Chief Danzig climbed out and assessed the scene. “I take it we lucked out and the dogs weren’t loose.”
“Oh yeah they were,” Duncan said, “and ready to eat us alive…until the California Kid here worked some kind of voodoo that turned them into pussycats.”
Danzig started. “You’re joking.”
A chorus of neighbor voices swore to the story.
He eyed Garreth in amazement. “No one but Loxton has ever been able to control his dogs.”
Garreth shrugged in pretended modesty. “Dogs like me.” Or he had been damn lucky.
“You’re full of surprises.” Danzig turned to Nat, who had the wife on her feet again, still sobbing, and was steering her down the sidewalk. “You about to take her to the hospital?” At Nat’s nod, he said, “Then I’m stealing your ride-along. Hop in, Mikaelian, and let’s talk.”
Not immediately, however. Danzig drove in silence, pulling finally into a parking area in Pioneer Park. Still saying nothing, he led the way down the sidewalk and over a swinging bridge to an artificial island created by a loop of the Saline River. They sat on the steps of the bandstand in the middle of the island, where Danzig lit a thin cigar from a box in his jacket pocket. The sweet smoke curled around Garreth, mixed with Danzig’s blood scent.
“Do you want a job here?”
Shades of Phil Mikaelian, cutting to the chase. And as with his father, Garreth decided to answer in kind. “I already have a job back home.”
“Which I understand you have reservations about.” Danzig took a puff. “Yet here you’ve demonstrated yourself a capable officer, so…what’s the story?”
“Didn’t Nat tell you?”
“Let me hear it from you.”
Always be straight with him, Nat had said. Okay. Leaving out only mention of vampires and his real reason for being here, Garreth told Danzig everything…from Lane’s attack to Harry’s shooting. Danzig listened without comment to the end, smoking his cigar and leaning back against a post supporting the bandstand roof.
With the cigar smoked down to its plastic mouthpiece, he ground out the butt on the steps and dropped it in his pocket. “Assuming you’re right about trust of you being forever tainted out there, which I’m not convinced is the case, what’s holding you back from taking a job where you have a clean slate? The admittedly big hit in salary? Reluctance to let go of the familiar? Trying to make family and friends understand why you’d trade a Cadillac department for a Go-cart?” He smiled wryly. “I ran into that, taking this job. From my wife, too, at first, though now she’s glad we’re here.”
“I never thought about salary,” Garreth said. “The rest, yes.” But he might as well confess the strongest reason. “At Loxton’s, when I knew Nat and Duncan were having to fight the wife as well as Loxton and thought they might need me inside, I couldn’t even think of trying to go through the back door. They didn’t need me but what if they had? Can this department risk me freezing up again at a door?”
Danzig eyed him. “Are you going to let fear cripple you and keep you from a job it seems to me you enjoy?”
If only there were a way to ensure entry into dwellings when he needed to be there. Maybe there was, he thought suddenly. What if he volunteered to conduct free home security checks for everyone in town. Use his own time to do it, even when it meant suffering daylight. It would be good public relations for the department, good for the homeowners, and good for an invitation in everywhere.
Danzig’s brows rose. “Did I just see a light go on over your head?”
Why not answer. “Thinking about going into homes gave me a public relations idea.”
Danzig listened to it, and smiled. “That sounds like a yes, you want the job.” He sobered. “After dealing with Hepner and Loxton I don’t have to tell you this job is just as hazardous as in a city, but you ought to know it can be worse. Remember the Clutter murders in Truman Capote’s book
“Nat’s told me.”
Danzig stood and stretched. “I also want to tell you if you do prove psycho and present a danger to the your fellow officers, I’ll shoot you down like a mad dog. Come in Monday, then, and fill out an application and we’ll go from there.”
8
“From there” launched an intense two weeks…applying, being fingerprinted to prove he was who he claimed, sliding through a physical with a Dr. Staab tut-tutting over the usual low blood pressure and heart rate, hypnotizing a lab tech into reading normal values in the blood work, being tested for a Kansas drivers license, interviewing with the mayor and city council. No one hires on to a new department in two weeks, Garreth would have thought, but they seemed to be fast-tracking him, as if afraid of him changing his mind. They apparently considered his records from the SFPD enough of a background investigation.
Every night he continued riding along with Nat, learning the radio codes the department used, memorizing the town and people. He saw how the cruise traffic changed Fridays when the Baumen Timberwolves had home games. Sparse early — everyone went to the games — it ramped up afterward, game-goers howling and waving banners as they circled up and down Kansas. Especially when Baumen won, Nat said.
Riding along, he wangled invitations into homes when possible, and learned to recognize the voices of various sheriff departments’ personnel on the radio. Including a Trego County dispatcher named Lila, with whom their own night dispatcher Doris Schoning, though thin as Sue Ann was plump, exchanged recipes in the wee hours. After the shift he studied the Kansas Criminal Code and Vehicle Code until dawn.
All the while feeling wretched. Sending the SFPD his resignation left him gutted, despite the conviction he must be here. Phone calls home, full of lies, made him feel even worse. On Saturday he laid groundwork by telling Harry and his father he was in Kansas…having met a police chief who invited him deer and turkey hunting here. When talking to Harry, he said the meeting occurred in Davis; talking to his father, it happened on the fictitious Montana hunting trip. Late in the week he called home enthusiastic reports of the hunting and the area. The next Tuesday he broke the news of being so taken with Baumen he had applied to the department here.
An exasperated Serruto said, “I think you’re totally screwed up and thank god you’ll be someone else’s headache now. But I hope the new job works out for you.”
It baffled Harry, moved now to rehab. “Don’t do this. You’re over-reacting. You’re too hard on yourself and you’re underestimating the understanding of your fellow officers. What are you going to do when you wake up a few weeks or months from now and realize what a mistake you made? ”
He told Lien the truth about joining this department, but it baffled her, too, even as she agreed to put his personal belongings in storage and sublet his apartment. “I understand how much you want to catch Lane but why must you give up everything here to do it? Isn’t your leave of absence enough time to stake out this town?”
“Remember
“Doesn’t your San Francisco badge? The rest of that text warns against setting yourself up to alter things according to your own judgment, which can end in mistake and failure.”
That disturbed him. Was he doing that? “I’m trying not to do that.”
“And if or when you do catch her, what then? How can you come home again.”
He could not of course. He could never go home again. With luck, though, that would never be an issue. He would be…crumbled to dust or something. “I’ll just have to wait and see.”
The most difficult call of all was to his parents, worse than telling them about Judith divorcing him. The phone lines fairly melted from his father’s anger. “I swear I don’t know what the hell is going on in your head! You want throw away your whole career with the SFPD for a one-horse department because you’re buying a load of bullshit from this hick police chief on the basis of him being a good hunting host! What is it, you think it’s going to be a soft job where you’ll never face another situation like the one with Harry? That isn’t starting over. It’s burying yourself!”
