A Good Day for Chardonnay

by Darynda Jones

  “You said to call for backup.”

  “And you called my mother?” she asked, her voice rising a notch.

  “No. I called her book club. Those ladies are fierce.” The grin he wore made it impossible to be annoyed. He had a point, after all.

  Sun scanned the area, now littered with women who’d run out of fucks to give decades ago, and focused on two in particular. They carried butterfly nets, one as though it were an assault rifle, the other as though it were a missile launcher.

  “Just two more quick questions,” she said.

  He pulled the goggles back into position, and said, “Hit me.”

  “Why the hell do they have butterfly nets and where did they get them on such short notice?”

  He chuckled and gestured toward a wily, five-foot firecracker in full camouflage regalia and neon pink crocs that were so blinding through the goggles Sun had to look away. Wanda also happened to be the one carrying her butterfly net like a missile launcher, which fit her personality to a tee.

  “I think every time the men in white coats come for Wanda, she steals their nets and runs away.”

  The deputies laughed softly through the comm, Zee’s an alluring, husky thing, and Deputy Salazar’s a bubbly giggle like champagne. Or denture-cleaning tablets.

  “That wouldn’t surprise me,” Sun said, wondering in the back of her mind if any of her mother’s book club mates could be associated with the Dangerous Daughters. If it were even real. “It would also not surprise me if she brought the butterfly net more for you than for the raccoon.”

  He laughed again, but quickly changed his mind. Concern flashed across the part of his boyishly handsome face that she could see. “You’re joking, right?”

  Sun shrugged. Wanda had always had a thing for the intrepid deputy. Sadly, the intrepid deputy had always had a thing for Sun’s mother, which would explain his calling in her book club more than his lame-ass excuse.

  She used to think Quincy’s crush was just a post-pubescent schoolboy thing, but since she’d moved back to Del Sol four months ago, Quince constantly asked about her mom, the lovely Elaine Freyr. How was she? What she was up to? Had she ever had an affair with a younger, freakishly comely man?

  It was weird. And getting weirder every day. So much so, in fact, that Sun had caught onto his ruse about a month in. He was deflecting. Straight up. He was in love with someone else, and he didn’t want her to know. Her. Sunshine Vicram. His best friend since the sandbox.

  Sun vowed to find out who he was rounding the bases and sliding into home with if it were the last thing she did on this Earth. To date, she’d narrowed it down to thirty-seven women (and two men, just in case). She was so close she could taste victory. Or wishful thinking. Emotional figures of speech tasted startlingly similar.

  Her phone dinged with a text from her date asking if everything was okay.

  Before she could answer, Quincy whispered so loudly he probably scared off the masked bandit. “There he is!”

  Sun glanced at the porch and, sure enough, the little guy was climbing out of a tiny hole in the ceiling of Quincy’s porch as though being poured out of it, his fur fluffing up to three times his actual size. It reminded Sun she needed to cut back on the carbs.

  Quince slid his goggles down and raised his dart gun, a non-lethal tranquilizer launcher that looked like a combination of an Uzi and a water gun.

  “Please don’t tranq my mother,” Sun said, cringing as she stood beside him and watched the critter through her goggles.

  Before he could get a clear shot, however, Wanda ran forward, her net at the ready. “I’ll get ‘im!”

  “Shit,” Quince said. Abandoning his cover, he vaulted around the bush toward the melee of vigilant women.

  Sun fought off the branch again and followed, trying not to twist her ankle. She watched as Wanda, her mother, and Darlene Tapia, another member of the infamous Book Babes Book Club, ascended the stairs to the porch and rushed the panicked, screeching creature.

  Poor little guy. Sun would’ve screeched, too. Those women were alarmingly fast runners.

  “Don’t get near it!” Quincy shouted.

  “It’s okay, handsome.” Wanda took a swipe at the ball of fur, just missing it by several tenths of a mile. “I was vaccinated for rabies when I was a kid. I’m immune.”

  Sun’s heart jumped into her throat as Wanda got closer. The rabies angle had yet to occur to her. “I’m not sure it works that way, Wanda!”

  “I can’t see anything,” Elaine Freyr said, now watching from a safe-ish distance on the porch as her friends advanced. She spun in a complete circle, searching the shadows of the porch. “Where’d it go?”

  Darlene Tapia followed suit. All three women were in the dizzying midst of full-on adrenaline rushes, screaming and recoiling with the slightest movement, Wanda swinging wildly as the raccoon scurried about trying to escape. Wanda was either going to kill the raccoon or concuss someone else.

  Quincy took up position about ten feet out and raised the rifle again.

  “Don’t you dare,” Sun said, glaring at him as she ran past. She hiked up the stairs, ducked another swipe from Wanda’s net, and slid to a stop beside her mother, her gaze darting about.

  “Son of a bitch,” Quincy said with more whine than all of southern France. “He got away.”

  “And whose fault would that be?” she asked him over her shoulder. She turned back to the maniac who’d birthed her. “Mom, it’s okay. We’ve got this.” When Elaine didn’t move, Sun put a hand on her arm. “Mom?”

  Her mother stood frozen, staring up into a darkened corner of the porch. Sun pivoted slowly and came face-to-face with a very angry raccoon, their noses only inches apart.

  It sat hunchbacked on a high windowsill, a slow hiss leaking from between its exposed teeth, as it gazed at her with wide, feral eyes. Eyes that glowed like they belonged to a creature possessed by a powerful evil. One so ancient, so primordial, it predated human language.

  Then she realized she was still wearing the goggles and the ominous metaphor lost its ardor. Much like Sun’s hopes to go her entire life without wrestling a raccoon in the dark with a gang of bookworms cheering her on. But stranger things had happened.

  Before she could react, she heard the thud of compressed air. Quincy had taken a shot with her barely inches from the terrified animal. What the actual hell?

  He’d just moved up a notch on her hit list, overtaking Ryan Spalding, a boy who’d claimed she’d given him a hand job under the bleachers in high school, when she realized it was a misfire. The gun. Not the hand job. She’d never touched Ryan’s penis, much to his chagrin.

  Quincy let loose a dozen expletives followed by a sheepishly meek, “Misfire.”

  She wanted to roll her eyes but didn’t dare take them off the rodent. They were locked in a stare-down of legendary proportions. “Zee,” she said softly into her comm set, staying as still as she possibly could, “you wanna help me out here?”

  Zee’s smooth voice came back to her. “Will do, boss.” Her calm tone spoke volumes. Like elevator music. Or an acid trip. She was already in the zone and probably had the creature in her crosshairs. “One inch to the left.”

  Sun eased to her left a microsecond before a dart whizzed past her ear.

  It hit home just as the raccoon catapulted off the sill and onto her goggle-covered face. She screamed and sank her fingers in its fur to rip it off, but it held on for dear life, anchoring its razor-sharp claws in her scalp. She stumbled back and tripped on something hard and short. Probably her own indignation.

  Her mother screamed but it barely registered before Sun found herself falling. No. Not just falling. Tumbling, suddenly weightless. She’d done a backflip over the wooden porch railing and seemed to be plummeting headfirst toward certain death.

  A familiar set of arms caught her in midair before all three—the owner of said arms, the facehugger, and Sun herself—slammed onto the rocky earth beneath them. Air whooshed out of her lung
s and, even with the insulation of her rescuer, the hard landing sent a jolt of pain through body parts that, until that moment, she was unaware existed.

  It also dislodged the raccoon. The furball shot into the darkness and landed a few feet away with a soft thud.

  She rolled off her rescuer and lay on her back, gazing up at the stars and gasping to force air into lungs that had seized up, when her mother’s head popped into her line of sight.

  “Honey, are you okay?” she asked, concern lining her pretty, upside-down face.

  “Peachy, Mom,” Sun said, her voice strained. “Thanks for asking.” Her gaze slid past the woman who birthed her and back up to the stars again, hoping for a glimpse of the Little Dipper, wishing she could pluck it from the heavens and beat her chief deputy with it. “Deputy Cooper?”

  “Yeah, boss?” he replied, panting close by.

  “Are you conscious?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you give me one good reason why I shouldn’t beat you to death with a feather duster?”

  “I made you bacon the other day.”

  Damn it.

  2

  If you don’t talk to your cat about catnip, who will?

  —SIGN AT DEL SOL VETERINARY CLINIC

  “You know this is all your fault.”

  Sun gaped at her chief deputy as he followed her through the bullpen toward her office at the station, caged raccoon in hand.

  “If you would’ve just let me shoot him…”

  Sun knew better than that. If anything, she’d saved him weeks of guilt. He didn’t have the stomach for such things. She waved a hand at him. “I know, Quince, but there was no need to kill the little guy,” she said to let him off the hook. “We’ll get him checked out, then take him out to Dover Pass and release him.”

  He stopped and the look he gave her would’ve broke her heart if it weren’t so funny. “We’re just going to dump him? Leave him out there all alone and defenseless?”

  “He’s a wild animal. Completely untamed. And possibly rabid.”

  He lifted the cage onto her desk and studied the hapless creature snoozing away. “That never stopped your parents from caring for you.”

  Ouch. “Touché. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that you can’t keep him.”

  His shoulders deflated. They’d dealt with wildlife before, but Quincy had clearly grown attached to the menace and their cat-and-mouse game of tag over the last few weeks.

  Sun opened a cabinet and looked at herself in the mirror. Only minor cuts and a tiny bruise on her jaw. Not bad. Her hair, however … She combed through it with her fingers, then gave up, closed the door, and popped a coffee pod into the maker. “I was having such a great hair day.”

  Quince chuckled. “Sometimes I forget you’re a girl.”

  “Please. Like you don’t have bad hair days.”

  “True. Remember our senior pictures?”

  She stopped and stared dreamily into the vast oblivion. “How could I forget the greatest memory of my life?”

  “And it’s forever commemorated in our yearbook.”

  “I’m a little disappointed no one calls you SpongeBob anymore.”

  He stuck his fingers through the cage and petted their unconscious guest. “If we did keep him—”

  “Quincy,” she warned.

  “—and I’m not saying we will, but if we did—”

  “Quince.” She knew he would do this.

  “—he could be our mascot.” He raised a hopeful gaze. “I’ve always wanted a raccoon to assist me with petty crimes.”

  Sun struggled to hide her amusement and joined him in admiring the fluffy furball. “He is adorable.”

  “Right?”

  She looked at Quince, then back at the raccoon. “He’s kind of like your spirit animal.”

  “What if he has rabies, though?”

  “Then he would be exactly like your spirit animal.”

  Sun’s newest recruit walked in then, Poetry Rojas, freshly graduated from the police academy and looking spiffy in his pressed black uniform.

  “Hey, Rojas,” she said.

  He handed her a file. “Boss, can I ask you something?”

  “Of course.” She grabbed her cup and took a long, scalding draw.

  “Did you hire me because you feel sorry for me?”

  She choked, not sure if it was due to the scalding liquid burning the back of her throat or Rojas’s question. Most likely a combination of the two.

  “I’m not a charity case,” he continued. “I want to earn this position on my own merit.”

  She tossed in a few last-minute coughs, then asked, “Seriously?”

  “No.” He grinned, an enchanting lopsided thing. Never mind that underneath the uniform lay enough ink to print The New York Times for a month. He was a good officer. “It just makes me sound like a better person when I say shit like that.”

  She tapped her temple and looked at Quince. “Always thinking, this one.”

  “I think,” he said, defensively.

  “Mm-hm.” She glanced over the report Rojas had brought in. “I want you to pay attention to this, Quince. Rojas knows how to write up a report.”

  “I write reports.”

  “Listen,” she said before reading aloud. “‘Single-handedly and with zero safety incidents, updated the communication and output device that utilizes and produces vital information while simultaneously sharing critical data with coworkers and creating a more efficient and productive work environment.’”

  After taking a moment to let the sentence sink in, Quince frowned at Rojas and asked, “What does that even mean?”

  The glib smirk the new deputy offered her BFF was too much. “I changed the ink cartridge in the printer.”

  Sun nodded. “I like the way you think, Rojas.”

  “Thanks, boss.” He bent to check out the caged menace snoring away. “How’d it go?”

  “I had a raccoon’s crotch in my face for what seemed like hours.”

  He arched a brow. “I didn’t know you were into that sort of thing.”

  She picked up her cup and took another sip. “I have many sides, Rojas.”

  After a quick glance over his shoulder at Quince, he straightened and started to leave, but Sun could tell there was something more lingering just below the surface. He had questions. And doubts. She knew he would.

  “Quince, can you give us a sec?”

  “Sure thing.” He gave Rojas a challenging stare, one that warmed Sun’s heart. She’d known they would get along when she hired Rojas, and Quincy’s ribbing was proof that she’d been right.

  She sat at her desk and motioned for him to sit across from her.

  The situation with Poetry Rojas was one that she would never have believed if it hadn’t happened on her watch. Four months ago, U.S. Marshals had descended upon the town of Del Sol searching for an escaped convict named Ramses Rojas, Poetry’s twin brother. What she figured out during the manhunt was that Ramses was actually Poetry. He’d gone to prison in his brother’s stead.

  How he had pulled it off, she would never quite understand, but it was important to Poetry. He’d implied once that he’d owed his brother, so when the cops mistakenly arrested him, he didn’t correct them. In Sun’s opinion, unless Ramses had given up a kidney for him, Poetry got the short end of the stick. Three years inside for a crime he didn’t commit was asking a lot.

  While there, however, Poetry had earned a bachelor’s in Criminal Justice and was actively working to get his case—his brother’s case—overturned. Getting caught in the middle of a jailbreak hadn’t been his plan. Sun had seen the footage from the van the prisoners had escaped from. He’d had no choice but to go along. Luckily for her, because she would never have found him otherwise.

  “How are you doing, Rojas?”

  He leaned back in the chair, still a tad untrusting of the situation, and possibly of her, and said evasively, “I’m good.”

  “Your scores were excellent at the a
cademy.” Like she knew they would be.

  “Thanks.”

  “No, thank you. It makes me look good.”

  He nodded and she realized getting past the barriers he’d built in prison for a crime he didn’t commit would take some time. That was okay. She just happened to have some extra time.

  “Do you have any questions? Complaints? Concerns?”

  He lifted a shoulder. “I do have one concern, if you’re asking.”

  She took another sip. “I’m asking.”

  He took a moment to consider his words, then said, “I think you got the wrong guy.”

  “I doubt it. I haven’t arrested anyone in days,” she teased. The statement didn’t surprise her. Rojas had been questioning her decision to blackmail him into joining the team since she’d first done it four months earlier.

  He sat up straighter in agitation. “What happens if I can’t solve a case or if someone gets away on my watch or if I make a mistake and someone dies because of it?” He dropped his gaze to study his hands. “What if I fail?”

  His misgivings only strengthened Sun’s conviction that she’d made the right decision. She would’ve been worried were he not questioning his ability to do the job. “You will fail.”

  He fixed her with a guarded stare.

  “You will make mistakes.” She leaned forward and spoke softly. “You will regret decisions you made because hindsight is twenty-twenty. But you’ll learn from them and do better next time.”

  “You don’t make mistakes.”

  “Trust me, I do. On a daily basis.”

  He shook his head. “I’ve read your clearance rate from when you were a detective in Santa Fe. Ninety-seven percent. That’s almost unheard of. If you do make mistakes, you don’t make many.”

  “Maybe I’m just really good at fixing them before they become an issue,” she offered, but she had the feeling he was referring to something a little more specific. Maybe something he’d done in the past that made him question his position. When he asked his next question, she was sure of it.