by Diane Kelly
“I’m glad to see you’ve recovered.” I shot him a smile. “See you at noon.”
As I headed down the sidewalk, I had to restrain myself from hollering “Woo-hoo!” and hurdling the metal bike rack. I’d missed the Ninja rider today, but now I had a lunch date with Trey. Things are looking up.
***
I spent the rest of the morning dealing with a couple of fender benders, standard fare for a stormy day. By noon, the rain had slowed to a gray mist that might have depressed me had I not been excited about my lunch date.
Trey was waiting inside the glass doors of the school when I pulled up to the curb. He trotted through the drizzle and hopped into the front seat. “Hey, again.”
“Hey yourself.”
“Where’s the best place to get lunch around here?”
I gestured at the school. “It’s sloppy Joe day in the cafeteria. Can’t hardly beat that.”
Trey cringed. “I found a hair net in my chocolate pudding once in junior high. Sworn off school cafeterias ever since.”
“Can’t blame you there.”
Food options were limited in Jacksburg. Other than a half dozen fast food places, the only restaurants were a barbecue joint out on the highway, an all-you-can-eat catfish place, or Lorene’s diner on Main. I put the car in gear. “Lorene’s, it is.”
I radioed Selena to let her know where I’d be, then pulled out of the lot and headed into town.
“I’m glad I ran into you,” Trey said. “I was planning on driving into a tree and calling 9-1-1 so I could see you again.”
“You could’ve just called the station and asked to speak with me.”
He slapped his forehead. “Right. Duh.” He shot me that same mischievous grin from the bowling alley, the one that made me want to wear crotch-less panties and dance and bake cookies, all at the same time.
When we stopped at a red light at Dumont and Main, Trey looked over at me. “What’s it like, being a cop?”
In a big city, a cop was part soldier, part psychologist, and part referee. In Jacksburg, I felt more like a glorified hall monitor. “Honestly? Being a cop has its moments, but for the most part it’s pretty boring. You just drive around town, always on the lookout for—”
“Whoa!” Trey’s eyes locked on something out the window behind me. “You see that?”
I turned to spot the back of a tall guy wearing baggy jeans and a Dallas Cowboys hoodie. He clutched a handgun in his fist. He yanked open the door of the Grab–N-Go and darted inside. Gah! An armed robbery. What a way to start a date!
I turned on my flashing lights, gunned the engine, and careened into the lot of the convenience store. “Stay in the car,” I ordered as I shoved the gearshift into park. “Don’t let anyone come inside the store.”
I radioed for backup, jumped out of the cruiser, and pulled my gun from its holster. My shoes slid on the slick pavement as I rushed up to the glass windows at the front of the store, but I managed to keep my balance. Displays situated against the window inside blocked my view into the building. I crouched down and peeked in between a cardboard potato chip display and a metal rack filled with Thrifty Nickel magazines. The guy in the hooded sweatshirt stood at the front counter, his gun pointed at the bald, jowly face of Chip Sweeney, the middle-aged, beer-bellied clerk.
My heart sputtered in my chest like the Icee dispenser. I held my gun in both hands, took a deep breath, and leaped up, shoving the door open and rushing inside. “Police! Put your weapon down and your hands in the air!”
The guy in the sweatshirt shrieked and raised both hands in the air, his right hand still clutching the gun. His face was dark, but the hands raised above him were definitely Caucasian. I squinted. The robber wore black panty hose over his face. What a dumb ass. With his hands in the air, his baggy jeans slipped down a few inches, revealing a pair of striped boxer-briefs and a belly button. The guy sported an outie.
I pointed my gun at his head. The dark hose obscured his facial features and pulled his nose flat, giving his face a warped shape. With the dark hosiery over his head and the baggy clothes, his age and physical features were indeterminable. “I said put your weapon down! Now!”
The guy looked up at his hand as if surprised to see the gun there. He slowly began to lower his hands, then changed tactics, yanking his pants up with one hand, turning, and bolting past a rack of disposable diapers as he ran to the back of the store. He barreled through the swinging door of the stockroom, slamming the door against the wall. BAM!
Through the glass doors I saw Andre’s cruiser blast into the parking lot. “Cover the back door!” I screamed into my shoulder mic.
I ran into the dimly lit stockroom after the robber. The guy dodged around stacked boxes of beer and motor oil, looking for an exit, having trouble seeing with the black hose still over his face. When he realized I was catching up to him, he grabbed a four-pack of toilet paper off a stack and hurled it at me. The package bounced off my shoulder and landed at my feet. I kicked the toilet paper aside and ran down the row of boxes.
He spied the back door and scrambled toward it, tripping over a case of powdered donuts, smashing the top of a box with his knee and sending up a sweetly-scented poof of white powder that coated the front of his jeans. He staggered to the wide gray metal door and shoved the bar to open it. It didn’t budge. “Fuck!”
A thick sliding bolt held the door in place. The guy jerked on the bolt with his left hand, but only managed to move it a couple of inches.
I crouched behind a stack of Diet Pepsi twelve packs and peeked out, my gun pointed at his hood. “Drop your weapon now or I’ll blow your head off!”
It would have been easy to take the guy out with a bullet right then. But I couldn’t do it. Not again. He was armed, had not put down his weapon, and my training told me to shoot. My instincts, however, told me otherwise. Police work was one percent training, ninety-nine percent instinct. As a cop, I’d learned to trust my intuition, my gut. But every once in a while instincts went wrong and cops died. I hoped this wouldn’t be one of those times. Getting myself killed sure would put a damper on my lunch date with Trey.
The guy turned to face me. His hood slipped backwards off his head and the legs of the panty hose, still attached, dropped down, one on each side of his face like long bunny ears. He dashed forward, hunched over, heading back through the stockroom doors and into the store, leaving a trail of powdered sugar in his wake, the legs of the black panty hose streaming behind him.
Ugh. Should’ve shot him in the nuts while I had the chance. The world was already full of idiots like him. No sense letting him create any more. He wasn’t even smart enough to cut the legs off the hose. Definitely an amateur.
He dashed out the front door, past the cruiser where Trey stood, half-in and half-out of the open passenger door. Ignoring my earlier orders, Trey took off after the robber, leaping onto his back and bringing him down in an oily puddle next to the gas pumps where the two of them narrowly missed being run over by a bright yellow Volkswagen bug pulling up to refuel.
The guy put up a good fight, bucking like a bronco, trying to shake Trey loose, sending up splashes of murky rainwater. But Trey held on, keeping the bastard down on the ground. Gotta say, I hadn’t expected a brainy guy like Trey to be so tough, so brave, so fearless. Maybe a computer nerd could be my type after all.
When Trey saw me approaching, he rolled sideways off the man’s back. I yanked my pepper spray from my belt, turned my head and squeezed my eyes shut, shooting a steady stream directly at the robber’s face.
Busted.
“Aaahhh!” The guy covered his eyes and nose with his hands, and rolled around on the ground, kicking up more dirty rainwater with his tennis shoes. His jeans had again worked their way down and the waistband was now bunched around his knees, his drenched boxers clinging to his pasty ass.
Andre came around the side of the building, hurried over, and snatched up the gun from the ground where the guy had dropped it when Trey pounced on him.
Andre looked the thing over, frowned, and handed it to me.
The gun was unexpectedly light. I examined it closer. The damn thing was one of those toy Airsoft guns that shoots plastic BBs. This idiot could have gotten himself killed for carrying a stupid toy! What’s worse, I would’ve been the one to kill him, the one who’d suffer the overwhelming guilt. At least my other kill had been self-defense, necessary and justified. Hell, I’d almost bled to death from knife wounds myself before the ambulance arrived.
Chip stepped up beside us, noting the white powder on the robber’s jeans. “Cocaine?”
“Nah. Powdered donuts. He crushed a case in the stockroom.”
“Darn it.” Chip frowned. “Powdered donuts are one of our best sellers.”
After a moment or two, the initial effects of the pepper spray wore off, and the idiot stopped wailing and rolling around, settling into a soggy, sobbing lump on the pavement. Using my foot, I nudged him onto his belly, knelt across his back, and cuffed him. I backed off to kneel beside him. “Sit up.”
He rolled over onto his back and rocked forward a few times in a vain attempt to sit up. He lacked the abdominal strength needed, so I stood, grabbed the legs of the too-tight panty hose, and pulled on them, hauling him by his head to a sitting position. “You ought to think about doing some crunches, buddy.”
I yanked again on the hose, trying to remove them. The darn things were so tight on the guy’s face they pulled his eyelids, lips, and nose upwards, his nostrils flaring like a pig snout.
“That hurts!” he cried.
“Tough.” I pulled on the panty hose with both hands. Six yanks later, they were off. I checked the tag. Control top, petite size A. What a doofus.
I looked down to find an ugly, greasy-haired kid with a silver hoop through his eyebrow, a forehead hosting a zit convention, and a few scraggly brown whiskers, a sorry excuse for a soul patch, under his bottom lip. “How old are you?”
The kid looked down at his lap, coated with wet, white powder and tiny gravel bits from the parking lot. “Sixteen.”
Just young enough to still be considered a juvenile under Texas law. Lucky for him. Texans don’t believe in coddling children. Under our criminal justice system, seventeen-year-olds were treated as adults, eligible for life terms and lethal injections, though we don’t trust them with beer until they’re twenty-one. Go figure.
“Shouldn’t you be in school?” I asked.
Before he could answer, the Star Wars theme song rang out loudly from the back pocket of the kid’s jeans. I reached my hand into the pocket and pulled out a cell phone. The caller ID readout said “Banger.”
I tapped the button to accept the call and held the phone to my ear. “Yo, Banger.”
“Dawg?”
“Dawg can’t talk right now. His sorry ass is being hauled off to juvie.”
There was a short pause as Banger processed the information. “No shit?”
“No shit.”
I ended the call while Andre pulled the kid to his feet. “Get in the car,” I said. “And if you know what’s good for you, don’t give us any more trouble.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Tears began to well up in the kid’s eyes. If he was looking for sympathy, he’d have to look elsewhere. What if I’d shot the kid and later found out he’d been armed with a mere toy? I’d have never recovered from that.
Once the kid was settled in the back seat, I radioed Selena. “Get someone from juvie over to the station.”
“Okey-dokey.”
The car was quiet while we drove back to headquarters, the only sound being the kid snuffling in the backseat. Trey glanced over at me a few times during the trip, his expression one of admiration and awe. Heck, I was just doing my job. And, truth be told, I’d been scared to death.
I pulled under the overhang at the DQHQ, parked next to my Dad’s SUV, and turned to Trey. “This’ll take a few minutes. Want to come inside?”
“Sure.”
I led the boy into the station. Trey followed. Selena glanced up from the TV, which was tuned to Family Feud. “Juvie’s on their way.” She did a double take when she saw Trey behind me. A suspicious smile crept across her lips.
I shot her a death glare to keep her from saying anything embarrassing. “Selena, Trey. Trey, Selena.”
The two nodded to each other.
Trey followed me and the kid back to the freezer, eyeing the eagle Glick had etched into the stainless steel wall the night before. “Wow. That’s good. Who did it?”
“Lucas Glick, believe it or not.”
Trey cocked his head. “He’s a darn good artist. Does he do that for a living?”
“Nah. He runs a septic tank service.”
“It’s a crappy job,” Trey said, “but somebody’s got to do it.”
I groaned at his pun.
Trey stepped into the cell to take a closer look at the eagle. “Seems like a waste of talent.”
Lots of things were wasted were Lucas Glick was concerned, including, most often, himself.
After Trey left the cell, I removed the cuffs from the boy’s wrists and backed out quickly, keeping my eyes on the kid and my hand on my nightstick. The kid looked as though he’d given up but I’d seen desperate people make desperate moves. I’d learned to be ready for anything.
Trey settled in on the opposite side of my booth, checking e-mail and playing games on his cell phone while I filled out paperwork and telephoned the boy’s mother. No father, no big surprise there.
When I finished, I left Trey at my booth and spent a few minutes in the bathroom with the blower aimed at my uniform, drying the rain the kid had splashed on me during his arrest. My bangs were hopelessly frizzy, but I combed the rest of my hair out and re-braided it. I even smoothed on a touch of toffee-tinted lipstick since I didn’t have to worry about my helmet smudging it today.
When I returned to my desk, I found Trey sitting at my computer, typing on my keyboard and manipulating my mouse. He looked up when I stepped up to the table. “You weren’t kidding about your system. This is pathetic.”
“Told ya.”
He clicked a few more buttons. “It should run a little faster now. I defragged it for you.”
“I have no idea what you just said,” I replied, “but thanks. Faster is always better.”
A sly grin spread his lips. “Is it?”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
HOT LUNCH
Ten minutes later, we made our way across the black and white checkered floor of Lorene’s and slid into a red vinyl booth. A boney middle-aged waitress with menus in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other passed by and tossed two greasy menus onto the table without saying a word to us. That’s the kind of service you get when a business has no real competition.
Trey picked up a menu and opened it. “What’s good here?”
“Everything.” What Lorene’s lacked in atmosphere and service, it made up for in deliciousness. There wasn’t a single diet dish on the menu, nothing heart-healthy, nothing low-calorie or gluten-free. Lorene used only real butter, real cream, and real mayonnaise, which explained why most of her customers were real close to having a coronary.
I didn’t need to look at a menu. I’d eaten here hundreds of times over the years and had the entire thing memorized. I sat back against the booth and closed my eyes, the all-too-familiar post-bust shakes trying to kick in. I tightened all my muscles to try to keep them under control. When I opened my eyes, I found Trey watching me.