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“Caramel mocha double espresso ready.” A boy with boredom-glazed eyes handed over her drink.
“Thank you.” The coffee's warmth seeped into her palm. Heaven. The chocolate scent jolted her system into working order. Everything would be better now.
She blew away the steam and screwed on the lid, then slung her gym bag over her shoulder. As she swerved through the maze of tiny tables crowding the floor between the counter and the door, her cell vibrated against her butt. Shrugging her stuffed gym bag higher up on her shoulder, she grabbed her phone out of her back pocket.
“Hello?”
“Um…Ms. Martin…”
Beth sighed and pushed open the heavy glass door with her hip. “Martinez.” The cold wind blasted her, sending a chill down her spine.
“Yeah, Ms. Martinez. I'm Deputy Schnell with the Council County Sheriff's Office. Can you meet me at your grandparents' home? Seems it's been broken into.”
Fifteen minutes and twenty miles later, Beth stalked out of the tiny living room in her dead grandparents' vacant home. Technically it was her house now, but she couldn’t think of it that way.
She traced the curse words spray painted in red on the foyer walls. Most were in English, but centered on the oak front door in large, block capital letters and underlined with a bold swoosh was the word puta.
Nice try, but she’d been called a lot worse. Whoever had done this had crossed a line they shouldn't have.
Looked like the nasty calls and threatening texts had been only the beginning. The assholes had upped the ante. Her tormentor had promised she’d regret her decision not to sell. He’d sorely misjudged her reaction to this because it wasn’t regret making her blood boil.
Something crunched under her favorite cherry-red cowboy boots as she marched across the hall. She stepped sideways and glanced down at the remains of a broken window pane under her sole before taking stock of the damage in the dining room. Where once photos of her grandfather's retirement party, her parents’ wedding pictures and her own Quinceañera portrait had hung, fist-sized holes dotted the pale-yellow walls like Swiss cheese. Stomach clenching, her hand reflexively went to her abdomen as if she and not the wall had been punched.
“Uh, Ms. Martin.”
She took a steadying sip of coffee, then said, “Martinez.”
“No ma'am, my name is Schnell.”
She spun around and eyeballed the rail-thin deputy standing in the living room. Is this what law enforcement had come to in rural Western Nebraska? My God, they hadn't just scraped the bottom of the barrel with this guy. No. They'd broken through it, dug around in the muck underneath, pulled up this fine specimen and slapped a uniform on him.
“My name is Martinez,” she rolled the R and emphasized the Z.
His pale-green eyes bulged and his Adam's apple bobbed convulsively. “Apologies, ma'am, but this was just kids who did this. Sheriff Wilcox said he was sure of it as soon as I told him about the damage.” He nodded as if that settled everything.
He continued to chatter, but she listened with half an ear and walked back into the living room. Broken beer bottles and fast-food wrappers littered the thick carpet. If her beloved abuelita had lived long enough to see her pin-neat living room with its daisy wallpaper turned into a trash dump, she would have rained down misery on the litterbug.
Schnell shifted his slight weight from side to side and clutched his hat. “Drunk people…uh…kids…uh…teenagers,” he mumbled. His gaze turned toward the large yellow stain on the living room carpet that reeked of ammonia. “It's the only, uh, explanation.”
Bullshit.
Beth took another fortifying gulp of coffee. Its heat flowed over her tongue and down her throat, distracting her from her initial impulse to rip the deputy a new one. Not the best plan of action. She was an estate attorney, for God's sake; you couldn’t get any more staid than that. She needed to calm down and think logically. Unable to hazard a guess about whether the freckle-faced deputy, who looked all of twelve, was dim or corrupt, she counted to twenty.
“And what about the threatening phone calls telling me my life would go to hell if I didn't sell? Were those from bored kids too, Deputy Schnell?”
His eyes went wide, but he didn't utter a word. Pulling at his loose shirt collar, he gulped hard, as if he'd swallowed one of the slimy frogs from the pond out back.
Heavy footsteps thunked up the front steps, followed by a quick rapping on the open door.
“Heard there was some trouble in the neighborhood and I figured I'd poke my head in to see if I could help.” Council County Sheriff Roger Wilcox stood in the doorway, his soft belly protruding over the belt of his uniform pants. A smile curled his lips, barely visible under his gray handlebar mustache.
Just perfect.
For the past two months he'd disregarded her complaints about her neighbors feeling forced to sell and the escalating threats against her. Sure, he'd promised to look into it, but never took any action. Low priority, he’d claimed. So she’d stewed and tried to dig up any information she could find on the mystery buyer. She’d been tempted to tell Hank, see if he would talk to Wilcox sheriff to sheriff, but her grandparents’ house was outside of Hank’s Dry Creek County jurisdiction and the last thing she wanted to do was drag him into a turf battle with a neighboring sheriff.
Sweeping her hands across the air to en
compass the vandalism, she nodded at the sheriff. “Yep. Seems like someone is trying to send me a message.”
