by A. J. Aalto
Unhinged or not, it worked. “Please. Look at those spindly arms of yours,” he scoffed.
I flexed at him aggressively, which was entirely lost in my sweatshirt. I threw out my best old school WWF wrestler flex-and-show poses, stopping just short of doing Hulk Hogan’s mighty power point. He seemed unforgivably unimpressed. I really wanted to yell, tear my shirt open, and give my sweet abs a challenging slap; I refrained, since I don’t have sweet abs. Also, it was my favorite hoodie, and it would be a dumb way to ruin it. Also-also, I pretty sure I wasn't strong enough to rip it off.
“It’s a wiry sort of strength,” I said. “Guess it has to be felt to be understood.”
He didn't seem in any hurry to feel it, but he did lace his fingers together and extend his arms overhead, cracking his knuckles and showing off more upper-arm definition than was probably healthy for a single woman to stare at for too long. I wondered if Maim had gotten this good a look at him. I might have to gloat later.
“I plank with no hands,” I bragged. “That’s why my arms ain’t swole like yours.”
His brows drew together in a slightly perplexed clench. “Bet those are some mighty toes.”
“Right?” I nodded seriously. “My toes are so much mightier than yours will ever be.” I did a slow warm-up circle with my head, loosening my neck the way Hood had showed me, and picked up my gun, checking the clip. “Think you can out-shoot me?”
He looked aghast that I'd pilfered it from right in front of him. “You’re not using your weapon in here.”
“Then why is it in my hand?” I asked, acting mystified to see it out of its case. I reached my left hand out toward the target-control switch.
“Don’t poke that.”
I poked it. The paper target flew away from the booth, settling downrange about five meters or so. “I poked that a little,” I confessed unnecessarily.
“Don’t shoot the target,” he warned.
“Right,” I agreed. “But I’m going to, though.”
“Nope,” he said earnestly. “Don’t do that.”
I wrinkled my nose. “I’m going to do that one time.”
His eyes widened. Mine did, too. His nostrils flared. My nostrils flared. His hands twitched. Mine remained solidly around my gun. We stared each other down. He raised his voice. “Not even one time.”
“One bullet,” I said, squaring my body towards the target, but not turning my head away from him.
“Zero,” he said. “Zero bullets.”
“Grab your ear protection and clear,” I said, tapping my earmuffs into place.
“Step back,” a familiar voice said behind us. Hood. I didn’t wait for the new guy to react. On an exhale, I fired off six rounds in rapid succession and was pleased as punch when they tore through the red triangle in the head on the target.
“You going to let her get away with that?” Hood's drawl was equal parts amusement and challenge. “Some civilian walks into our range, disobeys how many direct commands from an officer, and discharges a firearm? How'd she even get her hands on the gun, Deputy?” He laid so much emphasis on the new dude's title that it might as well have been “dumbfuck.”
“Well, shit,” he muttered, crestfallen.
Hood's poker face shattered and he smirked. “If you can keep up with her marksmanship, I won't write your ass up, Morgan.”
I swapped clips and loaded the one I had half-emptied while the chief deputy sidled up to the next booth and put his own headgear on, throwing back a target and matching me clip for clip. After we’d practiced a bit under Hood’s scrutiny, I set my gun down and slid the earmuffs back off my head to let them sit around my neck. The new guy did the same, and we faced the sheriff together.
“Morning, Sheriff Hood,” I said brightly.
“Morning, trouble.” Rob shook his head. “Are you stirring shit with my deputy?”
“I might be,” I admitted. “You didn’t warn him I’d be by?”
“Nah,” Hood said. “I thought it might be fun to see how your people skills training was coming along. Looks like Elian and Harry still have a lot of work to do.”
“Harry says the same about you,” I replied. “Why don’t I have sweet abs to show off yet?” I cocked a thumb at Morgan's torso and the offending abs of sweetness. “That’s some fucking bullshit. You’re my trainer. You need to get me on a program.”
“I’m not building you any sweet abs,” Hood said. “You’re already unhealthy and insufferable, and we both know you get abs in the kitchen, where you eat like shit when you eat at all.”
“I tried that steel-cut sludge you told Harry to make me this morning. I could use that stuff to hang fucking bathroom tile, so don't sell me that 'nutritious is delicious' crap sandwich.”
Hood smirked and ignored my fresh complaint. “Morgan Sally, Marnie Baranuik. She may be here annoying us off and on for the foreseeable future. She’s…” Hood wrestled with words for a moment and gave up, ending his assessment with a shrug. He took a few moments to check over our paper targets, clucking his tongue. “Well, she didn't land you on my shit list for marksmanship, even if she is kind of a ringer. Good thing, too; I hate paperwork.”
Sally sighed with surprised relief, and I stuck out my hand. The chief deputy was looking back and forth between Hood and me, as if judging the level of acquaintance before he made any decisions. He shook my bare hand firmly, and I withdrew quickly enough so that the Blue Sense didn’t flare with any deeper impressions.
“Let me ask you, Rob,” I said, cocking my head and checking his face for signs of irritation, “because I will be questioned about this later. Do you feel like I’m knockin’ collywobbles off your trolley?” I rethought that. “Or knocking your trolley off the collywobbles?”
“Every damn day,” Rob said, rolling with it. “If I have collywobbles, I blame you. I thought this was your day off. And by that, I mean, I thought I had the day off.” He didn’t wait for my cheeky retort. “My office. Carry on, deputy.”
Sally nodded. “Yessir.”
I put my gun back in its case, hung up my ear protection, and followed Hood back through the workout room and down the hall to his office.
He closed the door behind me, tossed his jacket off the chair in front of his desk so I could sit there, and went to open his blinds to let in some light. The early morning sun revealed dust motes in the air and deep lines on his face. “You ate breakfast?”
I nodded. “When your grain gruel tried to glue my face shut, I had some fruit.”
He looked at least somewhat mollified.
“Sally seems like a good lad. Solid. Amusing. Lousy with a comeback, though.”
“Yes, that’s one of my most important hiring criteria: will this officer's quick wit amuse my most famously annoying citizen?” he drawled.
I sat and swung my boot heels up on Hood’s desk. My feet splayed out and I stared at him between them. “Got a local address for Mitch Dunlop?”
He checked his texts with his thumb, scrolling through. I thought he wasn’t going to answer me, but he finally put his phone down and said, “Nope.”
“Would you tell me if you did?”
“Are you talking about the Mitch Dunlop I told you to stay away from? The Mitch Dunlop who showed up at North Suburban yesterday afternoon for stitches in his posterior pelvic region from a stab wound?” He nailed me with an accusing glare.
“He blame me for that?” I asked.
“He said he quote sat on a pair of scissors unquote. Which would mean they were sticking straight up when he did it. I'm just a cop, and not a material-science physicist, but that's not really a common position for scissors to be in on their own.”
“Maybe they were some of those fancy, ergonomic Ikea jobbers.” I drummed on the black jeans on my thighs with both hands like I was playing the bongos. “He should be more careful.”
He made it clear he wasn’t buying it by leaning on his desk solidly on both elbows, wrapping his left hand over his right fist, and looking at me over
them without speaking for a long time. Hood’s usual skeptical-sympathetic gaze had lost the latter portion and was now entirely full of doubt. The old Marnie would have squirmed and eventually blurted something incriminating, but I was running Marnie 3.0, and my drumming on my thigh-bongos didn’t even falter.
Finally, he asked, “Why do you want to find him?”
“I’m ready to date again,” I lied with blithe nonchalance. “Two months is long enough to mourn, and I like a man who stalks me from the gym and ambushes me. It’s pretty hot.” When his eyes said get-real, I shrugged. “He was looking for something in Batten’s house. I want to know what. And why. The timing can't be a coincidence.”
He considered, but if he had any information about Mitch Dunlop’s whereabouts, he chose not to share it. “Any other exciting plans today?”
“Thought I’d talk to Chapel after I treat Golden to breakfast.”
Hood’s nearly invisible eyebrows shot up. “Guess that means you got yours.”
“My what?” I shook my head.
Hood opened his desk and pulled out an envelope and his name scrawled on the front. No stamps. “Chapel hand delivered it to me. He had a bunch of them.”
“What’s in it?”
“Haven’t opened it,” he admitted, tapping the side of the envelope on his desk. “Been putting it off.”
“Maybe it’s time-sensitive,” I said. “You should open it.”
He exhaled hard from his nostrils like an unhappy dragon. “Don’t wanna.”
“Give it to me, I’ll open it.”
“Nope.” He popped it back in his desk. “Chapel had one with your name on it. Just a heads up.”
I didn’t like the sound of that one bit. It was like getting a text message that read, We need to talk. “Well, fuckberries.”
“So that’s where I picked up that word.” He started shuffling through the papers on his desk as a distraction, but he didn’t fool me. The conversation wasn't done, and he wasn’t sure where to take it next.
“I better be hustling,” I said, getting up. The Blue Sense revealed relief, which he did a reasonably good job of keeping off his face. I did a double-take at a receipt on the desk for one of the big box stores in Superior, Colorado. I felt my lips spread into yet another grin: three cases of Kit Kat bars. I tapped the desk twice with my forefinger and shot him a knowing look. “Enabler.”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” he lied, and made a show of trying to find the hat that was on the hook by the wall. “They’re for me.”
“You’re an enabler for Jill, but you’re tough on me.”
He snagged his hat and put it on. Looking terribly official, he informed me, “You need it more.”
Point: Hood. I accepted this with a wave goodbye. “Okay. So you’ll do it again tomorrow.”
It was almost seven-fifteen. On my way out, the light rock radio station was playing Justin Bieber, and Jill was halfway through what may have been her third Kit Kat of the morning. She was placating a caller who was frantic enough that I could hear the voice buzz through the headset, but she took the time to shoot me a smile and a wink on my way out. She poked a few buttons and dispatched ambulance, fire, and a deputy, and sucked chocolate off the side of her thumb before taking another call. For people like Jill, life was a fleet-footed mouse skittering past the blades of a tractor that was chewing up everyone else, spitting out maimed corpses for her to dodge.
I hadn't wanted to be Morgan Sally's bunny rabbit, and I didn't want to be Jill's field mouse, either. I wasn't cut out for the rodent life, even if I wasn't totally foxy.
Chapter 8
When I got to Claire’s Early Bird, there were only two cars in the lot. One of them had an ad for a local handyman wrapped around the back window, with a guy sitting behind the wheel talking on the phone before or after his breakfast. The other was Claire’s Bronco. I had beaten the rush that descended between seven-thirty and quarter to eight, when commuters from Ten Springs would pull off on their way to Boulder before work. Most of them would just hit the drive thru for coffee and a pastry. The actual owners of the place, Claire’s mother and brother, Nina and Daniel, handled the kitchen and drive thru window. They must have named the place for Claire because — and this had taken me a moment or ten to digest — with her frizzy hair and cold, reptilian gaze, was the friendliest face in the family. I pulled into the spot furthest from the door and hurried inside. Looking around, I didn't see Golden anywhere, so I claimed one of the five comfortable booths by the windows before anyone else could.
Claire’s had gone through a recent partial renovation that I hadn’t really absorbed yet; it always had a greasy spoon vibe, but Claire and company had torn out the corner tables and installed an old organ where customers could find various sweeteners and creamers to doctor up a coffee to go. They’d swapped the overhead fluorescent lights for some black and white glass pendant jobs. The curtains, once a cheerful country print, had been replaced with black and white gingham with tiebacks. The overall effect was a cross between a piano bar and a marginally-newer greasy spoon as done by Edward Gorey, sort of an Addams' Family lounge. If I squinted the right way, I could just about picture Lurch playing the organ between handing out sugar cubes.
Claire waddled over to offer coffee, but I asked about tea, and she gave me a suspicious glare before going off to fetch the pot; Claire didn’t like when her regulars, even an erratic and occasional breakfast counter occupant like me, changed their usual orders. I wondered how she was settling into the gussied-up digs, but she wasn’t chatty at the best of times, so I didn’t inquire.
I got out my Moleskine and pencil and reviewed my notes from my meeting with Beau. Jotted in the margins, I had asked, Mermaid? Horseman? Horsewoman? If so, which one? Wax seal? Dream communication? How do I find her? WTF do I do about it? And underlined, Hide Beau?
The bell over the front door dinged and the door let in sunshine and early morning bird song with a white-haired couple in their eighties wearing matching grey L.L. Bean parkas. He had his arm out for her to take, but she stubbornly hobbled on her own, gripping the throat of her coat closed. The old man waved at Claire, who fetched the coffee pot and two menus.
The couple chose the booth beside mine, despite the rest of the tables being empty. I wanted to be annoyed, but they looked like that was their usual spot, and I was the interloper. The man helped his wife off with her coat and hung it up on the peg before attempting his. While she eased into her seat, he greeted Claire with a pleasantly booming, stentorian voice, the carrying vocals of someone accustomed to speaking to a crowd, or perhaps being heard over construction or manufacturing equipment running at full throttle. He thanked her for the coffee and complimented her promptness loudly enough that my own cup rattled on its plate, and then sat directly behind me. I may have cringed and wished I still had my ear protection from the gun range.
“This stupid hand,” he said to his wife. “Like a block of ice. Always pins and needles.”
His wife cooed sympathetically. “We should mention it to the doctor again, Hal.”
“Oh! I must have stuffed two hankies in my pocket today. Look at this. Two of them. However did that happen?”
“I gave you an extra on account of your sniffles, you silly goat,” she said kindly. “You saw me do it.”
“I did, I did at that, you’re right, Petal.” He sipped coffee loudly enough for me to hear, and then exclaimed with a surprised noise at the temperature. “That bruise is starting to clean up a bit. How about the one on your knee?”
“Oh, Hal!” she said, sounding disappointed.
He chuckled and dropped his voice; though he was still practically yelling, it was his conspiratorial tone that made my lips quirk. “Well, you know I don’t peek without permission when the lights are on anymore, dear, you know that. I wouldn’t dare.” They shared a hushed spatter of almost teenager-like giggles about their nude moments that made me smile secretly as I pretended to scribble in my Moleskine.
He added, “You’d clobber me,” to which she started a round of, “I wouldn’t!” followed by his, “You would!” They continued this until they completely dissolved into more laughter. Their comfort with one another and their companionship was charming. They ordered the exact same meal, the Early Bird Special, and when it was brought, he made a soft exclamation.
“Now, pass me your pastry, Petal.”
“Just this once, Hal.” I could practically hear her playful pout.
“You can’t eat that, dear. Your blood sugar,” he gently reminded. “Look at all that frosting.”
She replied with a soft, “Oh, poo.”
“Getting old is hell,” he agreed, but he sounded satisfied, and I could picture him eating her dessert happily enough. They were cute as the dickens, and they made me realize that I wanted what they had. I’d always pictured myself growing old with Harry, but he wouldn’t grow old with me. He already was old; older than them, older than Grandma Vi would be, older than Carole Jeanne, older than any living mortal. We wouldn’t share the experience of winding down slowly together. He’d be in his thirty-five-year-old body forever. He wouldn’t complain about his aching joints or his grey hairs or leave his dentures beside mine on the bathroom sink in little matching cups of blue water. He would nurture me through my aging, as he had done with Grandma Vi. And the DaySitter before her. And the one before her. He would eventually sit by my deathbed and ask me if I had any ideas on who might replace me as his caregiver and advocate. But I wouldn’t have a granddaughter to suggest. Would I?
The old lady chided, “You might look a little less pleased with yourself when you eat that, Hal.”
“What fun would that be?” he said on a chortle, and they both laughed pleasantly again in their happy little us-against-the-world bubble. That’s when I lost it.
I hadn’t cried in a while, and I sure as hell hadn’t planned on doing it in the corner booth at Claire's. I tried to cut it short, but it wanted to last; I attempted to smother it behind one bare fist, but it squeaked out enough that the older couple, upon their exit, happened to notice. I felt a light tap and looked up to see a handkerchief in my face.