by Roger Busby
The Sheriff of Tesco
By
Roger Busby
The Sheriff of Tesco
Copyright 2012 by Roger Busby
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy; recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now know or to be invented, without the permission in writing for the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
For Maureen with love
The Sheriff of Tesco
by Roger Busby
Improvised Explosive Device (IED): The detonation blast from an IED travels at 13,000 mph, reaches 7,000 degrees Fahrenheit, creates 400 tons of pressure per square inch. It is the insurgents’ weapon of choice.
He walked over to where she was sitting alone in the corner of the supermarket coffee shop sipping a cappuccino. Noticed, close up, that her brown hair, pulled back into a ponytail, was dashed with blonde highlights, her face young looking, probably mid thirties.
“Mind if I join you?” he asked, pulling out a plastic chair.
“Be my guest,” She looked up, saw this raw boned man, the angular planes of his face weather tanned, his eyes the palest blue.
Although the store was busy with the usual throng of mid-week shoppers there were plenty of empty tables in the cafe. She raised a quizzical eyebrow and met his steady gaze.
“Nice morning,” he began his gambit, his eyes not leaving hers. Hazel with flecks of white, like a snow-shower. He made a mental note.
“That depends,” she said, “On how you define nice.” She read the ID tag clipped to the breast pocket of his dark blue shirt. John Russell. “I like this spot,” she said, nodding towards the trolley park, ”easy to keep an eye on my shopping from here,” the merest shrug, “you never know, do you.”
“That’s for sure,” he replied, biding his time as he sized her up. “Always pays to be careful.”
“Not that there’s much worth stealing,” she said, “Since my husband died I don’t do much in the way of fancy cooking anymore. Just convenience stuff, mostly, sort of lost my appetite.”
He made another mental note: Widow.
“So do you work here, John Russell?”
He tilted the ID tag and she read the words under the stylised eye motif: Pinkerton Security.
“Oh,” she smiled and the smile widened into a grin, “the dudes who tamed the West, railroad dicks, Dashiell Hammett.”
He looked nonplussed
“The Pinkertons...we never sleep!”
“You’ve lost me,” he said
“Don’t tell me you’ve never read Hammett, Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key?”
He shook his head.
“Great detective writer, oh, I’ve read ‘em all.” She smiled at the puzzled expression he was trying to disguise. “You don’t get it, do you?”
“Get what?” This wasn’t the way he had intended to play it; she had thrown him off balance and he felt suddenly unsure of himself.
“Why Dashiell Hammett. He was a Pinkerton agent, just like you. The immortal legend handed down from the railroads and the banks of the
Wild West...” she glanced around the store, “...to Tesco’s Old Kent Road. Who would have thought it...the legend lives on.”
No he didn’t get it. He’d become a 12-hour shift security guard when he left the Royal Marines. It was the only steady job he could get and legends didn’t come into it.
She began quoting passages of Hammett from memory. The Maltese Falcon...The Thin Man, telling him they all celebrated the lone detective risking all in the quest for the truth. “And you’re carrying the torch now, John Russell, the Sheriff of Tesco,” she laughed, “ Or do your friends call you Jack?”
“Jane, actually,” he smiled, harking back to Lima Company, “they called me Jane.”
She laughed. “Jane Russell?”
“A bootneck joke,” he said, slightly abashed, “but mostly they called me Colours...short for Colour Sergeant Russell.”
"Royal Marines?”
He nodded, wondering now if she was putting him on and the familiar stabbing ache started up in his leg. He was about to reply when the pager on his belt cheeped. Russell glanced down thankfully and read the message; looked up again, saw her watching him, and said: “Don’t go away...I’ll be right back.”
He went up to the security office thinking: The Maltese Falcon? Wasn’t that a Bogart movie?
Fat Eddie was working the cameras, flipping images across a bank of screens.
Russell stood behind him and watched the show unfold as the cameras tracked up and down the aisles, paused for a moment to feature a bunch of kids snacking on crisps and biscuits filched from the display, munching the merchandise on the hoof.
“Grazers in again,” Fat Eddie observed, “Another bite out of the profits. His nibs’ll go ballistic if he spots ‘em.”
“Just kids,” Russell shrugged. He knew from experience that the grazers weren’t worth chasing. Soon as he braced them they’d scatter and he’d be run ragged all over the store. The nagging ache began to throb. “Modern youth,” he said, “in my day it was scrumping apples.” He looked at the rolls of grey flesh oozing over the collar of Fat Eddie’s shirt. “Is that it?”
The camera panned. “Ah there’s the joker.” Fat Eddie zoomed in on a balding man with a goatee wearing a waxed Barbour. “Just now he slipped a bottle of scotch into the poacher’s pocket. God knows what else he’s got tucked away. You’d better get after him, Russell, before he legs it.”
John Russell watched the shoplifter a moment longer. He was good, but not that good. Then he said: “You ever hear of Dashiell Hammett , Eddie?”
Fat Eddie turned from the console, his brow furrowed. “Hammett...Hammett? Can’t say I have. What shift’s he on?”
Russell went back down to the shop floor, weaving between the knots of shoppers, dodging the trolley jockeys. He worked around the aisles until he came up behind his target in canned goods; pictured those old-time railroad detectives lying in ambush for the outlaw gang like he’d seen on TV. Tapped the target on the shoulder. The man spun around blinking rapidly. He had nervous eyes.
Russell liked to give his suspects names. It was a trick he had picked up from his undercover days in Northern Ireland, up against the PIRA, a time of moving shadows when no one was referred to by their real name. This one he called John, Slippery John.
Crowded him against the cliff of baked beans and tinned tomatoes.
“Just a word to the wise, pal,” he said with no expression on his face, “you just starred in our in-store movie. Now you go through that checkout over there with merchandise you haven’t paid for and the minute you step outside you will be committing a criminal offence under the Theft Act by demonstrating your intention to permanently deprive. That’s when I’m going to have to grab you by your scrawny chicken neck and haul you up before the manager and he’s an eighteen carat mean bastard on the best of days.”
Russell hooked his thumbs into his belt. “We prosecute all shoplifters, no exception. Company policy, you getting my drift?” Stared the man down. What had she called him? The Sheriff of Tesco?
Slippery John blinked more rapidly; goatee bobbing as Russell reached down and tapped his poacher’s pocket, heard the telltale clink. He stepped back and gave the man his personal space back. Watched him scuttle off. Russell looked up and nodded to the eye of the CCTV camera. Crime prevention. He wondered what that Hammett guy would have made of that little drama.
He went back to the coffee shop
carrying two fresh coffees, a cappuccino and an americano, set the frothy one down in front of her and to her raised eyebrow said: “Staff perks.” He didn’t tell her that the gesture was designed to prevent her making a run for it.
“You know,” she said, smiling, “I’ve been thinking...you’re a lot like him, you know, you’ve got that haunted look about you. Hammett was the same, haunted.”
“How’d you know that,” he said, taking the seat opposite her, surprised to discover that the blonde streaks in her hair were actually grey.
“Oh I’m an authority on him,” she said. “He had a shack down on the beach where he used to write; an old upright typewriter, hammering away at his stories, just the sea for company.”
“A loner,” Russell said, picturing the scene she had painted for him.
“That’s the essence of the Pinkerton, man alone against the odds, that’s the thread.”
“With his detective stories, or real life?”
“Both,” she said, “His compulsion, only he never felt he could get either of them perfect. That’s the trouble with the perfectionist, nothing’s ever quite good enough.”
“So he was unhappy