Paw Enforcement 02 - Paw and Order

by Kelly, Diane

  I stepped to the fence. “Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Lipscomb!” I called, waving a hand.

  Sherry turned my way and lifted a hand in acknowledgment. Michael cast a glance in my direction and raised his chin, but didn’t smile. The couple probably had mixed feelings about me. Though I’d supported their protest at the mall, telling them to let me know if anyone gave them any hassles, I’d also tagged along with the detective who’d interrogated them about the bombings. Nevertheless, I wanted them to know I was on site. Protesting at a rodeo where beer flowed freely on a Saturday night probably wasn’t the safest thing to do. I had no right to send them away and they had every right to speak their minds, but frankly they were asking for trouble. I decided to stick close by.

  Minutes later, I noticed Clint heading through the milling crowd toward me. He was back in uniform and back atop Jack. Yet another shiny belt buckle graced his belly, today’s selection proclaiming him the bareback champion of the Houston rodeo.

  He pulled up perpendicular to me and reined his horse to a stop. He beamed down at me and pulled a blue ribbon from his pocket. “I won first prize. Scored ninety points.”

  I reached up to pet Jack’s snout. “Congratulations. That was quite a ride.”

  “My best ever!” He pumped a fist in triumph. “If I do well in the final round, I’m gonna think about going out on the circuit.”

  “Meaning…?”

  “The professional rodeo circuit. I’m placing consistently enough now that I could make a go of it.”

  “Wouldn’t that require a lot of travel?” I asked. “What about your job here?”

  “Being a professional rodeo cowboy is the chance of a lifetime. I can always come back to law enforcement later.” He offered a sound that was part snort, part chuckle. “After all, it’s not like people are going to stop committing crimes.”

  If only.

  Behind me, a drunken voice hollered, “Fuckin’ hippie … fuckers!”

  Such eloquence, no?

  I turned to see a squat, potbellied redneck pull a plastic tin of Skoal from his back pocket and hurl it at Michael. He ducked in time to avoid the projectile, but the tin continued on its course, flying over the fence and past me to hit Jack in the ass. Thump!

  With a frightened whinny, the horse reared up onto its hind legs, its front hooves pawing the air mere inches from me and my partner.

  “Whoa, boy!” Clint called.

  I yanked Brigit back as far as I could, but we were trapped between the horse and the fence. If not for Clint’s expert handling, both Brigit and I could have been trampled or crushed.

  Once the horse’s feet had returned to the ground, Clint pointed a finger at the gaping-mouthed redneck and yelled, “Stay right there!”

  Realizing he’d effed up in a major way, a way that could land his sorry, chubby, and drunken ass in jail, the offender took off running.

  Knowing a dog could maneuver through the crowd more easily and with less risk than a horse, I raised a palm to Clint. “We got this.”

  I unclipped Brigit’s leash and gave her the command to pursue the idiot. Her nails scrabbled on the asphalt as she took off running. Five seconds later, the guy lay facedown on the asphalt amid flattened drink cups, paper cotton candy cones, and hot dog wrappings, his arms curved protectively over his head and face. Brigit lay spread-eagled across his back, the collar of his shirt gripped firmly in her teeth. She yanked on his collar, jerking his head left and right as he howled in terror.

  I headed over, pulling my baton from my belt and extending it with a flick of my wrist. Snap! Clint and Jack trailed along behind me.

  “Call off your dog!” the guy shrieked as I stepped up.

  “I will,” I told him calmly, “as soon as you apologize to those people.” I used my nightstick to gesture to the protestors at the fence before motioning at Clint and Jack. “And to them.”

  “I’m sorry!” he cried. “Now get the dog off me!”

  I called Brigit off, giving her the order to return to my side. After reattaching her leash, I looked down at the man, who rolled over onto his back and sat up.

  Clint slid down off his horse, gathering the reins in his hand. When the guy made a move to stand, Clint said, “Nobody told you to get up.”

  The guy sat back down on the asphalt, glaring up at Clint.

  “Now get up,” Clint ordered, chuckling.

  When the man stood, Clint stepped close to him and took a sniff. “You smell like alcohol.”

  “I only drank two beers!” The guy looked to the side, a sign that he was lying, intimidated by the tall deputy towering over him, or both.

  “Two beers,” Clint repeated. “Just two beers? Nothing else?”

  The eyes darted around.

  Clint motioned with his index finger. “Take off your boots.”

  “Why?”

  Clint bent down and got in the man’s face. “’Cause I told you to.”

  After casting another glare at the deputy, the guy complied, removing first his left, then his right boot, having to grab the fence to keep from falling over. A crowd had gathered around to watch. He glanced around at the spectators and scooped up the boots, holding them tight to his chest.

  “Set your boots down,” Clint said.

  When the guy failed to move right away, Clint, too, pulled his nightstick from his belt. “I said to set. Your. Boots. Down.” Though Clint didn’t say it in so many words, his tone said it for him. This guy could either comply voluntarily or get his ass kicked.

  With a huff of anger and frustration, the guy set his boots on the ground. Clint looked down into them. “Just as I suspected.” He kicked one of them over and a metal flask slid out onto the pavement.

  Another huff from the redneck.

  “Let’s see here.” Clint rubbed his chin. “Looks like we’ve got a nice list of charges.” He counted them off on his fingers. “Littering. Public intoxication. Drunk and disorderly. Assault on a law enforcement officer—”

  “I didn’t assault you!” the guy cried.

  “You assaulted my horse.” Clint’s eyes narrowed. “If you’d have hit me, I might have found it in my heart to forgive you. But nobody messes with my horse.”

  Desperate, the guy said, “I don’t think I’m drunk.”

  Clint snorted and looked my way. “That sounds just like something a drunk would say, don’t it?”

  “Sure does.” I stepped forward now. “We could give him a sobriety test.”

  Clint raised his palms. “Be my guest, Officer Luz.”

  I pulled my penlight from my pocket and shined it into the guy’s eyes, checking the reaction time of his pupils. Yup. Definitely on the slow side. But might as well be thorough. Might as well give the guy a little payback, too, a little tit for his tat, shit for his shat. “Recite the alphabet.”

  “A, B, C,” he began. “D, E, F.”

  When he’d successfully recited his ABCs, he said, “See? I’m not drunk.”

  “Inconclusive,” I said. “Fill in the blank. Once upon a midnight dreary, as I…” I made a circular motion with my finger, inviting him to finish the sentence.

  He looked up as if racking his brain for the answer. “Uh…”

  “Whacked off!” called a male voice from the crowd.

  I ran my penlight over the crowd. “Wrong answer.”

  Another guy in the crowd took a shot. “Tried on my girlfriend’s underwear!”

  “You’re getting closer,” I said.

  A female voice chimed in now. “Turned into a pumpkin?”

  Did nobody in this crowd read the classics? I shook my head. “Sorry. Still wrong.”

  “Good guesses, though,” Clint added, giving the crowd a thumbs-up.

  “See?” yelled the redneck. “They don’t know the answer either and they’re sober!”

  I stepped toward him and looked him in the eye. “Did you just admit that you’re drunk?”

  He looked up as if trying to remember what he’d just said. “Uh … no …
I don’t think so.”

  Clint and I exchanged glances before turning back to the redneck.

  “You’ve failed the cognitive test miserably,” Clint said. “But we can’t tell if that’s because you’re drunk or just plain stupid.”

  The guy’s face turned red with rage. “I’m not stupid!”

  Clint raised a brow. “So you are admitting you’re drunk, then?”

  “No!” The guy looked from Clint to me. “No, I’m not!”

  “Let’s try a physical test.” I used my baton to gesture at his feet. “To the left.”

  He took a step to the left.

  “Take it back now, y’all.”

  He took a step back.

  “One hop this time.”

  He hopped once.

  “Right foot,” I said. “Stomp.”

  He stomped his right foot.

  “Left foot,” I said. “Let’s stomp.”

  He stomped again with his other foot.

  “Now cha-cha. And do it real smooth.”

  “Wait.” His brows angled in consternation. “Is this ‘Cha-Cha Slide’?”

  Clint cut his eyes my way and offered a snicker.

  Realizing we’d had as much fun with the guy as we could without crossing the line, I returned my baton to my belt, my penlight to my pocket, and retrieved my handcuffs. “Turn around,” I told the guy. “Put your hands behind your back.”

  “Now wait just a minute.” Clint stepped up close, though his towering over me didn’t so much intimidate me as excite me. “This collar is mine.”

  “My partner took him down.”

  “And my horse took a hit to the ass.”

  Our gazes locked in a challenge, his eyes searing into me like lasers. Though I fought to control them, my breaths came hard and fast. But when Clint ran his tongue over his lips in overt seduction, a laugh escaped me and I acquiesced.

  “All right.” I stepped back to allow Clint to cuff the guy. “If you need this collar that bad you can have him.”

  The deputy pulled out his cuffs and slipped them onto the guy’s wrists. Click-click.

  Before hauling the guy off, he gave me a sly smile. “Nice doing business with ya’.” A wink followed. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten about that ride.”

  Heck, I hadn’t forgotten about it, either.

  As Clint headed off with his horse on one side, his prisoner on the other, the crowd dispersed. A dispatcher’s voice came over my shoulder-mounted radio. “Officer needed at the arena ladies’ room.”

  The male cops on site quickly deferred to me, their voices coming through loud and clear over the radio.

  “Sounds like a job for you, Luz,” one said.

  “Girl problems,” said another. “I’m out.”

  Derek was even more direct. “Ain’t no way in hell I’m going in a ladies’ room.”

  I rolled my eyes and pushed the mic button. “I’m on it.”

  Minutes later, Brigit and I found a blond, fiftyish woman dressed in upscale western attire standing outside the ladies’ room. Her skin bore a light flush, as if she’d had a glass or two of wine. Tipsy, but not drunk.

  Brigit snuffled around for a moment on the floor around the woman’s feet, then raised her head high, her nose wriggling. She looked off down the hall.

  “Somebody stole my purse!” the woman cried. “It was hanging on the hook in the stall and then a hand reached over and”—she threw her hands into the air in a magical poof gesture—“it was gone!”

  “Did you see the person who took it?”

  “Only her hand.”

  “Was there anything identifiable about her hand or arm that you noticed? A ring maybe? A tattoo or scar? The color of her sleeve?”

  The woman squinted in concentration. “I think her sleeve was dark. Leather, maybe? And it seemed like maybe her nails were painted pink. But it happened so fast it’s hard to say for sure.”

  I nodded to let her know I understood. “When you exited the stall, was there anyone else in the bathroom?”

  “Two girls,” she said. “I told them my purse had been stolen and asked if they’d seen the person who’d come out of the stall next to me. Both said no. They’d been washing their hands and hadn’t gotten a good look. I’d called out when I saw the thief take my purse but I guess the girls couldn’t hear me hollering over the sound of the running water.”

  “Any chance one of them could have taken it? Maybe hidden it inside their coat?”

  The woman shook her head again. “They were both in jeans and those fitted knit jackets the young ones wear these days. There wouldn’t have been anywhere for them to hide my purse.”

  “These girls,” I said. “How old were they? Teens? Younger?”

  “No, not that young,” the woman said. “I’d say they were in their mid to late twenties.”

  I supposed that would make them “girls” to a woman her age, though I was in my mid-twenties, too, and considered myself a full-fledged woman. Hear me roar. “What did you do then?”

  “I tried to run after the thief. Took me a second or two to get around the girl with the crutches. By that time, whoever had taken my purse was long gone.”

  “One of the girls had a broken leg?”

  “I don’t think so. There was no cast on her leg. I suppose she just had a sprained ankle or something like that. She had on the cutest pair of boots I’ve ever seen. Tan on the foot with bright pink on the upper part.”

  The boots did indeed sound cute. They also sounded irrelevant. Maybe if this woman had paid as much attention to her purse as she had to the girl’s boots, she’d still have her bag.

  I unzipped my police-issue jacket and pulled my notepad and pen from the breast pocket of my shirt. After jotting down the woman’s name—Catherine Quimby—and some notes—Suspect: Pink nails/dark leather jacket. Witnesses: 2 women/ 20s/crutches no cast?/tan & pink boots—I resumed my questioning. “Were the two women who were in the bathroom there together?”

  Catherine’s brows tipped inward as she thought. “I don’t believe so. They were at opposite ends of the counter. Friends would have likely stood closer together.”

  Unless they were pretending not to know each other. After all, women often traveled in pairs or groups when going to the restroom. Hmm …

  “What did they look like?”

  She looked up, as if trying to visualize them in her mind. “Unremarkable, really. Brown hair. Average height and build. Wearing jeans and jackets and boots, like I said.”

  Just like virtually every other young woman at the stock show and rodeo tonight.

  “What all was in your purse?” I asked.

  “Hairbrush. Makeup. Tissue. Gum. My wallet, of course.”

  “How much cash was in it?”

  She looked up in thought. “Forty or fifty dollars maybe? I don’t know the exact amount. Oh, and my pills were in my purse, too.”

  “Pills?”

  “My prescription arthritis pills. Vicodin.”

  Painkillers, a mix of hydrocodone bitartrate and acetaminophen, a type of legal drug sometimes sold illegally on the streets. Interesting. “How many pills were in the bottle?”

  Again she looked up in thought. “Maybe a hundred and ten pills? It was nearly full. I just had the prescription refilled.”

  The gears of my mind began to turn. Was it possible someone had targeted her for the Vicodin? “When’s the last time you took a pill?”

  “This afternoon around three,” she said, “before I left the house.”

  “So you haven’t taken any here at the rodeo?”

  “No.”

  “Did you take the bottle out of your purse for some other reason while you were here?”

  “I took it out and sat it on the counter when I stopped to buy a corn dog. I was digging through the bottom of my purse for change and it was getting in my way.”

  Someone might have spotted the bottle and targeted her for the pills. Then again, she could just be a random victim, chosen because her
outfit and purse indicated she was well off.

  I motioned for Catherine to follow me and Brigit into the bathroom. Whipping my baton out once again, I used it to poke around in the trash cans. Nope. No sign of a discarded purse.

  I looked back at the woman. “Which stall were you in?”

  The woman pointed. “The one on the end.”

  I stepped over and went inside to take a look around. Brigit took advantage of the opportunity to grab a drink from a toilet. I yanked back on her leash. “Stop it! That’s disgusting.”

  It was bad enough when she did it at home, but a public toilet? Yick!

  Nothing in the stall provided any clues, though writing on the wall in pink lipstick informed me that Sophie + Clint McCutcheon = ♥.

  Hmm. I wasn’t sure that math worked out. If a rodeo groupie throws herself at a bareback rider at two hundred miles an hour, how long until their genitals meet?

  I decided not to put any time into answering that word problem. Instead, I radioed my fellow officers. “If anybody sees a young woman in a leather jacket and pink nail polish or one with brown hair on crutches, hold them for questioning.”

  FOURTEEN

  EAU DE TOILET

  Brigit

  A public bathroom was the canine equivalent of happy hour. So many toilets to drink from!

  Brigit got only three laps of water before Megan pulled her back from the commode and issued a cry of disgust. As if Megan were so clean. Right now she had pig poop on her shoe and wasn’t even aware of it.

  Humans can be so stupid. And their noses were so useless. Brigit’s far superior nose picked up all kinds of things. For instance, though she didn’t know their names, she could make out the scents of two different colognes. One smelled like flowers, with a hint of those round fruits that Megan cut in half and twisted on her cheap plastic juicer. The other smelled like flowers, too, and vanilla. Why human beings wanted to smell like a garden or a cupcake was beyond Brigit. She much preferred the personal, natural scent of sweat socks discarded after a long run.

  FIFTEEN

  PAYROLL

  Robin Hood

  As she waited in the car for her sisters, she fingered through the woman’s wallet.