Home > Troublemaker(13)

Troublemaker(13)
Author: Linda Howard

“All right!” she said to the dog. “Hold your horses.” She checked the display and told Daina, “You’re good.” Another head butt knocked her leg sideways. “Okay, okay, I’m coming. You must really need to pee.”

Daina left and Bo locked the door behind her, then took Tricks out the back way. Tricks immediately dropped her ball at Bo’s feet and took off running. Taking the hint, Bo threw the ball as hard as she could—which, after two years of training, was a decent distance. Thanks to having a dog who loved chasing a ball, she had nice throwing muscles. Tricks caught the ball on the first bounce and immediately paused, posing with her head lifted in a beauty-queen tilt, waiting for the praise she expected when she made a good catch. “Perfect! That’s a beautiful catch!” Bo called. With a wag of her tail, Tricks abandoned the pose and trotted back, joy in every line of her body. Despite Trick’s insistence that she needed to pee, Bo had to throw the ball three more times before the dog finally squatted and did her business.

Bo dug her keys out of her pocket and unlocked her seven-year-old red Jeep Wrangler. Tricks bounded up into the passenger seat and happily waited until Bo had buckled her special doggie-harness seat belt.

As she was leaving the parking lot, her second-in-command and the true heart and soul of the police department, Jesse Tucker, pulled in and stopped his squad car beside Bo’s Jeep. Both of them lowered their windows so they could talk.

She hung an elbow out the window and squinted against the afternoon sun, which was shining directly into her eyes. “I’m finished with the paperwork,” she said. “Unless something has come up, I’m going home to do some work there.” She was a freelance technical writer, and that was where the bulk of her income came from.

“Everything’s as quiet as it ever is,” he replied. “Weather report said it’s going to turn cold again tonight, maybe some snow.”

“I’m keeping my fingers crossed we dodge this one.”

Spring wasn’t in a hurry, that was for certain. Starting in February they’d had the occasional bright, warm(ish) day like today, giving everyone hope that they’d seen the end of snow for this year, but despite the calendar saying it was spring, they hadn’t turned that corner yet. Snow wasn’t unheard of in April, and her day would be the same regardless of what the weather did; that didn’t stop her from feeling disgruntled.

“I’ll check in before I head home,” he said, which he always did anyway. He pulled the squad car into a parking slot, and Bo pulled out onto Hamrickville’s main street, which was named Broad instead of Main. Several people waved at her as she passed: Harold Patterson in the Broad Street Barbershop, Doris Brown as she entered the bakery she owned and operated, as well as Mayor Buddy Owenby, who was walking well now after having broken his ankle this past December while deer hunting. The mayor kept curtailed hours, too; his was a part-time job like hers, and he owned the small grocery store that served the town. Bo was fond of Mayor Buddy; he’d served four terms and was in large part responsible for keeping the little town as viable as it was. It had been his idea to turn over running the town as much as possible to the younger generation, thereby keeping them involved and, most of all, there. Hamrickville hadn’t seen a large drain of its younger citizens toward greener pastures.

As many people as waved to her, twice that many waved to Tricks. She knew who they were waving to because they yelled, “Tricks!” as the Jeep rolled by. It seemed as if everyone in town knew her pet. For her part, Tricks sat in the passenger seat with her tongue lolling out and a big, happy golden-retriever smile on her face. For all her diva ways, Tricks had the typical retriever nature, sunny, without a lick of dignity, and always ready to play.

Several miles out of town, Bo took a secondary road and drove a couple more miles before she reached her driveway. Her mailbox was on the opposite side of the road so she drove past the driveway, checked for any traffic either behind her or in front of her before swerving onto the right shoulder to give herself a wider turning axis, then left across both lanes of the road to pull onto the opposite shoulder just short of the mailbox. She’d performed that maneuver so often there was a crescent-shaped track worn out in the shoulder on both sides of the road.

The mailbox was set far enough off the pavement and the shoulder was wide enough that other vehicles had plenty of room to get past. And if anyone didn’t like it—well, tough shit; she was the chief of police, and even though she lived in the county instead of inside town limits, no one in the sheriff’s department was going to hassle her over something as mundane as how she collected her mail. She didn’t get a whole lot of perks with the job, but she’d gladly use the ones she did.

She put the transmission in park and got out, tugging hard on the door of the battered mailbox because it was slightly warped from being attacked by a couple of teenagers with a baseball bat. She pulled out the usual assortment of sales papers, flyers, a bill or two, and one thick oversized envelope that didn’t have a return address. Huh. Bo eyed the envelope, examining the postage—just the right amount, a post-office sticker rather than extra stamps—and the location and date. It had been mailed three days before from New York City.

Double huh. She didn’t know anyone in New York City—or state, for that matter.

Common sense told her a mail bomb would come in a box, not an envelope, even if she had any reason to be wary of a mail bomb, which she didn’t. Hamrickville wasn’t exactly a hotbed of crime, or of anything else.

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