Chapter 2
“Because she took my ice cream!” I was trying to explain, but Deputy Bobby simply wasn’t understanding. In my frustration, my volume continued to rise. “She stole it!”
“I know,” Deputy Bobby said. “I saw. In fact, I pointed it out. But believe it or not, ice cream theft isn’t a shoot-to-kill offense.”
“Then arrest her!”
A lady in an enormous SUV laid on her horn.
Deputy Bobby turned to give her one of his trademark looks, and the horn cut off abruptly.
When he turned back to me, some of that saintly patience must have been beginning to wear off because he said, “In the first place, I can’t arrest her because I can’t leave my post. In the second place, why would I arrest her, Dash? ”
“Because she’s a thief!”
“You saw her—she’s old. She got confused. She took the wrong cone.”
“That’s ageist.”
Deputy Bobby sighed.
“And,” I continued, “they called my name, and she waited until Chaleena wasn’t looking, and then she took it.”
“Did you hear the part where I said she got confused?”
“She didn’t get confused. This was—this was planned.” And then genius struck. “This was a heist!”
“It was not a heist,” Deputy Bobby said.
“It was. This was sneakery. This was chicanery. This was strategery.”
He mouthed strategery. Aloud, he said, “Chaleena will make you another cone if you explain what happened.”
“How are you not seeing what’s going on here?”
“What’s going on here?”
“There’s a criminal mastermind operating in Hastings Rock!”
This time, his sigh was even deeper. “How about I buy us some ice cream on my break?”
“Oh no. You didn’t want any ice cream. You’re trying to buy me off. You’re trying to silence me.”
“How much of this is for real, and how much of it is you trying to get a rise out of me?”
“Sixty-forty.”
He was silent—and, I guessed, counting to ten in his head. Then he said, “Goodbye, Dash.”
I turned to stalk away, but my dramatic gesture was ruined by the fact that Deputy Bobby had to grab my arm to keep me from being flattened by a gang of hoodlums in a Toyota Highlander.
When I reached the sidewalk (safely, thanks to Deputy Bobby), I gave a considering look in the direction of the thief.
I could still see her white-haired head bobbing away from me, but in a few moments, she’d be lost in the crowd of visitors.
Part of me knew that Deputy Bobby was probably right—she’d taken my cone by accident, and yes, I’d allowed my initial outrage and disappointment and emotions to get the better of me (I mean, cut me some slack—we’re talking about the world’s best ice cream).
But another part of me—the part of me that studied people, that observed behavior, that was trying to make a career out of understanding how and why people broke the law, even if it was only in fiction—remembered what I’d seen.
Chaleena ducking her head back inside the truck.
The woman stepping forward. The way she had reached for the cone.
Confident; that was the best word for it.
Or maybe there was one that was even better: brazen.
I knew what I’d seen, and it hadn’t been confusion, and it hadn’t been a mistake.
I started down the sidewalk after her. After a few paces, I had to twist to fit between clusters of tourists who had stopped to look into shop windows, and I was forced to loop out into the street where chokepoints closed off the path completely.
The woman ahead of me wasn’t having any better luck, so I was able to keep her in sight as I tried to catch up.
Then a clear stretch opened in front of me, and I broke into a jog.
“Excuse me,” I called. “Ma’am! Excuse me!”
Heads turned. A woman who was sitting for a caricature gaped at me, and the caricaturist added that expression to the drawing.
(Not, I suspected, an artistic choice she’d be happy about.) A man in a shirt that said CALL ME GRAMPS held up his hand like he had a question—or, maybe, was checking to see if he was, perhaps, the ma’am in question.
But the white-haired woman who had stolen my ice cream cone didn’t look around.
If anything, she ducked her head and went faster.
Something like a thrill went through me. That wasn’t the behavior of an honest citizen. That certainly wasn’t the behavior of a confused old woman. The word heist came back to me.
(Also, I deeply regretted saying strategery in front of Deputy Bobby.)
When the woman reached the next store—a gift shop owned by an out-of-town company, notorious among locals for hawking cheap, generic junk—she darted inside.
I went after her.
Inside, the whir of a fan competed with the voices of shoppers.
A woman held up an oversized T-shirt (the graphic showed a hand throwing the peace sign), measuring it against her teenage—and clearly grumpy—son.
A heavyset man in a Roll Tide hat was smelling factory-produced “artisan” soaps, making a face after each one before gamely moving on to try the next. And—
There. The white-haired lady was ducking behind a wall of display cubes holding, yes, even more T-shirts.
I darted and glided between tourists, circled around the T-shirt display, and caught a glimpse of my quarry slipping out the back door. She didn’t move like an old lady, that was for sure. I sprinted after her.
As I neared the doorway, the tail-end of a conversation reached me: “—don’t know; he must have seen me—”
I stepped out of the shop and saw the woman I’d been following. She had turned, as though waiting for me. And, I noticed, she’d gotten rid of my ice cream cone. I had a single moment to experience a burst of outrage.
Then something struck me at the ankles, and I tripped.
I pitched forward, lost my footing on the narrow steps, and crashed down onto the worn pavement of the alley.
The landing drove the breath from my lungs, and as my brain tried to reboot, I gasped for air.
I was vaguely aware of someone poking and prodding at me.
I caught a whiff of a smell I couldn’t quite place—like vinyl or plastic. Somehow, I flopped onto my back.
Staring up, I recognized the woman I’d been following.
Next to her was another woman—white, middle aged, and holding a cane (which I realized, with a kind of brain lag, she had used to trip me on the stairs).
In her other hand, she was carrying an enormous beach bag stuffed full of clothes that still had the security tags on them.
She was wearing what I could honestly call the most hideous hat I’d ever seen.
It was knit. It was befeathered. It was drooping and shapeless and multicolored, and whoever had made it had worked shiny, metallic strands in with the yarn.
It looked, I thought, like what Tinkerbell’s puke might look like.
And I realized I might have a concussion.
“He followed you,” the second woman said.
“It’s not my fault!” the first woman said. “How was I supposed to know?”
The second woman made a disgusted noise. “Way to go, Joan. You ruined everything.” She stared at me a moment longer. Then she spat and said, “Let’s find Phyllis and get out of here.”