4. Are you ready to surrender? #4
“You’re not just good at budgeting, Bailey.
If someone told me you were a goddess of budgeting, I would believe them.
I’ve seen what you’ve done with our household budget.
And not only do you handle the budget to save us money, you do not shirk on the quality.
That is very important—we can’t afford to shirk in terms of quality and services, so the budget is a very careful dance. ”
“The budget doesn’t have enough in it for coffee,” I warned him.
“That’s easily solved. We will put a tip jar on the eighth floor and make a note that all tips go to buying coffee and low-grade pixie dust for the station.
You’re going to keep your pixie-dust license, and we’ll make a system to help make sure the cops are level-headed during stressful shifts.
I already encourage them to get a low-grade dose on the way to work.
Our job can get pretty damned stressful, and the dust dulls the edge. ”
“You’ve done work performance tests, haven’t you?” I accused, as my husband would do just that to make certain his cops were in the best health possible.
“Absolutely. Getting rid of ticket quotas helped almost as much as encouraging pixie dust.”
“What is the deal with ticket quotas anyway?”
“Revenue. I had ticket quotas removed from all Manhattan precincts, and general performance of the cops increased fairly significantly; they were able to worry about more important calls and catching dangerous drivers. Once upon a time, we were also responsible for issuing parking tickets, but we lobbed that over to the city level. Last I checked, they had community service workers handle issuing standard parking tickets and checking meters.”
“Efficient.”
“It saved us a fortune.” Quinn admitted. “Unfortunately, how we saved ourselves a fortune is going to make our search even more difficult. While the police will help augment animal control as needed, we don’t keep much in the way of records unless it’s a notable instance.”
“Like the Chief of Police’s wife being caught with her ass sticking out of a dumpster while being slobbered on by yet another rabid puppy?”
“Precisely. Don’t forget about the one with distemper.”
I sighed, as that poor dog had been too far gone to save, but I’d stayed with him the entire time before being carted off to be treated for rabies, distemper, and any other disease a dog might pick up on the streets. “They had to put that one down.”
“I know.”
“I guess I can’t turn into a unicorn and burn any assholes behind the rabies outbreak, can I?”
“However much I would enjoy helping you do just that, we can’t. It’s tempting, but we’re the good guys because we don’t do that unless required.”
“That ex-cadet deserved to be squished like a grape. He was going to hurt you.”
“That is an excellent example of when it’s acceptable to ram all six or seven hundred pounds of your unicorn self into somebody. However, next time, please try to avoid being poisoned with ambrosia.”
“I didn’t do that on purpose.”
“I can handle being poisoned with ambrosia almost as well as you can, so try to remember that next time.”
I wrinkled my nose and went to work properly labeling my spreadsheet, creating a pivot table, and getting statistics on rabies infections by year and state.
Vermont came in at the top with six thousand rabies cases, and with a frown, I filtered by year, discovering a surge in rabies cases in the state six years ago.
When I filtered by species, I discovered most of the victims of the virus were raccoons with wolves nipping hot on their heels.
“Hey, Quinn. How many wolves live in Vermont?”
While Quinn worked on a search to find out, I adjusted my filters to include the month, discovering a pack of a hundred and fifty wolves had been found to be rabid in a single month in the state.
“According to the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department, the state can likely sustain no more than a hundred wolves spread across several packs. That’s a rough estimation. According to this, there are currently two packs in the state. One has twelve known members, and the other has eight.”
“Six years ago, in March, they found a hundred and fifty rabid wolves. The same month had a thousand rabid raccoons.”
“Where the hell did Vermont get a thousand rabid raccoons?”
“How the hell did they catch a thousand rabid raccoons?” I added the locations, and sure enough, there were clusters of rabid animals.
I pulled up a map of Vermont and plugged in the name of the town closest to the largest cluster.
“Long Lake’s rural area has a population of around seven hundred, but there’s almost ten thousand people if you combine all of the surrounding towns, villages, and hamlets.
” I filtered to add a column to get a number of how many citizen-killed animals had been reported to the CDC.
“Apparently, Long Lake residents take rabies seriously; they killed eight hundred rabid raccoons and asked animal control to deal with the wolves, all hundred and fifty of them that had moved in. Maybe hunting the eight hundred rabid raccoons? How many wolves can eight hundred raccoons feed?”
“Considering how much Sunny can scarf down for breakfast, I’m going to say not as many as you would think.”
“Don’t say such terrible things about my puppy. Sunny is the best puppy. So is Blizzard. We have the best puppies.”
“And I’m going to guess our new wolf will also be your best puppy when she’s ready to come home with us.”
I grinned at my husband. “Absolutely. She can become a little pack with Sunny and Blizzard. Blizzard is a wolf trapped in a husky body.”
“I have no idea where we’re going to find a house big enough at a decent distance from work to have an entire animal sanctuary, but it looks like I’m going to have to figure that out. Is it only raccoons and wolves on your list?”
I checked, and once I determined some people had been infected, I checked their treatment status, relieved to discover everyone had been successfully cured. “A few humans, but they were treated. No deaths.”
“Gorgons?”
“Not in Long Lake.” I restored the sheet settings, filtered by species, and selected gorgon. My eyes widened.