Chapter 14
Fourteen
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—Gentry’s secret thoughts
Gentry
I was still thinking about Sage’s reaction to that nurse when I pulled up behind a speeder a couple of days later.
Whatever progress we’d made after that day had been erased.
She was there, but she wasn’t there.
Any time I saw her at my place over the next forty-eight hours, she’d go out of her way not to get anywhere near me.
And when I went out to the yard to see if I could get Neo to come walk or run with me, she’d make an excuse and leave.
The driver that I thought would be pulling over in the nearest parking lot kept driving, and I wondered if I was in the world’s slowest police pursuit.
Eventually they pulled over in front of the Sonic, and I understood.
They’d parked in a stall and ordered, using their time wisely to order while they were being given a speeding ticket.
Earlier, I’d been intending to just let them know they were speeding, and not to camp out in the left lane. Then let them off with a warning.
But nothing aggravated me more than to have my chain jerked.
I wasn’t police material.
I’d been in the military for years, becoming the ultimate fighting force that the US Army had to offer, but I still couldn’t stand the general population.
I especially didn’t like when they wasted my time and didn’t respect me.
I parked behind the car then called the plate number in.
The dispatcher, an elderly woman in her mid-to late sixties, confirmed the plate numbers and went silent.
As I waited for her to get back to me, I studied the outside of the vehicle.
It was a black Toyota Tacoma with so much dirt on it that it was nearly obscuring a couple of numbers on the license plate.
As I studied the car, the window of the driver’s side rolled down, and the driver put the credit card into the machine to pay.
I studied the driver with a critical eye.
I expected a man to be driving, but the arm that reached out belonged to a woman.
A very small, very tattooed, very dry-skinned looking woman.
The skin was so tanned that it looked like the woman went to a tanning bed every single day for hours on end.
I’d bet my left nut that the woman was a pack-a-day smoker.
Just as that thought occurred to me, the woman flicked a cigarette butt out of the window toward a Sonic carhop that was heading to another car.
She had to sidestep to avoid getting hit.
I gritted my teeth and added yet another citation to the growing list that was already taking place in my head.
“No outstanding warrants,” the dispatcher said. “Though there are several notes in here about the woman.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “Argumentative with the police?”
“You got it,” she said. “Want backup?”
Did I?
I didn’t think I needed it, but sometimes it was better safe than sorry.
“Who’s close?”
“Black’s down the street eating lunch,” she said. “Mance is just down the road, too. Faith and Colliery are on a call.”
I grimaced.
I wasn’t interrupting Black’s lunch if I didn’t have to. And I couldn’t stand Mance.
“I’ll be okay,” I said. “Thanks, darlin’.”
I didn’t actually know the dispatcher’s name.
It was some grandma name that she’d told me a hundred thousand times, and I felt bad that I couldn’t remember it. So I always called her “darlin’.” We both knew that I didn’t know and pretended like I did.
I was really bad at names, and it took an act of God to get me to remember one.
“Be careful, Gentry,” she ordered in her grandmotherly voice.
I got out, my ticket book already in my hand.
We usually went digital with our tickets, but of course, today was not our day.
The system had gone down around noon and had stayed down for the last two hours.
So we were back to paper tickets and filling out notes by hand until the system was back up.
Even worse, with the system being down, we were also kind of flying blind on the warrants thing.
To the best of the dispatcher’s knowledge, there wasn’t a warrant. But that system was outdated and clunky. It wasn’t always the most reliable, and the offline version was like reading half of what was actually in each person’s file.
“Do you know why I pulled you over?” I asked as I walked up to the open car door window.
The woman who’d started a new cigarette the moment she threw the old one out blew out a puff of smoke in my direction before answering, “Isn’t that your job, Officer? To know why I was pulled over?”
The woman was in her fifties. She was short, scrawny, and I was right. She looked like she lived in the sun.
The carhop came back with a bag of food for the bitch in the truck and I pointed at a table behind her. “Just sit it there until we’re done with this traffic stop. Thank you.”
The woman didn’t argue, setting it on the table just beyond the woman in the car’s reach.
The chain smoker narrowed her eyes at me. “That’s my food.”
“Sure is,” I said. “And you should’ve waited to order it. In the meantime, I need your license and registration.”
She rolled her eyes and handed them both to me.
The license was almost orangey yellow, likely from the amount of smoke that was caked onto it.
I eyed the license.
Expired.
The registration was out, too.
“Both of these are expired,” I told her.
She smiled. “They’re not. I just never got the new tags and license.”
My ass.
“You were going fifty in a thirty-five,” I said. “I’m writing you a ticket today for that, as well as the expired tags, the expired license, and the littering.”
“What littering?” she asked in outrage.
I pointed at the cigarette butt.
“You can pick that up when you go get your food,” I said as I headed back to my car with her license.
I called the information in to the dispatcher, who didn’t have much to add seeing as she’d already given me everything she could scrounge up about the car owner.
I finished writing all the tickets, then went to hand them back to her.
I saw she’d gotten up to get her food, but not the cigarette butt.
“You forgot to get your trash,” I said as I handed the tickets to her. “Sign them and hand over the back copies.”
The woman rolled her eyes, signed them, then went back to eating her hamburger.
“I’m not moving until you get that picked up,” I said. “I’m hungry, too.”
She snorted. “Maybe they’ll poison your burger.”
I walked to the window and ordered a drink and some chili-cheese fries.
The woman watched me order. Watched me get my food. Then watched me eat it.
All the while I could tell she was getting angrier and angrier that I wasn’t moving my cruiser.
As I threw my trash away, I fully expected to go to my cruiser and sit, but she threw the door open and bounced the door off the speaker.
She marched to the cigarette butt with scaly looking legs then marched back to her truck and tossed the cigarette butt down into her floorboard with what looked to be a thousand other cigarette butts.
Gross.
She threw her hands up and pointed at me.
I grinned and walked back to my car.
Sometimes, being a police officer was so much fun…
The last thing that I wanted to deal with when I got into the office was Kelly, but life didn’t like me.
She smiled and waved when I was forced to walk through the front door and acted like we hadn’t just seen each other only a couple of hours ago.
When I’d left, there were FBI guys with Black taking up the back conference room. In doing so, they’d ordered us to use the front door, which meant I had to fucking see Kelly.
I didn’t want to see Kelly at all, let alone several times that day.
It was fucking sucky that she kept talking to me, too.
I tried to ignore her as I passed but ended up not being successful because what she said caught me off guard.
“That woman that you’re married to…”
I paused with my arm on the door handle to the sheriff’s office. “Yeah?”
“Is it serious?”
I nearly snorted.
She thought we were married, and she was asking if it was serious?
Seriously?
“As serious as marriage can get,” I said as I yanked the door open and walked inside.
“But y’all don’t go out together.” She got up and followed me inside. “You’re never together, actually. I’ve seen her go everywhere by herself, even when you’re off. You’re even part of the SAR team together, and you don’t go together.”
It highly irritated me that she paid that close attention to me that she knew who I came and went with. It also irritated me that she knew Sage’s whereabouts.
We may not be what we appeared to be, but that protective instinct to make sure that nothing and no one ever touched her burned hot and deep.
I stopped and turned, leveling my gaze on Kelly.
“I’m not sure what exactly you’re hoping to accomplish by spouting out my and my wife’s every move,” I said stiffly. “But I’d really appreciate it if you kept your nose out of our business. I don’t need nor want you there.”
Kelly’s face flashed with anger, but instead of heading her off and stoking that anger any deeper, I headed inside.
I passed the conference room full of FBI agents and paused in the doorway to listen.
The FBI agents, support staff, and anyone else that needed to be there had come in droves.
After comparing his missing children with other departments, we’d found that there were about nineteen spread out over sixteen counties that were missing as well. All in the same age range, the same MO, the same everything.
Just minutes after making that connection, all of our systems had gone down.
But the FBI had shown anyway.
They’d also informed us that our system had been hacked, and that we needed to be very careful about what we shared and how we shared it now.
Because there was a serial kidnapper—we didn’t know about the killer part yet—that was highly intelligent, knew the area well, and had insider knowledge of all of our departments.
We’d called Apollo the moment that we’d known that there were some holes we needed patched, and he’d been working on it since this morning.
I made eye contact with Black who nodded his head at me, his face grim. “Gentlemen, let’s take a break.”