Take a Chance

by D. Jackson Leigh

  Jamie jerked her hand back. “You can start by parking in legal spaces. I’m running out of ticket books.” She stalked out the door before the sensation of Trip’s heart throbbing against the back of her hand weakened her resolve to keep Trip Beaumont at a distance.

  Chapter Nine

  Sunday morning had dawned bright and clear, and Jamie smiled when she saw the three men sitting on the porch of the old depot. She was a bit later than usual, because she was careful to alter her patrol route each day so any criminals never knew what time of day she might appear on their side of town.

  She’d been restless and unsettled after seeing Trip, so she asked MJ’s permission to use the B and B kitchen and baked two peach cobblers the night before. She left one for MJ. The second cobbler was nestled in her trunk next to a cooler that contained a half-gallon of vanilla ice cream. Cooking was something she took up while rehabbing. Her goal was to improve her diet and fitness level as she recovered from the shrapnel that killed her canine and nearly tore off her leg. This cobbler recipe wasn’t exactly healthy but one her physical therapist, who was from South Carolina, shared with her.

  Petunia barked a greeting and hopped around the back seat, eager to go greet the men. Jamie released her from the car, but ordered her to heel, and Petunia complied after a tiny, impatient dance. Jamie wasn’t about to let her get sloppy while she was on duty.

  She called out to the men. “Hi, guys. I brought you a surprise.” She took the cobbler from the passenger seat and placed it on the warm hood of the cruiser. “I’ve got ice cream, too,” she said as they cautiously approached.

  “Hoo-wee.” Pete jogged the rest of the way to be first in line. “Look what the po-po done brought, boys.”

  Jamie scooped a huge helping of cobbler topped with ice cream into a plastic bowl and stabbed a plastic spoon into the top before handing it to Pete. He dug in, overfilling his mouth and humming his approval.

  Toby wiped his hands on a dingy handkerchief while he watched Jamie fill a second bowl. “It’s very good of you to think of us, miss,” he said, taking the bowl and closing his eyes as his lips moved in a brief prayer before he dug into his treat.

  “I suppose you got stuck working on Sunday because you’re the new deputy,” Toby said.

  “Nah. The other guys all like to go to church with their families and were rotating the Sunday duty. But I’m not much for organized religion, so I offered to fill the shift permanently. Sundays are generally quiet, a good way to start my work week.”

  Adder hung back, but his eyes flicked from the other men to the third bowl Jamie was filling.

  “Come on, Adder,” Jamie said softly. “I know you like peaches. There’s no trip wire.”

  He came closer, and even though he avoided looking at Jamie, she could see his dilated pupils, huge and black. Petunia quietly left Jamie’s side and sniffed his pants as he took his first bite. She sat and looked up at him. “Not sharing this with you, pup. You’ll have to beg from the other guys.” His words were low and gruff.

  “Actually, she’s not begging.” Jamie kept her voice soft. “She’s alerting me that you’re carrying either drugs or a weapon.”

  Adder froze, so Jamie spoke quickly before he could bolt.

  “I’m not going to arrest you for having a small stash.” She waited a heartbeat until he looked up, shame written across his tanned features. “But if I catch you selling or transporting for dealers, I will.”

  His lip curled in a slight, grim smile. “Maybe I am.”

  “If you are, you’re not carrying much today. Petunia knows.” Jamie took a bite from her own bowl of cobbler. “She’d be barking her head off instead of gazing up at you.” She stared off into the distance, aware that Toby and Pete were watching them. “And if she was, my gun would be in my hand and you’d be in cuffs. Is that what you want, Adder?”

  He stared into his bowl, then closed his eyes as he spoke. “I want the desert to get out of my head.” His face twisted into a tight grimace. “I want the screams of my buddies being blown to pieces to stop so I can sleep at night.”

  Toby was at his side in a second, one hand ready to catch Adder’s bowl if he dropped it and the other rubbing comforting circles on his back. “It’s okay, son. We all have our demons to fight. Victory is not always winning the battle, but rising every time you fall. Give yourself time. You’ll find a way to beat this.”

  Adder nodded, and although he didn’t look up, he resumed eating.

  Jamie stared at Toby. Who was this homeless man quoting Napoleon Bonaparte? Pete shifted anxiously from foot to foot; he’d gobbled up a second bowl of cobbler when Toby shoved it at him so he could go to Adder. Still, Pete’s eyes darted from them to the half pan of cobbler sitting on the trunk. She needed to get back on patrol, but she pulled a business card from her wallet and scribbled her personal cell number on the back and held it out to Adder. “I still hear them, too,” she said. “Call me if you need to talk, or just want someone to sit with for a while.”

  He hesitantly took the card, but still avoided her gaze.

  “Pete! You were supposed to hold that for me, not eat it.” Toby’s scold held no anger, just admonishment as though he was reprimanding a child.

  Pete giggled and bounced on his toes. “You didn’t say that, so I figured you didn’t want it.” He reminded Jamie of that old television character, Ernest T. Bass, who definitely had some mental issues.

  She turned back to the cruiser and handed the cobbler pan to Toby. “How about you guys finish this off for me?” She patted her stomach. “I spend way too much time sitting in that patrol car, and I don’t want to ruin my girlish figure.”

  “We don’t want that neither,” Pete said, his eyes locked on the goodies. “No, sir. It’s our duty to keep you from it.”

  Toby bowed slightly. “We thank you, Deputy Grant. It’s very kind of you.”

  “Jamie. I’m just Jamie to you guys.” She handed Pete the half-full carton of ice cream and opened the door for Petunia to jump in. “You should eat that up pretty quick before it melts. I’ll be seeing you around. Church lets out services in a bit, and I need to go direct traffic so the Baptists and the Methodists don’t run over each other to get a table at the Cracker Barrel.”

  * * *

  Trip swallowed the last bite of buttered toast and downed another dose of aspirin with her third bottle of water. It’d been a decade since she’d drank enough to induce a hangover. Coming face-to-face with Jamie had thrown her. Even though she’d known Grace’s new deputy was female and J. Grant, never in her wildest dreams did she really think it could be Jamie. Her Jamie. No, not hers. Because she’d screwed things up with the one woman she desperately wanted.

  Jamie had grown from a smokin’ hot coed to an even more attractive woman. All of it—her infatuation, the undeniable connection, and the ache of her unrequited interest—flooded back tenfold. Jamie obviously didn’t feel the same.

  After Jamie left, Trip plastered a smile on her face and dutifully circulated among her guests until the grills shut down, dusk fell, and the crowd thinned. That’s when she retreated to the front porch with a glass of ice and a bottle of her favorite blended whiskey. She wasn’t sure when the party ended, but the sky was beginning to lighten when Jerome, headed to the barn to feed horses before Sunday morning church services, shook her awake. She’d spent the night in a straight-back rocking chair, and her thirty-six-year-old body complained plenty when she stood to stagger inside.

  She took a long, hot shower, downed some aspirin and two bottles of water before climbing into her much softer bed for six hours of sobering sleep. Her headache was better now, but her heart was still sore from the emotional impact of finding Jamie back in her life. Or was she? She’d disappeared from Trip’s life before with no notice, no note of explanation. But Pine Cone was even smaller than its geographical borders when it came to tripping over the same people week after week. And Jamie wasn’t just passing through like Dani probably would.

&nbs
p; Trip sucked in a deep breath and blew it out. Her brain wasn’t up to sorting this out right now. The clinic was closed on Sunday, and though a kennel helper would have fed animals and cleaned pens, she needed to check on the patients with wounds or hospitalized with serious illnesses. She trudged across the drive to the clinic, only to realize Dani’s car was parked by the back entrance. Still, she went inside and pulled on a lab coat over her normal Sunday attire—loose basketball shorts and her favorite faded vet school T-shirt. She found Dani in the treatment room, inserting a new IV in the leg of an Irish setter who’d pulled his previous one out during the night.

  “Hey, haven’t you read your contract? You’re not scheduled to come in on Sundays. That’s my job because you cover Saturdays while I go to horse shows.”

  Dani glanced up and smiled as she finished taping the IV securely to the setter’s leg, then ruffled the dog’s ears affectionately and softly scolded him. “Now leave that one alone or I’ll be fitting you with a cone of shame next time.” The dog wagged his tail, oblivious to her threat.

  “I don’t think your scolding penetrated that thick Irish setter skull,” Trip said. She liked the way Dani handled her patients, and how they responded to her.

  Dani shrugged. “You know what they say in vet school…”

  “Some dogs have brains and others have red coats,” they quoted together.

  “This is his last bag of fluids, anyway,” Dani said, hefting him from the table and walking him back to his cage. “He’s feeling a lot better. I’ll be calling his owner to come pick him up tomorrow. I doubt we’ll have to worry about them being careless with antifreeze again once I show them their bill.”

  “Their teenager was the careless one, but it won’t happen again. Not only did he come close to losing his best friend, he’ll be working off most of that bill slinging hay bales for Jerome. Trust me, that’s hard work he won’t soon forget.”

  While Dani gently checked the IVs and administered medicine to a pair of Yorkie pups suffering from parvo, Trip pulled a terrier mix from a smaller pen and checked his multiple stitched wounds earned in a fight with a dog five times his size. “This guy looks like something out of a horror movie, but he should be good to go home tomorrow, too.”

  “You were right about the cookout, by the way.”

  “How so?”

  “I met a lot of great people and even picked up a new client for us.”

  “Do tell.”

  “Yeah, a terrier mix with a gastric problem. It was a shelter pup, so its medical history is sketchy. It’s a chronic issue, and several visits to specialists have helped the owner manage it somewhat. But she’s worried because the pup seems to be having some abdominal pain and has lost interest in food.”

  “Could be intestinal cancer,” Trip offered, closing the terrier back in his pen. “Who’s the owner?”

  “Jamie Grant. It’d be a shame if it is cancer. The terrier came from a program that turns the most unwanted shelter dogs into service animals. Jamie works for the sheriff’s office and trained this dog herself to sniff out drugs and explosives.”

  Trip had stopped listening the second Dani said Jamie’s name. Her brain whirled with this new information.

  “Trip? Are you all right?”

  “Yeah. I’m fine. My brain just sidetracked to something else for a minute. It’s still a little foggy. What were you saying?”

  “I’ve already been through the cat room, so we’re done.”

  “Oh, right. Remind me why you’re here on a Sunday?”

  Dani ducked her head. “Well, I saw you, uh, napping in the chair on the front porch and had an idea you might not be up for dealing with clogged drainage tubes and double diarrhea from the Yorkie twins.”

  Embarrassment heated Trip’s neck and ears. “Yeah. Not usually my style. At least, not since I graduated vet school a decade ago.” She rubbed her temples. “And it’ll be two decades, if ever, before I’ll do it again. But thanks for having my back.”

  “No problem,” Dani said.

  Trip started to leave, but stopped in the doorway. “Did Jamie make an appointment for her dog?”

  “Tomorrow. Nine o’clock. Before they start their shift.”

  “My morning is flexible tomorrow. I’ll handle that one if you don’t mind. Jamie and I were teammates on the basketball team where I did my undergrad. I’d like to handle this one personally.”

  “Sure, no problem. Jamie didn’t mention you guys were friends. I sure hope it isn’t cancer so you don’t have to give her bad news.”

  “Thanks. See you tomorrow morning, then.”

  * * *

  Jamie pulled into the small parking lot next to the windowless brick building. When she’d interviewed for the Pine Cone job, she’d been impressed that the sheriff was an advocate of community policing. And she was pretty sure she nailed the interview when she asked if they had a local Boys and Girls Club because she’d been a volunteer when she was a college student.

  As expected, the club was located in a blighted neighborhood where teens idled on street corners and parks were little more than rusted swing sets and cracked concrete basketball courts. She slowed as she approached the front entrance with Petunia at her heel. A dejected group of kids, five boys and two girls she guessed to be between seven and twelve years old, sat on the sidewalk with their backs against the dirty brick of the building. The kids stood and shifted away as she walked to them, their wary eyes taking in her uniform.

  “What’s up, guys?” Jamie asked.

  “Ain’t no crime to sit on the sidewalk,” a scowling boy said as he stepped to the front of the group. “We ain’t bothering nobody.”

  Jamie put her hands up, palms out. “Whoa. P and I aren’t here to hassle anybody.”

  Taking her cue, Petunia balanced on her haunches and held both front paws in the air, mirroring Jamie’s gesture. The smallest girl giggled, and several other faces lit up with smiles, but all remained behind their spokesman.

  “I’ll bet it’s a lot cooler inside,” Jamie said, pointing to the door.

  “It’s locked,” a different boy said. “Miss M ain’t here today.”

  “She’s real sick,” the older girl said. “Some days, she doesn’t come.”

  Grace had told Jamie that Millicent Williams, the nonprofit’s director, was struggling to keep the center open.

  “So, nobody else opens up when Miss M is sick?”

  “The Preacher Tom comes on Tuesday and Thursday, but nobody else,” another boy said.

  “What’s your dog’s name?” the small girl asked.

  “This is Canine Officer Petunia,” Jamie said, signaling P, who touched her paw to her brow in a cute salute. The little girl giggled again.

  “That ain’t no police dog,” the group’s leader said.

  “She sure is,” Jamie said. “She’s specially trained to sniff out explosives and illegal drugs.”

  The boy frowned but didn’t respond. Sweat trickled down his temple, and he wiped it away with a shrug of his shoulder.

  Jamie scanned the area. On the other side of the center’s squat building was a single basketball court partially surrounded by rusting chain-link fence. The goals were dented metal and the hoops net-less. Trash and weeds cluttered a vacant lot across the street where a lone, scraggly oak stood. Next to it, a store with ancient gas pumps had thick bars on the windows. The neglect was even worse than the inner-city project where she’d grown up. Was there no place for these children to play?

  “So what do you guys usually do when you hang out?” she asked.

  “Duh.” The leader of the group pointed to the locked door of the center. “We go in there.”

  “Miss M has video games, and we paint and draw and she gives us cookies,” one of the younger boys said, bouncing on his feet.

  Jamie scratched her head. “Hmm. Well, I don’t have a key to get inside today. But I might have an idea. P, stay.” She jogged across the street to the store. The store was nicer on the inside tha
n it was on the outside. A wall of glass-front refrigeration units was mostly filled with beer, but several others held bottled water, sodas, and a few grocery essentials. She grabbed seven sodas. Near the register, a warmer that looked more like an old movie popcorn cooker held foil-wrapped hotdogs, and a freezer was filled with various ice cream treats. Jamie scooped up seven Klondike bars. She put the sodas and ice cream on the counter. The old man at the register began to ring up her items. “And I’ll take seven of those dogs.”

  The old man bagged the ice cream bars and sodas and recited her total. While she dug out her wallet, he slid seven of the foil-covered hotdogs into another bag, along with a handful of ketchup and mustard packets. He looked across the street to the kids, who were all watching the store. “You’re not the first one, you know. Others with good intentions have come down here and fed them or helped them for a day or even a few weeks,” he said. “But it’s not really a kindness, because you do-gooders eventually don’t come back and those kids are reminded again and again that they aren’t worth anyone sticking around.” He held out her change.

  Jamie took the money and gathered up her bags, then leveled her gaze at him. “I might not look like it now in this uniform, but I was one of them once,” she said softly. “And I’m here to stay.”

  She crossed back to the kids and began handing out the treats. “Eat your ice cream first before it melts,” she said. “P and I will be back in about fifteen or twenty minutes, so don’t go anywhere.” She pointed to the group’s leader. “You’re in charge. Make sure everybody puts their trash in the bags.”

  The food was gone and the trash bagged when she returned. They eyed the wide broom she held in one hand and the cloth shopping bag she held in the other.

  “Since we can’t get inside to paint and draw, we’ll do it out here,” she said. Jamie put the bag down and dug out one of the boxes of fat colored chalks. “As soon as I sweep it clean, the sidewalk will be our canvas.”