by A. E. Howe
“You did throw up on duty twice in one week. Besides, think about how much they must like you to give you a nickname.”
“Yeah, right,” he muttered good-naturedly. If you can’t take a little ribbing, you’re not going to last long in law enforcement. Pete had been on the giving end of more than a few jokes himself. “So, in complete confidence, Shantel told me you’re coming back full time.”
I rolled my eyes. “I haven’t even talked to Dad yet. He’s going to have more than a little to say about it.”
“He’s not going to make you jump through too many hoops. He just managed to fill one of the investigator positions and he still has two patrol positions open.”
“Pete, you should have learned by now that Dad will do whatever the hell he wants to do.”
“Have you seen the press conference that he and Tolland did this morning?” Pete asked. I hadn’t. “He’s in a good mood, and you and I are on the most favored list. Honestly, I should go in and ask for a raise.”
“We’ll see. But I wouldn’t be surprised if I end up filling one of those patrol positions. Do we know who he hired as an investigator?”
Pete looked at me with a smirk. “I shouldn’t tell you. It might make you change your mind about coming back.”
“He didn’t.”
“He did. Darlene Marks starts the first of March.”
“That woman pointed a gun at me,” I grumbled.
“She did find you in a room with a murdered man. Probably why your dad hired her. Not because she held a gun on you, but because she was willing to see the possibility of an officer being a bad guy. Shows she thinks outside the box.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“Well, if you’re going to beg for your job back, now is as good a time as any.”
“You’re probably right. Maybe I’ll get a little sympathy for the beating I took.” I touched my side and groaned.
Dad’s assistant smiled at me as I approached his office. I could tell that Shantel had told everyone I was coming back. She had probably been afraid that I’d change my mind, so she took the precaution of making it general knowledge. I sighed and asked if I could see the sheriff.
“Sure. I think he’s been waiting for you.”
I went into Dad’s office and stopped when I saw Mauser. I wasn’t sure that I could take one of his enthusiastic greetings in the shape I was in. To my shock, Mauser got up, shuffled over to me and leaned gently against my hip.
“Damn you,” I told him. “You get all sweet like this and I’ll decide I actually like you.” I gave him a vigorous ear rub, even though the movement sent pain running across my ribs. “Okay, that’s enough, big guy, I don’t like you that much.” Mauser circled a couple of times and laid back down next to Dad’s desk.
Dad was sorting papers on his desk and pretending to ignore me. The papers looked like applications. He looked up and tried to keep from smiling.
“What do you want?” he asked as gruffly as he could manage. He didn’t invite me to sit down.
“I’m sure you’ve already heard it through the grapevine. I’d like to come back full time,” I said flatly.
He leaned back in his chair and looked up at me.
“I know you’re a good deputy. I know you’re a better investigator than you are a patrol officer. And you are a very good investigator. A little raw around the edges, and I think you get by on luck too often, but I can’t argue with the results. What I want to know is, are you going to be committed to the job? I realize you became a deputy because I asked you to. Now you’re asking me if you can come back to the job. I’m willing to take you back, but on one condition. You have to be able to look me in the eye and tell me that this is what you want. That you aren’t doing this for me, or just to have a job, or because you can’t think of anything else to do. No, I want you to tell me you’re doing this because you want to be an investigator.” He paused. “Can you do that?”
I felt like I was getting married. Of course, the joke is that cops are married to the job, so maybe it did take that kind of commitment. I looked him in the eye.
“Yes. I want to be a deputy.”
He looked down at Mauser. “Mauser gave you a paws up, so…” He stared back at me for a minute and then gave me one of his very rare, ear-to-ear smiles. “Fine. You did great work catching Winston and not getting killed. And as a reward for that, I’m going to let you come back as an investigator. Honestly, it wouldn’t be fair to patrol to put you back on the streets.”
Wow, I thought, brought back without some cruel punishment. He really was in a good mood. But then the other shoe fell.
“However,” he went on, “you won’t be Pete’s partner. You’ll be teamed up with our newest investigator, Darlene Marks. You can help her transition from the Calhoun Police Department.”
My mouth dropped open. “This is punishment for having quit,” I blurted out before I could stop myself.
“You are very perceptive. That’s what makes you a good investigator. Now, get out of here before I change my mind about hiring you back.”
Stunned, I turned around and walked out. How could things be worse? I thought. Then I bumped into Julio as I was walking back to my old desk.
“Hey, Larry, glad you’re back,” he said.
I nodded, still trying to comprehend what had just happened to me.
“Guess who’s back in town,” he said. “Your looney ex-girlfriend Marcy. I just saw her at the Fast Mart.”
Oh, crap.
THE END
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Larry Macklin returns in:
March’s Luck
A Larry Macklin Mystery–Book 5
Read it now: AMAZON AMAZON UK
Though happy to be back at his job as a criminal investigator, Larry Macklin is struggling to adapt to life with his new partner. But concerns about his work relationship quickly take a back seat to his personal life when his irrational ex-girlfriend, Marcy, returns to town.
Larry soon has bigger problems when members of a prominent local family are killed off one by one. As he tries to find the murderer before anyone else in the family loses their life, Larry’s investigation intersects with a hare-brained search for stolen Nazi gold.
Are the bumbling treasure hunters—Marcy among them—somehow responsible for the murders? Or is someone else picking off members of the family for financial gain? With a long list of suspects and a very short list of motives, Larry is going to need a lot of luck to solve this case.
Here’s a preview:
Chapter One
I walked into the sheriff’s office on a Tuesday morning and waved to Dill Kirby, the semi-retired sergeant working the front desk. He gave me a broad smile.
“Mornin’, Larry! She beat ya in,” he said loudly and laughed wickedly at my expense.
“Thanks, old man,” I threw back at him, but he just shook his head and chuckled.
I walked down the hall and turned the corner into the large open area that housed the criminal investigations department. Adams County is small and rural, so there were only ten desks in the room. Mine sat between the desk of my old partner, Pete Henley, and that of my new partner, Darlene Marks. Darlene was at her desk, staring at her monitor. A big mug of coffee from the Fast Mart sat by her elbow, while her leg tapped quickly up and down.
I tried to be inconspicuous as I walked over to my desk. All I wanted was a couple of minutes to sit down and look over any reports that had been assigned to me from the night before and to generally wake up. I knew that I didn’t stand a chance.
“Morning, Rookie!” Darlene said cheerfully. Way too cheerfully for eight-thirty in the morning.
“Why do you call me that? I’ve been working here for nearly seven years. You’re the one that started barely a week ago,” I grumbled at her. We’d been over this ground before.
“I’ve been in law enforcement for ten years, pal. Your dad’s just got you sh
owing me around. It’s not like you’re my field training officer.”
“You’re not my FTO either, so stop calling me rookie,” I said.
“You have got to learn to take a joke. Everyone should have a nickname. Like your old partner, Deputy Barf,” she said lightly.
I looked longingly over at Pete’s desk. He was probably eating breakfast at the Donut Hole right now. He had never come in and called me names before nine o’clock in the morning. I missed working with Pete a lot.
“We’ve got some doozies from last night,” Darlene went on. “Here’s one we can work on together,” she said, handing me a copy of a report from patrol.
Lt. Johnson came in around seven every morning and went through the previous night’s reports and assigned them to investigators. Easy cases could be handled by one investigator, but for something more serious we’d team up with our partners and work them together. Since Darlene had become my partner, I’d found that I was willing to work on some pretty big cases by myself. But if she asked for my help on a case, I really couldn’t refuse.
“Somebody stole a backhoe. Brand new. Thing’s worth twenty-five thousand.”
“That’s less than some cars,” I said, not wanting to be drawn into it.
“Yeah, but they almost ran over some homeless guy on their way out of the yard with it. Knocked him down. Could have killed him.” Darlene got excited easily. Though, looking over the report, I had to admit that we could bring some pretty serious charges against the thief.
The homeless man had been taken to a hospital in Tallahassee. “Contacting the hospital would be one of the first steps,” I said reluctantly. Glancing over at Darlene, I saw that she was already on the phone. She mouthed: Calling the hospital. I sighed and went back to looking over my own assignments.
An hour later we pulled into the parking lot of Mill’s Lumber and Supply. They were the local John Deere dealership and it was their backhoe that had gone missing.
The manager, Dave Rudd, took us out back.
“Damned thing. I got a call from the alarm company about two o’clock. Now, that ain’t unusual, stupid thing goes off a couple times a month. Can’t get them to fix it right. Anyway, that’s why I wasn’t too excited. I got dressed, with my wife cussin’ up a storm about being woke up again, and headed out to my truck. That’s when I got a call from one of your deputies that the fence was all tore to hell and some guy was hurt. Well, I didn’t know who he was talking about. We don’t have a night watchman or anything. Of course, now that I think about it, a night watchman might not be a bad idea.”
Dave kept talking all the way to the back lot. I listened with half an ear while Darlene took meticulous notes. Not easy since she was walking too.
“He cut our chain, then backed up and hooked his truck up to the trailer. Guess we shouldn’t have left it on the trailer, but who the hell would think someone would cut through the lock?” Dave said, shaking his head.
We looked at the chain and lock. The chain was heavy-duty, but the lock, not so much. The thief had cut the lock off and was in like Flynn.
“I’ll be glad to come out and give your place a security check,” Darlene told Dave. They wandered off, talking about all the problems of securing a large site, while I looked around the grounds. Attached to the report was a picture of the backhoe and trailer that were stolen. From where I stood, I could see at least three pieces of heavy equipment that looked more expensive and just as easy to steal.
“Why do you think they took that backhoe?” I asked Rudd. He stopped and looked at me, slightly puzzled.
“You know, I wondered that myself.”
“The report said they also broke into your office. Where is that?” Darlene asked him.
“Over here,” he said, leading us to a small annex built onto the store with a sign over the door that read “John Deere Sales”. He pointed to the door, which looked like someone had just taken a crowbar and levered the door open. Sykes, the deputy responding, had dusted the door and the office for prints. With small cases, our deputies often do the evidence collection themselves.
“They took the keys. In fact, they took a lot of keys,” Dave said, sounding a bit tired. “I’m going to have to get replacement keys for all of the equipment they didn’t steal.” A thought occurred to him. “You don’t think they’re planning on coming back for the other rigs, do you?”
“No. I’m sure they took all the keys ’cause they didn’t know which set went to the one they were going to steal,” I reassured him.
“The good news is that probably means it’s not an inside job,” Darlene said, making notes. Points to her, I thought.
“Ohhhh, I see. Because if it was one of our guys, he’d know which set of keys went with which backhoe. Yeah, gee, I hadn’t even thought it could have been one of our employees. Wow, that is good news.”
“Interesting,” Darlene said. She had an irritating habit of making you ask what she was talking about, but this time I was on top of it.
“You’re right,” I told her. “The thief didn’t ransack the office.”
Dave looked back and forth between Darlene and me. I explained, “That means our bad guy wasn’t after money. Which was also my point about the backhoe he stole. It wasn’t the most valuable one on your lot.”
Dave nodded thoughtfully.
“Gooseneck trailer, right?” I asked.
“Yep, you don’t want something that big and heavy hanging off your bumper,” he said, falling quickly into the cadence of a sales pitch.
I held up my hand and called dispatch, asking if they had any reports of a truck being stolen in the last forty-eight hours.
“Bingo,” I said after getting contact info from the dispatcher. “A dually was stolen from a farm south of town last night.”
“The plot thickens,” Darlene said with way too much enthusiasm.
Before we left I turned to Dave. “This may be a stupid question, but what would someone do with that particular piece of equipment?”
“Dig a hole, fill in a hole, or both,” he answered, eyebrows raised. I nodded. Stupid question.
After we’d been out and talked with the farmer whose truck was stolen, I was forced to admit to myself—not to Darlene, but just to myself—that this case was a lot more interesting than I’d thought it would be when I read the report.
“The thief had to know where that truck was,” Darlene said as I drove. We’d decided to go to the Donut Hole for lunch. With Winston’s Grill closed after the owner had turned out to be a homicidal maniac, the Donut Hole had ramped up their lunch menu, adding wraps and more sandwiches.
“Yep,” I agreed. The farm was pretty far out of town. “Which means that’s probably our best chance. There has to be a connection. Our crook could be a family member, friend, neighbor or an ex-employee.”
“Or possibly he spotted the truck in town and decided that was the one he wanted, then followed the truck out to the farm.”
“Maybe, but he’d be taking a chance. How would he know that the owner left the keys in the truck?” I asked. Though, honestly, that wasn’t as rare on a farm as it would be in town. A farmer could have several farmhands that might need to use the truck, so sometimes it was just easier to leave the keys in the vehicle so that anyone that needed it didn’t have to hunt up the person with the keys.
We took our sandwiches and sat at one of the picnic tables outside the small restaurant. With Darlene eating and not talking, I enjoyed my lunch and the quiet, watching a steady stream of folks come and go. The loss of Winston’s had been a godsend for the Donut Hole.
The weather was perfect. The sun was shining in a clear blue sky and a cool breeze blew through the trees. In north Florida the worst of the winter weather is usually over by mid-March. There can still be the occasional freeze or days of rain, but most days are like this, making you want to spend them lying in the grass and staring up at the sky.
The peace of the afternoon was shattered when I heard the screech of brakes. I looked
up to see a small, bright red car make a sharp turn into the parking lot. The driver was short and something about the profile set the hairs on the back of my neck on end. The car slammed to a stop and the door was open before the vehicle had stopped rocking back and forth.
“Damn it!” I blurted out involuntarily, looking for some way to escape. Darlene just stared at the wild-eyed, black-haired woman who came stomping over to our table.
“You haven’t answered any of my texts,” Marcy Pike loudly accused me.
I stood up, facing my ex-girlfriend. “Just calm down. I don’t have to answer your texts,” I said reasonably. “Besides, I haven’t gotten most of them because I blocked you after I got the first one.”
Her face turned a dangerous, fiery red. “You son of a—” Surprisingly, she stopped herself. “Look, I just want to talk to you.” Marcy had turned the volume on her voice down by half, trying to sound sane.
I looked around at the dozen people, including Darlene, who’d stopped eating in order to watch the show. “Fair enough,” I said, turning back to her. “Let’s go over to your car.”
One of the things that galled Marcy the most was someone being rational, but she seemed to swallow her desire for battle and nodded.
I took out my phone as we walked to her car. “Let me finish this text,” I said when we stopped. On my phone I typed out: watch us. if things get ugly come break it up, and sent the text to Darlene.
“Are you done?” Marcy asked with narrowed eyes as I put my phone away.
“Sorry,” I said, trying to throw some water on whatever fire she wanted to get started. “I heard your dad’s been sick. I hope he gets better soon.”
“He’s pretty bad off. He’s in hospice now,” Marcy said and, for a moment, there was real emotion in her voice. But it was all gone by the time she spat out the next sentence. “Look, I need any of my stuff that you still have.”
“What stuff? We lived together, like, nine years ago,” I reminded her.
“I know I left some stuff when I moved out,” Marcy said accusingly.
