Rude Awakening (2 page)

And that was before Monday had even really begun. Later that afternoon I had a ‘shots fired' called in from out in the country and, being March and not hunting season, we had to deal with it. But the country, being big like it is with just some mile markers and a bunch of trees as landmarks, is not a real good description, so we never found the perpetrator, nor did we find anything dead.

Tuesday was just the usual crap. But then Wednesday, Arlene Edgewater called in to say that she'd had a peeping Tom the night before. Now, Arlene is seventy-five if she's a day, and I'm not saying she's not a good-looking woman, even at seventy-five, but we don't get a lot of peeping toms going after the senior set. Which just goes to show what an ageist I am, even in
my
advanced years. Wednesday night, while Dalton Pettigrew was doing his rounds (going by Miz Edgewater's house special because I asked him to), he caught Lon Robert Brown peeping in Miz Edgewater's bedroom window. Dalton called me down to the station to deal with Lon Robert, who's ninety-three. He had figured out some way to get out of his daughter Lois's house, even though she's got keyed deadbolts on every door in the house, due to her daddy's Alzheimer's. I called Lois, who Dalton easily could have called himself, but he didn't, and had a long talk,
again
, with her about having her daddy put in a home. By the time I got back to my house on Mountain Falls Road, all the lights were on and Johnny Mac, my four-year-old son, was sitting in his mama's lap in the living room, running a temperature of 102 point something.

So on Thursday I stayed home in the morning with Johnny Mac and went in after lunch when my wife Jean came home for her turn.

Which gets us back to Friday. Johnny Mac woke up perfectly OK. Jean fixed him oatmeal for breakfast, even though he insisted he wanted McDonald's. So, like an idiot, I promised him McDonald's for lunch. So Jean took him to pre school, and I picked him up at noon, and we met his mama at McDonald's. As anyone with kids knows, McDonald's is
haute cuisine
for the Happy Meal set, and a decent reward for a four-year-old who managed to outsmart a temperature.

So he got four-piece chicken McNuggets with ranch, apple slices with caramel dipping sauce and chocolate milk, all in a Happy Meal with a cheap plastic toy, which is the real reason most kids even want to go to McDonald's. Jean got a salad, and I got a Big Mac and large fries. Jean and I got to talking, not really noticing how many of my fries Johnny Mac was managing to shovel into his mouth, along with his own concoction of ranch dressing mixed with ketchup (if you don't look directly at it, it's not
that
bad). He'd already managed to finish his chicken nuggets, apple dippers and most of his chocolate milk.

There was absolutely no warning. The boy just spewed. Blew chunks everywhere – all over himself, his mama and me. And he just didn't stop. The lady sitting next to us began to dry heave, which got her two-year-old crying, and the manager, Sharon Maggert, who me and my ex-wife used to double date with back the summer after we graduated high school, came running out, screaming my name and pointing at the door.

By this time, Johnny Mac had quit spewing, so I picked him up and rushed toward the door. Unfortunately, I was holding him around the middle, which I now see might have been a mistake. As we approached the doors, he projectile vomited, hitting the glass doors, the floor, the life-size cut-out of Ronald MacDonald standing next to the door and the booth closest to us.

Sharon didn't even let Jean finish cleaning up, just asked us to leave and to use the drive-thru from now on. I thought that was rude, but Jean said just to leave her be, so I did. We all headed back home for a change of clothes. I left Johnny Mac and Jean back at the house and headed back to the station.

And for those of you who might be asking yourselves, hey, isn't he too old to have a four-year-old son? The answer is yes, I am. Way too old. I'm now doing something I shoulda done thirty years ago, i.e., being a daddy. But thirty years ago it didn't happen. It happened four years ago, and what's a fella to do? At somewhere around the sixty mark (and I'm not telling if it was north or south), I met a lady named Jean, who took a fancy to a paunchy, balding deputy sheriff, who just happened to have a killer smile and a sparkle in his blue eyes. That's me, folks. And the rest, as they say, is history.

So, here it was: three o'clock on a Friday afternoon, and I was making up statistics on the eminent probability of a fatality on Mitchem Road and Highway-5, and trying to get the smell of Johnny Mac's spew out of my nostrils, when I got an intercom call from Gladys, our civilian clerk.

‘Milt,' she said, with that no-nonsense sound to her voice. ‘You need to get out here.'

Hitting the switch to talk, I said, ‘I'm busy.'

‘Now,' she said, and her tone brooked no argument. Thinking
she ain't the boss of me
did little to keep me in my seat. Having been raised by a mama whose ‘now' meant serious business, I was kinda like Pavlov's dog to that word. I went into the large area where Gladys ruled.

Two things caught my eye. The first was Gladys standing behind her counter, arms across her chest, a scowl on her face. The second was what she was scowling at. Namely, my deputy Dalton Pettigrew's mama.

Dalton's mama was five foot nothing, weighed about eighty-five pounds and was wearing a workout suit that appeared to come from the boy's department of J.C. Penney's. The running shoes on her tiny feet lit up when she moved – definitely from the boy's department. She had very short salt-and-pepper hair, glasses and a hawkish nose. And she ruled the roost at her house like nobody's business – and had since Dalton's daddy went out for a pack of cigarettes one night and never came back. 'Course, maybe she ruled the roost before that, too, which may have been
why
Dalton's daddy left. And it looked like she was trying to rule the roost here now, too. The fact that this was definitely, and without question, Gladys's roost didn't seem to impress the lady much.

My cousin Earl, gone now for some twenty-odd years, was a friend of Dalton's daddy. I was in grammar school when they were hanging out, but I remember the elder Pettigrew well. Dalton is definitely a clone of his daddy: big and blond and not very bright; Dalton's daddy should have been a football player but was too clumsy to do much. His name was Peter Pepperidge Pettigrew, known throughout the high school as ‘Threepee'. After high school he went away from Longbranch, coming back about a year later with wife, Clovis, and the first of the three Pettigrew children: Hawke, another clone of his daddy. Unfortunately, the middle child was a girl, Mary Ellen, and she, too, took after Threepee. That boy had some serious genes.

Seeing me, Gladys said, ‘I've been telling her Dalton doesn't come on duty til Monday!'

‘That so?' I said.

‘That's what the roster says!' Gladys said, staring daggers at me and shoving the roster under my nose. Seeing as it was a Friday, and Gladys had initiated ‘casual Fridays' a couple of years back, she was attired that day in stretch denim pants that covered what my nephew Leonard said was called ‘junk in the trunk', which Gladys had a serious amount of, and a long-sleeved denim shirt that Gladys herself had appliquéd with multicolored spring flowers, yellow-and-black bumblebees and pink and purple butterflies. Her champagne blonde hair was curled in a tight new perm and her cheeks were as rosy as Max Factor could make 'em.

I pushed the roster back a bit, so I could see what she was shoving under my nose, and looked. It definitely said Dalton was off today, through the weekend and not on again until Monday morning.

I showed the roster to Clovis Pettigrew. ‘That's what it says,' I said.

‘Well, that's not what my boy told me!' she said, hands on hips, scowl on face. Actually, I've never seen her face look anything other than how it did now, so maybe it wasn't a scowl, maybe that was just the way her face looked. Or maybe she'd been scowling for so long, the wind changed and she now wore it permanently, just like my mama always warned me.

‘He said he was coming in to work this morning?' I asked, picking up real quick like, which is what a duly elected sheriff should do.

‘He left yesterday evening, saying he had to work the night shift. Then when he didn't come home this morning like he was supposed to, I got to calling his cell phone. And instead of talking to me, there was a message saying he had to work straight through to Monday. Some undercover thing!' Clovis said.

Uh oh, I thought. We don't do undercover, and even if we did, I'd never use Dalton for such a thing. The boy wouldn't be able to persuade a two-year-old that he was anything other than a cop.

‘Ma'am,' I said to Dalton's mama, ‘let me look into this and I'll get right back to you. I've got your number and I'll give you a call.'

Arms back across her chest. ‘No, I don't think so, Sheriff,' she said. ‘I think I'll just wait here until you produce my son.'

‘That'll be kinda hard, Miz Pettigrew,' I said, thinking fast. ‘With Dalton being undercover and all, I don't want to blow his cover by calling him out too soon. If there's something you need me to pass on to him, I'd be glad to.'

Her hands moved to her hips as she studied me. ‘If you get my boy in trouble with this undercover business, I'll have your badge. You understand me, Sheriff?'

I wasn't sure what she was gonna
do
with my badge, but I nodded just the same. ‘Let me get a message to him,' I said, ‘and I'm sure he'll get a chance to get back to you later today.'

‘Just tell him to call me. That's all.' With that, Clovis Pettigrew swung around and marched out the door and Gladys and I both breathed a sigh of relief.

Turning to Gladys, I asked, ‘Where's Dalton?'

‘Hell if I know!' she said, which was one of the very few times I'd ever heard her use a cuss word. But Clovis Pettigrew has that effect on people.

‘Find him!' I said.

‘Where? He's obviously not at home and he sure as heck isn't here! He doesn't go any place else!' Gladys said.

She had a point. I went back to my office and called up my second-in-command, Emmett Hopkins, who was at home today, since he'd be covering the weekend. I woke him up.

‘You know where Dalton is?' I asked him.

‘Dalton?' he repeated, sounding sleepy, which made me feel a little bit guilty, but it was a measure of my manhood how quickly I got over it.

‘Yeah. We can't seem to find him. You send him out on something?' I asked.

‘Uh uh,' Emmett said. ‘Haven't talked to Dalton since yesterday morning.' There was a small silence, then he said, ‘But he did seem excited about something. When I asked him what, he just said he had a busy weekend coming up.'

‘Well, according to his mama he left there yesterday evening, saying he was going undercover and wouldn't be back until Monday,' I told Emmett.

‘Say what?' Emmett said. I could hear the bed covers rustling as he got himself up.

‘You heard me,' I said.

‘Yeah, I heard you, but that's bullshit,' Emmett said.

‘
I
know that. I wouldn't use Dalton for anything undercover. Even if we had anything we needed somebody to go undercover for. I'm thinking he lied to his mama.'

‘No shit,' Emmett said. ‘Dalton lied to his mama. That's not like him.'

‘Tell me about it,' I said.

‘So where is he?' Emmett asked.

‘Hell if I know.' I hung up without a goodbye and sat at my desk thinking. Dalton had today and the weekend off, told his mama he wouldn't be back until Monday and he wasn't due back here until then. So why was I upset? Dalton was a grown man and if he decided to get away from his mama for a day or two, who could blame him? He'd talked a while back about wanting to get married. He'd said at the time that he didn't have a girlfriend or anything, but that had been a while ago. Didn't mean he didn't have one now. So maybe he was with a woman. That was a good thing. At least to me – doubt his mama would see it that way, though.

I couldn't help thinking back to when Dalton first came on with the sheriff's department. My predecessor, Elberry Blankenship, was sheriff then and him and his wife went to the Church of Christ, where Clovis Pettigrew had dragged her children twice a Sunday – every Sunday of their lives.

At that time, Dalton was twenty-two years old and had held five jobs. Because of his size, when he graduated high school, Bodine's Feed & Grain hired him right up, knowing he was big enough and strong enough to throw around the huge sacks of feed and other stuff Bodine's Feed & Grain sold. That is, until they found out he was very politely not selling deer feeders, deer licks or the very expensive (the prize that kept Bodine's Feed & Grain in the black every year) deer blinds handmade by Lester Bodine, Sr himself. Dalton just didn't believe in shooting animals. He got fired.

Rigsby's Five & Dime fired him because he couldn't seem to get the price gun to work; and his table-waiting days at the Longbranch Inn concluded after he spilled a cup of coffee, two eggs over easy, grits and biscuits all over His Honor, the Mayor. There was a job at some place over in Bishop that I know didn't last too long, and one in Taylor County that ended in him being asked not to come back that way anytime soon.

It was a grave Clovis Pettigrew who practically begged the sheriff to hire Dalton after the retirement of Dale Morgan, who had dropped dead two days after retirement, which goes to show you either don't retire period or you retire real early so you can enjoy it. Anyway, with great disquiet, the sheriff hired Dalton, mostly for answering the police band radio, which he took to real well. When the sheriff took him out to the shooting range, and gave his own personal gun to him to shoot, he saw that not only was Dalton a crack shot, he didn't shoot a single civilian that popped up on the course. So he sent Dalton up to Oklahoma City for training and got him back six weeks later with a C average in everything but the shooting range, where he made straight A+s. He's been a sworn-in Prophesy County Deputy Sheriff ever since.