Protector by Laurel Dewey Page B

and she treated him as such.
     
    The traffic going east on I-70 toward Tower Road was surprisingly light for a Monday night. By the time Jane drove past the Denver International Airport exit, there were only a few other cars sharing the highway with her. By this point of the drive, the scenery became desolate and isolated. Flat, dry plains stretched into the distance until they met the cloudless sky. There was a starkness and emptiness to the area, even back twenty years ago when Jane called it home. Turning off on Tower Road, Jane gunned the Mustang down a lonely ribbon of road dotted by rural electric light poles, precariously balancing the never ending miles of electric lines that looped one after the other. The soulful voice of Gladys Knight singing “Midnight Train to Georgia” blared from the Mustang. Jane drove on Tower for several miles, almost to the line that separated Denver City and County from Adams County, and turned right onto a dirt road. She passed several old homes before turning left into the gravel drive, past the black mailbox that said “DALE PERRY” in stark white block letters.
     
    Her father’s bleached, single-story white house stood on the left side of the wide driveway, shaded by a ring of weeping willows. Directly ahead of the driveway was a narrow, wooden building with small windows that served as her father’s workshop. When he wasn’t knocking back booze or hunched over the kitchen table perusing photographs of mutilated bodies, you could find him inside the workshop. It was a place where he could clean his guns and listen to eight tracks of Tony Bennett, Nancy Sinatra and Dean Martin. Jane brought the Mustang to a halt ten feet from the workshop and turned off the engine. It was 5:30—a good forty-five minutes before Mike would wander down the road in his beat-up pickup truck. Forty-five minutes to be alone in a place she despised.
     
    Jane got out of the car, grabbing the Corona from the front seat. She stared at the workshop. Her pulse quickened and that familiar rage welled up inside of her. She canvassed the squares of dusty windows and finally the tin roof, searching for “the mark.” Through the filtering rays of the setting sun, she found it—a hole just big enough for a .38 bullet to exit.
     
    Her dad bought the house and the weed-filled acre it sat on for $25,000 in the early sixties. That was back when Denver detectives weren’t given city parameters in which they had to reside. There was a small circle of neighbors who lived nearby in this desolate corner of Denver County. As Jane liked to put it when she was growing up, you were close enough to the neighbors to ask for help, but far enough away so they couldn’t hear you scream. Dale Perry didn’t care if his wife had to drive over 30 miles one way to pick up a quart of milk or that his son and daughter had to wake up an hour and a half early each morning to make the long journey into school. In Dale’s world, he was king and the human beings who were unlucky enough to exist in his shadow were told to do whatever he said and then shut up.
     
    Jane entered the house, letting the screen door slam shut. Everything was in a kind of suspended animation—a visual portrait of the moments leading up to the heart attack. There was the half-washed pan in the sink. The dishcloth on the floor. The half drunk whiskey teetering on the arm of the recliner. The littered ashtray filled with cigarette butts. The three-week-old newspaper, opened to the “Crime Blotter.” For Jane, it was like visiting a crime scene, except this victim unfortunately didn’t die. There was an uneasy silence in the room that lay heavy in the air. Jane turned on the TV, flipped over to the Denver early evening news report and adjusted the volume so it was just loud enough to create background chatter.
     
    Checking out the hall closet, Jane found stacks of cardboard boxes filled with the remnants of homicide notes, photos, and volumes of crime