10. Hook and book
TEN
Hook and book
TO ARREST SOMEONE
The next morning, Trent’s perma-smile faltered when he eased his cruiser into the chaos at Water Street and Townsend Boulevard. Someone had roused the rabble, and the citizens of Townsend Harbor had split like a bad romance over the city’s proposal to replace the one working stoplight downtown with a roundabout. In lieu of torches and pitchforks, the local mob brandished signs that wobbled in the air like a flock of confused pigeons, each scrawled with bold proclamations either damning or praising the traffic circle that had yet to exist.
Intersections give me erections! one sign declared, while another retorted, Don’t be square—put a circle there!
He let out a chuckle, shaking his head at the small-town fervor. The scene was a living, breathing embodiment of “quirky”—the kind of thing you’d expect to see in a feel-good flick where the biggest scandal involved Grandma’s famous pie recipes.
A late-winter mist had given way to a vibrant blue canvas with fluffy clouds scattered about like cotton balls. The sunshine was golden and warm against the cool, crisp air. The charming Victorian buildings lined the streets, their colorful fa?ades and ornate details a perfect backdrop to the adorable drama.
Damn, this was better than a No Point Shakespeare Company’s production of A Comedy of Errors .
With a heavy sigh, Trent leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes for the space of a centering breath, realizing some of the ever-present tension in his shoulders was absent. Damn, but last night had been something else. His lips curled at the memory of Maggie’s soft moans, the taste of her skin, the way she’d clung to him like ivy. He’d had to use every bit of his willpower to peel himself from bed and show up for his shift.
Days like this, he almost looked forward to. Nothing this hilarious ever happened in Albuquerque.
For a small town, they sure did have strong opinions about changes in infrastructure. The retirees who showed up to these kinds of protests had little else to do on a Sunday morning.
Trent parked amid the chaos and climbed out of his cruiser, scanning the crowd for any signs of violence. Thankfully, other than a few heated arguments and insults being hurled, nothing seemed out of control.
His ears were bombarded with the cacophony of discord as he wedged his way through the throngs of agitated townsfolk. Other officers had parked in the bank parking lot down the way to keep a distant eye on what had been a peaceful protest until Myrtle Le Grande showed up with a one-ton truck full of her stock in trade.
On this, day two of the protest, the seventy-something local queer icon and manure maven had backed her truck up to the side of the anti-traffic-circle warriors and jettisoned a large pile of excrement onto the walkway. As the deputy in charge on shift, it was his responsibility to de-escalate the situation.
Myrtle leaned on a big shovel next to a knee-high—well, thigh high for her—pile of dung that smelled so ripe his eyes began to water.
“Well, if it isn’t Deputy Delish in the flesh,” she greeted him with a knowing smile.
“Keep it in your pants, Myrtle,” Trent quipped before turning to address several red-faced elderly with their bloomers in a bunch.
At their helm was the mighty Miss Janet, one of the local Christian soldiers who always seemed to be in charge of these debacles.
“We told her to keep her BS out of here, and look what she did!” Janet screeched.
“Hey, screw you, Janet, this is not your basic bitch bullshit. It’s mostly llama dung, compost, and some horse urine to balance the pH!”
Trent put a staying hand on Myrtle’s painfully thin shoulder. “This is now a contaminated area,” he announced loud enough for the few dozen pink-cheeked stoplight enthusiasts. “You’ll all need to get back while we contain the mess and get it cleaned up.”
Myrtle made an obscene gesture of triumph. “That’s what I’m talking about, McGarvey—you clear out these holy rollers and their boring signs! Shoo!” To his chagrin, she lifted her metal shovel and waved it at the encroaching conservative coven.
Trent whirled on her, doing his best not to loom over an old woman who came up to his nipples. “Myrtle…this is a serious offense. Rest that shovel on the ground or I’ll be forced to take it.”
“Your face says you’re pissed, but those dreamy eyes are all afterglow,” she teased, nudging him with her elbow, though she put the shovel’s metal head back on the concrete. “Finally pulled our Maggie, eh? You sly fox.”
“Mind out of the gutter, would you? I’m on duty.” But the smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth betrayed him. It was true: he felt lighter than usual, despite the weight of his uniform and the morning’s coffee yet to kick in.
“Sure, sure.” She winked, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Heard she’s quite the handful.”
“More than a handful,” he muttered, scanning past another cluster of residents, “and nowhere to be seen.”
The truth was, Trent was begrudgingly fond of the chaos Maggie brought with her—it stirred something deep within him, something he thought he had packed away when he left Albuquerque behind. But damn if it didn’t make his job harder, especially when he found himself tiptoeing to the line of his own ethical no man’s land.
Shaking his head, he realized something devastating in real time.
He was a goner.
Like, this was cause for some concern.
“Hiya, Myrtle.” Local mechanic and ex-con Gabe Kelly sauntered over with his fiancée, Gemma, a stunning brunette with a sleek ponytail and a bangin’ power suit.
“Gabe, Lyra, tell these Jesus freaks what you think of the church at large!” Myrtle yelled, pointing the fully automatic kill clip that was the ex-Catholic Bostonian’s vocabulary. He’d spray these old folks with four-letter bullets, shrug his shoulders, and eat a giant sandwich while watching the carnage play out.
Lyra McKendrick, Gemma’s twin and Gabe’s future sister-in-law, had turned up for the protest, and if anyone had Myrtle’s back, and vice versa, it was these two. Gemma, Trent remembered, had a pathological avoidance of all forms of conflict, while Lyra prided herself on wading into the middle with her righteous indignation and a mean case of ASD savant syndrome. Think what you want about Lyra—she was usually just as correct as she was abrasive.
“Don’t you dare,” Trent warned, though whether it was to Myrtle, Lyra, or Gabe, he wasn’t sure.
Probably all of them.
“Roundabouts are a menace!” barked an astonishingly blond man with a chin wattle that would make a turkey proud. Trent recognized him as Bradley Osgaard, the local self-appointed Port Townsend online censor, ran and moderated Port Townsend pages on various social media apps, turning them into his pathetic online echo chamber. His color was as ridiculously high as the belt cinching his chinos up to his armpits, voice quivering with passion as he shook his fist. “They’ll have us going ’round in circles, dizzy and more lost than a one-legged duck in a pond!”
Lyra snorted, pinning him with her unflinching, unsettling eye contact. “Statistically speaking, they reduce traffic accidents by thirty-nine percent!” The thick-framed glasses she wore told them she ate statistics for breakfast.
“Arrest Myrtle the turd-le, officer, we demand it!” Janet, her cheeks flushed with the kind of fervor usually reserved for discount sales at the local bakery, clutched her cardigan over a house dress and cast dirty looks at Lyra’s designer drip.
“Oh please, Janet, you’re complaining a lot for someone who smells like an old bowl of onions sat in the fridge too long,” Myrtle groused.
The pungent smell of manure thickened the air, clinging to clothes and churning stomachs. Trent grimaced, watching as protesters scattered to escape the stench. The woman had gigantic titanium balls to call someone out on their aroma.
He had to give it to Myrtle… It was the most effective and least violent protest disbandment he’d ever seen.
“Who is responsible for this biohazard?” Every time Trent heard Mayor Stewart’s voice, he had the spine-curling urge to cover his no-no squares.
“Don’t worry about it—the perpetrator is being dealt with.” Trent eyed Myrtle, who scraped her shovel across the concrete with more enthusiasm than necessary.
“Dealt with? She should be arrested!” The mayor stabbed a finger at Myrtle. “Disturbing the peace, illegal dumping—she’s a menace!”
“I understand your concern.” Trent kept his tone neutral, though inwardly he itched to elbow the guy into the pile, so the smell would match his personality. Myrtle might be eccentric, but she’d taken things too far this time. Still, he was in no great hurry to slap handcuffs on her itty-bitty wrists. “Rest assured, the situation will be handled appropriately.”
The mayor sniffed, clearly unappeased. “See that it is. Or on your head be it.”
Trent gave the man his best what-the-fuck-ever look before replying, “Yes, sir.” As much as he loved his job, sometimes he hated it. “I will have to ticket and fine you, Myrtle. And if you don’t clean this up immediately…” He let the threat of arrest remain unspoken.
“Oh, I know—I brought my checkbook!” Myrtle grinned. “Worth every penny, and make sure you spell my middle name right. Here’s my license.”
Pulling a face, Trent took the black latex gloves out of his utility belt and donned them before taking the stained, well-used identification.
Janet stamped her clogs in protest. “This town’s gone to pot ever since that woman and her sort moved here.”
Lyra took a step in Janet’s direction, a dangerous gleam in her dark eyes. “What do you mean, her sort? Why don’t you teetotalers get a life, or at least a fucking hobby. Gathering a posse to bully an elderly lesbian isn’t a good look.”
“Who you calling elderly?” Myrtle chirped.
Uh oh.
Trent placed himself between the mini conclave squaring off like the generals meeting over the battlefield, their deeply weird armies bracketing them, waiting for the charge.
“Ms. McKendrick, Myrtle is in zero danger of anything like that happening.” He put up a hand against the local lawyer’s famously barbed tongue.
“I know that,” she replied. “How about someone WikiLeak that to the right hand of Jesus queer-hating Christ over there?”
“And while you’re at it, take this shit sack of a mayor and this Igor-looking muthafuckah out with the rest of this garbage.” Gabe threw every bit of his Southie accent into his tone.
“I will not stand here and be spoken to like this!” Mayor Stewart’s hair ruffled in the wind, showing the liver-spotted scalp beneath.
“Promise?” Myrtle said. “Why don’t you take your little secretary and split?”
“Secretary?” Gabe’s eyebrow went up.
“Yeah. Mayor Spewart’s wife won’t let him have female secretaries anymore, so he’s stuck with Bradley O, the keyboard warrior who wants to be like Michael Vick but with humans.”
“I’ll sue you for libel!” the pinkening Bradley O threatened.
“Good luck,” Myrtle spat. “The only lawyer in town is on my side.”
“The devil is on your side!” Janet cried, making the sign of the cross.
Myrtle whirled on her. “I will jump-kick the ass fat out of your lip fillers, Janet, see if I don’t!”
The corpulent Christian gestured to Trent, who was trying extra hard not to enjoy himself. “Did you hear that? She just threatened me with violence. I demand you press charges!”
Trent physically put himself between the two women over fifty, making sure no one threw what objectively promised to be the funniest punch in the world.
“I wasn’t joking about clearing out of here, all of you.” He pushed more authority into his tone. “For everyone’s health and safety, you’ll need to leave until this is clean. Everyone. No exceptions.”
Janet and her clan balked. “But our First Amendment rights?—”
“May be exercised on any other part of any other street but this one.” He opened his arms to herd the crowd further away so another deputy could tape off the area.
Myrtle cheerfully took up her shovel and began to transfer her precious poop from the ground back to her truck. “Like I’d waste this grade-A…waste,” she mumbled to herself.
“You’re a waste of space,” Bradley told her, tapping his pen on his clipboard. “This isn’t over, Myrtle.”
“Eat shit, Brad.”
Trent realized too late that Myrtle wasn’t giving the smug secretary a suggestion, but a warning. And before he could stop her, she’d used the wood handle of her shovel to poke the man in the back of his knee, buckling it.
Before anyone could react, he was sprawled face-first in Myrtle’s manure.
Brad flailed hilariously and finally made his way to his feet when he realized no one was going to help him up.
To be fair, most people were laughing too hard.
“Gather your henchman, mayor,” Myrtle said, raising a gnarled middle finger.
“Arrest this…woman!” Mayor Stewart demanded. “She just assaulted my—employee!”
Gabe scoffed, wiping tears of mirth from his baby blues before folding his tattooed arms over a chest built in a prison weight room. “Oh, c’mon, Spewart, it can’t taste any worse than your fumunda-laden dick, and he seems to gobble that just fine on the daily.”
He and Lyra touched knuckles as Myrtle laughed so hard she dropped her shovel with a clang.
Janet, apparently having had her fill of profanity for the day, lashed out at Myrtle in the way only a Karen of the highest order could do. “Where’s your abomination of a wife, Myrtle? Trouble in paradise? Living in sin not working out for you?”
“You keep my woman’s name out of your whore mouth!” Myrtle pushed her sleeves up her little arms like post-spinach Popeye ready to open a can of whoop-ass.
Trent turned on Janet, the last of his good humor a martyr to her bigotry. “Ma’am, you’ll take that hate speech somewhere else right now.”
“Or what?” Janet’s eyes turned ugly(er), lip lifting in a vampiric snarl. “Better to smell like onions than shit and tuna …”
“Oh, I’m about to lay down some dolphin-safe whoop-ass on this bi?—”
Trent caught Myrtle as she advanced on the woman twice her size and half again her height, before she could go all Will Smith on Janet’s obviously fraudulent cheekbones.
Somewhere from behind the ringing in his ears caused by his elevating blood pressure, Trent heard the mayor demand Myrtle’s arrest, along with that of a few others.
“You saw what she did! All of you!” The mayor pointed as if Myrtle wasn’t dangling like a recalcitrant toddler from Trent’s careful grip. “She’s finally going to answer for her shenanigans!”
“Shenanigans? That was barely even hijinks!” Her eyes were bright and owlish with innocence. “How is it my fault his knee ran into my shovel?”
“I saw nothin’.” Gabe shrugged, winking at Myrtle before casting Trent a stony look.
“I might have seen Bradley lunge first,” Lyra added before turning to Trent with her unsettlingly frank assessment.
He wondered what she saw.
“You ask my client nothing until I meet you at the jail, you understand? And if this shit-covered motherfucker presses charges, I’ll make sure every press outlet in town knows he was beaten up by a seventy-year-old woman who weighs all of seventy pounds.”
“Hundred and six!” Myrtle insisted. “I’m back on carbs, and Gabe’s been pumping iron with me.”
“Shut your mouth, Myrtle!” Mayor Stewart ordered her.
“You first!” And damned if the crepey-skinned, bird-boned biddy didn’t wrench out of Trent’s gentle grip, drop to gather a handful of her product, and hurl it right into the mayor’s face with the precision of post-roids A-Rod.
“This stops now ,” Trent growled.
For a moment, everyone (finally) hesitated, having caught the glint in his eye his father had once called his “fuck around and found out” look.
“Myrtle, drop those gloves to the pavement.”
She complied.
“I’m sorry, but I’m placing you under arrest, for assault, but I won’t cuff you unless I see you reach for that pile again, you hear me?”
When he expected her to be chastened, she turned around and secured her own wrists behind her back. “I can’t be trusted around these ass-waffles. If Vee weren’t with your lover at the Palace, she’d be here putting every single one of you to shame . To fucking shame!”
Reaching for his cuffs, Trent warmed them with his fingers before securing them loosely on her tiny wrists. “You have?—”
“I know, I know… I have the right to remain silent, anything I say can and will be, blah blah blah… I’ve been getting arrested at protests since before you were born, kid.”
After Mirandizing her properly, Trent allowed his crew to disperse the rest of the passionate protesters as he buckled the pungent lady into his back seat.
Ugh. He would never get the smell out, unless he could?—
A thought hit him upside the head with all the force of the flat side of Myrtle’s shovel.
“Wait just a second… Did you say that Maggie and Vee were at the Palace Hotel?” he asked his rearview mirror.
The little white lady turned impossibly paler, her eyes shifting in a way that told him her next words were an absolute lie.
“Nope? I said… Erm… Alice’s… My pal, Alice. She wanted to meet Maggie, so Vee took her over there. She’ll come and bail me out before I can squat and cough, and we’ll go have victory drinks at Sirens. Maggie isn’t working, so the drinks will be better.”
Trent’s temper spiked so incredibly hot he bit down on his lips so as not to say something the old woman didn’t deserve.
She was the woman betraying him at the moment.
Goddamn.
The morning had been so perfect. Waking to Maggie’s warm body beside him. Sinking into her as he pulled her to his chest. Burying his face into the fragrance of her hair.
Had she been planning to lie to him all day?
He had a perp in his back seat. His day crew at the crossroads. His boss had the day off.
And somehow…he couldn’t bring himself to reach for his radio and send the town police to catch her in the act.
She’d be arrested for trespassing, and this time, Mayor Stewart wouldn’t hesitate to throw the book at her.
He should have listened to Maggie in the first place when she asked if he’d stay with her.
And tied her to the fucking bed.