Final Justice

Final Justice

A Romantic Suspense

by

Patricia Hagan

New York Times Bestselling Author

Previously titled:
Cry Me a River

Published by
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www.epublishingworks.com

ISBN: 978-1-61417-387-8

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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PART I

Chapter 1

Halloween Eve, 1969

It was nearly three in the morning before Sheriff Luke Ballard dared hope the Halloween pranksters were through for another year. He and his deputies, Matt Rumsey and Kirby Washam, had been patrolling all night, but vandals had still managed to strew trash on lawns and send rolls of toilet paper spiraling onto tree limbs. Some of the unpopular high school teachers would wake up to flat tires.

The "biggie" had been the cruel trick played on poor Betsy Borden, and Luke was itching to get his hands on the "sickos" responsible. Betsy had been off her rocker ever since her husband and three kids were killed a few years back when lightning hit their tar paper shack and set it on fire while she was at prayer meeting. Folks figured Eddie Borden was passed out drunk, and the kids were too little to save themselves. Betsy's kin had offered her a home, but she refused to sleep indoors because she was scared of another fire, so she bedded down with the chickens in the roost house.

Then tonight, just after midnight, one of Betsy's neighbors called the sheriff's office to say he'd heard her screaming bloody murder. When Luke got there, he'd found her curled up in a ball in the chicken droppings under the roost, babbling that Eddie's ghost had come back to haunt her for not being home that night to save him and the kids.

The ghost turned out to be a pulley stretched between two trees drawing a white sheet back and forth. Luke had coaxed Betsy out of the roost house and showed her it was just a Halloween prank. She hadn't said a word, just stood there looking like a whipped hound dog, then turned and crawled back inside.

Luke knew firsthand just how mean some folks could be in Hampton, Alabama. It was why he had left, but the hunger for revenge had brought him back, and when he showed a few people paybacks were hell, he'd go again, never to return.

Like a lot of southern towns, Hampton's business section squared around the courthouse. Luke saw the supermarket windows had been soaped, and he just could make out the signs advertising 59 cents a pound for ground beef and a quarter for a dozen eggs.

He hit the brakes and came to a dead stop in front of the movie theater.
Easy Rider
had been playing nearly a month, and the glass case next to the ticket booth had been broken and the poster of Peter Fonda was gone.

Shaking his head and thinking how he and his deputies were going to be blamed for not being on their toes to stop all the meanness, Luke drove on down to the end of Elm Street and the railroad tracks that served as an unofficial border between town and the mill village.

In the distance he could see the lights from the mill itself. Operating around the clock, it was the financial heartbeat of Buford County. Everybody was tied to it either by employment or dependency on the payroll to stay in business.

He made it a point to avoid the village as much as possible. It stirred too many bad memories. He hated the area around the tracks even more. Kearney's Corner was a cluster of rundown wooden shacks built behind a greasy cafe and cheap gas station. It hadn't always been so trashy. As the story went, right after the Civil War, it was where the trains stopped at the water tank. Jebediah Kearney built a little stand and bought vegetables and fruit from desperate farmers and sold them to the rail passengers at a big profit.