Against the Paw

by Diane Kelly

  Most cops favored their Tasers or pepper spray, but having been a twirler in the high school band, my baton was my nonlethal weapon of choice. I whipped it from my belt and flicked my wrist to extend it. Snap!

  The kids leaped to their feet, some scrambling onto the tabletops to get a better view, all of them whipping out their cell phones and holding them up to record the chase. “Go, dog! Go!”

  And go Brigit did.

  With a leap that would make any long-jump champion proud, she hurled herself up and forward, onto Schorndorf’s back, taking him down to the tile floor. Whump!

  Finally, I caught up with them. “Good girl!” I praised Brigit before ordering her to release the man.

  Pulling my cuffs from my belt, I knelt down next to Schorndorf, yanked his hands up behind him, and cuffed his wrists. Thank goodness this has been resolved with only minor incident.

  As I stood, a chicken nugget sailed past me and nailed Schorndorf in the ass, leaving a greasy smear on the back of his pants. The nugget was merely the opening salvo. In seconds, the students unleashed a barrage of chicken nuggets, Tater Tots, and French fries, enough to virtually bury the man. A celery stalk pinged Schorndorf on the forehead. At least one of these kids packed a healthy lunch.

  The chant of “Go, dog! Go!” was replaced by “Seniors rule! Seniors rule!”

  When an onion ring bounced off my left boob, I stepped aside, getting myself out of the line of fire.

  “Seniors rule! Seniors rule!”

  Schorndorf curled up in the fetal position and shrieked, “Stop, you little assholes!”

  A pint of chocolate milk sailed through the air, nailing the man in the shoulder and sending up a spray of brown liquid. Sploosh!

  The chant grew louder, many of the teens accentuating their cries with fists thrown in the air. “Seniors rule! Seniors rule!”

  While Brigit took advantage of the mayhem to scrabble around Schorndorf and gorge on the edible projectiles, I turned to the students and raised a hand, keeping my baton down at my side. “That’s enough! Sit down!” My voice was barely audible over the din in the room. Too bad I hadn’t had the foresight to bring my bullhorn inside with me.

  While the bombardment lessened slightly, it didn’t stop. The seniors did, in fact, rule.

  “Enough! Stop!” I yelled again.

  By this time, the kids had become bored with throwing things at Schorndorf and were now tossing tidbits directly to Brigit. She snapped morsels of hot dog and pepperoni pizza from the air. Snap! Snap! A French fry. Snap! The tail end of a bean burrito. Snap!

  I turned to Brigit and ordered her to return to my side. “Now!” I added when she ignored me, making no move to obey. Sheesh. She was as bad as the seniors. But if she didn’t stop now she’d end up with an upset tummy. Was there something I could give her for that? Pupto Bitchmol, perhaps?

  I made one more attempt to quell the mayhem. “Everyone sit down!”

  Alas, not a single butt in the lunchroom found its seat.

  The lunch lady cast a glance my way. “I can handle these monsters.” She overturned a five-gallon bucket labeled VEGETABLE SHORTENING and stepped up onto her makeshift plastic pulpit. Brandishing her huge metal spoon, she hollered, “Next kid who throws something is going to be very sorry!”

  Immediately, the students stopped chanting and lobbing their food and took their seats. Who needs dragnet when you’ve got a hairnet?

  The principal ran up to me, his foot sliding on a trio of greasy Tater Tots. I grabbed his arm to keep him from falling back on his butt.

  When he’d regained his balance, he looked from Schorndorf to me. “What on earth is happening here?”

  I gestured to Brigit, who was gobbling down a hamburger bun someone had thrown like a Frisbee. “My dog alerted on Mr. Schorndorf’s car in the parking lot. He’s subbing for a gym teacher today. When I came inside to speak with him, he took off running.”

  The principal looked down at the grease-stained and chocolate-milk-soaked man on the floor, glanced over at the students, and shook his head. “I better get to the gym and check on his class.”

  “Good idea.”

  Derek strolled up, shaking his head. “This is what happens when you send a girl to do a man’s job.”

  It took everything in me not to whap Derek with my baton. Instead, I took a deep breath, closed my baton, and returned it to my belt. “How much did you see?”

  “Everything.” He waved his cell phone in my face. “And so will the chief. I sent him the video.”

  If I didn’t have sufficient reason to despise Derek before, I certainly did now.

  While the custodians came around to clean up the mess and the teachers on lunch duty chastised the students, I yanked Schorndorf to his feet and Brigit and I escorted him out to the parking lot.

  I stopped as I reached the teachers’ lot. Groan. So much for preventing senior pranks. Every car in the lot—including my cruiser—was covered in shaving cream and colorful Silly String. The only car that had been spared was Derek’s squad car, which sat at the curb, lights flashing.

  “This is all on you, Luz,” Derek said with a snort. “It was like this when I got here.”

  Fan-damn-tastic.

  Schorndorf had yet to say a word or meet my eye, though he scowled down at Brigit as she licked what appeared to be banana pudding from the leg of his pants. So much for her diet. Her calorie intake today was off the charts.

  My cell phone rang, the caller ID indicating it was Chief Garelik calling. I cringed, bracing myself as I answered the call. “Good afternoon, Chief.”

  “Good God Almighty, Officer Luz!” he cried. “You started a food fight in the cafeteria?”

  “Food fight” wasn’t exactly the right word. What happened was more like some type of culinary blitzkrieg. But no point in correcting him. “I didn’t start it,” I replied through clenched teeth. “The students did. And if Officer Mackey had been performing his duties rather than recording the events on his phone, things would not have gotten so out of hand.”

  I cut my eyes to Derek. I had both the chief and Mackey there, and they knew it.

  “Get back to work,” the chief said.

  “I never stopped working, sir.”

  The click of the chief hanging up was the only reply.

  Derek kept watch over Schorndorf while I returned Brigit to her enclosure and searched the VW. Sure enough, Schorndorf had a dime bag of marijuana under the driver’s seat. I held up the bag. “Bingo. Brigit’s nose always knows.”

  Derek opened the back door of his cruiser and motioned for the substitute teacher to take a seat inside, all the while reciting his Miranda rights as casually as if he were ordering a draft beer at a local bar. Once the man was secured, he held out his hand. “Gimme.”

  I handed him the dime bag so he could turn it in at the station for processing. Without another word, he slid into his seat, started his car, and drove off.

  I returned to my cruiser, climbed in, and activated the windshield wipers, doing the best I could to clear the shaving cream and Silly String from the glass. With any luck, the rest of it would blow off as I drove.

  As I pulled out of the school parking lot, my radio crackled with a call from dispatch. “Need an officer to speak with a resident of Berkeley Place. She thinks someone was in her bushes last night.”

  Derek’s voice came back on the airwaves. “If I’d been in her bushes, she’d have known it.” He followed his crude comment with his signature guffaw. Haw-haw-haw!

  The last thing a worried woman needed was a macho shithead like Derek Mackey showing up on her doorstep. Besides, he was tied up taking Schorndorf to the station. I grabbed my mic from the dashboard. “Officers Luz and Brigit responding.”

  We headed up the road into the Berkeley Place neighborhood. It was an upscale area, with most houses in the half-million-dollar range, a high price by Texas standards where housing came relatively cheap. Part of the Mexican government’s Peters Colony back in the mid-1800s
, the area had later been turned over to gringos as part of a land grant. W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel had lived in a farmhouse in the area before becoming governor of Texas. Deed restrictions from a century ago prohibited wooden homes, so stucco and brick became the materials of choice for those building residences in the area. Given their age, the vast majority of the houses had been gutted and updated multiple times over the decades. Some even came with separate guesthouses in the backyards. This is living.

  My cruiser rolled to a stop at the address the dispatcher had provided. Like most of the homes in Berkeley Place, this house was a mix of stucco and brick, with a manicured yard that had been professionally landscaped and maintained. I emerged from my patrol car and freed my partner, who promptly relieved herself in the grass by the curb.

  As I approached the front door, a woman opened it. She looked to be in her early thirties and wore a pair of bejeweled sandals and a gauzy, feminine dress. Her long, dark hair hung to nearly elbow level, approximately the same length as my own, though mine was currently pulled up into a professional-looking bun.

  The woman stepped onto the porch. “Thanks for coming, Officer. I’m Kirstin Rumford.”

  I introduced myself and shook her hand, then tilted my head to indicate Brigit. “My partner, Sergeant Brigit.”

  When Brigit raised her paw, Kirstin smiled and bent down to shake it. “Nice to meet you, Brigit.”

  “I understand you might have had an intruder?”

  The woman’s expression grew sheepish. “Maybe I’m just being paranoid, but last night I thought I heard someone sneeze outside my window. When I came outside this morning to leave for work I noticed the azalea bushes on the side of my house were broken.” She motioned for me to follow her around to the side of the house and stopped in front of a large window.

  While Brigit sniffed around at the base of the foliage, I took a look at the bushes. A few branches on two of the bushes directly under the window were broken, the pieces that had been fully severed having fallen into the bush or all the way to the ground. Other broken limbs dangled.

  “It definitely looks like the bushes have been damaged.” I bent down and looked at the bark chips covering the surface of the flower bed. They, too, appeared to have been disturbed. Because the layer of bark chips was so thick, no soil was exposed. If anyone had been in the bushes, the chips had prevented them from leaving footprints.

  Kirstin’s face drew and she crossed her arms over herself in an instinctive reaction of self-protection. “I phoned the neighborhood watch last night. One of the men drove over right away, but he didn’t see anyone around.”

  She’d been smart to notify the neighborhood watch. We police couldn’t be everywhere and, as hard as we tried to familiarize ourselves with our beats, residents often knew better than law enforcement when something or someone was out of place in a particular area.

  Brigit came up next to me and put her head to the ground, sniffing what appeared to be some type of small animal scat.

  I looked up at the woman. “There’s some small poop here. Do you get raccoons?”

  “Sometimes,” she said. “But I’ve never heard of them climbing bushes.”

  Neither had I. Trees, sure. But bushes, no. Of course if two male raccoons had gotten into a tussle out here anything was possible.

  I lifted my chin to indicate the window. “What room is inside there?”

  “My bedroom,” the woman said. “That’s why this got me so worried. I mean, to think that a man might have been out here peeping at me…” Though her words trailed off, she completed her sentence with a shudder, taking me back to my own shudder in this morning’s meeting when the captain had been telling us about Ralph Hurley.

  I leaned over the broken bushes to examine the screen. It appeared to be tightly in place. “It doesn’t look like the screen has been tampered with.” The closed miniblinds, however, hung slightly askew, the bottom edge not quite reaching the sill on the right side. Would a person be able to see in through the small space?

  I stepped back and took a look around, walking up and down the side of the house, my eyes scanning the ground, bushes, and up the outer walls to the eaves. While I’d seen a light fixture on the woman’s porch and up-lights mounted along the front of the house, there didn’t appear to be any lighting along this side. In the dark of night, it would be easy for someone to hide himself in the shadows. Still, I needed to consider all of the possibilities. As I looked around, I noticed that the azalea bushes near the rear of the house had been trimmed more than the others. “The bushes have been cut back more here. Why is that?”

  “A roofer was out here last month to fix a leak,” she said. “A guy from Zinniker and Sons. That’s where he put up his ladder. When he left I noticed it had broken some branches on the bushes so I had my gardeners trim them.”

  I glanced back down the row to the bushes under her bedroom window. “Could it be possible that the roofer also damaged the bushes under your window but that you didn’t notice until now?”

  She mulled the proposition over for a moment. “I suppose it’s possible, but if he’d damaged those bushes, too, I think I would’ve noticed it last month.”

  Her explanation made sense. The bushes had probably been damaged more recently. “Do you l-live alone, ma’am?”

  “Yes,” she replied. “My husband used to live here, too, but we separated a year ago. We’re in the process of getting a divorce.”

  A woman home alone, Hurley’s typical victim. He’d had ample time to drive from San Antonio to Fort Worth yesterday afternoon, but he wouldn’t yet have had time to case this woman’s house, would he? Then again, he could have simply followed her home from somewhere and looked for clues that she lived by herself. The lack of other cars in the garage or driveway would be a giveaway, as would lights on in only one room of the house at a time. Of course Hurley might have had nothing at all to do with the broken bushes. It was anyone’s guess at this point.

  “Has your divorce been amicable?” I asked.

  Kristin cocked her head, her brow furrowing. “What do you mean?”

  “Would your husband have any reason to be out here? Maybe spying on you and a date out of jealousy? Or coming to take some item of property you two might be squabbling over?”

  I’d seen all kinds of bad behavior during my relatively short time on the force. Jealous exes who vandalized their former boyfriend’s or girlfriend’s cars. Men who rooted for rival sports teams trying to tear each other apart in the parking lot of a sports bar. An angry neighbor who’d taken a baseball bat to a set of noisy wind chimes. Nothing would surprise me now.

  “No,” Kirstin said. “I can’t imagine my husband doing anything like that. Besides, I haven’t changed the locks and he still has a key. There’d be no need for him to break in.”

  “Have you seen anyone unusual hanging around the street? Somebody odd come to the door? Anyone following you?” Maybe an oversized escaped parolee in an Isuzu Amigo?

  Her eyes went wide. “You think someone might have been following me?”

  I raised a palm to calm her. “Just trying to examine all potential angles.”

  She chewed her lip. “I haven’t noticed anyone following me, but I haven’t really been looking. Nobody strange has come to the door that I recall. I work long hours and only come out front to check the mail so I don’t see much of what’s going on in the neighborhood.”

  “The police department received an alert for a convict from San Antonio with a history of breaking into homes and forcing the residents to give him their cash and debit cards. He tends to target female victims who live alone. It couldn’t hurt for you to keep an eye out for a large, brown-haired man in an Isuzu Amigo.”

  Her eyes went wide again. “Has he been spotted here?”

  “No, but he has contacts in the area so he might head this way.” Then again, he might be headed to Cozumel with plans to sun himself on a beach. His stolen dollars would go much further there.

  I
turned to face the road and looked up and down the street. A pair of squirrels chased each other around and up the trunk of a tree across the way, capturing Brigit’s eyes as well as mine. Fortunately, she was on her best behavior and made no move to chase them. A blue jay alighted on a fence post, her head jerking this way and that as she surveyed her surroundings. Next door, a black-and-white soccer ball sat forgotten beside the driveway.

  Hmm …

  I pointed to the ball. “Think some kids might have k-kicked their ball into your bushes?”

  Kirstin eyed the ball and visibly relaxed, her tight shoulders loosening. “That would explain things, wouldn’t it?” She exhaled a long breath of relief. “I feel silly now for calling the police.”

  “No need to feel silly,” I assured her. “Better safe than sorry.”

  We stepped back around to the front of her house.

  “Just in case it wasn’t kids,” I added, “you might want to take some extra precautionary measures. Straighten your miniblinds and make sure they completely cover your window. Maybe add some lighting down the side of your house.”

  Brigit flopped onto her back on the lawn and wriggled around, scratching her back on the grass.

  The woman smiled at my partner’s antics. “I suppose I could get a watchdog, too.”

  “Couldn’t hurt.” Dogs were an effective warning system, though, like their electronic counterparts, they were prone to giving false alarms, especially if a skunk was in the vicinity.

  I gave Kirstin my business card and told her to be sure to call again if she saw anything suspicious. With that, Brigit and I bade the woman good-bye and set back out on patrol.

  NINE

  JUNGLE LOVE

  Brigit

  Brigit enjoyed working in the W1 division. Forest Park and the TCU campus had large grass expanses where she could stretch her legs. The Trinity River provided a place for her to take a nice swim, though her partner never seemed too happy when Brigit bounded into the water and returned to her side to shake herself dry. But what Brigit liked best about working the district was the zoo.