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REMI
Sheriff Shane doesn’t arrive at our house until almost four hours later, showered, shaved, and smelling of fresh coffee and bacon, so I guess he doesn’t give a shit about trespassing, either.
“You again,” he says as soon as I open the door.
I was holding out a faint hope that it might be a different sheriff who pulled me over for speeding, but nope, same asshole.
He pokes around the house without touching anything or climbing any stairs. Then he hitches up his belt, chuckling a little as he says, “You think somebody tried to break inhere?”.
It does sound a bit like accusing someone of breaking into the DMV to wait in line.
By the light of day, Blackleaf does not look better. In fact, it looks a hell of a lot worse because I didn’t clean up the water or the broken dishes, having much overestimated our sheriff’s evidence-gathering capabilities. If I thought he was going to bust out the fingerprint dusting kit, I was sorely mistaken—he doesn’t even bag and tag the bone.
In the first awful moment, I thought it might be an ulna or a tibia.
“Nope,” the sheriff says, tossing it in the trash. “Golden retriever.”
That doesn’t make me feel a whole lot better.
“Don’t you want to take it anyway?”
“What for? DNA test it and see if he’s got a brother?” The sheriff roars at his own joke.
I’m not smiling.
“Aren’t you concerned that somebody killed a dog?”
“Killin’ a dog ain’t illegal—unless you do it in a cruel and torturous way,” the sheriff says with cold carelessness.
“Kinda seems like they did.”
“No way to know from one bone.”
“Oh. I thought they invented this thing called forensic science.”
Now the sheriff isn’t smiling, either.
“That sounds a lot like you tellin’ me how to do my job, little lady—when you got a whole lotta work here to do all by yourself. And I’m not sure you’ve got the proper permits…so maybe keep your focus on your own list of chores…” his eyes flick up to my hair and down to my lip ring, “…and try not to draw so much attention.”
He holds his belt, elbows flared like a gunslinger. I face him across the flooded kitchen, hands stuffed in the pockets of my jeans, feeling about the same.
“What about all this?” I demand, jerking my chin at the pile of smashed glass and crockery.
“Maybe the wind blew it over.” The sheriff’s mouth is a thin, hard line.
I’d like to walk outside and take a baseball bat to his cruiser.
“Wow. Thank god I called you.”
“Well, that’s the kind of service you can expect here in Grimstone, little lady.” He’s steely-eyed as he bites off each word. “So anytime you get yourself in trouble, you just give me a call, and I’ll be right over to give you the benefit of our state-of-the-art forensic science.”
“Four hours later.”
“That’s right. Just as fast as I can.”
Now that the sheriff and I have established that we wouldn’t piss on each other in a firestorm, he’s ready to be on his way.
“You got permission to use this road?” he calls out as he climbs back in his cruiser. “It belongs to Dr. Covett.”
