Page 32 of Moonshine Kiss
“Good. Now get on back to work. We have a few hundred hormonal minds to influence today.”
“On it.”
She turned her back on me and pulled the paperwork out of her inbox. I was officially dismissed.
I paused in the doorway and looked back. “Are you sure you don’t want to fire me?”
She threw a wadded-up sticky note in my direction. “Get!” she said, shooing me from her office.
* * *
“If one more blooger puts a microphone inmy face—”
“What’s a blooger?”
“You know. One of them there people who types stuff on the internet.”
“I think they’re called bloggers.”
“Well, that’s just stupid.”
16
Cassidy
Busting the three dumbasses camped out in front of my house this morning gave me a nice little buzz. So had the $200 fine I’d slapped them with for loitering without a permit.
It was cause for celebration. I called in an order to The Brunch Club and swung by on my way to the station. Donuts might be the preferred pastry of choice for cops across the country, but here in Bootleg our palates were more refined.
I tucked the box of fresh-from-the-oven bacon and egg pastries into the back seat of my car and cranked the volume on Mr. Garth Brooks as I cruised the two blocks to work.
News would travel and the rest of the vultures would get the message, I thought with satisfaction. We did things differently here in Bootleg Springs.
Turning the wheel, I pulled in to the back lot of the station. Dad had been sheriff for the better part of my lifetime, and the police station was as much home to me as the couch in my parents’ family room.
I balanced the box of pastries and the stack of files that I’d taken home to peruse and flashed my key card under the reader. It was one of the visible signs of progress at the Bootleg PD. We were woefully behind on our technology. All case files prior to 2011 were still paper. I’d been pushing for an intern or two to tackle the scanning job. Dad was mulling it over.
“Mornin’,” I greeted Fanny Sue Tomaschek, deputy sheriff and my father’s right hand. Fanny could trace her family back in Olamette County five generations. She was Bootleg Springs. It made her one of the best assets our little department had. She balanced somber professionalism with the kind of public relations that only comes from knowing every single person born and raised in town for the last forty years.
She was fifty-eight, ran one marathon a year, and was the second-best shot in the department.
I was the first. And I was gunning for her job when she retired in exactly four years. Not that I’d confessed my ambitions to anyone. Some things were best kept to myself. So until then I reviewed old case files, took online classes on public administration, and was the best damn deputy I could be.
“Morning there, Cass. Heard you had some excitement this morning,” she said swiveling away from her ancient computer monitor.
“News travels fast.”
“Sure does, Deputy Obvious,” Fanny Sue smirked. “That’s $200 towards the Repave the Parking Lot fund.”
“These snoopy weasels are probably gonna pay for the whole project before things blow over,” I predicted.
I dumped the pastries on Fanny Sue’s desk and the files on my own. It was a green metal monstrosity, a dinosaur leftover from the 70s. Two of the drawers stuck unless punched at exactly the right spot. The flat screen monitor that didn’t flicker and flip had come out of my own pocket. Not having seizures or migraines was worth it in my mind.
The phone was ringing off the hook, which was to be expected after Connelly’s little show last night. Bex, our tattooed, eyebrow-pierced organizational badass, fielded calls like it was her superpower. She worked out of the property room, where evidence and confiscated property was stored. There was a sliding glass window in one wall so she could deal with walk-ins and accept dog license fees and applications.
Behind the property room, well out of public view, was the Summertimer Board. In an unofficial pool, we each identified potential troublemaking summertimers. At the end of the summer, the employee with the worst summertimer infraction won the pot. Fanny Sue—and her infallible instincts—remained undefeated.
The board was currently blank and wouldn’t be filled again until June of next year.
