Page 1 of Misadventures in Blue
Chapter One
Jace
A burglary sounds more exciting than it is.
Burglars are opportunists, generally, and the ones smart enough to do it more than once are smart enough to know how to do it right. Know what you want and take it while no one else is around.
Sticking a gun in a bank teller’s face isn’t going to get you anything but a prison sentence—but if we’re talking the kind of theft that happens without anyone getting hurt? And for shit that isn’t federally protected? Well, be clever and you might just get away with it.
Anyway, alarm calls for business structures at night usually turn out to be nothing. Bad wiring or teens goofing off or—most commonly—a night cleaning crew with an old alarm code. And the turns-out-to-be-nothing calls are frequent enough that I’m surprised when I get to the scene and actually find broken glass everywhere. A brief and welcome shot of adrenaline pulses through me as I call it in and draw my weapon to search the premises.
Empty.
With a disappointment that is as irrational as it is unwanted, I update dispatch and call my sergeant.
“Russo,” she answers in her usual clipped way.
“Hey, Sarge, it’s Sutton. I’m responding to that alarm at 10533 Mastin, and I think you should call Detective Day in. It looks like another one of her doctor’s office robberies.”
I can tell by the pause on the other end of the phone that my sergeant has no idea what I’m talking about.
“She sent an email about it last week,” I add. “Asking to be alerted if there was another one, which I think this is.”
I hear clicking and sighing and guess that Russo is double-checking her own inbox to find Detective Day’s email.
“All right, kid,” Russo says. “Found the email. Looks like calling her in is what we need to do.”
That at least gives me some kind of satisfaction. Maybe there is no one to chase, nothing to do, but at least I can make sure the right person gets the right information.
But it isn’t a lot of satisfaction.
Well, Jace, what did you expect when you took a job working for a suburban police department? Firefights? Car chases?
No. I knew exactly what I was doing when I applied at Hocker Grove Police Department. My sister just had her second baby, my folks were retiring, and I wanted to put down roots. I wanted to buy a house and maybe get my degree and settle down. I wanted something more than the stop-and-start life of active duty in the army like I had before.
I wanted to come back to the place where I grew up.
I walk out of the doctor’s office and crunch across the broken glass back to my car for the crime-scene tape, taking in the typical Hocker Grove night as I do. I take in the empty parking lot, still puddled and damp from an earlier storm and lit by lonely light poles, and I take in the distant roar of the interstate and the rustling of wet tree leaves in the wind.
I smell the suburban air, a mix of wet grass and gasoline. The almost-country and the almost-city mixed together.
I smell home.
Although for being home sweet suburban home, Hocker Grove is plenty busy and plenty grim. As the second-most-populous city in the state of Kansas, with almost two hundred thousand people, every type of crime comes out to play. Domestic abuse, drug abuse, battery, assault, theft, and so many auto burglaries that they have their own unit in the investigation division.
As I know from my own childhood growing up in a shitty apartment tucked behind a Walmart, Hocker Grove isn’t all happy middle-class families and prosperity. But even with all the work that needs to be done, the pace of life here after six years in the army and three hellish stints in Afghanistan feels, well…boring and uneventful.
Russo arrives right as I am pulling the tape from my car, and after her come Coulson, Romero, and Quinn. Together it doesn’t take long to get the scene roped off and secure, and afterward, I slide into my car and start sketching out the beginnings of my report. I hate paperwork, but if there’s one thing I learned from the army, it’s that there’s no point in putting off things you hate. Especially paperwork. It just bites you in the ass harder when the time comes.
