It may be blasphemy to say it here in Texas, but if William
Travis and his men had defended the Alamo the way Bree
defended Alice that day, General Santa Anna would have
scooted back to Mexico with his tail between his legs. I’m
telling you, Bree was a sight to behold: half naked in her
skimpy pink sundress, her hair teased seven ways from
Sunday, purple-painted toenails peeping from three-inch
high strappy silver sandals, and a look in her eyes that
could have brought a grown man to his knees.
If, that is, that grown man had been anyone other than
Detective Cal McCormack. He’d heard the call come in over
the scanner, that twenty-six-year-old doctoral student
Bryan Campbell had been bludgeoned to death, apparently
with an industrial-sized stapler, but he wasn’t on the
case. The victim, Bryan, was Cal’s nephew, his older sister
Marla’s boy.
Cal and I go way back, back to summer games of kickball and
capture-the-flag. We weren’t close anymore, but I knew Cal
McCormack as well as anyone. Laid-back, laconic, law-
abiding Cal. That afternoon in Sinclair Hall, though, I saw
a side of Cal McCormack I’d never seen before.
He was incandescent with fury.
"What the hell happened here?" he bellowed, towering over
Alice as she huddled in the shelter of her mother’s arms.
Bree angled her body between Alice and the colossal cowboy
and raised her chin to stare him in the eye. "Don’t you
take that tone with my child, Cal McCormack."
The Cal I knew would be chastened by a southern woman
asserting her motherly credentials, would have tipped his
hat (metaphorically speaking) and begged pardon. But this
new Cal spun like a force of nature.
"Back off, Bree," he barked. "Your child is covered in
Bryan’s blood, and she’s going to tell me why." He took
another ominous step, crowding Bree and Alice against the
wall. "Now."
I recognized the mulish expression on my cousin’s face.
Irresistible force had met immovable object, and nothing
good could come from that.