Good lord! What a turnaround! For seven years she’d been digging herself out of a deep hole, then like a lightning bolt she was once more secure and solvent. The relief was so overwhelming she felt giddy and pulled to the side of the road until she’d settled down some. She hugged Tricks, which earned her a lick. “Guess what, baby girl,” she said as she stroked the dog’s lush fur. “You’re going to be getting a new stuffed toy to play with. How does that sound, huh? Do you want a new baby?”
Tricks tilted her head back in enjoyment of the stroking, her eyes half-closed and a blissful golden-retriever smile on her face.
Bo’s mind whirled with things she could do, one of which was buy a new vehicle that was more suitable for her, but the past seven years had taught her a lot and she immediately rejected the idea. No way. She didn’t need a new car. She might want one, but she didn’t need one. The Jeep was running fine, and it was paid for. No, it wasn’t the most comfortable or practical choice for her, it had some miles on it, but she was used to it and she couldn’t see spending money she didn’t need to spend. That was how she’d gotten into such a financial mess to begin with. Likewise, she didn’t need a new wardrobe. Or jewelry. Or a bigger TV.
Everything she needed—a home, friends, a job, Tricks—she already had.
Buying Tricks a new stuffed animal sounded like a great way to celebrate. Other than that, she’d use the entire hundred and fifty thousand to retire the last of her credit-card debt and make a big payment on her mortgage. She might refinance, she thought—but if she did, it would be for a shorter length of time. With the credit-card debt gone, she could easily pay extra on the principal as well as start saving for when she actually needed a new car.
With seven years of hard work she’d bought herself some wiggle room and relief, finally. It was kind of annoying that Axel, of all people, had provided her with the means to jump out of the hole.
Never mind how annoying it was. She’d jump anyway.
When her heart rate settled down, she pulled back onto the highway and finished the drive to town. The light snow had melted into the occasional white patch, and a weak sun was trying to break through the dismal gray sky. Traffic was on the light side; evidently people were waiting until the snow was completely gone, and the temperature more than two degrees above freezing before they ventured out on their Friday errands. She passed a few people heading out for lunch a little early and greeted them with a honk and a wave. She made it all the way to the second traffic light before someone yelled, “Tricks!” and the royal procession began.
Tricks ate it up, beaming and giving the occasional happy “Woof!” when her name was called. She knew the routine and was more than happy to play her part.
The school principal, Evan Cummins, was leaving the bank where his wife, Lisa, was a vice president of commercial loans. The bank was small enough that she was likely the vice president of commercial loans, but the title was nice and Lisa well liked. Evan waved his arm to flag Bo down, and she pulled to the curb and rolled down her window. Evan darted across the street and leaned down to look in at her and Tricks. “Morning, Chief,” he said cheerfully. “Hi, Tricks.”
“Good morning,” Bo replied. “Is anything wrong?”
“No, everything’s okay that I know of, which usually means something will blow up in my face as soon as I get back to the school. I just wanted to ask you if it would be okay for Tricks to ride on the Seniors’ Float in the Heritage Parade. She was the kids’ number one pick.”
The mental image tickled Bo, and she began laughing. “Will she have to wear a tiara?” The Heritage Parade was an annual event put on by the town, held in May just before the end of school so they could guarantee the kids’ participation. They got out of school to decorate the floats, and the competition between the classes was fierce. The day included an antique car show, a crafts fair, and different food vendors set up in the small town park so people could picnic without having to bring their own food. There were, of course, a Heritage King and Queen picked from the senior class.
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” he replied. He was a pleasant-looking man in his mid-forties, brown hair and brown eyes, with a dimple beside his mouth when he smiled. All the kids and teachers in their small school seemed to like him, with the occasional hiccup in popularity whenever some of the kids got in trouble. He was a local, which to her way of thinking was a big plus because he knew everyone and the current set of parents were likely his own schoolmates, which meant he got more trust than an outsider would have.
Bo thought about it. Tricks loved attention, but she loved it only when Bo was nearby. “I don’t know that she’d stay on the float if I weren’t there. And, no, I don’t want to ride on a float. She might do okay if we practiced, but more than likely she’d jump off the float and start looking for me.”
Evan made a series of thoughtful expressions as he ran possibilities through his head. “How about if you’re hidden where no one can see you? On the float, I mean. I don’t want her to get hurt jumping off a moving flatbed trailer. The kids really want her there. I think they’d crown her queen if she attended school.”
When Tricks was just a year old, Evan had talked Bo into attending Career Day at the school and bringing Tricks along. The gregarious dog had pranced into the redbrick building as if she owned it, bestowed her tennis ball on select students for them to throw for her, cuddled, licked, and generally charmed all the kids.
Bo hesitated. “Let me think about it.” She really didn’t want to spend an hour or so crouched on a slow-moving float, especially when there wasn’t any guarantee Tricks would sit prettily even with Bo nearby. She sighed. Oh hell, of course she’d do it, if Tricks would cooperate. “We’d need to do a practice run or two, to see if she’d do it. She might hate the commotion.”
Then again, when had Tricks ever hated being the center of attention? Nevertheless, Bo wasn’t going to spring anything on her that was that far outside her experience.
“I’ll get something set up,” he promised and lightly slapped the door frame as he straightened. “Thanks, Chief. I’ll tell the kids it’s a maybe, and it depends on Tricks.”
She rolled up the window and continued down the street toward the police station, but before she reached there she saw Jesse’s patrol car come racing up the street and slide to a stop in front of Doris Brown’s bakery. He leaped out of the car and ran inside.
Unless he had a cake emergency, Bo thought, something was wrong. She pulled to the curb on the opposite side of the street, let the window down a couple of inches so Tricks would have fresh air, and dashed across the street to join him. Had someone had a heart attack? Just as she reached the sidewalk, she heard a scream and a loud crash and her heart jumped; she jerked the door open and rushed inside.
At first the scene was too chaotic to make sense. Jesse and a man were rolling on the floor, throwing punches. Miss Doris stood behind the counter, her hands clapped to her cheeks with her eyes wide and panicky while she emitted a series of little cries like a squeaky car alarm going off. Her granddaughter, Emily, sat crying on the floor with a hand held over her left eye. The glass in one of the counters was broken, as was a table. A customer, Brandwyn Wyman, had grabbed up one of the chairs and was circling the two men fighting, ready to clobber one of them in the head if she got an open shot.
All Bo knew was that if a fight was going on, she was on Jesse’s side. Without giving herself time to think and chicken out, she gulped once and threw herself into the fray and locked her arm under the other guy’s chin, pulling back as hard as she could. If nothing else, at least she could distract him and give Jesse a chance to get him handcuffed.
The man bucked and threw himself sideways, trying to dislodge her. The impact with the floor jarred her, hard, made her vision blur and sound fade. She’d never been in a physical fight before and wasn’t prepared for the shock of impact—it was, well, shocking—but she tightened her arm and held on, reaching over his shoulder to clamp her free hand around
her other wrist to keep him from breaking her grip. Another scream split the air, Jesse was swearing like a sailor, and then she felt the guy’s muscles tightening as he gathered himself and lurched to his feet with her clinging to his back for all she was worth. He punched blindly over his shoulder, catching her on the right cheekbone. A series of things happened almost simultaneously:
She saw stars. Literally.
Fury swamped her, a red, all-encompassing fury that blotted out reason and felt as if her entire body had expanded from the force of it. She heard someone roaring, “I’ll tear your fucking head off!” and to her horror realized it was her because she was suiting action to words and had her knees braced against his back while she hauled back with all her body weight behind it.
Jesse came off the floor like a tiger, reaching for them.
And Brandwyn stepped in, a five-foot-two, red-haired avenging angel with purpose in her eyes as she swung the chair with the precision of a professional baseball player, missing Bo’s head by inches but clobbering the hell out of her target.
The guy went down like a fallen tree. Not being an experienced rider of either horses or humans, Bo couldn’t launch herself free fast enough to evade yet another impact with the floor. The back of her head slammed against wood, her right shoulder slammed against something else, and there was a brief moment of silence.
“Holy shit.”
Again, the voice was hers, faint and astonished now. She blinked up at the ceiling and tried to make her surroundings snap into place because they seemed to be doing crazy stuff such as whirling and dancing. She heard Jesse on the radio, his tone sharp and urgent, then Miss Doris’s round face swam into view as she knelt beside Bo. She was saying, “Oh lordy, oh lordy,” over and over.
Bo took a deep breath, and her surroundings did indeed snap back into place, with an audible pop! She turned her head and saw Jesse efficiently handcuffing the guy and rolling him over as he cast a swiftly assessing look at her.
“Get some ice, Miss Doris. For both Emily and the chief.”
Miss Doris scrambled to her feet and hurried away, and her place was taken by both Emily and Brandwyn. Emily’s left eye was swollen and rapidly bruising, but she seemed otherwise unhurt. She grabbed some napkins from the holder on one of the tables and gently pressed it to Bo’s cheekbone. Brandwyn squatted beside her, her attention darting from Bo to the unconscious man as if prepared for him to recover and cause more trouble. If so, from the fierce expression on her face, she intended to be prepared.
“What the hell?”
Bo wondered who was controlling her tongue, because the last three sentences out of her own mouth had been swear words. Not that she didn’t cuss a bit now and then, but she’d always been careful not to say the F word now that she was chief. That ban had now been broken, and she had no doubt the entire town would know her utterances, verbatim, before the day was over. Mayor Buddy might feel he needed to have a word with her over her public use of foul language.
“Shit,” she said, in response to her own thought.
“Damn it!” She’d just done it again. “Will someone please put a gag on me?”
Jesse joined the squat club. He looked a little worse for wear himself, with his shirt torn and his nose dripping blood. Emily handed him a napkin and he made an effort to clean it away, then simply clamped the napkin over his nose. “The medics will be here soon,” he said, his tone nasal but comforting. “And half the county, I expect.”
Bo began cautiously moving her arms and legs, checking herself out. She didn’t think there was anything broken, but she was kind of addled and couldn’t be certain. “Why?”
The three squatters looked at each other in alarm.
“I’m not concussed,” she said a bit irritably. “I don’t think so, anyway.”
“You did hit your head kind of hard on the floor.”
Yeah, she remembered that. “Okay, okay. I see your point.” Nevertheless, she got her left elbow under her and levered herself to a sitting position. If the medics and half the county were on their way, she at least wanted to be sitting up, preferably in a chair.
“Take it easy,” Emily said, her soft voice worried. She was a pretty, gentle young woman, very much like her grandmother both in sweetness and in her master’s touch with baking.
“That was wild,” Brandwyn said, awe in her tone. “You jumped on his back like a monkey on an elephant.”
That was kind of how she’d felt, too, and not in a good way. The elephant had definitely been in control. Groaning a little, she hauled her butt into a chair just as Miss Doris hurried back with not two but three bags of ice. One went on Emily’s eye, the second one on Bo’s cheekbone, and the third on Jesse’s nose.
She felt strange, kind of disconnected from everything, even the throbbing of her cheekbone and shoulder. This was the first violence she’d ever encountered, and she hoped it was the last. The altercation felt as if it had lasted for half an hour at least, but it had to have been—what?—a minute, tops? She patted her coat pocket for her cell phone but came up empty.
“I’ve lost my cell.”
Brandwyn looked around and said, “Here it is,” as she stooped to pick up the phone from where it had skidded under another table. Bo took it and pressed the home button to bring up the time. Yes, less than five minutes had passed since she’d spoken to Evan in front of the bank. And what the hell difference did it make anyway?
It didn’t. Checking the time was just more of that sense of disconnection, trying to find something solid, something normal.
Maybe the best way was in conversation. As soon as she had the thought, she realized the rest of them were talking, Jesse asking questions, Brandwyn and Miss Doris talking over each other, Emily starting to cry.
Bo said, “Who is that?” and pointed at the handcuffed man on the floor, because she didn’t recognize him.
The four of them stared at her. “That’s Kyle,” Emily said, sniffling. “My husband.”
“What? Kyle? What happened to his hair?” She’d met Kyle once or twice; she’d always thought Emily had married the pick of the Gooding family, but maybe not. When she’d seen him before, he’d worn his hair buzzed, been clean shaven; now his light brown hair was long, almost touching his shoulders, and he had the scruffy three-day beard a lot of guys were wearing to show how cool they were.
“He’s been growing it out,” Emily replied unnecessarily.
Kyle began shifting and making sounds that were a combination of grunts and groans. Following hard on that were some slurred curses, including “Stupid bitch, you’ll pay for this.”
“Are you threatening your wife?” Jesse asked in his cop voice, setting the ice bag aside and gripping the front of Kyle’s jacket with both hands to haul him to a sitting position. As he did so, the first of the sirens became audible, coming in stereo from both ends of town.
Kyle wasn’t stupid; his father had always paid to make trouble go away whenever any of his kids misbehaved, but Miss Doris and Emily were both well liked, and some trouble trumped money. Not only that, he was beginning to realize he’d been in a fight with two law officers, and that wasn’t good. “No,” he said sullenly. “I’m talking about a divorce.”
“Praise the lord,” said Miss Doris, glaring at him. “You’re so low-down, you’d have to grow ten feet taller before you could lick the soles of Emily’s shoes.”
“Miss Doris, how about you and Emily, and Brandwyn, move to the other side of the room, please.” Jesse cast an encompassing look at both Kyle and Bo, decided one wasn’t going anywhere and the other was doing okay, and he began herding the ladies along.
Kyle slanted Bo one of those sullen looks.
“I didn’t know it was you,” she said, though it wouldn’t have made any difference if she had. “I haven’t seen you since you grew your hair out.”
He didn’t look apologetic, but again, he wasn’t stupid. “I didn’t know it was you either,” he mumbled, and that was likely true given that she’d
jumped him from behind. “Sorry.” After a pause, “You okay?”
She didn’t answer because the medic truck screeched to a stop outside the shop, followed by a county car coming from the opposite direction. They parked nose to nose, and two medics and a deputy bailed out. Other sirens were wailing as more patrol cars descended on them.
The medics came first to her, for reasons unknown. The attention was overwhelming, swamping her with the sense of being out of control as well as disconnected. She wasn’t hurt all that much, a little bruised and sore, while Jesse was actually bleeding, but then she realized all the others were on their feet while she was sitting down—well, except for Kyle, but considering he was handcuffed, evidently sympathy for him was running low. One of the medics finally peeled off to check out Jesse and Emily, while the other checked her pupils, which appeared to be normal.
Maybe they were reacting to the novelty of the “lady chief” being in an altercation, but the small bakery was soon filled to bursting with county deputies and other official types, as well as the town’s other four police officers, two of whom were off-duty. For God’s sake, even the coroner showed up; it must have been a slow day for bodies. Several of the town council members arrived, as well as Mayor Buddy. Kyle Gooding was hauled to his feet, his head examined where Brandwyn had clobbered him with the chair, and taken away to the hospital in the next town over for checking out. He wanted to have whoever hit him arrested, but that didn’t fly considering he’d been in the process of attacking two law officers when Brandwyn brained him. After he was checked out, assuming he wasn’t admitted, he’d be taken to the county jail because the town didn’t have a jail and all their arrestees were put in the county facility. Even after Kyle was gone, people still stood around, laughing and retelling the fracas.
Bo instinctively retreated behind her mental walls, where she always went when she was in protective mode. She’d learned to do that at an early age as a means of coping with her mother’s parade of boyfriends and husbands, constant relocating, and a father who appeared to forget about her for years at a time. What had worked for the kid still worked for the adult. She didn’t like being the center of attention, and if the attention wouldn’t go away, then she would, at least inside her head.