Bulldogs & Bullets: A Dog Town USA Cozy Mystery

by Meg Muldoon

  I made a snorting noise.

  “If I were to leave journalism, it wouldn’t be for any low-level entry cop post, I can tell you that much,” I said playfully.

  “Oh yeah?” he said, clearly amused.

  He crossed his arms, and I couldn’t help but notice his muscles ripple beneath his long sleeve shirt as he did.

  “Yeah,” I continued. “I wouldn’t accept anything less than detective. And I’d hold out for detective lieutenant before I even considered looking at a contract.”

  He chuckled, his voice intermingling with the corn popping in the microwave.

  “You’re saying you want my job?”

  I shrugged.

  “Well, I’d prefer that nobody got fired or demoted when the department hires me, but let’s face it: it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there. You’ve got to be cutthroat if you’re going to make a good leader in the Dog Mountain Police Department. And I don’t know if you’re up to the job, Lt. Sakai. You’re clearly too much of a romantic.”

  That sent him reeling with laughter. Mugs’ ears perked up and the mutt opened his bleary eyes.

  “You drive a hard bargain, Winifred Wolf.”

  “What can I say? I know what I want and I’m tenacious.”

  “And beautiful, too. And that’s a deadly combo if there ever was one.”

  I smiled when he called me beautiful.

  It wasn’t that I was unfortunate looking. But I wasn’t any beauty, either.

  Only Sam didn’t seem to realize that.

  He gazed at me for a long, long moment then. I met his burning stare and felt my heart flutter and my palms grow damp with sweat.

  I wasn’t sure how much more of those kinds of heart palpitations I could take before it did something crazy like pop out of my chest.

  He smiled for a second, then broke the stare. He looked down, still smiling.

  “What are you grinning at over there?”

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “Tell me.”

  “If I do, you’ll just tell the other cops about my sappy romantic ways.”

  “I can keep a secret.”

  He paused for a drawn-out moment.

  “All right, well… I was just wondering how a simple guy like me ever caught the Winifred Wolf.”

  I gently nudged Mugs off of my lap and stood up. I walked slowly over to the kitchen toward him. His eyes followed me the whole way.

  “I know how.”

  “‘Cuz I’m fast and mean?” he said.

  “Nope,” I said, stepping close to him. “It’s the opposite. It’s ‘cuz you’re sweet. Because underneath that tough guy cop persona, you’re kind and caring. And you’ve got the biggest heart of any person I’ve ever known, Sam. That’s how you caught me.”

  His cheeks flushed slightly, making me grin.

  “Aw, did I embarrass you?” I said.

  He smirked.

  “I did, didn’t I?”

  “No,” he said, wrapping his arms around my hips and pulling me close. “And don’t be telling my cop buddies about it, either.”

  He pressed against me and our lips locked in a passionate, smoldering kiss that felt full of things that had been left unsaid between us.

  Mugs let out another whimper from the sofa, but this time, neither one of us cared.

  He held me like that for a long moment, his hands reaching slowly beneath my shirt and—

  I felt my eyes fling open and grow wide as the distinct aroma of smoke tainted the air.

  Our kiss wasn’t the only thing smoldering.

  I pulled away suddenly.

  “The popcorn!” I shouted.

  His eyes widened, too, as the realization hit him. He loosened his grip on me and quickly lunged for the microwave handle.

  Dark smoke billowed out from the small plastic microwave box.

  “Son of a…” Sam said, grabbing the blackened edges of the paper bag and quickly tossing it into the sink.

  Mugs started barking loudly at the commotion.

  Sam opened the window above the sink while I grabbed a kitchen towel and started waving the smoke out of the house. After airing out the place, he grabbed the scorched bag and opened it.

  The kernels were burnt beyond recognition.

  “Oh, man. You like your popcorn well-done, don’t you, Freddie?”

  I suddenly started giggling. A moment later, the giddiness took over my whole body and I was convulsing with laughter.

  Sam’s face broke into a smile and he joined me.

  By the time we finally stopped laughing, tears were streaming down both of our faces.

  Chapter 11

  I woke up early back at my house and got ready fast, trying to get a head start on the work day.

  By the time I got to the office, it was 8 a.m., and it was just about void of human life the way newsrooms usually were at this hour.

  But of course, Roger Kobritz was there. Sitting at his desk – as always – like he was glued to the hunk of composite wood.

  I’d come in early, partly as a sign of faith. Trying to show my editor that despite missing a big piece of Sunday’s A1 story, he could count on me to go above and beyond to save it.

  But somehow, it didn’t seem like Kobritz was getting the message.

  “Ms. Wolf, I’m going to need you to write a piece on the school board candidates for Tuesday’s edition next week,” he said first thing when he saw me come in.

  Well, hello to you, too, I’d thought cynically.

  I still had my jacket on and I was trying to catch my breath after just ascending the stairs up to the newsroom. My cheeks burned with the cold from crossing the parking lot. And technically, my work day didn’t begin for another hour.

  “I thought Jennifer was writing that school candidate piece,” I said. “And how come we’re running it so early? That’s the kind of story that should be running closer to Election Day.”

  We were still over a month away from elections, though you couldn’t throw a stone in Dog Mountain without hitting an election sign in somebody’s front yard.

  “Jennifer had a good enterprise story idea I’ve decided that she needs to work on,” Kobritz said. “And you’re the only one with time in your schedule next week. Additionally, as you know, we’ve been scrambling for stories lately. This is a solid one that will take up some good space in the paper.”

  I stifled a scoff.

  My schedule was packed, and he knew it, too.

  Kobritz was trying to make it so that I didn’t have a personal life whatsoever.

  “I’ve got the dog poop story to salvage, and I’m working on that Hal Parker piece,” I said. “You know, the profile I pitched at yesterday’s meeting? I already talked to him last night after the school board meeting and he agreed to an interview.”

  Kobritz let out a long, troubled sigh.

  “If you work this weekend, then you have time to write all three, Freddie,” he said, turning back around to face his computer. “We can run the school board candidate story alongside your Parker piece on Tuesday. We’ll showcase prospective school board members and outgoing school board members. It’ll take up a lot of room in the paper. Which is what we need right now.”

  I was about to protest, since he’d just taken out my entire weekend plans with a wrecking ball, but he cleared his throat loudly before I could say anything.

  “You can take next Thursday and Friday off to make up for the days worked this weekend,” he said. “Additionally, I think we can make that school board candidate story more engaging for our readership. I want you to not only interview the candidates, but I want you to also talk to them about their dogs. This is Dog Mountain, after all, and the dog angle will add an incentive for readers to continue reading what is usually a pretty boring election piece.”

  I stifled back a sigh, and instead, took it out on my lower lip. I gnawed on it and stood there, looking at Kobritz for a long moment.

  I wasn’t happy about having to work this weekend. But I was
more unhappy with the dog angle suggestion for the candidate story.

  The dog angle was ridiculous – sensationalism at its worst – and Kobritz knew it. It would turn the school board election into a dog beauty contest rather than something that should have been based on the candidates’ experience and credentials.

  But lately, it seemed that Kobritz wasn’t above this kind of blatant mad grab for readership. All he seemed to care about was not getting into hot water with Janet Chandler, the paper’s owner.

  Kobritz glanced back after noticing me standing there. He met my eyes, obviously understanding what my silence meant.

  “Look Ms. Wolf, if you didn’t want to take on miscellaneous stories like this, then you should have taken a real beat when it was offered to y—”

  Just then, The Smith’s “How Soon is Now” rang out from Kobritz’s khaki pocket.

  I raised my eyebrows and watched as he fumbled for the phone just as Morrissey launched into how he was human and needed to be loved.

  I liked The Smiths just fine. But it seemed downright sad for anybody to have that song as their ringtone. Let alone as a ringtone specifically assigned to their wife’s cell number.

  “I need to take this,” Kobritz said, standing up and brushing past me.

  I bet you do, I thought.

  I watched as he walked speedily down the hall toward the breakroom, holding the phone to his ear and speaking in strained, hushed tones.

  I felt a little sorry for him. But only a little. Because marital troubles or not, it was time for him to stop punishing me for not taking the crime beat.

  Chapter 12

  I stared numbly at the screen of my work computer, dreamily thinking about all that scorched popcorn in Sam’s sink.

  That smoldering kiss from the night before consumed my thoughts, and I felt my arms suddenly break out in goose bumps.

  Sam hadn’t asked outright, but I knew he’d wanted me to stay at his house the night before. And while a part of me had wanted that too, I had instead kissed him goodnight and driven back home with Mugs instead.

  We’d started this relationship out by both agreeing on one thing: that we weren’t going to rush into things. That we were going to take things slow. Sam had been married before, and love had done a number on him. It had done a number on me in its own way, too. And neither one of us was eager to get hurt again.

  Lately, however, the fire building up between us was making it harder and harder to go at a slow pace. I felt it. And I knew that Sam felt it, too.

  I always found a way of pulling away before anything got too intense, though. I always left, thinking I was being smart and prudent and because I didn’t want to mess up the good thing we had going by jumping in too quickly. I had jumped in too quickly, once. And all I got for falling too fast was a shattered heart and a one-way ticket back home to Dog Mountain—

  “Hey, Red.”

  I nearly knocked over my coffee thermos in surprise when I heard his voice.

  I swallowed hard and turned around in my swivel chair, looking at the man leaning on the partition of my cubicle.

  Speak of the devil, and he shall appear.

  He was dressed in his usual untidy mess of a loose, buttoned-down shirt that had seen better days and ripped-up jeans that should have been on a college-aged skateboarder instead of a full-grown man in a professional work place. His hair had a tousled, just-rolled-out-of-bed look to it, and his five-o-clock shadow from the day before was now growing into full-on sloppy stubble.

  But somehow, the I-don’t-give-a-damn-what-anybody-thinks look always worked for him.

  His pale, sea glass-colored eyes caught the grey morning light streaming through the window, and it momentarily caused my breath to catch in my throat.

  I might have hated him. But that didn’t make Jimmy Brewer any less good-looking than he was.

  “I didn’t mean to startle you, Red,” he said.

  As I looked at him, time seemed to pass in slow motion. Like the way it passes when you trip and fall hard, and you can’t believe any of it is really happening.

  I finally cleared my throat and glanced back at my computer.

  “You didn’t startle me,” I said in a low voice. “What do you need?”

  I narrowed my eyes at the screen, avoiding eye contact.

  “Kobritz asked me to, uh, to talk to you about the school board candidate story?” he said, glancing at a post-it note that the editor no doubt had left on the photographer’s desk. “He wants some creative shots of the candidates with their dogs or something? ‘Shots to show that the candidates are human’ is how the ‘Britz wrote it out here.”

  Jimmy leaned over my desk.

  “You got any idea what he means by that?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, coldly. “Kobritz just assigned me the story a couple of hours ago.”

  He nodded.

  “I’m sure you can come up with something on your own though, can’t you?” I said, stacking a pile of notebooks on my desk that didn’t need to be stacked. “I’ve got other things to do right now.”

  “Well, I thought it might be easiest if I could tag along with you on the interviews,” Jimmy said. “That way I don’t have to go chasing the school board candidates down separately.”

  I shook my head silently to myself.

  Typical Jimmy. Rather than do his own legwork for the story, he was relying on me to set up the meetings for him.

  “I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” I said, looking squarely at him.

  “Why not?” he said, innocently.

  “I think you know why not,” I said, my blood practically boiling in my veins.

  He looked around for a second, as if to make sure nobody was listening to our conversation. Then he leaned farther over the cubicle wall.

  “C’mon, Red. Give me a break,” he said in a voice that was barely above a whisper. “When I got hired here, you knew we’d have to work together sometimes. And I’ve got a ton on my schedule right now as is. Having those shoot sessions set up would really save me a lot of time.”

  I glared at him.

  “You don’t even have to speak to me if you don’t want to, okay?” he continued. “Just cut me some slack on this, and I’ll talk to Kobritz about not assigning me to anymore of your stories in the future. All right?”

  I raised my eyebrows when he said that.

  I had thought about talking to Kobritz myself about it, but hadn’t wanted to cause any more problems with the ornery editor. Not to mention the fact that if I did that, then the gossiping tongue-waggers of the office would catch wind about the past I had with Jimmy, and I’d never hear the end of it. As of now, I’d somehow been able to keep it under wraps. Even though Scott Appleton had an inkling that something had happened between Jimmy and me, in a rare display of solidarity, he’d been good enough to keep his mouth shut about it.

  But if it came from Jimmy instead of me, then people might just chalk it up to nothing more than two co-workers not getting along.

  I leaned back farther in my chair.

  “You promise to talk to Kobritz about that?” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’ll just tell him that I’m too lazy of a photographer to keep up with a driven reporter like you.”

  He smiled broadly at his little joke, but I didn’t give him so much as a hint of a smile.

  “Fine,” I said coldly. “I’ll email you the interview times when I set them up.”

  “Thanks,” he said, nodding.

  I turned back to my computer and ignored him.

  It was the longest conversation we’d had since he first started working in the newsroom back in July.

  I felt his eyes linger on me for a second longer. Then he started walking away toward the photo department across the newsroom.

  I stood up, leaning over the cubicle dividing wall.

  “And Jimmy?” I said after him.

  He stopped in his tracks and turned his head.

  “I don’t want you
calling me that anymore.”

  “What?” he said, furrowing his brow. “You mean Red?”

  I nodded.

  He’d assigned me the nickname back when we were friends. And we were most definitely not friends anymore.

  He looked dumbfounded for a second, but then he shrugged like it was no skin off his teeth.

  I watched as he walked away down the hall.

  I didn’t know what was worse: having to see Jimmy Brewer every day. Or having to see him and know that he didn’t even have any idea about how badly he had hurt me.

  I let out a long sigh and sat back down. I took a sip of coffee, trying to steady my nerves.

  Maybe Sam was right.

  Maybe I should have been thinking about a career switch.

  Chapter 13

  Mindy Monahan could hide from me all she wanted to at home.

  But she couldn’t hide from me at work.

  I pulled into the crowded parking lot of Tabor Elementary School, finding a spot beneath a large golden-leafed oak to leave the Hyundai. Before getting out, I ran a hand through my hair, checking my looks in the rearview mirror. After tossing my limp hair up into a high ponytail, I finally got out of the car and walked across the parking lot.

  The skies were the color of birch bark, and looked swollen with rain. Any minute now I fully expected them to let loose in a typical display of Dog Mountain autumn weather.

  I entered the metal front doors of the school just as a dust-devil of dead leaves nipped at my heels. I wiped my shoes free of gravel on the doormat and headed for the main office.

  The receptionist – an elderly woman with deep wrinkles gouged across her face, greeted me with a warm smile. She clutched a chipped mug with the cheery words “Tabor Elementary School Thanks You!” scrawled on it.

  “How can I help you, deary?” she asked.

  “I’m here to see Mindy Monahan,” I said, picking up the pen by the sign-in sheet and scribbling my name down along with the time – protocol for any school visitor.

  “Is she expecting you?” she asked.

  “Uh… yes,” I lied.

  Though technically, it wasn’t really a lie. Mindy owed me after standing me and the school board up the night before.