I hit hard and fast.
He didn’t even see the blows coming.
He fell to the floor in a heap and seemed unsure where he was.
His buddies that’d slunk in with him considered leaping to his friend’s aid but they took one look at my uniform and backed away.
Yeah, being sheriff still meant something.
Even now.
“Get him out of here,” I said, waving at the crumpled figure on the floor.
I climbed back on the stool and threw back the spilled shot.
My radio crackled.
“Sheriff Posiek. Come in, over.”
Fuck’s sake.
Can’t a man have a single moment to himself?
“Yeah?” I snapped.
“There’s a disturbance at Yale farm, over.”
“So, why are you bothering me with it? Send one of the plods.”
“The farmer said it was something you might want to deal with personally.”
“Personally? What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. He said he’s an old pal of yours and that it might be of some interest to you.”
“Who did you say it was? Yale?”
“Martin Yale.”
“I barely even knew the asshole. I haven’t spoken to him since the third grade.”
“He requested you specifically. He was insistent it should be you and sounded very frantic.”
I sighed.
It was probably a good thing to get me out of the bar for a few hours, not that I much looked forward to brushing up on a friendship that’d died years ago.
“Fine, I’ll go see what the trouble is.”
I left a twenty-dollar bill on the bar and put my shot glass on top of it, not that anyone was likely to steal it after a cop put it there.
Especially after the can of whoop-ass I’d just opened.
I stood up and, a little unsteady on my feet, noticed the patrons gawping at me.
I brushed off my hat and put it on.
I turned to Bill.
“Sorry for the… disruption. I’ve got a few… problems to work on.”
“Aight,” Bill said in a tone that suggested he didn’t accept my apology and believed my excuse even less.
To hell with him.
As I approached the exit, the clack of billiard balls nipped at my heels.
I stopped at the door and turned back to Bill, who was in the process of extracting the bill from under the shot glass.
“Hey, Bill,” I said.
Bill leaped a foot in the air before turning to me.
“Yeah?”
“I’ve been drinking in your bar.”
Bill nodded, unsure where I was going with this.
“And I must have downed half a dozen shots or more.”
He just stared at me.
“So, aren’t you going to warn me not to drive?” I said. “That would be what a responsible barkeep and friend would do. Unless you don’t think we’re friends anymore?”
I looked at him levelly.
His goateed mouth opened and shut before he looked at something to one side, unsure quite what to say.
“I, uh, guess you’re right.”
“So? Aren’t you going to say it? If you don’t, and I end up having an accident, there might be a lot of questions later about how much of it was your fault for not taking the proper precautions. And there’s plenty of witnesses in here who would testify to you having not carried out your duty.”
Bill glanced at the rest of the bar, who didn’t pay him any attention.
He cleared his throat.
“Sheriff, are you sure you should be driving after drinking? I’d hate for you to have an accident.”
I pushed up the brim of my hat with a thumb.
“Well, that’s very kind of you, Bill. Thanks for asking, but I think I’ll be fine.”
Bill just stared at me.
So did the rest of the bar.
“I’ll let you off this one time, Bill,” I said. “But if you pull this sort of shit again, I’m going to shut you down. You hear me?”
Bill nodded and daren’t say another word.
Good.
It was better to be feared than irrelevant.
And I’d been made to feel irrelevant too damn much recently.
I turned toward the door and marched out.
Yale Farm was a two-bit dust hole on the other side of town.
Giving things a nice name didn’t make them nicer places to live.
It belonged to a section of town that hadn’t seen a whole lot of investment in the past forty years or more.
I considered calling in and turning the job over to someone else.
I didn’t do a lot of house calls anymore—and for good reason.
They’d been the bane of my existence as a beat cop.
It was the biggest draw in being the sheriff.
I’d always had my eye on the top job and as my predecessor was getting on in years, I knew it wouldn’t be long before they found someone to fill his snakeskin boots.
I did a good job as a beat cop, cutting deals with criminals so they handed me the name of others higher up in the organization.
Everyone won.
Except the grasses.
Once I got promoted, they were the first ones I booked, sent to the same jails that housed those they’d dobbed in.
The thought of them locked inside with them never failed to make me chuckle.
In six months, I cleaned up the streets.
And the best part?
None of the snitches squealed on me because they knew I had the power to make their situation a whole lot worse if I wanted to.
They kept their mouths shut and did their time.
Meanwhile, I moved up the ladder of success, dusting off the entrails of those I’d known as a kid.
One of those friendships was a fellow named Martin Yale, a buddy I used to knock around with at elementary school.
We used to hide out in the library and read comic books.
When we graduated to high school, we lost touch instantly, each of us finding our own cliques.
Mine was sports, his drugs.
He did five years in the slammer while I was still coming up through the ranks.
There was little I could do to help him now, not that I ever would have lifted so much as a finger.
Criminals were criminals, cops were cops.
Once you crossed that line, you never stepped back across it.
I pulled up to the squat house with metal grilles over the windows.
Broken supermarket trollies were parked on either side of me as if it was a
