Excerpt

CHAPTER TWO

I was starting to get the hang of patrol on the graveyard shift. When Deputy Collins had started training me to take over the southwest sector of Kitsap County, he tried to make me believe I must pack a Thermos for every shift, claiming there was no good coffee to be had in the sector before McDonald's opened at six A.M.

I could see where he had gotten that impression. The AM/PM off Highway 16 was hit-or-miss, depending on whether the clerk was new and still cared. Or not. The no-name gulp-and-choke in Gorst probably just scooped some mud from the bay at low tide, mixed it with water, and put it in the thermal carafe hoping no one would notice. Yeah, it was that bad. There were a pair of bikini barista coffee stands serving the area, but the nice young women who staffed them were generally not happy to see law enforcement roll up, so I think they intentionally kept us away by serving us lattes made from recycled coffee grounds. Bitter as all hell.

For all his experience as a deputy, Collins didn't have the complete story on the south county's offerings. He didn't know about Al's convenience store in Olalla, and I did.

Al's was on the waterfront, about a mile north of the county line, so it was fairly out of the way compared to the rest of the sector. However, the store's owner, Al Junior, was about as big a coffee snob as I had ever met. He always said it would be an affront to his honor as a Pacific Northwesterner, a shopkeep, and a human being if his small batch-roast coffee wasn't hot and ready when he unlocked his doors at five. A full hour before McDonald's.

I pointed the nose of my cruiser, the oldest emerald green Ford Explorer the department owned, eastward on a rain-slicked two-lane road named after the Nelsons, one of the area's pioneer families, and monitored the radio chatter as I headed for my pre-dawn coffee break.

The radio was quiet except for a few mop-up calls regarding a fire at a residence in Kingston, at the opposite end of the county. Sounded like the North Kitsap Fire Department had the blaze nearly out and there were no major injuries. I offered a thought of thanks toward heaven for that. Given that it was the second of January, the whole tragedy had probably been caused by a Christmas tree that had stayed too long at the party without having enough to drink.

Stupid.

Just stupid.

Normally I wouldn't be so cynical about anything related to Christmas, but Anna Kramer's missing persons case was only a week behind me. I was still working through some of the emotional fallout from the Fields boys' disgusting ideas about Christmas dessert. I swore I could still hear the echoes of Jordan Fields's big Remington rifle firing at me from forty feet away, the snap and thwack of the big round passing inches over my head, into the wall of the shack he and his uncle had held Anna in. Thinking about it brought up the little hairs on the back of my neck and, unfortunately, remembering how I fired back four times to protect Anna and myself didn't do much to lay them down again.

After four days of administrative leave it had been good to come back to work, where I could focus on the job ahead instead of ruminating on what could have gone wrong, but hadn't. At the moment my job consisted of eyeballing the mailboxes along the side of the road as I drove toward coffee. Normally, early Sunday mornings meant I would find clusters of mailboxes hanging open—evidence of tweakers looking for easy pickings, even in the locked ones—but not that day. I saw no junk mail piled haphazardly in the ditches. Nice for a change.

I came to a complete stop at the end of Nelson and double-checked the traffic coming from my right as I turned left onto Crescent Valley Road. The rain picked up as I motored down the hill towards Olalla Bay and Al's. Being that the road was flanked by tree-covered hills on one side and the cold dark water of Colvos Passage on the other, it felt like I was cutting through black ink with my headlights. Coming around the corner, I caught sight of Al's.

The old fluorescent fixtures lighting a pair of gas pumps out front and the beer signs in the windows created a hazy oasis of false daylight that the bay reflected back in little winks. The tide was coming in. If I put the windows down I would hear it lapping at the underside of the bridge that spanned the mouth of the slough as I passed over it.

Though I had my pick of the six nose-in spots in front of the store, I chose to park my cruiser parallel to the road at the edge of the lot so I could stretch my legs a little more.

Before shutting the engine off, I keyed the radio and called Dispatch, "CenCom, Union-6-2." It still felt terrific to use my newly-acquired Union designation over the radio, so I did it whenever I could without looking like a dork. Maybe someday it would get old. But not yet.

"Go ahead, Union-6-2."

"Please mark me Code 7. Will keep my ears on the radio." Eating meals while still on the clock wasn't department policy, but I was the only patrol deputy in the sector until shift change so I didn't want to call 10-7, out of service.

"Affirmative, Union-6-2. I have you Code 7." As Dispatch time-stamped the call for the recordings, I was officially on break.

As always, getting out of the Explorer in full gear required detangling the seatbelt from the extra ammunition clips and my handcuffs that I wore secured to the back of my ballistic vest. Not such a big deal when I was just getting coffee, but I worried about what might happen if I needed to get out quickly. They just didn't make patrol vehicles for women who barely reached five foot three. I had been seriously thinking about pulling Sheriff Cassidy aside and asking her how she used to handle wrestling with her seatbelt when she was on patrol, but I didn't want her to think I wasn't able to handle the little stuff myself.

My thoughts were focused on how I might redistribute some of my gear to thigh holsters when I pulled open the door to Al's and was welcomed by the commingled smells of fresh coffee and hot cinnamon rolls.

Heaven on Earth.

Al's wasn't a big place. It had been built in the 1940s, in the austere style of the times. Just a big room under a tall gabled roof with a dozen fluorescent light fixtures dangling over six short aisles spread out in the center of the room. The back half of the store was ringed with glass-doored commercial refrigerators, mostly full of cold beer. Up front to the left of the door Al sat on a stool behind his counter which served as cash wrap, kayak rental counter, and tavern bar top.

"Morning, Al," I said after the brass bell on the door stopped jangling. I dropped three dollar bills on the counter.

"Mornin' kiddo," he answered, reaching for the cash without looking away from his computer. About normal for Al, and I'd known him since I was twelve.

Next to Al nine beer taps poked through the wall of the beverage refrigerator where the kegs lived. The taps had been drained and sealed for the season with frowny-face signs, as it was getting too cold to sit and have a brew in the outdoor beer garden, even with the woodstove stoked up.

Across the store from Al Junior, I could hear his daughter, Emma, washing dishes in the small kitchen with her back to the rest of the store. I don't know how she managed to bake pastries, pizzas, and gourmet hamburgers in such a small place.

And there, right in front of the door was what I craved. The coffee counter. Three carafes of fresh coffee and all the fixings, including the one thing Al seemed to understand that no one else did: a carafe of steamed milk. The perfect way to cut the bitter bite of a cup of joe without cooling things down. I grabbed a twenty-ounce paper cup and filled it full of coffee and steamed milk and sugar, all that I could fit without spilling, and wandered over to see if Emma's cinnamon rolls were out of the oven yet.

"Morning, Em," I called.

"With you in a sec," Emma called back without looking up from the giant stainless steel mixing bowl she was washing. I wasn't even sure she knew it was me until she added, "I have a favor to ask of you, Desty."

"No hurry," I said, turning my attention to the corkboard on the wall above the store's Little Free Library that filled the corner between a drink cooler full of sodas and the kitchen. The books never held much interest for me—mostly romances and thrillers I had read years before—but the collection of photographs pinned to the board really pulled at me.

Someone had already posted photos of the previous day's New Year's Day Polar Bear jump. Hundreds of people—old and young, singly and in groups, sober and silly—all lining up to leap off the bridge I had just driven over. Each one with their own reason to start off a new year with a plunge into the icy waters of the brackish slough that rolled out into Colvos Passage.

Sure, other places had Polar Bear swims. But only in Olalla was the breathtakingly cold plunge followed by a community bonfire that grew into a potluck which then lasted until everyone migrated en masse to the Grange Hall for Bingo.

I suddenly regretted that I had gone home to sleep after my shift instead of coming down to take the plunge.

Next year, I promised myself. In fact, I made it a New Year's resolution.

"Al, you make any resolutions this year?" I hollered.

"I'm too old to make resolutions."

"How about you, Emma?" I asked. "Any resolutions?"

She came out of the kitchen with a cinnamon roll in a styrofoam container and waved me around the corner into the hall leading to the beer garden. I wondered what was up and followed her.

"Funny you should ask about resolutions," she said, handing me the container. The plain white squishy clamshell box had been hand-decorated with a three-color logo. Emma's Confections.

"Hey, that's nice," I said, admiring the elaborate black font surrounded by symmetrical curliques in blue and yellow.

"I'm gonna do it," she said, a huge smile on her face. "I found a storefront on Bay Street that's opening up next week and I'm gonna do it. Emma's Confections is going to happen."

As long as I had known Emma, she had been a baker. She started working for her mom and dad when she was just fourteen, and by our senior year in high school she had convinced them to renovate the store to add the kitchen. Al had resisted the space the kitchen was going to take away from his beer garden, but Mrs. Al overrode him. Not long after that, the little convenience store became the go-to place for homemade goodies.

"That's great!" I was genuinely happy for her.

"I'm glad you feel that way, because I have a favor to ask."

"Okay," I said, popping open the clamshell and inhaling the sweet and spicy smell.

"I need an investor."

"An investor?" I did not consider myself that kind of person. I was lucky to get three percent of my pay into my county-matched retirement plan.

"I know you've been saving up for school next year. If you invest with me, I'll get it back to you in a year with interest."

"My college fund? How much are we talking here?"

"Thirty thousand," she said, looking nervous and excited.

Thirty thousand would wipe out my entire savings. I had been putting money into it since my third week on the job at the jail when I'd gotten assaulted by a prisoner. I had been off work for a week with a back injury, refusing to take opioids and miserable because of it. I committed to advancing my career out of the trenches as quickly as possible. Finishing my bachelor's degree was the fastest way to do that.

"If you get me thirty thousand this week, I'll give you back forty thousand by the end of the year," Emma begged.

I did the math. That was better than a thirty percent return on my money. My savings account was paying less than two percent. It sounded too good to be true.

Which meant it probably was.

I didn't think that Emma was conning me. Knowing her, there was a spreadsheet somewhere that showed exactly how she was going to make it happen. But opening a new business was tough. Not all of them made it.

"What do you say?" Emma asked. "I'll even name a donut after you. The Deputy Quinn. Glazed chocolate with red and blue sprinkles."

Just then the radio clipped to my collar came to life with a call for me.

I held a finger up to Emma to pause our conversation. "CenCom, Union-6-2, go ahead," I answered. Talk about being saved by the bell.

"Union-6-2, respond to a 4-59 at a commercial property, Enchanted Gardens," the dispatcher said, and rattled off an address on Coulter Creek Road at the northeast corner of my sector. I was glad it was a plain 4-59, Burglary, not a 4-59-S, Burglary Silent Alarm, because it was going to take me at least twenty minutes to get to the scene. If the alarm had just started going off I was probably couldn't get there in time to catch anyone in the act, and I was closest.

I grabbed my coffee and cinnamon roll and waved three fingers to Emma, rudely pulling the Deputy On Duty card to exit the conversation without giving her a real answer. As I headed toward the door, I confirmed for Dispatch that I was back in service, "Copy CenCom. Union-6-2 en route."

As I hit the door, I swear I heard Emma holler after me that our conversation wasn't over. Knowing her, she'd be calling before the end of the day for an answer. Hopefully by then I'd have some way to convince her to go looking for another pond of investors to fish in.

The remote start feature on my cruiser allowed me to peel out of the parking lot as quickly as I could belt myself in, stow my coffee in the center console, and engage my light bar. The roads were still pre-dawn empty, but my route back to the highway was chock full of blind corners, so I kept my speed below fifty, regardless of the blindingly bright red and blue light that preceded me through the rainy darkness. A few siren blips at the major intersections got me onto the highway headed west without spilling any coffee.

I won't lie, I will always love the way that drivers get out of my way when I'm barreling down the left lane of the highway, lights a-flashing. Making better time than I planned, I got off at the Tremont exit to wind my way westward toward Coulter Creek, again keeping it under fifty because of the rain and the limited visibility.

Responding to burglary calls was kind of a smack in the face for me. I had the unhappy privilege of interacting with a citizen who had just been victimized, had their sense of safety violated, and was looking for some promise of justice. Most often the best I could do for them was take a thorough report and pass it along to our detectives. Sometimes, if I eyeballed enough evidence at the scene, I was authorized to call in our crime scene team. If they found prints or trace evidence or something interesting in the security footage, then there might be something for the detectives to follow up on. Unfortunately, collecting evidence didn't necessarily mean that there would be any justice for the victims. Property crimes just didn't get the kind of priority in our department that violent crimes did.

Citizens did not want to hear that from a patrol officer after finding that they'd been burgled.

At least this call was for a commercial property, not a residence. Though, a call from a nursery at a quarter past five on a Sunday morning was odd, especially one that came in from a call to nine-one-one rather than an automatic response to an alarm system being tripped.

Something about the call was going to surprise me.

I prepared myself.

Or at least I thought I was prepared.