Page 10 of Pete and His Precious

To my surprise, my phone buzzes a few seconds later with a text.

I’m looking forward to it, my precious.

To me, precious is more fitting to describe a girl than a boy. I want to be her manly hero, not her precious.

But, I guess beggars can’t be choosy. So I write back.

I think you should be my precious. And I’m looking forward to it too.

I grin to myself, stretching a bit to work the nervousness out of my body. I hear her phone ding and she pauses for just a moment, and then, she starts back in on her regular book.

The couple is soon kissing, and then it goes into a scene with the heroine Carolyn’s grandmother. Even listening to her do that is like dipping my nerve endings into a soothing balm of peace and comfort. She has a voice that’s perfect for narration.

Now, I just have to get through the rest of the week. I’ve decided that I should take drawing lessons, just in case I do end up stuck painting children’s faces. How hard could it be, right? I just never had the proper training. I mean, I had art in elementary school, but the teacher didn’t teach me to draw. She spent most of her time trying to make sure we kept our crayons on the paper, and not on the walls or desk.

My bad day starts to fade away, and I might have taken a bit of a nap in my recliner before I walk into the kitchen and start supper. I’m just about to the point where I feel like my life isn’t that bad, when my phone rings.

I blink, because it’s the police chief. It’s odd that he would be calling me when I’m off duty. That either means that there’ssomething big going down and he needs me, or there’s a problem somewhere.

I don’t think I want to deal with this right now, but I’m in a better frame of mind than I was earlier, at least.

I swipe my phone. “Yes, sir?”

“McKinsey. I’m going to need you.”

“All right, sir. Right now?”

“No. I’m placing you on unpaid leave.”

“What?” He just said he needed me. Now I’m going on unpaid leave?

“Yeah. Don’t flip out.”

“I’m not flipping out, but I don’t understand. You just said you needed me.” I try to still my racing heart. Sure, my job doesn’t pay much, but it’s everything I ever wanted to be. A cop in my hometown. And it pays the bills. What am I going to do with no money coming in?

“Did I do something wrong?” I ask, trying to look back at my job over last week, last month, goodness, my entire life. I can’t remember ever stepping out of bounds to the point where I would be placed on administrative leave with no pay.

“I had a request. I don’t normally respond to these requests, but I couldn’t ignore this one because of the money involved.”

“You took a bribe?” I want to punch the wall, honestly. I thought he was upstanding and upright, and —

“No. But, I had a request, for you specifically, to be a security guard for a little girl.”

“No.” I say immediately, forgetting that I’m talking to my boss. “I mean, no sir,” I say, modulating my tone just a bit, but keeping the absolute finality of it. I don’t want him to get the wrong impression. This is not something we are going to negotiate about.

“That was my immediate response too, until the woman told me that she was going to pay you twice your normal salary, plusshe was making a substantial donation to the force. You know we never have enough funding.”

Yeah. I know that. Typical small town that gets zero attention from state and federal governments. We are on our own as a local community, which, it’s a good community, but we’re not rich. No one is. We help each other, and that’s part of the reason I’m here. I don’t want to climb the ladder, and make a gazillion dollars. I just want to serve my community. And that means making less money than I could make as a state trooper, or, ironically, going into private security.

“I don’t do children.” This is nonnegotiable.

“Well you do now. So it’s a little girl. She’s ten, and the mother said... Well you know, everything the mothers always say. She’s perfect. She might be a little hellion, but for the donation she is going to make to the force, you can do your duty, and watch her for a month.”

“A month?” If I had been sitting down I would have blown out of my chair like a rocket was under my butt. As it was, I totally missed the bowl I was trying to pour canned soup in. I now have a mess on my counter, but I ignore it, and go over to the table, putting my phone on speaker, and setting my hands on either side of it. This cannot be happening.

“Yes. A month.”

“I am not going to go sit in school besides some little girl for an entire month. I got out of school, and I swore I was never going back.” That was what I said on my graduation day. Everyone else was crying big buckets of tears because they were apparently sad for some reason. Meanwhile, I couldn’t get out of that place fast enough. Not that I don’t love our local school, but I felt like a caged animal in there.

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