitch?" he thought as rage once more boiled up inside him.

Just then he saw a sheriff's department patrol car pull into the diner's parking lot. This one had two people in it and, since Rod knew some of the sheriff's cars did have two cops in them, he almost ignored it. Force of habit made him check it out, though, and when he did, he recognized the driver, deputy Luke Thomas. When he checked out the passenger and red-hot rage exploded through him. It was Lise! He grabbed his 9mm Ruger semi-automatic pistol off the seat of his truck, opened the door, got out, and started running across the parking lot toward the police car.

"I'll show them!" he thought. "It all ends here!" As he ran, he cocked the action of the gun, preparing to fire it.