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I left him in the back seat of my running truck with the heat going and a window cracked for fresh air. He looked happy enough, licking his balls clean and listening to pop country on the radio.
“Thanks for comin’, Frank.” Aubrey George, the owner of Your Local Bookie, greeted me when I walked into her Main Street shop, the jingle bell on the door tinkling behind me. She looked flustered but in one piece. The front door or window hadn’t been smashed in at least.
“You alright?” I passed her after I looked her over and went to check out the damaged back door in the stock room. It looked like the lock she had on it wasn’t a strong one, like someone could force it open with a good shove. The door had a three-inch by maybe twelve-inch window set into the left side, and the glass was cracked, a few pieces littering the floor around the door, and the metal around the lock had crumpled in a bit, like maybe it had been kicked or hit with something heavy.
“Yeah. I’m fine. I was late openin’ up this mornin’, and when I got here, I found this mess. There’s muddy shoe prints.” She pointed by her feet to a smudged imprint on the tile floor of what looked to possibly be an athletic shoe. Likely a man’s or a teenaged boy’s shoe judging by the large size.
She followed me back out to the main room. “Now,” she said, “before you suggest that it was my boys who caused this mess, I promise you, if they wanted to steal from me, they’d just take money from my purse. It wouldn’t be the first time, but I don’t think they’d damage the store, ’cause they know it’s what pays for their video game obsession. Plus, it’d totally ruin their street cred if any of their friends found out they were in a bookstore without bein’ forced.” She rolled her eyes. “And I would beat ’em within an inch of their lives.” She looked up at me sheepishly. “Just kiddin’. I don’t beat my kids.”
Walking around her, I looked behind the counter, but nothing seemed out of place. “Never said it was your boys.”
She bumped into my back when I stopped to get a good look. “Well, it was my first thought, so I wouldn’t blame you.” She took a few steps backward, putting a proper amount of distance between us. “It ain’t like those two haven’t been in their fair share of trouble. You yourself hauled ’em to a cell at the station for stealin’ from the Liquor Depot.”
“They were lucky nothin’ was damaged, and they only took one bottle of vodka on a dare.” The owner of the Liquor Depot hadn’t pressed charges, and Aubrey’s boys hadn’t had a chance to drink any of the vodka, at least not that time, so they got off scot-free, which, in my unoffered opinion, was part of her problem.
“Yeah, well, I love my boys, but I never said they had common sense.”
“What was stolen?” I asked, planting my hands on my hips as I surveyed the rest of the small bookshop. Besides the back door and the mess on the floor, everything looked fine to me. There was no damage to the main part of the store that I could see.
“You get straight to the point, don’tcha? Um,” she said, her eyes focused on my hands on my holster. Finally, she sighed and looked around too. “Twenty bucks in cash was taken from the till. I think maybe whoever it was knows how to work a cash register. There was a little over fifty bucks in there last night, but they only took twenty. Most people pay with cards or their phones nowadays, so I don’t keep too much cash around. I close the register every night before I leave, but I found it open when I got here this mornin’. Whatcha think that’s about?”
“Hm.” It told me she wasn’t being careful enough with her money, and that either the thief was really bad at their job, or it was someone who needed money but felt bad about taking it. So maybe not someone who needed it for drugs. Usually, the desire for a fix overrode the guilt. I knew that from experience. But who the hell committed burglary for twenty bucks?
“Are you always this talkative?” Mrs. George asked and laughed, her eyes finally landing on mine instead of every other inch of my body.
But it wasn’t my job to make baseless assumptions. I needed more information. Besides, what was the point of saying words just to say them? What good did that do anybody? Seemed to me it was a waste of perfectly good mountain air. I didn’t answer her. “What else was taken?”
“Nothin’, not as far as I can tell.”
“No other damage besides the back door?”
“Nope. Nada.” She walked the length of the store, checking shelves, looking up and down, aisle by aisle, but she stopped in the middle next to a tall, round table. “Wait. There was a display right here. I know exactly what books are missin’ ’cause I just made it last night before I closed.”
“Are the missin’ books significant somehow?” I asked, noticing under the store’s bright lights how the shoeprints led from the table to the cash register and out the back door.
“No. I mean, altogether, they probably only cost thirty bucks retail. They were trade paperbacks, not first-edition hardcovers, but they were all classics. The Catcher in the Rye, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Of Mice and Men, Oliver Twist, and this one here, The Great Gatsby.” She held up a blue book with weird-looking eyes on the front. “Guess the thief isn’t a fan of F. Scott Fitzgerald.”
The small paperback copy of The Great Gatsby dangling from her fingers was one I recognized. I couldn’t disagree with whoever had stolen the other books. If I remembered it right from high school, the book was depressing as shit, and who wants to read about a bunch of rich people wasting their money?
I logged the stolen books in my pocket notebook. “You got cameras?” Not many store owners did in Wisper. We didn’t usually have any upticks in petty crimes around these parts. Not anything too serious anyway, especially not downtown since the sheriff’s station sat smack-dab in the middle of it.
Aubrey grimaced. “Um, I do have cameras, actually, but I need help settin’ ’em up, and we’ve already discussed how my boys aren’t the most helpful.” Her husband dying on duty overseas several years ago left her alone with twin boys who hadn’t become better behaved after their dad died. Huh. It was occurring to me that maybe it was why I was so hard on her boys whenever they found themselves in trouble with the law—which was often. They’d gone in the misbehaving dead-soldier-father direction, and I’d gone in the other.
“Might be difficult to find your thief without ’em, but I’ll do my best.”
“Frank, really, there’s not much missin’. I only called you in case this is related to any other crimes or the person could be dangerous, though I’m thinkin’ it was just somebody who needed money for food or somethin’. I probably won’t even file a claim with my insurance. The deductible will probably cost more than the damage itself.” She shrugged. “Why bother?”
“That’s up to you,” I said. “You got somebody you can call to fix your back door and install them cameras?”
“Yeah. You know my cousin, Max, right? He’ll help me.”
I made a note to text him myself to make sure it was done. “Okay. Anything else while I’m here?”
“No. That’s it, I guess.” Was I wrong, or did she look disappointed there weren’t any other crimes for her to report?
“Alright then.” I tipped my hat and headed toward the front door, but on the way, I noticed two local women in front of the shop, looking in the big front window at a Valentine’s Day display of what I guessed were probably romance books. They were red and pink enough. “Mrs. George, you notice anybody out front last night or maybe the last few days? Any suspicious customers you remember? Anybody hangin’ around out back when you parked?”
