CHAPTER 41 – THE CALL-OUT
Craig Briggs had liked Leonard Loomis well enough in life, but was finding the man a serious pain in the rump as a murder victim. Not that he held it against the man, exactly, but it was getting harder to remember the man behind all the bother and frustration.
Briggs was just finishing dinner when the call-out came. It was the first time in weeks he'd made it to dessert without a call. He'd been entertaining hopes he might make it entirely through the meal without an interruption.
It didn't help that Tina got so excited about anything to do with anyone not a local up to usual tricks. Thought the sky was falling, Tina did, at the least provocation (and outsiders were, invariably in her view, provocations, whether they behaved themselves or not). On top of that, answering calls to 999 apparently provided the only excitement in her life. Not like her colleague Charlotte, who had a life, and a love, and a wedding coming up, not to mention responsibilities on the side. Charlotte was grounded and glowing: it made for a nice combination in a woman. Tina, on the other hand, had gone shallower and shallower as time went on. It was very sad, really.
He grabbed his gear, trying unsuccessfully to fend off a side-by-side comparison of his life with Tina's. Really, policing was all he did these days. It was all he wanted to do – just not quite so much of it at once, please; and less of it weird, thanks. In addition to the Loomis murder and the attempted arson afterward, he'd had strange women prowling around in the woods, and two old ladies insisting they'd been kidnapped and mistreated by space aliens. (But not flying ones, Mabel insisted. Mabel wouldn't even pretend to fly, even in her imaginary kidnappings. Her aliens drove their victims about. She wanted that noted especially, in case the BBC might be interested in following up on unorthodox aliens.) In addition, old Jon Wells had finally gone senile, but was enjoying a new burst of athleticism, which meant that rescuers had to jog to catch him, often as not. They'd also had to drag him out of the river twice already. Jon had decided that it was the Channel, and he was determined to swim across it for the supposed glory of it.
You name it, the strangest things had gone wrong lately.
On his way out, Briggs rubbed his fingertip along the frame of his favorite picture of Frannie. It was his way of saying that he remembered, and also that he was holding to his promise of not trying to join her too soon. It was about all she had ever asked of him: not that he guard himself at all costs, but that he didn't get himself killed for nothing. She'd been the perfect cop's wife, he thought. Heaven knew that women who could survive being married to a policeman were hard enough to come by. But even among that rare lot, she'd been a gem.
Not Exactly Allies Page 41