Wrong Number, Right Grumpy Sheriff (Wrong Number, Right Grump #2)

Chapter 1

chapter

one

Griff

Not wrong like a bad call. Wrong like the ringtone is the one assigned to my county-issued cell—the number maybe four people in this county have, all of whom know better than to dial it. My new subordinates at the sheriff’s office know I prefer texts.

I answer it anyway. That’s the whole problem with me. I always answer. Because when you work homicide in Houston, you have no choice. So now it’s instinct, even though I left Houston months ago.

“Meadows,” I say.

There’s no response. Then a stretch of static. Under it, faint, a female voice that isn’t talking to me. “—no, no, no, stop, I’m fine—”

Then a robot lady, calm as a lake: Emergency SOS. A hard fall was detected. Address is as follows…

The line drops.

I sit there a second in the dark of my kitchen with the coffee I haven’t poured yet, and I do the math I’ve done ten thousand times. Fall detection. Auto-dial. Which means somewhere in my jurisdiction a person is on the ground and their watch is more worried about it than they are.

The address pings through a beat later. If I remember correctly, it’s the old Pruitt place off Farm Road 12, the little clapboard house that’s been sagging on its foundation since before I left.

It’s at the far end of town, which means somebody’s out there alone at the ass-end of a county road with a device screaming that they went down hard.

Here’s the thing nobody in Saddle Creek knows about me yet, and I intend to keep it that way: I did eleven years in a city where a repeat address on the board was a joke.

Oh, her again. Wrote it off. Passed it down the line.

And one Tuesday—it’s always a Tuesday—the last time somebody wrote it off was the last time anybody heard from her.

So. I don’t write off repeats. I don’t hand them to anybody. I go.

I’m already reaching for my keys.

The Pruitt place has an old dented truck in the drive.

The white paint is chipped in some places and the tailgate is missing a few of the letters from CHEVROLET.

So it now reads CHE RO T. The porch light burns against a sky that’s going the soft bruised color it goes right before real dark.

There’s a ladder tipped over in the flowerbed.

And a woman on her hands and knees in the grass.

I try to ignore the plump heart-shaped ass, but I am completely unsuccessful. Which makes me feel like a creeper since this woman could be seriously injured if she fell off that ladder.

Then she sits back on her heels, and I see she’s not hurt. Instead, she’s arguing… with her wrist.

“I did not fall, I stepped down, there is a difference and you would know that if you had legs or eyes—” She jabs at the watch face. Jabs again. “Cancel. Cancel. Why do you not—oh my God.”

I cut the engine. Get out. My boots hit gravel and she goes still and then her whole head comes up and around, and I get the full front of her. She’s young. Clearly, an adult, but definitely younger than me. She’s plump and curvy, soft where a woman should be soft.

Paint on her hands. Paint on one cheekbone, a streak of it, blue.

There’s more of it dried up on her forearms in about six colors like she lost a fight with a rainbow.

She’s got a pencil shoved through a knot of dark hair that is losing structural integrity by the second.

She stares at me, wide-eyed and open-mouthed.

I know what she sees. A man the size of a doorframe walking across her yard in the failing light. I’m not in uniform since I was already home, but she can surely see the Bluebonnet County Sheriff’s Office star emblazoned on the side of my truck.

She shakes her head. Her brow furrows and she looks damned adorable. But that just pisses me off. That I noticed it. That I mentally acknowledged it. I am a goddamn professional. And I’m here on official duty.

I finally get close enough to see the color of her eyes—brown—which is also annoying. Not the color, but that I noticed.

“No,” she says.

“Ma’am?”

“No. Just, no.” She holds her wrist up. “This is a nuisance. I’m fine. Promise.” She does a little twirl. “See? I’m all good.”

“Got a fall alert.”

“How mortifying. I didn’t fall. I got off the ladder; I just stepped off a little too high and stumbled.”

“Doesn’t matter. If we get the alerts, we have to check. Office policy.” Okay, I don’t actually know if it’s an official policy. But it’s my damn policy.

“I can’t believe you drove all the way out here.” Then she pauses, tilts her head. “Wait, you’re not Sheriff Burton.”

“I am not. Meadows. Sheriff Meadows. Sheriff Burton retired. I was elected last month and recently took office.”

“Oh. That makes sense, I guess.” She gives me a genuine smile that nearly knocks the breath from my chest.

I rub at the spot.

“Now you know it’s just me, and I’m okay; you can go back to work. Sorry to be a pest”

“Just me doesn’t help, Mrs… what is your last name?”

“Duh. I’m Hope Bailey. No Mrs. Just a Miss.”

I choose not to wonder why the hell I asked it that way.

“Very well, Ms. Bailey, I’m going to go ahead and walk the perimeter while I’m here just to make sure everything is safe. It is getting dark.”

“Dark? Sure. Happens every day about this time.”

Fuck, she’s cute.

Again she gives me a wide, but authentic smile. “But this is Saddle Creek. It’s perfectly safe.”

“If it’s all the same to you, I’ll just do a walk around.”

“Suit yourself, Sheriff.”

This is completely unnecessary; I realize that as I walk around to the back of her property. But there’s always that chance that something could be missed. I won’t let that kind of thing happen again. By the time I’m done with my check, I’m surprised to find Ms. Bailey still standing in her yard.

“All clear.”

“Thank you for checking. And again, I really am sorry you came all the way out here. Do you need me to sign something? Is there a fine? I feel like there should be a fine.”

“No fine.” I keep my voice flat. Flat is safe. I nod towards her wrist. “You want to check that thing's settings so this doesn’t happen again.”

“Yes. God. Yes, I will absolutely—” She looks down at the watch, which picks that exact second to light up with some cheerful little message, and her whole face falls, and I have to study the tipped-over ladder in her flowerbed so I don't do something stupid with my mouth.

“It's new. I got it because I live alone out here and my sister—my friend, Cora, she worries, she said get the watch. They’re kind of pricey though so I got this one second hand from a friend in town.”

“It called my cell,” I say. “Not dispatch.”

“Is that bad?”

“It's wrong.” Alerts route to the county line. They don't route to a man's personal cell three weeks off the carrier's recycled pile. “Alerts go to the county line, to the dispatch. Not to my direct number.”

“Oh.” Judging by her expression, I’m pretty sure she doesn't know what to do with that.

“Well. Since you drove all the way out—can I get you something?

I have lemonade, the real kind, I squeeze it, and I made snickerdoodles this afternoon because I stress-bake when a deadline's bad and this deadline is bad, so there are, like, four dozen, and I cannot eat four dozen snickerdoodles, I'll die—” She's already half-turned for the porch, already sure I'll say yes, because a woman like this has clearly never once considered that a person might not want to sit on her porch and eat her cookies in the last good light of the day.

“Two minutes. Sit down. You came all this way, the least I can do is—”

Two minutes. Lemonade she squeezed herself. A chair on that sagging porch and the smell of cinnamon coming through the window and this woman talking until the dark came down.

I’m already making to follow her to the porch. I want it so much it makes me pause. I pull my keys from my pocket.

“Appreciate it, but I need to go.”

“Oh, alright. I’ll get the watch fixed. Thanks for checking on me.”

I nod and climb into my truck.

I make it a mile and a half down FR-12 before I’m pretty sure I know how she takes her coffee.

I don’t, actually. I’ve known the woman eleven minutes, and I’ve got no earthly idea how she takes her coffee.

But my brain, unprompted, offered up light and too sweet, probably, with a sprinkle of cinnamon on top.

I don’t do that. I have never once done that.

I am extremely good at not doing that. It’s the entire reason I’m good at the job—I see people clean, no story, just the facts of them.

Except I’ve got blue paint on a cheekbone—stuck behind my eyes like a smear I can’t blink off.

Snickerdoodles. Christ.

My phone buzzes. Deputy Tate, who is twenty-six and thinks I hung the moon, which I’m working on curing him of.

Tate: Everything ok out at the Pruitt place? Saw you rolled on it yourself.

Tate: I coulda taken that one, boss. You were off shift.

I look at the message at the stop sign where FR-12 hits the highway, and there’s nobody coming in either direction for a country mile, just me and the dark and a question with an easy answer.

Sure. It’s a nothing call. If it happens again, you can handle it.

That’s the answer. That’s the correct, sane answer of a man who did eleven years and came home to do less.

Me: I’ve got it.

I hit send before I can think about why.

Then I sit at the empty stop sign a second longer than necessary. Because for reasons I don’t want to examine too closely, I’m not quite ready to be too far from Miss not Mrs Hope Bailey.